- [Monica] Thank you for joining us for Republican Reckoning with Henry Olsen and Ross Douthat, moderated by Monica Guzman.

Before we begin, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger foundation.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

Thanks everyone for being here, I'm Monica Guzman, your host for this next session on a very timely topic, in the wild, wild world of politics.

So the Republican party, if you're not being generous, you might say it's in crisis, or you might claim to borrow words from its most famous member that it's a total disaster.

Having lost the White House and Senate, Republicans are now the underdogs, but if the party needs unity to bounce back, it's got some work to do.

There's constant debate about how to oppose the Biden administration, how to articulate alternatives, criticisms, action.

Some of the party's most well-established leaders are being sidelined, booed, jeered, and might even be kicked off their pedestal soon.

Locally too, all around the country, Republicans are having a reckoning with who they are, what they stand for, and where it's all going.

So now, if you were being generous, I should say, you might say that all this drama is just that.

It's drama.

That underneath, the shakeups are just the natural adjustments of a major American political party that's very much in transition.

And in that case, the question is a transition to what?

Well, we're very lucky to have two of the absolute best people here to talk about this today.

Henry Olsen is a columnist at the Washington Post, and author of the 2017 book, "Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism."

Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist.

His most recent book is called "The Decadent Society," how we became the victim of our own success.

So please join me in welcoming Henry Olsen and Ross Douthat.

They're in the three bucks.

Hello gentlemen, how you doing?

- Pretty well, how about you?

- Doing all right.

- Thanks so much for having us, Monica.

- Of course.

Well, let's get started.

There's obviously a lot of ground to cover with the Republican party and politics right now.

It's quite the moment.

First things first, just to check, Henry, then Ross, are you still registered Republicans?

- Yeah, Virginia doesn't have party registration, which is where I live.

So I'm not a registered Republican, but I still consider myself a Republican.

I'd rather try and save the party I've supported for 45 years than leave it.

- I'll offer the opposite answer.

I think that I am a registered Republican in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, where the Republican primary is obviously the central battle (chuckles) for political power.

That's a joke for anyone who doesn't know New Haven politics intimately.

I tend to identify more as a sort of conservative of some sort than as a Republican per se, but I think Henry and I are basically in the same place of regarding the GOP as the only plausible vehicle for conservative politics in the US, for better or worse.

- Gotcha.

So let's talk about what the Republican party stands for right now.

And I want to try something a little different.

Henry, I'd like you to give us your most generous interpretation of where the party is right now.

And then Ross, you give us your least generous.

So Henry kick us off.

- This may not sound generous to your listeners.

The party is going through a soul search.

That it is a party that is still coming to grips with the intellectual challenges that Donald Trump's election, not Donald Trump personally, but Donald Trump's election brought.

And you see a lot of intellectual ferment.

You've got people talking about what does it mean to be a working class party?

Do we want to be working class party?

Should we abandon Afghanistan?

- Ah, so by the way, I should have mentioned, we may have the occasional technical difficulty with Henry, but we will be pleased, when he is back, to finish his very generous interpretation, but for now, Ross.

- (chuckles) But we skipped the generosity.

- Yeah, I think we just had to skip to the negative, so why don't you take us there.

(chuckles) - In case we don't get Henry back quickly, I mean, I think that Henry's generous interpretation is, oh, no, Henry's back, I think?

- There he is.

- All right, so we can continue with generosity.

- Go.

- I was just saying is that I think the generous interpretation is that the party is finding its way.

That I think there is an undeniable political fact that the people who are most open to voting for a center-right party these days have different priorities than those who are open to voting for a center-right party in 2004, 2008.

And that's a fact the Republican party has yet to adjust to.

If it adjusts to it properly, it can become a majority party.

If it adjusts to that improperly, it can become and remain an irrelevant minority for quite some time.

- So I agree with that.

One of the nice things about just having Henry and I together is that we have, I think, a broadly similar take on this sort of issue of the GOP and the working class.

We both think that the party is going through this kind of transition and that it has to go through this kind of transition in order to be successful in the future.

It has to figure out what being a sort of populist and working class party means.

So agreeing with that generous interpretation, then I'll offer the less generous interpretation, which is that the Republican party is hostage to the paranoia and conspiracy theories of Donald J. Trump.

