The Dispatch Podcast - Infrastructure Push and Bumpy Roads

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

President Biden introduced a massive $2 trillion infrastructure plan in Pittsburgh, and the gang is wondering what type of fight the GOP is going to put up against the bill. Steve asks, “You’d think this might be something Republicans would object to and fight pretty strongly. Are you getting the sense that Republicans will do that?” To hear everyone’s dejected response to that question, just hit the play button. Other topics discussed are whether or not vaccine passports are a good idea, the first rumblings of 2024 presidential politics, and, finally, religion in America and what the growing number of “nones” means for the country’s future. Show Notes: -The latest version of The Sweep (read the whole thing!) -Politico polling on infrastructure plan -Israel’s vaccine passport protocols -Echelon Insights 2024 presidential polling -U.S. church membership falls below majority for first time - Gallup Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This week, lots to talk about. The Biden administration is unveiling a $2 trillion dollar infrastructure package. We got to talk about vaccine passports and the soft launch of the 2024 campaigns, plus the decline of church membership. Let's dive right in, Steve, two trillion-dollar infrastructure package. Two-tillion-dollar infrastructure package that is likely to be the first of two major infrastructure packages, the other one costing potentially as much as this $2.3 trillion proposed package from the White House. We're just getting details of the White House's proposal. We've known that the White House wanted to do this.

We've known roughly that they wanted to break it up into two different proposals. But we're now seeing some of the details. $600 billion for America's infrastructure, $300 billion for domestic manufacturers, $200 billion in housing infrastructure, lots of additional priorities. They're pitching this as a jobs plan, as a climate change. plan national broadband, modernizing the power grid, upgrading school facilities, research and development projects, drinking water safe. If it's a priority of Democrats, it's likely somewhere in this bill or will be in the next one. How are they going to pay for it?

The White House says that they're going to pay for it with a wide variety of new taxes, bumping up the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, global minimum tax paid from 13% to 21% going after fossil fuels, ending tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, and raising taxes on the wealthy in a variety of ways. My first question actually goes to you, Sarah, since you addressed the polling on some of this in this week's sweep. this is something, at least at the beginning, seems unlikely to get much Republican support. And the White House doesn't really seem to be looking for much Republican support.

They're embracing this as a New Deal style, major transformative spending project on top of the $1.9 trillion in COVID relief. That was actually really COVID relief at a lot more. And as I said, they're going big in all likelihood with another one of these. You would think that this might be something Republicans would object to and fight pretty strongly. Are you getting the sense that Republicans will do that? And if so, what does the polling tell us about the popularity of these kinds of spending initiatives and the taxes that are being discussed to pay for, at least part of them? so much there and so much to talk about on this on that exact question. So first of all,

what's interesting about this plan to me on the politics is that it kind of ignores the rescambling of the parties that have been going on. On the one hand, Republicans are in a bit of a tough spot, hard to say, my, limited government when you didn't care about spending or limited government for the last four years in like a really, really obvious, you know, outrageous way. On the other hand, there are Democrats who have already said they're not going to vote for this bill. On the progressive left, they've said there's not enough on climate change. In the middle, there's some balking at the spending. And on the more conservative side, they're concerned about some of the businesses moving overseas, stuff like that.

But I found it. So polling-wise, this is going to be incredibly popular at the front end, calling something an infrastructure business. is good for polling business, if you will. And then the top lines that the administration is putting out, which is what people are going to hear first, very popular, talking about fixing roads and bridges. That always gets bipartisan support and polling. I think that the $100 billion or so that they are saying

is in the bill for expanding broadband connectivity across the country will be incredibly popular. What's interesting is, as you see the shift in political constituents, where union workers are actually shifting a little more towards the Republicans and you have a college divide. College educated voters more likely to be Democrats, non-college educators, educated more likely to be Republicans. This bill will appeal to a lot of those new Republicans. Now, whether they'll stay Republicans, whether this will somehow stem that shift, maybe that's what the Biden administration is thinking. I find that to be.

