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The Ezra Klein Show
By Ezra Klein
transcript
In 2020, very few people had heard the name Vivek Ramaswamy. Thus, before he ran for president, before he was one of the breakout stars of the Republican primary, neither of them could even state for you three provinces in Eastern Ukraine that they want to send our troops to actually fight for. Look at that. I mean, she has no idea what the hell the names of those provinces are. He is polling higher than many of his competitors who have far more political experience rising to second place behind former President Trump. In a new poll out of New Hampshire today, we become a party of losers. At the end of the day, that is where the party is headed. Is this style of rhetoric. And then in the summer, when Republicans were riding high, when Donald Trump seemed a pretty good bet to win the presidential campaign, Ramaswamy went to the National Conservatism Conference, a place where his colleague and sometimes enemy JD Vance was also speaking and gave a pretty interesting speech. Thank you for the warm welcome. It’s going to be a different kind of speech tonight, arguing there was a deep divide in the America First movement. It’s not a rah rah speech. My goal is to actually tonight just illuminate what I view as this growing, healthy but existent rift between what I call the National protectionist direction of the future and a national Libertarian direction for the future Vance, of course, was then chosen to be Trump’s vice president, elevating the leader of the other side of what Ramaswamy takes as a divide to possibly the vice presidency. But Ramaswamy thinks that a future Trump administration. And if Trump loses, certainly a future Republican Party is still quite capable on these issues. He just published a book making some of these arguments and thought would be an interesting time to have a moment to talk about these divides. As always, my email. Nytimes.com Vivek Ramaswamy. Welcome to the show. It’s good to be on, man. So in 2022, you told the New Yorker that you recoil when you’re called a conservative in your book. The term you like to use for your movement is the movement you’re part of. Is America first. What’s the difference between being a conservative and being America first. Well, the reason is, I think, the term conservative. And I would say everything I’m saying, there’s a parallel version of it for liberal and the left, but that’s less my concern of what you probably won’t hear from me. But I think the term conservative itself is ill-defined today. And so I think that if there’s one thing that unites the conservative movement today, it is its opposition to radical left wing excess. But if you ask the question of what does it actually stand for, that question, I think is far more unanswered. Even the values or the value systems that conservatives are seeking to conserve have in some ways actually been eroded and disappeared in the country, which requires a kind of creation, which has historically been a progressive project rather than a conservative project. And that gets a little etymological and philosophical. But in a more practical sense, even the modern conservative movement consists of I think, a rather widely disparate group of movements. Within it. You would have the neoliberal informed or what you might call neo conservative vision of conservatism, Bush era Republican conservatism versus a more nationalist America First direction. That speaks to certainly my vision for the future of the country. But if you double click on that itself is comprised of at least two, if not more different factions within it as well. And so anyway, for me, I think a lot of these labels can be confining and that’s one of the reasons I’ve tried to maybe go out of my way more so than an average politician to write a larger number of books, articles take a little bit more, go to the distance a little bit to lay out what my views actually are rather than to have them be analogized to somebody’s preexisting category of where they try to fit me in. I’m unafraid of being a little etymological. We’re here on a podcast. I’ve been thinking about George W Bush recently. I often think about him. He’s a big figure in my own cosmology, and he was understood in his day as a nationalist. This was an era of flag pins. You’re wearing a flag pin right now the post 9/11 period. What I see in the America First world is a sense that what came before was insufficiently nationalist. If I was to say what unites all of you together, it is a sense of renewed nationalism and a sense that nationalism was betrayed not just by a left that you say has excesses, but a right that lost the plot. In what way was George W Bush not nationalist? Well, the short version of the answer to that question would be interventionist foreign policy and the use of American taxpayer and even live life resources to advance goals that didn’t directly advance or even indirectly advance the American interest. That’s the short version of the answer to that question. But if you want to go longer form and in terms of history here, let’s go even further back to the evolution of modern conservatism and how we got to where we are. I think if you go back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, this is a kind of modern, original sin in American politics of the creation of a nanny state. To me, I include the entitlement state, which is the state that gives away stuff welfare, Medicaid, et cetera. There’s the regulatory state, the rise of 3 letter agencies to administer this larger form of government and the regulatory state. And then there’s the foreign nanny state, which is the foreign aid complex and the foreign interventionist complex. What I think of as classical conservatism in the latter half of the 20th century was a reactionary response to that LBJ vision of the Great Society that got watered down through what we would say, the