Abundance and the Left

It is a wild thing to release a book into the world. “Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, has been out for a month and a half. It hit number one on The New York Times bestseller list this week, which — thank you to all of you out there who have read it or listened to it. No way that would have happened without you. It’s doing things out there that I never really expected it to do, creating arguments that I didn’t see coming, which is amazing. And so I wanted to have on today two people from the left, which is where much more of the pushback than I necessarily saw coming has come from. One from the anti-monopoly left. We clearly have a monopoly problem with Facebook. Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University. She has mounted runs for governor, for a state attorney general, for Congress, and has authored a number of books. And I also wanted to have somebody on from the part of the left that has become obsessed with building the Green New Deal. Left, right. So what I’d like to see is actually a whole new generation of leaders in the Democratic Party running on a real economic vision to counter what the far right is proposing. Saikat Chakrabarti is running for Congress in San Francisco against Nancy Pelosi. He’s the president and co-founder of the New Consensus think tank, and he was AOC’s first chief of staff. He helped recruit her for Congress and run her campaign. I found this conversation both great about abundance, but also about some of the broader goals, questions, animating impulses and theories of the left as it tries to define itself for this next era. Saikat Chakrabarti, Zephyr Teachout. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having us on. Yeah, Thanks for having us. So my simplest summary of abundance is it’s an effort to focus people on the question of what do we need more of and what is stopping us from getting it. So I’d like to hear from both of you about what you think of the book’s arguments, where you agree and where you disagree. And, Zephyr, why don’t we start with you. Yeah I mean, I appreciate how you led off, because I do actually think that there’s a deep disagreement. I’ll start with the deep disagreement, and then there’s some areas of genuine agreement. And we should talk about those as well. But I gather you’re having us on to really fight out the I want the deep disagreement. Yeah there’s an area of deep disagreement and there’s areas of specific disagreement. So the deepest disagreement is actually what you started with, which is the question of focus. And I think that we should be focusing Democratic politics and politics in general on the problem of concentrated power and the way in which concentrated power is making it impossible to do things, and also really crushing our democracy, that we really do have an oligarchy problem, and that the anti-monopoly toolkit is then a response to that. So like with that focus, I would say, O.K, something good. The Biden administration did getting over-the-counter hearing aids like a life changer for millions of Americans who blocked that. Well, it’s an oligarchy in the hearing aid market. There’s basically five companies that control the hearing aids, and they did everything they could to slow down the procedure to use the best friend of the Chamber of Commerce is a long notice and comment period that slows down government from doing something really good and meaningful. So I use that as a micro example. But the macro critique and disagreement is around focus. Well, I actually agree with a lot of the goal of abundance. And I think everyone here agrees that America is really stuck and the specific reasons why we’re stuck, I think that might be where there’s some disagreement or is broader than a thing than just process. But the thing I really want to add to the discussion and the question we’ve been studying at New consensus has been how do countries get unstuck, because if you look at the history of the 20th century, every modern developed nation, most of them liberal democracies, they went through these phases of rapidly transforming their economies and creating absurd levels of prosperity for pretty much everyone in their society. And, they often did it after these periods of being really stuck. America, in the mobilization for World War two, we did after years of stagnation and the Great Depression. And what we’ve seen is countries seem to do it by pitching the sweeping transformation of the whole economy and then executing at breakneck speed. They flip into this whole other mode of operating that I think is really different than how we operate today in America. And we’ve been calling it mission mode and consensus, but it’s different three really distinct ways. Countries in mission mode, they have this whole other kind of leadership that pops up that doesn’t just pitch a mission, they actually follow through. And execute. They organize society actively to be a part of it. And really importantly, they capture the National attention. They really make a show of the progress. They call it the heroes, and they use that as political capital to blow through obstacles, whether that’s corporate monopolies or process. And the second part is they make comprehensive plans. They don’t just pass a bunch of policies and take their hands off the steering wheel. They actually plan for all the things that need to happen to make things happen. And they create. The third piece is they create financing and executing institutions. And so America needs to have a bunch of these all across our society. During World War II, the largest that we’ve ever had was one called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. And the RFC was like, it wasn’t just a public investment bank. It was like a project manager. It would go out and find problems and find bottlenecks and push and actively make sure stuff got done. Things got built, do whatever is necessary to just push things along. And we’ve really tried to find examples of societies that manage to do this kind of broad based prosperity through iterative, slow reforms. And it’s really hard to find a single society that did it. There’s something about the scale and speed of a sweeping transformation that creates this momentum, that gives you this escape velocity, where these countries. Finally get the gumption to tackle all these obstacles that are standing in the way of progress. And so that I think that’s the bigger the big piece that’s missing for how do you actually get past all these obstacles that we’re talking about. Oh, this piece is super hard. Yeah sorry. Is that you want to jump in. I just want to make sure that we keep something. I think that is really important. Really central, which is democracy. And so when I’m thinking about examples and you’ve done a lot more research in other countries, but in the United States, obviously we’re going to look at FDR and we aren’t going to spend all our time on the New Deal, but we see that for FDR in the first term, it was more of a top down vision. Let’s just get things done. And he found it didn’t work. And the buy in for that, he needed to bring an anti-monopoly agenda. And when you and I worked together, I think eight years ago on visions of the Green New Deal, I think an underappreciated aspect of the Green New Deal is it’s not just a technocratic, top down vision. It is very much about a vision of power. I think one of the places where I differ, maybe with your school, is I tend to work backwards from a policy outcome. What I think are the obstacles that are getting away. Those obstacles are almost always in some way related to some kind of power wielded by someone or some group, but it can change pretty dramatically in different places. So I want to ground this. The single biggest item in virtually every household’s budget is the home they live in. It’s the rent. It’s the mortgage. So there’s a new Rand report that came out after my book was written. It found it costs four times as much more than