From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In 2020, very few people had heard the name Vivek Ramaswamy.
That was before he ran for president as a not-that-well-known biotech executive and anti-woke crusader, before he was one of the breakout stars of the Republican primary, a guy who proved to be a lot faster on his feet at a debate and before a crowd than a lot of the much more experienced politicians who were competing against him.
I think there's something deeper going on in the Republican Party here.And I am upset about what happened last night.We've become a party of losers at the end of the day.We're the cancer of the Republican establishment.
So reject this myth that they've been selling you, that somebody had a cup of coffee stint at the UN and then makes 8 million bucks after, has real foreign policy experience.
And then in the summer, when Republicans were riding high, when Donald Trump seemed a pretty good bet to win the presidential campaign, Ramaswamy went to the National Conservatism Conference, a place where his colleague and sometimes frenemy J.D.
Vance was also speaking, and gave a pretty interesting speech.
Thank you for the warm welcome.It's going to be a different kind of speech tonight.
Arguing there was a deep divide in the America First movement.
This is not a rah-rah speech.My goal is to actually tonight just illuminate what I view as this growing, healthy, but existent rift between what I call the national protectionist direction of the future
and a national libertarian direction for the future.
Vance, of course, was then chosen to be Trump's vice president, elevating the leader of the other side of what Ramaswamy takes as a divide to possibly the vice presidency.
But Ramaswamy thinks that a future Trump administration, and if Trump loses, certainly a future Republican party, is still quite shapeable on these issues.
He just published a book making some of these arguments, and I thought it'd be an interesting time to have a moment to talk about these divides. As always, my email is rickleinshow at nytimes.com. Vivek Rambhaswamy, welcome to the show.
It's good to be on, man.So in 2022, you told The New Yorker that you recoil when you're called a conservative.In your book, the term you like to use for your movement is the movement you're part of is America first.
What's the difference between being a conservative and being America first?
Well, the reason is, I think the term conservative and I would say everything I'm saying, there's a parallel version of it for liberal and the left, but that's less my concern or what you probably want to hear from me.
But I think the term conservative itself is ill-defined today.If there's one thing that unites the conservative movement today, it is its opposition to radical left-wing excess.
But if you ask the question of what does it actually stand for, that question I think is far more unanswered.
even the values or the value systems that conservatives are seeking to conserve have in some ways actually been eroded and disappeared in the country, which requires a kind of creation, which has historically been a progressive project rather than a conservative project.
That gets a little etymological and philosophical, but in a more practical sense, even the modern conservative movement consists of
I think a rather widely disparate group of movements within it would have the neoliberal informed or what you might call neoconservative vision of conservatism, Bush era Republican conservatism versus a more nationalist America First direction that speaks to certainly my vision for the future of the country.
But if you double click on that, that itself is comprised of at least two, if not more different factions within it as well.
And so anyway, for me, I think a lot of these labels can be confining because people tend to reason by analogizing you to something rather than analyzing your own views.
And that's one of the reasons I've tried to, you know, maybe go out of my way more so than an average politician to write a larger number of books, articles, you know, go to the distance a little bit to lay out what my views actually are rather than to have them be analogized to somebody's preexisting category of where they try to fit me in.
Well, I'm not afraid of being a little etymological.We're here on a podcast.I've been thinking about George W. Bush recently.You know, I have to think about him.He's a big figure in my own cosmology.And he was understood in his day as a nationalist.
This was an era of flag pins.You're wearing a flag pin right now, like the post 9-11 period. What I see in the America First world is a sense of what came before was insufficiently nationalist.
If I was to say what unites all of you together, it is a sense of renewed nationalism and a sense that nationalism was betrayed not just by a left that you say has excesses, but a right that lost the plot.
In what way was George W. Bush not nationalist?
Well, the short version of answer that question would be interventionist foreign policy and the use of American taxpayer and even life resources to advance goals that didn't directly advance or even indirectly advance the American interest.
That's the short version of the answer to that question.But if you want to go longer form and in terms of history here, let's go even further back to the evolution of modern conservatism and how we got to where we are.
I think if you go back to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, this is a kind of modern original sin in American politics of the creation of a nanny state.
To me, I include the entitlement state, which is the state that gives away stuff, welfare, Medicaid, et cetera.There's the regulatory state, the rise of three-letter agencies to administer this larger form of government, the regulatory state.
And then there's the foreign nanny state, which is the foreign aid complex and the foreign interventionist complex.
What I think of as classical conservatism in the latter half of the 20th century was a reactionary response to that LBJ vision of the Great Society that got watered down through what we would say the rise of neoconservatism, Bush-era conservatism.
that effectively accepted that this sort of larger form of government in some form was here to stay, that we're not really gonna undo the Great Society, that we're not really gonna undo the existence of the regulatory state, but we wanna be thoughtful about curbing its overgrowth.
while at the same time saying that while we're at it, and we got big government, we might as well use it to spread democracy using capitalism as a vector to do it.And if we're not going to use capitalism to do it, we'll use military force to do it.
And that's a different kind of big government that became accepted in the form of conservative doctrine, not just accepted, but a central feature of it.And then what I see in the America First response right now is
a unified response that is against that neoconservative vision, but if you double-click on what that actually stands for, that itself is unanswered, too.
And I think what you see in broadly what's thought of in popular circles as the America First movement today, but what I call the protectionist wing of the America First movement. is an economic objective, an economic project.
You could call it economic populism or economic nationalism.
But in some ways, the protectionist strand of this says, okay, well, if big government's gonna be here to stay, we don't just wanna curb it, we actually want to use it to advance substantive goals of our own.
versus the strand that I'm more identified with.
I would, I, but I've certainly turned the national libertarian or national liberty strand of America first says that actually the whole project we got to actually keep our eye on the ball was dismantling the existence of that nanny state in all of its form, the entitlement state, the regulatory state and the foreign nanny state.
And you know, we've gotten into the thick of a lot here very quickly.I'm glad to get into it.We're Medicare and Medicaid mistakes.
I believe they were, with the benefit of retrospect, particularly Medicaid, particularly the welfare state, without work attachments required attached to it.
Medicare and Social Security I put in a different category, which we can get to later, and I think is a little bit orthogonal to the discussion, certainly that I'm most interested in having that I think is on the money right now.
But when you think about Medicaid and welfare, well.
I think that social security, I mean, you kind of had the real, my real issue there is if we'd ever actually taken advantage of the surplus that we had, it's a bit more mechanical issue that if you just allowed for the surplus to be invested at rates of normally normalized returns of the stock market or diversified portfolio, we'd have a far excess surplus that would be sustaining itself.
So it was, you pay in, you pay out versus having a redistributionist quality to it.
versus what I think of as the welfare state, my principal issue with it is that it actually, I think the evidence would show, in my opinion, that it has harmed the very people that it was created to actually help through creating incentive distortions that maybe were predictable.
We could debate the history of this and maybe weren't predictable, but even ex-ante, if you'd asked a lot of people who designed it and fast forwarded the results as they exist today, they'd be different from the results that even the designers of those policies would have envisioned.
But my core focus actually, even in my presidential campaign, had been less taking aim at that, though I do think that that's a project we have to come back to, but was to take aim at at least the regulatory state that was a close cousin of that state.
And I think basically what happened in the 60s is we traded off our sovereignty for this stuff.And I think the problem we're basically going to run into as a country is eventually that stuff is going to run out.
in the form of our national debt crisis, and we're left with neither sovereignty nor stuff.And I think this should be the central focus and concern of the conservative movement, which is not quite today.
That brings me back to this distinction between the national protectionist and the national libertarian camps of the America First movement.
And the irony is, as I've made the case for the more national libertarian strain, let's just say in recent months, in a more pronounced way in particular, one of the criticisms I've gotten is that as it relates to sort of trade and immigration policy and my attitudes towards the regulatory state,
Is that just a reversion to a kind of neoconservatism or neoliberalism?
And my sort of retort back to that, and this is at the bleeding edge of America First debates right now, is that actually the America First wing, the protectionist wing's acceptance of the big state is actually the permanent codification of the neoconservative premise that rejected the classical conservatism that was hostile to the existence of the nanny state in the first place.
And so where we're getting, how many conservatisms can dance on the head of this particular?I was, I was used to doing the etymology and lexicons.And so, you know, I feel like we're using too many terms.Hold on.
Hold on the terms for a minute.Yeah. I've sat in chairs exactly as far from Paul Ryan as I'm sitting from you.Put aside the foreign policy for a minute.Which is key.A lot of what you're saying just feels like Paul Ryan to me.
