It’s the Center That Is Strong and Principled

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B o l l a n d branch dot com promo code beg to differ. Welcome to Bags to differ. The Bulwark’s weekly round table discussion featuring civil across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I am joined.

By our regulars Bill Galston of the Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal and Linda Chavez of the Niscannon Center Damon Linkers out this week with COVID, but we are fortunate to be joined by Ben Wittis, Co Founder of Law Fair and senior fellow at Bookings as well. And our special guest this week is Charles Lane columnist for The Washington Post. Welcome, one and all. I would like to begin with the letter that was sent by the progressive caucus this week to president Biden urging that he change his position on Ukraine. The group of thirty progressives did a lot of throat clearing about how much they support Ukraine and don’t like it when aggressive, fascist dictatorships invade other countries.

But they said, we urge you to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for blah blah blah blah. And they went on that way I think this letter had become public for maybe twenty four hours before it was withdrawn. With a story about how there was some staffer who had screwed up. I’m gonna start with you Chuck Lane. I’m gonna quote, Jake Akim Klass, a Democratic member of Congress who said, this letter is an olive branch to a war criminal who’s losing his war.

Let’s say you.

There’s so much to say. I’ve actually wrote my column about it this week. You have to look at it in the context of what had happened just before, which is that Kevin McCarthy had voiced some equivocation about a writing quote, a blank check for Ukraine in the next Congress. And so following on that, this looked like, oh my god, we’re having this right left convergence on walking away from Ukraine. What was, to me, most astonishing about this letter was that it went beyond even president Trump’s position, which is that the US should broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia.

I thought that was a soft on Ukraine position. This letter endorsed direct US Russia negotiations to settle on a ceasefire. We can go into the drama internally to the Democratic Party about this which is an amazing story in itself how the bumbling that went into the release of this letter. But the big picture here is that it now for the first time even though they retracted it, although a couple of people who signed it themselves said they still stood by it. This is the first signal we have that squishiness about president Biden’s policy is now bipartisan.

And that, I think, was a pretty good day for Vladimir Putin.

Bill Galston, it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes for the propagandists and the Kremlin to seize upon this and say, look, you know, the the west is cracking. Their resolve is weakening. You have Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republicans in the House. Signaling that there’s no blank check, and now you have the leaders of the leftist faction in the Democratic Party saying essentially the exact same thing we just have to hang on. Actually, as a number of critics have pointed out, it would it would not shorten the war.

It would lengthen the war because it would embolden

Putin to stick it out. Right? Couldn’t agree more, Mona. I too devoted my column this week to this controversy but in the context of troubling trends throughout the Western Alliance, and I pointed to political changes in a number of European governments that in the not too distant future could lead to some erosion of the wall of Western resistance to what Putin has been doing. So this was an unforced error of considerable proportions.

And without naming names, I can tell you that even the staunchest defenders of the letter are having second thoughts about what the letter said and even more importantly what it didn’t say. Putin’s best hope at this point is to gain through the ballot box what he can’t attain on the battlefield. That is his game plan and anything that encourages him to believe that the wall of West resistance to his aggression, and yes, his war crimes is weakening, can only have negative consequences. I will also say that I parsed the content of the letter very carefully And what they’re recommending is a policy of self contradiction. But on the one hand, we should negotiate directly with Russia But on the other hand, we should back no solution that the Ukrainians don’t support.

There are two things wrong with that. Logic. First of all, the Ukrainians vigorously vociferously object to any negotiations where they’re not at the table and b, they’ve made it very clear that there is no basis whatever for a conversation about territorial compromise.

The

Russians are the invaders. They argue, and it is up to the invaders. To leave Ukrainian territory as defined and recognized by the international community, period full stop. There were signs early in the conflict that if all other territorial issues were settled, that the Ukrainian government might be willing to park the issue of Crimea for an extended period. Whether that caveat is still on the table I can tell you.

Other than that, the letter is defining or pointing to what is in fact a null set of possible outcomes from negotiation. And, you know, it’s pretty words covering over the fact that the letter either means nothing or it means negotiations about territorial compromise that the Ukrainians will never voluntarily accept.

Linda, one of the things that you see frequently among dov’s, and I’m not now going to say left wing dov’s be because we have plenty of them on the right as well. But you see them contrast diplomacy versus armed conflict. And they say, I’m for diplomacy. I’m not for armed conflict. I think there should be diplomatic solutions to problems, not military solutions.