four times actually per square foot, to produce a publicly subsidized affordable housing. So the public affordable housing that I think the left supports in California, as it costs to produce a square foot of market rate housing in Texas. This is to both of you. Maybe I’ll start with you because you’re in California. Why do you think that is. Well Yeah. We have a huge housing shortage in California. I think the process that we use to build housing is crazy. Everyone knows it’s not going to build enough housing. We’d have this process in San Francisco where you approve on a parcel by parcel method and then parcel by parcel method to decide which housing gets built. And so that process is a big part of the problem. But, I don’t actually think it’s just going to be process that will fix it, because what we see is often financing is a problem. Yeah like last year, a bunch of construction projects in San Francisco got stalled because interest rates went up. So construction loans got very expensive. And our current approach to that is throwing our hands up and saying, well, I guess that’s too bad, but it’s why it’s really key that we have public financing institutions to try to make sure this stuff moves along and keeps happening. And I think that it’s really this all we can’t have just this one solution. There’s going to be so many bottlenecks that come in the way. Even if we fix the financing, there might be something else that pops up. So it’s this whole other mindset we really need to get into to try to figure out how to make sure that houses get built. Zephyr, what’s your take on this. Yeah I mean, housing is a global crisis right now. It’s not just an American crisis and especially the cost of housing, but. But California versus Texas. I want to keep grounded there. Yeah why is it forex more if you just look at market rate housing. California it’s more than 2x more in Texas per square foot. Yeah So as I wrote in the review, I have some initial thoughts on housing, but I actually think there’s a lot of areas of overlap on housing that we both agree that there are actually significant problems with zoning. My suspicion is that there is a decent amount of problem in the concentration in the Homebuilding market and in some of the supplies for construction market. I don’t know if that’s different in those different areas. I don’t know if it’s likely to be that California would be much more porous to corporate power than Texas. Yeah but I actually suspect I don’t want I don’t need to fight you on particular housing policies that you’re deep in the weeds of on zoning policies. But I think your theory, as I understand it, is that the main reason for the cost difference is. Left wing resistance, is Rick Caruso. I think Rick Caruso is this billionaire in La who was leading a big NIMBY movement to make sure that you didn’t have any reform on single family housing. Does he fit into your story. Yes so, I mean, you cannot cover housing in California or New York City, where you and I now live and not find a huge amount of NIMBYism, or I mean, Rick Caruso is currently suing to stop the development of. He’s using the California Environmental Quality Act to sue to stop the development next to one of his malls. Which implies to me, there’s something wrong with the California Environmental Quality Act. But I think where the reason I’m grounding us here. One is housing is a big deal. I think there’s a tendency to it has been interesting to me to see many of my friends on the left of yada, yada, yada. Housing it’s like, no, of course, we all agree on that. I’m not sure we all agree. And I want to come back to the question of financing, but the reason I bring it up is that I actually think power is incredibly important here. But power is very much related to process, and I think we all would probably agree that the way we do regulations now has created this feasting capacity for special interests. It’s very easy for them to come in and delay, and in particular for interests and particularly for corporate interests, because they can hire the lobbyists, the lawyers. But one of the reasons I’m very focused on the way we have created process vetocracy is that it creates entry points for all kinds of incumbent players. Sometimes it’s corporations, sometimes it’s unions, sometimes it’s local homeowners, sometimes it’s people I am allied with, sometimes people I’m not allied with. But what it isn’t is visible. And the more you have process that is complex and delay oriented, but also in the shadows, you have to know the planning meeting is happening. You have to know how the notice and comment period works, the more I think what you have done is open your system to all kinds of capture. How do you take that. I’d have to know about the particular process that you’re talking about. And I do think they matter. And as one of my concerns about the book is that if you describe process vetoes generally, but don’t say which ones are a problem, they don’t really matters. Like I actually think it’s good that I was comparing the other day. I was looking at O.K, what about upstate New York versus Texas. Because I don’t California housing markets. But what about upstate New York versus Texas. Not New York City, but places where there’s more capacity. And roughly. It’s not two point times, it’s about 20 percent more expensive, 10 percent to 20 percent more expensive in upstate New York to build than in Texas. And some part of that is labor. And I think that’s good. I think it’s good we have a more unionized labor force in New York than we do in Texas. So can I. Can I come back to you with another example, which is, I think, an area where I want to stay on housing. And then we can talk about another example, because what you just said about the cost of construction is important. I want to throw this to you because this, I think, is where it gets even harder. Zephyr just said, look, one of the reasons you’re going to have a higher cost of housing construction in upstate New York than Texas is. We use union labor laws, or we use prevailing wage laws, depending on what you’re looking at. And the more I’ve dug into this, the more I have come to see that in blue states or under Democratic governments, we have made the cost of public construction very high. The reason I started with an example about why is it more to make publicly subsidized affordable housing. Why does that cost more than market rate housing per square foot in California. Why is it much more than it costs in Texas. Is it it begins to force you to confront all these rules the government has placed upon itself. They add delay and they add cost, which if it all then got done, would be fine. But sometimes in high speed rail in California, it doesn’t. How do you think about the cost of construction in a place like San Francisco. So, well, first off, just in the San Francisco versus Texas example that we’re talking about I just want to make one point there, because Austin, which is a city that people refer to a lot where they did a lot of streamlined permitting, construction went up, rents went down really good. But it wasn’t actually enough. There are percent of Austin’s population still cost burdened by rent. And now construction slowed down because part of the reason costs went down was a lot of people left Austin at that time. It started having net migration out of Austin. And so now what happens. I think there’s another example of just doing the permitting. Streamlining isn’t going to be a Silver bullet. But when you’re talking about costs, I’d say there’s not one simple answer. I think the optimism here that I have is you look at Europe, Europe can build stuff way faster and way cheaper than us. They have way more unionized labor force. And I think what I wish we had in America, I wish we had large union bargaining deals and a sectoral way, the way many European countries do and do this at a society way. I wish we didn’t have to jam all these requirements into legislation because we had actual societal