be a fascinating element of this between the sort of pro-union stuff and the broadband stuff that will hit mostly rural communities, frankly, a lot to like in polling when you ask folks. Now, here's the flip side. They haven't heard the opposition to the bill. They haven't heard those little things that are in the bill that people seize on that will drive them crazy and will drive down the numbers. But we had this conversation a couple weeks ago where Republicans have had options to really message on legislation and on policy like they did with Obamacare and just nosedive the popularity of a bill into the ground

once they grab onto the messaging. But they seem pretty distracted. We used Dr. Seuss as an example last time. That may be the stand-in for us for a while of sort of seizing on a cultural issue that has nothing to do with the workings of government and then letting these big bills sail through. Big question for the Democrats, though,

if they're not seeking Republican support in the Senate, are they willing to blow up the filibuster on that? Lots there as well to pick up on. Jonah, I'll go to you next. I think one of the most interesting points Sarah raises is this intra-Republican split. I mean, we've talked about this on the podcast several times before you've looked at it pretty

intensely on the remnant. There's this huge split among Republicans about a sort of traditional, we might call the movement conservative-style Republicans on the one hand, which I would say with establishment Republicans were kind of the dominant forces in the Republican Party over the past four decades. And on the other hand, a group of new right Republicans who seem much more comfortable with big government so long as big government pursues the ends that they deem correct or or in support of the common good. Are Republicans, given the lack of focus in the last five years from Republicans on spending and size and scope of government issues in general, and this split in particular,

do you expect Republicans will be able to mount any kind of a serious attack or counterattack or critique of what the Democrats are proposing here? No. Next question. David. I mean, part of the problem is that, I mean, it's almost a sociological problem, is the number of sort of fiscal hawk conservatives who were known as fiscal hawk conservatives, including some friends of mine, you know, like Larry Cudlow, you know, and, you know, and Kevin Hassett, and then other people who I wouldn't necessarily call friends anymore, so I won't have to name them, but, um, uh, they went along.

They gave permission structure for all the stuff that Trump wanted to do. They, uh, gave, uh, rhetorical and political cover for all sorts of grandiose, you know, big spending things. I mean, I used to joke that George W. Bush was spending money like a pimp with a week to live. And now he looks like frugal compared to every president we've had since. And I think, so at this point, part of the problem is that those people don't have the heavy hitter credibility within the conversation on the right that they once did. As I mentioned, I think the last time I was on here, I think part of the problem for Republican politics, politicians is rather than actually open themselves up to the charge of hypocrisy, they're just staying quiet, you know, and meanwhile, the Trump years created this new avenue for people often fighting against straw men, you know, calling them market fundamentalists and saying that

the libertarians ran Washington for the last 30 years. But it is, they have now gotten a beachhead in the right-wing conversation to say that conservatives really shouldn't be opposed to big sweeping spending programs and industrial policy and all that. I mean, there are some people

who are smart about it and say you don't have to go back to raw libertarianism to still care about debt and deficit, but they're a minority among that crowd. The majority of that crowd, you know, basically laid down markers that they're in favor of massive spending.

And so now they're only objective have to be on some specifics that the Democrats are going to be spending on, and that's going to make it a culture war fight. It's not going to be about spending. It's not going to be about debt. It's not going to be about deficit. It's going to be about look how they want to spend your tax dollars on, you know, teaching lesbian poetry in the antebellum South or something.

I don't know. But it's not going to be, but it can't be like we're against the actual spending and growth of government stuff because that argument is. been nullified. And so you get this catalytic effect that everything has to be a cultural war fight because that's the only space left for a lot of these guys to be consistent on and to fight on and to say things that the audience actually wants to hear anyway.

