TAI’s Jeffrey Gedmin and Charles Davidson recently sat down with William A. Galston and William Kristol to discuss the 2020 election and the future of American politics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Charles Davidson for TAI: A primary focus of ours at The American Interest is to contribute to the renewal of a broad, healthy political center. Do you think this is possible in the context of our current polarization? How would we advance such an agenda?
William Kristol: As John McCain liked to say, “It’s always darkest before it turns pitch black.” It’s dark and getting darker, but dawn really could be over the horizon. We might need a shock—like the 2020 election campaign—to teach Americans the importance of having a real center. I’m actually with the optimistic side. I think it’s not at all hopeless.
The one caution I would make is that we can’t merely go back to something that was. We might therefore think about constructing a new center as opposed to renewing it. There are important reforms to be made, but I’ve become somewhat radicalized over the last few years in believing that we need to think anew. We need to take a fresh look at the parties, at Congress, and at our civic institutions and the media. And maybe people will be spurred to that by this bad situation we now find ourselves in.
William A. Galston: I would add to the sources of hope. There’s a lot of evidence for the proposition that although the American people are more polarized than they used to be, they are not as polarized as the political parties have become. Our institutions now have the effect not of mirroring the sentiments of the country, but of exacerbating them at the expense of the center, which continues to exist. I am hopeful that with appropriate leadership, there could be a very different thrust to our politics in the years to come. It’s not going to happen instantaneously, but American history suggests that when the majority of the American people want something, eventually, they get it.
Jeff Gedmin for TAI: What’s broken in America, fundamentally? Is it chiefly culture, or is it a problem with our institutions?
WAG: We have cultural divisions, there’s no question about that. But we may also be in a Madisonian moment where artful institution redesign could make a significant difference. Congress is by far the weakest of our public institutions. And the weakness of Congress has had the effect of inducing the other branches of government to expand their power beyond due constitutional bounds. So, job number one is to ask, given the limits imposed by public opinion and by our party system, what can be done to renew Congress as a functioning institution?
I’ll give you an example. The budget process is clearly broken. We are operating with a Budget Act that was passed in 1974. It was extremely effective in dealing with the problems of its day, but new problems have arisen, and we haven’t revisited the way we make fundamental fiscal decisions in this country. We should, and we can.
Here’s another example. After a period in which new media were in effect functioning in a Wild West legal environment, where people made their own rules, there’s been a growing realization—including among the Big Tech companies—that the unregulated market has had negative economic and political consequences. I noted with interest that Facebook recently came out with a proposed framework for content regulation, which was not a topic they were willing to broach at all a few years ago. Change is afoot, and it’s not occurring as quickly as anybody would like, but I think it will be positive.
WK: Bill and I are both political scientists, so maybe we have an interest in asserting that politics can make a fundamental difference. But I do think that’s the case. There’s too much cultural, economic, and sociological determinism floating around. Obviously a lot of intelligent things have been written about the economic dislocations of globalization, automation, and the technological revolution, and those things are awfully important. But I think the intelligent political design of institutions, as Bill said, and flat-out leadership, matter a lot.
The public’s always going to have mixed views, different anxieties and resentments. But I don’t know that the public is much worse than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. In some ways it may be better. It’s leadership that’s been failing.
TAI: Why are we producing such poor leaders, then?
WK: Some of it’s just bad luck and chance. One can get too deterministic about this. I mean, look at Britain in the 1930s: Sometimes, fantastic leadership only emerges when the bad leaders are stuffed aside by events.
I do think the primary process is an obvious problem. Demagogues have always became senators and governors in American history, but there were a lot of checks to prevent them from becoming the actual nominee of one of the two major parties. In that respect, it’s the primary system combined with celebrity culture combined with media incentives combined with some fluke of bad luck, in terms of Trump having unique name recognition and a particularly advantageous candidate to run against, which together produced this situation. It needn’t have happened in 2016. The same system was in place in 2012 but it produced Romney and Ryan on the Republican side and Obama and Biden on the Democratic side.
I do think if we get a Trump-Sanders matchup in 2020, that really is a moment when you can see both parties going down a European path, where the normal establishments have utterly lost control. It hasn’t really happened before in American politics where the two parties nominate someone—Trump in 2016, Sanders in 2020—who has such little support from elected officials in the party. I’m not even making a value judgment, I’m just saying that analytically it’s kind of unbelievable. No governor supports Sanders, for instance.
