3 Takeaways - Highlight on Politics: 5 of the World’s Sharpest Minds in Politics (#216)

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Election fever is heating up, and no matter how you plan on voting, these 3 Takeaways excerpts provide valuable insight into our political challenges, plus thoughts on how to resolve them. Guests include Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua; former political consultant and presidential advisor Karl Rove; White House advisor to four U.S. presidents David Gergen; political commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will; and journalist extraordinaire Fareed Zakaria.

It's election season, and in this special highlights episode of Three Takeaways, the focus is on the deepening divisions and the challenges facing American politics. This episode brings together insights from five distinguished guests, each offering a unique perspective on the current state of the political landscape and what lies ahead. First, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua discusses how group identity and tribalism have fueled partisanship in the U.S. She explores how even young children display unconscious bias and explains how this tribal behavior has not only divided the country, but also contributed to U.S. policy failures abroad. Then, former political consultant and

presidential advisor Karl Rove gives his candid view on the current ugliness in American politics. He highlights the challenges both the Republican and Democratic parties face, and he offers a provocative analysis of where both parties have gone astray. And last, he offers his vision for how the country can be restored. Next, David Gergen, a White House advisor to four U.S. presidents, both Democrats, believing that they have the potential to lead with wisdom, if given the opportunity. From a conservative perspective, George Will, a political commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, examines the current state of both parties. He critiques Donald Trump's impact on the Republican Party, and he laments how progressives have come to dominate the Democratic Party's agenda. George Will also discusses the dangers of deficit spending, highlighting the unified stance of political elites across the spectrum on this issue. Finally, Fareed Zakaria shares the very strange and unique thing that

Americans have done to their political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have lost their ability to select candidates for president. The parties, he explains, have become empty shells. America now has a system in which political entrepreneurs without legislative accomplishments are the stars of the Republican and Democratic parties. Through these powerful excerpts, listeners will gain a multifaceted understanding of the political challenges facing America today, along with thoughtful considerations on how to navigate them. Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists.

Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. I'm delighted to be here today with Amy Chua. She's a professor at Yale, a leading original thinker. She's been named one of Time Magazine's most influential people, one of The Atlantic's brave thinkers, and also one of foreign policy's global thinkers. In a fascinating study, children between the ages of four and eight, which is really young, were randomly assigned to either the red team or the blue team, which you wouldn't think would be a very important distinction. But these kids were then given a

t-shirt, of course, bonding color. So they were either wearing a red t-shirt or a blue t-shirt. These young subjects were then shown computer edited images of a whole bunch of other kids, half of whom were wearing red T-shirts, the other half wearing blue T-shirts. And then they were asked questions about these children in the computer. The results, Lynn, were fascinating. Even though these kids knew absolutely nothing about the children in the computer-edited images, they consistently said that they liked the kids wearing their color better, wanted to allocate more resources to them, and most disturbingly, consistently displayed systematic unconscious bias. Humans are just a little tribal. We are

very tribal. And once we identify with a group, our identities basically become sort of bound up with it. And the effect is like a drug. We experience pleasure when members of our in-group do well, even if we personally aren't actually gaining anything. And more troublingly, we experience pleasure when members of the opposite group fail or suffer misfortune. Used to be Republicans and Democrats could be friends. You could talk at dinner parties. There are these crazy studies now that show it's almost like an ethnic divide or a racial divide. Some vast number of Democrats saying they would be incredibly upset if their child married a Republican and vice versa,

you know, which is much more, I mean, it's really something relatively new. Because of our original sin of slavery, race will always be one of the major problems. And that's just not going to go away anytime soon. But equally, or at least very important, is something new. And that is the, roughly speaking, the division between cosmopolitan elites, you know, many of them living on the coast, and what you might call, well, President Trump's base of heartland or rural or southern America, blue collar white America. That divide is really stark now in a way that it wasn't before. It's almost what social scientists would call an ethnic divide. I'm excited to be with Karl Rove. Karl is credited with George W. Bush's successful