So that, David, is an extraordinarily depressing assessment of the current situation. And accurate. See, the great thing is that in these days, depressing and accurate are synonyms. Yeah. Yes. But that's, I mean, you know, as somebody considers himself of an old school movement conservative, classical liberal, conservative libertarian,

size and scope of government really matters to me. In some ways, it's the thing that we should be fighting about most. And Jonah's argument is basically, yeah, that's probably not going to be the fight. It hasn't been the fight in the past five years. It's not going to be the fight now, in part because it hasn't been the fight in the past five years. But the underlying fundamentals of government and our spending are debts and deficits haven't changed. If anything, the rather urgent situation, I think approaching a debt crisis, has become more urgent. You had $5.3 trillion in spending on COVID relief before the latest COVID relief package.

You're approaching $28 trillion in debt, $85,000 per person in the United States. And the Republican Party can't mount an argument about the size and scope of government? Yeah. You know, there's an irony here in the, in when Joan was talking about the new right guys, a lot of these guys are simultaneously people who believe in, quite frankly, a lot of the provisions that were in, that, that are in the infrastructure plan, who quite frankly believe what's in some of the provisions that were in the COVID relief package. But there are also people who are convinced that Biden is a threat to the existence of the country.

And so there's a mandatory total resistance against Biden, even in the face of maybe some provisions or some things you might like. These two things are happening at the same time. And then if you kind of put that into the conservative media ecosystem, as near as I can tell, Republicans, if all you did was watch sort of Fox or OAN or Newsmax or. talk in talk radio, as near as I can tell, Republicans voted 100% against the $1.9 trillion package to save Dr. Seuss. So, you know, I think that it's like culture war all the way down, but because there is so much culture war hostility, it's foreclosing compromise on other things that maybe Republican voters might want, but what Republican voters, especially primary voters, really want is culture war. And culture war means massive resistance to the Biden.

agenda, you know, here's the thing that I wonder about, though. What I wonder about is if a Biden gets frustrated and sees all of his big legislative initiatives stacking up like ships waiting for the clearing of the Suez Canal, if he says, here's the strategic filibuster busting, it's infrastructure. It's not high. hyper divisive stuff like the Equality Act. It's not hyper-divisive stuff like voting. It's infrastructure. Sorry, I had to get rid of the infrastructure to repair roads and bridges.

That's what I had to do. Get rid of the filibuster. Yeah, yeah, get rid of the filibuster to repair roads and bridges. I had to get, that's how bad they are, America. They wouldn't let me repair the bridges in your town. They wouldn't let me repair and widen the roads that you're stuck on. every day in your commute. That's how intransigent they were. So that's why the filibuster had to go. It wasn't to wipe out religious liberty. It's not to pack the court. It's not for all of those

things. They wouldn't even let me build a bridge. And I think that if you're talking about sort of politically, strategically about busting the filibuster, I wonder if an infrastructure bill, which would be widely popular, that is not, doesn't touch nearly the same third rails that voting does, or the Equality Act does, if that's how this ends up happening. And if I was a Republican in the Senate, I might be thinking hard about if that was a possibility. Also, just to note,

this is an infrastructure bill. Calling it an infrastructure bill is both good messaging and also pretty accurate. But that's second bill you talked about, Steve, that they're calling the second infrastructure bill is like infrastructure in a metaphorical. sense. I mean, everything is infrastructure, right? If the U.S. Congress is doing it, they're trying to build up America. If Republicans let them call that second bill an infrastructure bill,

they should cease to be a political party because that is malpractice politically. Well, you might have a point. You might have a point there. Look, I mean, I think, I mean, I would love to offer a sharply different understanding of the current political dynamics than we've heard from the three of you. Unfortunately, in this instance, I think you're wise and prophetic. I think we're likely to have a debate with a lot of discussion from Republicans, a lot of shouting from Republicans about socialism, while not actually really fighting these kinds of pretty significant. And again, in the terms of the Biden White House, self-described transformative New Deal style overhaul of the way that the U.S.