WAG: I’ve believed for a long time that we were playing with fire when we converted our primary system to one in which the votes of a relatively small slice of the electorate would determine the choices available to Americans in each presidential election. Now the inherent flaws of that system have become even more apparent. This is another institutional “reform” like the 1974 Budget Act that was devised at a particular time in our history to address a particular set of circumstances, which are a half-century old. We now face new problems and our system of presidential selection has developed new pathologies and we have to respond to them with real institutional creativity.
Many of my colleagues are thinking about ways of introducing a greater measure of what they call “peer review” into the system. This, obviously, challenges the retreat of the Democratic Party from superdelegates. It is entirely possible that the changes to the system in recent years have all headed in the wrong direction.
TAI: It seems to us that there’s a split among anti-Trump analysts. One group says that while Trump is ghastly, our democratic institutions are fundamentally still strong and holding; the other thinks the assault on democratic norms and institutions is taking its toll. Where do you both come out on this?
WAG: It’s my view that the past three years have represented a stress test for our institutions. So far, they are mostly intact. But I’m not alone in worrying what they would be like if the system had to endure eight years of Donald Trump and not just four. We’ve already seen what happens when the President feels unbound and vindicated. And getting re-elected, I think, would be the ultimate liberation for President Trump.
He clearly has a very expansive view of executive power. He believes that the Madisonian lines separating the different branches of government are not lines that he is bound to respect. James Madison famously defined tyranny as the concentration of all powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—in a single set of hands. I don’t think that Mr. Trump would be able to achieve that in full measure, but it’s clear that that’s where he would like to go. You can see that not only by observing his actions, but also by paying attention to what he says, particularly when he enviously praises foreign leaders who’ve achieved a greater measure of concentration than he has.
I think there is cause for deep concern. The rule of law matters. The integrity of the judicial system matters. Respect for legislative prerogative matters. What we’re discovering is that our constitutional system is actually a lot more loose-jointed than we often suppose it to be. Many of the practices that we take for granted were forms of self-restraint never written into law or regulation, let alone the Constitution. We are discovering the hard way what happens when there’s a chief executive who really doesn’t care much about customary restraints, sometimes called norms, and who looks at the powers at his disposal and asks himself, “How far can I push things in order to get what I want?”
The answer is pretty far. We’ve found out, for example, that over the past four or five decades Congress has made more than 100 grants of emergency power to the Executive Branch. Many of them have long outlived their usefulness; others should never have been granted in the first place. We’re discovering that a sufficiently determined chief executive can use them, for example, to redeploy funds over the objection of the Congress of the United States, which is supposed to have the sole power of appropriation. These are all troubling signs.
WK: I think that’s right. Let me just add, one could have imagined a happy scenario when Trump first got elected. He doesn’t have respect for norms, doesn’t understand institutions, assumes he can run America like a private business, but in this scenario he comes to realize that the White House is different from Trump Tower, that the Oval Office has its own set of responsibilities. He has people around him who enforce a lot of norms, both informal and formal, and he accepts that and learns from it. That would be the story of someone who runs as a demagogue, but is moderated by the office, by his staff, and by Congress. That is not what has happened, but it wasn’t entirely crazy, in November 2016, to think that could happen, and a lot of people explicitly hoped it would.
The other extreme scenario, of course, was that Trump would be able to totally run roughshod over everything—no pushback from the military when he wants the brass to go after an individual officer, no pushback from the Justice Department, in terms of firing Mueller or now intervening in individual criminal prosecutions. We’re not in the worst case. There was a fair amount of pushback and there remains a fair amount of institutional resistance to Trump. But there’s less than there was three years ago, especially in the Executive Branch, and much less in Congress than we could have expected. Much, much, much less in the Republican Party than one could have expected.
Luckily in America, the head of the Executive Branch of the federal government is not all powerful. But I do think that things are getting worse, not better. A lot of these institutional restraints have been chipped away and the people now running these institutions don’t believe in them much, if at all. And I very much agree with Bill that eight years will make it much worse.
WAG: Let me just add a word to that, looking beyond our shores. Everything I read confirms what I hear privately, especially from Europeans: If Mr. Trump is re-elected, they will be forced to conclude that postwar America no longer exists—that they’re in a totally new situation where they’re not going to be able to rely on American leadership, where they will disagree with us at least as frequently as they agree, where they will have to think about fending for themselves in a context in which they’re not very strong, frankly, and will probably end up making all sorts of compromises with the Chinese on the economic front and the Russians on the political front. The White House’s belief that we don’t need friends, that the world can be run as an endless series of bilateral transactions, will end by leaving us alone in the world at precisely the time when we need all the help we can get to counter a rising China. This is deeply worrying.
