in history? Are we entering a dark authoritarian era, or are we on the brink of a technological golden age? or the apocalypse? No one really knows, but I'm trying to find out. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and on my show... times I'm exploring this new world order with the thinkers and leaders giving Follow it wherever you get your podcasts.
It is a wild thing to release a book into the world. Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson has been out for a month and a half. It hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week, which thank you to all of you out there who have read it or listened to it. No way that would have happened without you.
And it's doing things out there that I never really expected it to do, creating arguments that I didn't see coming, which is amazing. And so I wanted to have on today two people from the left, which is where much more of the pushback than I necessarily saw coming has come from.
One from the anti-monopoly left, which I think sees abundance in ways I didn't initially foresee as a threat, as a challenge. And I also want to have somebody on from the part of the left that has become obsessed with building. the Green New Deal left, the industrial policy left, the left that thinks we have lost the ability to accomplish the missions the left has set for America through the government.
So my guests today are Shukat Chakabadi, who is running for Congress in San Francisco against Nancy Pelosi. He's the president and co-founder of the new consensus think tank, and he was AOC's first chief of staff. He helped recruit her for Congress and run her campaign. And Zephyr Teachout, who is a law professor at Fordham University, a key figure in anti-monopoly thinking. She has mounted runs for governor, for state attorney general, for Congress, has authored a number of books.
I found this conversation both great about abundance, but also about some of the broader goals, questions, animating impulses and theories of the left as it tries to define itself for this next era. So my simplest summary of abundance is it's an effort to focus people on the question of what do we need more? and what is stopping us from getting out. So I'd like to hear from both of you about what you think of the book's argument.
where you agree and where you disagree. And Zephyr, why don't we start with you? Yeah, I mean, I appreciate how you let off because I do actually think that There's a deep disagreement. I'll start with the deep disagreement. And then there's some areas of genuine agreement. And we should talk about those as well. But I gather you're having us on to really.
fight out the... I want the deep disagreement. There's an area of deep disagreement and there's areas of specific disagreement. So the deepest disagreement is actually what you started with, which is the question of focus. And I think that we should be focusing democratic politics and politics in general on the problem of concentrated power and the way in which concentrated power is making it impossible to do things.
and also really crushing our democracy, that we really do have an oligarchy problem, and that the anti-monopoly toolkit is then a response to that. So, like, with that focus, I would say... Okay, something good the Biden administration did, getting over-the-counter hearing aids. Like a life changer for millions of Americans. Who blocked that? Well, it's a...
oligarchy in the hearing aid market. There's basically five companies that control the hearing aids and they did everything they could to slow down the procedure. The best friend of the Chamber of Commerce is a long notice and comment period that slows down government from doing something really good and meaningful. So I use that as a micro example, but the macro critique and disagreement is around folks.
Well, I actually agree with a lot of the goal of abundance. And I think everyone here agrees that America is really stuck, you know, and the specific reasons why we're stuck, I think that might be where there's some disagreement or, you know, is broader than a thing than just process.
But the thing I really want to add to the discussion and the question we've been studying at New Consensus has been how do countries get unstuck? Because if you look at the history of the 20th century, Every modern developed nation, most of them liberal democracies, they went through these phases of rapidly transforming their economy.
and creating absurd levels of prosperity for pretty much everyone in their society. And, you know, they often did it after these periods of being really stuck. America and the mobilization for World War II, we did after years of stagnation and the Great Depression. And what we've sort of seen is countries seem to do it.
By pitching as our sweeping transformation of the whole economy and executing at breakneck speed, they flip into this whole other mode of operating that I think is really different than how we operate today in America. And, you know, we've been calling it mission mode at New Consensus. But it's different three really distinct ways. You know, countries in mission mode, they have this whole other kind of leadership that pops up that doesn't just...
pitch a mission. They actually follow through and execute. They organize society actively to be a part of it. And really importantly, they capture the national attention. You know, they really make a show of the progress. They call the heroes and they use that as political capital to blow through obstacles, whether that's.
corporate monopolies or process. The second part is they make comprehensive plans. They don't just pass a bunch of policies and take their hands off the steering wheel. They actually plan for all the things that need to happen to make things happen. And, you know, there are pieces that create financing and executing institutions.
And so America needs to have a bunch of these all across our society. During World War II, the largest that we've ever had was one called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. And the RFC wasn't just a public investment bank. It was like a project manager. It would go out and find problems and find bottlenecks and push and actively make sure stuff got done, things got built, do whatever is necessary to just push things along.
And we've really tried to find examples of societies that managed to do this kind of broad-based prosperity through iterative, slow reforms. And it's really hard to find a single society that did it. Is there something about the scale and speed of a sweeping transformation? that creates this momentum, that gives you this escape velocity where these countries finally get the gumption to tackle all these obstacles that are standing in the way of progress.
And so that's the big piece that's missing for how to actually get past all these obstacles that we're talking about. Oh, this piece is super hard. Yeah, sorry, Zephyr, you want to jump in? I just want to make sure that we keep something I think that is really important, really central, which is...
democracy and so when I'm thinking about examples and you know you've done a lot more research in other countries but in the United States obviously we're going to look at FDR and we aren't going to spend all our time on the new deal. But we see that for FDR in the first term, it was more of a top-down vision. Let's just get things done. And he found it didn't work. And the buy-in for that, he needed to bring an anti-monopoly agenda.
And when you and I worked together, I think, eight years ago on visions of the Green New Deal, I think an underappreciated aspect of the Green New Deal is it's not just a technocratic top-down vision. It is very much about a vision of power. I think one of the places where I differ maybe with your school is I tend to work backwards from a policy outcome.
to what i think are the obstacles that are getting away those obstacles are almost always in some way related to some kind of power wielded by someone some group but it can change pretty dramatically in different places so i want to ground that The single biggest item in virtually every household's budget is the home they live in. It's the rent. It's the mortgage.
So there's a new Rand report. It came out after my book was written. It found it costs four times as much, more than four times actually, per square foot. to produce publicly subsidized affordable housing. So the public affordable housing that I think the left supports in California as it costs to produce a square foot of market rate housing. This is to both of you. Maybe I'll start with you, Shikad, because you're in California. Why do you think that...
Well, yeah, we have a huge housing shortage in California. I think the process that we use to build housing is Everyone knows it's not going to build enough housing. We'd have this process in San Francisco where you approve on a parcel by parcel method to decide which housing gets built. So that process is a big part of the problem, but I don't actually think it's just going to be a process that'll fix it.
because what we see is often financing is a problem. Like last year, a bunch of construction projects in San Francisco got stalled because interest rates went up. So construction loans got very expensive. And our current approach to that is throwing our hands up and saying, well, I guess that's too bad. But it's why it's really key that we have public financing institutions to try to make sure this stuff moves along and keeps happening.
We can't have just this one solution. There's going to be so many bottlenecks that come in the way. Even if we fix the financing, there might be something else that pops up, right? So it's this whole other mindset we really need to get into to try to figure out how to make sure the houses get built. Zephyr, what's your take on this?
