michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, Ross sits down with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been called the future of the Republican Party.

josh hawley

What we need in this country we need in the Senate is a politics that’s focused on what I’ve called the American middle.

david leonhardt

Then Ross, Michelle, and I talk about what a real conservative populism might look like.

michelle goldberg

That’s a clue about who he really needs when he talks about, quote unquote, “average Americans” or when he talks about the middle.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

It was the best cable prestige drama I watched on TV all of last year. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Josh Hawley is the youngest member of the United States Senate. He’s 39 years old, a former Missouri attorney general, and last year, he beat the Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill in a closely watched race. We wanted to talk with Hawley because he’s part of a change in the Republican Party, in which more Republicans at least talk the language of populism, rather than of big business. Hawley wants Washington to take a tougher approach to regulating Google and Facebook. He sponsored a bill to reduce prescription drug prices. And he talks about helping what he calls the American middle. He is, in other words, a version of Donald Trump without the racist tweets and with some policy seriousness. Ross recently traveled down to the senator’s office to talk with him. After their conversation, Michelle and I will come back to talk about some of the larger themes.

ross douthat

So I’m here with Senator Hawley, who has distinguished himself as one of the more active, interesting, and occasionally, controversial members of the Republican Party. So I just want to start out by asking a sort of big picture policy question. Is there a coherent populist policy agenda that’s different from where the Republican Party was, let’s say, 10 years ago?

josh hawley

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I think that my own sense of it is that we should be very skeptical of and concerned about concentrations of power. And so we should be concerned about big government. But we should also be concerned about big tech and in places like big pharma. And we should especially be concerned about concentrations of power that link up together, and you see that with big government, big pharma. You see that with big government and big tech. Our constitutional tradition has put an incredible amount of emphasis on the right of the everyday man and woman to run this democracy. It’s an incredibly noble inheritance that we have. And I think that it is time that that core, really, of our political tradition received the emphasis that it needs. And this concern about bigness and about concentration of power is very, very important to that.

ross douthat

So I’ve spent time in Silicon Valley, and one of the things that you hear in Silicon Valley from people often pretty high up the food chain there is a sort of sense of befuddlement at you especially, but also other Republicans’ critiques of the major Silicon Valley corporations, with the idea being Republicans are supposed to be the party of business. They’re the party of entrepreneurship. We’re the only incredibly entrepreneurial part of the American economy arguably right now. Why aren’t Republicans on our side against liberal critics? So the general question is what do you say to them? And then the specific question is do you think Facebook, and Google and companies like that are at this point monopolies?

josh hawley

I think that it’s hard to argue that Facebook and Google with the enormous market concentration that they enjoy are not monopolies, at least in the colloquial sense. Now does that mean that they’re in violation of our antitrust law? I’m not sure, but they should certainly be investigated for it. But just to go back to your point for a moment about what they have given the American economy, their great claim to be entrepreneurial and innovative, I mean, are they really, is my question. I mean, you think here we are 50 years after the moon landing. You think about what the tech sector gave to this country in the decade of the 1960s. And then you think about what the tech sector has given to this country in the last decade. My critique of them is not that they’ve been too innovative. It’s that they haven’t really been innovative enough. It’s that they’ve actually squelched competition, that they’ve slowed innovation. They’ve given us a social media model that I’ve called the addiction economy, that’s based on taking our data without telling us, selling it without getting our consent, and getting us addicted to their platforms.

ross douthat

So it’s not only Silicon Valley big shots who don’t appreciate that line of argument. It’s also some of my friends on the more libertarian wing of the right who say that you’re basically making a kind of nanny-state argument. At the very least, it’s a sort of anti-libertarian perspective of how government responds to companies trying to find consumers basically, right?

