Reform and The Future of the Republican Party

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.

This is Larry Lessig. This is another episode of Another Way. This is a continuation of our conversation with people on the right attempting to understand what's possible in the conversation between the right and the left to address what we all agree is a fundamental threat to this republic. Today I'm going to talk to Bill Kristol, someone I've known for about a decade and somebody who's obviously been incredibly prominent for many years in Republican politics. During the Trump administration, he declared he was a Democrat so long as Donald Trump was the president president, but somebody who has articulated values and ideas that many of which I strongly disagree with. He is a Neo Khan and I, during the period where neocons had their strongest reign, spent many hours protesting everything that they were fighting for, especially in Iraq. But Bill Kristol is more than what he was and we're going to hear where his ideas have moved. And here's some something about insights about what's possible. If you've not seen or heard Bill Kristol before, that's not surprising given the way our media might divide the world. Bill Kristol was one of the founders at Commentary and the Public Interest. He was chief of staff to Dan Quayle. Some referred to him as Dan Quayle's brain. And he was on John McCain's foreign policy team during McCain's campaign for president. He then became the founder of the Weekly Standard, which during the Trump years, because it was not pro Trump, became no longer sustainable and had to shut down. He's now editor. I believe he's editor in chief. I may be wrong about that. At the Bulwark, which is an online independent publication which is recommended strongly. It's in my feed. He wrote for the New York Times. He wrote for Time, and he has been a very strong anti Trump Republican or conservative. He ran or helped to start Republicans for the Rule of Law, which was trying to affect the way the Trump administration engaged with the first impeachment. And he was instrumental to behind an extremely effective group, not as famous as the Lincoln Project, but that might be a good sign. The Republican voters against Trump, which we'll talk about a little bit, but which was focused on getting ordinary people to articulate the reasons why they cannot or could not support reelecting Donald Trump, many of them having admitted that they supported Trump in 2016. These conversations are aiming to find common ground. And I've got to say that when I wake up in the morning and feel the most hopeless, I don't know why mornings for me are hopeless times, but they are. It's because I find it so hard to imagine finding common ground. I don't mean among friends. And so this might be an exception because I think of Bill Kristol as someone who's become a friend. But I mean, across the political spectrum, the common enterprise seems to have been lost, or the conception of a common enterprise. And as you'll see at the end of this podcast, there's a common view that Bill and I have about the urgency of addressing the problems that we face right now, given this gap that exists between one side and the other. And I hope in this conversation maybe you can see insight or how we can rebuild something of a common enterprise. Bill Kristol, thanks so much for talking with us. As I have explained to the audience, an audience which is not typically heard from people like you, we've had some conservatives, we've had some Republicans. But you might be the most important figure who understands the arc of what used to be your party. I'm going to ask you whether you're back in that party now on this podcast. And typically we've been talking about issues that you and I have spoken about. We've been talking about questions of reform and how do we get a democracy or a republic that is representative again. But the question I want to talk to you about today is maybe more fundamental. It's how do we get a functioning republic back? And I know this is something that's been keeping you awake, if you're kept awake at night for a long time, ever since 2016 when you became a clear anti Trumper. But I just wonder, in your own words, how do you characterize where we are right now, what has happened, and especially what's happened in the party you used to be a member of.

First of all, it's good to be with you and you've given an awful lot of thought to reform in a more systematic way than I have. I've kind of backed into it, I suppose, from my deep dissatisfaction and concern obviously with the Republican Party over the last five, six years and with the Trump ascendancy. Some dissatisfaction and concern before that. More in retrospect. I should have had more before that and I probably should have had more dissatisfaction and concern with the two party system and the whole electoral and political system. Not that I wasn't in favor of a bunch of reforms, but it wasn't, you know, sort of at the top of my top of my concern. It's happened by list of concerns in the way that it's probably moved to now. So what? Well, I mean, the simplest way to. I guess I'll make two points just to start with, maybe to be helpful. Donald Trump. You know, it's very unfortunate that Donald Trump was President of the United States for four years. It's unfortunate he got the Republican nomination. It's unfortunate he won the presidency in 2016. And some of it is flukish, of course. I mean, multi candidate race and Jeb Bush was a perfect opponent and foil for him, and then Hillary Clinton, et cetera, et cetera. But obviously his ascendancy reveals something about susceptibility of the party and of the system and of the electorate to a pretty loathsome demagoguery. But he himself could not have done this. I mean, even if he had fluked into the presidency, know, former reality TV guy wins the nomination against a split field, there's a mood for change, defeats a weak Democratic candidate. I would say in a normal system, that person gets constrained by the system, by Congress, by his own party, by the other elected officials. It's not like he appoints the Republican members of Congress, after all, who have independent standing in his party. And he's a little more like, I don't know, I don't know enough about Italian politics to say this with confidence, but my sense of what Berlusconi was like as president, kind of weird and probably did some damage, may have done some good things for all I know, but basically someone who comes and eventually goes and the system is for better or worse, what it was and doesn't fundamentally transform things and isn't really a fundamental threat to liberty, to democracy, to, you know, representative government in a way that Trump, I do think became because he was enabled by his party. And that is the most striking and somewhat surprising thing to me, that you didn't have the barriers you should have had to him being more than a kind of flaky, flamboyant, somewhat disruptive, somewhat irresponsible, reckless, but not fundamentally damaging president and leader of his party, and still leader of his party. So I do think Trump's ascendancy shows something very worrisome about the Republican Party, showed something worrisome, shows something worrisome today since as ex president, he continues to dominate the party and in turn, and finally, I mean, we have two major parties in this country and one of them is the Republican Party and It controls what, 50 senators and almost half the House, and I think a slight majority of governors. And Trump got what, 46% of the vote and 47% maybe in 2020. So it's half the country almost. And that party is enthralled, enthralled to a nativist authoritarian who is not committed to representative democracy, as we've noted, at all, and indeed encouraged an insurrection which he has not apologized for, which the party seems to be just pretending didn't happen. So that's where I think the Trump is. The, you know, he's a symptomatic cause and all that, but he shows. He's awakened me somewhat, I think, to awakened me, partly awakened me and partly caused a situation where one has to be much more deeply concerned than, I think, what had to be six, seven, eight years ago.