So here's why it's radically different, I would say, is I am more committed in my rejection of blithe neoliberalism, even more committed to that.
What is blithe neoliberalism?
So blithe neoliberalism is liberal internationalism
of a variety that says we were somehow gonna export Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to China, that the sole goal of immigration policy was to view the United States as an economic zone, and that the goal of all immigration policy was to maximize the size of that economic pie without regard to national identity.
Those are some of the big mistakes of blithe neoliberalism of yesterday.I think what we've learned from that is here's a couple key errors, I would say like deep category errors that were committed that we still suffer the consequences of today.
One of those is that we now depend on our chief adversary for our own national security.The number one supplier to the U.S.military, directly or indirectly, is China.40% of the semiconductors that power the Department of Defense come from China.
Our military industrial base is dependent on China so much so that Raytheon says that we have to make nice with China.This makes no sense.
Like, even if you're a classical Hayek-style libertarian, read The Road to Serfdom, he would even admit and even embrace the idea that a nation cannot depend on its adversary for its own national self-defense.It just doesn't make sense.
But that's, I think, sin number one of the old blithe neoliberalism.
And number two, related to this issue of immigration, that somehow, I don't care what language you speak, I don't care what your allegiance to the civic ideals of the United States are, if you know the first thing about it,
if you're gonna add some unit of economic efficiency to the U.S.economy, our immigration policy is effectively just a subset of economic policy, which I think has had the effect of eroding our national character and national identity.
And it just wasn't in the scope of concern of the Paul Ryan-style worldview of the 1990s.So in that sense, I depart in no uncertain terms from the blithe neoliberalism of yesterday.
However, there's a fork in the road then about how one responds to that.
If you're really serious about declaring economic independence from China, which I think is a chief and vital objective for the United States, at least in areas critical to our national security, then yes, of course that means on-shoring to the U.S., we're all in favor of that, but it also means if you're really serious about it, expanding trade relationships with South Korea, Japan, India, you could debate other countries, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, et cetera.
But if your top goal is to protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition, then you actually want less trade with those countries.
But if that's your objective, then you're necessarily delaying the time period it takes to declare independence from China.So there's a choice.
So in this, you sound a little bit more to me like where the Biden administration is than where Donald Trump is.
Well, I'm sure you will.What you're describing is what they often talk about as friends shoring. Before them, what you're describing is what got talked about was actually called the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
We're going to encircle China with a series of trade deals.And I'm sure you would have designed the trade deal in terms of climate and labor standards differently.
But with different deals we make with other players who we will increase our trade with them, and as such, our industrial base will be less dependent on China.
And Trump has a not just a set of China tariffs, but a 10 or 20 percent, depending on which speech he's giving, tariff on all imported goods from anybody, be they friend or foe.
You sound to me like you're interested in this other idea that our trade with friends should go up in order to make trade with China go down.
that strikes me as actually more common cause right now with people on the Democratic side than people on the Republican ticket.
A lot of things to say in response to that.First of all, I could care less right now for the purpose of this discussion about what label we overlay on anything, right?
Because I think there's deep divides in the Democratic Party, as I said at the very start of this conversation, as I think there are real divides in the Republican Party.
Sure, but I think it's useful to ground things in actual policies people are proposing.But then the second point is Biden's actually kept most of the Trump tariffs intact.
And then the next thing we could talk about is... Right, but he's not trying to create a universal tariff. If he kept all the tariffs that he supposedly would have opposed from Donald Trump, he's effectively less than.
He's not trying to create a 10 or 20% universal tariff.
He's just not.I think we can get into the essence of what Donald Trump is also trying to do, which I think is a little different than what you characterized.
He's proposing a 10 or 20% universal tariff.
I think he's using the threat of tariffs to be able to accomplish other goals as a negotiator.So you don't think he will do the thing that he's saying he will do?
I think that he's using, Donald Trump is all about, with respect to the international stage, using our leverage to the maximum extent possible.
So we have to sort of assume secret knowledge of what Donald Trump is going to do.
Well, I think that he's proven himself to be an apt negotiator for the United States in getting other countries to pony up in contexts where they haven't in the past.
Part of what you're doing by putting Donald Trump there is we're not putting a traditional stuffed suit politician, but you're effectively putting somebody there who keeps other countries guessing in a way that we're able to extract leverage from them as a consequence.
So you're saying he is running for president on his core economic policy, but we should not evaluate that policy because in office he'll do something else when I think the way to evaluate Donald Trump is how he performed in his first term.
So the way Donald Trump performed in his first term is I'm going to do what's right for America.I'm going to do it situationally.What best advances America's interests, whatever it is.I think the TPP was poorly executed.
You anticipated correctly some of the things I would say with respect to climate change, related objectives, et cetera, that are baked in.But even more so just to get closer to the meat of it.
I think that it's not really free trade when the other side of that trading relationship isn't playing by the same terms as us when it comes to state subsidies, for example.
So tariff is a tax, but there's various ways of having indirect tariffs or indirect imbalances in the trading relationship when you have state-related subsidies on one side versus another.
If another country or trading partner is applying a tariff to us, either a direct tariff or an indirect tariff in the imbalance of state-sponsored support, Then I think it is totally fair game for the U.S.
to say, well, we're going to do the same thing in return, even though I believe the best state of affairs for everybody involved is getting rid of that state sponsorship and the tariffs in the first place.
And I think if you look, in fact, like forget rhetoric and everything else, but in fact, a lot of what Donald Trump accomplished was either leveling the playing field or using the threat of going further than that to accomplish other objectives.
That's what we got out of the first term. I think that's fair game.
One thing that is difficult about talking about Donald Trump, both in terms of policies he proposes, but also the first term that he inhabited, is that in both cases you have a problem of interpretation.
So in the first term, it is not just canon among liberal reporters, but canon among Trump staffers, that Trump was highly blocked by the bureaucracy that he, in theory, controlled.
And a huge amount of the thinking around the America First movement is how to make a second Trump term more responsive to at least what people believe is Trump's interests and desires than the first term was.
I don't agree with this sort of vision of Donald Trump as sitting up late at night every night, carefully pouring through proposed trade deals with different countries bilaterally to decide what's in the American interest.
He got some things done and didn't change a whole lot of things.But there are theories beneath these.And what I think is interesting about your book, about some of the speeches you've been giving, is a distinction in theory.
Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, believes J.D.Vance certainly believes that we have very zero sum transactional relationships with other countries and that we are getting robbed on deals.
But just in general, we should be pushing to bring much, much more on shore. A lot of trade theorists believe, a lot of people who think about trade believe, you can have much more positive some relationships.
I think that is functionally right now where you are.
And my sense is that Trump, the whole theory of those tariffs, which is why I take them seriously, at least as an idea of what Donald Trump believes about the world, is that you would just bring back a lot more industrial base if you made all the imports from the rest of the world more expensive.
That is, I think, a natural way to look at that.It is the way JD Vance explains it.Is your view that Donald Trump does not believe that at core?
He's not mercantilist in that way?I think, so here's the thing about Donald Trump and the coalition he leads right now versus a part of that coalition that has the ideology that you're describing.
I think Donald Trump at his core is a pragmatist and I do believe, and I,
I think it would be boring to have an hour-long conversation about different interpretations of Donald Trump's style, but I'll give you my perspective on it, is I do think that he is somebody who, pragmatically, is not gonna be an ideologue one way or the other on this question, but is just gonna look at what makes America a better country, and how you're able to exert negotiating leverage in a situation-by-situation basis to get there.
What I think is more interesting, though, is there is the ideological strand that you described.And I would go one step further in what that ideological strand thinks it's accomplishing, the protectionist strand.
It's not just bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.I think there's even more to the project than that.I think part of the project is also playing with American wages, bringing the wage of the American worker up by saying that effectively you are
engaging with slave labor style wages.You could debate or not, but I'm articulating the view that it's like slave labor wages in another country and stuff's made cheaply because of that.
You're effectively forcing the American worker to compete at that lower wage if you're engaging in a truly open bilateral free trade relationship. And that's where this bleeds into immigration policy.
So trade policy, immigration policy to the protectionist camp, I think of as more of a subset of actually of anything is labor policy, a little bit of industrial policy, but it actually is labor policy at its core.
The protectionist view on this is, look, if an American company could pay an American worker $20 an hour to do a job, and they could pay to foreign-born workers legally or illegally.