rise of neo conservatism, Bush era conservatism that effectively accepted that this larger form of government in some form was here to stay, that we’re not really going to undo the Great Society, that we’re not really going to undo the existence of the regulatory state. But we want to be thoughtful about curbing its overgrowth while at the same time saying that while we’re at it and we got big government, we might as well use it to spread democracy, using capitalism as a vector to do it. And if we’re not going to use capitalism to do it, we’ll use military force to do it. And that’s a different kind of big government that became accepted in the form of conservative doctrine, not just accepted, but central feature of it. And then what I see in the America First response right now is a unified response that is against that neoconservative vision. And I think what you see in broadly what’s thought of in popular circles as the America First movement today, but what I call the protectionist wing of the America First movement is an economic objective, an economic project. You could call it economic populism or economic nationalism. But in some ways, the protectionist strand of this says, O.K, well, if big government is going to be here to stay, we don’t just want to curb it. We actually want to use it to advance substantive goals of our own versus the strand that I’m more identified with. I would I’ve certainly termed the. National libertarian or National Liberty. Strand of America first says that actually the whole project. We got to actually keep our eye on the ball was dismantling the existence of that Nanny state in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state and the foreign nanny state. And we’ve gotten into the thick of a lot. No, this is great. I’m glad to get into it. Where Medicare and Medicaid mistakes, I believe they were with the benefit of retrospect, particularly Medicaid, particularly the welfare state, without work, attachments required attached to it. Medicare and Social Security had put in a different category, which we can get to later and I think is a little bit orthogonal to the discussion. Certainly that I’m most interested in having that I think is on the money right now. Why are they in a different category. Well, I think that Social Security I mean, you kind of had the my real issue there is if we’d ever actually taken advantage of the surplus that we had, it’s a bit more mechanical issue that if you just allowed for the surplus to be invested at rates of normally normalized returns of the stock market or diversified portfolio, we’d have a far excess surplus that would be sustaining itself. So it was pay in pay out versus having a redistributionist quality to it versus what I think of as the welfare state. My principal issue with it is that it actually I think the evidence would show, in my opinion, that it has harmed the very people that it was created to actually help. But my core focus actually, even in my presidential campaign, had been less taking aim at that, though I do think that that’s a project we have to come back to but was to take aim, at least the regulatory state that was a close cousin of that state. And I think basically what happened in the 60s is we traded off our sovereignty for this stuff. And I think the problem we’re basically going to run into as a country is eventually that stuff is going to run out in the form of our national debt crisis, and we’re left with neither sovereignty nor stuff. And I think this should be the central focus and concern of the conservative movement, which is not quite today. That brings me back to this distinction between the National protectionist and the National libertarian camps of the America First movement. And the irony is, as I’ve made the case for the more national Libertarian strain, let’s just say in recent months, in a more pronounced way in particular, one of the criticisms I’ve gotten is that just a reversion to a kind of neo conservatism or neoliberalism. And my retort back to that, and this is at the bleeding edge of America first debates right now is that actually the America First wing, the protectionist wings acceptance of the big state, is actually the permanent codification of the neo conservative premise that rejected the classical conservatism that was hostile to the existence of the nanny state in the first place. And so where we’re getting right, how many conservatisms can dance on the head of this particular pan. I was. You said you want to get an etymology and lexicons. And so I feel like we’re using too many terms. But hold on, hold on the terms for a minute. Yeah I’ve sat in chairs Exactly as far from Paul Ryan as I’m sitting from. You put aside the foreign policy for a minute, which is key. Which is key. Which is key to a lot of what you’re saying. Just feels like Paul Ryan to me. So here’s why it’s radically different. I would say is I am more committed in my rejection of blithe neoliberalism, even more committed what is blithe neoliberalism. So blithe? Neo liberalism is liberal internationalism of a variety that says we were somehow going to export Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to China, that the sole goal of immigration policy was to view the United States as an economic zone and that the goal of all immigration policy was to maximize the size of that economic pie without regard to national identity. Those are some of the big mistakes of blithe neoliberalism of yesterday. I think what we’ve learned from that is here’s a couple key errors. I would say like deep category errors that were committed that we still suffer the consequences of today. One of those is that we now depend on our chief adversary for our own national security. The number one supplier to the US military directly or indirectly, is China. 