josh hawley

I thought that conservatives cared a lot about markets that were competitive and that were actually good for new entrants and that were actually good for workers. But this market hasn’t been. It enriches the people at the very top who found these companies. And it stifles competition and slows innovation. So I think it’s strange that they are defending this sector of the American economy and their behavior, number one. But number two, I think to say to parents that you’re a bad parent unless you know exactly what your kids are doing— parents are barraged with TV, with these mobile platforms, iPads, phones. I mean, I’m a parent myself of two little boys. Parents are desperately trying to navigate a culture that seems to be against them and against their kids. They need some help and just some basic decency. And I don’t think it’s too much to ask that these companies do that.

ross douthat

And well, since I basically agree with the second half of your answer, I’m going to go back to the first because I think there is a view that says, O.K., Hawley and maybe some other Republican populists are suddenly discovering that some American corporations don’t pay their workers very well. But is it fair to say that Google and Facebook are more implicated in the problems of wage stagnation and the low wage economy than any other major American corporation? Why are they a particular target on that front?

josh hawley

Well, first of all, these companies are uniquely powerful. Their control over information is unprecedented in American history. Their control over our personal information is unprecedented in American history. I mean, you can’t find another analog. You have to go back a century to try and find a set of corporations that exerted as much power in the American economy and as much influence in American society as these do. And so we should be uniquely concerned about them, number one. Number two, are they the only drivers of wage stagnation? Of course not. And should we be concerned about wage stagnation across the board? Yes, we should. The last thing I would say is culture and economics are linked, but in this respect, the fact that Silicon Valley, these companies think of themselves not really as American companies, but as citizens of the world, that they are oriented towards a global economy. And what happens to American workers is utterly secondary — that’s a social issue as well as an economic issue and one we should be concerned about.

ross douthat

What you just said sounds to me not just like a critique of Silicon Valley, but also like a critique of the tax bill that the Republican Congress passed and President Trump signed and that got some criticism from some of your colleagues along the way. But I think there’s a certain amount of evidence since the tax bill was passed that a lot of corporations have used that money as a kind of windfall for shareholders without sort of reinvesting it deeply into the American economy. Do you have any second thoughts about how the tax bill was designed and passed?

josh hawley

First of all, I think this is a multi-decade trend now, which makes it more urgent, not less. The trend being that we see these multinationals investing less and less in American workers, and American capital investment, and American research and development. These issues don’t begin with the tax bill, and they certainly weren’t ended by it. So there’s a lot of work to do. I think that lowering the corporate tax rate, as many folks were in favor of, including Barack Obama, that’s fine. I think perhaps the more important parts of the bill were those that giving relief to working families. And I think the tax bill did a good job of that. But listen, I wasn’t here for it. I had no part in writing it, debating it, and I think that it’s a new day and there’s a lot of work to do.

ross douthat

That’s fair, but if it came up for a vote again, would you vote for it?

josh hawley

[LAUGHS] Give me a chance to vote on things that I’ve actually had some opportunity to help shape and help craft. And I think that’s why we’re having the policy discussions we’re having now. And that’s why you see me making the proposals that I’m making.

ross douthat

Which proposal that you’ve made on the campaign trail or in the Senate do you think would do the most directly for the lower middle class family in suburban Missouri?

josh hawley

Let me just say that I think what we need in this country we need in the Senate, is a politics that’s focused on what I’ve called the American middle. About that, I mean the middle of our society. Now I come from the middle of our country. They need politics that’s focused on their needs, on their families, on their ambitions. I think the prescription drug bill that I introduced with Senator Scott, you know, that bill would immediately lower prescription drug costs. In the state of Missouri, you want to talk about drivers of health care costs and out of pocket expenses for families. I have had, Ross, multiple families tell me that they’ve had a spouse who’s had to go back to work. They’ve had a spouse who has had to quit a job and take a different one or get a second job in order to just pay their basic health care expenses. In my part of the country, for the folks I represent, this is totally unsustainable. And I think that prescription drugs are a huge driver of that. I also proposed on the campaign trail reform of the Earned Income Tax Credit in a way that would really benefit workers immediately. Don’t make them wait till the end of the year to apply. Allow them to get those benefits now with their paychecks. I think that would be a big help, too.