This is kind of boilerplate you often hear. But of course, you cannot have true diplomacy without the threat of arms. It goes back to Frederick the Great, who said diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments. Do you agree with me that they are not seeing the facts on the ground. I mean, Ukraine is in the process of defeating the Russian behemoth here.

And at this moment, they choose to to suggest what what would essentially be a

a kind of surrender Well, of course, you can have diplomacy with our arms, a Neville Chamberlain, a new a thing or two about that. Didn’t work out so well. And it did not certainly prevent arms from eventually being needed. Look, there is nothing good. You can say about this letter.

And one of the things that I found disheartening about it is the excuse now is, well, you know, we drafted this letter in July and it wasn’t supposed to be, you know, let out. We didn’t know that it was gonna be released. Well, I’m sorry. I don’t think it was any better in July than it is now. It was worse Yeah.

You know, it’s right. In some ways, it was worse. So, you know, this is one of the things that reminds me how absolutely homeless people like you and I are. Progressives can never be counted on. I don’t believe in foreign policy matters.

I think they are squishes at heart. And when it was important in order to make a contrast with the other side to have a stiff spine, a somewhat exerted I was particularly upset when I saw Jamie Raskin’s name on this too. He’s my congressman. I mean, he represents the district that I live in. And I have to say that, you know, election is right around the corner, and I was thinking can I really bring myself to hope for Jamie Raskin.

He’s not somebody I would ever have supported in the past, but I’ve been very pleased by what he’s done on democracy issues. This really threw a monkey wrench in that and, you know, it’s not about me and and my vote personally, but the point is there just are so few people It seems in public life today who have spine when it comes to these kinds of very, very hard to decisions. And we live in such a dangerous world. And I don’t know what these progresses think they would accomplish. You know, do they I guess, they think they would save some Ukrainian lives.

But at the expense of what, at the expense of the next country that Vladimir Putin decides to invade, It’s really disheartening. It was just, I think, a disgraceful episode. The one good thing that may come out of this is congresswoman Jayapal, I think now probably has no chance of becoming part of the leadership in the Democratic Party. And that to me is a good thing for lots of reasons. Ben witnesses, we criticized Joe Biden fair amount for various things,

but not not on this topic. I feel that he has been pretty great on Ukraine. So comment on anything that you like that you’ve heard thus far, and then I’d like to hear you about this speech that Putin gave today where he said that the US and the West were destabilizing the world and responsible for the global food shortage and threatening Taiwan. I mean, it was the most textbook example of projection I’ve ever seen. So I have three points to make about what I’ve heard, and the first relates

to Linda’s point about how few people have spines. And I do wanna say that we are blessed with a president who does not share the predilections of both the left and the right to dictate to the Ukrainian’s terms in a kind of great game like fashion in which we sit down with Putin and carve up Ukraine in a negotiation with the Russians and then kind of force it down their throats. And I think there’s a broader point there. I have spent a huge amount of time talking to Ukrainians some for a podcast that I’ve done for law fair, and some just, you know, socially and for my own education. And I I literally have not met a single one who sounds anything like the progressive caucus or Matt Gates or the New York Times editorial page, which by the way, has its own walk of shame to do on this matter, or Tucker Carlson or Kevin McCarthy, right, all of whom in very different ways and with very different flavors of sound would presume to, you know, be squishes in the face of Putin and carve up Ukraine on its behalf And I don’t wanna say that those voices are morally similar, but they are similar in the sense that they all reflect the basic belief that it’s in some kind of nineteen twenties like way, they’ll be an international conference where we will, you know, sit down with the Russians and play the great game and divide up the world.

And, you know, one person who has not done that is Joe Biden and who has, you know, said since the beginning that this is a matter that the Ukrainians have to deal with And that means on the one hand that we’re not gonna do their fighting for them, though we will support them militarily and economically and with sanctions. But secondly, that we’re not going to dictate the answer to them. And so I think the – this brings me to my second point, which is that we often think of the center, whether the center left or the center right, as that sort of squishy middle between the left and the right and the left believes in something and the right believes in something. But, you know, the middle is just the accommodation of often the worst points of the two sides. And this is a great example of the proposition that that is you know, a lot of hui and that this is an area where the center has led.