TAI: Bill Kristol, you mentioned that there’s too much determinism in our analysis of Trump. But, overall, in terms of the mentality in our country, is there some sort of authoritarian temptation we’re suffering?
WK: I think so, yes. The good news is that people have recognized that temptation many times in the past. It can be beat back and overcome.
I don’t mean to minimize it. The weakening of various institutions that used to curb that temptation is pretty striking. On the one hand, one can say, “it’s not the Great Depression, it’s not Vietnam . . . why is this happening now, when we’re enjoying relative peace and prosperity?” On the other hand, between globalization, automation, and cultural transformation, I don’t think a sociologist would be that surprised, if he or she came down from Mars after 20 or 30 years, to be told, “You know what, it’s going to be disruptive and people are going to fall for various false, simple solutions to their problems.”
The heartening aspect of it, to me, is that we’ve been through things like this before and other countries have too. And it’s not clear how much we have an American problem as opposed to a Washington problem. I don’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone inside the Beltway is terrible, and outside it’s all wonderful. But state and local government do seem healthier than the Federal government. It doesn’t feel like the 1850s inside of many civic and religious institutions. Which isn’t to say, of course, that if the political institutions continue on the path they’re on, they won’t drag down state and local institutions as well.
WAG: One of the things that worries me most at this point is the growing alignment between politics and geography. This isn’t confined to the United States. Throughout the advanced democracies you have a widening gap between metropolitan areas and their suburbs—most of which are doing pretty well—on the one hand, and small towns and rural areas, most of which are stagnating and some of which are in outright decline (including demographically). This geographical cleavage, unfortunately, maps onto our political divisions. It’s not healthy when more and more people in our society feel completely uncomfortable unless they are living cheek-by-jowl with people who agree with their political ideas and preferences. That’s where we’ve been heading pretty steadily over the past 30 to 40 years.
It’s reached a point now where there really are two Americas with specific geographic locations. They don’t particularly like each other and they don’t even particularly understand each other. I don’t think it’s healthy if one political party aligns with one part of the nation’s geography and the other with the rest of the nation’s geography. The last time we had that, we ended up with the election of 1896, which at least for three decades resolved the tension. It’s not clear to me how we would get another election of 1896, but I think we need one.
TAI: If we end up with a Trump versus Sanders election, what are the biggest risks, and why? And then a footnote about the changing Democratic Party today: Some voices in its progressive wing have developed views toward Israel that might alarm some of us. What do you make of that trend?
WAG: First of all, Gallup just published a series of polls asking, “Would you vote for an X for president?” where they filled in the blank about 20 different ways. “Socialist” was the most unpopular option. A solid majority of the country said it would not vote for a socialist candidate. I think that has the ring of truth, so I don’t expect it to come to that. When the Democratic Party last went down this road in 1972 with George McGovern, the consequence was a defeat ringing enough that the next Democratic nominee was the most conservative Democrat to be nominated for President since the end of the 19th century. So I’d caution against linear thinking here.
Clearly, we are in difficult times for both parties. I can say with confidence that the forces are more evenly balanced in the Democratic Party. That said, there’s obviously a problem in the Democratic Party and part of it has to do with generational replacement. We have many young Democrats who have no memory of the Cold War, who were not alive during the near-death experience that Israel had in the Six-Day War, and who see the situation in the Middle East entirely through the prism of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. That those are flawed lenses through which to see the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not to gainsay their popularity in power. So, yes. There is a real problem.
WK: Yeah, I agree. The problems are different in both parties, but you look at Trump and Sanders and it does feel like something is going on that is analogous. It may fall short in one party, and that makes a huge difference: It matters whether you get 51% or 49% of the vote, and whether you win a nomination or lose a nomination. This is where I’m not too deterministic. But, on the other hand the fact that Sanders has such massive support among younger voters in general and younger Democrats in particular is pretty astonishing to me.
WAG: I actually disagree with that. I recently wrote a Wall Street Journal piece explaining why so many young people are supporting Bernie Sanders. If you simply ask the question, “If you’re 30 years old today, what have your formative experiences been?” the question almost answers itself. Because everything that’s happened to them since they were born has had the effect of preparing them to support somebody like Bernie Sanders.