solutions for it. But I think it’s possible, and the other thing Europe does is on a lot of these process questions, they empower their agencies to have more empowerment. They have more power to actually make decisions. Sometimes we overindex on how much the process is getting in the way, because what you see in a lot of cases is we add process, but stuff still gets built. China in the 1980s, when I was going through massive amounts of development, bringing in American companies, made those companies jump through all kinds of hoops. They had to train up Chinese workers. They had to do joint ventures with Chinese companies. But there’s this overall mindset we actually have to get this stuff done that was different there. I think that’s the bigger thing that’s missing. Even in Europe, they have timelines on how long these environmental reviews can take. And in America, I think the bigger thing that’s happened is we’ve let open ended lawsuits and this general kind of culture of letting things languish forever. Take over. I think it is underappreciated how differently Europe does government than America. We took a pretty different path from countries that I think we imagined to be similar. And so people often say, well, of course you can’t build subways in New York City. It’s a big old city now, but they do it in Paris, which is an older city. And I always say, I say it in the book. The difference can’t be unions because these countries have higher union density than America does. It is a difference in the way the government acts and approaches. Do you have a view on what the key differences are. But more to the point, why America and Europe took such different pathways in the back half of the 20th century. My theory for why America and Europe kind of ended up differently is Europe actually did their post-war boom and all that development in a more Democratic way than we did. We had this Robert Moses era, which where we didn’t get a lot of public buy in. We did demolish a bunch of communities. And then we got the backlash. And now we can’t build for 50 years. Whereas Europe, I think, took more of an approach of trying to bring society in through this development. But I think the larger theory of why everywhere stagnating is I think countries have to go through these periods of renewal where they really go for it. And all the European democracies did this in peacetime, post-war. When they’re doing their booms and it’s in these contexts of a larger, society wide transformation that you’re able to do things like change the housing rules because housing is a big deal. But if you just do a whole politics around housing. That’s not a big enough constituency to call for the huge kind of structural reforms you need across society. In France, for example, they built TGV their national high speed rail during their post-war boom. I know you talk a lot about California high speed rail, but if you look at how they did that versus how we did California high speed rail, it was this comprehensive plan where they pitched the country on the whole network. And so because there was this huge network, they planned for all the surrounding industry, they built out universities to train the engineers. They built out, rolling cars and industries to build the train sets. They built out all this steel industries. And they even planned, this is when they’re deploying nuclear power all over France. They planned their nuclear power deployment in a way to make sure they would have the power to power the trains. And I’d say that whole thing was even made possible because France is in the middle of a larger national renewal where they were building out their whole economy. And Charles Gaulle even talked about it as a mission for France, actually. But in the flip side, we got California high speed rail where they had this project, which was one line, and I just think it wasn’t big enough to use the political capital of that project to push through the SQL reforms or whatever other reforms we would need to make that go faster. Well, they also didn’t try. They didn’t try. It was kind of I don’t think it was I think it has been more recent that there’s this appreciation that something has gone wrong. It’s like these examples of stacked up the Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway, high speed rail. Yeah and I mean, it takes time to realize you’ve gotten into a hole. Well, I think we’ve lost that muscle. I think we’ve totally lost that muscle of how do you actually do the kind of comprehensive planning, the execution of these big projects and the transforming your whole economy. And so, I don’t even I don’t think they thought they weren’t trying. They were just doing the normal thing politicians do. Except for there’s an example you had wanted to bring up. Yeah, well, I actually do want to turn to green energy because I think it’s really important. But I do want to use the pick up on what you’re talking about the Second Avenue subway. And as you point out, Ezra, it’s not because of labor costs because comparable projects have similar labor costs in Europe. And there I don’t think you can look at what has happened in New York Public transit, subway and real estate without telling a story of money and politics like one of the big differences between the United States and Europe during the period you’re talking about is that we said we allowed for unlimited campaign spending. We basically made the job of politicians to be a fundraising job. And then in Citizens United supercharged that by allowing corporate spending. So in New York to be particular about housing in the subway, it meant that the real estate board of New York has this outsized power in state politics and gets just a lot of giveaways that most people think didn’t make that big a difference and led to really expensive per square footage housing. So that occupied the space on housing. And then it led to New York State government under Andrew Cuomo for starving the subway. So then it had to spend all its money doing fixes that would have been much cheaper to fix earlier. So, and something that I do think you point out in the book, which is they also starved state capacity. They really said let’s consult everything out and pay big consultants. But that flow that is downstream from the centralized corporate power over politics. And I think one of the things that’s underappreciated is how innovating big money politics is, how it drains politicians of dynamism, is how much big donors actually want government to not act, not just in the lobbying front, which we’ve talked about earlier, but in talking to whether it’s governors or congressmen, is that their tendency is towards no as opposed towards dynamism. And when you actually have a popular politics, people want to exercise that power. One one of the things I am trying to do in the book and in my reporting across these domains, because, look, rural broadband is different than the Second Avenue subway. The Second Avenue subway is different than high speed rail. High speed rail is different than building housing. You go down the line. They’re all different. Each unhappy policy is unhappy in its own way. To paraphrase Tolstoy. But one thing that I think about is the centralization versus a fracturing of power. Now, I don’t disagree with you that oftentimes you’ll dig into one of these things and you will find a lot of corporate power, acting ISPs and the rural broadband example. And look, you’re building high speed rail. You’re building a Second Avenue subway. You are inconveniencing all kinds of not just big businesses, but small ones. And that matters. I mean, I was covering this part of high speed rail they spent years in litigation with a small mini storage facility that just didn’t want to be moved. It’s totally reasonable that storage facility didn’t want to be moved. In Europe, they moved the storage facility. They just have different laws around that kind of thing. But one thing that I have been fascinated by, and that led to some of the