So there must have been a moment in the ascendancy of Trump when you were startled or deeply surprised. I mean, you were editor of the Weekly Standard, and that shut down, I guess, partly because the division in the conservative movement. I mean, did this completely surprise you or was it. Did you expect more people to stand up in a kind of Romney esque way, or even better to Trump?

Yeah, I expected Trump not to be the nominee. That was my thing. I predicted the most and was wrong about the most. Once he was the nominee, I thought he could beat Hillary Clinton. There were only two parties and time for a change, and people could overcome their doubts and tell themselves he'd be more responsible once in office, et cetera. But the nomination, I thought he'd be another Herman Cain or Pat Buchanan, sort of a combination of the outsider businessman or the rabble rousing demagogue. But those people have not gotten the nomination typically or really at all, I would say, in the modern Republican Party or the modern Democratic Party, for better or worse, these are pretty establishment oriented parties tend to nominate the next in line, some former governor or senator or vice president or whatever. So I didn't expect Trump to take off. I suppose I underestimated the amount of hostility to elites of both parties and of. And elites in general and out in the country, especially among the Republican primary electorate, though among both parties, as we can see from Sanders, success as well. I underestimated his fame, his celebrity because of the TV show and sort of the extent to which he had more of an appeal than a typical outsider businessman who was going to shake things up, but who normally fades as a presidential candidate or even was a gubernatorial candidate in most cases. So I underestimated Trump. The moment where it became clear to me I kind of was underestimating, I suppose, was. I'll tell this quick story in about three he announced, I can't remember summer of 2015? Of course, but it was June, July, maybe June, I think. And in July, I think it was. So I wrote an editorial about three weeks in. This is one of the few things I sort of got right. I said, look, Otto, we're never going to support Trump at the Weekly Standard. He'd be horrible as a nominee and as a president. But he seems to be hitting a chord and maybe the other hitting a nerve and maybe the other Republican presidential candidates should take notice and maybe there's some things he's raising that they could kind of adjust their own message with respect to some of the outsider reform, not the really despicable parts of his message, but the more the parts that had a kind of healthy side to them at least, or could have a healthy side to them. So I don't really remember the editorial too well, but it was nothing much, 700 words. And so I said on the one hand that we couldn't support him, of course, but on the other hand, it was kind of a call to pay a little more attention to him. So the phone rings. I remember this week, it's a Friday afternoon. We put the magazine to bed on Thursday night. It goes, went up online. Then someone comes into my office and we still had sort of at this point, you know, we of course all had iPhones, cell phones, but we still had kind of landlines and a switchboard, I guess. And a call comes into the main number and it, the someone comes into my office and says there's someone on the phone. And she says she's calling for Donald Trump. And I said, oh, come on. I'm assuming it's like some joke, some friend playing, you know, a gag, but whatever, I wasn't doing anything. It was like literally 4 o' clock Friday afternoon or something. So put it up, put it through. And I pick up the phone and. And this woman says she's Donald Trump's secretary and could I hold for Mr. Trump? And I still think probably a gag. But then guy comes on the phone and either it's Donald Trump or, you know, someone said in that live doing a very good imitation of Donald Trump. And it was Trump and it was very funny. He says, you know, hey, Bill, as if we're like really good friends. We're probably shaking hands twice at different, you know, dinners with 800 people in New York City or something. And hey, Bill, they told me, they told me you wrote an editorial and you said you would never vote for me, but I'm going to change your mind about that. But Meanwhile, you know, you did say some nice things and that people should take what I'm saying seriously. I appreciate that. You know, it's important that we people take. Take these things seriously. I mean, it was just. The funny thing I remember was him beginning by saying unselfconsciously, in a way, this is part of that kind of odd charm he sometimes has, I suppose to some people. You know, they told me you wrote an editorial X. The editorial was like a page, you know, and it's sort of funny that they didn't even think of. I don't care. I don't say this out of any vanity, but they didn't give it to him to read. You know, it's like he just gets these. Like someone tells him, hey, this is editorial. That guy Crystal you've seen on TV a little bit, you know, he doesn't like you, but he says they should take you seriously. Why don't you call him and you know, maybe schmooze him a little and he'll be a little nicer. So that's what. He did that for five, eight minutes or something. Perfectly. He was kind of jocular. I was kind of. I don't. Didn't know what quite what to say, frankly. But I just kind of, you know, listened mostly and made a few comments, wished him stay well on the campaign trail and so forth. And I remember him, he hung up, he said, I gotta go. Taking on the plane. It's about to take off for Iowa. Oh yeah, that makes sense. I remembered that he was traveling out to Iowa, maybe for his first big campaign visit there for the caucus. And the next day was the day in Iowa where he gets asked, as you may recall it then this sessions with each of the candidates. He gets asked what he thinks about McCain and McCain's having been a prisoner of war. And it's where he says, I don't respect, you know, I like people who weren't prisoners or whatever. As that exchange with. I think it's Frank Luntz is on stage. I saw it at the time Saturday. I remember that and being just kind of appalled. And I was on ABC the next morning, I mean previously scheduled just to be on this Week. And I remember saying, well, he's dead to me. I mean, I didn't like him anyway. But this is really just so repulsive. And secondly, I think this just dooms him in the Republican primary because who's going to. Republicans respect people who fight for our country, like Senator McCain. And you can't just get away with saying this kind of thing. It became pretty clear about a week, but within about a week that this hadn't doomed him at all. And I sort of thought, boy, I really don't. I am now out of touch with what Republicans out there in the country. So that was the moment where I sort of realized that he was a more serious candidate than I thought. I still thought he could be beaten, and I think he could have been if things had broken somewhat differently. He didn't do that well in the first couple of primaries, if you think back, But I mean, you know well enough. But he wasn't getting 50% of the vote or anything. But the divided field allowed him to chug through. And he was a good demagogue. He was an effective demagogue. And it turned out the party was just so much more ripe for demagoguery. The party voters were. And the party officials and other elected. The elected officials and the party apparatus, such as it is, was so much more unwilling to resist than I expected.