I mean, housing is a global crisis right now it's not just an american crisis then especially the cost of housing but but california versus texas i want to keep grounded yeah why is it 4x more if you just look at market rate housing california it's more than 2x more in texas per square foot yeah why So I, as I wrote in the review, you know, I have some initial thoughts on housing, but I actually think there's a lot of areas.
that we both agree that there are actually significant problems with zoning. My suspicion is that there is a... decent amount of problem in the concentration in the home building market and some of the supplies for construction market. I don't know if that's different in those different areas. It's unlikely to me that California would be much more porous.
to corporate power than taxes. Yeah, but I actually suspect, like, I don't need to fight you on particular housing policies that you're deep in the weeds of, on zoning policies. Your theory, as I understand it... that the main reason for the cost difference is left-wing resistance like Rick Caruso. I think Rick Caruso is this billionaire in LA who was leading a big NIMBY movement.
to make sure that you shouldn't have any reform on single-family housing. Does he fit into your story? Yes. So, I mean, you cannot cover housing in California or New York City where you and I now live. and not find a huge amount. of NIMBYism. Rick Caruso is currently suing. He's using the California Environmental Quality Act to sue to stop a development next to one of his malls, which implies to me there's something wrong with the California Environmental Quality Act.
But I think where the reason I'm grounding us here, one is housing is a big deal. It has been interesting to me to see many of my friends on the left sort of yada, yada, yada housing. It's like, no, of course we all agree on that. I'm not sure we all agree. And I want to come back to the question of financing. But the reason I bring it up is I actually think power is incredibly important here. But power is very much related to process.
And I think we all would probably agree that the way we do regulations now has created this feasting. capacity for special interests. It's very easy for them to come in and delay and reshape. And in particular for corporate interests, because they can hire the lobbyists, the lawyers. But one of the reasons I'm very focused... on the way we have created process vitocracy is it creates entry points for all kinds of incumbent player.
Sometimes it's corporations, sometimes it's unions, sometimes it's local homeowners, sometimes it's people I am allied with, sometimes people I'm not allied with, but what it isn't. is visible. And the more you have process that is complex and delay-oriented, but also in the shadows, you have to know the planning meeting is happening, you have to know how the notice and comment period works. the more I think what you have done is open your system to all kinds of capture. How do you take that?
I'd have to know about the particular process vetoes that you're talking about. I do think they matter. And as you know, one of my concerns about the book is that if you describe process vetoes generally, but don't say which ones are a problem.
It doesn't really matter. I actually think it's good that I was comparing the other day. I was looking at, okay, what about upstate New York versus Texas? Because I don't know California housing markets, but what about upstate New York versus Texas? Not New York City, but places where there's more capacity. And roughly, it's not two-point times. It's about 20% more expensive, 10 to 20% more expensive in upstate New York to build than in Texas.
And some part of that is labor. And I think that's good. Like, I think it's good we have a more unionized labor force. in New York than we do in Texas. So can I come back to you with another example, which is, I think, an area where I... Well, I want to stay on housing and then we can talk about another example. Because what you just said about the cost of construction is important. I want to throw this to you. Because this, I think, is where it gets even harder. Zephyr just said...
look, one of the reasons you're going to have a higher cost of housing construction in upstate New York than Texas is we use union labor laws or use prevailing wage laws, depending on what you're looking at. And the more I've dug into... the more I have come to see that In blue states or under democratic governments, we have made the cost of public construction very high. The reason I start with an example about why is it more to make publicly subsidized affordable housing?
Why does that cost more than market rate housing per square foot in California? Why is it much more than it costs in Texas? It begins to force you to confront all these rules the government has placed upon itself. They add delay and they add cost, which if it all then got done would be fine, but sometimes like in high-speed rail in California, it doesn't. How do you think about the cost of construction in a place like San Francisco?
First off, you know, just in the San Francisco versus Texas example that we're talking about, I just want to make like one sort of point there because Austin, which is a city that people refer to a lot where they did a lot of streamlined permitting. Construction went up, rents went down really good. But it wasn't actually enough. The 50% of Austin's population is still cost burdened by rent.
And now construction slowed down because part of the reason costs went down was a lot of people left Austin at that time. They started having that migration out of Austin. And so now what happens, right? I think there's another example of just doing the permitting streamlining isn't going to be a silver bullet. But when you're talking about costs, there's not one simple answer.
I think the optimism here that I have is you look at Europe, you know, Europe can build stuff way faster and way cheaper than us. They have a way more unionized labor force. And I think what I wish we had in America. I wish we had large union bargaining deals in a sectoral way, the way many European countries do, and do this in a society way. I wish we didn't have to jam all these requirements into legislation because we had actual societal solutions for it.
But I think it's possible. And the other thing Europe does is on a lot of these process questions, they empower their agencies to have more power to actually make decisions. And sometimes we over-index on how much the process is getting in the way. because what you see in a lot of cases is We add process, but stuff still gets built in China in the 1980s.
When I was going through massive amounts of development, bringing in American companies, made those companies jump through all kinds of hoops. You know, they had to train up Chinese workers and do joint ventures with Chinese companies. But there's this overall mindset we actually have to get the stuff done that was different there. I think that's the bigger thing that's missing. Even in Europe, they have timelines on how long these environmental reviews can take. And in America...
the bigger thing that's happened is we've let open-ended lawsuits and this general kind of culture of letting things languish forever take over. I think it is underappreciated. how differently Europe does government. than america we took a pretty different path from countries and i think we imagine to be similar people often say well of course you can't build subways in new york city it's a big old city now but they do it in paris which is an older city
And I always say, I say it in the book, the difference can't be unions because these countries have higher union density than America does. It is a difference in the way the government... acts and approaches. Do you have a view on sort of what the key differences are, but more the point why America and Europe took such different pathways in the back half of the 20th century? My theory for why America and Europe kind of ended up differently is
Europe actually did their post-war boom and all that development in a more democratic way than we did. We had this Robert Moses era. where we didn't get a lot of public buy-in. We did demolish a bunch of communities, and then we got the backlash, and now we can't build for 50 years. Whereas Europe, I think, took more of an approach of trying to bring society in through this development. But I think the larger theory of why everywhere is stagnating.
is I think countries have to go through these periods of renewal where they really go for it. And all the European democracies did this in peacetime post-war, right, when they're doing their booms. And it's in these contexts of a larger... society-wide transformation that you're able to do things like change the housing rules because housing is a big deal. But if you just do a whole politics around housing, that's not a big enough constituency.
to call for the huge kind of structural reforms you need across the side. In France, for example. They built TGV, you know, their national high-speed rail during their post-war boom. And, you know, I know you talk a lot about California high-speed rail, but, like, if you look at how they did that versus how we did California high-speed rail. It was this comprehensive plan where they pitched the country on the whole network.
And so because it was this huge network, they planned for all the surrounding industry. They built out universities to train the engineers. They built out rolling car set industries to build a train set. They built out all the steel industries. And they even planned, this is when they're deploying nuclear power all over France, they planned their nuclear power deployment.
in a way to make sure they would have the power to power the trains. And I'd say that whole thing was even made possible because France was in the middle of a larger national renewal where they were building out their whole economy. And Charles de Gaulle even talked about it as a mission for France, actually.
