This transcript is drawn from an event hosted on September 4 by RDI featuring Rep. Steve Israel, Daniella Ballou-Aares, and Bret Stephens, moderated by RDI CEO Uriel Epshtein:
Uriel Epshtein: What does it mean to be on the American Right today?
Bret Stephens: There have always been two versions of the Right in modern American life. One is conservative in the sense that it aims to conserve a liberal republic. That is to say, a republic centered on ideas of individual rights and individual freedom of action. The old-fashioned conservative—the conservative I was and actually feel I still am—believes in institutions like family, business, and religion because we think that it creates individuals who are best capable of exercising liberty. But liberty is what this conservatism is trying to preserve.
Then there’s another idea of the Right, and that is illiberalism. It’s the opposite of that old-fashioned conservative idea. It is opposed to the liberal idea because it valorizes things like the nation, an idea of peoplehood above all else. And it’s not afraid to trample on individual liberties, whether they’re economic liberties like free trade or freedom of speech. Not least the free movement of people through an open and generous system of immigration, which in my view has always served the country well. So this is the real divide on the Right today. It’s really between a Right that believes in liberty and a Right that is essentially nationalist.
Uriel Epshtein: While these two strains may well have been present over the decades, there’s one strain that is now far more dominant than the other. How did that happen?
Bret Stephens: Warren Buffett once described the evolution of investment as, “first come the innovators, then come the imitators, and then come the idiots.” And to some extent, something similar happened in the conservative movement.
If you go back 50 years to the 1970s, the Right was a place with a lot of intellectual ferment. There were a lot of interesting ideas percolating through the pages of National Review or Commentary in part because the New Deal consensus was falling apart after 40 years of ascendancy.
To come up as an intellectual on the Right when I was young, you had to write. That is to say, you had to be capable of writing an essay that could get published on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Then something called Fox News happened, and all of a sudden, you could become a very popular figure on the Right basically by being good at television.
I really think that the switch in media had a bigger impact than people realize because the people who became the heroes of the Right weren’t like William F. Buckley or Irving Kristol, who—whether you agreed or disagreed with—-were thoughtful human beings. They were Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. So it became, I’m sorry to say, a stupid movement with stupid ideas that were tested on Fox.
Uriel Epshtein: Steve—what about the Left?
Steve Israel: Several years ago, the US Army War College came up with a wonderful acronym about the state of affairs in Congress, the government, and in your lives. They called it “VUCA.” It stands for “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.” Does that not describe the state of the nation and the state of the world? So even the definitions of Left and Right are completely “VUCA.”
I want to tell you about the time I saw moderation die in the United States Congress and when the Left and the Right cleaved to the extremes. Mostly caused by what Bret said, business models, cable television, algorithms on social media, and congressional gerrymandering, which has pushed districts further to the Left and further to the Right. If you want to understand why Congress is so dysfunctional, all you have to do is go to the parking lot on a Thursday night or a Friday morning in the Capitol building when members of Congress take their last votes and then stampede down the steps to their cars to get the hell out of town and go back to their districts.
Back in 2011, I had to cast my vote and rush to a car so I could be driven to the airport and get on a flight to New York because I had a speech at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington. And on my way out, there was a very slow-moving Republican congressman from Illinois named Tim Johnson. He was just moving so slowly, I had to beat him. So I pushed open the front doors to the Congress—these are heavy, bomb-proof doors—and the corner of the door caught his shoe, ripped his shoe, sent him down on his knees, and he yelled, “Ow.”
As a New York congressman, I did what you would expect me to do. I just kept going. A week later, I was in a member’s gym, and this guy next to me on the treadmill said, “Well, you don’t remember me, do you?” And I said, “No.” He said, “Well, I’m Tim Johnson from Springfield, Illinois—the district that Abraham Lincoln once had. You pushed that door open so hard that it ripped my shoe, and I bled.” And I said, “What kind of shoes do you buy?”