In this case, sometimes Republicans use the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration to confound this much more uncomfortable discussion about legal immigration.But what he would say is,
For $20 an hour, if you could pay an American-born worker, but a foreign-born worker, even a legal immigrant, would be doing the same job for $10 an hour, the job of U.S.
immigration policy should be to keep those two foreign-born workers out so that the domestic-born worker can actually be paid the higher wage.
That's a totally different view from not only classical economic theory, but also my own view of the national libertarian worldview, which is that actually the thing we should be caring about when it relates to immigration policy
is something else altogether, which is the national character of the United States.If your vision of immigration policy is one of protecting American workers from wage competition, then you just want less immigration, period.
If your goal is to actually preserve the national character and identity of the United States, it's a different immigration policy, which in theory could be more same or less.Pragmatically, in the near term, almost certainly means a lot less.
But you get there for very different reasons.
I always find the way the America First movement doesn't think about immigration to be interesting.
Because on the one hand, on the trade side, what I see is a description of America as locked in incredible zero-sum competitive relationships with other countries in the world.
Competitive relationships for where you're gonna put a factory, for who's gonna buy whose exports or imports.It's a very dog-eat-dog economic view of things.And in some ways it's true.
And here you have this incredible possible advantage America has over everybody else, which is everybody wants to come here.And you could build an immigration system that is bringing in not just low-wage work, but a lot of high-wage talent, right?
And the stories of this, you know, Steve Jobs, the son of a Syrian refugee, or Legion.
And Elon Musk, you know, himself.Elon Musk himself.Yeah.
The degree to which that does not seem to be a huge part of competition strategies on the right or the America First thing is interesting to me.You bring up a point system in the book.
I'm not sure that it isn't.I'm not sure that it isn't.
Well, talk to me about how you think about it.
So I drew this distinction earlier, but I want to dwell on it for a second because I think it's really important in understanding what's actually going on with our base versus what may appear to people peering on it from the outside versus in.
So I do think that most of the prominent voices that wear the mantle of the America First right adopt the protectionist view. I don't think that that is broadly representative of where a much more diverse coalition, even within America, first dress.
You take someone like Elon Musk, who's playing an instrumental role, I think, in guiding, you know, hopefully success for Donald Trump in this election.
I'm where Elon is, and Elon's where I am on this question, is that we want to be the championship team.So the three principles I give for immigration policy to make it really simple for people is No migration without consent.
Consent should only be granted to migrants who benefit America, and those who enter without consent must be removed. But number two is the most interesting.Consent should only be granted and should be granted to migrants who benefit America.
Now, I view that benefit more holistically than just the economic benefit, but who benefit America in increasing the civic character that I think we're missing in our country.
And further, a subset of that civic character is self-determination, self-reliance, and the ability to work hard through a meritocratic system of American capitalism.
So I think that that is alive and well, actually, in the bloodstream of America first policy.
But I think part of what's happened is some of the most articulate, thoughtful, intelligent and prominent voices wearing the America first mantle on the right, I think, have adopted that more protectionist view that you don't really see fully embodied in Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has facets of each of these elements in his policy vision. But I think that his view that if you were educated at a U.S.
university and you're going to be somebody who's actually going to be one of the geniuses like the next Elon Musk's of this country, we want them in the United States of America.
I sort of look at America first as this strange effort to contest what it is that Donald Trump himself means.And there's a version that's J.D.Vance, which is the immigration policy here is about protecting American workers from wage competition.
Fair enough.There's a version that you are trying to advocate and be a leader in, which is we should be pursuing a certain vision of national identity.And I want to talk about what that means.
And there's a thing that I actually hear from the guy who has made this popular and who is leading this movement, which is that immigrants are vermin who are polluting the gene pool with bad genes, that they are coming here from insane asylums, they are coming here from prisons, that
the people themselves are the problem, right?Sometimes it feels to me like there's an effort to sanitize this or to ideologize it, to make it something we can argue about with spreadsheets, to make it something that we can think about in policy.But
I think for Trump himself and the thing that gives us a lot of its power and the way he talks about it over and over and over again in a very consistent way, it's not about wages and it's not really about identity.
It's a belief that the people who are coming here are bad.They're not sending their best.And that is the problem.And so we should lock it up because the people who come here should not be coming here.So let me draw a couple of distinctions, right?
Because I think that I hate talking about stuff that's trite, right?And even amongst Republicans, I try not to say things that have already been said. But what you're bringing up is the distinction that everybody knows about.
And I'm a hawk on this, too, which is illegal immigration.So the premise here is if your first act of entering this country breaks the law, then by definition, in some base sense of the word, like definitionally, you are a lawbreaker.
No, I want to stop here, actually, because I'm not bringing up illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration is part of what I'm saying.But Donald Trump does not make the distinction you are describing.
If you may, let me finish then. Yes, but I don't want you to move the subject of what I'm talking about.I'm not moving the subject of it, but you're asking about who is he referring to when talking about criminals, right?
Broadly speaking, denigrating terms, I think are generally reserved for people who have crossed illegally.We've just been going through the Haitians and they have not come through illegally.
The same Donald Trump, as a matter of a couple months ago, said that he wants to staple potentially an H-1B visa to everybody who graduates from a U.S.university.That's not their criminal's worldview.
So I think a lot of this, and I'm not, I'm here to share with you what my perspectives are, but you're asking about Donald Trump and my understanding of where he's at on this, which I respect, is broadly overlaps with the distinction between illegal immigration and legal immigration.
And then there's one step further in the quasi-legal immigration category.
An interesting thing about our current immigration system, and I make this point in the book as well, you can imagine an immigration system that rewards all kinds of different attributes.
It could reward intelligence, it could reward national allegiance, it could reward willingness to work hard, or economic contributions, or how much money you have when you already come here so you're not gonna be dependent on the welfare state.
Our immigration system rewards none of those qualities.The number one human attribute that our current immigration system rewards is actually your willingness to lie, actually, which is a sad and unfortunate fact.
If you're somebody coming from another country and you can't in good conscience say you're not seeking asylum because I'm not going to be a threat of imminent bodily harm because of my race or my religion, I just can't say that to the U.S.
government because it's a lie, you're not going to get in. If you don't actually face that, but you're willing to say it, you actually do get in.
So I think against that backdrop, we do have a broken immigration system in both the illegal and even quasi-legal variety, where your willingness to lie on day one is the number one human attribute that sadly our current immigration system rewards.
So against that backdrop, there's a lot of frustration in the conservative movement.Broadly, I share some of it.Donald Trump clearly shares some of it to say that that needs to change.
But if we're talking about Trump for a minute before moving on to broader policy views,
I think Donald Trump is also the person who has said things like he loves immigrant, he's married to an immigrant, he praises legal immigrants of different contexts, and I think that the top policy, it doesn't surprise anybody to know this, just listen to Donald Trump at one of his rallies, I think correctly, one of the top policies is to seal the border and to stop the illegal immigration crisis into our country.
Once we've achieved that, I think we're gonna be in a good position to have lasting immigration reform on the legal side, and I believe there's two competing visions here, but I come down on the side of prioritizing
civic assimilation and civic identity and economic contributions as part of that, as distinct from the economic protectionist vision of saying that somehow our job is to coddle Americans who are already here from being prevented from having to compete in the labor market with the best and brightest whom we might otherwise allow in the country.
This is probably more where I take your earlier view on Donald Trump, where I think that what he did in his first term is illustrative.
There were a lot of immigration compromises Donald Trump could have struck that would have been border-hardening at a level he never got anywhere near because he couldn't pass legislation.
Comprehensive immigration reform is now, I think, an idea associated with the Democratic Party. But it could be something that the members of the right propose.Right.
There could be a Vance Trump policy that describes the border hardening and deportation measures they would like to take, but also describes what a pro-America immigration system.
I think that's coming.I think that's coming.But I think we've got to go in order.And I think this is part of where we lack the ability to have this conversation with intellectual clarity without solving the mass illegal migration crisis.
Order is weird here because the reason conference immigration... If I may just add one more point.Well, I just want to explain why I was pushing this at you.
The reason Democrats thought about conference immigration reform is recognizing they needed Republican votes.They put a bunch of things they weren't actually that excited about in there to try to get them.
The reason I'd be interested to see Donald Trump and J.D.Vance put something like this out is that if you wanted to legislate on this, you actually need democratic votes.
So making a comprehensive, not just saying my only aim is mass deportation, is actually how you get that.
Two points on this where I have a different point of view.I think it is actually for uniting the American public around where we eventually land.I actually think it's important to go in two steps and not do it in one step.Why?