40 percent of the semiconductors that power the Department of Defense come from China. Our military industrial base is dependent on China, so much so that Raytheon says that we have to make nice with China. This makes no sense. Like even if you’re classical, Hayek style libertarian, read the road to Serfdom. He would even admit and even embrace the idea that a nation cannot depend on its adversary for its own national self defense. It just doesn’t make sense. But that’s I think, the sin number one of the old blithe neoliberalism and number two, related to this issue of immigration, that somehow I don’t care what language you speak, I don’t care what your allegiance to the civic ideals of the United States are. If the first thing about it if you’re going to add some unit of economic efficiency to the US economy, our immigration policy is effectively just a subset of economic policy, which I think has had the effect of eroding our national character and national identity in a way that just wasn’t in the scope of concern of the Paul Ryan style worldview of the 1990s. So in that sense, I depart in no uncertain terms from the blithe neoliberalism of yesterday. However, there’s a fork in the road then about how one responds to that. If you’re really serious about declaring economic independence from China, which I think is a chief and vital objective for the United States. At least in areas critical to our national security, then Yes, of course, that means onshoring to the US. We’re all in favor of that. But it also means if you’re really serious about it, expanding trade relationships with South Korea, Japan, India, you could debate other countries Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, et cetera. But if your top goal is to protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition, then you actually want less trade with those countries. But if that’s your objective, then you’re necessarily delaying the time period it takes to declare independence from China. So there’s a choice. So in this you sound a little bit more to me like where the Biden administration is than where Donald Trump is. I disagree. Well, I’m sure you will. Yeah but what you’re describing is what they often talk about as friendshoring before them. What you’re describing is what got talked about was actually called the trans-pacific partnership trade deal. We are going to encircle China with a series of trade deals. And I’m sure you would have designed the trade deal in terms of climate and Labor Standards differently. But with Trump. Has a not just a set of China tariffs, but a 10 percent or 20 percent depending on which speech he’s giving tariff on all imported goods from anybody, be they friend or foe. You sound to me like you’re interested in this other idea that our trade with friends should go up in order to make trade with China go down. That strikes me as actually more common cause right now with people on the Democratic side than people on the Republican ticket. Well, the first thing I will say, a lot of things to say in response to that. First of all, I could care less right now for the purpose of this discussion about what label we overlay on anything because I think there’s deep divides in the Democratic Party, as I think there are. Sure but I think it’s useful to ground things in actual policies people are proposing. But then on the second point is Biden’s actually kept most of the Trump tariffs intact. And then the next thing we could talk about. But he’s not trying to create a universal tariff. Well, that’s an if he kept all the tariffs that he supposedly would have opposed it from Donald Trump. No, no, no. He’s not trying to create a 10 percent or 20 percent universal tariff. He’s just not I think we can get into the essence on man. He’s going to get to the essence of what Donald Trump is also trying to do, which I think is a little different than what you characterize proposing a 10 percent or 20 percent universal. I think he’s using the threat of tariffs to be able to accomplish some other goals as an. So you don’t think he will do the thing that he’s saying he will do. I think that he’s using Donald Trump is all about with respect to the International stage, using our leverage to the maximum extent possible. So we have to assume secret knowledge of what Donald Trump is going to do. Well, I think that he’s proven himself to be an apt negotiator for the United States in getting other countries to pony up in contexts where they haven’t in the past. And so I think that we got to part of what you’re doing by putting Donald Trump there is we’re not putting a traditional stuffed suit politician, but you’re effectively putting somebody there who keeps other countries guessing in a way that we’re able to extract leverage from them as a consequence. So we can’t really debate what he’s going to do then. So you’re saying he is running for president on his core economic policy, but we should not evaluate that policy because in office he’ll do something else when he I think the way to evaluate Donald Trump is how he performed in his first term. So the way Donald Trump performed in his first term is I’m going to do what’s right for America. I’m going to do it situationally, what best advances America’s interests, whatever it is. I think the TPP was poorly executed. You anticipated correctly. Some of the things I would say with respect to climate change related objectives, et cetera, that are baked in. But even more so just to get closer to the meat of it. I think that it’s not really free trade when the other side of that trading relationship isn’t playing by the same terms as us when it comes to state subsidies, for example. So tariff is a tax, but there’s three ways of having indirect tariffs or indirect imbalances in the trading relationship. When you have state related subsidies on one side versus another, if another country or trading partner is applying a tariff to us, either a direct tariff or an indirect tariff in the imbalance of state sponsored support, then I think it is totally fair game for the Uc to say, well, we’re