After that we asked ourselves, why is it that in the member’s gym, Republicans and Democrats can play basketball, handball, paddle ball, compete, have fun, be civil and respectful, but as soon as we go on the elevators two floors up to the floor of the House, we’re like a fourth grade assembly that’s out of control? So we formed something called the Center Aisle Caucus. I invited 25 Democrats. He invited 25 Republicans. We met once a month at the Hunan Dynasty Chinese restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue because it was cheap and close to the floor.
We always had the same rules. We brought a kitchen timer, picked an issue, and set five minutes to scream at each other and 55 minutes to figure out where we could agree. This is what we learned: Democrats and Republicans are going to disagree 80 percent of the time. And that’s okay. There’s a reason I’m a Democrat and there’s a reason Tim Johnson was a Republican. The problem with Washington is that we’re so busy disagreeing on the 80 percent, that we forget that there’s 20 percent that we could agree on instantly.
Here’s what happened to the Center Aisle Caucus. In the 2012 election, Tea Party Republicans were attacking Republicans for going to dinner with Democrats. Attacking them for being moderate, which was their way of calling them “treasonous.” They were losing primaries because they were members of the Center Aisle Caucus. And by the way, in a different year, the Democrats would have faced the same challenges. At the end of the Center Aisle Caucus’s existence, we had two Republicans and 20 Democrats because all of the other Republicans either lost primaries or had to resign because they were afraid that they would lose primaries.
It was at the Hunan Dynasty Chinese restaurant that I saw moderation die. There was no incentive to be a moderate in the United States Congress anymore.
Uriel Epshtein: Daniella, we talked about these different sides now. You work with business leaders every day from Fortune 500 companies. What is the role of business in our politics and in our democracy?
Daniella Ballou-Aares: I went to Washington in 2012 because I joined the Obama administration as a senior advisor for international development to the Secretary of State. But I didn’t join as a typical political appointee. I was coming from New York. I had spent the first 15 years of my career in the business world, which I realized was infinitely more practical than politics. I had focused all of my career internationally learning how to build strong economies and businesses.
So when I came to Washington, I had this very internationally focused role. But when I started looking at the institutions in Congress, the federal level, the state department, and other agencies, I was just trying to figure out why it really wasn’t working. And I had not truly appreciated the dynamic that was occurring in the broader political space that was making it so impossible to get things done.
I came to appreciate—from an outsider’s perspective—a set of conditions that had driven division. Some of it was creating a real inability to find common ground in Congress and to have a functional system too. And that made me really scared because it felt as though we had these institutions with certain expectations, and they just no longer could do the things that they were supposed to do. And so the kind of former management consultant in me was like, “Well, we must be able to manage this better, right? Okay, let’s just have a better strategy. Let’s make the institution stronger.”
But it became clear that it wasn’t just that the government isn’t pragmatic enough, but that actually we had a whole set of incentives in the institutions which were making it impossible to change.
I was still in the administration when Trump won the 2016 election, and all of a sudden I saw all of my networks in business that had been totally disengaged in politics have no idea what to do. How would they respond? What were the conditions that had led to Trump winning? And if you look, we’ve seen it in Hungary and Turkey, where autocracy starts to take hold and the business community just kind of wakes up one day and figures out it’s happening when it’s too late—when they haven’t exercised their power and when their business gets nationalized.
I started to work with academic leaders, peers, and former CEOs, to say, “What would a coalition of business leaders look like who were well-informed, ready to respond when we had threats and really built real influence across the country?” And at Leadership Now, that’s what we’ve done over the last seven years. I think the coalition for democracy right now goes from the center-right to the center-left, across business, and across faith groups. I don’t think we should underestimate that we need these different pillars of society to be organized and effective to respond to the kinds of threats that we’re facing today.
Bret Stephens: One point worth noting is that the generation of congressional leaders who came out of World War II were Americans who had a common set of experiences. Democrat or Republican, they could recognize each other in a way that was almost primordial and went beyond politics because they’d been in foxholes or served on ships together.
We live in a world where I think different political leaders just have totally different sets of experiences. It’s very difficult for them to recognize someone from the other party. And people on both sides say, “You have no idea what real America is like,” because their own “real America” is a very balkanized version of it.