campaigns for governor of Texas and then for president of the United States. He held the title of senior advisor and deputy chief of staff during George W. Bush's presidency. He is also one of the most insightful political analysts anywhere in the world today. Both parties are disrupted and broken. Situations like this are not the result of one factor, in my opinion. They're the result of multiple factors. Part of it was the economic collapse of 2008. It caused people to fundamentally distrust the institutions of our economy, the pillars of our society. How come the bankers got bailed out? How come the car companies got bailed out? But how come ordinary Americans had to suffer? You saw the growth on the Democratic left of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The relationship between the little man

and little woman and their government is messed up and we need to rebalance it so that the little man and the little woman get a fair shake. And on the right, you saw the growth of the Tea Party move. A group of people who said the relationship between our government and the little man and little woman has been corrupted. The big boys get bailed out with a loophole or a bailout, and the little man and little woman, they have to suffer. And then we had increasingly populism on the left and right of the Democratic Party began to take root and to gain strength. And we saw it in 2016, where the Republican Party nominates a populist who had voted for John Kerry in 2004 and had invited the

Clintons to his most recent wedding. And the Democrat contest goes long because we have people on the left of the Democratic Party, at the tip of five by Bernie Sanders, who makes the contest go and go and go. And so I think that added, these players, these populist players were able to feed on the anxiety and angst of the American people in both political parties and rile them up. And then the Trump years, where we went from yang to yang with a very contentious personality who had no interest really, or maybe he had an interest, but he had no ability to bring people together. And then we had COVID, which discombobulated us from top to bottom. There are big arguments going on underneath the surface in each party. The left of the Democratic Party is in war with traditional Democrats and the populist wing of the Republican

Party is in combat with the traditional conservative wing of the Republican Party. Both parties are broken. Our political system is exemplified by enormous distrust. Americans distrust the media. They distrust their government. They distrust each other. They hate the other political party more than they love their own. As a result, we are in a tribal moment where you attack my guy, even if I don't like my guy, gal, I'm going to prepare to their defense and I'm going to hate the other party more than I love my own party. And that's not sustainable. I mean, at some point the system reverts because people are just sick of what's going on. But yeah, we're in an ugly moment. I'm excited to be with David Gergen. There's no one like him. He's not

only been a White House advisor to four presidents, he's been an advisor to both Republican and Democratic presidents. David, how do you see the state of democracy in America? Beyond anything we've seen in my lifetime, I think this goes far beyond where we were in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and early 70s. I think that there's an anger. People who were once seen as rivals now see each other as enemies. They now think of politics as a zero-sum game. If you win something, I lose something.

And politics is usually, as independents, when successfully practicing our democracy, is a win-win. And we've lost so much of that capacity. And it's really hard to think that there was time when I was growing up, this was before you came along, that we had a sense of heroes in our country. And some of them were in political leadership, but some were in sports, and some were the Jackie Robinson of that day. And heroes have now become celebrities.

We're interested because of the Kardashians or who are they, but they're not our heroes. The question becomes, where are the Zelenskys in our America? We don't seem to have any at the moment. I think they're going to be out there. I think that there are some individuals that are coming along. And one of the reasons I'm so much in favor of the millennials and the Gen Z going forward, is they have been knocked around. They had to have the hard times in life. They've had a lot of adversity in their lives. They've seen country knocked down.

But that toughened them up. Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her son, John Quincy, when he was a teenager, through a famous letter, in which she made the argument that adversity brings opportunity, opportunity for people to grow and people. And from national adversity so often comes statesmen. It's important to remember that. My friend Warren Bennis, who was a leadership guru, dear man, used to ask me the question, how is it that when we were a country of three million people back in the early days of the

Republic, and we produced six world-class leaders in that small population. You know, there was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, all six of that world-class leader. And then Warren Bennis would say, today we have 330 million Americans and we have a hard time finding one world-class leader in the group.

And something happened there that we need to address. And I think Abigail was right. In this university, we could see some of the real leaders reemerge. They are emerged. And I'm encouraged about that. I confess that I'm a short-term pessimist. I think the next few years are going to be extremely rough. Next five or six years, we'll maybe become uncoverable.

But I'm increasingly a long-term optimist. I do think there are glimmers of hope that are out there now that were not there a few years ago. And I see them coming through my classrooms at the Kennedy School, at Harvard. And I'm just seeing the quality of students coming through has gone just straight up. I'm excited to be with George Will. He's a columnist for The Washington Post and is known for his independent thought and insights and his contributions to the conservative movement.