WK: I’ll read the piece, but I don’t quite agree with that. The college-educated and non-college educated had very different experiences, for example. A lot of what’s happened since they were born might have told them that technological innovation is a pretty impressive thing, and probably happens more often when there are free markets, even if that has its own bad side effects. I wouldn’t have predicted, despite wage stagnation and poor prospects for the non-college educated, and even if they don’t remember the Cold War, that young people would be quite as enamored of Sanders’s message.
It’s also just that he’s a funny champion, right? In a way, AOC is a more obvious one, a young person emerging to speak for young people who’ve been neglected. But we are where we are. We have half of young Democrats loving Sanders and 90 percent of older Republicans loving Trump. So, two parts of our country are pretty enamored of people who are far from the mainstream.
TAI: What about Mike Bloomberg in all of this?
WK: Well, we’ll know more when people have a chance to vote for or against him. In a way it seems kind of crazy that a billionaire who’s been a Republican most of his public life suddenly gets in late and can possibly take the Democratic nomination. On the other hand, he was a good mayor of our largest city for 12 years. I think some of the coverage of Bloomberg is really unfair. I was struck by the messaging on TV the other day: “Well, another billionaire is showing up.” He’s not just another billionaire. He turned to public service—even leaving aside his philanthropy, which is quite impressive—and actually ran our largest city in challenging times in a very impressive way. So he’s not Tom Steyer, he’s not Howard Schultz. I’m not beating up on them, but they are literally billionaires who thought being a billionaire qualified them to run for office. It’s not fair to put Bloomberg in that category, I think.
WAG: I agree with that completely. But it is really striking: Each of the three people with the best chance of being inaugurated President on January 20th of next year has an ambiguous relationship with the party he’s vying to represent. Donald Trump is nobody’s idea of a lifetime Republican. Bernie has been a Democrat for about 10 percent of his adult life, and it’s always a fleeting attachment. And as for former Mayor Bloomberg, I’m not sure this is the first time he’s going to think of himself as a Democrat, but it might well be. It’s hard to interpret this as a sign that our two-party system is in good working order.
TAI: On foreign policy, is it fair to say that a much less interventionist consensus is emerging on the right and the left—or is this a blip? And second, it is now in fashion to talk about great power competition with China, Russia, and to some extent Iran. What are we getting right and what are we getting wrong?
WK: The American public is not crazy about foreign interventions, obviously. But I think the caricature that they’re wildly isolationist or ignorant is not fair either. They expect their leaders to know more than they do about these challenges, to think ahead and inform them about what they have to do. And in some ways they’ve been amazingly patient with leaders. If you think of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, not all these wars have gone so well. They’ve turned on those leaders to some degree, but less than one might have thought.
I think this is a case where you’ve had two presidents in a row who really ran against an interventionist foreign policy, and even against bipartisan foreign policy tradition. Obama did so in a qualified manner, while Trump was completely unabashed. I mean, he won the Republican nomination running against Bush and Romney, the most recent Republican president and nominee. That’s pretty unusual, actually. Parties usually produce a leader who is more or less in sync with the previous people that led the party. That really wasn’t the case with Trump, and somewhat wasn’t the case with Obama. It much more isn’t the case for Sanders.
For me, it’s a leadership issue. If you have presidents and nominees that don’t remind people of obligations and the consequences of acting and not acting, that has an effect on public opinion and on younger politicians. The incentive structure today is not what it was when Dick Luger or Sam Nunn were young politicians. Even Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, knew that you really couldn’t be president unless you showed an interest in foreign policy, so he educated himself and picked a VP nominee who had the credentials.
I don’t know how hard it will be to turn this trend around. But reality can wake us up pretty quickly, unfortunately.
WAG: On the one hand, all of the survey research that I’m aware of suggests that Americans understand viscerally that our alliances make us stronger, not weaker. Most Americans are not eager to stand alone in the world.
On the other hand, the experience of the past 20 years has certainly undermined American’s willingness to support land wars that seem to have no end—and in the case of Iraq, no rationale. To put it slightly differently, Americans are perfectly comfortable with the idea that almost seven decades after the war on the Korean Peninsula, we would still have tens of thousands of troops there. Similarly, although the dangers to Europe seem more remote, Americans have never seriously objected to the idea that we would have a continuing presence in Europe since the end of World War II.
But they are not willing to see their young men and women fight and die in what appear to be endless, pointless wars. My breath was taken away when Donald Trump the candidate started attacking his own party for its role in creating these wars. I really thought the party would rise up against him. It turns out he understood better what people were thinking than those who had been studying public opinion for a long time.