George McGovern, a famous progressive liberal, ran for president in 1972, but didn’t do so well. After he left Congress, he started a little inn in Connecticut and he wrote a famous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying, “Gosh, I had no idea how cumbersome regulations were.” We pass these things in Congress thinking, “well, wouldn’t it be a good idea if every hotel had steps that were a certain height so that they could accommodate people with disabilities?” But then when you’re actually dealing with that reality, it’s very different.
And I think it’s the same thing for Republicans looking at realities that other groups experience— African Americans and so on.
It’s a vast generalization, but I think one of the biggest problems that we have now in the United States is that there are basically two economies in America. One is an economy of words and another is an economy of stuff.
I’m a journalist. My decisions in life are choosing between a semicolon or a period. It’s an economy of words. If you’re a lawyer, it’s an economy of words. If you’re an academic, it’s an economy of words. If you’re a civil servant, it’s largely an economy of words. You’re issuing words, that’s what you’re doing. It’s a wonderful thing. I’m all for it. God bless the First Amendment.
But there’s another side of America that is in an economy of stuff, moving shit from A to B. Serving 500 customers in your restaurant, just getting things around. And it would be a good thing in our politics if the “stuff economy” and the “word’s economy” could mingle a little more and understand where things are coming from. I think a lot of what happened with the Trump phenomenon in 2016 might be happening again, and it’s a revenge of the economy of stuff against the economy of words.
Just to give you an example, I suspect many people in this room have no idea why masking was such a big deal for so many Americans. If you were working from home as a remote lawyer, and then you have to go out, you’re going to put on your mask. And for the short time it takes you to go to Whole Foods and shop, it’s all cool.
But if you’re a service worker with a mask on for nine hours, it’s a very different experience. I remember people in my world just couldn’t understand what all the rage was about the masks. And I would say, “Well, maybe you should try wearing one for nine hours and then smell your breath and see how that goes down.” We need to find a way to bridge that particular divide.
Steve Israel: Let me share with you from a practical perspective how that plays out with our policymakers. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s compare the average day of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Marjorie Taylor Greene wakes up in the morning, and the first thing she does is check her retweets in that echo chamber that tells her how wonderful she is, and checks how much money she has raised online as a result of those tweets. Then when she’s in her district, she goes to the local coffee shop, and there’s a TV above the counter and it’s on Fox News. And all of her constituents at that coffee counter are saying, “You can’t let these liberal Democrats take over our country. We have to take America back.” And she hears that and that validates her views. And then she goes to the factory, and she goes to places that make stuff and she hears people say, “They want to put us in masks and you have to stop them.”
And she goes about her day and does her town hall meetings and because she’s in a ruby red redistricted district, there’s not a single moderate or progressive in those town meetings. It’s all an echo chamber. And then she’ll address the local Rotary or the Kiwanis, and they’re all agreeing with her. She’ll speak at a dinner at some county Republican club. Last thing she will do at night is she’ll check her retweets again and watch Sean Hannity, and that’s her world.
AOC wakes up in the morning, and she checks her social media feed and says, “Wow, look at all these followers I got. I’m on the right track.” And then she goes to the Starbucks where everybody’s saying, “You can’t let these Republicans do what they’re trying to do.” And she addresses the Upper West Side Women’s Democratic Club in apartments so beautiful that they make you take off your shoes so you don’t scuff the bamboo floors. And the last thing she’s listening to before she goes to bed is Rachel Maddow. That is why most members of Congress come to Washington every week and look at the other and believe they are the other. They are aliens. They just don’t understand America. Most of that is driven by, in my view, the crime of Congressional redistricting, which is creating two completely separate political realities for most members of Congress.
Uriel Epshtein: How optimistic are you both about America’s political future?
Bret Stephens: I’m definitely a long-term optimist about the United States. You go back 50 years, and the same kind of pessimism that describes this conversation would describe a conversation about the future of democracy then. Go back to the 1930s and 1890s and it’s the same deal. And it’s not to say those problems aren’t real, but the sources of regeneration and renewal in American life are really powerful.