And Trump basically, in a certain way, showed the party, the opening that it had.

He showed the possibility for sort of breaking out of some of the parties sterile orthodoxies that defined its campaigns in 2008 and 2012.

But then having showed that path in some of the failures of his presidency, and then especially in the way he ended it, he basically tried to slam the door on the future.

And instead of saying, okay, I showed a way to be a populous conservative.

Now go learn from this and broaden the coalition, he basically insisted no, I won, I won by a landslide.

In order to be a good Republican, you have to agree that I won, and a party that thinks that it won an election that had actually lost, whether or not it's a danger to democracy itself, which is sort of the big picture debate, is certainly a danger to itself.

And is certainly unlikely to be in a position to actually capture a majority in the near future.

So that would be the more pessimistic take.

- Well, staying with you, Ross, and a bit of a segue from that point, what then is something you are grateful emerged in the Republican party over the last four years?

You talked about Trump sort of showing an opening.

So what are the seeds that were planted that you see that you want to grow?

And what are the ones you think should be pulled out of the ground?

- I mean, I think what Trump did, Trump came into the party and was not a Republican, was certainly not a conservative, had no attachment to the sort of long arc of Reagan era conservatism, and a lot of the sort of the orthodoxies that had developed in the party over that time.

And that meant that he could come in and say things that lots of Republicans were afraid to say, like the war in Iraq was a mistake and we need to recalibrate our approach to the Middle East.

Now he wouldn't put it in, (chuckles) you know, he wouldn't use the word recalibrate probably, but, you know, sort of envision a shift in foreign policy that the Republicans he ran against in 2016 were not, to put it mildly, envisioning.

And similarly on domestic policy, I think Trump coming in and basically saying, you know, the Republican fixation on deficits and entitlement reform in 2008 and 2012 was a mistake, and the parties should be focused on full employment and working class wages.

Whether or not he followed through on those ideas successfully, I think it was a necessary and important shift for the Republican party that I think has influenced some of the people who want to lead the party after Trump.

Again, the question is whether there will be an after-Trump on any immediate time horizon.

- So to flip this to you, Henry, we just brought up Reagan.

Comes up a lot, (chuckles) discussions about the Republican party, of course.

He once famously quipped, 'The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.'

So what do you think Republicans know right now that Democrats don't and should?

- I think that Democrats remain massively overconfident.

They remain overconfident based on polling data.

We've seen plenty of examples of presidencies that start well, in theory, and end poorly, in fact.

David Shor, the very influential, progressive analyst, came out with an analysis about a week ago that said that Joe Biden is in, perhaps, one of the weakest positions of any incoming president for decades.

And that, based on historical data going back to 1942, the Democrats should expect in an average year to get 48% of the vote, which would cost them 20 house seats and control of the Senate.

And that's a progressive analyst looking at the data.

You'll hear almost none of them in Democrat circles.

They are all talking about transformation and FDR and completely blind to the way in which the politics on the ground is simply not reflecting that.

They are hoping against hope that Donald Trump continues to be front and center.

And Donald Trump continues to give them that opportunity, but we shouldn't assume people will still think this way a year and a half from now, depending on what's happening in the country.

And Democrats should be very more aware of the precariousness of their majority, rather than thinking that Donald Trump's narrow rejection is a sign that they can thoroughly remake America and turn America blue again.

- So crossing the aisle or rather staying on the Democrat side, I think for a bit, Ross, have the Democrats then learned anything or stolen any tricks from Trump?

I mean, has politics on both sides of the aisle transformed for the better in anyway?

- I mean, I disagree a little with Henry.

I think Democrats are pretty aware of the precarity of their congressional majorities at least.

I think some of the emphasis on Biden going big and, you know, spending as much money as possible.

And then beyond that, ideas that probably aren't going to come to fruition like statehood for Puerto Rico or DC or packing the Supreme court.

I think those ideas reflect the Democratic sense, not of overconfidence, but of fear, right?

Fear that politics is going to snap back pretty quickly.

So I think there's at least some of that on the Democratic side of the aisle.

I think if you look at the Biden administration itself, they have learned something from the Trump era.