I think you got to deal with the illegal immigration crisis first, after which I think you've built trust with the American populace that we can actually have an honest
earnest conversation about how we're solving for legal immigration, as opposed to a system where we've really abandoned a lot of the border security policies that have bred deep mistrust in the American populace that anything we're gonna do in some type of package hodgepodge deal is actually just a reverse maneuver for accomplishing the same thing that we were accomplishing through mass illegal migration.
So for the purpose of building lasting unity around this and actually solving this problem, I think we need to fix illegal migration first,
Once that issue is done, then I think we can have a rational conversation about what legal immigration policy looks like.
The thing I want to get at, though, with immigration and the point I'm making about Donald Trump is it actually really matters what is motivating somebody.I think that is actually your core point here.Yeah.
And I think a lot of people following Donald Trump are motivated more by what I would describe as policy objectives than than he is.
But the thing that has motivated a movement, the thing that makes this whole thing powerful does have animal spirits in it.
One of the things I sort of appreciate about the distinction you're drawing between you and what you call the national patronage side of this is that I think what you're describing is closer to the way you would try to
turn the animal spirits into policy than the economic side.I think the economic side is trying to sanitize us, whereas national identity.I actually agree with you on that.
National identity is closer to the thing that I think Donald Trump feels, that people behind him feel, that is actually getting debated and that we don't really have such a good way of talking about.
Because national identity isn't a thing you can measure on a chart, right?We don't run studies on how good the national identity is.And so it's actually not always the simplest thing to put into an immigration policy.
So talk to me about how you understand what kind of immigration helps and harms the national identity.
So this comment you just made signals to me that I think you really, I think, I don't mean to sound pompous, but you really get this, I think, in a deep way.I think that's a little bit of retroactive reengineering of what's going on.
But what's really in people's hearts is this deeper question of identity.And then we can maybe get to this later.I think what's lurking underneath this entire debate is actually a deeper question of identity of what it means to be an American.
But we can come to that in a little bit. So I think the question here as it relates to immigration policy is closer to identity and American identity.
And I would like to translate that to policy through what I consider to be a civic nationalist vision.So in some sense, the most upstream view that I have is what it means to be an American is we have an attachment to these civic ideals.
And as it relates to immigration policy, how we instantiate that is to say that if you have somebody from another country who has a greater understanding of U.S.
history than the average American citizen here, has a greater commitment to the ideals embodied in that history than the average citizen here, is more fluent in the U.S.language or proficient in the U.S.
language than the average citizen here, so therefore can communicate and engage with those ideals, and is willing to work harder and embody greater contributions to America than the average citizen here, then we should have an immigration policy that selects for that class of immigrant, which is different than the view of saying the blood and soil vision of identity, say there are certain people who are vested into a tie to this homeland that deserve to be protected and taken care of by their government,
And if there are other people who are going to offer a competitive force in the marketplace for labor, it is the job of America first leadership to keep them out.
Two things have always struck me as complicated in this view.One is that national identity is itself malleable.
And what different people feel is the nature of attachment to America and the nature of the instantiation of American ideals differs from place to place.I'm Californian.
We are a state with very high immigration, very high immigration of people who don't come speaking English.I grew up in Orange County and a part of Orange County with very high Asian immigration.
A lot of the people I grew up with didn't speak English.Amazing Americans work hard.Their children are amazing Americans.They contributed a huge amount also to the economy of the country.
And part of being California, at least in the way I am, part of my national and state identity has to do with the way America assimilates and mixes in immigrants.
Trying to get at that in a test, one of the things I sometimes find interesting about an argument like yours is I get where you're coming from.
But there's this part of you that will, in a minute, tell me about the government's incapacity, all the administrative agencies we need to shut down, all the regulators who might be well-intentioned and wanna make the world a better place.
And then you're gonna be like, but what we can do is give people a test on paper that is gonna tell us what kind of American they're gonna be.Tell me about how you think about that.
Let me just start with a basic premise, because it's a fair point for you to raise, totally.
What I've said is, at the very least, for example, just to people who may have not followed my entire campaign, but are listening to this conversation, just to understand where I'm coming from, I'm looking at these principles not just to the outside, but also to the inside.
So one of the controversial positions I adopted during my campaign, which I stand by,
is I think every native-born high school senior should have to pass the same civics test that we already require of every legal immigrant who enters this country, which I think every native-born high school senior should be able to pass that, arguably even be fully viewed as a capital C citizen in the United States.
Well, I think that we could debate the way that you implement it, but at least I think every high school senior, let's just say the mildest version of this, which I think should be least controversial and most adoptable, is to graduate even from high school.
You should be able to know the same thing about our country that every legal immigrant is required to know before they become a full citizen.So this is a civic nationalist view that goes far beyond just immigration policy.
As it relates to immigration policy, it speaks to me when you talk about your identity as a Californian and the different attributes that compose identity.Identity is such a complicated concept and there's a lot of layers of one's own identity.
Religious identity, ethnic identity, what foods you eat, the cultural traditions that make up who you are.
And I am not of the view, I hope I haven't ever represented myself to be, even inadvertently, I'm not of the view that you need to abdicate those other forms of your identity to opt into the American identity.
It would be a bizarre thing for me to say because I am the kid of legal immigrants to this country, and there are many elements to my own identity that go beyond just the civic commitments to the U.S.ideals.
But I think that that is a necessary condition of actually being able to opt into those ideals.So I draw a distinction between your knowledge of
The ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, our constitutional system of self-governance, your ability, and I think this is the most controversial one, but your ability to speak English, which I think is a precondition for assimilating into a country of other people who share those same ideals, versus whether you like to play baseball, soccer, or cricket.
And I bring that up because I think that is an issue for certain cultural vision of what identity actually is.Like, do you have to like hot dogs and baseball rather than, you know, enchiladas and soccer?I don't think that that matters to me.
To distinguish between the two things here, because this is actually not even meant to be a hostile question.The question I am getting at is within your framework, not even within my framework. What do you believe these tests can really do?
A minute ago, you said to me, right?
I don't want to fetishize the test as one attribute.
English as a national language, I think, would be high on the list.
A minute ago, you said to me that our immigration system, what it prioritizes above all else is a willingness to lie.Right.
Because if you come and you'll claim asylum in your view falsely, that gives you, you know, you get brought into the country, at least for a period of time.It's not my view, Ezra.Don't just say in your view.I mean, it is what's happening today.
I'm saying that People can disagree on what is, and in fact, you disagree, you have a whole thing in your book about the rates at which different judges grant asylum claims.
So the question of what counts as a credible asylum claim is not just contested, but is itself ambiguous.
And in, among other things, the bill that Donald Trump helped kill, we were going to change the sort of levels of asylum claims you need to be able to make in order to claim that successfully. So I think I'm actually saying the same thing you are.
Some claims are ambiguous, although I don't always think that the same people you probably do are falsely claiming it.I think, you know, different levels of fear are understood differently by people.
The thing I am saying is that how do you just avoid this being a teaching to the test, right?Coming to America is great.You know, being able to say on a form that the Declaration of Independence was about equality for all men is easy.
So now we're talking about plumbing and implementation, which I don't want to reject, which I don't want to reject.
Isn't this how you want to instantiate?Well, I think a test is just one example.I think proficiency in English is high on the list.I think the different ways of testing for that are also high on the list.
Doesn't mean it's one multiple choice, you know, Scantron style scan form that you fill in.
And I don't wanna dismiss the question about implementation, but what I do wanna just draw the distinction of is there is a very different competing vision that this is at all the thing that we're supposed to be concerned about versus saying if that person is gonna work harder and more hours for a lower wage, that's a problem.
So that's the basic distinction I'm drawing.Now how you implement it, I mean, I'm not trying to just be a philosopher in the clouds here.
Those are important questions to get to, but at least you gotta know what you're solving for before you actually even solve for it. And there is a deep-seated divide, even on the right, about what we're actually solving for.
And I think right now, especially if we're successful in winning this election, as I'm rooting for and working hard to make happen, I think it will actually be really important for us to just see with clarity the why of why we're advancing each of these different visions of trade and immigration policy, and especially attitudes towards regulatory reform.
So why don't we talk about just at a philosophical level, the difference you see between the way that the national patronage side, as you call it, and your side think about what should be done with the administrative state?
Sure.And I use the word national patronage and national protectionist sometimes interchangeably, but I think there's two competing visions of how we view the administrative state and the regulatory state.
One is that we want to use the levers of power to advance affirmatively pro-American and pro-worker ends.You could even call it more broadly conservative ends.
There was a moment where, I remember it was Bill Clinton kind of in the, I think it was the late 90s that he said something like, the era of big government is over, which if a Republican said it during that same period, it would mean nothing.