So. But, I mean, one could talk about a candidate whose positions on the policy dials surprise you, and it turns out that, you know, he's more anti free trade than you would expect a Republican presidential candidate to be and the like. But that's not really what distinguished this person. The most striking thing about this person was his ability to construct an alternative reality. And it's not just that he himself would construct it, because I think sometimes he actually believed it. Like that call he had with the Georgia Secretary of State asking for the 11,000 votes. It really sounded to me like he really believed he had won. So it could be pathological at that level. But the scary thing, to go back to your point about the party or the public, the scary thing is the number of times he would construct an alternative reality. And it was clear to everybody it was just a lie, just not true at all. And yet he's sustained in it. Nothing constrains the construction of this reality. And to be in a place where we have the ability to persuade 70% of Americans that this election was stolen and still have no way to carve back on that understanding is terrifying. But I just wonder, how would you diagnose it? Like, if you were. I mean, you have a PhD in political science, if you were writing a thesis about why it is that right now we're at a place where the public can be led to misunderstand something so fundamental, what would the reason be?

I mean, I don't have any great insights. I think the normal answers are probably correct. A combination of they've always been demagogues. They always were able to persuade X number of people of alternate realities. The, you know, State Department's kind of run by communists or, I don't know, African Americans having equal rights is going to destroy, you know, life as we know it or whatever the, you know, different demagogues have said. But in this case, there's something about, you know, social media, there's something about Fox News, honestly, I think the combination of those two and Trump was a pretty smart demagogue and pretty effective at using both of those, obviously. And then disaffected public that was unhappy for good reasons in some ways with the way the system was performing, who felt both disaffected and sort of disenfranchised isn't quite the right word. But whatever I'm looking for here, disempowered certainly, therefore more open to kind of reading into their anxieties and frustrations and unhappinesses that there's a conspiracy somewhere. I mean, having said all that, and then it turned out there was more nativism, more bigotry than I expected to be played on and more of a sense. And this, I think helped him a lot during the campaign and it's helped him for the last four years more of a sense. And this is more of a psychological thing than a political sciencey thing, I guess. But, you know, once you're released, some people have prejudices. We all do. And most people do. Most political thinkers have known that when a successful nation, a successful democracy, tries to keep them under control, to lessen them, to mute them, to make it not respectable in any case, to express them. So you might say something at 11pm in a bar or something at home on your couch watching tv, but you wouldn't say it in public and you wouldn't quite therefore act on it. Big, big difference. You know, to harbor certain views that aren't great and then to really proclaim those views and act on those views and rally other people to those views. Really the difference between a reasonably healthy system with, you know, where it could be better on the one hand, and it's just a flat out system that just flat out, you know, promulgates prejudices and indeed magnifies them and uses a bullhorn to proclaim them. And my friend Charlie Sykes has this formulation about a lot of this. Nativism and bigotry was kind of a recessive gene in the Republican electorate. It didn't pop up that often and sort of respectable people kind of slapped it down. The McCains and the Romneys and so forth. It's now become, it became under Trump, the dominant gene. And that's a big difference. You know, recessive gene's not great, but it's recessive. But anyway, the psychological thing, I think turned out that people really enjoyed being able to indulge their inner feelings. They're not so healthy feelings. And all these kind of constraints that, that they hadn't been able to quite say what they kind of thought about these newcomers and about immigrants. They'd been able to say it sort of, but they had to kind of mask it. And now they just get to be sort of full out, kind of let it all hang out. And so an awful lot of Americans let it all hang out. And at these Trump rallies and on social media and people on Fox News let it all hang out and encourage more people to let it hang out even more. And it really became a cycle of kind of extremism and also of conspiracy mongering that, you know, healthy countries usually manage to avoid and unhealthy countries can fall into. And sometimes it's a bit of a, you know, mystery why it happens at a particular time and so forth. But, yeah, I do think in retrospect, Fox News, social media, a lot of that stuff was more important than I thought. Then Trump just got kind of lucky. There was, there were terrorist attacks in 2015 here, obviously, San Bernardino and in Europe. And they were covered a lot and they were bad, obviously, but he was just willing to exploit them in a way that others had tiptoed around a little bit. But Muslims. The other point of the part, I will dwell in 2015, but the one moment of the campaign where I also realized, oh, my God, we're in trouble, was I think this is November after San Bernardino, where there was that terrorist incident and Trump called for a Muslim ban. And everyone dutifully, I think it was October, November, and everyone dutifully denounced that correctly. As you look, we can say we should be careful about who we admit from different countries that have terror networks and so forth, but you can't have a literal religious ban, which is what he was saying, a ban on adherence to a particular religion. And in any case, the San Bernardino terrorists, as I recall, had been in the US either for decades or maybe had been born there, I can't remember. So there was not, it was not like somebody flown in from Syria, you know, two months ago and was a, was smuggled in as a terrorist under, you know, come across the southern border pretending to be a Mexican immigrant or Something. So the whole thing was, was. Was ridiculous and dutifully denounced and I think sincerely denounced by the Jeb Bushes of the world and by the weekly standards of the world and the Wall street journals and national reviews of the world, and Trump ignored it. And I talked later with someone who ignored the denunciations and persisted, basically. And I talked to someone from another campaign, you know, a month or two after that, and he said, this was the moment I thought, oh, my God, we're in trouble. Because Trump's numbers went up, not down, after he stuck to the Muslim ban. So a lot of this stuff was percolating out there, and Trump was shameless and pretty effective in exploiting it.

Okay, so, but the motive of suppressed racism is a good account of one part of the disconnect from reality. But the part of the story that I would never have predicted was the disconnect around the pandemic. I mean, we succeeded in politicizing a grave national threat which has cost the lives of half a million people so far. Now, that's not because in some sense people wanted to kill each other or they wanted other people to die. It's those people, in fact, who died more. That's really about just the economy of influence and information. Right? And so if we're in a place where you can radicalize ideas about a pandemic as much as, you know, fuel the prejudices which have been latent for hundreds of years in America, that's an even scarier prospect. Right? I mean, what is the constraint if we, if we can achieve that?