You see it in foreign policy where Biden is, at least officially, doing the thing that Trump was unable to get the National Security Bureaucracy to do and pull troops out of Afghanistan.

There's been a real recalibration of US foreign policy towards China that Trump started and Biden has picked up on.

And then Biden is doing things around trade and other sort of industrial policy where he's basically keeping some things that Trump did in place.

He's got a new Buy American, you know, sort of conception.

He's trying to do the infrastructure bill that again, Trump ran on in 2016 and never delivered.

So I think Biden looks at the landscape and says, Trump showed that after years of globalization, after the Iraq war, you know, there is this sort of political opportunity for a leader who can say we're rebuilding the US and reorienting its foreign policy.

Trump tried to do it, Biden's trying to do it.

And I think overall, that's probably a good thing.

I think the weakness for the Democrats is not so much on those issues.

It's on the issues that divide their base internally, whether it is immigration, where the Biden administration is struggling to get a handle on the rising number of border crossers.

Crime, where crime rates went up a lot in the last year, even as left-wing activists were making sort of abolish and defund the police a slogan.

It's those kinds of issues of sort of social breakdown and certain kinds of culture war that divide the Democrats internally.

They're trying not to talk about them at the national level.

Biden's sort of tries to rise above those issues.

It works until it doesn't (chuckles) basically, and local issues have a way of becoming national issues in a hurry, and I think that's the biggest danger for the Democrats.

If crime continues to rise for two more years, once the pandemic is over, that's a big problem for Democrats, for instance.

- So Henry, yeah, go ahead and respond to that if you'd like.

- No, I actually would agree with a lot of that.

I gave Biden a C minus when I was asked to grade his first 100 days, largely on the analysis that as my thinking projecting is that he wants to marry those insights about Trump to a party that is largely progressive on culture.

And wants a degree of spending and influx of money into the economy that is unwarranted by the pandemic and he's gambling that that can work.

I don't think it will.

And that's why I am to think that there is a Republican opportunity in the midterms there.

You know, I operate on election Twitter a lot, and anybody who says this on election Twitter just gets knocked down, knocked down, knocked down.

We're stupid, we're partisan, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And the sober minds understand that.

But I don't think the sober minds dominate the thinking right now.

- This might be a good time, then, to bring up the big lie.

Oh yep, looks like we may have lost Henry again, but we will bring him back in as soon as his tech issues gear up for a second.

So Ross, the big lie, it's what Democrats call the idea that the election was stolen.

This week, unsurprisingly, Trump is trying to flip that around, claiming that the, quote, 'fraudulent presidential election of 2020 is the real big lie.'

So where is all this headed?

This contentiousness over the election results.

So I'll go to Ross and then Henry.

- I mean, I think it depends on, ultimately, on whether Trump really wants to run for president again, right?

I mean, in the short term, you have the figure of Liz Cheney who has, for reasons that I'm not sure were actually strategic, decided to sort of continue picking a public fight on these issues and obviously I agree with her on the merits.

I'm less sure that it makes sense for someone who has her views and her position of power to sort of cede that position of power right now, given that at the moment Trump isn't running for president and nothing direct is at stake.

- Do you think that she knows that?

That she knows that that's where this is headed?

'Cause she keeps beating this drum.

- Yeah, I mean, I think she's a smart politician.

I think she understands, yes, that in making these choices, she's likely to lose her leadership position and, you know, possibly her seat, although that may be somewhat less likely.

And yeah, I mean, again, there's a case that you have to stand on principle in this case.

I think for her, she took the stand on principle.

She cast the critical votes to impeach Trump.

It's not clear that fighting, continuing to fight it now, you know, anyway, but I mean to leap forward though, right?

Like if Trump doesn't run in 2024, I think the narrative about 2020 sort of gets subsumed back into the older Republican narrative that, you know, voter fraud was a problem, but not, you know, not one that was something they would use to claim that they won an election that they'd actually very clearly lost.

I think if Trump does run, you know, obviously if he runs, gets the nomination loses narrowly again, (chuckles) we've seen the play once.

We know what he'll do again.

And again, if people like Liz Cheney have sort of been purged or self purged, the party will have a harder time managing him the way I think most Republican elites actually did manage Trump in this case.