going to do the same thing in return, even though I believe the best state of affairs for everybody involved is getting rid of that state sponsorship and the tariffs in the first place. And I think if you look in fact like forget rhetoric and everything else, but in fact, a lot of what Donald Trump accomplished was either leveling the playing field or using the threat of going further than that to accomplish other objectives. That’s what we got out of the first term. I think that’s fair game. So one thing that is difficult about talking about Donald Trump, both in terms of policies he proposes, but also the first term that he inhabited, is that in both cases, you have a problem of interpretation. So in the first term, it is not just cannon among liberal reporters, but cannon among Trump staffers, that Trump was highly blocked by the bureaucracy, that he in theory controlled. And a huge amount of the thinking around the America First movement is how to make a second Trump term more responsive to at least what people believe is Trump’s interests and desires than the first term was. I don’t agree with this vision of Donald Trump as sitting up late at night, every night, carefully poring through proposed trade deals with different countries bilaterally to decide what’s in the American interest. He got some things done and didn’t change a whole lot of things. But there are theories beneath these. And what I think is interesting about your book, about some of the speeches you’ve been giving is a distinction in theory. Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, believes JD Vance certainly believes that we have very zero sum transaction. Personal relationships with other countries and that we are getting robbed on deals. But just in general, we should be pushing to bring much, much more onshore. A lot of trade theorists believe, a lot of people think about trade, believe you can have much more positive some relationships. I think that is functionally right now where you are. And my sense is that Trump the whole theory of those tariffs. which is why I take them seriously, at least as an idea of what Donald Trump believes about the world, is that you would just bring back a lot more industrial base if you made all the imports from the rest of the world more expensive. That is, I think, a natural way to look at that. It is a way, Vance explains. It is your view that Donald Trump does not believe that at core he’s not mercantilist in that way. I think so. Here’s the thing about Donald Trump and the coalition he leads right now versus a part of that coalition that has the ideology that you’re describing. I think Donald Trump at his core is a pragmatist. And I do believe and I think it would be boring to have an hour long conversation about different interpretations of Donald Trump’s style. But I’ll give you my perspective on it, is I do think that he is somebody who pragmatically is not going to be an ideologue one way or the other on this question, but is just going to look at what makes America a better country and how you’re able to exert negotiating leverage in a situation by situation basis to get there. What I think is more interesting, though, is there is the ideological strand that you described. And I would go one step further in what that ideological strand thinks it’s accomplishing the protectionist strand. It’s not just bringing manufacturing back to the US. I think there’s even more to the project than that. I think part of the project is also playing with American wages, bringing the wage of the American worker up by saying that effectively you are engaging with slave labor style wages, you could debate or not. But I’m articulating the view that it’s like slave labor wages in another country and stuff’s made cheaply. Because of that, you’re effectively forcing the American worker to compete at that lower wage. If you’re engaging in a truly open, bilateral free trade relationship. And that’s where this bleeds into immigration policy. So trade policy, immigration policy to the protectionist camp, I think as more of a subset of actually of anything is labor policy, a little bit of industrial policy, but it actually is labor policy at its core. The protectionist view on this is, look, if an American company could pay an American worker $20 an hour to do a job and they could pay two foreign born workers legally or illegally in this case, sometimes Republicans use the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration to confound this much more uncomfortable discussion about legal immigration. But what he would say is for $20 an hour, if you could pay an American born worker, but a foreign born worker, even a legal immigrant, would be doing the same job for $10 an hour. The job of US immigration policy should be to keep those two foreign born workers out so that the domestic born worker can actually be paid the higher wage. That’s a totally different view from not only classical economic theory, but also my own view of the National libertarian worldview, which is that actually the thing we should be caring about when it relates to immigration policy is something else altogether, which is the National character of the United States. If your vision of immigration policy is one of protecting American workers from wage competition, then you just want less immigration, period. If your goal is to actually. Preserve the National character and identity of the United States. It’s a different immigration policy, which in theory could be more same or less pragmatically in the near term, almost certainly means a lot less. But you get there for very different reasons. I always find the way the America First movement doesn’t think about immigration to be interesting because on the one hand, on the trade side, what I see is a description of America as locked in incredible zero sum competitive relationships with other countries in the world, competitive relationships for where