No, that's well said. I absolutely agree with that. To broaden your point a little from the pandemic, the fact that he did what he did as president for four years and still was able to get effectively virtually the same vote he got four years ago as a candidate is very, very worrisome and much more worrisome than his initial election. People could have voted for him in 2016. He's kind of a loudmouth, says a few things he shouldn't. But, you know, he's a businessman. He'll come in, he'll shake things up in a useful way. He'll be constrained by his own party, by the elected officials, by the system, by his cabinet, and, you know, it'll be kind of healthy, maybe a little bit of shake up. You know, then we go through four years. He's not constrained. His party capitulates to him. He's pretty good at bullying his party. The people who did constrain him a little bit in his Cabinet and his administration gradually are know leave and they can't take it anymore. They're fired. The guardrails start to disappear, becomes more and more evident. The pandemic becomes in a way the culmination of that where he's just utterly reckless and irresponsible and hundreds of thousands of people die and still they stick with him. I totally agree that the, the fact that people stuck with him as a president, as an incumbent president for his reelection is far more worrisome than the fact that they fell for him once as a candidate.

Yeah. So I began to have connection with you during the lead up into this election and in context where people were talking about reform and also how do we change the make sure that Donald Trump was not reelected. There were certain points in that process where you seemed optimistic in recovering something of the Republican soul. Let's put it. I remember once you were recounting focus groups in Ohio. This is early on, but where if you could get the Republican voters not to try to justify what they did in 2016, but to think instead about what the future should be. They were not as committed to the idea of Donald Trump as a nominee. They just were not committed to the idea of denouncing the person they had voted for. You were involved in, in Republicans for the Rule of Law, Republican voters against Trump, which I was talking to a data guy who told me that of all the kind of conservative or Republican interventions, this was the most effective of any of them in changing people's views. You adopted a really, I think, super smart technique of just basically having people shoot iPhone videos and uploading those iPhone videos. And those were watched much more effectively than the slick Lincoln Project videos were. But in that process, I mean, you could have been fighting with whatever energy you had because it's a fight that had to be waged, or you could have been fighting it believing you were going to persuade 30% of your party or even 5% of your party. But of course, there are more people who voted in the Republican Party for Trump or self identified Republicans who voted for Democrats trump in 2020 than in 2016. So I guess what I want to understand here is do you think that we're less plastic or there's less chance to do something about recovering people's understanding here or values here, or was this something just particular about Trump?

I don't know. I mean, in a way you could argue it either way, that it did all happen kind of suddenly, that could unhappen, perhaps somewhat suddenly. But no, on the whole, I'm pessimistic and partly for going through these three or four years experience, that is we had a fair amount of polling data that showed what you were saying in, let's say, 2018. I don't want to be lectured at by people like you. I'm not. I'm making this up and this is in effect what people were saying. In focus crucibles I have people like you, Bill Kristol, about why it was wrong to me for Trump. I don't want to apologize for my vote and I don't want to have to say I like Hillary Clinton. But you know, we elected him, he's doing some good things. The economy's okay. Some of the other stuff's a little crazy. Take a low look in, you know, in 2020 kind of thing. But by 2019 that was fading and there was much more loyalty. And this impeachment is totally, you know, then, then he does the this Russia, then Ukraine and it's all pretty clear what he's doing, I think. And people are just doubling down for him and certainly his media organs are doing that and voters are going to along on the Republican side. I tried pretty hard to recruit presidential candidate or candidates to run against him in the Republican primary precisely to answer the objection of, well, you want me to vote for some Democrat. Well, no, I just want you to vote for another Republican, you know, and Joe Walsh, Rand, and he was a conservative Republican for life. Tea Party then Bill Weld, a liberal Republican, yet sort of. They weren't, neither was ultimately, I suppose you would say, credible as a winner. But they were there. No support really. No interest, no donor interest, not much voter interest, no elected official interest. Others took a pass. Trump waltzes to renomination, the party gets more and more supportive of him. The numbers stay very strong, I do think in Republican voters against Trump, we peeled away and we have, you know, the data would suggest this few percent of Trump voters from 2016 who moved either to not voting or in most cases all the way to Biden and several third party voters in 2016. There were a lot in 2016, I think 6% total and that shrunk to 2% in 2020. And the majority of those voters went to Biden. Now could have happened, obviously might have happened anyway if we hadn't done much. But we had a very focused effort. But in a way that focused effort that I think I'm glad your friend thinks it worked. Well, I think it did too. But it was hard and we spent a fair amount of money on it and Raised money and worked hard at it. And our focus group showed that voter to voter communication was more effective than slick ads or people like me, again saying, hey, you should be for Biden, and having someone say, look, I voted for Trump in 2016 and I'm not comfortable entirely at all with these Democrats, but we just got them, can't afford four more years. That was the tone of our stuff. Even so, we did a pretty good job. We got, you know, 3, 4, 5% of the Republicans maybe to move. We didn't get 30, as you say. So our expectations came way down. I still think we did, you know, what we had to do. But, and so that left me pessimistic, I would say, on November 3rd, especially when I saw the returns and that Trump and the Republicans were doing better than the polls though. Trump lost. But let me sort of pessimistic about the liberation of the party from Trump, but still, maybe now that he loses, you know, it's one thing when you're in a fight, you're being attacked. The liberal media, even despite the pandemic and all the obvious evidence, I think, of the cost we were paying for Trump as president. Still, I mean, my initial, just to double back one minute, my initial formulation of this, which I think had been correct theoretically was you could have been for Trump in 2016. You could still tell a pollster you kind of approve of him, but you just don't like the people who disapprove of him. Doesn't mean you're going to be for giving him another four years. Right. You could decide that you made a good effort to go. You don't want to be second guessed on something you've done. You've chose to, I don't know, make go on vacation to X place, get annoyed when someone says that was a stupid place to go. You're defensive about it. Doesn't mean you go again, though, the next time. I kind of thought people might have that attitude on Trump. They didn't. They all voted to reelect him, not just to elect him, not all, but almost all. So that had to be pessimistic. Then November 3rd happened and I thought, well, okay, maybe that sort of breaks the attachment. He loses. A lot of his thing was being a winner. McCain was a loser, Romney was a loser, Trump's a winner. Okay, he's not a winner, he's a loser. Sort of like McCain and Romney, reasonably close races. McCain wasn't quite as close, but, you know, sort of an incumbent. So you shouldn't lose when you're an incumbent. So anyway, he's just another guy who's lost a president presidential race and maybe it all fades away. And then of course, he doubles down on the elections that are stolen. It's the hoax, the fraud, the big lie. And it turns out the party goes along with that and his voters go along with that. And the price of going along with that is January 6th. And that for 24 hours people thought, and I did, too, in a way a little bit, gee, maybe this 5 a terrible price to pay. But maybe finally this snapshot, the attachment, so to speak, the delusion. And no, not doesn't seem to have as we speak here in mid late February. So, yeah, I think at each stage, hopes that weren't unreasonable hopes. I think that we can kind of this could be we could turn the corner, so to speak, on the attachment of one of our two major parties and huge chunk of that major party to Trump. Those hopes have been dashed. And I mean, I feel as we talk here in February, whatever, the 24th, that they certainly he's lost very little as a result of losing on November 3, propagating a big lie, inciting January 6, getting impeached again, having a few people denounce him, whether Liz Cheney, who, you know, people who had gone along with him, who supported him for reelection, turning to denounce him, Liz Cheney even voting to impeach Mitch McConnell, not voting to convict, but, you know, giving a pretty strong speech. And I don't know that any of that has made much difference. So I am pessimistic about the Republican Party.