But it's also just a question for the Republican primary.

And that's sort of the more, I think the more urgent case, if you are imagining Trump running and yourself running against him, as at least some Republican politicians probably do imagine right now, you have to figure out what you're going to say, when Trump basically says, I am legitimately the President of the United States, why are you running in a primary against me?

I won the last election fair and square.

That I think is the place where this, you know, really, again, if Trump runs, cashes out in a way that puts any Republican running against him in a real bind.

- Is that the key point for you, Henry, as well?

Whether or not Trump runs?

- Yeah.

I've got a couple of things.

First of all, I just want to make it clear.

I oppose the frog theory.

Within a week of the election, within like five days, I wrote a column saying this was bunk.

Continued to that support that, I called for Trump's impeachment in the second instance, after January 6th, and I continued to be upset that people in the Republican party won't take on the big lie.

I think essentially, because Trump won't let it go, what the Republican parties thought was, we can manage the outcome if we don't criticize Trump publicly and we just keep people in line.

They were right substantively.

There was no decertification of election results.

There was no legislative overturning the popular vote in 2020, they were wrong politically.

And I think what they're going to have to do over the next year is actually respond.

Donald Trump has no substantive evidence, but the fact that he has no substantive evidence has never been refuted by people who people in the Republican party might trust.

That has to end.

I think the key element for Donald Trump's political future is the primary challenges that he is going to enthusiastically back to what he considers to be heretical Republicans in 2022.

He's the sitting leader of the Republican party taking on heretics in the party.

He has to win nearly all of those challenges.

If he only wins half of them, people will see that they can stand up to the bully in the room.

So I'm not thinking about 2024 right now.

I'm thinking about the summer of 2022 and Donald Trump intentionally goes after his critics.

And if he doesn't, you know, it's like they used to say, if you're going to try and kill the king, kill the king.

It's the reverse here, he has to quash his enemies, almost all of them, and if he doesn't, then you'll start to see his leadership of the Republican party fade.

And we'll probably see him start conducting more self-inflicted wounds as he behaves more radically to maintain this declining influence.

But that's a year and a half away.

I don't know what Republican voters will decide between May and September of 2022.

- Hmm.

So to both of you, what do you hope to see happen with Liz Cheney?

Maybe as soon as, you know, coming up and what do you think will happen, and is there a difference?

- I've written two columns on this in the last three days.

(chuckles) I just want to refer people to those columns in the Washington Post.

So Liz Cheney suffers from two problems.

One is her Trump problem.

- All right, Ross, why don't you take it?

- I really wanted to hear what Henry had to say (chuckles) 'cause he did write two columns and I have not written two columns.

I mean, my basic take is the one that I sort of gestured at before, right?

I expect Liz Cheney to lose her leadership position.

I, you know, in an ideal world, obviously I would prefer not to have, well, I think there are ways in which Liz Cheney independent of Trump is not an ideal leader for the Republican caucus right now.

And I think Henry can maybe speak to that more, but I don't think it's good for Republican leaders to lose their positions over fights with Trump over the election.

I think it's a very bad sign for the party.

Finally though, I wish that Liz Cheney had found a way not to continue picking these fights.

I think in the sense that I think if you are again, concerned about Republicans doing the right thing in the event that you get some future, you know, sort of political meltdown involving Trump claiming fraud again in 2024, you want people in positions of power who you know will stand up to him and Cheney proved that she would.

And yeah, I kind of wish she had kept her head down in the last month rather than fighting this out.

- Making it untenable, and Henry, yes.

I know one of your columns was about how the real misalignment is that she just doesn't match up ideologically with the party as it is now.

Maybe the attention is not on policy in this fight.

So tell us more about that.

- But you see, I disagree with that, is that fundamentally you have to understand that the people who supported Cheney back in the first challenge are the people who are generally conservative, but would like to get by the Trump issue.

And what Cheney's done in the last month is basically to tell those people that she doesn't agree with them.

Is that if you have concerns about getting out of Afghanistan, she's basically said that's not a Republican position.

One of the key things that's not getting reported outside of Washington is when the head of the Republican Study Committee, which is basically the sub caucus that includes like 70% of the people, said that the Republican party is a working class party and should work to maintain that.