you’re going to put a factory for who’s going to buy, whose exports or imports. It’s a very dog-eat-dog economic view of things. And in some ways it’s true. And here you have this incredible possible advantage America has over everybody else, which is everybody wants to come here. And you could build an immigration system that is bringing in not just low wage work, but a lot of high wage talent. In the stories of This. Steve Jobs, the son of a Syrian refugee, are Legion. I mean, Elon Musk, you himself, Elon Musk himself. The degree to which that does not seem to be a huge part of competition strategies on the right or the America First thing is interesting you bring up a point system in the book. I’m not sure that it isn’t. Well, talk to me about how you think about it. So I drew this distinction earlier, but I want to dwell on it for a second because I think this is really important in understanding what’s actually going on with our base versus what may appear to people peering on it from the outside versus in. So I do think that most of the prominent voices that wear the mantle of the America First right. Adopt the protectionist view, I don’t think that is broadly representative of where a much more diverse coalition even within America first dress, you take someone like Elon Musk, who’s playing an instrumental role, I think in guiding hopefully success for Donald Trump in this election, I’m where Elon is and Elon is where I am on this question is that we want to be the championship team. So the three principles I give for immigration policy to make it really simple for people is no migration without consent. Consent should only be granted to migrants who benefit America, and those who enter without consent must be removed. But number 2 is the most interesting. Consent should only be granted and should be granted to migrants who benefit America. Now, I view that benefit more holistically than just the economic benefit, but who benefit America in increasing the civic character that I think we’re missing in our country. And further, part of a subset of that civic character is self determination and self-reliance and the ability to work hard through a meritocratic system of American capitalism. So I think that is alive and well actually in the bloodstream of America First Policy. But I think part of what’s happened is some of the most articulate, thoughtful, intelligent. And prominent voices wearing the America First mantle on the right, I think, have adopted that more protectionist view that you don’t really see fully embodied in Donald Trump. Donald Trump has facets of each of these elements in his policy vision. But I think that his view that if you were educated at a Uc University and you’re going to be somebody who’s actually going to be one of the geniuses like the next Elon Musk’s of this country, we want them in the United States of America. So on immigration, I think you get this interesting question, which gets to me at the heart of the cleavage you’re describing. I look at America First as. This strange effort to contest what it is that Donald Trump himself means. And there’s a version that is JD Vance that I think you were describing very well here, which is the immigration policy here is about protecting American workers from wage competition. Fair enough. There’s a version that you are trying to advocate and be a leader in, which is we should be pursuing a certain vision of national identity. And I to talk about what that means. And there’s a thing that I actually hear from the guy who has made this popular and who is leading this movement, which is that immigrants are vermin who are polluting the gene pool with bad genes, that they are coming here from insane asylums. They are coming here from prisons, that the people themselves are the problem. It’s sometimes it feels to me like there’s an effort to sanitize this or to idealize it to make it something we can argue about with spreadsheets, to make it something that we can think about in policy. But I think for Trump himself and the thing that gives us a lot of its power and the way he talks about it over and over and over again in a very consistent way, it’s not about wages and it’s not really about identity. It’s a belief that the people who are coming here are bad. They’re not sending their best. And that is the problem. And so we should lock it up because the people who come here should not be coming here. So let me draw a couple of distinctions. Because I think that what I hate talking about stuff that’s trite. And even amongst Republicans, I try not to say things that have already been said. But what you’re bringing up is the distinction that everybody knows about. And I’m a hawk on this, too, which is illegal immigration. So the premise here is if your first act of entering this country breaks the law, then by definition in some bass sense of the word like definitionally, you are AI want to stop here actually, because I’m not bringing up illegal immigration. An illegal immigration you’re talking about. We’re talking about illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is part of what I’m saying. But Donald Trump does not make the distinction you are describing here. If you may. Let me finish, then. Because I’m actually. But I don’t want you to move the subject of what I’m talking the subject of it. But you’re asking about who is he referring to and talking about criminals. Broadly speaking, denigrating terms, I think are generally reserved for people who have crossed illegally. We just been going through the Haitians and they have not come here illegally. No, no, no. Well, versus the same Donald Trump, as a matter of a couple of months ago said that he wants to staple potentially an h-1b visa to everybody who graduates from a Uc University. That’s not their criminals worldview. So I think a lot of this and I’m not I’m here to share with you what my perspectives are. But you’re asking about. Donald