Okay, so pessimism is an attitude and a prediction. But even if you're pessimistic, you could have good reason to try to do something. So I want to focus on the last part here about what the strategies could be. I mean, you know, it is striking to see someone like Liz Cheney in particular, you know, I think, who's been very strong and principled and articulating a vision which I would have thought at least 50% of Republicans would have rallied behind. But as you mentioned, as you say, we don't yet see that. Instead, we see, you know, her equivalent in the Senate, Romney, declaring that if he runs in 2024, he will easily be the party's nominee. What could be done to begin to change this dynamic? And maybe it's not I don't want to limit it to the dynamic about Donald Trump. I mean, we should stand back and just say we've got a pathological dynamic in American democracy, period. This kind of as Matt Drotman puts it this doom loop of, of a ideological two party system, which of course historically is very rare for us. It's only recently that we have two ideological parties lining up in this extremely polarized way circa Civil War. It's all over again. It's an uncivil war, as Biden would put it. What is the intervention that would break this even if it's not necessarily an intervention that's going to make Republicans not like Donald Trump?

I mean, so that's the huge question that a lot of us have been debating. And I think actually there's been a pretty healthy debate discussion, differences of views. But you know, sort of several of the views can be reasonable and we can do more than one thing about what can be done. So I guess I'd put it maybe two categories, kind of shortish medium term and then more fundamental as you mentioned, you mentioned both short medium term. I think pretty simple choices, not simple to know what to do do, but the conceptually pretty simple. Maybe you could save the Republican Party or fight a civil war within the Republican Party that isn't just a slaughter of your side, but where you actually have a pretty good chunk of Republicans who stand up against Trump and some of them win in 2022 in primaries for Congress and open seats or redistrict seats or maybe even knock off a couple of Trumpian comments and you win the open Republican Senate primaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania and North Carolina or something like that and you have some governors step up and maybe the party and then in 20 some of them win, maybe most of them win. The Trumpy people don't destroy the non Trumpy people in primaries. And maybe by 2023 you can see that the party's becoming maybe only gradually less Trump dominated. And so it's worth fighting that fight within the Republican Party. I think it is worth it because you want one of the two. You don't want to just give up on one of the two major parties. Bracketing the question of whether we're going to end up forever have two major parties. But still for now we do. You don't want to give up on one of them in the current electoral system. But I am also I've become more pes. That I think was an important strategy for the first term. I think it was important for us to be able to say in good faith that we're fighting within the Republican Party to try to stop Trump and as Republicans trying to save the party and the country from Trump. I'm less optimistic about that. Now I just think, I don't know, let's see what happens. 2022 will be very important. But I right now would think that Trumpy Republicans will clobber the non Trumpy Republicans. And at some point I think just hanging on and saying, I'm fighting within the Republican Party, it's fine and I have many friends who are doing it, but what does it amount to if you just end up losing? And then, and then what does it really matter if you end up supporting Trump or a Trumpy candidate or set of Trumpy candidates, you know, for different offices in 2022 or 2024 anyway? I mean, if you think it's a real threat, the Trumpiness of the party, leave aside Trump. You don't, you know, you might prefer, you might like your individual Republican member of Congress, okay? But if that member of Congress winning is going to make Kevin McCarthy speaker of the House, that's a real problem, at least from my point of view. So I've moved away from the let's try to save the Republican Party to the other obvious alternative, which is, okay, well, maybe we can just help make the Democratic Party more sane and we can help Joe Biden be a more successful President and we can be a bit of a force for centrism, let's call it for shorthand in the Democratic Party. And that seems reasonable. We helped Biden win in 2020. Why can't we help? Why can't I here in virginia Help Terry McAuliffe be the next Democratic Governor of Virginia? He's pretty moderate. He was governor once before. That's not going to be a big problem from my point of view in terms of his policies. Instead of a more radical Democrat or liberal Democrat. I mean, that seems to me to be short term or reasonable effort. The other thing, and there's a lot of interest in this, is a third party or independent candidates or some kind of faction that somehow works in both parties at once. I'm open to that. I think the real third party is very, very difficult in the current moment and doesn't address the short term problem of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader again and a Trump or a Trumpy person as President of the United States in 2025. And suddenly we're, that's giving, in effect, Trump a second term or Trumpiness a second term. I don't think the third party can stop that. Or maybe it could after 2022. Anyway, I think for the next year, the sort of Republican alternative and the Democratic alternative are kind of dominant But I also very much agree that over a slightly longer time horizon and maybe even in the shorter time horizon, all kinds of electoral reforms, voting reforms, party reforms, congressional reforms are important to begin to address both the underlying cultural and social and economic problems, but also the actual problems of the political system set up as it is now. I don't know that any of those can save us very, very quickly, but we can presumably go on both these, pursue efforts in both these spheres simultaneously or in parallel. I haven't fully thought through the interconnection of them or whether trade offs of some point there probably are, but I think that's the kind of discussion that's going on and you're very much part of it. And I'm part of it too, a little bit in terms of all, in all these different areas of how are we going to fix things? I don't think we can just say, well, let's just fix until we get persuaded the whole country to have ranked choice voting, or until we fundamentally change a party system that has been moving in the way it's moving for decades and it's pretty deeply entrenched right now that we can't just say until that gets changed, everything's terrible because you can have a bad polarized and partisan, not very responsive system with a lot of silliness in it that's a lot different from real authoritarianism and real demagoguery of the Trump sort. So I don't think one wants to take the position that until you can do everything, you can't do anything. But one doesn't want to take the opposite position either, which is entirely incremental. And I'm going to pray that the Biden wing of the Democratic Party stays dominant and not think at all about deeper reforms. And the one you mentioned, and I know you've been so involved in is important. I mean, somehow having you can have a two party system in this kind of system. We have presidential system, first past the post electoral systems mostly and so forth. You get a two party system can work fine if there's parties of a certain character. Ideological parties can work fine if there are a lot of them in a parliamentary system and they can make coalitions or if they're maybe in a different kind of electoral setup with ranked choice voting, something like that. The combination we now have of these highly ideological parties in the kind of system we now have electorally and in Congress is very, very problematic. So I'm very open minded. It has been something I've been involved in until recently, but I'm very open minded about these different proposals to change one aspect or another of the system. Either the electoral aspect or the congressional governing aspect, or the so to speak, ideological aspect of the parties themselves. Or I guess one could work on all these fronts.