And the center has led with a very strong simple position that we should support Ukraine and not dictate the terms of the outcome to the Ukrainians and not back off our support. And both the right and the left with very different rhetoric have grave anxiety is about that position, and they come out in different ways, but Actually, the fundamental division is between those who want to play the great game with Putin and those who do not. I think we should be, as Mona says, respectful of the fact that Biden has never wavered in a significant get way on that point, though he has made some mistakes of various types along the way. The final point I just want to make is that when you talk to Ukrainians, one thing you learn is how terrifying this type of rhetoric in the Americas, in particular, among Americans, among Canadians, and among Western Europeans is to them. They do not understand necessarily nor should they have to.

The nuances of the American political system so that something that’s the progressive caucus letter, how different is that from the Democratic leadership or how different is, you know, the New York Times editorial from the position of the Biden administration. You know, you actually have to be pretty sophisticated about American politics in order to understand that. And in a world in which the SDP government in Germany is, from their point of view, quite hostile and has really dragged its feet. There’s a real, you know, a real sense of anxiety that this kind of rhetoric, whether it’s from Tucker Carlson or whether it’s from Kevin McCarthy or whether it’s from the progressive caucus induces. And I I do think that there is real reason to be careful and to, you know, for the strong center, whether the center right or the center left, to be emphatic that these are not positions that are on the a table and that American support for Ukraine is not a negotiable position.

That is an excellent point,

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And now we will turn to our next topic, which is the upcoming midterms. I will start with you, Bill Galston, a few weeks ago. Democrats may have imagined that abortion was going to save the day for them. It’s not looking that way now, but then again, you know, you’ve lived by the poles die by the polls who knows if they’re accurate, but it’s not looking that good for Democrats at the moment. My question to you is, What is their closing argument and what should their closing argument be?

Well, let me commit political heresy. I don’t think it much matters what the closing argument is because

at this point,

almost all

voters have made up their minds. And I doubt very much that a last minute outpouring of ads and campaign appearances by Notables will make much of a difference. I understand the logic of people who’ve been arguing that Democrats simply can’t preserve radio silence on the issue of the economy and specifically on the issue of across the board, inflation. That said, it doesn’t make matters any better if you say things about inflation that very few voters will find credible. My experience tells me that if you’re dealing with a massive fact on the ground that affects people every day, There isn’t much that you can say about their experience that will convince them not to feel what they’re feeling.

It’s a very unfortunate political situation for Democrats because I think there is no good strategy right now for talking about the economy. I know that a number of progressive pollsters got together to write a memo to the effect that if only the Democrats would heed their advice for the last two weeks of the campaign, it will make a big difference. The Democratic Party does seem to be adjusting its strategy in the direction of that memo, and we will see, and it’s always open to democratic operatives of that particular political orientation to argue that if only their advice had been followed sooner and better, that the outcome would have been different. We’ll never know my own view is that letting the inflation genie out of the bottle was the kiss of death for Democrats in midterm I briefly entertained the hope that the abortion issue would mitigate the damage. I can always argue after the effect that the that the results would have been even worse if it hadn’t been for that issue.

And I think that’s probably the case. But but I absolutely agree with you, Mona. It’s not going to be the silver bullet salvation for the party. And I have to say now speaking as an obsessive consumer political information that the surveys and assessments of trends on the ground that I’ve reading in the past couple of weeks are anything but encouraging for Democrats. Chuck,

you can often tell how a party is doing by where Their leading figures are campaigning in the final days. And this week, Jill Biden is in Rhode Island, and the president is in New York. So not good. I’d like to talk with you a little bit about one case that Democrats are making, which is that the Republicans cannot be trusted with power that there are a great number of election deniers on the ballot. In fact, Washington Post, your newspaper had a survey found that something like fifty one percent of the Republican candidates are either election deniers or have expressed skepticism about the results.

So that’s one argument that the Democrats are trying to make that the Republicans don’t deserve power because of that. On the other hand, you have the problem that Democrats have spent good money trying to get election deniers, the Republican nomination, in a number of cases. And even now, they are attempting to undermine a particular Republican David Valle Deo in California, who was one of the only dead Republicans to vote for impeachment they’re running ads against him, hoping to make Republicans angry at him by saying that he’s a traitor.