inquiry for me, was that innovation you’re talking about. Yes How many politicians I talked to and they would not all describe it to me as about corporate power, but they do describe it as there is a thing they want to do. And all they can do is tell me all the reasons they can’t do it the real estate board, the planning board, the fractured zones of authority between different councils in La and the way that the La municipal structure actually works. I talked during the fight for congestion pricing in New York City to the head of the MTA, and he was so frustrated by how much time he was spending working on environmental assessment with the Biden administration at that point. It’s always a different story. But what you often see is we just don’t give the people we’ve imbued with Democratic authority a mayor, a governor, honestly, even a president, as much power as you think from the outside, it’s enervating to them. But it’s also, I think, confusing to the public. Obama promised a public option. Why couldn’t he deliver it. You Joe Biden said I’d get this. Why didn’t I get it. And does it lead you, Zephyr towards. Because I think there’s a tension here that I find difficult to resolve between wanting things to be very small D Democratic, and then also recognizing that small D Democratic processes can get very captured thinking that maybe we need more executive power, but also recognizing that then you can get a bad executive like we have nationally at the moment, then you have a different problem. How do you think about the level at which power should be exercised, and the ability of some central voice to say thank you for your concerns. We’re doing it this way. So I love the question. And I think it is just telling the truth about the nature of how power is organized in society today. And I don’t think it’s just a few instances. I mean, this may be an area of difference. I think that the major innovating power is actually centralized corporate power. And I think you’ll find it in area after area after area. So let’s talk about green energy. You probably, I think, familiar with the New York Sabin school. And they come out with this report fairly regularly on where are their checks on local rules against Green energy building. And so I took a look at it the other day. And it’s majority red districts in New York. And it looks like around the country that there’s these new rules that come in that say you can’t build solar. Green energy has become a culture war. Green energy has become a culture war. And so I look at that and I say, I have a very clear story of where that came from. That came from 2010, when the Koch brothers decided to threaten every single Republican who dared use the word climate change in a primary and took something that in the McCain era had been Republicans and Democrats both thinking about green energy in the future and turned it into a culture war, and then are going to local communities and saying, here, I’ve got a way to block your green energy project. And the difference between you and me, I think probably is that if I were to go to say, Western New York or places where these and by the way, these are very significant blocks. There’s 400 different blocks, 400 different projects that are being slowed in terms of solar development or wind development. There’s Kathy Hochul vetoing offshore wind. And I think to give some meat to the question, you might say, well, we’ve just got to stop local communities from doing things because we need to push through this green energy development. And the populist story is to actually just tell the truth about where this came from is to say big oil has been crushing innovation in electric vehicles for 40 years now. And we know that. You don’t, Ezra. You don’t. I actually am curious about this. You don’t think that left NIMBYism has been a bigger deal in crushing green energy than big oil. Do you Not at the climate change level, but I wouldn’t call it left NIMBYism either. O.K, look, here’s the question I would ask if I was complicating this story because of course I agree that there has been a huge, multi-billion dollar, now multi-decade effort by fossil fuel industry to destroy any action or any real action on climate change. That’s just fact. Yeah, I think, where your story begins to demand complication is why is it easier to build green energy in Texas than California. Why so I’ve gone and run these numbers, working with the people who are modeling the Inflation Reduction Act build out. If you look at where the IRA’S money is going, if you are looking at deployment of green energy infrastructure or advanced manufacturing for Green energy, that money is going majority to red states. They are building more of it. If you look at money, the subsidies to buy things, to by the end products to buy an electric vehicle that goes more to blue states because we buy more, maybe not any more Teslas, but at one time, Teslas in California and New York. And so this to me, there’s no doubt that the politics are, as you describe them nationally. And there’s also no doubt that what you would assume from that politics is a much more rapid build out of Green energy infrastructure in blue states than red, and that is not what we see. I find it, I say this in the introduction of the book. This book is not aimed at the right because they don’t share my goal on decarbonization. But then trying to understand why Texas and Georgia have been such incredible success stories from the perspective of the IRA and a bunch of the states that are much more aligned with its politics have been much more difficult. That then requires some untangling, and you focus very much on this. I’m curious how you think about that. Yeah, I’d say, well, first of all, I mean, I do agree that money and politics is this hugely enervating force. But I think even if we got rid of money in politics and all the other forces that get in the way, I don’t think our politicians on their own would do things at the scale. Even looking at Texas versus California. Yeah, people are building in Texas because in a completely nothing else going on scenario. There’s fewer rules in Texas. It’s cheaper to build in Texas. So you build in Texas, but that’s not going to build out enough clean energy to make any dent. Actually in the global problem of going to of tackling climate change. And I think the money and politics and all that just supports the general feeling that our politicians have, and this trend that they’ve had of trying to do less and less. I think one of the really bad parts of money in politics is that politicians spend all their time calling big donors for money, and they think that’s their job. And they’re really confused by the job of actually trying to build stuff, or make things happen. But I think there was an interview with Haason Khan, who was I worked on the CHIPS Act on yesterday, and he was talking about the stuff that actually got in the way of the CHIPS Act. And a big part of it was trying to negotiate with all the different special interests and groups that had stuff to say. And he said, that’s fine. That’s an important part of the process. And again, Europe does this as well. But there is no real. And they’ve lost semiconductor manufacturing. Yeah that’s fair. But you know but there is no real focus from the up top. There’s no political leadership that was saying we got to get this fab built right. I was saying that’s actually the overwhelming priority here. And I think what happens when you create a political moment that’s bigger than any of these forces, you can actually blow past it. And we’re kind of seeing that with Trump and tariffs right now. Dark abundance. Yeah dark abundance because I’m sure all the businesses are calling up Trump right now and being like, what the hell are you doing with these tariffs. And they’re calling all their congresspeople and senators. But Trump’s created such a political moment and a reality within the Republican Party where you’ve just got to go along with the tariffs, the