And she called that a neo-Marxist idea.

And so when you take on head of the largest group whose members are the people who saved your behind three months ago, and say that you're a neo-Marxist, you're basically saying you have no respect for the people who saved your life.

That's why she's in trouble now.

They were willing to deal with the Trump stuff, but she shouldn't be poking Trump in the eye.

But what she's doing is picking unnecessary fights with people who were her allies, who now decided, I don't want this anymore.

I don't want it.

I don't want to have to deal with Trump every day.

And I don't want her in a leadership position, telling me that I'm wrong about the future of the party.

And so I, regretfully, think she needs to go.

And my piece today was saying that Elise Stefanik may be the right choice, because if she does become the next number three, she'll not only be the only woman, she'll be the only millennial in leadership, and crucially, she'll be the only person who represents an Obama-Trump district, a district that represents and is populated by the people who were working class voters who supported the Democrats in the nineties, and the aughts and in the early tens.

And now are Trump voters.

She's the only voice that will be in the leadership council.

And if she brings that insight, that could help bring the party together rather than drive it apart.

But it's all down to who she is and what she actually is willing to do.

- Hmm.

So switching back over to, you mentioned dealing with Trump every day.

So from The Desk of Donald J. Trump this week, that's the former president's new media feed, tied to what he's calling, Save America and the America First movement, what does it all amount to, to you Ross?

Start us off?

What does Trump really mean right now to the Republican party?

- God knows.

I mean, we're running just a really fascinating media experiment where you have a candidate who was sort of built by a combination of online media and his cable news presence.

He has been banned, purged, whatever you want to call it from the most important online media platforms.

And once that happened, cable news coverage of him, which I think we sort of established now, was sort of linked to the way he used social media, right?

There was some kind of interplay between his tweets and CNN's desire to cover them, right?

That interplay is broken.

And that has weakened him.

I think maybe a little more than I would have expected a few months ago.

You can see it in sort of, you know, there was a moment a couple of weeks ago where Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, temporarily pulled ahead of Trump on predicted and betting shares for the 2024 nomination.

I would not have expected that to happen, right, you know, in the first few months at least.

(chuckles) And you know, I mean, that's just one small indicator, but I think it's a useful signifier that Trump has been weakened by the change in his media environment.

And so I think the core question, and this goes to Henry's point about the midterms, right?

Is what does he do during the midterms?

You know, just having an internet presence isn't enough.

He has to inject himself more fully and he can do that, right?

Like if he wants to go on Fox and you know, be on Hannity or Tucker Carlson or call into Fox and Friends, like he can do that.

So he can inject himself more, at least into the conservative portion of the media stream.

And he can go back to holding rallies.

And at some point, he'll do that and we'll see what effect that has.

But basically, he's taken a hit.

His influence has taken a hit.

I don't think this platform is what gets it back.

I think he has to go into Fox, you know, he has to hold rallies.

He has to sort of inject himself more fully than just sort of building something that's like an island unto itself.

I don't think Trump island works on his list of properties.

- (laughs) Right.

Henry, what do you think on that?

Agree, disagree?

- I think Trump is both the single most important figure in the Republican party and his influence is fading.

There was a poll from the monthly Wall Street Journal, NBC news poll came out that, for the first time in years, said, when you ask people, Republicans, are you more of a supporter of Donald Trump or more of a supporter of the Republican party?

More people said they were supportive of the Republican party than Donald Trump.

Before the election it would have been two to one in favor of Trump.

Now it's a slim majority in favor of the party.

And I think that's an indication that out of sight, out of mind, and an indication of people who might say, I liked some of the things Donald Trump brought to bear, but it's time to move him along.

There are still millions of people who worship him and the ground he walks on.

And what we'll see in 2022 is a battle between these various groups of people in all these different primaries, which is why I think we don't know the answer yet.

It's so long in advance.

And I'm just reminded of the 1992 election.

When Ross Perot got 18% of the vote and people thought he was really powerful.

And by September, he was a has-been because he blew up in a debate that he was expected to win on NAFTA with Vice President Al Gore.

There's a lot of time for Donald Trump to lose influence.

It's hard to see what he does to gain it.