Yeah, but the part that worries me the most now, I mean, I've been thinking for a long time about what the ideal electoral reforms would look like or the ideal anti corruption reforms would look like. But increasingly I fear that even if we got all of them tomorrow, if we have political parties which have this attitude of anti compromise politics where the idea is one side can't get give in to the other side at all without betraying their integrity, then we don't have political parties that can work in the American democracy. I mean, we just don't have a constitution for that, as you just said. I mean, you can't have this mix of ideological parties in the way that we do right now. And in a weird sense, the genius of our tradition was that the complexity of the parties was hidden. Like you didn't see that we had four parties. We looked like we had two, but we had four. And when you had four, none of them could presume to speak for the majority. So they all had this instinct that they needed to work with other parties. They had to, with other factions. Like they had to build majorities. And it wasn't a, it wasn't a dishonorable act to try to find compromise to come to a policy that they would represent a majority. But so long as we live in this current world, I'm not sure how we get to that. You know, you wrote a piece in the Bulwark this week, I think, saying that maybe the best thing to do is just to, you know, help Joe Biden be a great successful president. But you know, if you and people like you show up in the Democratic Party and start, you know, pushing to help Joe Biden, there's a division in the Democratic Party too that isn't eager to welcome you because you're not, you know, sufficiently progressive. And so this purity and the belief that the job is to remain pure, it's almost, you know, I was a Reagan delegate in 1980 and this is kind of the way I thought, you know, in my naive 19 year old state, like what politics should be, the purity, the ideological purity is what we should be pushing for. This naive purity. I can say now that I'm, you know, almost, almost 40 years later, this naive purity is really poisonous. And I don't know what, you know, you can't lecture people into giving it up. And if every time you give up on it, you're like characterized as a sellout, then obviously not many people are gonna wanna do it. So then the question is, what's the mechanism to make it so? People just have to do it. You just have to be striking deals. Like there's no way nobody has power unless you strike deals or you learn how to practice that. And so I wonder why you think being like a, you know, pumping up Biden, who I think has been astonishing in his successfulness so far, I think he's done, he's been pitch perfect in what he should be doing, recognizing that we don't have a presidency, we don't have a system where we have a, you know, ruling by diktat. We have a system where we need a Congress. I wonder how that translates into ra reforming this most broken institution that, you know, obviously the framers thought was the most important institution. It's Article 1 in the Constitution for a good reason.

So I think what you said was very well said. And I mean, I'll throw the question back to you in a sense, I mean, how does one restore, well, can one restore, let's just call it a shorthand, a Madisonian parties that have kind of an internal Madisonianism. That's a good way of putting it, maybe pluralism as opposed to these purity obsessed, polarized, hyper partisan parties that we've developed. And does that require party reform? Well, that's which would really be, I guess, electoral reform, open primaries, frank choice voting. Does it require congressional reform? Because that's where our federal elected officials end up in Congress. And a lot of the congressional polarization is both, I guess, effect and cause maybe of the party polarization, but they certainly kind of go hand in hand. One reason Congress didn't check Trump is that it was Republicans controlled Congress or both houses for two years and one house for two years and the party incentives overwhelmed the separation of powers, checks and balances incentives. So I'm very open to all kinds of, you know, congressional reforms, presidential reforms, the Jack Goldsmith, Bob Bower sort of set of reforms. We're actually going to work on that some democracy together, try to get some of those through some of the ethics reforms. You know, there's a lot, there's a lot one, a lot of different things to reform. But, and it's a little chicken and egg, so everyone doesn't want to like obsessively try to rank them or something. But I mean, what do you think? Is it Congress that what's the core of the problem. Congress or the parties?