He's won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. What does the Republican Party stand for today? Do you see it as being conservative and standing for limited government and markets? Well, to put it politely, I guess you'd say, and perhaps optimistically, the Republican Party is schizophrenic today. There's a conservative understanding of the role of judiciary and supervising the excesses of democracy and all the rest. But this is less important today, less garish than the Republican parties. I'm not going to say loyalty to Trump because loyalty implies some kind of affection. No one likes Mr. Trump. Even those who profess to don't. They're terrified of him because they

think, and they're not necessarily wrong, that one dyspeptic tweet from Mar-a-Lago can end their careers, which doesn't make for a happy party. A party that is terrified for a substantial portion of its voters is a funny political party and not a happy party. It's hard to know what Donald Trump cares about other than Donald Trump. And when a political party becomes preoccupied with devotion to a person rather than a program, there's a sense in which it leaves politics and becomes a performative kind of arena for virtue signaling and striking poses and giving disaffected people the catharsis of themselves voting for an audience. It's not an edifying spectacle. How do you see the Democratic Party?

The Democratic Party is also dominated by a tail that wags the bigger dog, and that is the progressive wing is in the saddle, riding poor Joe Biden. In the Democratic contest for the 2020 nomination, only one-third of those who participated in the nominating process voted for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. So progressives are at most a third of the Democratic Party. You have said that the political class today is more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. Can you explain that? Sure. more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. Can you explain that?

Sure. From Elizabeth Morin on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, the political class is united by a constant, powerful imperative for deficit spending. Give the American people a dollar's worth of government goods and services, charge them only 75 cents for it. The public's happy. It's happy. This terrific fall of a quarter of the cost of our consumption of goods and services off on the unconsenting because unborn future Americans. We used to borrow money for the future. We fought wars for

the future. We built roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, harbors for the future. Now we're borrowing again to finance our own current consumption of goods and services. If that isn't decadent and immoral, I don't know what is. Today, I'm excited to be with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a bestselling author. He's the author of five New York Times bestselling books, and his most recent book, which is wonderful, is Age of Revolutions. How do you see the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S.? Are they weakened shells? Fundamentally, we have done something very

strange to our political parties. We took away their primary function. The primary function of every political party is to choose a candidate. The secondary function, you could say, is choose a platform and then raise money around it. We've really taken most of those functions away from the parties. The primary system means that the 10% that is most extreme, most engaged in each party chooses the candidate. That, by the way, is a unique system. No other advanced democracy in the world does it this way. And every other democracy, the party, through some internal means, chooses the candidate and then presents it to you for the election. We have an election

before we have the election. And what does that mean? That means that the party elders, party officials, senior party members lose power, and party activists, extremists, the people on Twitter, the people who go to primaries, they gain power. The people I mentioned, the party elders, tend to be mainstream.

They're politicians. They've been elected by broad constituencies. They represent, in a sense, the center of the political spectrum. The people who vote in primaries tend to represent the extreme. So it's been a very bad trade that we've made. And it means that the party is really now a shell, as you say, within which political entrepreneurs act. And if you can raise the money and you can gain attention, you become important. Give you one example. In the old days, the way you became prominent as a congressperson was you gained expertise, you went on big committees, you gained

legislative achievements, and that made you famous. Today, the way you become famous is you go on Twitter, you go on cable TV, you raise money, you know, that becomes your fundraising mechanism. And so you have people like AOC and Matt Goetz on either side, neither of whom have any legislative accomplishments to them. But they are great on Twitter. They're great on social media. They're great on. Those are the stars of the Republican Democratic Party. I hope that you've enjoyed this special election highlights episode. Stay tuned for more highlight episodes. If you'd like to listen to any of the full episodes, Yale Professor Amy Chua is episode 77. Karl Rove is episode 168.

Presidential Advisor David Gergen is episode 96. Conservative columnist George Will is episode 87. And Fareed Zakaria is episode 209. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope that you are, please review us in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. And if you're interested, you can also sign up for the weekly Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com,

where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also find on our Three Takeaways website, our featured speakers, as well as our episodes organized by category. And if you'd like, you can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.