Trump and my understanding of where he’s at on this, which I respect, is broadly overlaps with the distinction between illegal immigration and legal immigration. And then there’s one step further in the quasi legal immigration category. An interesting thing about our current immigration system, and I make this point in the book as well, you can imagine an immigration system that rewards all kinds of different attributes. It could reward intelligence, it could reward national allegiance, it could reward willingness to work hard or economic contributions or how much money you have when you already come here. So you’re not going to be dependent on the welfare state. Our immigration system rewards none of those qualities. The number one human attribute that our current immigration system rewards is actually your willingness to lie, actually, which is a sad and unfortunate fact. If you’re somebody coming from another country and you can’t in good conscience say you’re not seeking asylum because I’m not going to be a threat of imminent bodily harm because of my race or my religion. I just can’t say that to the US government because it’s a lie. You’re not going to get in if you don’t actually face that, but you’re willing to say it. You actually do get in. So I think against that backdrop, we do have a broken immigration system in both the illegal and even quasi legal variety where your willingness to lie on day one is the number one human attribute that, sadly, our current immigration system rewards. So against that backdrop, there’s a lot of frustration in the conservative movement broadly. I share some of it. Donald Trump clearly shares some of it to say that needs to change. But if we’re talking about Trump for a minute before moving on to broader policy views, I think Donald Trump is also the person who has said things like he loves immigrants. He’s married to an immigrant. He praises illegal immigrants of different contexts. And I think that the top policy doesn’t surprise anybody to know this. Just listen to Donald Trump at one of his rallies. I think correctly, one of the top policies is to seal the border and to stop the illegal immigration crisis into our country. Once we’ve achieved that, I think we’re going to be in a good position to have lasting immigration reform on the legal side. And I believe there’s two competing visions here. But I come down on the side of prioritizing civic assimilation and civic identity and economic contributions as part of that, as distinct from the economic protectionist vision of saying that somehow our job is to coddle Americans who are already here from being prevented, from having to compete in the labor market with the best and brightest whom we might otherwise allow into the country. This is probably more where I take your earlier view on Donald Trump, where I think that what he did in his first term is illustrative. There were a lot of immigration compromises Donald Trump could have struck that would have been border hardening at a level he never got anywhere near because he couldn’t pass legislation. Comprehensive immigration reform is now, I think, an idea associated with the Democratic Party. But it could be something that members of the right propose. There could be a Vance Trump policy that describes the border hardening and deportation measures they would like to take, but also describes what a pro-America, immigration system should be. I think that’s coming. I think that’s coming. But I think we’ve got to go in order. And I think this is part of where we lack the ability to have this conversation with intellectual clarity without solving the mass illegal migration crisis. First order is weird here because the reason Democrats thought about comprehensive immigration reform is recognizing they needed Republican votes. They put a bunch of things they weren’t actually that excited about in there to try to get them. The reason I’d be interested to see Donald Trump and JD Vance put something like this out is that if you wanted to. Legislate on this. You actually need Democratic votes. So making a comprehensive, not just saying my only aim is mass deportation is actually how you get that. Two points on this, where I have a different point of view, I think it is actually for uniting the American public around where we eventually land. I actually think it’s important to go in two steps and not do it in one step. I think you’ve got to deal with the illegal immigration crisis first, after which I think you’ve built trust with the American populace, that we can actually have an honest, earnest conversation about how we’re solving for legal immigration as opposed to a system where we’ve really abandoned a lot of the border security policies that have bred deep mistrust in the American populace, that anything we’re going to do in some type of package hodgepodge deal is actually just a reverse maneuver for accomplishing the same thing that we were accomplishing through mass illegal migration. So for the purpose of building lasting unity around this, I think we need to fix illegal migration first. Once that issue is done, then I think we can have a rational conversation about what legal immigration policy looks like. The thing I want to get at, though, with immigration is and the point I’m making about Donald Trump is it actually really matters what is motivating somebody. I take that as actually your core point here. Yeah and I think a lot of the people following Donald Trump are motivated more by what I would describe as policy objectives than he is. But the thing that has motivated a movement, the thing that makes this whole thing powerful, does have animal spirits in it. One of the things I appreciate about the distinction you’re drawing between you and what you call the National patronage side of this is it. I think what you’re describing is closer to the way you would try to. Turn the animal spirits into policy. Then the economic side, I think