If they lose as badly as Bill suggests and I think it was right to suggest they’re gonna lose that badly, there will be a lot of second guessing of the decision that Nancy Pelosi Chuck Schumer and the White House all agreed on to run those kinds of machiavellian little games around the country because there’s better than zero chance that a couple of those candidates are actually gonna go ahead and win their general election races. So They may come out of this race, not only having lost both houses of congress and many governorships, but also having sacrificed their principles, which is really a bad situation. I would like to just reflect a minute on the paradox here that as you say on the one hand, the Republican Party is totally infected with this kind of disease of what we’re calling election denial or just like literal embraces things that didn’t happen as some kind of litmus test to be in the party, and yet the voters are electing them or seem to be willing to elect them or at least give them a very extensive hearing. And I think this points to the failure of Democrats to appreciate that democracy is a process and it’s about substance.

So what they are doing in fact is defending the democratic process, but when they have power not delivering the substance that proves to the public, that democracy works. You know, we often talk about this in the context of other countries. Well, you know, the people lose faith in democracy because it hasn’t delivered for them. We’re living in an environment where fentanyl overdose deaths are in the triple digits, thousands each year. We have real wages declining three percent in

the last

year. We have as Bill has pointed out inflation people can’t afford to fill up their cars. I’m not saying all of that is Joe Biden’s fault personally. Don’t get me wrong, but I’m saying that’s the lived experience of people out there in this democracy. And so when you talk to them about the horrible things that happened on January sixth, and

the,

you know, future possibility that there will be something else like it, they’ll say, you’re right about the past, you might be right about the future, but what I’m interested in is what’s happening right now. And my concern and I’ve written this in different ways, and I call it, my concern is that the Democrats were absolutely right about urgency of the condition in which the American democracy finds itself after Trump and after January sixth, but they didn’t govern as if they understood that what that urgency required was for them to be good stewards of the system and show people that they are cautious and careful about how they manage public policy. And so we did have things like the overspending on the stimulus. We had some flubs around COVID. And so on, we have had and I’m just gonna say, we have had a great overshoot on things like no cash bail, In fact, you know, the rhetorical outreach of Democrats in terms of, you know, kind of delegitimizing tough prosecution of violent crime and so on.

And and I think they’re gonna pay the price for that. And it will teach them that absolutely, we must defend the process of democracy elections and everything that goes with it. But if you don’t back that up by showing that

it delivers on substance, it it won’t work. Linda, to add to Chuck’s list, we could also mention the student loan forgiveness move, which would only add to inflation if it’s survived court challenges and looked really like a direct payoff to a Democratic constituency, the college educated, who tend to make a lot more money and live more prosperous lives than the non college educated who are, by the way, the majority, And so that too has to be late at the Democrat’s feet. You know, when Biden was running and he talked about, you know, the importance of democracy, you might have thought that after they took power and they had the House and Senate that they would act like democracy was an emergency, But, you know, here we are. It’s almost two years. They have not passed the electoral count reform act, which would have been a signal that they were serious at least about one of the threats to democracy in our system.

But in stead, they didn’t act like it was a Democratic emergency until now, and the voters can be forgiven for treating it a little cynically and saying, well, you’re saying it’s an emergent see now because you want my vote. I think

that’s right. There’s another problem though. And and this is something that’s always bothered me about, you know, progressive ideas about expanding the time in which Americans could vote. Yeah.

It’s

convenient if you can vote over a longer period than on a single day. There are lots of reasons why that probably does increase participation. Certainly during the pandemic, I think it was absolutely necessary. But, you know, the the economy is driving this election. And lo and behold, today, we had some sort of good news.

The US economy is reversing the six month slump. It actually grew slightly after two quarters of flatter negative growth. The price of gasoline is actually like coming down. You know, it’s not at where where it was, but it’s not that far off where it was a year ago. I just looked at the triple a averages.

And yesterday, the triple day average was three point seven six dollars a year ago. It was three dollars and forty cents, essentially. So it’s up a little bit, but nothing like it was over the summer. If we were all voting at the same time in just a little less than two weeks from now, we’d all be voting on the same information but a lot of people have already cast their votes or are casting their votes right now, and they aren’t necessarily catching up with this new. So I think that that’s part of the problem.

But I think the bigger problem is exactly what you and others have said. And that is those of us who voted or some of us for the first time in a very long time for the democrats in twenty twenty, voted because we thought we were voting for a more centrist batch of candidates, and they have not governed that way. And I think that, you know, this country is despite the the move we’ve seen in the Republican Party to the right and the sort of continued move to the left in the Democratic Party, we are by and large a centrist nation. But I do think that having voting on a particular day on a particular set of facts that we all at least have access to even if we don’t, you know, avail ourselves of that information is helpful. And I am concerned that things may actually be turning a little more favorably on the economy, which would in fact help the Democrats, but people may not have the opportunity to be able to reflect that in their vote.