But of course, the fact that he was the Democratic president of the United States carried a lot of weight.
And though it hasn't been articulated in so many words yet, I think there's a version of the Republican statement right now from the protectionist or patronage camp that says the era of small government is over.
Nobody said in so many words, but effectively that's what's on offer.
The separate vision is to say that we don't want to replace that left-wing regulatory apparatus and bureaucracy with a conservative or pro-American or pro-worker version of anything.
We actually want to get in there and actually dismantle it and shut it down.
And my view is that we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past if we take the short-term approach of empowering the CFPB to cap credit card interest rates and implement a statute that would do so and use a regulatory apparatus to enforce it.
or to empower the Department of Transportation to include a broader set of regulations to make sure something we all want to see not happen.Trains aren't going off the tracks in East Palestine.
None of us want that to happen, but is the right solution more regulation or less regulation, actually, to make that happen?
the Department of Education, do we want to continue subsidizing four-year college degrees that hasn't worked out so well, but is the right answer to then redirect that to subsidize two-year college degrees or vocational programs, or is the right answer actually to shut it down and send the money back to the states and respectively then to the people?
Those are very different competing visions, and my own view is that
We cannot claim to reform this administrative state by just incrementally clipping it around the edges, cutting off one-headed of an eight-headed hydra, as an analogy I sometimes use, it grows right back.
We have to be willing to take on the project of actually just gutting the thing. versus the protectionist or patronage view says, OK, that's already here to stay.It's not going anywhere.
Conservatives have been talking about this, to give fairness to this view, for 60 years, and it hasn't happened.We might as well use that machinery to at least achieve positive ends for American workers and manufacturers and pro-American goals.
And that's, I think, a well-intentioned but very different view than the one that I hold.
Let me try to inhabit that other view for you.Sure.Which is, I like the way, the riff you gave at the beginning, which is that in a way, the promise is the era of small government is over.I understand. J.D.
Vance and Kevin Roberts at Heritage, who's got a forthcoming book about some of this, as really saying you could see this as having two axes, right?Big small has been the traditional argument about government in American life for decades, right?
That was the Paul Ryan, Barack Obama argument, at least in its framework terms.That the distinction that is being made now is theirs, ours. that the era of their government is ending, and what's coming is the era of our government.
The deep state will be turned to our use, right?The use of things like Schedule F to sort of fill the administrative state with more political appointees, the sort of set of vetted and personnel-like databases and plans. Which makes sense.
I mean, you know, people I talked to in the Trump administration from the first term say, and I think this is a completely credible argument to make, that they were foiled often by bureaucracy they felt they could not control.
But that the promise being made is not just towards conservative ends.
Oh, you know, we use the administrative state to do some things we like to do, but that it will actually be a tool of, you know, Republican, in this case, power that will be taken over and reoriented.
Ron DeSantis, who I think was sort of similar in this, would often make the argument that what he was going to do was use the power of the state to bring other institutions that had become too woke or too liberal to heal, business, universities, et cetera.
And that has been what has been exciting in it to people in that movement, right?One of the lessons of Trump won was, oh, this has all been taken over by the left, right?We don't control the government even when we control the government.
And the core promise, I think, of a lot of the from Project 2025 to others, sort of MAGA-oriented policy projects has been, no, no, no, no, no.
Next time we will control the government.So I think it is as yet indeterminate.That's the case I would make to you.
And again, I come back to this principle that some of the most prominent and well-spoken, most of the prominent well-spoken voices out there
at the top, right, of the intelligentsia have come down on the side of using the levers of power to advance positive goals, or certainly what our movement sees as positive goals.
But I see an interesting trend when I travel the country, which is, this will just be maybe interesting to you because it's just rooms I've been in that Maybe you've been in two, but I've been in a lot of them for the last year and a half.
You travel more than I do.Well, yeah, we can agree on that.The last year and a half, there's a lot you can just get by the sick sense of being in a room with roughly 500 people that you don't get from any poll or anything else.
There are a lot of books in this room, but books leave something out.
Books leave something in, too, but I would say that in this case, if you're in a room, and I was in a room with 1,000 people in Ohio last night and have been in similar rooms like that in places from Iowa to New Hampshire to Nevada to other states across this country over the last couple of years.
And there's a funny thing right now, which is you could walk into a room of 1,000 of those people in a tent in Wisconsin, for example.Another example of a place I've been.
And a leader from the protectionist strand of the America First right could say, we need to bring more jobs back to America.We need to protect American workers.We're the party of the working class.We need to make more things here.
We need to make sure that people aren't, the government's not taking advantage.You break up the big companies and have delivered in the right and compelling way. which isn't always exactly done, but which is the best version of that.
You're going to get a rousing applause, standing ovation.Yes, we're in favor of that.Same room, replay it.I go in that room and say, I don't want to replace the left-wing nanny state with the right-wing nanny state.
I want to get in there and dismantle the nanny state.I don't want to get in there and reform these agencies.I want to get in there and actually shut them down.Rousing applause to the same thing.
Those are two different competing visions of exactly how you're going to use the levers of the state to advance or not advance certain policy goals.
And what that says, and why I think this is important to explicate these differences now, is that I think our base, the MAGA base, the America First base, and what is now effectively the future Republican base, and even beyond the Republican base of the country, is, I think, actually very open to which way this movement is actually going to be led.
I will grant that some of the most well-listened to voices that are most prominent from a media perspective and otherwise vice presidential candidates may land on.
You know, I mean, you would say the NatCon current for the last several years, I think, has been in this direction.But the reason Yoram invited me to speak at NatCon this year was to make the case that even in the NatCon new right movement,
there's a place for the movement in that new right movement for my strain, which is different than the historical strand of the new right.So in some sense, I'm proposing a new new right that I think is quite distinct from the old new right.
I guess I don't actually totally understand on this what is different about your strain.So when Rick Perry famously gets up on the stage and is like, I'm gonna take out three agencies and it's energy, it's education, I can't remember the third one.
But that was a very common sort of thing to say, right?Famously, Reagan wanted to get rid of the Department of Education.
And one of the theories, or certainly one of the arguments, has been what Trump has represented is an ideological break with that, a sense that people didn't want it.
And one reason they chose him over others in the party is that they just didn't want that.They didn't want the Paul Ryan thing, the Ron Paul thing.They're not libertarians in that way.
So tell me what you think is wrong in that interpretation of your own.
First of all, Donald Trump actually, just to bring up that example, Donald Trump actually has called for the abolition of multiple agencies, including the U.S.Department of Education.
Yeah, but given that he didn't do it, I don't think anybody believes he will.Well, I think that... He didn't even try. I, again, talk about the evolution over the course of that first term.
Rick Perry ended up running an agency he wanted to get rid of, which is one of my favorite little pieces of American political history.
We'll put that to one side.
But I think that part of the problem in having the discussion, and I said this earlier when you brought up Paul Ryan, is when you bring up any one person and try to pin the ideology to that, you're always going to find diverse ranges of actions and perspectives that a person has that don't map directly onto the ideology.
But in terms of the ideology, is some of that there with Donald Trump?Absolutely.We're talking about Schedule F. The first step was actually firing a lot of those employees.
The goal of whether or not you refill those positions is a separate debate that comes afterwards.If you look at the Efficiency Commission that we're talking about right now, I mean, is the goal of that to rehire a bunch of those bureaucrats?
That's not the character of certainly what Elon did at Twitter.And I don't think it's going to be the character of what the most important part of that project actually looks like, which is shaving down and thinning down the bureaucracy.
Now, it's not just limited to these esoteric functions in the Department of Education or Commerce or whatever.I think a lot of this gets pretty close to the center of the national security state.
Gets a lot closer to even when you think about agencies that the Department of Justice interfaces with, regulatory agencies.Those haven't really been areas where conservatives have taken real aim in the past.
And the irony is, the protectionist strand or the patronage strand effectively is accepting the neoconservative concession to say that some of this government's here to stay.
All that the Paul Ryans want to do is how do we tame further growth of it, whereas now we've accepted that premise even further and said that we need to just use it in service of our own ends, where part of what I want to bring back is actually the vision of
completing the unfinished work.What's your list of what you want to get rid of?75% at least of the headcount.
I think on day one, I mean, if you woke up tomorrow and there were 50% fewer people working in the federal bureaucracy, not a thing is going to change for the worse, but a lot, I believe, will have changed for the better.
You're going to see a lower rate.
Yeah, well, part of what it achieves is it slows the rate of what I view as unconstitutional lawmaking, which has been, I think, the cardinal sin of the last half century in American life, is that most of the laws that are passed aren't actually passed by Congress.