But on the flip side, we got California High Speed Rail, where they had this project, which was one line, and I just think it wasn't big enough to use the political capital of that project to push through the SQL reforms or whatever other reforms we would need.
to make that go faster. They also didn't try. I think it has been more recent that there's a sort of appreciation that something has gone wrong. It's like these examples have stacked up the big dig the second avenue subway high-speed rail yeah and i mean it takes time to realize you've gotten into a hole well i think we've lost that muscle you know i think we've totally lost that muscle of how do you actually do
the kind of comprehensive planning, the execution of these big projects and transforming your whole economy. I don't think they thought they weren't trying and they were just doing the normal thing politicians do. So for those, an example you had wanted to bring. Yeah, well, I actually do want to turn to green energy because I think it's really important, but I do want to use, pick up on what you're talking about, about the second avenue.
And as you point out, Ezra, it's not because of labor costs, because comparable projects have similar labor costs in Europe. There, I don't think you can look at what has happened in New York. public transit subway and real estate without telling the story of money and politics. Like one of the big differences between the United States and Europe during the period you're talking about.
is that we allowed for unlimited campaign spending. We basically made the job of politicians to be a fundraising job. And then in Citizens United, supercharged that by allowing corporate spending. So in New York, to be particular about housing and the subway, it meant that the Real Estate Board of New York has this outsized power in state politics.
and gets just a lot of giveaways that most people think didn't make that big a difference and led to really expensive per square footage housing. So that sort of occupied the space on housing. And then it led to New York state government under Andrew Cuomo for starving the subway.
So then it had to spend all its money doing fixes that would have been much cheaper to fix earlier. And something that I do think you point out in the book, which is they also starved state capacity. They really said, let's consult everything out and pay big consultants. but that is downstream from the centralized corporate power over politics. And I think one of the things that's underappreciated is how enervating big money politics is, is how it drains.
politicians of dynamism is how much big donors actually want government to not. not just in the lobbying front, which we've talked about earlier, but in talking to whether it's governors or congressmen, is that their tendency is towards no as opposed towards dynamism. And when you actually have a popular politic... People want to exercise that power.
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One of the things I am trying to do in the book and in my reporting across these domains, because, look, rural broadband is different than Second Avenue Subway. Second Avenue Subway is different than high-speed rail. High-speed rail is different than building housing. You can sort of go down the line. They're all different. Each unhappy policy is unhappy in its own way, to paraphrase Tolstoy. But one thing that I think about is the centralization versus a fracturing of power.
Now, I don't disagree with you that oftentimes you'll dig into one of these things and you will find a lot of corporate power. acting, ISPs in the World Broadband example. And look, you're building high-speed rail, you're building a Second Avenue subway, you are inconveniencing all kinds of, not just big businesses, but small ones.
And that matters, right? I mean, I was covering this part of High Speed Rail. They spent years in litigation with a small mini storage facility that just didn't want to be moved. It's totally reasonable that that storage facility didn't want to be moved. In Europe, they move the storage facility, right? They just have different laws around that kind of thing. But one thing that I have been fascinated by and that sort of led to some of the inquiry for me
Was that innervation you're talking about? Yes. How many politicians I talked to, and they would not all describe it to me as about corporate power, but they do describe it as there's a thing they want to do. And all they can do is tell me all the reasons they can't do it. the real estate board, the planning board, the fractured zones of authority between different councils in LA and the way that the LA municipal structure actually works.
I talked during the fight for congestion pricing in New York City ahead of the MTA. And he was so frustrated by how much time he was spending working on environmental assessment with the Biden administration at that point, right? It's always a different story, but what you often see is we just don't give.
the people we've imbued with democratic authority, a mayor, a governor, honestly, even a president, as much power as you sort of think from the outside. It's innovating to them, but it's also, I think, confusing to the public. Obama promised a public option. Why couldn't he do it? Joe Biden said, I get this. Why didn't I get it? And does it lead you, Zephyr, towards, because I think there's a tension here that I find difficult to resolve.
between wanting things to be very small-day democratic and then also recognizing that small-day democratic processes can get very captured, thinking that maybe we need more executive power, but also recognizing that you can get a bad executive like we have nationally at the moment, then you have a different problem. How do you think about the level at which power should be exercised and the ability of some central voice to say, thank you for your concerns. We're doing it this way.
So I love the question, and I think it is sort of just telling the truth about the nature of how power is organized in society today. And I don't think it's just a few instances. I mean, this may be an area of difference. I think that the major innovating power is actually centralized corporate power. And I think you'll find it in area after area after area.
So let's talk about green energy. You're probably familiar with the New York Sabin School, and they come out with this report fairly regularly. on where are there checks on local rules against green energy building. and so i took a look at it the other day and it's Majority red districts in New York and it looks like around the country that there's these new rules that come in that say can't build solar. Yeah, green energy has become a culture war. Right, green energy has become a culture war.
And so I look at that and I say, I have a very clear story of where that came from. That came from 2010 when the Koch brothers decided to threaten every single Republican who dared use the word climate change in a primary. and took something that in the McCain era had been... Republicans and Democrats both thinking about green energy in the future and turned it into a culture war.
and then are going to local communities and saying, here, I've got a way to block your green energy project. And the difference between you and me, I think, probably, is that... If I was to go to say Western New York or places where these, and by the way, these are very significant blocks. You know, there's 400 different blocks, 400 different projects that are being slowed in terms of solar development or wind development. Ah, there's Kathy Hochul! you know, vetoing offshore wind. I think...
To give some meat to the question, you might say, well we've just got to stop local communities from doing things because we need to push through this green energy development. And the populist story is to, like, actually just tell the truth about where this came from. It's like, big oil has been... crushing innovation in electric vehicles for 40 years now. And we know that, right? Ezra, you don't actually, I actually am curious about this. You don't think that
Left nimbyism has been a bigger deal in crushing green energy than big oil. Do you? Not the climate change law. But I wouldn't call it left nimbyism either. Okay. Look, here's the question I would ask if I was complicating this story. Because of course I agree that there has been a huge multi-billion dollar, now multi-decade effort by fossil fuel industry.
to destroy any action or any real action on climate change, right? That's just... I think where your story begins to demand complication is why is it easier to build green energy in Texas than California?
So I've gone and run these numbers working with the people who are modeling the Inflation Reduction Act's build-out. If you look at where the IRA's money is going, If you are looking at deployment of green energy infrastructure or advanced manufacturing for green energy, that money is going majority to red states.
If you look at money, the subsidies to buy things, to buy the end products, right, to buy an electric vehicle, that goes more to blue states because we buy more, maybe not any more Teslas, but at one time, Teslas in California, New York. And so there's no doubt that the politics are as you describe them nationally.