Ben, just in case people are

thinking, oh, well, you know, how much damage can the Republicans do? Among the things that McCarthy is talking about, Kevin McCarthy, if he becomes speaker, he will renew that wonderful Washington tradition the game of chicken about raising the debt ceiling. And he is, of course, promising all kinds of investigation. So it’s going to be hundred by twenty four seven, and god only knows what else. So is that what we’re in for in your judgment?

If the Republicans have a one vote majority in the House, that is what we’re in for. Yes. A kind of brinkmanship with the debt ceiling, probably government shutdowns, and Certainly endless investigations. I think we will hear more about Hunter Biden and its laptop and steel dossier than any of us thought was possible for Congress to do. That said, I wanna strike a note of cautious descent from the obituaries that you all are all writing in with different degrees of they had it coming to Democratic prospects here.

First of all, the average losses of the incumbent party in a first, midterms are pretty substantial. They’re in the neighborhood of twenty five house seats. So we’re starting from a vantage point, you know, if you’re measuring victory or loss in terms of control of the chamber, you would expect them to lose control of the House of Representatives, all things being equal. Secondly, the marginal changes in the generic ballot over the last six months. If you look at the five thirty eight average, are actually extremely modest.

So from a year ago, it has ranged from about Democrats ahead by three to about Republicans ahead by three. And right now, according to the five thirty eight average. Republicans are leading by about half of one percent. This is consistent with almost any margin of error, and it’s consistent with either party winning the House of Representatives. Which is not to say that I think the democrats are likely to retain control of it.

It’s just that I think with democratic losses, our probably going to be well within what we would think of as what you would expect the incumbent party to lose. Not something that there should be a circular firing squad about or an assumption that they did something catastrophic wrong in their governance just the sort of normal correction that we expect. The second point that I’d like to make involves the shape of the electorate. The generic ballot polls assume that we have some as do all poles assume that we have our hands around what the electorate is likely to look at. And I am very skeptical of that.

For a variety of reasons in the selection. One of them is dobs. I think we just do not have our hands around the question of how many suburban women are energized about this election in a way that you would not expect them to be in a midterm election. I think we also don’t have a good sense of how many lower income women who might not be normal voters in this context are certain voters. So our sense of what a likely voter is is a it influx.

And then secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we have seen in all of the states in which voting is open. This real surge. This is going to be a very high turnout election. Presidential election level turnout in a midterm election. In that context, I think it it wires a a certain humility in us to think we understand the actual shape of the electorate that is gonna turn out.

And in that context, I will note that Democrats have actually over performed their polls in the off cycle elections that have happened over the last few months. And so I would be careful about measuring the drapes if I were Kevin McCarthy or, you know, Jim Jordan for chairman of whatever Hunter Biden invests a gate of committee he wants to run. And I would also be careful on the Democratic side about recriminations for an election that they have not yet lost. And on the analysis side about scribing which of their many errors is to blame for the election that they have not yet lost. Okay.

Duly

noted your your descent I guess we’ll close out this segment with the evergreen sentiment for an election year, which is it all comes down to turnout. So

Alright. Let’s talk a little bit

more about the electorate and specifically about Hispanic voters and whether Democrats have misjudged them. Hispanic voters still lean very heavily democrat, but there’s been a lot of talk about a shift toward the Republicans. And so I’d like to hear you all on this topic. So Chuck, for example, you you noted that There are a goodly number of immigrants from Latin America these days that come from countries where socialism has killed their their home countries, you know, Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and these voters are Absolutely adamantly against anything that’s smack of socialism. Yeah, it’s reached the

point where we’ve been talking a little bit about this double reversed democratic strategy where they’re actually running they’re running a campaign against Maria, Elvira Salazar, who’s the incumbent congresswoman down in one of the districts in Miami who is of Cuban descent and they’re running an attack line against her, calling her a socialist. But as the Democrats are calling her a socialist because they understand how powerful this epithete is in certain Latin American communities. I think as a as a high level point, this illustrates that Latino or Hispanic is a total misnomer to the extent that people consider it to designate a unified political or cultural group. There’s tremendous variety in terms of heritage, history, there’s a there’s a group you might call Hispanic and New Mexico that consists of the descendants of people who were settled in that state before the United States was even founded. Puerto Ricans have migrated in large numbers to Orlando and created sort of a whole new ethnic hub in the middle of that state.