They're passed and written by agencies that wrote them by fiat. by employees who were neither elected nor could be elected out of their positions.
And according to classical interpretations, couldn't even be removed by the people who were elected to those positions, which I think is a violation of self-governance.And it's also the wet blanket on our economy.
And so the way I would see this playing out is, You look at the Supreme Court holdings over the last three years, culminating in the overturning of Chevron deference with the Loper case this year, the lover bright case.
And you say a mass number of those federal regulations, quite possibly a majority of them, quite likely a majority of those federal regulations as they exist on the books. run afoul of the major questions doctrine in West Virginia versus EPA.
And for people who aren't aware, what that case basically says, if it relates to a major question that has a major economic impact on Americans, or it relates to a major policy question, and they give you the benchmarks of what counts as a major question, it had to be passed through Congress, not by regulation or fiat.
And that provides a basis, a roadmap for saying, OK, if you have this much of a constraint in the application of the regulatory state, we necessarily have a surplus in the number of employee headcount that we need to support that.
That supports mass, nonspecific, but purposefully reductions in force.
This feels to me very generalized in a way that is not going to hold out specifically.And I'll give an example, right?OK. I suspect that you are not a huge fan of the raft of environmental laws passed in the early 70s, right?
NEPA and the environmental... I'm Nixon included, by the way.I mean, they were almost all passed under Nixon, right?He was the main progenitor.Part of my work right now, I do a lot of looking into how those laws are playing out.
And the amount of work that different companies have to engage in, kind of working back and forth with agencies, trying to see, oh, did my environmental impact report, you know, work out?
If you knocked out the headcount without changing the legislation, what you've just done is unfathomably slow down.It depends case by case.Right.So but but you're not going case by case.
You just want to a 50 percent, 75 percent headcount reductions on the regulatory case.
I think the way to do this is you have a constitutional lawyer embedded in every agency or some could overlap and double between multiple of them.And you just measure here's the standard in West Virginia versus EPA.
of what counts as a major question, are all regulations right now going to fail that test?No.But are a lot of regulations going to fail that test if that regulation on coal miners failed that test?
A lot of other folks who are even more advanced than I in the constitutional sphere of administrative law agree with me.You are talking about thousands upon thousands of federal regulations that also fail that test.
One of the further obstacles- But those ought to be litigated individually. If Kamala Harris is president, that's correct.
What I'm offering is a vision of executive humility to say that the executive branch is being told by the Supreme Court that so many of the regulations that have been perpetuated by our executive branch actually go beyond this constitutional scope of what the executive could do.
So the Supreme Court has already put the executive branch of government on notice.And I do think that part of what's happened is my own theory of how we got to where we are is I'm gonna be a little glib about this, but only a little bit.
When you have a bunch of people who show up to work who should have never had that job in the first place, whether it's a company or a government agency, they start finding things to do, actually.
I think that's a big part of how we got to a lot of this overgrown regulatory state.It's a bit of a cycle where you have overhiring, people then find things to do that they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.
And so I think you could look at a lot of these agencies in the history of sort of the agency creep and overgrowth of policy,
As part of actually just the existence of a bureaucracy, where in some cases, even if you take the Department of Education, part of the problem of what happened is the initial problem that it existed to solve, which in the case of the Department of Education was making sure that southern states weren't siphoning money away from principally black school districts to principally white ones.
that could have been a task force at the time on the back of the civil rights that you could debate the policy merits of doing it all believe it's important policy objective you could set up a task force to do it but once that work is done these agencies don't fold up and go on and and
redistribute their employees to the civilian or private sector workforce, they go on and find new things to do.So I think the roadmap we've been given by the current Supreme Court anyway gives us a path to correcting this.
And then you look at the headcount that's left.It's far less than is required to do what it's been doing, which is far more than it was permitted to do in the first place.
If you imagine the sort of national patronage person sitting here and trying to imagine, and there are a lot of policy plans out here trying to imagine this now, of what the government should be doing, all these ends, right?
You were talking about the goals you're actually trying to achieve.You're trying to achieve, as I understand it, more economic growth and less unconstitutional lawmaking.Is that a reasonable?More economic growth and more self-governance.
More self-governance.What's the other set of goals?How would you describe that piece of it? Do your best, shady Vance.
So yeah, I could give you, which I'm not going to do right now, because you're asking me the left, the sort of the liberal perspective, which is skeptical of self-governance itself, which is the idea that people can't be trusted to self-govern.
We'd screw it up.And therefore we need intelligent, educated, trained elites to be able to at least make sure the right decisions are made for the people.But you're not asking about that.You're asking about maybe for the conservative end.
And I think it's a parallel argument, which is that
We have certain substantive goals that matter to us, that we need to achieve by whatever means necessary to protect the forgotten American worker, to protect the forgotten American manufacturer, to be able to as a government actually serve the people, a first world nation that doesn't look like a first world nation in some places.
So that view would say we got a lot of damage to correct first, and a lot of that damage has been caused by regulatory capture and capitalist overreach, capitalist overreach that's captured that regulatory state, and it's the job of that apparatus to rectify that damage for the American worker and the American manufacturer who's been left behind and hollowed out and ignored.
before we ever get to the project of getting to some type of liberty-based fantasy land of getting rid of the bureaucracy.That'd be my beginnings of a best version of steelmanning, what I think that view looks like.
Well, let me try to add some bits of the steelman.Sure.Which is that there are goals that simply need to be carried out in protection of the people that the Republican Party now represents.
And I hear this in terms of the, you know, it's been one of the unusual kind of alliances where you have people like J.D.
Vance who will praise Lena Kahn's FTC as doing a lot to break up economic power and that creating more competition and be good for American workers.
I think there's a lot of view of, and there are speeches of this at NatCon, about how could you use regulators to try to build a more pro-life federal government, right?A federal government that is using more of its power to protect the unborn.
And to me, this is not a way station, as I understand it, on the path to perfect liberty where we've gotten rid of these bureaucracies.
It is a view that the end goal here is not liberty as defined by the absence of government or liberty even as defined by self-governance, but it is, you know, more families.
So we're not privatizing virtue as the language goes.
We're not privatizing virtue, but we're also seeing wages go up.
I mean, I understand the ends of a lot of this movement now is fundamentally saying, look, if you look at a lot of these Midwestern communities, you see family breakdown, you see people without jobs, you see low wages.That's right.
and more of all government policy, from trade policy to the administrative state, needs to be in service of creating the conditions under which you will have stronger families, stronger communities, and as such, the conditions under which more of what gets called virtue arises.
Yeah, no, I think those are good additions, actually, because I think that that does further and even more robustly represent the case for the use of muscular state power and intervention to achieve positive substantive goals.
And I want to draw an important distinction in my own view here, which is that I advocate my position not because I think that the liberty view is more important than serving American workers and manufacturers.
I offer my view because I think that is actually the path to better serve American workers and manufacturers in the long run. I don't want to see America become some backwater country on the other side of an ocean from a new rising power.
We saw what that looked like in 1776.I don't want America to become the next Great Britain.I think we are a nation in decline.
And I think that the patronage view may attenuate the trajectory of that decline and the experience of that decline for certain people who are alive today over the span of their lifetime.But it does not fundamentally alter that trend of decline.
You know, when I was coming up in journalism and economic policy journalism in particular, the big critique that more liberal people or more lefty people would make, often me included, of the dominant trends in democratic economics was that it didn't take power seriously, that in your models there was no variable for power.
When you think about how a worker and a firm are going to come to a mutually agreeable contract with each other, the firm's completely asymmetric power over the worker is not being sufficiently taken into account in your models of mutually beneficial negotiation.
And I sort of see a lot of this argument now being made on the right, that from the right towards the right, right, that we, the right here, have not taken power seriously into account and we need to start, and that that's where you end up getting things like more affection for Lena Kahn, or you've talked about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which you would like to eliminate, you're harshly critical of.
There is a lot that that organization does.
One of the things it does is administer the Truth in Lending Act, which forces credit card companies to disclose a lot more about what the fees and the late fees and the service fees, et cetera, of what they do are.
And the view behind a bill like that is that the power is asymmetric.
And so the arm of the government needs to reach in and force the credit card companies to tell people things that they would not otherwise want to tell them and, in fact, did not tell them beforehand, often hid from them in a million different ways.
And that until we do things like that, people do not have actually the power in the marketplace to make good decisions.Should they not be doing that?How do you think about this question of power?
I actually also have a concern about a type of power, but it's a different type of power, which is state capture.