And there's also no doubt that what you would assume from that politics is a much more rapid build-out of green energy infrastructure in blue states than red. And that is not what we... I say this in the introduction of the book. This book is not aimed at the right because they don't share my goal on decarbonization. But then trying to understand.
why Texas and Georgia have been such incredible success stories from the perspective of the IRA, and a bunch of the states that are much more aligned with its politics have been much more difficult. That then requires some untangling and check out. You focus very much on this. I'm curious how you think about that.
Well, first of all, I mean, I do agree that money in politics is this hugely innovating force, right? But even if we got rid of money in politics and all the other forces that kind of get in the way... I don't think our politicians on their own would do things at a scale. Even looking at Texas versus California, yeah, people are building in Texas because
In a completely, you know, nothing else going on sort of scenario, there's fewer rules in Texas, it's cheaper to build in Texas, so you're building Texas. But that's not going to build out enough clean energy to make any sort of dent, actually, you know, in the global problem of tackling climate change. I think the money and politics and all that just supports the general... feeling that our politicians have and this trend they've had of trying to do less and less.
I think one of the really bad parts of money in politics is that politicians spend all their time calling big donors for money, and they think that's their job. And they're really confused by the job of actually trying to build stuff or make things happen. Like, there was an interview with...
Hassan Khan, who was, I worked on the Chips Act on Oddbots yesterday, and he was talking about the stuff that actually got in the way of the Chips Act, right? And a big part of it was trying to negotiate with all the different special interests and groups that had stuff to say.
And he said, that's fine. That's an important part of the process. And again, you know, Europe does this as well. But there's no real... And they've lost semiconductor manufacturing. Yeah, that's fair. But there's no real focus from the up top. There's no political leadership that was saying... we got to get this fab built, right? I was saying that's actually an overwhelming priority here.
And what happens when you create a political moment that's bigger than any of these forces, you can actually blow past it. And we're kind of seeing that with Trump and tariffs right now. Dark abundance. Yeah, dark abundance.
I'm sure all the businesses are calling up Trump right now and being like, what the hell are you doing with these tariffs? And they're calling all their congresspeople and senators. But Trump's created such a political moment and reality within the Republican Party where you've just got to go along with the tariffs. The Republican congresspeople can say... Sorry, this is just too popular in the party. My hands are tied. I've got to go with the president.
Let me ask them that money in politics. I think this is an important question. I would support functionally the strongest money in politics.
regulations and laws anybody could imagine. I would repeal Buckley v. Vallejo. I don't think money is speech in politics. I think we've been on the wrong path on this for 30, 40 years. I completely believe that it's enervating. I believe that leads to levels of cynicism and distrust that even if you take out every other bad thing it's doing is complete toxicity in the veins of the body politic so yeah so i i agree with all this i also think when i look at individual issues
When we say money in politics, when we say corporate power, when we say concentrated power, we make a fractious plural into a single. Money in politics often lines up on many different sides of an issue. So I was having a conversation recently with very big money, not a group you would love me talking to, Zephyr, that have been trying to finance now for some decades.
major, well not major in terms of the build-out, but major in terms of the significance, pipelines that would bring clean energy from one place to another. I'm not aligned with them on everything, but I'm aligned with them on building these pipelines because we got to get this power from the place where we are generating it as clean power to where we can power homes in New York City. I want it to happen. And it has been decades. And that's a very common story on transmission.
On transmission lines, these are built by private companies. They are financed privately for the most part. These companies want this to happen. They end up facing a lot of other fights. Now, some of those fights on the other side are also money, sometimes even fossil fuel interests. But it's not just one thing. I think something I have come to believe, and this is maybe more sort of Shortcut's perspective, that over time we just sort of flipped the defense.
We flip the default to make it easier to veto, easier to stop than to create. Now that empowers money that wants to stop and makes it hard for money that wants to create. It empowers groups that want to stop and makes it hard for groups that want to create. To me, it's not that money should be in politics, but as a sort of monocausal explanation, money is often on many different sides of a political fight, including climate change, the entire theory of the IRA.
is leveraging private dollars to build a huge green energy infrastructure build-out, right? We are trying to align the markets alongside a political vision. Do you agree with the premise that in any given instance, money is often fractious? It's not one thing or trying to achieve one thing. Some of it may be on the side of a project you like. Some of it, again. What I believe is that we should not have centralized
corporate power governing our system, that there is a real threat. But in any given instance, I don't want to just be on the abstract level. And what that means is that I don't think it's good to have oligarchs fighting each other. and that a system of like two oligarchs being on a different side of a thing is still a deeply broken system and that we should recognize that brokenness. And the example I would use is, you know, from the left, think of the oligarchs we were embracing.
just eight years ago, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, that we're aligned with them on this, so we should stay aligned with them and make sure we actually, the Democratic Party building up their power. in order to in that case take on Donald Trump. But the truth is that if you engage in enhancing the political power of oligarchs because you have a short-term alignment on an issue, it will end up actually degrading.
the political process over time. I don't believe, even if I would like to get money out of politics, we're going to get money out of politics in a full-on way and end oligarchy on the pace we need to decarbonize. We have to build things. in the next couple of years. Donald Trump is now the biggest problem with this, but nevertheless, even if Kamala Harris had won the election, we would still be in this condition.
The theory you offered earlier was that money slows politics down. Yes. And what I'm saying, what I've seen in many things I've covered Money sometimes wants to speed things up. It sometimes wants to slow it down. It sometimes wants to build. It sometimes doesn't. There are developers that want to build housing. There are other moneyed interests that maybe don't, right? Mercurius are next to his mall.
And so that there's something here that it's not just the fault of money in politics because there's money on all sides of the issues, that there's something else going on that if we want to be able to build these things fast, we're going to have to take it out of systemic. level and the interests around that are going to be fractious and not unified. We have to make choices. So there is a deep, deep difference and then I want to use a specific example.
The deep difference is what I care about so much is I believe in the future. I believe in dynamism. I believe in a country in which people's full selves are brought to bear. I believe in far more equal country where we actually stand up for working people. And I believe that in order to stand up for working people, we need a dynamic country. And I absolutely believe that the biggest block to that.
is centralized power. And that in individual fights, you can say, oh, I think this moment of centralized power might force things through, but it will fundamentally lead to highly concentrated, top-down calcified power in the long term. And the example I want to use, you and I first met over 20 years ago when I was working for Howard Dean. And I was living in a flophouse in Vermont. Yes.
I don't blame Howard for this because I don't think he even knew about it. We wanted to put out a new, you know, here we are, a new dynamic campaign. We wanted to put out a new open source policy. And somebody's like, just run it by the general counsel. first. And I was new to politics. I was totally shocked. That is a veto. That is a slowing down. That's a slowing down in that particular campaign. Those little veto points.
are happening in every congressional campaign, in every state house, and it's that kind of veto. So, one of our problems on the left is we said, let's align with the big money, like the Reid Hoffman. And then Reid Hoffmans basically says, we can't have... Lena Kahn's dynamic use of government. She's somebody you would love. She's willing to break eggs, to get things done. cut through the bureaucracy to actually achieve things. And you have Reid Hoffman and other big wealthy tech billionaires.
saying, we are a veto point because of big money. You can't talk about those dynamic things in the campaign. Maybe you should get rid of Lena Kahn. So I think you're undervaluing. What happens when you actually embrace big power for individual projects? They become significant veto power elsewhere. So, Shoycott, this makes me think about your leadership point. One of the things I've observed covering a lot of fights in Washington. I would say over time The leadership of the Democratic Party.
became less and less willing to offend almost anybody who had considered in its coalition. Its coalition was vast, right? Its coalition stretching from Reid Hoffman and the general counsel of Microsoft on the one side to all kinds of environmental justice groups on the other side. And I'm not saying literally no one ever got offended.