He's already in a position.

I think time is not his friend here.

- But, one, people have been waiting for Donald Trump to like, naturally fade and lose influence for a long time.

I wrote a lot of columns making a version of Henry's point back in 2016 that were all wrong.

And what Trump has going for him is that he can lose a certain amount of influence and still be a dominant player in a Republican field in 2024, if it's divided.

And so if he comes in and he's down to 30% of the vote, 35% of the vote, that's all he had in 2016.

And with the right mix of people competing against him, he can still come back and win.

That's why something like DeSantis is such an interesting figure.

If basically, sort of the Republican establishment, such as it is, wants to defeat Trump in 2024, without having to like, you know, almost sort of, take him on from six directions at once.

I think they need their candidate early and maybe it's not DeSantis, but DeSantis is, you know, he's a guy who sort of fits that bill.

- Hm.

So speaking about, yeah, this is actually an excellent segue to local state regional level GOP.

Republicans who insist there was nothing wrong with the election are seeing censure, and on the local and state level here in Washington, the Republican candidate for governor, Loren Culp, never conceded the race to Jay Inslee.

Is this the new normal in the GOP, this approach on that level to elections all over the place?

I'll go to Henry.

- You know, there's too much of that.

- Go to Ross, we'll get Henry when he comes back.

- Yes, I think it's most likely to be the new normal in states where the Republican party is weak in certain ways.

They're sort of, you get sort (audio garbles) when parties are weak and they shrink.

I think where the Republicans should be most worried about it is in places where they were winning and just started losing, like Arizona.

So it's much more of a problem for Republicans in, you know, if you have a state that sort of in the balance and it starts to tip to Democrats and you get this spiral of sort of denialism and craziness, then the next thing you know, you can end up where Virginia ended up, where the Republican party in Virginia, you know, sort of becomes captive to its own its own extremism.

And you go from being a Republican state in, you know, 20 years ago to a competitive state 10 years ago to a safe democratic state.

And if that happens in places like Arizona, then the Republicans are in trouble, but it's not good.

It's not a good trend.

- Henry, hi, let's see if we can get your thoughts real quick on that.

(chuckles) - Yeah.

I think it's a minority trend, you know, is that you don't have people who were backed by the national party in serious races saying I lost, you know, Stacey Abrams is one of those people who still hasn't conceded as a Democrat, that she is not the governor of Georgia.

You know, somebody who, like a Loren Culp, nobody expected her to win.

She didn't come very close.

You know, fringe figures or people who don't have serious futures will tend to do fringy things, but it is a disturbing trend.

The belief in the election fraud myth is way too widespread within the Republican party, which is why, again, I think that responsible Republican leaders have tried not to engage the president.

It hasn't worked, and I think they're going to need to do so in a detailed way as we go forward.

- So just want to address our viewers real quick.

We are about to go into a Q&A, so if you haven't gotten your questions in, please do, and we will be asking Ross and Henry all your questions in just a moment.

So I have one more question from myself to both of you.

Let's say that it's summer 2022, and everyone's impressed, and including you two, and even Democrats privately admit that the Republican party seems to have gotten its act together.

And they're fearing just a trouncing in the midterms.

In your mind, what had to have happened to give you and others that impression?

Let's hear from Ross and then Henry.

- I think there are two scenarios.

One scenario is the economic recovery either disappoints, or you get a sudden uptick in inflation that some economists fear from the scale of stimulus spending.

If that happens, then Republicans can run against the Democrats on economic stewardship.

And that's always the primary place you want to be.

And they can say, look, the economy was coming back.

We handed it to the Democrats, they spend us into back into the 1970s.

I don't think that's terribly likely from my non-expert reading of the economic data.

I think if we're going to get inflation, on a serious scale, not a modest scale, it's much more likely further on in Biden's first term or even his second term.

So I think the midterms, it's more likely that Republicans end up fighting the midterms on some combination of Democratic interest groups are sort of keeping us in a pandemic zone by failing to open schools or sort of slow walking the comeback from the pandemic.

Again, God willing by next summer that that won't be an issue.