ross douthat

I think the specific thing you’ve proposed that has set the most libertarian hair on fire has been the idea that the biggest internet companies or the biggest social media companies should be, in effect — and you can correct me on this description — monitored for political bias. Is that fair? And how would that monitoring possibly work? The government changes hands every four years, and nobody can even agree right now on what constitutes political extremism or bias on the internet.

josh hawley

My proposal affects only the largest companies. So we’re talking really here about Google, Facebook, Twitter. Why should they continue to get a massive government subsidy if they’re going to be speakers and if they’re going to have a political point of view? Don’t get me wrong. If Facebook wants to have a political point of view, that’s totally fine. They’re a private company. This is America. They can do whatever they want. But they said we never, never change or moderate content on the basis of political viewpoint. So I said, fine. We agree that that should be the standard, so why don’t you just open your books up to an audit? And if in fact you’re not moderating on the basis of political viewpoint, you can keep your special immunity. But if you are, then you ought to be treated like any other platform that engages in such content moderation. The New York Times can publish whatever they want and have a political view. That’s fine. But nobody thinks that they’re not speaking. So I say let’s treat them fairly. And one last thing—

ross douthat

But how would you get the auditors? People on the internet can’t agree on whether Facebook is biased against conservatives. Which auditors are going to agree?

josh hawley

I think you use a standard that is well-developed in our law, which is viewpoint neutrality. I mean, I chose that phrase and we put it in the bill for a reason. It’s because it’s very well-developed in constitutional law. Courts at all levels — Supreme Court, intermediate courts, district courts — have for 50 years developed an exhaustive jurisprudence about what constitutes viewpoint discrimination, political discrimination, and they’ve applied it in a great variety of cases. So there is lots and lots of guidance. So what we’ve said is, look, use F.T.C. Use the First Amendment doctrine of viewpoint neutrality. There’s a gob of guidance there. Use that.

ross douthat

We’re talking a bit about elites, right? This idea of an elite class that’s presumably sort of, in some sense, bipartisan, concentrated, maybe in coastal cities. You spoke at the National Conservatism Conference that was held a little while ago in Washington, D.C., and you gave a speech elaborating on some of the themes we’ve discussed here and spending a particular amount of time critiquing cosmopolitan elites. What did you mean by cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan?

josh hawley

The folks who are in leadership of our big corporations, who are in leadership of our universities, who are in leadership of the media and the chattering class, and yes, in government, too. They don’t really share a common ethnic background, a common religious background. They do share a common background in education. Usually, they’re educated at elite schools.

ross douthat

As, for the record, you and I both were.

josh hawley

Indeed. ROSS DOUTHAT^ Right? So they have that. And then they also tend to share a outlook on the world that, in many ways, is shaped by those institutions. And it’s an outlook that is, in many ways, denationalized. So they don’t think a whole lot about patriotism. They don’t put a lot of emphasis. In fact, many of them are hostile to the idea of patriotism as being too nationalistic, as being somehow retrograde. They tend to think about global citizenship, think of themselves as citizens of the world. They tend to emphasize change over tradition, the values of career ambition over place. All of that is fine. It’s just that, that gives you the politics of elite ambition rather than the politics of the American middle. And here’s why, is that most Americans don’t share those particular values and that outlook. Most Americans want to live in the town they grew up in. They want to work in the family business if there is one. They want to raise a family. That’s very praiseworthy. In fact, you can make the argument — and I do — that it’s those virtues that built this country. And my argument is that our leadership class has become dangerously divorced from that outlook, from those values, from those ambitions so much so that they really don’t understand them anymore.

ross douthat

This argument got labeled anti-Semitic for the term cosmopolitan, or at least, “rootless cosmopolitan” is the more famous phrase that’s been thrown around to describe Jews and Judaism in the past. I want your quick response to that. And then I have what I think is a more serious follow up question.