But as I sort of like watched the procession from like the Obama era to the sort of Hillary Clinton campaign to the Biden-Harris era, and saw this in congress too it felt like as a matter of cultural the governance They wanted to run everything by everybody. And not literally anybody getting upset was an emergency, but the leadership became less and less taller.
of anybody being upset. Everybody had to get a little bit. You were in Congress. You ran AOC's first campaign, so you were part of the Let's Piss People Off caucus. i'm curious one if what i just said feels true to you and two what your sort of account of it is, like what you saw from it and what you think is behind.
That culture, it seems, is much more dominant now on the left than on the, you know, like, break every single egg of the global economy, right? Yeah, I think it's not just about not pissing people off. I think it's a complete abdication of responsibility of leading. I think it's a lack of realizing that we need new ideas and we need an actual vision for how to do stuff.
Because it's not just groups on the left. I went to a training when I was in Congress that was a training on how to get ideas from corporate lobbyists. I tweeted about it and I pissed off some people.
But it's really hard to push new ideas. What did they tell you in that training? How do you get ideas? It was very matter of fact. Don't they come to you? I would have assumed they come to you with ideas. They do come to you. But in the training, it was like, you know, if you're writing a bill, here are the people you can contact to get expertise, right?
similar to what you encountered in the Dean campaign. And, you know, I think it's just this complete abdication responsibility of your role to actually put out solutions that'll solve real problems. Like the culture is more. We'll figure out ideas from everybody that's around us and kind of cobble it together into this Frankenstein monster. We got in trouble with the Green New Deal when we put the Green New Deal out.
The week before we announced it, I think it was like 70 environmental groups wrote a letter saying they're going to denounce it because we were pushing something new. Because at that time, the environmental groups were really focused on just keep it in the ground stuff. Was there disagreement?
substantive or was it we were not consulted? They would probably say it was substantive. I don't think I'm going to say it wasn't, but it was more the latter, right? It was more that we weren't operating the idea space that everyone else was operating. But I'd say, in general, the pipeline example you brought up is a really interesting one, right? Because I think when you abdicate responsibility from actually pushing for new ideas and solutions,
What you're saying is the interest groups, which I think often, as you're pointing out, Zephyr, are the big corporate interests, they're going to fight it out. So in the case of the pipelines you're talking about... I'm sure there's interest groups on both sides, so 20 years later, we'll come to some resolution. But in the case of natural gas pipelines,
We streamlined all that, right? We put permitting under FERC. We made it happen super fast. It's huge. We have 3 million miles of natural gas pipeline in this country right now. We build it super fast because there wasn't really an opposing, a big enough opposing interest group. And so that's sort of what I see happening in the Democratic Party is there's a real resistance to putting out actual solutions and putting out real ways to solve these problems.
And just deciding that we're going to take ideas from everyone. And I agree with Zephyr that that tends to be the corporate powers that have more influence there. There's a part of the book that is in there, but I think has gotten the most attention. But we have over time, in my view, denuded the state of expertise. Members of Congress have, I think it is shocking how small the staff. of a House member who represents a highly populous district and maybe runs an important committee really is.
And I'm not saying that's the only reason they outsource a huge amount of their thinking and their work to corporate interests. to non-profits. But there is this whole theory in political science called legislative subsidy, which is that the real power of lobbying, or one of its real sources of power, is that it is the provider of expertise. And not only is it the provider of expertise, it is a provider of expertise from your former colleagues who you like.
They leave a congressional office because they've got three kids. And maybe, you know, one of the kids is in private school or all of them are or, you know, whatever it might be. We've held down congressional salaries. We've held down congressional staff sizes. That's all like high polling populist policy. And then people go into various forms of the private sector or the lobbying sector and sell back what they know. to their former colleague.
And in my version of abundance, where state capacity is very big, We need to fund the government itself a lot more. This is where I'm not a Doge person at all. I mean, I'm not a Doge person on a lot of levels, but my view is they want to destroy state capacity. Their view is that everybody would be more effective and productive in the private sector.
Whereas I would like people working for Congress to be both more numerous and make a lot more money because we should have much of the very best expertise in the world. helping Congress figure out its decarbonization policies and helping, you know, in California, we should have the best rail engineers in the world helping on a major high-speed rail build-out.
How do you think about that outsourcing of all these functions and the absence of in-house capacity? It's a major problem. It's a major problem. And that's why, you know, as you get into lower levels of government, lobbyist capture is even higher. Like in California state government's war center is in Congress because they have even less funding. What people actually want is not
what Doge is doing. They want effective government. And effective government happens if you have either a very well-paid civil service, as they do in Singapore or Finland or any of these countries that have effective government. But in America, the tough part of that is you're competing against Google salaries and all these high-paid salaries. And so I think one way you do that is
and you do need to increase the salaries and fund this stuff, but you also have to make it exciting. You have to make it something where the people working in government... are actually feeling like they're making an impact. They often do, but the people I talk to who the most want to try to fix how fast government goes are the people who work in government. You know, it's people working in the State Department and Treasury, wherever.
I think it's very radicalized. It's very underreported. Yeah, because they're... they're going in there and they're making a real sacrifice. All these people could be making, you know, half a million dollars in a lobbyist firm, but instead they're taking a huge pay cut to do something good.
One of the things I learned when I was in Congress was if you're a former member of Congress, you can be on the House floor. So what do lobbyists do? They hire former members of Congress so they can put votes on the House floor. They're not supposed to. It's technically against the rules, but, you know, come on.
How do you think about this question? First of all, I think it's huge, and I think the examples you use of like we're just outsourcing this thinned state, this sort of thinned and enervated state. is a very significant problem. And I just want to use some counter examples about a direction we can go.
which may help you understand sort of why I think there is such possibility in the anti-monopoly movement. Because a lot of what happened in the anti-monopoly movement is we started actually learning. how business actually works like oh we're learning how the John Deere actually limits repairs. You know, returning to the center of democratic politics, an understanding of, like, what happens with inhalers? What happens with fire trucks?
What happens with the franchise system? Asking a set of questions that, frankly, we didn't ask for 30 years. Like, what is happening in the vast bulk of the American economy? What is life like for working people on a day-to-day level? What is life like for a farmer? Some of the areas where you saw the most active government in the Biden administration. Biden administration was not coherent on this, right? Like there's different... You saw Pete Buttigieg, who came in, was willing to, you know.