But I don't think it's impossible that you could see the, you know, sort of school systems still, you know, if you get one more wave next winter, sort of still struggling to reopen, but then more importantly, what I said earlier, that if you have a continuation of the coronavirus, or a crime wave join to continue trouble at the border, join to sort of continue demonstrations of activist power in the Democratic party.

You know, then I think the Republicans have something to run against.

But it's about that combination.

It's not enough like today, a Democratic Congress woman, you know, referred to, you know, instead of mothers referred to, like, people who get pregnant or something, right?

So, you know, there's this sort of jargon like Latinx, that the Democrats use that I think is alienating to a lot of voters, but it's only a big political problem for the Democrats.

If it's combined with some sense that the Democrats are engaging in this jargon while they can't govern our cities and crime rates are rising.

That's, I think, the real danger zone for Democrats.

- It's a proof is in the pudding kind of scenario.

Henry, take us home and we'll go to Q&A.

- Yeah, no, I would basically agree with Ross, although I think, you know, we're not talking about 15% inflation next year, but I think we've got a very substantial chance of a real 5%.

And I say real 5% because the government will try and tamp it down by using things like personal consumption expenditures or core inflation rates that exclude food and energy.

But you know, the real inflation rate, meaning what real families face will be higher than that.

I think the message will be, if we're sitting here in July and Democrats say we're going to lose the midterms, and they really don't think they have a shot, I think it will be crime, country, and competence, that they will have mismanaged the economy, they will have mismanaged the border, and we will have a recurrence of crime.

And you know, for me, the event that I'm looking to is what happens if a jury doesn't find all three of the people who were with Derek Chauvin guilty of the highest possible crime in the trial that will start in Minneapolis in a couple months.

The evidence against Chauvin was pretty much really clear.

The evidence against these other guys, it's not going to be so clear cut.

They didn't have their knee on, you know, his face, on the Floyd's neck, they were around him.

It's entirely possible that these guys don't get convicted.

And what happens if that sets off another round of riots?

And then the fact is the great under reported story in America right now is the continuing high levels of crime compared to what we've seen in the last 25 years in most of our American cities.

That could continue and it could spiral out of control.

So to summarize, if we're in July and the Democrats have given up the ghost, it's crime, country, and competence, they will look mismanaged the three things that matter most.

- All right.

Thank you both.

I'm going to turn it to our viewers.

With moderates on both sides of the aisle being marginalized, do you two foresee an incredible future for a third party?

Who wants to take that one first?

- You know, there's always a problem with American third parties.

And one of the reasons they don't come up is because we actually have a multi-party system in this country right now because of our primaries.

In every other country of the world, the ins can block out the outs by selecting the nominees through party insider control processes, and the outsiders have to form new parties.

In the United States, you fight these battles between parties and party primaries every year.

And so consequently, as long as you think you've got a shot for significant influence, you're not going to make a third party.

The moderates may be unhappy, but they have to really feel utterly disenfranchised and then make common ground with moderates who are disenfranchised with another set of people over another set of issues.

So, until we eliminate the political primary system and go to an insider control nomination system, I think third parties in America are going to remain as rare as they've been in the last century.

- Yeah.

I mostly agree with Henry.

I think you can see both Trump's capture of the Republican nomination and the Bernie Sanders insurgency in the Democratic party, as examples of forces that in a different era, the era of Ross Perot or George Wallace, would have been third parties working outside the party system, but in an era of weaker parties, as Henry says, they work inside of, and that's what I would expect to happen with the one caveat that I do think if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, for the small group of Republicans who have really vehemently opposed him.

And now I'm thinking basically of Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney above all, there might be some pressure from themselves, from their donors, from other people to try and sort of create a non Trump conservative faction.

And I'm not sure how that would work, but I think if you're trying to imagine a third party, Trump being a Republican nominee in 2024 is sort of a precondition.

- I would agree with that.

- Who else do you view as the future of the Republican party?

Who would you want to lead the party?

So DeSantis has come up, we've thrown a few names around.

Henry, what do you think?

- Yeah, I've been asked the who question for the last decade and I always turn it around to the why.

Which is that the who in American politics changes rapidly.

If we were sitting here in 2012, everyone would be talking about Chris Christie.

By 2014, Chris Christie is considered to be dead in the water because of Bridgegate.