So there’s the lesson we should all take from this is don’t overgeneralize. And I think frankly, that’s something the democrats, sorry to harp on their mistakes, Ben, that’s something they have tended to do. In large part because they’re encouraged by the consultants and analysts who make a living, marketing things to Hispanics in a sort of a generic way. Having said that, I’ll make a bend with a slight cautionary note and say that I think it still remains to be seen just how big the drift toward the Republicans is going to be. If it happens, it’s going to happen because education per se is becoming a stronger dividing line in our politics than ethnicity.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the analytical work that’s been done showing that college education is now a real dividing line between Republicans and Democrats with the Democrats getting the people with the BAs and above. And many Latinos do not have a college education and therefore sort of fall into what we lose called the working class. I might add that law enforcement is an upward career path for many Latino men and women in this country. They they tend to be overrepresented in the Miami Dade metro police and in the border patrol. And if you think about the situation around crime, black lives matter, and so forth.

You can see where I’m going with that. So I think it remains to be seen how large the drift toward the Republicans will be. But I think the reality is the Democrats can’t afford to have it be very large at all before their sort of basic electoral business model starts to fall apart. And I must say if there’s going to be any kind of long term alarm bell that rings for them of this, it would be that they started to hemorrhage, say, five, ten, fifteen points there. The huge irony of course being that in twenty twelve, it was the Republicans who thought they needed to change their position on immigration.

They had that famous white paper after Mitt Romney lost. And all this expansion of their appeal to the Latino vote is occurring in the post Trump years. I don’t know if anybody’s really figured out why that is happening and what it means. Donald Berwick: Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Well, we just happen

to have somebody on this panel whose family traces its ancestry back to, you know, many generations in New Mexico. Right, Linda? I I

didn’t know that, but you learned

something. Yeah. Yeah. Sixteen o one. Yes.

They were conquistadors. Yeah. And and and by the way, you know, I it’s so nice to hear, try say what he did because, you know, I’ve been writing about this topic for many years. My first book out of the barrio was written and published in nineteen ninety one, and it made many of these points. First and foremost that the whole idea of anything such as ant Hispanic or Latino is a fabrication These are people whose ancestors hail from twenty four different countries.

They do have a common language, but if you’ve ever listened to somebody from Puerto Rico speak and then listen to somebody from Argentina or Mexico. You’ll hear that they’re very, very different. Many of the words are different. Certainly, the inflection is different. So and the cultures are different.

And Chuck wonders what explains the drift towards Trump. And I think Certainly, there we saw that in the twenty twenty election along the border. First and foremost, what drives Hispanics is what drives most working class people. And Chuck is right, at least for the generation who are working as opposed to to young people who may still be in school and not yet able to vote or or have graduated college and

are

voting. That they are very entrepreneurial, you know, much more likely to be small business people, much more, I think, driven by the economy and the opportunities to provided. And and, frankly, what happened during the Trump years, I don’t wanna give credit to Donald Trump himself, but the economy was doing very well. People were working small business people were being able to expand their businesses, and this had a great appeal. There also is, I think, and this is something that nobody likes to talk about.

We talked about it a few weeks ago. On the podcast. There are frictions between the Mexican American community in particular and the black community. And, you know, there was a time when we used to talk about blacks and Hispanics and and talk about it in terms as if it was all one big group and one happy family all to the left, all voting, Democrat. Hispanics they don’t constitute a racial group.

And among Mexican Americans, for example, used to be a majority. I think it’s still a plurality. Identify their race as white. And whether, you know, whatever you think about that, I think what it really reflects is an aspiration to be part of the great whole of America. And they are an immigrant group by and large.

And because of that, I think they behave much more like immigrants than obviously, the black community does, which faces a very different history of discrimination in the United States, and they’ve suffered much worse discrimination in leaving aside the question of slavery. So it’s a complicated community, but there’s another phenomena going on in and that is that there is a lot of outreach to Hispanic voters that’s taking place under the radar by the Republican National Committee. I haven’t had the TV on this morning. They were doing a report at one of the colleges in Arizona and they were talking to

young Mexican

American by and large voters. And they all talked about how many texts they get every single day from the Republican Party. Now, all of these people happen to be planning on voting Democrat. But I still thought it was striking that there has been so much more outreach. And again, a lot of it I think is under the radar.