It's a great way of putting the question. I think the problem is Congress. I mean, I think parties can rally people and unfortunately it's a very polarized binary frame. But that's just the reality of where we are. But I think that if there were more effective factions within Congress, they would have, they could be enormously effective. I mean, think about the Freedom Caucus and the extraordinary power they leveraged early on in the 2010s and obviously they didn't represent America, they didn't represent 20% of America, but they were able, because they were such a formidable block to leverage control in the Republican Party in a way that seems to me as a template, a model. So you wouldn't want the faction on the far left or a faction on the far right to do that again, but kind of grownups faction or a grownups caucus that in a Congress where it's a dozen seats that determines who the majority is, in a Senate where it's one seat that determines who the majority is, such a caucus would have enormous influence. It could write his own ticket, at least within a range of what's reasonable for both parties. And I just wonder whether that's not the strategy we should be thinking about to get to a place where people can see a Congress working again in the way it worked for huge chunks of American history.

I mean, I'm very sympathetic to that and I've been slightly involved in some efforts to. Can't you get, you know, four Republican senators and four Democratic senators to get together and say we're going to be a centrist caucus, each within our party but also working across the aisle and we're going to demand X, Y and Z in terms of process reforms or legislative reforms, other kinds of reforms, before we vote for either Schumer or Mercado as leader or before we go along with this legislation, that legislation or whatever. I've seen glimpses of that little green shoots of that have come up a little bit. And the pandemic, a relief bill in December and a little bit this time maybe. And maybe looking ahead, one can imagine more of such things. I think it should be encouraged. I suppose that the reason it hasn't. You'd think people would want to do it out of self interest, right? You could be so powerful if you're one of the, one of those four senators or a dozen members of Congress and you see a little bit of it with this problem solvers caucus and all. I think it turns out on the other hand that in the House at least, the mechanisms of reelection, of campaign finance and of primaries are such that those people are very worried about looking. It used to be kind of great to look like a bit of a rebel or, you know, kind of a guy who works, person who works across the aisle. The media loved it and you know, for kind of good reasons as well as kind of some silly ones. And voters respected it, though. It's like I'm not just some partisan I'm willing to work across now. It's the opposite, obviously. And so I don't know whether the fear of the voters, the fear of the partisan press, the control leadership has the much too great control the leadership has as opposed to the committees and shaping legislation. And again, it is a little bit, you know, chicken and egg. What do you fix first? It has gone hand in hand. There's no question that wildly too powerful leaders, the weakening of the committee system, the failure to just have normal legislation, the failure of debates and amendments and which does allow people to stake out different positions and build coalitions and work with this person on that issue and then that person on another issue. All of that just doesn't seem to exist anymore. So I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm very open to what you're saying. I'm not sure. I mean, they're there, they're elected. They presumably understand what we're saying. It's not like they haven't never occurred to them. This has been suggested many times and it's not happening. So there must be some sort of systemic or some kind of bar, psychological bar or political bar to what's happening, I guess, or may, you know, that's what I don't quite. And I don't really know, honestly. I mean, I probably should sit and just talk to them more, but I

don't know, it'd be a good conversation to have. It'd be a good question to raise. Let me just raise one last question as we're coming up at the end. So I, I'm struck by the lack of urgency in the Democrats. I, I kind of feel like the Democrats are facing an existential crisis. I mean, even though in, you know, I think any measure at least a moderate Democrat view is a, is a majority position in America, you know, and if you look at the actual way votes get cast, it's a majority party, maybe not substantially, but certainly not a minority party. What's going to happen after this period of redistricting is going to be a radical entrenchment of the minority party. I mean, in 2010, redistricting was still under the shadow of a threat that the Supreme Court would step in and sweep away openly partisan districting. That threat's been removed. And I think it's 61 chambers are now controlled by Republicans and 37 by Democrats across the country. And so what we're going to see after this redistricting is a radical entrenchment of a minority in government. And when you add that, when you add the House to the Senate, which of course is the same reality, I fear that the kind of frustration and anger against this political system on the left is going to rise in a very significant way. And not wanting to engage, not wanting to engage in a political system which is built to keep you out, but to be destructive of the political system or, you know, at least not constructive to making it something better. So I wonder, when we look at this and we like, obsess about the Republican Party, shouldn't we be obsessing about the Democratic Party and the Democrats recognition that they need gerrymandering reform in this next year? And if they don't get it, then there's no reason to think there's a democratic party in 2023 or 2025 because the effect of this redistricting is just going to be devastating.

I mean. Yeah. So I'm, I'm very much with you on the, as a sort of slightly, maybe a newcomer to not that I'm involved in that many internal Democratic Party considerations, but I've certainly been involved talking to many more Democrats than I used to, you know, in some meetings and all kinds of things. I am struck by a certain lack of urgency. I'd put it a little differently, but I think it very much dovetails. What you're saying. I mean, whether they might say, oh, well, we'll redistrict Illinois and New York and they'll redistrict Florida and Texas. It'll kind of wash out, but it doesn't quite wash out if you look at the numbers. But leaving even registering aside, it's not as if in a normal political sciencey analysis, the Republicans win the house in 2022 just because it's very rare for the party that has the White House not to lose some seats and they don't have to lose many to lose the House Senate. I think Democrats have a little better chance of holding, probably pick up a seat like Pennsylvania. So they have a little margin. Not obvious which ones they would lose. It's sorted out so much, but ultimately it's a very close to 50, 50 Senate. And so you can't count on that. And then as we were saying, after his incredible mismanagement of the pandemic with the burdens of incumbency, I would say some advantages of incumbency, too, but more burdens probably. Trump lost, you know, the three key states he needed to win by, I can't remember the total 50,000 vote to something total. If they had swung, he would have, he could have won or would have been even 26,000.

If they had swung in those three states, he would have won.