Republican Congress. People can say, sorry, this is just too popular in the party. My hands are tied. I’ve got to go with the president. Yeah Let me ask about money in politics. I think this is an important question. I would support functionally the strongest money in politics, regulations and laws that anybody could imagine. I would repeal Buckley v Valeo. I don’t think money is speech in politics. I think we’ve been on the wrong path on this for 30, 40 years. I completely believe that it’s enervating. I believe it leads to levels of cynicism and distrust that even if you take out every other bad thing. It’s doing is complete toxicity in the veins of the body politic. So you’re here. So I agree with all this. I also think when I look at individual issues, when we say money in politics, when we say corporate power, when we say concentrated power, we make a fractious plural into a singular. Money and politics often lines up on many different sides of an issue. So I was having a conversation recently with very big money. Like not a group. You would love me talking to Zephyr, that was part that had been trying to finance now for some decades. Major? well, not major in terms of the build out, but major in terms of the significance pipelines that would bring clean energy from one place to another. I’m not aligned with them on everything, but I’m aligned with them on building these pipelines, because we got to get this power from the place where we are generating it as clean power to where we can power homes in New York City. I want it to happen. And it has been decades. And that’s a very common story on transmission lines, on transmission lines, these are built by private companies. They are financed privately for the most part. These companies want this to happen. They end up facing a lot of other fights. Now, some of fights on the other side are also money. Some of them sometimes are even fossil fuel interests. But it’s not just one thing. I think something I have come to believe is that, and this is maybe more schweickart’s perspective, that over time we just flipped the default. We flipped the default to make it easier to veto, easier to stop than to create. Now that empowers money that wants to stop and makes it hard for money that wants to create. It empowers groups that want to stop and make. It makes it hard for groups that want to create to me. It’s not that money should be in politics, but as a monocausal explanation. Money is often on many different sides of a political fight, including climate change. The entire theory of the IRA is leveraging private dollars to build a huge green energy infrastructure build out. We are trying to align the markets alongside a political vision. Do you agree with the premise that in any given instance, money is often fractious? It’s not one thing, or trying to achieve one thing. Some of it may be on the side of a project you like some of it against. What I believe is that we should not have centralized corporate power governing our system, that there is a real threat in any given instance. I don’t want to just be on the abstract. No, no, I’m not. And what that means is that I don’t think it’s good to have oligarchs fighting each other, and that a system of two oligarchs being on a different side of a thing is still a deeply broken system, and that we should recognize that brokenness. And the example I would use is from the left, think of the oligarchs we were embracing in just eight years ago. Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, that we’re aligned with them on this. So we should stay aligned with them and make sure we actually the Democratic Party building up their power in that case, take on Donald Trump. But the truth is that if you engage in enhancing the political power of oligarchs because you have a short term alignment on an issue, it will end up actually degrading the political process over time. I don’t believe even if I would like to get money out of politics, we are going to get money out of politics in a full on way and an oligarchy on the pace. We need to decarbonize. We have to build things in the next couple of years. Donald Trump is now the biggest problem with this. But nevertheless, even if Kamala Harris had won the election, we would still be in this condition. The theory you offered earlier was that money slows politics down Yes And what I am saying, what I have seen in many things, I have covered it. Money sometimes wants to speed things up. It sometimes wants to slow it down. It sometimes wants to build it, sometimes it doesn’t. There are developers that want to build housing. There are other moneyed interests that maybe don’t. Rick Caruso next to his mall. And so that there’s something here that it’s not just the fault of money in politics, because there’s money on all sides of the issues, that there’s something else going on that if we want to be able to build these things fast, we’re going to have to take it at a systemic level. And the interest around that are going to be fractious and not unified. We have to make choices. So the deep difference is, I believe, in fact, what I believe. I mean, what I care about. So much is I believe in the future. I believe in dynamism. I believe in a country in which people’s full selves are brought to bear. I believe in a far more equal country where we actually stand up for working people. And I believe that in order to stand up for working people, we need a dynamic country. And I absolutely believe that the biggest block to that is centralized power, and that in individual fights you can say, oh, I think this moment of centralized power might force things through, but it will fundamentally lead to highly concentrated, top down, calcified power in the long term. And the example I want to use, you and I first met over 20 years ago when I was working for Howard Dean, and I was living in a flophouse in Vermont. Yes And. And I don’t blame Howard for this, because I don’t think he even knew about it. We wanted to put out a new here we are, a new dynamic campaign. We wanted to put out a new open source policy and somebody just run it by the general counsel of Microsoft. First, and I was new to politics. I was totally shocked. That is a veto. That is a slowing down that once politician that’s a slowing down in that particular campaign. Those little veto points are happening in every congressional House, in every congressional campaign, in every state house. And it’s that kind of Veto. So you bring in one of our problems on the left is we said, let’s align with the big money like the Reid Hoffman’s. And then Reid Hoffman’s basically says we can’t have Lena Khan’s dynamic use of government. She’s somebody you would love. She was willing to break eggs to get things done to cut through the bureaucracy, to actually achieve things. And you have Reid Hoffman and other big wealthy tech billionaires saying we are a veto point because of big money. You can’t talk about those dynamic things in the campaign. Maybe you should get rid of Lina Khan. So I think you’re undervaluing what happens when you actually embrace big power for individual products projects. They become veto power. They become significant veto power elsewhere. So, Schweikert, this makes me think about your leadership point. One of the things I’ve observed covering a lot of fights in Washington, I would say over time, the leadership of the Democratic Party became less and less willing to offend almost anybody who it considered in its coalition. Its coalition was vast. Its coalition stretching from Reid Hoffman and the general counsel of Microsoft on the one side to all kinds of environmental justice groups on the other side. And I’m not saying literally no one ever got offended, but as I watch the procession from the Obama era to the Hillary Clinton campaign to the biden-harris era, and saw this in Congress, too. It felt like as a matter of cultural the governance, culture, it wanted to run everything by everybody, and not literally anybody getting upset was an