And it’s not focused on issues like immigration. It is focused on the economy. And I, you know, I think we will continue to see that drift of Hispanic voters as they move up the economic ladder. They are much more likely, first of all, to be assimilated and to vote as others, you know, in whatever their economic class is. With, you know, the college educated more likely probably to vote democrat, but many of the small business people in the and the those who are working class and identify maybe as Mexican and American, but also as white, a voting Republican.

Ben,

there was a paper by Gabriel Sanchez published on the brookings website that tracked the motivations for Hispanics voting or he used the term Latinos. But it was a very interesting chart. It shows the reasons for voting among certain people who were polled, and partisanship began to pay more and more of a role wanting to support a Republican or wanting strongly to support a Democrat. The percentage of Latinos who said that the thing that motivated them to vote as they did was to support and represent Latinos has declined steadily. It was over forty percent in twenty sixteen and then it was below in twenty eighteen and drop dramatically, almost down to twenty percent in twenty twenty.

Now that’s just one poll, but it does sort of point to a clining sense of identity voting by people of who who speaks Spanish as their ancestral language. Which should surprise nobody. I mean, as Linda rightly points out,

you’re talking about a group of voters, which is actually many groups of voters, with incredibly diverse backgrounds regionally geographically in terms of the amount of time they’ve been here, the absurdity of the demographic identification, you can see it if you just replace the word Hispanic or Latino with the word Anglo. Right? Like, to to group all the people together as voters whose, you know, who come from English speaking backgrounds. You’d say, well, you’d never do that. And yet, we do do that in the context of Hispanic voters.

And It masks very significant differences politically. Very significant differences in terms of people’s relationships with, as Chuck was talking about, with things like the politics of the countries from which they came, whether it’s you know, sort of a Cuban aversion to the word socialism or in more recent ways of immigration, Venezuelan, you know, all of this gets lost in the term Hispanic. And so I don’t think it should surprise anyone that this is not a block voting situation. It’s not a situation where it should surprise people that South Texas voters are different from other Texas Hispanic voters, are different from South Florida voters, are different from Puerto Ricans in New York. I mean, and, you know, linguistic determinism is is a silly way to think about the way voters will behave.

You have to think about these communities as individual communities. And most individual communities will tend to vote according to the perceived self interest of their local groups rather than saying Well, what language do I speak? And how do other people who speak this language natively or who are descended from people who speak this language natively vote. And I think it just reflects a a a very reductionist way of understanding what are actually very complicated and diverse communities to that we ever allowed ourselves to reduce the situation to that degree. Bill,

we’ve chastised the democrats for treating Hispanics as a as a unified group. But, I mean, I just cannot get over the irony. You remember Ann Coulter’s book right around the time that Donald Trump was running for president. It was called adios America. And the premise of this book was that if we allow in any more of those darn Hispanic people, the America we’ve known and loved is over.

Because all they want is handouts from the government and they’ll never learn English or what, you know, the usual. Stuff. And of course, just look at the the Pew survey that came out, I think, in twenty twenty, showing that more Hispanics have a negative view of socialism than a positive one by fifty three to forty one percent and they have a very positive view toward capitalism as Linda and others were were just saying. So it isn’t just the democrats who got these people wrong. It was it was also the Republicans.

Well,

experiences taught me that if I simply take what Anne Coulter says and put a minus sign in front of it, I’m very likely to be on the right track. Let me be a little bit more analytical here and put this debate into both historical and empirical context. I don’t know when the phrase people of color came into vogue. But in my judgment, it represents a political hope, not a political group. To be specific, it represents a hope widely shared by Democrats, the Latinos, and other immigrant groups.

That have surged into the country since the liberalization of US immigration laws that occurred in the mid nineteen sixties will have the same outlook on the country, on social and economic issues on discrimination, etcetera, as African Americans. And using the African American experience as the template for the immigrant experience. I think is a fundamental analytical mistake. And it led some very shrewd analysts fifteen or twenty years ago, people who’ve now repented of their views. To introduce a kind of demographic determinism into democratic thinking on this issue.

On the evidence front, as Mona knows, because she was part of the public discussion, bookings has teamed up with the Public Religion Research Institute to conduct something called the American Value Series study rather in a series that goes back thirteen years. And the latest version was just released on Thursday, and it had some very interesting findings about Hispanics as a group as distinct, for example, from African Americans. And some of this has to do with gender politics and gender relations. The respondents in the survey, for example, were asked whether they agree or disagree with the proposition that in contemporary America, men are being punished just for acting like men. And Hispanics were eleven percentage points more likely to answer that question in the affirmative than African Americans were.