Break some eggs, get things done, stopped the first airline merger in 30 years, really got into the weeds of how transportation supply chains work. And we had the most successful air transit summer, you know, in years, in 2024. Like, an effective, dynamic. Everything's been going great with air travel ever since. I think he did a great job. Yes, I thought people would have judged his fault. I think he did a great job with the DOT. And so what I want to say is its capacity.
It's desire, it's drive. I think the drive comes from a vision that you are standing up for working people against the big airlines. Like that is actually a motivating drive and it's a politically motivating drive. but the kind of expertise we want matters it's not just
expertise generally. I think where the Democratic Party really should go is understanding how did we allow the greatest Geographic inequality in American history in the last 20 years where places like Utica New York are totally left behind Like that's weird and strange and we should treat it like weird and strange How did we allow diapers to get so expensive when we should have, you know, like real innovations and eco diapers instead of just this? incredibly expensive.
You know, price gouging, frankly, during the pandemic. Real expertise and expertise in the nature of business. And I think sometimes people think of anti-monopoly as anti-business. And we're like, no, we're the first pro-business. real movement in a long time. It's just, it's not the choke point businesses that like you note in other contexts. The problem of choke points is they enterrate. Like, why even bother make a new eco diaper if you're just going to get crushed?
Yeah, and that's a really important point because if we actually embark on these big missions and make it exciting enough to be in government, we don't want to just be anti-people who know how to do stuff. Like when we did the World War II mobilization... The guy who ran a big part of it was this guy, Bill Knudsen, who was actually the CEO of GM. But he had come up as an engineer through the factory floor. He understood how that whole economy worked.
And that was why we were able to organize all the other CEOs and the entire economy to do war production. FDR almost hired a banker who did the World War I mobilization, which wasn't as good. And that guy said, no, you got to get someone who actually knows this. And we need to have people like that now. And unfortunately, Elon Musk is now going and just destroying government, but we need a Bill Nudsen today. I feel like the left has developed a very complicated relationship.
with expertise from the business world. So on the one hand, some of the people who I think are the heroes of this era and this movement, like Gary Gensler, say, who was a high-up banker before he became a regulator, obviously come from the world that they now regulate or that they oversee. And of course those worlds have people with incredible expertise. I mean, there's a granularity to how every industry works that is very, very hard to attain from the outside.
And on the other hand, I will often see nominations attacked or tried to be scheduled because the person worked in the corporate world. I talk to people who leave Democratic administrations now, and they become very, very nervous about where they work. Because they fear that if they work in X place, they can't come back in in a future administration. And I feel like there has not emerged a clear criteria.
the kind of person we're willing to hire. This is the kind of person we're not. This is when corporate experience is a good thing. This is when it's not. And so it sort of like pushed a lot of people into the nonprofit world. And there's nothing wrong with the nonprofit world. Many of my dearest friends work in the nonprofit world.
But I'd be curious to hear you talk about this, Zephyr, because there are all these projects, like the Revolving Door Project, that basically sort of say, look, this person worked at this place, at this place. They've been involved in this thing, and we think that makes them suspicious. And so on the one hand, that might be true, right? I do think you can have
a lot of interest capture. And on the other hand, we know that a lot of the people who have been leaders in these areas, I mean, you can talk about Joseph Kennedy, right? Sort of being the traitor to his class under FDR on financial regulation. have come from these places and you sort of need to have.
that level of knowledge about the thing you're regulating to effectively bring it under any kind of wise control. Yeah, I don't think that there is a single silver bullet answer. You know, like, these are the precise criteria, I think. Just to sort of repeat what you said, I think there is good reason to be skeptical if you see a pattern, but the Democratic Party, and this is maybe a meta version of your micro question, I think the Democratic Party needs a North Star that is not rejected.
I think we all probably agree with that. And I think the North Star should be standing up to monopolistic middlemen that are crushing people's wages. raising their prices and stopping innovation and a dynamic society. And those who want to come in to join that North Star, we should welcome with open arms. And so when it comes to particular appointments,
I mean, Jonathan Cantor came from big law and did an incredible job. Jonathan Cantor was the AAG of antitrust, and you may be thinking about... I don't see what an AAG is. Oh, the assistant attorney general. He was in charge of...
Department of Justice antitrust under Biden. And even if you don't know his name, you are living in Jonathan Cantor's world these few weeks because we have the biggest antitrust trials in 30 years happening with Google being found a monopolist now three times looking towards a breakup.
a really powerful, dynamic, very, very effective head of antitrust under Biden. And he came from industry. So I don't think there's a single answer here. I don't disagree on a bunch of the anti-monopoly questions. I think Google is a monopoly. What problems can't be solved? by the North Star being corporate concentration and anti-monopoly.
Like I have a lot of skepticism. That's a problem in the housing market. I have skepticism. That's actually the problem in the energy market. We might disagree on some of these, but what. can't be, right? I think my critique sometimes of what I hear is not so much that I disagree with it, but I disagree about that it will solve as many problems as is being claimed. What really worries you that you just don't think? this particular frame. I don't think that anti-monopoly can solve
significant problems of racism in this country. I don't think anti-monopoly can solve toxins in our water, although I think there's an anti-monopoly. I immediately am like, yeah, but there's an anti-monopoly component right there. And then having said that, right, there's a reason that Frederick Douglass and Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power. Like there is a... Try to live in that world. Right, so... Maybe what I would ask.
then, so when I ask as an anti-monopolist, and anti-monopoly is an antitrust, I hope you know that. Antitrust, yeah, right, yeah. Anti-monopoly is much more about power than anti-monopoly. Yeah, right. And that I understand. You said this very clearly at the beginning, but I understand your goal as being a fundamental rebalancing.
Yeah, it's a democracy vision. It's a fundamental rebalancing of social power. Because if Steve Tellis were here, a political scientist, he would say that people in your movement are very focused on one kind of power. but not many, many other kinds of power, that you can break corporate power.
And you have all kinds of other minoritarian institutions operating at every single level of government. There's a great law paper by David Schleicher recently about the law of the gentry and the triumph of the law of the gentry and property law. Like local governments exercise power, unions exercise power. There's a million kinds of power.
exercise within every level of society. And I think that the argument some other people make, even if they agree on some of the anti-monopoly sides, would say that doesn't get you to democracy. You can have low levels of corporate concentration, at least acceptable levels of corporate concentration, and have unwise power used in all kinds of other ways, indeed in the post-FDR period.
I don't think anybody would say we are a perfect democracy. Power was exercised in horrific ways in the American South, right? You just said it doesn't solve racism. So that's the only place where I wouldn't say anti-monopoly is synonymous with democracy. I think for 40 years, we stopped, to use your phrase, you know, bottleneck detective. We basically stopped asking the power question. And there's just a little bit of history here. There was this big movement.
both Republicans and Democrats got on board with. I mean, I think some of the questions, if there are good ideas that come from Republican areas, I think we should take them. I don't think it's a left-right issue. But they got on board with this idea that we should just focus on...
outputs and not on power. And so that's part of the reason you hear some resistance from the anti-monopolis to your vision. And I guess I would challenge to say What the anti-monopoly movement has started to do is started to investigate in areas where You wouldn't necessarily guess that in the Kroger-Albertson's merger... that pharmacists would be on fire about it and be the biggest opponents, that they would see the joining of two big grocery stores as a fundamental threat.