josh hawley

Well, first, I mean, it’s totally absurd. You know, there’s nothing that liberal elites love more besides the fact that being elites and looking down on others than using the charges of bigotry to shut down debate. Especially when they’re implicated in such serious social and economic failures, as they are. And the truth is, is that the leadership of this country has given us this system that we are struggling with now. It’s given us wages that have been flat for decades. It’s given us families that are in crisis. It’s given us an opioid crisis. It’s given us a death of despair crisis. These are real things. And I think that what you find is the liberal segment of the ruling class — and there’s a lot of them — they don’t want to face up to these things, and they do not want to admit that they have anything to do with them. So I have to say to my liberal friends, you can kick and scream and try to change the debate all you want. But until you’re willing to confront the fact that many of the policies that you have pursued and much of the outlook that you have embraced is part of how we have gotten to the crisis that we’re at, we’re just not going to make much progress.

ross douthat

Basically, I think that any effective conservative populism worthy of the name is going to get a version of the critique that was leveled at your speech. I think there’s a way in which a lot of people on the left will say we want a more populist conservatism. And then when it comes along, because it’s socially conservative, it freaks out liberals in its own way and inspires the kind of reaction that your speech got. At the same time, both your speech and the entire conference was at least shadowed by, if not overshadowed by, the fact that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, took that opportunity that weekend to launch what you might call, at least, a sort of racially-tinged conflict with a bunch of Democratic members of the House. And it seems to me that the specific way that President Trump conducts himself and the general sort of racialized tinge that a lot of conservative populism takes on in the Western world is both a moral problem, and it’s a practical problem because the great American middle that you’re talking about includes a heck of a lot of African-American, Hispanic, Asian and other non-white Americans who, right now, are not voting for the Republican Party. Do you agree that that’s a problem?

josh hawley

Well, let me just start with your last point there about who the American middle includes. I don’t know whose interest it is to say that working class refers only to white people, but it’s wrong. And it is very, very destructive. So what we need I think is policies and a politics that is focused on working families of all ethnic backgrounds and emphasizes the things that we hold in common. We do not have a common racial background in this country. That’s a good thing. But we are united by common loves, and I think we have got to practice a politics that emphasizes the things that we love together. And any conservative who’s worthy of the name of whatever label you want to put on him or her has got to put forward a politics of common feeling and common loves. I think it is absolutely vital. It’s vital at any time. And it’s certainly vital in this time.

ross douthat

Do you think Donald Trump is putting forward a politics of common feelings and common love?

josh hawley

I can’t speak for him, Ross. I think what the president is doing is —

ross douthat

You could speak about him.

josh hawley

Well, and I will, and here’s what I’ll say about this. The president won the state of Missouri in 2016 by 20 points. What you have in my state are many, many people who say I feel that I have been disrespected, that I have been looked down upon, and they feel that the president speaks for them. I think that that’s a good thing. I think it does not need to be and must not be something that divides us by race, but we have to work to bring together all Americans who share these common loves, and I think it’s vital. I think it’s urgent.

ross douthat

I mean, the reality, though, right, is that I’m sitting here as an Op-Ed columnist, and you’re sitting here as a Republican senator. And as an Op-Ed columnist, I can make a version of the point you just made, sort of explaining Donald Trump’s appeal. But then I can say, but Donald Trump was a birther and plays to bigotry. And even as he makes people in Missouri feel respected, he’s disrespecting people in Baltimore, and Chicago and all over the country. And it seems like you as a Republican senator can’t offer the other paragraph.

josh hawley

Well, listen, I think it’s a question of first of all, you’ve got to agree with it to offer it.

ross douthat

That’s fair. That’s fair.

josh hawley

And I don’t think that — again, I can only speak for the people of Missouri. They’re the ones who I know, but I know a lot of Trump supporters in Missouri. And I don’t think that they’re racists. And I think that this media fixation on, is what the president said today or tweeted today, whatever it may be, is that racially motivated, or is it a dog whistle? I think that there’s a point at which, number one, it’s a beltway obsession. Number two, voters who listen to this feel, again, that they’re not being heard. I mean, they say, listen, why don’t you quit talking about his tweets and start talking about what I’m trying to tell you, which is that my wages are flat, which is my health care costs too much. So let’s get on actually with addressing the issues that brought the president to where he is and that he singled out and addressed, which is why he’s president.