the economic side is trying to sanitize this, whereas national identity, I actually agree with you on that. National identity is closer to the thing that I think to the flame. Donald Trump feels that people behind him feel that it’s actually getting debated and that we don’t really have such a good way of talking about because national identity isn’t a thing you can measure on a chart. We don’t run studies on how good the National identity is. And so it’s actually not always the simplest thing to put into an immigration policy. So talk to me about how you understand what kind of immigration and harms. This signals to me that I think you really I think I don’t mean to sound pompous, but you really get this, I think in a deep way. I think that’s a little bit of retroactive re-engineering of what’s going on. But what’s really in people’s hearts is this deeper question of identity. And then we can maybe get to this later. I think what’s lurking underneath this entire debate is actually a deeper question of identity, of what it means to be an American. But we can come to that in a little bit. So I think the question here as it relates to immigration policy is closer to identity and American identity. And I would like to translate that to policy through what I consider to be a civic nationalist vision. In some sense, the most upstream view that I have is what it means to be an American is we have an attachment to these civic ideals. And as it relates to immigration policy, how we instantiate that is to say that if you have somebody from another country who has a greater understanding of US history than the average American citizen here has a greater commitment to the ideals embodied in that history than the average citizen here is more fluent in the US language or proficient in the US language than the average citizen here. So therefore can communicate and engage with those ideals and is willing to work harder and embody greater contributions to America than the average citizen here. Then we should have an immigration policy that selects for that class of immigrant, which is different than the view of saying the blood and soil vision of identity. Say there are certain people who are vested into a tie to this Homeland that deserve to be protected and taken care of by their government. And if there are other people who are going to offer a competitive force in the marketplace for labor, it is the job of America first leadership to keep them out. Now, I actually believe what you believe, which is that Donald Trump is actually much more motivated by and I think a lot of the base behind Donald Trump and the MAGA movement is a lot closer to the flame with where I’m at on this question is much more about identity than it is about this economic populism. Two things have always struck me as complicated in this view. One is that national identity is itself malleable and what different people feel is the nature of attachment to America and the nature of the instantiation of American ideals differs from place to place. I’m Californian. We are a state with very high immigration, very high immigration of people don’t come speaking English. I grew up in Orange County and a part of Orange County with very high Asian immigration. A lot of the people I grew up with didn’t speak English. Amazing Americans work hard. Their children are amazing Americans. They contributed a huge amount also to the economy of the country. And part of being Californian, at least in the way I am part of my national and state identity has to do with the way America assimilates and mixes in immigrants. Trying to get at that in a test. One of the things I sometimes find interesting about an argument like yours is I get where you’re coming from, but there’s this part of you that will in a minute. Tell me about the government’s incapacity. All the administrative agencies we need to shut down all the regulators who might be well intentioned and want to make the world a better place. And then you’re going to be like, but what we can do is give people a test on paper. So it is going to tell, I understand where you’re coming from, what kind of American they’re going to be. So tell Let me just let me just start with let me just start with a basic premise, because it’s a fair it’s a fair point for you to raise totally. What I’ve said is, at the very least, for example, just to people who may have not followed my entire campaign but are listening to this conversation, just understand where I’m coming from. I’m looking at these principles not just to the outside, but also to the inside. So one of the controversial positions I adopted during my campaign, which I stand by is I think every native born high school senior should have to pass the same civics test that we already require of every legal immigrant who enters this country, which I think every native born high school senior should be able to pass that arguably to even be fully viewed as a capital C citizen in the United States in order to vote. Well, I think that we could debate the way that you implement it, but at least I think every high school senior, let’s just say the mildest version of this, which I think should be least controversial and most adaptable, is to graduate even from high school. You should be able to the same thing about our country that every legal immigrant is required to know before they become a full citizen. So this is a civic nationalist view that goes far beyond just immigration policy as it relates to immigration policy. It speaks to me when you talk about your identity as a Californian and the different attributes that compose identity, right. Identity is such a complicated concept, and there’s a lot of layers of what one’s own identity, religious identity, ethnic identity, what foods you eat, the cultural traditions that make up who you are. And I am not of the view. I hope I haven’t ever represented myself to be even inadvertently. I’m not of the