Four months ago, everyone would be talking about Kristi Noem, then she commits an oh no by going against the party based on transgender.

You just don't know who is going to have the skill and the chops to navigate this over a three-year period.

So the what that I think represents the center of Republican party opinion is somebody who is willing to use government power in domestically and limited, but effective ways to help people who need it, whether they're racial minorities or whether they're struggling blue collar workers.

Somebody who has a realistic foreign policy that doesn't engage in imperial overstretch, but concentrates on the real foe that we have, which is the Chinese, Russian, Iranian access that is emergent.

And on social issues, one that speaks about social issues in a non theological way and focuses more on family and community.

You find somebody who can be an articulate advocate for that, and that unites the party while being attractive to some of the people who supported Biden or a third party candidate.

- Ross, do you have the list of criteria or do you have someone in mind?

- I think I generally agree with Henry's list of criteria.

I think there's, you know, a collection of people, men in the Senate, who I think would agree with Henry's analysis in broad strokes and are trying in different ways to sort of experiment in that direction and not coincidentally, they're all men who think they're going to be president of the United States someday, meaning Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, who's position has taken a bit of a hit since January 6th, but who is still sort of trying to be a populous politician, issuing proposals to break up Silicon Valley giants and so on.

And so I think that cluster of three or four would be populist senators is where the most interesting action is.

And then you have a figure like Tim Scott, who is sort of less of a policy entrepreneur and more, sort of a public embodiment, I think, of what a, you know, business friendly African-American politician from South Carolina, I think is sort of an embodiment of whatever remains of the party establishment would like the future of the party to be.

And I think he's pulled ahead of Nikki Haley as sort of the figure who occupies that zone right now.

But I think DeSantis, I think not being in Washington DC is always a pretty big advantage.

You know, there could be a sort of Chris Christie style meltdown for DeSantis and his future, but right now, he's clearly in the strongest position of any governor to be a sort of post-Trump leader for the party.

- I would agree with both of those.

I would agree with all of that analysis.

The way I've talked about, but who is to again, to clump them.

(audio garbles) - Okay, we'll see if we can fit one or two more questions.

We brought up the tech issues.

So Ross, should former President Trump be reinstated by Facebook ever?

Do Republican party members now see themselves as willing captives of a right wing outlier movement rather than as a genuine credible opposition party?

Those are two very different questions.

(laughs) But go ahead and take the take the first one, if you would.

- I mean, I think I'm of two minds, I think that Trump morally deserves to be banned from social media platforms.

At the same time, I think it's a really bad situation for a democratic society to have a few companies with this kind of power over sort of public speech to the point where they can remove the effective leader of the political opposition.

And you'll notice that political leaders who don't like Donald Trump very much, especially in Western Europe, were very quick to be critical of the Silicon Valley decisions.

I think, because they see this as an issue of like who actually has the power.

So I guess I'd like to live in a world where a company like Facebook could ban Trump.

And it wouldn't matter because Facebook doesn't have that kind of power, which is a little bit of a cop out, but that would be my answer.

- But we don't live in that world.

And that's why I oppose Trump.

January 6th was a red line for me.

And I'm not going to ever vote for him again under any circumstances, but I think we have to be in a democracy, and in a democracy, you have to let odious figures speak to the public.

We've got a number of examples in American history of people who we consider to be odious figures, but we always have recognized that you have to have a wide range of tolerance, of unacceptable or odious speech in order to ensure that people with power don't then use the banning of those people to begin to narrow legitimate and political... - Okay.

And it looks like actually that's our time.

So Henry, I hope he can come up a little bit just to say a quick goodbye, but we are so grateful, Ross and Henry, for your insights today, this was a really wide ranging, very fun and dynamic conversation about a topic that's not about to get boring, I think.

(Ross laughs) There's definitely a lot, and there's Henry!

- I apologize, I have a bad internet connection and I've never had this happen on an event before.

I'm sorry it happened.

- But you know, we're rolling with it.

- Your insights were much clearer than your internet connection, Henry.

(laughter) - That's the line, that's it.

- There it is.

- There it is.

Well, thank you both so very much.

This has been fantastic, so thank you.

- Absolutely, thank you so much.

(upbeat music)