emergency. But the leadership became less and less tolerant of anybody being upset. Everybody had to get a little bit. You were in Congress. You helped. You ran AOC’s first campaign. So you were part of the let’s piss people off caucus. I’m curious what if what I just said feels true to you and to what your account of it is like what you saw from it and what you think is behind that culture, which seems much more dominant now on the left than on break every single leg of the global economy, right. Yeah I think it’s not just about not pissing people off. I think it’s a complete abdication of responsibility, of leading. I think it’s a lack of realizing that we need new ideas, and we need an actual vision for how to do stuff. And in the Democratic Party, because it’s not just groups on the left. Like, I went to a training when I was in Congress that was a training on how to get ideas from corporate lobbyists. I tweeted about it and I pissed off some people, but it’s really hard to push new ideas. What do they tell you in that training. How do you get ideas. Very matter of fact, don’t they come to you. I would assume they come to you. They do come to you. But in the training it was like if you’re writing a bill, here are the people you can contact to get expertise. Similar to what you encounter with the Dean campaign. And I think it’s just this complete abdication of responsibility of your role to actually put out solutions that will solve real, real problems like the culture is more. We’ll figure out ideas from everybody that’s around us and kind of cobble it together into this Frankenstein monster in general. Like the pipeline example you brought up is a really interesting one because I think when you abdicate responsibility from actually pushing for new ideas and solutions, what you’re saying is the interest groups, which I think often, as you’re pointing out, Zephyr, are the big corporate interests. They’re going to fight it out. So in the case of the pipelines you’re talking about I’m sure there’s interest groups on both sides. So 20 years later we’ll come to some resolution. But in the case of natural gas pipelines, we streamlined all that. We put permitting under FERC. We made it happen super fast. We did it huge. We have of natural gas pipeline in this country right now. We build it super fast because there wasn’t really an opposing a big enough opposing interest group. And so that’s what I see happening in the Democratic Party is there’s a real resistance to putting out actual solutions and putting out, real ways to solve these problems and just deciding that we’re going to take ideas from everyone. And I agree with Zephyr that tends to be the corporate powers that have more influence there that is in there, but I think has gotten less attention. But we have, over time, in my view, denuded the state of expertise members of Congress have. I think it is shocking how small the staff of a House member who represents a highly populous district and maybe runs an important committee, really is. And I’m not saying that’s the only reason they outsource a huge amount of their thinking and their work to corporate interests, to nonprofits. But there is this whole theory in political science called legislative subsidy, which is that the real power of lobbying, or one of its real sources of power is that it is the provider of expertise, and not only is it the provider of expertise, it is the provider of expertise from your former colleagues who you liked. They leave a congressional office because now they’ve got three kids, and maybe one of the kids is in private school, or all of them are, or whatever it might be. We’ve held down congressional salaries. We’ve held down congressional staff sizes. That’s all like high polling, populist policy. And then people go into various forms of the private sector or the lobbying sector and sell back what they to their former colleagues. And in my version of abundance, where state capacity is very big, we need to fund the government itself a lot more like this is where I’m not a Doge person at all. I mean, I’m not a Doge person on a lot of levels, but my view is they want to destroy state capacity. Their view is that everybody would be more effective and productive in the private sector, whereas I would like people working for Congress to be both more numerous and make a lot more money, because we should have much of the very best expertise in the world helping Congress figure out its decarbonization policies and helping in California, we should have the best rail engineers in the world helping on a major high speed rail build out. How do you think about that outsourcing of all these functions and the absence of in-house capacity. It’s a major problem. It’s a major problem. And that’s why as you get into lower levels of government lobbyists, captures even higher like in California State government, it’s worse than it is in Congress because they have even less funding. And I think if you look, what people actually want is not what Doge is doing. They want effective government. And effective government happens if you have either a very well paid civil service, as they do in Singapore or Finland, or any of these countries that have effective government. But in America, the tough part of that is you’re competing against Google salaries and all these high paid salaries. And so I think one way you do that is you do need to increase salaries, you need to fund this stuff, but you also have to make it exciting. You have to make it something where the people working in government are actually feeling like they’re making an impact. They often do. But the people I talked to who the most want to try to fix how fast government goes, are the people who work in government people working in the State Department and Treasury wherever, but they get very radicalized. It’s very underreported. It’s because they’re going in there and they’re making a real sacrifice. All these people could be making half a million at a lobbyist firm, but instead they’re taking a huge pay cut to do something good. One of the things I learned when I was in Congress was if you’re a former member of Congress, you can be on the House floor. So what do lobbyists do. They hire former members of Congress so they can whip votes on the House floor. They’re not supposed to. It’s technically against the rules. But, come on. How do you think about this question. First of all, I just I think it’s huge. And I think that the examples you use of we’re just outsourcing this thin state, this thin and enervated state is a very significant problem. And I just want to use some counter examples about a direction we can go, which may help. You understand of why I think there’s such possibility in the anti-monopoly movement, because a lot of what happened in the anti-monopoly movement is we started actually learning how business actually works. Like oh, we’re learning how the John Deere actually limits repairs returning to the center of Democratic politics, an understanding of what happens with inhalers, what happens with fire trucks, what happens with the franchise system, asking a set of questions that frankly, we didn’t ask for 30 years, what is happening in the vast bulk of the American economy. What is life like for working people on a day to day level. What is life like for a farmer. And so some of the areas where you saw the most active government in the Biden administration and the Biden administration was not coherent on this. Like there’s different departments. You saw Pete Buttigieg, who came in, was willing to break some eggs, get things done, stopped the first airline merger in 30 years really got into the weeds of how transportation supply chains work. And we had the most success air transit summer, in years in 2024 an effective dynamic. Everything’s been going great with air travel ever since. But I think he did a great job. It’s not his fault, right. I think he did a great job with the dot. And so what I want to say is it’s capacity, it’s