But once you start asking the power question, then pharmacists come out of the woodwork and say, yeah, this is killing us. We're getting starved by this. And so it's not to say that it answers every question, but that it is in far more areas than we think. that the loss of our looking at questions of power was probably one of the biggest losses.
And so I think, one, sure, there are areas that can't be solved by that, but there's far more areas that surprise even me today that actually have a power component and a power bottleneck. Let me ask you about something you brought up a while ago that I'd sort of turned to be a cost of construction question. But one thing we used to do more of, that other countries do much more than we do, is public financing. And that's been a big part of the work being done by your group at New Consensus.
Talk a little bit about what public financing can do. And sort of as Zephyr was saying, we lost a certain set of tools in the toolkit. But more than that, we lost a certain set of lenses for analyzing problem society. When you focus there on things like a reconstruction finance corporation for modern era or more public infrastructure banks, What analytically did we stop seeing that you're trying to restore? And then what would things like this actually do that is not being done?
The thing that we've sort of lost is a little bigger than just public financing. It's sort of public institutions. that proactively go out and make stuff happen. We have a little bit of this now. We have it with DARPA, you know, on sort of research and development projects. And that's kind of public financing as well of those kinds of projects. But we've lost it for the entire sector of creating industries and creating infrastructure.
And there was a loan program at the DOE that the IRA funded for clean energy projects that Jigar Shah ran. It's a great program, but it's a wait-and-see approach. So people apply for loans for products they want to do. But there's all kinds of projects that just aren't happening.
Right now, a big bottleneck to expanding electric grids is transformer shortage because we only have a few companies that make transformers. And we only have one company that makes electric steel that we need for transformers. and no one's popping up to make new electric steel companies. So what I'm imagining is something like the RFC today, Reconstruction Finance Corporation would push them to expand production if they don't do it, fund startups, and if they don't do it,
Put up state-owned corporations, right? And this is what China does. This is exactly what China does. China got these ideas from us. This was what we used to do. And other countries in Europe have versions of this. It's key to know that it's not just like this one institution, if we put it in, it's going to fix everything. Germany has all kinds of financing mechanisms. They have agricultural co-op banks. They have this whole range of financing for small and medium manufacturing.
in the country, and that's held up a lot of their economy. And in China, similar, they have these big industrial banks that fund all kinds of projects. But it's really just this proactive nature of finding projects that are getting in the way of progress and then making sure those things get built. How much of the level of leadership or neology to you is the loss of that?
People talk about neoliberalism, and I think neoliberalism is a very complex and weird and abused term. But one thing I believe, we write this in the book, is that Democrats stopped intervening on the production side of it. they more or less began to trust the market. You know, maybe you had to put some rules on the market. Maybe you had to put some curbs on the market. But the idea that you were going to intervene to do things the market wasn't going to do or create market.
for things that needed to happen that weren't happening. It fell out of favor, not in the sense that it would be desirable, but in the sense that it was even possible. The view is that The government will fail. If it tries to do this industrial policy, fails when you try it. That picking winners and losers is always a line fails when you try it.
Then obviously over there came China. And I think that changed the intellectual side of this. But how do you see what happened there, both ideologically and when you look at where the leadership of the party is now, do you see it changing? I think that is the big part of the story, the major part of the story, is after the New Deal. And there's a great book called Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips Fine, which really details the push of that ideology over 40 years, a long-term plan.
And I think that's why even when presidents came in wanting to do a little bit more Obama, I forget which book, but there's some book where Obama actually said after a session, shouldn't we do our moonshot project now? But he was surrounded by people who was like, no, no, no, obviously we shouldn't be doing that. You know, when they're talking about...
Well, they tried some, right? High-speed rail, smart grid, electronic health markets. I always think about those as being the big signature moonshots of the Recovery Act. And none of them actually happened. And they were so tiny. I think that was part of the problem. You know, in the context of a larger economy, you can't just say one little high-speed rail line, right? And they also funded Solyndra and Tesla, as you point out in the book, right?
but they only wanted to do those two projects and they just focused on the failure of Solyndra rather than the huge success of Tesla. Well, that guarantee program funded more than just those two. Yeah, those are the big ones. Those are the big ones. And everybody knows Solyndra. I mean, I was thinking about this. I did this show with Tom Friedman recently about China.
And one of the ways I think Republicans specifically, but then in response Democrats also, have really hindered government by becoming too afraid of failure. And the feeling that if you loan money to something that goes belly up, if you fund a grant for science, it can sound funny if somebody says it at a speech. And one way to just destroy not just state capacity, but state ambition.
is to make the state so cautious. I mean, some of the process and procedure we talk about, it's endless auditing and oversight and procedure to show you're doing nothing wrong, which in the end makes you can't do all that much right. I completely agree with you. And I want to say it's one point that I don't think I've seen anybody talk about in the book, but I thought was great is that you highlight.
a problem with the golden fleece awards you know and the way in which we started do you want to say what those are You'll remember exactly, but it's the award for the stupidest government program. Who was it? I want to say it was William Proxmire, if I'm not wrong. But also, you just saw Donald Trump doing it when he stood up and he says at the joint session of Congress speech,
you know all this money to make mice transgender which we also was not what was being done you can't we don't know how to make mice transgender but but it's a common thing in politics and you even hear it from democrats sometimes this sort of picking out of the thing that sounds embarrassing. And then what you do is you terrify agencies because they don't want to be the ones blamed for an embarrassing sounding thing. Absolutely. And when you look at little things like...
Not little things. Big local things, I should say. Really important local things like the 2nd Avenue subway and procurement. The way in which... I mean, it's a way in which I think we've got corruption all wrong. We're like really focused on this massive compliance regime instead of focused on the big corruption issues as opposed to little corruption issues. But I think you're right, and I think that does take a cultural change.
to be willing to accept failure. A program that I think really works. was the Paycheck Protection Program. And the Paycheck Protection Program has gotten beaten up by so many different people by finding, you know, the... The examples of fraud. And there was a lot of fraud. And there was fraud. And it was worth it. It was absolutely worth it to support businesses around the country, to keep them open during COVID. It was worth it for the workers, for those businesses.
In order to do great things, you do actually have to do things wrong sometimes. And I really loved that point in the book. Well, let me go back to this point about corruption and what you said about the Paycheck Protection Act. Because one thing you see... with the Paycheck Protection Act, with unemployment insurance in that period. And this comes up a lot. When there is an agreed-upon crisis,
The government will throw out a bunch of its normal rules and procedures and act really fast. So I tell a story in the book about Josh Shapiro's rebuild of the I-95. This bridge collapses after a fire beneath it when a truck overturns. It's a crucial transportation artery on the northeast corridor.