When respondents were asked, well, do you think our society has become, quote, too soft and feminine again by eleven percentage points, Hispanics were more likely to answer that in the affirmative than African Americans. I could go on, but gender politics in the Hispanic community and the aggregate for all of the internal differences that it is play out noticeably differently from gender politics inside the African American community and I think that is working to the advantage of Republicans who have associated themselves with the complaints of men who feel that they are discriminated against for being men. More than ten years ago, my brookings colleague, Elaine Kmart, who is of Italian heritage, Sicily, to be precise, predicted that within a generation, Hispanics would come to resemble Italians more than African Americans that they indeed would be the Italians of the twenty first century. And I would say right now, that proposition is looking pretty good. Italians were new deal democrats but they jumped ship when the Democratic Party changed in the nineteen sixties, and they are now as a group staunchly.

Republican. And unless Democrats play their cards very well, the same thing could well happen with Hispanics. Now we have

to zip through our highlight and low light of the week because we are hard up against it. We have another pod cash that needs to record, so I’m gonna ask everybody to be very pissy. Let’s start with you, Chuck Lane. Well,

my low light will be what we started this podcast with that really terrible debacle over the progressive letter seeming to back away to call for negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Obviously, it’s an unforced error that can be undone, but the damage will be lasting. Linda Chavez.

While continuing my masochistic trend of the last several weeks, I’m gonna recommend this week that listeners listen to the Trump tapes. I actually purchased it through Audible. I’ve been listening to it. This is Bob Woodward’s release of all of his interview tapes with Donald Trump. And for those who think they’ve well, I’ve read this before.

I read rage. I read the fear. I read the various books about Donald Trump. Bob Woodward is right. It is very different to hear Donald Trump in his own voice And what is particularly striking is the mental deterioration that occurred during his four years in office and I recommend the book.

Bob Woodward doesn’t need me to sell more books, but I do think it’s worth listening to. Interesting. Okay. Benwittice, So I want to take a needless swipe at climate activists today for the rather

goofy but pretty dangerous habit of gluing themselves to priceless works of art. Now, I am not opposed to flamboyant and even semi legal demonstrations I have been engaged as some listeners will know for the past several months in actions involving lights and the Russian embassies in the United States, in Canada, and in most recently in Paris where the action was not in highly consistent with local law. That said, I do think there should be a relationship approximate relationship between the target that you are attacking and the issue that you’re upset about. So when I’m upset about, you know, Russian genocide in Ukraine, I don’t attack a vermeer. I go after the Russian embassy which has some relationship to that.

And I think the climate activists really need to think about what they’re drawing attention to when they glue themselves to a vermeer or throw tomato juice at some other work of art what they are actually drawing attention to has nothing to do with climate. It has

to do with something like museum security. I agree a hundred percent. I would just add that I think they chose artwork that had glass covers. I don’t think they surely. Yes.

And and that and that works perfectly well until, say, you break the glass. No. Of course. No. It comes

with that saying until something

goes wrong

and you knock

the thing off. Right. Right. Of

course. Of course. Of course.

What did poor Johannes Vermeer ever do. Yeah. Exactly. The climate crisis worse. Right.

And I just think we need there needs to be a relationship between the target and the problem.

I completely

agree. Okay. Bill Galston, it will not surprise you to learn that Chuck took

my low light. So I will now proceed to my second low light which was the senatorial debate in Pennsylvania. When you have a choice between unappetizing options, choose the least bad one.

And I’m

afraid that the Federman campaign violated that doctrine. And the result was a disaster that could well cost Democrats control of the US senate.

Right. Okay. My low light is that this is gonna be tiny bit wonky, but bear with me. The Food and Drug Administration has announced that it is indefinitely postponing an expert panel that was supposed to meet on granting over the counter status to birth control pills. This should be a no brainer.

K? Birth control pills should be available over the counter. They are in lots of other places around the world. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is for it as is the AMA. The American academy of family physicians, etcetera, etcetera.

They all say it’s totally fine and the FDA is dragging its feet and in particular, after the overturning of Roe with the Dobbs’ decision, the fact that the FDA would delay this is unconscionable. Alright, with that, I want to thank our guests, Chuck Lane, and our special fill in, Benjamin Witties, and of course, all of our regulars and our listeners, also Jason Brown, our sound engineer today and Katie Cooper, our producer. I want to thank all our listeners and we will return next week as every week.

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