desire, it’s drive. I think the drive comes from a vision that you are standing up for working people against the big airlines like that is actually a motivating drive, and it’s a politically motivating drive. But the kind of expertise. We want matters. It’s not just expertise generally. I think where the Democratic Party really should go is understanding how did we allow the greatest geographic inequality in American history. In the last 20 years where places like Utica, New York are totally left behind. Like, that’s weird and strange and we should treat it like weird and strange. How did we allow diapers to get so expensive when we should have real innovations in eco diapers instead of just this kind of incredibly expensive. Price gouging, frankly, during the pandemic, real expertise and expertise in the nature of business. And I think sometimes people think of anti-monopoly as anti-business. And we’re like, no, we’re the first pro-business real movement in a long time. It’s just it’s not the choke point. Businesses that you note in other contexts, the problem of choke points is they innovate. Like, why even bother. Make a new eco diaper if you’re just going to get crushed. Yeah, and that’s a really important point, because if we actually embark on these big missions and make it exciting enough to be in government, we don’t want to just be anti people who know how to do stuff, when we did the World War II mobilization. The guy who ran a big part of it was this guy, Bill Knudsen, who was actually the CEO of GM. But he had come up as an engineer through the factory floor. He understood how that whole economy worked. And that was why we were able to organize all the other CEOs and the entire economy to do the war production. It Previously, FDR almost hired like a banker who did the World War one mobilization, which wasn’t as good. And that guy said, no, you got to get someone who actually knows this stuff. And we need to have people like that now. And unfortunately, Elon Musk is now going in and just destroying government. But we need to build Knudsen today. I feel like the left has developed a very complicated relationship with expertise from the business world. So on the one hand, some of the people who I think are the heroes of this era and this movement of Gary Gensler say, who was a high up banker before he became a regulator, obviously come from the worlds that they now regulate or that they oversee. And of course, those worlds have people with incredible expertise. I mean, there’s a granularity to how every industry works that is very, very hard to attain from the outside. And on the other hand, I will often see nominations attacked or tried to be scaled because of the person worked in the corporate world. I talk to people who leave Democratic administrations now and they become very, very nervous about where they work because they fear that if they work in X place, they can’t come back in a future administration. And I feel like there has not emerged a clear criteria for this is the kind of person we’re willing to hire. This is the kind of person we’re not. This is when corporate experience is a good thing. This is when it’s not. And so it’s pushed a lot of people into the nonprofit world. And there’s nothing wrong with the nonprofit world. Many of my dearest friends work in the nonprofit world, but I’d be curious to hear you talk about this Zephyr, because there are all these projects the revolving door project, that basically say, look, this person worked at this place, at this place, they’ve been involved in this thing, and we think that makes them suspicious. And so on the one hand, that might be true, right. I do think you can have a lot of interest capture. And on the other hand, we know that a lot of the people who have been leaders in these areas. I mean, you could talk about Joseph Kennedy being the traitor to his class under FDR on financial regulation have come from these places, and you need to have that level of knowledge about the thing you’re regulating to effectively bring it under any kind of wise control. Yeah I don’t think that there is a single Silver bullet answer. These are the precise criteria. I think there is as just repeat what you said. I think there is good reason to be skeptical if you see a pattern. But the Democratic Party. And this is maybe a meta version of your micro question, I think the Democratic Party needs a North Star that is not rejecting Trump. I think we all probably agree with that. And I think the North Star should be standing up to monopolistic middlemen that are crushing people’s wages, raising their prices, and stopping innovation in a dynamic society. And those who want to come in to join that North Star we should welcome with open arms. And so when it comes to particular appointments, I mean, Jonathan Canter came from big law and did an incredible job. Jonathan Cantor was the AG of antitrust. And you may be thinking about an AG is Oh, the Assistant Attorney General. He was in charge of Department of Justice Antitrust under Biden. And even if you don’t know his name are living in Jonathan Kantor’s world these few weeks, because we have the biggest antitrust trials in 30 years happening with the Google being found, a monopolist now three times looking towards a breakup, a really powerful dynamic used his capacity very, very effective head of antitrust under Biden. And he came from industry. So I don’t think there’s a single answer here. I don’t disagree on a bunch of the anti-monopoly questions. I think Google is a monopolist. What problems can’t be solved by the North Star being corporate concentration and anti-monopoly, right. Like, I have a lot of skepticism. That’s the problem in the housing market. I have skepticism that’s actually the problem in the energy market. But we might disagree on some of these. But what can’t be right. I think my critique sometimes of what I hear is not so much that I disagree with it, but that I disagree about the way that it will solve as many problems as is being claimed. Yeah, no. What really worries you that you just don’t think this particular frame answers. I don’t think that anti-monopoly can solve significant problems of racism in this country. I don’t think anti-monopoly can solve toxins in our water, although I think there’s an anti-monopoly. I immediately I’m like, yeah, but there’s an anti-monopoly component right there. And having said that, there’s a reason that Frederick Douglass and Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power. Like there is a standby counsel for a minute, try to live in that world. So what. Maybe what I would ask then. So what I ask, as an anti-monopolist and an anti-monopoly is an antitrust. I hope you know that antitrust, right. Yeah anti-monopoly is much more about power than antitrust. Yeah, right. That’s the and that I understand you said this very clear at the beginning, but you’re I understand your goal as being a fundamental rebalancing of social power. Yeah it’s a democracy vision. It’s a fundamental rebalancing of social power. Because if Steve Telus were here, a political scientist, he would say that people in your movement are very focused on one kind of power, but not many, many other kinds of power that you can break corporate power. And you have all kinds of other minoritarian institutions operating at every single level of government. There’s a great law paper by David Schleicher recently about the law of the Gentry and the triumph of the law of the Gentry and property law. Like local governments exercise power, unions exercise power. There’s a million kinds of power exercised at every level of society. And I think that the argument some other people make, even if they agree on some of the anti-monopoly sides, would say that doesn’t get you to democracy. You can have low levels of corporate concentration, or at least acceptable levels of corporate concentration and have unwise power used in all kinds of other ways. Indeed, in the post FDR period. I don’t think anybody would say we