ross douthat

Senator Hawley, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on “The Argument.”

josh hawley

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

O.K. Ross, Michelle, and I are back to talk about Senator Hawley. I want to start by taking his case at face value, Ross. I love his critique of big business. I was cheering as I was listening to him make it to you, and I’m thrilled to hear a Republican talk about the problems of big business. My question is what he imagines being the countervailing force that can actually constrain the political and economic power of big business. I’m not asking you to speak for him, but what do conservative populists see as the force that can stand up to these big bad corporations?

ross douthat

I mean, I think the answer for this kind of conservative populism to make sense has to be, to some extent, the government. For a long time, the conservative theory of the American scene placed an incredible amount of weight on non-governmental entities, charitable organizations, churches, families, and so on, as this crucial alternative to the choice between big business and big government. And I think one of the things you see animating Hawley and other younger conservatives is the sense that if that civil society is breaking down, then cultural conservatives maybe especially have to be a little more willing to use state power to either help rebuild civic and social life or just to counterbalance big corporate entities. And I think Hawley’s talk about the problem of concentrated power in Silicon Valley implies a form of trust busting. It doesn’t necessarily mean supporting big new federal bureaucracies, but it supports directing money in particular ways, using state power in particular ways.

michelle goldberg

What’s so frustrating listening to him is that obviously I’m with him on the monopolistic power of these corporations. And I could even be talked into an argument against Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives a lot of these platforms immunity from the responsibilities of, say, The New York Times not to publish slander, and libel, and defamation, et cetera, and would actually fundamentally change how a lot of these platforms work. He calls these companies monopolies, but the plan that he’s laying out is basically to have somebody monitor them for what he calls political bias. And what I think most liberals hear when they hear conservatives talk about political bias is an attempt to kind of work the refs and make them more friendly and amenable to the right. The right has spent decades fear mongering about the fairness doctrine that used to create some sort of nominal political fairness on the airwaves. And now it seems like they want a conservative doctrine applied to these tech companies. And I don’t think it’s workable, but it also seems sort of beside the point when you’re talking about the concentration of corporate power.

ross douthat

Well, it’s beside the point I think for what liberals are most afraid of with these companies.

michelle goldberg

I just mean it has nothing to do with breaking them up.

ross douthat

That specifically doesn’t but I think he’s doing several different things at once. I think he’s arguing, one, that internet companies and the internet itself should be more subject to regulation that is trying to sort of protect people from the addictive side of the internet. Two, and this is in the proposal that you mentioned is more particular to conservatives, that the most powerful social media companies should have some version of, yeah, I think it’s fair to call it a kind of fairness doctrine to answer the conservative anxiety that these incredibly powerful, effectively, media companies are all being run out of the most liberal part of the country. And then, three, he also has, I think, an openness to using antitrust to consider attacking or breaking them up. You know, I mean, you can only go so far with this because in the Trump era, nothing is actually happening in Washington. And so all of his proposals are just sort of writing on a napkin. But for someone who’s been a senator for such a short period of time, he’s put forward a lot of proposals that do actually break with conservative orthodoxy on other areas of economic policy. And the most recent one actually, since I had that conversation with him, he and Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin have put forward a proposal basically to devalue the U.S. currency — that’s the simplest way of putting it — in a way that would be really good, at least in theory, for U.S. manufacturers. And so it’s a proposal that is backed and cheered by a lot of labor unions. So in that sense, he is trying to answer your question, David, not just about government, but about an economic policy that might, in certain ways, be good for part of labor. So I’ve been involved in efforts to imagine a different conservatism for a long time. And I think it’s totally reasonable to have some skepticism about how this all cashes out. But it is the case that if you just go down the list of Hawley’s proposals, they are more substantial and more populist than just about any other Republican senator.