You know, are we confident that that wouldn't happen in 2024, that maybe they'll, maybe Trump will run again and look better, but maybe it won't be Trump, It'll be someone a little more disciplined. Maybe the Democrats won't have a candidate like Biden who did a pretty good job of pulling together all strands of the party. So I'm, but I'm amazed, I agree, by the lack of urgency there for, of the Democrats in general. I mean, you focus on the topic you've thought so much about, which is versions of redistricting and some of the gerrymandering and some of the, let's call them, political and electoral reforms. But I'd say that's true of a whole bunch of other issues, too. I mean, they need to, Biden really needs to succeed, and that doesn't mean he has to be moderate on everything. I'm not making here a sort of special interest case for the moderate wing as opposed to the AOC wing. Maybe in fact, the AOC wing is right on a few issues and he should go more in that direction. I don't know. But the point is you gotta do some. There has to be a general sense of it's very important that this Democratic administration succeed. They need to be thinking all the time about how to do that. That requires electoral reforms, congressional reforms, policies that will work. It's not always obvious what will work. I understand that, but I'm generally a little struck by the kind of business as usual character of what's happening now. It's partly the pandemic and so forth, and partly what I'm saying is a little unfair. I think Biden's been pretty aggressive on Covid and I think he has a reasonable attitude of I've got to get this under control first. And I think that's fine. And I agree with that. And he should probably put some other things off for a while. But yeah, I am struck by what you say just in my conversations with sort of operatives and sort of liberal intellectual types even here in Washington and outside Washington, a little bit of, you know, well, we got Trump's not there, thank God. And now Biden's in charge. And it's sort of the same attitude they had when Obama was in charge or placed in, you know, it's complicated and there's some good things and some bad things. And I feel like I have more of an urgent sense that Biden has to succeed than Democrats, you know, do, which is a little odd, I think. And not just succeed. I don't mean to make this too much about, well, this policy has to work, but really have both a public strategy to explain to the American public what he's doing and win over the ones who are winnable, but also to think through all these reforms you've been talking about. But other things in terms of the media and such, that really would be a real strategy to not let the normal drift just take over again. Because the normal drift is not as good for Democrats as they think. They are very overconfident about the Republican self destruction. And I'll just close with it. I know we're running out of time. This Kevin McCarthy, so he had a rough, I mean, everyone thinks, oh, he had a very rough month or six weeks. You know, he, he voted to overturn the elections. He, you know, gets kind of embarrassed by Trump. He goes back and forth. He doesn't vote to impeach him. Liz Cheney breaks with him. Then he ends up having to support Liz Cheney that he doesn't support Marjorie Taylor Greene. And it's all looks like he's wavering, you know, to suck off to Trump at Mar A Lago. That's embarrassing everyone in the liberal media. And I think a fair number of Democrats even were sort of, oh boy, Kevin McCarthy. How pitiful and how embarrassing for him. He's had such a rough time. And I remember telling them the beginning about 10 days ago. I think now people are kind of seeing this. Kevin McCarthy doesn't think that Kevin McCarthy thinks I had kind of a rough hand given to me to play here for about a month or six weeks. I kind of bungled a couple of little things, you know, some tactical stuff, but basically I've ended up fine. Liz Cheney is number three in the party leadership. So the donors can say, see, they're not all crazy. Liz Cheney is still there. Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn't expelled by the Republicans from the committee. So the Trump true believers can say they're being okay to us, we're not being expelled. There'll be an embarrassing CPAC this weekend and all kinds of silly stuff will happen. But McCarthy thinks he's navigating these choppy waters reasonably effectively. There'll be a bunch of primaries in more moderate districts. They'll quietly try to help the slightly more moderate Republicans win. And Georgia, rural Georgia districts, they'll let the Marjorie Taylor greens win, and he'll end up being speaker of the House. And I don't think that's a crazy view by McCarthy, unfortunately. And I don't think Republican Democrats are alarmed enough at just the sort of normal that they have to change the normal political dynamics, whether it's by a whole bunch of Congress Congressional reforms or a whole bunch of electoral reforms or policy reforms as well, that grab the country's attention and interests. So I'm very much with you on that.

Yeah. Something fundamental. Well, Bill, we were on a panel together at Harvard and our job was to disagree with each other on every issue. And I think we succeeded in that. I think we disagreed on every issue on that panel. But I admire the openness with which you've confronted the facts about where our politics has gone. I wish more on my side did the same thing. And I respect your willingness to talk openly about how we, all of us, can change to make this a successful system. And most importantly, I share the urgency that you have just expressed about if we don't get something from Fundamental right in the next couple years, it's going to be even worse than it has been. So thank you for taking an hour and I hope we can continue this conversation in other ways, too.

Well, thanks for your kind words and thanks for all your efforts and as you say, which I haven't always agreed with, but I think we're really. Yeah, we do share, I think, a common sense of urgency and a common sense of the importance obviously of this Republican self government persisting. And not just persisting, but being strengthened. So let's continue to stay in touch and I really enjoyed this conversation.

Yeah. And what you said there, let's make sure people understand Republican self government. That's small R. Small R. Totally small R. Yeah.

Right. Liberal democracy with a small D and Republican self government with a small R. Right, Great.

Okay. Thank you very much. That's our episode with Bill Kristol. These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens Us on the web at Equal Citizens Us anotherway. And at that location is a way for you to say what other ideas or people or thoughts you think we should be covering. If you find these conversations useful not just to reinforce our own views, but to help each other understand the other side's views. Please share this with your friends, or even those who you want to be your friends. There's a way at the website slash another way to make that sharing easier. Many of the ideas that we're going to talk about in the course of these conversations are ideas that we'll be writing about and spreading. And in a new substack that Equal Citizens has developed, focusing on the effort to enact HR1. And on the website, you can sign up for the substack, which will keep you up to date on everything that's happening in news and commentary, and insight about how we can move the Project for Reform forward. This is Larry Lessig. I'm grateful for for you spending the time that you do listening here, and I'm even more grateful for your feedback and thoughts. You can find a way to connect with me also at the website. The easiest way is lessigualcitizens us. Otherwise, please stay tuned for the next episode when we will be talking to Rob Sand. This is an inserted episode between Rokahana and Rob sand, but Rob sand continues the conversation of trying to understand where common ground is. Rob sand comes from Iowa, a perfect place to try to figure out how to make this conversation possible. Thanks very much.

Sa.