view that you need to abdicate those other forms of your identity to opt into the American identity. It would be a bizarre thing for me to say because I am the kid of legal immigrants to this country. And there are many elements to my own identity that go beyond just the civic commitments to the US ideals. But I think that is a necessary condition of actually being able to opt into those ideals. So I draw a distinction between your knowledge of the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, our constitutional system of self-governance, your ability. And I think this is the most controversial one, but your ability to speak English, which I think is a precondition for assimilating into a country of other people who share those same ideals versus whether you like to play baseball, soccer or cricket. And I bring that up because I think that is an issue for certain cultural vision of what identity actually is like. Do you have to hot dogs and baseball rather than enchiladas and soccer. I don’t think distinguish between the two things here because it’s actually not even meant to be a hostile question. I think the question I’m getting at is within your framework, not even within my framework, what do you believe these tests can really do. A minute ago, you said to me, right, I don’t want to fetishize the test is one attribute. English is a national language I think would be high on the list. I understand that a minute ago, you said to me that our immigration system, what it prioritizes above all else is a willingness to lie. Because if you come and you’ll claim asylum in your view falsely, that gives you get brought into the country, at least for a period of time. It’s not my view. Ezra, don’t just say in your view. I mean, it is what’s happening today. I am saying that people can disagree on what is and in fact do disagree. You have a whole thing in your book about the rates at which different judges grant asylum claims. So the question of what counts as a credible asylum claim is not just contested, but is itself ambiguous. And in, among other things, the bill that Donald Trump helped kill. We were going to change the levels of asylum claims you need to be able to make in order to claim that successfully. So I think I’m actually saying the same thing you are. Asylum claims are ambiguous, although I don’t always think that the same people you probably do are falsely claiming it. I think different levels of fear are understood differently by people. The thing I am saying is that how do you just avoid this being a teaching to the test. Coming to America is great. Being able to say on a form that the Declaration of Independence was about equality for all men is easy. So now we’re talking about plumbing and implementation, which I don’t want to reject. I don’t think I want to. I mean, isn’t this how you want to instantiate it. I think a test is just one example. I think proficiency in English is high on the list, and I don’t want to dismiss the question about implementation, but what I do want to just draw the distinction of is there is a very different competing vision that this is at all the thing that we’re supposed to be concerned about versus saying if that person is going to work harder and more hours for a lower wage, that’s a problem. So that’s the basic distinction I’m drawing now, how you implement it. I mean, I’m not trying to just be a philosopher in the clouds here. Those are important questions to get to. But at least you got to know what you’re solving for before you actually even solve for it. And there is a deep seated divide even on the right about what we’re actually solving for. And I think right now, especially. If we’re successful in winning this election, as I’m rooting for and working hard to make happen, I think it will actually be really important for us to just see with clarity the why of why we’re advancing each of these different visions of trade and immigration policy and especially attitudes towards regulatory reform. So why don’t we talk about just at a philosophical level, the difference you see between the way that the National patronage side, as you call it, and your side think about what should be done with the administrative state. Sure and I use the word national patronage and national protectionist, sometimes interchangeably. But I think there’s two competing visions or how we view the administrative state and the regulatory state. One is that we want to use the levers of power to advance affirmatively pro-American and pro-worker ends. You could even call it more broadly conservative ends. There was a moment where I remember it was Bill Clinton kind of in the I think it was in the late 90s that he said something like, the era of big government is over, which if a Republican said it during that same period, it would mean nothing. But of course, the fact that he was the Democratic president of the United States carried a lot of weight. And though it hasn’t been articulated in so many words yet, I think there’s a version of the Republican statement right now from the protectionist or patronage camp that says the era of small government is over. Nobody said in so many words, but effectively that’s what’s on offer. The separate vision is to say that we don’t want to replace that left wing regulatory apparatus and bureaucracy with a conservative or pro-American or pro-worker version of anything. We actually want to get in there and actually dismantle it and shut it down. In my view, is that we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past if we take the short term approach of empowering the CFPB to cap credit card interest rates and implement a statute that would do so. And use a regulatory apparatus to enforce it, or to empower the Department of Transportation to include a broader set of regulations to make sure something we all want to see not happen. Trains aren’t going off the tracks in East Palestine. None of us want that........