See, state capture to effectuate capitalist goals is not something that is internal to a national libertarian or liberty-oriented perspective, but it is a perversion that is real and exists. And that is more likely to happen.
In fact, it happens all the time because of the existence of that bureaucracy.In fact, the more vast that bureaucracy is, the more nodes you have for capture.
The market power concern is not high on my list compared to the government capture concern, which is high on my list.You could say that where this really puts itself into relief.
So the credit card company disclosure acts that I've mentioned, right?How do you think about that?I think it increases barriers to entry for smaller credit card companies. to have to say what your late fees and interest rates and so on are.
By some sort of bureaucratized measure that involves an army of compliance attorneys at a company.That's what, it's hard to start a new startup credit card company.It just is, actually.Yeah.
Where this really comes into relief is in the area of tech, right?
Because what are our attitudes towards, a lot of the animus you've seen towards big tech comes from, among other things, but the rise of censorship or the perceived censorship industrial complex.
The idea that big tech or a small number of companies using their market power can decide what information is or isn't available to you has led some to take, OK, they're too big and they exercise too much market power.
Therefore, we need to actually break them up.Well, what we learn is a lot of that censorship was at least indirectly the product of
receiving a favorable regulatory environment from the very government actors that cared about those companies, making sure that certain forms of misinformation were suppressed.
And so I trace the root cause back to the existence of the government and the related bureaucracy required to administer its vision.That's the wrongful exercise of power that I'm most concerned about.
And ironically, the more you're trying to take care of market power concerns, the more of that other problem you end up creating in the process, which was historically an argument vis-a-vis the left.
But I think right now presents itself as this new argument within the new right as well.
So let's bring in a figure you've talked about as I think a leader on your side of this a few times here, which is Elon Musk.Musk's current political incarnation is fascinating and depressing to me.
Not because we don't agree, although we don't agree, but because to me Elon Musk is the greatest walking example for grand public-private partnerships that could possibly exist.
And now that he has succeeded in that, he is trying to pull the ladder up behind him.
So Tesla exists because electric cars could take off because of subsidies upon subsidies upon subsidies upon subsidies to make buying electric cars cheaper at a time when it was necessarily more expensive because of how new the technology was and what they were trying to achieve.
SpaceX, of course, is, on the one hand, I think you could take it very much as a critique of how bad product development and engineering got at NASA, but it can only be what it is because you actually need the government to do space.
And now Musk is out there as a sort of more national libertarian figure saying we don't need the subsidies anymore, get rid of them.But in order to have truly two world-beating companies in America, right?
And I take Tesla and SpaceX as extraordinary achievements.And the people who want to dismiss what Musk achieved, I think it's functionally ridiculous.
But you couldn't have done it without the kinds of bureaucracies and government interventions that not only are you sort of dismissing here, but that he's now dismissing.
I respectfully disagree with that broad characterization because I think it gets involved in the specifics.Let's take SpaceX off the table, right?
Because space exploration is not going to happen for all kinds of reasons without, I mean, it was done within the government.Your choices are do it within the government or do it through public-private partnership outside government.
For space exploration as a category, let's just take that off the table.Okay, so you're agreeing that we need the government there. I agree that this is one of the roles of the long run.I mean, I think government has two purposes.
Provide for long-run security and protect private property rights.And on the first prong of that, space exploration is an important part of it.And I think it's in the national interest of the United States for the long run.
So that's just its own category.On Tesla, I mean, you're not talking about, you're talking about kicking the ladder out from underneath you for who, like Ford and General Motors?
So I don't have some sort of kicking the ladder out from under you sort of concern to believe that these behemoths like Ford and GM need subsidies from the government.I'm not sympathetic to that.
I do have this concern, but rather than debate the current state of the auto manufacturing world, but what I am saying is that it is undeniable that we have Tesla because the government supported Tesla over and over and over again and also supported and kind of encouraged the electric vehicle development and market in the U.S.
So when you're saying that That's my question, right?In China, who's the other grand competitor in this so strong that we are putting gigantic tariffs on their electric vehicles.
Of course, the state has been a huge incubator of the electric vehicle industry there, too.So the two great examples we have of world leading electric vehicle companies, the state has been a profound nurturing and protecting force.
I think we would have gotten to the same place in the development of Let's just say the category who has said had to be electric, but innovative next generation vehicles that leave people living better lives and offering greater consumer choice.
I think we would have gotten there either way with or without that government intervention.So to say that we wouldn't have a Tesla vehicle today, but for the history of government subsidies. I believe is a false claim.
You can't have a counterfactual because we never had the world or the country without the subsidies.
But we have counterfactuals by way of innovative industries in a diverse range of sectors outside of electric vehicles that prove that without the government intervention, we achieved that.Well, this one's hard.
Because we'd have to go sort of industry by industry and see, well, where was the important research done?Where were there actually subsidies?
But I guess this is also a disagreement rather than I mean, we definitely disagree here, but I feel like this is also actually an interesting disagreement between you and where the national protectionists and also.
for that matter, the Biden world is gone, which is there's been a huge revival of a belief that you need high levels of industrial policy to nurture American industries, particularly in a world where the reality is you have China, you have the European Union, you have Japan and South Korea and others.
Semiconductors are another very good example of this.
I love talking about semiconductors.It's an important enough subject, so it deserves some airtime at least, right?But it's important enough, of course, because it goes to the future security of our country.
It goes to all forms of future innovation, powering AI and the AI revolution.So all kinds of reasons it's an important subject. But I bring it up because it was an interesting joiner for you to bring up in the context of industrial policy.
It hasn't worked in China.I mean, actually, what you see, it has worked in Taiwan and South Korea.What you see is that.But just talk about China, what you brought up, though, which is a chief competitor in the grand geopolitical landscape is.
China now has its telltale corruption investigations which effectively follow nothing other than failed industrial policy for years, coddling these companies to be able to produce what they actually just consistently failed at.
In the U.S., you look at the rise of NVIDIA, and to be, at least at certain points in this last year, the largest company by market capitalization on planet Earth. wasn't because of the CHIPS Act.
It was because of massive booming demand for advances in the field of AI that demanded more semiconductor inputs that we were otherwise lacking in a supply-demand imbalance.
That's actually what drives the innovation, not the state-sponsored mercantilism of either China or the United States.NVIDIA is great.
It's a remarkable company.My point is that we have lost the capacity to make huge ranges of advanced semiconductors in this country
over a long period of time, and we had lost it to countries that had made semiconductor manufacturing central to their industrial policy.
I don't think it was the industrial policy in Taiwan that accounted for it.I think it was actually deep cultural factors that accounted for it.It wasn't the money.It wasn't anything else.
It was years of dedicated cultural approach to how you make these things, which is a different kind of innovation. where Taiwan culturally created a workforce that really excelled.
They're having trouble even getting American workers, even transplanting some of them to train enough, not because of the lack of money.
It's not because we're not showering enough money on these semiconductor companies here that we're not able to get to the same place here as quickly.
I think it relates to some of those cultural attributes where our own workforce has actually fallen behind.In the long run,
I don't want to be this declining great power because these short-term so-called protectionist policies are going to leave all of us holding the short end of the stick.
See, I think true American exceptionalism is aspiring towards true greatness in America that we want the championship team right here at home.And that involves all of us stepping up and leveling up.
The same message that I've preached to the left, right, of
victory over victimhood, self-reliance and self-determination, I think applies to all of us right now, and we gotta eat our own cooking, is my own view for the long run, because that's gonna be better for the American worker and the manufacturer over time, rather than creating the artificial conditions of shielding ourselves from what eventually is gonna be China or somebody else, or China and somebody else, inevitably otherwise eating our lunch and what that future looks like.
So that's where I'm coming from.
There was a part of your book that I found moving or sad, and I guess this is well-known, I didn't know it, that you'd had this interaction with Ann Coulter, where I guess she says to you, look, you're great, you're really impressive, but I wouldn't vote for you because you're, quote, an Indian.
You are so bright and articulate, and I guess I can call you articulate since you're not an American black.Can't say that about them.That's derogatory.
Oh, and I agreed with many, many things you said during, in fact, probably more than most other candidates when you were running for president.But I still would not have voted for you because you're an Indian.
Before we get into the sort of bigger point you draw out of that, what was that moment like for you?
My moment, my first one was just like laughter, like this sort of person who's this undereducated about what exactly are the qualifications to be a U.S.president was amusing.I wasn't.She wasn't saying it was about qualifications.