And sometimes technological problems are solved by other technological solutions. Technology creates problems, but technology also finds ways to solve them. I’ll give you an example. I think this country was in a way suffocating under a handful of established media enterprises that dominated our conversation. And suddenly that’s opening up thanks to Substack and thanks to brilliant enterprising independent thinkers like say Andrew Sullivan who said, “Screw New York Magazine. I’m going to go do my own thing.” He has tons of subscribers, people of different political varieties. People get sick of suffocating political correctness, and thank God for comedy. And I think this is an amazing era of comedy because there’s something to be disgusted by, which is people telling you, “That’s not funny.”
I think there’s also a palpable hunger for a different kind of conversation. I did this thing with Gail Collins, my liberal colleague in the New York Times, and when it started, I was like, “Ah, it’s something I have to do with my venerable colleague.” And it turns out it is like orders of magnitude, the most popular thing in the New York Times, because people like the good humor, the sparring, but with a sense of joy that undergirds it. They like agreeable disagreement, and there’s a market for a different kind of conversation than the one that Hannity or Maddow are providing. We just haven’t really tapped it. So I think we’re going to discover these things.
One last point, there is a pessimism paradox in democratic life. Every democracy believes it’s on the edge of total extinction and annihilation. You go back to Ronald Reagan in the 1960s. When Reagan was governor of California, he made his name by saying, “Freedom is about to be lost.”
And when you’re a pessimist, you actually do something about your problems. Because a pessimistic mentality also means that you’re thinking about how to address your problems. It’s the optimists that worry me, because they’re the ones who end up falling into ditches. They’re looking at the next great thing, and they’re not worried about what’s ahead of them.
My wonderful, brilliant friend Pamela Paresky came up with this brilliant line talking about the habits of a free mind: curiosity, engagement, and humility. We can do more to cultivate these things at universities and grade schools and so on. But it’s not like some terrible mystery that we can’t solve. It’s not like addressing the climate crisis. It’s telling your kids before you think of your answer, “Listen to what someone else is saying.”
Have some humility to know that, at the age of 19, you probably are not in full possession of the truth about the crisis in the Middle East or one thing or another. We can teach these things, we can do it. It’s not a mystery. We just have to get on with it.
Steve Israel: I’m not going to disagree with Bret. I’m just going to put an “and” on it. I agree fully that America has had these historic pivot points—1850, 1919, 1940s, 1960s, 1980s—where people feel severely threatened, but we’ve always figured our way out of those pivots and brought an even better life to the next generation.
I do think this is different because we have an ex-president running for president again who denies the truth consistently. Who, in my view, will urge people to take to the streets and embrace violence on election day, no matter how badly he loses. This is new. We’ve never had a president who encouraged people to go to the Capitol and do harm to members of Congress.
Right now the Democrats have finally found a leader who has instilled in us ironclad pragmatism, absolute messaged discipline, and complete unity. Finally, we have found somebody who can do what Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer couldn’t do. We have somebody who is keeping us united.
I believe that this is a strategic alliance because the stakes are so existential, but if the Vice President wins, and my dear friend Tim Walz wins, I give it about 24 hours before we go back to our ideological corners and start devouring each other again.
I am optimistic in the long-term. I teach at Cornell University, where I also run its Institute of Politics. I teach because I believe that my generation of former and current members of Congress have screwed up immensely. But what I see in my classroom with the next generation is a sense of curiosity, an intolerance for intolerance, a desire to figure it out and get to solutions notwithstanding ideology. And that’s what gives me long-term hope for the future.
Uriel Epshtein is the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative.
Steve Israel is a former member of Congress representing New York’s second and third districts as a Democrat from 2001 to 2017 and currently serves as the inaugural director of the Cornell Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.
Daniella Ballou-Aares is the founder and CEO of the Leadership Now Project, a national membership organization of business and thought leaders committed to fixing American democracy. Daniella is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a 2014 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.
Bret Stephens is a New York Times opinion columnist and winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. He is the inaugural editor of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations and sits on RDI’s advisory board.