were a perfect democracy. Power was exercised in horrific ways in the American South. You just said it doesn’t solve racism. So that’s the only place where I wouldn’t say anti monopoly is synonymous with democracy. I think for 40 years. We stopped, to use your phrase bottleneck, Detective. We basically stopped asking the power question. And you know The just a little bit of history here. There was this big movement which both Republicans and Democrats got on board with. I mean, I think some of the questions, if there are good ideas that have come from Republican areas, I think we should take them. I don’t think it’s a left right issue. But they got on board with this idea that we should just focus on outputs and not on power. And so that’s part of the reason you hear some resistance from the anti-monopolist to your vision. And I guess I would challenge to say when you are what the anti-monopoly movement has started to do is started to investigate in areas where you wouldn’t necessarily guess that in the Kroger Albertsons merger, that pharmacists would be on fire about it and be the biggest opponents that they would see the joining of two big grocery stores as a fundamental threat. But once you start asking the power question, then pharmacists come out of the woodwork and say yeah, this is killing us. We’re getting starved by this. And so it’s not to say that it answers every question, but that it is in far more areas than what you think that the loss of our looking at questions of power was probably one of the biggest losses. And so I think one sure, there are areas that can’t be solved by that, but there’s far more areas that surprise even me today that actually have a power component and a power bottleneck. Let me ask you about something you brought up a while ago that I had turned to be a cost of construction question, but one thing we used to do more of that. Other countries do much more than we do. Is public financing, and that’s been a big part of the work being done by your group at New consensus. Talk a little bit about what public financing can do. And as Zephyr was saying, we lost a certain set of tools in the toolkit. But more than that, we lost a certain set of lenses for analyzing problems in society. When you focus there on things like a reconstruction Finance Corporation for a modern era or a more public infrastructure banks, what analytically did we stop seeing that you’re trying to restore. And then what would things like this actually do. That is not being done. The thing that we’ve lost is a little bigger than just public financing. It’s public institutions that proactively go out and make stuff happen. We have a little bit of this now. We have it with DARPA on research and development projects. And that’s kind of public financing as well of those kinds of projects. But we’ve lost it for the entire sector of creating industries and creating infrastructure. And there was a loan program at the DOE that the IRA funded for clean energy projects that Jigar Shah ran. It was a great program, but it’s a wait and see approach. So people apply for loans for projects they want to do. But there’s all kinds of projects that just aren’t happening. Like right now. A big bottleneck to expanding electric grids is a transformer shortage, because we only have a few companies that make transformers, and we only have one company that makes electric steel that we need for transformers. And no one’s popping up to make new electric steel companies. So, what I’m imagining is something like the R of C today would go out and try to push those companies to expand. And if they don’t expand yeah, the reconstruction Finance Corporation would push them to expand production. If they don’t do it, fund startups, and if they don’t do it, put up state owned corporations. And this is what China does. This is exactly what China does. China got these ideas from us. This was what we used to do. And other countries and Europe have versions of this. And it’s key to note that it’s not just like this one institution. If we put it in, it’s going to fix everything. Germany has all kinds of financing mechanisms. They have agricultural co-op banks. They have this whole range of financing for small and medium manufacturing in the country. And that’s held up a lot of their economy. And in China, similar. They have these big industrial banks that fund all kinds of projects. But it’s really just this proactive nature of trying finding projects that are getting in the way of progress and then making sure those things get built. And how much in how much of the level of leadership or ideology to you is the loss of that. People talk about neoliberalism, and I think neoliberalism is a very complex and weird and abused term. But one thing I believe we write this in the book is that Democrats stopped intervening on the production side of the economy. They more or less began to trust the market. Maybe you had to put some rules on the market. Maybe you had to put some curbs on the market. But the idea that you were going to intervene to do things the market wasn’t going to do or create markets for things that needed to happen that weren’t happening. It fell out of favor, not in the sense that it would be desirable, but in the sense that it was even possible. The view is that the government will fail, right, if it tries to do this. Industrial policy fails when you try it, that picking winners and losers is always a line fails when you do it. Then obviously over there came China, and I think that changed the intellectual side of this. But how do you see what happened there, both ideologically and when you look at the leadership of the party as now, do you see it changing. I think that is the big part of the story. The major part of the story is, after the New Deal and there’s a great book called Invisible hands by Kim phillips-fein, where she really details the push of that ideology over 40 years, the long term plan. And I think that’s why even when presidents came in wanting to do a little bit more Obama, I forget which book, but there’s some book where Obama actually said, after a recession, shouldn’t we do our moonshot project now. But he was surrounded by people who were like, no, no, no, that’s obviously we shouldn’t be doing that when they’re talking about the well, they tried some. High speed rail, smart grid, electronic health records. I always think about those as being the big signature moonshots of the Recovery Act. And none of them actually happened. And they were so tiny. I think that was part of the problem. In the context of the larger economy, you can’t just say one little high speed rail line. And they did. They also funded Solyndra and Tesla, as you point out in the book. But they only wanted to do those two projects, and they just focused on the failure of Solyndra rather than the huge success of Tesla. Well, that guarantee program funded more than just those two. Yeah, but those are the big ones. Those are the big ones. And everybody knows Solyndra. I mean this to me. I was thinking about this. I did this show with Tom Friedman recently about China. And one of the ways, I think Republicans specifically. But then in response, Democrats also have really hindered government is by becoming too afraid of failure. And the feeling that if you loan money to something that goes belly up, if you fund a grant for science, it can sound funny if somebody says it at a speech. And one way to just destroy not just state capacity, but state ambition is to make the state so cautious. I mean, some of the process and procedure we talk about it’s endless auditing and oversight and procedure to show you’re doing nothing wrong, which in the end makes it so you can’t do all that much. I completely agree with you, and I want to say it’s one point that I don’t think I’ve seen anybody talk about in the book, but I thought was great, is that you highlight the problem with the Golden fleece awards, and the way in which we started. Do you want to say what those are. You’ll remem