Well, I think she was saying it in a literal sense about qualification.If you listen to her justification is you haven't been here for enough generations to be truly a natural born citizen of a kind who could be the U.S.president.
And her view embedded in this is that how American you are is a function of how many generations your bloodline is tied to the United States of America.And I reject that view.Actually, I think that a citizen is a citizen of this country, period.
And I think if you have. been born in this country, you pledge allegiance to this country, those ideals, whether it's one generation, two generation or 10, there's not a spectrum of Americanness.
Another way of saying this is Americanness is not a scalar quality to me.It is a binary quality to me of whether or not you're an American citizen.And she just fundamentally doesn't share that view.
Part of what she was doing, though, is I think also just trying to be provocative to maybe get a little bit more attention than that interview otherwise would have gotten.
And I had to play a little bit nicer than I would have if we were in a neutral forum.
I had invited her, for God's sake, on my own podcast to have her air some of the criticisms that she had of me during the presidential campaign, so gave her a respectful chance to share her view.But I think she's dead wrong.
I think there's three competing visions of American identity lurking underneath the surface of the AmeriCorps movement.
One is the one that I share, which is that there's a shared set of civic ideals that brought together a divided polyglot group of people 250 years ago, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and operationalized in the U.S.Constitution.
And that's what unites America.And your commitment to those ideals is what defines whether or not you're an American.I think there are two other competing visions.
There's more of a blood and soil conception of American identity, which is that you vest into how American you are based on how many generations your family and your lineage has been attached to the soil of this nation.
How many people are in your Kentucky cemetery plot, for instance?
For example, you are inextricably linked to this land.On this view, you'll have the view that people won't be willing to fight for abstractions or abstract ideals, but they will fight for their homeland.I disagree with that view.This is J.D.
Vance's convention speech.Well, I think it's representative of a broader worldview in some segments of the Nat Con world.
And in my Natcon speech, I rejected that view because I actually think the American Revolution was fought for a set of abstract ideals, actually.
I think Thomas Jefferson, the man who signed the Declaration of Independence, was swearing into existence a nation founded on those civic ideals.And that's exactly what was the war that led to the formation of this country.
And in some cases, even the wars that we fought since, including the Civil War.
That's different still from a third one, which came up even in an event I was at last night, which is one grounded with religious identity, where, you know, guy came up to the microphone and told me to my face, you know, you're part of what was the word he used?
Wicked religion.And, you know, that's unrelated to the founding of this country.But those are three different competing views of American identity.So many people misunderstood and culture to be in the third category of this, which is not.
When you try to, I guess to yourself, steel man the spectrum of Americanist view, which is I think the blood and soil of Americanist view.
When JD Vance was on the stage and he sort of, I had heard this in his NatCon speech and they did it at the Republican National Convention, and he gives this sort of long story.
about proposing to his wife and saying, look, I got a bunch of debt and I've got a cemetery plot and spins that into this broader point, which I've also just a little bit weird because it ends up framing him as more committed to the country than the person he's proposing to.
But what he's saying is that there is something about this being your land and your father's land and your father's father's land that makes you.A partisan of it. and makes you belong to it.In a way, my father is from Brazil.
I'm the first generation of that side of my family to be American.When I look inside myself, I don't feel less American than people who have a longer relationship here.
But when you're around people who do feel that way, and your movement is rife with them, what do you think they are saying?
And it's interesting, because you brought JD a couple of times.He and I actually, our friendship goes back.We were law school classmates, and I was with him as recently as yesterday.
His son shares his name with me, as well as Vivek, and we have kids about the same age, right?So Usha and I are also friends from law school classmates.All three of us, and my wife as well, got to know each other really well years ago.
And one of the things I respect about him, unlike so many in American politics, including the Republican Party, is he does have a clear ideological vision that is motivated by his love of this country.
And our friendship has been based, even dating back 10 years, long before we each entered politics, on having healthy degrees of discussion and debate and honing one another's perspectives along the way.
And I think we're gonna continue that relationship in the years ahead of us.And so, like on a personal note, like in sort of framings that you brought it up, it's, I'm not in some sort of like at odds relationship.
I agree with 80% of views and you agree with 80% of mine.But there's a different view here.
he is framed as a leader.You don't say his name directly, but J.D.Benz is very much a leader of this other side.
He's the most thoughtful, he's the most thoughtful American protectionist today.No doubt about it.And I respect the fact that, and it's motivated by a love of this country.
On this question of Americanness and identity, this is the way national identities are normally built.So in some sense, the default presumption has to belong to this other side, that the blood and soil vision, like that has to be the default.
We think about the national identity of Italy, or the national identity of Japan, right?
The feedstock, the genetic stock, the lineage, the ancestry, that's what makes, just as a human being, viscerally, the way we're wired, tied to a nation, part of what gives that allegiance to the nation some meat, some substance, some heft, is that genetic bloodline tie.
That's just the way it's always been.So that has to be the default.
Now, I think what made America unique, I would say exceptional, and this goes to the question of American exceptionalism and whether you believe it and it's possible, is that America wasn't that, actually.
Broadly speaking, basically the only major nation in human history that was instead founded as a creedal nation, a nation that was tied to a set of ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and U.S.Constitution.
Not even religious ideals, but civic ideals that transcended ethnicity and even religion. So that's what made America different.I think the blood and soil vision of American identity.
Makes American exceptionalism impossible because Japan's or Italy's claim on a strong national identity will always be stronger than ours because that's how they've been built far longer than we have.
By contrast, I believe American exceptionalism is not only possible, it is real, because we are exceptional as the only nation founded on a set of ideals that brought together an otherwise diverse, divided group of people together.
And I believe those ideals still exist.And I believe people will fight and die for those ideals.I think people did fight and die for those ideals.And I think that that's why this country has survived.
And so that's a very different vision of what it means to be an American. than one that scales as a function of how many generations you've been here.And that, by the way, is the whale lurking underneath the entire policy conversation we've had.
Why do you understand this as being contested in the America First movement?
Because if you went back a couple of years, right, if you have George W. Bush and John Kerry debating this, if you have Barack Obama and John McCain debating this, they both sound like you without the talking about woke capital.
And what is new, not new in American history, but I think it's because they failed.
Actually, I think this is a product of them failing.
So I hope I hope I don't sound like them because my aspiration is to fill a gap that they never did, which is part of what's developed in our own country is a deep loss of what that national identity is in the first place.
And so I think when you talk about everything I've worked on, even though capitalism stuff is actually downstream of this, deeper hole of purpose and meaning in American life.
And I think we live in a moment, you could debate what postmodernism is, but I think we live in a moment in our national history and more broadly the history of the West where people are starved for purpose and meaning and identity.
And I think that that was in other books that I've written and other work in the prior phase before I ran for U.S.president identified as the source of wokeness on the left.
But I think that that root cause is still the source of clinging on to these other more innate native feral senses of identity that I think you now see emerging on the right as well.
And so I think the beauty of America is that our own civic ideals and our pledging allegiance to those ideals can fill that vacuum, actually. that civic vision of what it means to be a capital C citizen of this country.
That's what I think we're missing.I think John John McCain or George Bush went nowhere really near that in any substantive way that mattered, maybe through some prepped speech that they read off a teleprompter in some stilted way.
But to give people of this country the real sense of this is what it means to be a capital Z citizen of this country.That's what I think has been missing in the leadership of the Republican Party since arguably Reagan.
And I think what it means to be an American actually is that you really believe what Thomas Jefferson did as a deist, by the way, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
That's what made America great the first time.And to me, I think reviving that conception of American identity is an essential part of how we make America great again.
I think that wrap-up is actually a nice place to end.So always our final question, what are three books you recommend to the audience?
So I would say The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich von Hayek.And I'd actually, because I'm in the mood today, I'll recommend The Bug with Geetha, which is obviously a religious text, but has great import.
And while we're feeling in the mood and the theme of the conversation today, give another careful read of The Road to Serfdom.And I think we would do well to remember a lot of those lessons.Because I think Hayek is,
misunderstood or misremembered as so many scholars are, and sometimes it's worth going back and just remembering what they actually had to say.
And on some of these questions relating to pure fantasyland libertarianism versus actually very pragmatic insights that he had in that book about making sure that national security was a separate category from these questions relating to economic policy is worth even for a modern libertarian to remind themselves of when we think about the future of our own country.
Vivek Ramaswamy, thank you very much.It's good to see you, man.Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Elias Isquith.Fact-checking by Michelle Harris.Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota.
Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon.The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Kristen Lin.Original music by Isaac Jones.Audience strategy by Kristina Simuluski and Shannon Busta.
The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