david leonhardt

I mean, the two big asks that I have for conservative populists — not that they’re asking my opinion — are, one, do stuff on economics that actually matters. Josh Hawley was one of the attorney generals who tried to take away people’s health insurance by repealing Obamacare. And if you want to say, yeah, but we’re going to replace it with something else, that’s fine. But so far, there haven’t been a lot of those ideas. The second ask that I have is some willingness to compromise, because I guess what I wonder is if, in the future, we ever again have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, will Josh Hawley outsource his Senate vote to Mitch McConnell and Fox News and just vote against everything the Democrats are doing? Or would he be willing to negotiate and essentially try to make a bill more conservative, but then be willing to vote for it in a way that no Republicans, essentially, were willing to do during the Obama years? Can you imagine that, or is the sort of structure of the Republican Party and conservative America now so strong that basically Democrats should have very low expectations for finding any Republican votes?

ross douthat

I think it would depend heavily on the larger political context. But I agree with you. It’s easy to imagine that anti-big tech common ground dissolving under the weight of partisanship. I have a question. My question for you guys is about how liberals on the left would react to this kind of populism. Because if we take Hawley seriously as someone who wants to shift the Republican Party’s economic positions, at the same time, he is very socially conservative.

michelle goldberg

No, I find him terrifying.

ross douthat

This is what I’m interested in, right, that there is this sense in which Hawley, to a lot of liberals, even though he’s closer to their views on economic policy, is seen as more frightening than a Mitt Romney or some other more, let’s say, plutocrat-friendly Republican.

michelle goldberg

Well, I want to say he was very dismissive and you were, I think, also kind of dismissive about the idea that his critique of cosmopolitans who are sort of global citizens who don’t have any fundamental loyalty to their country, that causes deep and tremendous anxiety, I think, among a lot of Jews. There is this idea that seems to be essential to most right wing populism. People sometimes call it producerism, which is basically that you have the middle of the country that is being assailed by both the kind of parasitic underclass and a rootless overclass. And that analysis is common to all sorts of right wing populist movements. And it very, very often degenerates into anti-Semitism. And so when I see someone like him, Ivy League educated, thinking that he speaks for the, quote unquote, “middle of the country,” but people like me and my family are some sort of deracinated elites that are kind of outside the national community. After Trump was elected, one of the first things I did was find out how could I get residency in Germany, or how could I get residency in other countries that I thought might be more hospitable if things got really bad here? And I have those same sorts of thoughts when I hear Hawley talking about cosmopolitanism.

ross douthat

I guess, my question for you then is I think that substantively, you share a certain amount of Hawley’s critique of, let’s say, the financialist aspect of the overclass. An economic populism on the right wouldn’t necessarily make some of the same arguments about financial elites, and global corporations, and so on that have been totally common coming from Democratic politicians over the years, whether it’s Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown, the whole concept of economic patriotism and so on, right?

michelle goldberg

My problem with the word cosmopolitan to describe the kind of financial overclass is that, again, it seems to conflate people who are culturally liberal, who live in cities, and who have maybe high levels of openness to multiculturalism, with billionaires and people who actually are running the economy. And I just think that that analysis is pernicious.

ross douthat

I guess I think that there’s a version of that analysis that’s correct, not in the sense that the average struggling 23-year-old journalist in Brooklyn isn’t in any way comparable to a financial elite. But in the sense that I think that there is financial power and there is cultural power, and both are sort of generated in different ways out of a meritocratic overclass that is concentrated in big cities. I think there is overlap between the kind of power that Hollywood and The New York Times have and the kind of power that Goldman Sachs has. And I think I agree with you that there is a sort of inherent danger in this kind of conservative analysis because it tends to sort of descend back into scapegoating minority groups or the poor. But at the same time, I think analytically, there’s something going on that can’t just be reduced to the guys on Wall Street.

michelle goldberg

Can I just say quickly that I think those three things describe overlapping but different phenomenon. And that cosmopolitanism is much more about a cultural phenomenon, whereas meritocracy and neoliberalism are about economic power. The other thing I want to say is that Hawley kind of walks this line between, on the one hand, trying to make his analysis not a white nationalist analysis, right? So that he will say, obviously, that people in the middle class, lower middle class — we’re not just talking about white people, right? And in fact, large, large numbers of people of color, if not most people of color, share the economic concerns that he says he wants to speak to. But then when you hear him say something about, like, average voters don’t care about parsing the president’s words for racism, that’s a clue about who he really means when he talks about, quote unquote, “average Americans” or when he talks about the middle. And it’s not all Americans, it’s something very demographically specific.