If someone other than Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, I don’t think that it will be difficult to persuade Americans that we need to return to our alliances with a renewed sense of purpose. I don’t think it will be that difficult to persuade Americans that staying out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was not the smartest thing we’ve ever done. I think more broadly, it will not be difficult to persuade Americans that the era of great power competition, which never completely went away, has now returned with somewhat different dramatis personae and that the need to address the challenge of a rising China, which is an economic challenge, a diplomatic challenge, and a military challenge, is unavoidable.
So, I’m not pessimistic, under the right kind of leadership, about the persistence of American foreign policy as a force for good in the world.
TAI: If you were advising 2020 candidates or the next Commander-in-Chief, how would you identify, let’s say, three to five top-line strategic priorities? And what about the domestic reform agenda?
WAG: Believing, as I do, that coming up with a comprehensive strategy to address the challenge of a rising China is job one, I’ve reached the conclusion that there’s nothing we can do through trade negotiations or other forms of diplomatic pressure to persuade the Chinese to abandon their aspiration to seize the commanding heights of the new technological economy, and to do so in very short order.
Therefore, we need something like a national defense economic mobilization which would create a strategic investment plan to allow us to be fully competitive with the Chinese in the next decade. I think it’s pretty clear that the market, left to its own devices, has not produced a plan for keeping us competitive. How is it possible that not a single American company seems to be able to compete with Huawei? I think the next Commander-in-Chief may have to enter the White House with a national investment plan that he or she is prepared to carry out.
That’s one top priority. It means, by the way, rethinking the defense budget in light of that overriding challenge. What are our aircraft carriers really worth in the context of this new, highly technologized military competition with China? It also means thinking through some really tough questions. If China increases military pressure on Taiwan, how far are we really prepared to go?
One of the things that attracts me to a national defense economic mobilization is that it also provides a new organizing principle for a substantial portion of domestic policy, because it puts the United States government in the position of affirmatively sponsoring, jump starting, capitalizing, and accelerating the processes of innovation which will not only enable us to be much more competitive at home, and shore up our defenses, but also provide a new generation of opportunity in the economy.
WK: For me, there are both great power challenges and what I’d call the challenge of chaos. In addition to focusing on how to deal with China and Russia, there’s a separate challenge in reminding Americans that a world in which chaos is kept to a minimum is a much better world, and much better for America, than one in which the institutions that check chaos—whether military, diplomatic, economic, or health institutions like the World Health Organization—are allowed to atrophy. We don’t want a world in which things are falling apart, because eventually that will have its effect at home.
I think there’s a need for the next President to remind America that we’re privileged to have the chance to shape this order, and it’s a burden but also a really great thing for the country—sort of a John Kennedy sense that this is something Americans can be proud of. I don’t think that’s likely going to happen in the next few years, unfortunately. It’s not “America First,” and it’s definitely not a Sanders foreign policy. It could be a Bloomberg or Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg foreign policy, though.
To close on an upbeat note, I do think that the worse things get, the more chance there is for fresh thinking institutionally. How does one regulate these new technologies, or use markets to shape them for the better rather than the worse? Or how do they influence markets for better and worse? As worrisome as things might be, it’s not a bad moment, intellectually, to be thinking about these fundamental challenges.
WAG: Let me return to the second half of your question. Apart from the commander-in-chief challenge, there’s a more exclusively domestic challenge which goes to the heart of the kind of country we want to be. There’s a widespread sense that the United States has become a less fluid society than it used to be: It has fewer opportunities for social and economic mobility; the circumstances of your birth are a little bit stickier and more determinative of where you end up. Some have charged that the upper-middle class has become a self-perpetuating meritocracy where advantage is passed down from one generation to the next.
Similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, you have the reproduction of disadvantage and poverty from generation to generation. I think these are serious concerns. The promise of America, after all, is the promise of being able to improve your circumstances through your own efforts and to provide better prospects for posterity, including your own children. If we’re not attending to that promise of American life, and if we’re not doing what we need to do in order to make sure that the mechanisms of mobility are alive and well, then I think we’re in danger of exacerbating the sort of social discontent and antipathy that we’ve seen so much in evidence through much of the 21st century in this country.
That’s a lot more food for thought, and it has implications for everything from early childhood education and training to acceptance patterns in our elite institutions of higher education. We have to rethink all this, I believe, quite comprehensively.