And he declares an emergency declaration. And he uses union labor, by the way. He doesn't throw everything overboard. But I talked to the transportation lead in Pennsylvania about the project. And I was saying, okay, how would this have gone normally? He said, well... Just doing the contracting rules that we normally go through would have taken 12 to 24 months on the design proposals and the contracting bidding process and so on. Then I was on Gavin Newsom's podcast.
and just a funny sentence and he was saying Well, you focused on that, but we did one of those projects in nine days here under emergency declarations. And I had a different conversation with Westmore in Maryland. And they did this, I forget, I think it was a port, but they had another big emergency declaration project.
And I began to think about this question. If every Democratic governor I talked to is so proud of what they did under emergency declaration, where they were able to wipe out a bunch of rules, that you can track them back and why they made sense. I mean, the way they did the I-95 project so quickly in Pennsylvania was there happened to be two contractors. working on that portion of the I-95 that day.
And when the emergency declaration was made, the transportation secretary basically pulled both of them off of their current project. said you're doing this now and they were on the project as he said to me the moment the fire department released the scene and on the one hand that's something to be proud of And I'm hearing you completely understand how if the way we give out contracts Is the transportation secretary just as you?
That's an incredible avenue for corruption. But I'd be curious, as somebody who studied corruption a lot, how you think about this, because we've created such slowness in our efforts to root out patronage and corruption. I'm not sure we have rooted out the patronage in corruption, but we've definitely created the slowness. Something seems wrong here in the equilibrium. I'll just repeat, I guess, what I said before, which is I think we focused on the wrong kind of corruption, right?
So that what you want is systems where there are lots of contractors and there is competitive bidding. So it actually really matters that there's lots of contractors. That's an anti-monopoly issue, by the way. And then when you have those lots of contractors, and then you want systems that don't reward inside deals like campaign finance deals. But I think that we've thought we can root out corruption.
by doing micro checklist as opposed to looking at structures and systems and that we should look at structures and systems of power as the big defenses against corrupt systems as opposed to the checklist. We need some checklist, by the way. You can't have no rules. And I do think that there's some innovative things happening with procurement. But as I understand, there is a real issue with only a few suppliers. That's one of the big corruption risks.
that we don't deal with through checklist compliance, you deal with through making sure there's more suppliers. This goes, I think, to your idea of mission-driven politics. that there are these periods when we agree on a mission. Usually it's a war, but not that long ago it was a pandemic. And all of a sudden we snap into a different mode. And it's a cliche in Congress and in politics. Oh, we act during emergencies.
And then you think, well, is climate change not an emergency that maybe we need to think about how we're acting during? But it's raised for me this ongoing question of, on the one hand, you don't want everything done under an emergency declaration. Your normal rules should be good rules. And on the other hand, I've had sort of the same question I think that you're raising. I'd be curious what you've concluded about it, which is,
How do you snap the system into more of a different mode? I feel like Donald Trump has come in and shown you can do it through will. I mean, I'm not happy about what he's doing or why he's doing it, but... The boundaries that everybody else seemed to respect have been normal. Where have you come to on this? I think it's actually important to remember that
For most of the cases in the 20th century, it wasn't under a war or some kind of emergence like that. You know, there was usually some political party that came into power, you know, in Western Europe or in South Korea that really just pitched the mission of let's get rich, you know, let's make society rich. Finland did this after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 80s and 90s. And that was pretty recent. So it's possible for politics to come in and say the mission is
Our society has been kind of declining. We're stuck. People's wages have been stagnating. And we actually need to fix that. And I actually think the politics is already almost there. I think that's what people thought they're voting for with Obama and with Trump and to an extent with Biden. Biden really campaigned on a bit of a mission. And it was in a crisis.
And it was in a crisis. Which increased people's ambitions quite a bit. Yeah, and I think... I think there's just been this general sense that whatever the current political order is, is not delivering the promise that people have had, you know, that America made of people in the post-war era. So we're looking for something new that's going to start delivering that again. So I think the real challenge actually is for a political leader. to come in and really pitch the whole thing, you know.
Operation Warp Speed happened during a crisis, but it wasn't big enough. It was like one small mission. We have done a lot of little small missions. We just need Operation Warp Speed for everything. And it's through that mission that I think you figure out what the new rules institutions should be. It wasn't like...
we threw out all the rules during world war ii there was tons of paperwork you know and the companies complained constantly about all the paperwork they had to do but we had the war production board and you know don nelson would be going around trying to figure out what paperwork is actually creating a bottleneck and what paperwork is necessary
And that's something we need to be able to do at the agency level. But to me, there's just something staring us in the face about why politicians aren't mission-driven. And it is money and politics. So you probably are familiar with the oligarchy study. It's now, I think, 10 years old, and it's only gotten worse, that wealthy people, there is real responsiveness. to their interests and there's almost no responsiveness to what the public wants.
in terms of the outcomes. And what happens in those emergency situations I believe is that the leaders forget all their responsiveness to their donors. And they do for a combination of reasons. One is they really care about people who are dealing with the flood. And they really care. I mean, I don't think everybody's awful. They really care about serving those people.
but also they are out of the campaign mode, and in the campaign mode when half of the money is coming from people who are making $100,000 donations in the post-Citizens United World. The imagination of leaders, of who they are delivering for, the voices in their head, are not the people who are really not sure where their next paycheck is going to come from, have to pay too much for an inhaler, have had a stagnant wage.
their own sense of mission has truly been clouded by money and politics. And so breaking that, that's not an easy thing to break. But I mean, if Bernie Sanders had been president, if Bernie had won. I don't think any of us doubt that he would have felt like it was an emergency. that it's an emergency for working people in this country in the sense that he would have figured out how to do what Pete Buttigieg did or Lena Kahn did or Jonathan Cantor did.
or Shapiro did in those moments is to take the tools of government to serve the working people of the country. So it's a hopeful story because it suggests we're not that far away. But it does suggest that we have to see the barriers as the way in which if you're in your mind, you're in a cocktail party with billionaires, it's going to be really hard to be mission driven about the bridge on a day to day basis.
I think that's the place to end. So always a final question about three books you recommend to the audience. And Zephyr, why don't we begin with you? Two books that kind of got me down this path, they're not necessarily anti-monopoly books or democracy books, but I think they are. One is The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt. And the other is The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwin. and then listen liberal.
Listen liberal by Thomas Frank, who wrote What's the Matter with Kansas, who had a call to arms about the future of the Democratic Party about 10 years ago. I'll say Destructive Creation by Mark Wilson is probably the most detailed book I read about the actual mobilization during World War II. I read the book. When you read what they did, it is shocking. It's amazing. It's really amazing.
Second book, I'd say, is Bat Samaritans by Ha Jun Chang, which tells a story of how a bunch of developed countries managed to go into mission mode and develop their countries. And the third, I'd say, is probably The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter. It's about FDR's first 100 days and really paints a picture of his style of leadership and how he was able to do so much without legislation. Shaka Chakrabadi. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks.
This episode of The Ezra Clown Show is produced by Roland Hu and Jack McCordick. Backchecking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gallup with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Annie Galvin,
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