ross douthat

And I think that I don’t know if that reflects Hawley’s own perspective or just reflects the way that Republican politicians are trying to deal with the phenomenon of Donald Trump. But either way, it’s essentially the limiting principle right now on any kind of post Trump conservative nationalism, that the nature of the Trump phenomenon requires a dismissal of criticisms of the president’s bigotry. And yet, for nationalism to make sense of something that isn’t just white identity politics, it has to actually define the middle of the country in pan-ethnic terms, which Hawley wants to do, but Donald Trump is president.

david leonhardt

To answer your question, Ross, I am more welcoming of this kind of talk from conservatives, I think. But I’m also pretty skeptical. Because if you actually had conservatives willing to be part of a bipartisan coalition that was going to try to take on economic inequality and corporate power, the solutions you’d get would be much more lasting than anything you would get from just the Democrats passing it. The Republicans on the Supreme Court — and yes, they are Republicans — would be less likely to overturn it. They would have more buy-in. But I’m skeptical because I think the burden of proof is on these Republicans to show they’re willing to use this for more than just talking points. Because Barack Obama tried really hard to get Republican buy-in on his health care bill. He used fairly conservative ideas. He offered to talk behind the scenes with Republicans about tort reform. He did any number of things. And the Republicans made it clear that there was no price at which they were willing to participate in extending health insurance to people. And the next time we have a Democratic president, I would love to see people like Josh Hawley involved, or the next time we have a Republican president willing to legislate. But I just feel like it would be the first time I’d see an actual willingness to do that kind of compromise work in many, many years.

ross douthat

I think that’s totally reasonable, but I also think that has some implications for what the next Democratic president should think about doing or trying to do first, assuming that there is a Republican Senate. I think the implications of what Hawley is doing is that the next Democratic president should come in and at least try to take yes for an answer from a few of these populist conservatives and say, yes, let’s start by talking about big tech. Or let’s start by talking about family policy, which is another potential area of overlap.

david leonhardt

All of this is a reminder of how important the Senate is in 2020. While we all are paying attention to the presidential election, everyone should be paying more attention to the Senate. And now it is time for our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion to take your mind off of politics. This is a Ross heavy show. It’s your week to make a recommendation. What do you have for us?

ross douthat

I’m going to recommend the HBO show “Succession,” which started up again in its second season this weekend. I suspect it is a show that our liberal listeners will enjoy perhaps even more than I do. It’s a show about a fictional family that is supposed to resemble Rupert Murdoch’s family, a family of grasping, greedy, backstabbing, extremely entertaining rich people in Manhattan and the wars between them over the possibility of who’s going to inherit this vast corporate empire. It had kind of a soft launch in season one. It wasn’t a huge hit. It got some good reviews. But it was, to my mind, along with “Atlanta,” I would say, it was the best cable prestige drama I watched on TV all of last year. And I’m hopeful that season two will be excellent as well.

michelle goldberg

It’s so good. I love that show. And I have to say one thing about that show is that it was the first kind of art of any kind that made me feel like I had possibly some emotional purchase on the Trump kids, and particularly Ivanka. Her willingness to be complicit in what her father’s doing and to tie herself at the cost of whatever reputation she had before this nightmare began has always just been inexplicable to me. And watching this show — I mean, it’s not about the Trumps, it’s about a family, like you said, that resembles the Murdochs — I felt like it gives you some sense of what it would be like to be in this hermetically sealed world, where your position inside the family is so much more real to you than anything that’s going on in the broader society.

david leonhardt

Well, I haven’t watched it yet, but you are making me want to do so. So what’s the recommendation again, Ross?

ross douthat

It is HBO’s “Succession.”

david leonhardt