government relates to its citizens. I think there will be a big fight. I just don't think Republicans will make many actual points on the specifics of expanding government. I agree with all that, and I agree with all the, for the most part, all the punitry here, including the punitry that came out of my pie hole. But I do think that if we are, if you were like an historian looking back 25 years from now, assuming that we're not all living in caves, one of the, I think the sort of meta narrative things to get all grandiose about all this that has been going on is what we're witnessing is, like I have friends who tell me not to worry about inflation, who I trust.

and I you know if we're a metropinear who spends a lot of time thinking about this tells me there's not a lot of evidence that inflation is coming I'm not saying that makes him right it just means that me that by and by my light makes it de facto

a reasonable position to hold and he could still be wrong but I don't know and I find it all witchcraft but I think as a political and psychological matter to live in a society that no longer actually cares about inflation and no longer actually cares about debt and deficit whether it's right

on the economic facts or not gets you this kind of stuff. We have spent the American Recovery Act alone thing was $100 billion more than the total GDP of Italy. And collectively, we basically have spent the GDP of Western Europe or close to it on the pandemic. And that doesn't even count all the stuff that's on the books that's technically not spending from the Federal Reserve. And if you did put that on the books,

you double it again in terms of loan guarantees and all that kind of stuff. If there's no inflation, that's great. If debt doesn't matter anymore, that's great. But what defines your politics when you might as well be printing trillion dollar coins when money, when these rules don't apply? No one's ever lived in that society successfully. So it's just, it's, it's, it's undiscovered country.

And it's, and I don't know what's going to happen, but it's fascinating. politics where you have two parties that basically want to compete over who can spend more. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance

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That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. Speaking of popularity, let's move from the very popular to the pretty unpopular, Jonah, vaccine passports. Yeah, so. Wait, before you tell us about,

the outrage around vaccine passports. Can you tell me what a vaccine passport is? No. No, I can. So maybe we can cut this conversation a little short. No, no, no. So the problem, so it depends. Israel actually has a vaccine, like a legit, straightforward vaccine passport. It's called like the Green Pass. And once you have it, you can go into bars and restaurants and hair salons. You still have a hard time surprisingly finding a good bagel in Israel, but your COVID status won't affect it if you have the Green Pass kind of thing. But like I have a white card with the CDC logo on the top that has in handwriting my name and the date that I got my first shot. Why isn't that already a vaccine passport?

Yeah, so that's the thing, right? So in America, there is no thing that is like your official, you know, here's my vaccine passport. portfolio kind of thing that some guy in a trench coat with a German accent asks him for or anything like that. And so there are a lot of people talking past each other. I mean, got to remember that there was a time not long ago where there were people, I mean, I remember this Washington, the Washington Times writer talked about how wearing a mask made you, made the push towards wearing mask was an embrace, not just of Maoist value. but of Asian values and totalitarianism

and that this was the sinicization of America and yada, yeah, yeah. So people can be unreasonable on some of these things. I just want to put that out there as a placeholder. But so there is a lot of talk about requiring some kind of document. A lot of corporations are going to require, thinking about requiring it for sporting events,

stadiums, that kind of stuff. A lot of businesses are going to require, it for liability reasons for their employees to come back to the office. And this is causing widespread confusion about and outrage and culture war posturing on both sides where one side wants to, where one group is portraying this as Orwellian, you know, police state stuff. Coincidentally, these are the same people who really liked the idea of like Arizona's ID card stuff for immigration.

They like voter ID, but like having a document that shows you've been vaccinated, strikes them of a police state. And on the other side, there is a whiff of sort of vengeance porn to this, where you listen to some folks on MSNBC talking about how the people who don't get their vaccine passports have no right to complain because they're dumb Republican white men

and they deserve to be locked out of their livelihoods and all the rest. I find most of this culture war fight stuff absurd and dumb and not tied very much to the facts. As far as I can tell, maybe I've missed some article in my reading and my homework on all of this.

But as a practical matter, I think I'm torn about it. And I don't know exactly, and I can walk through the, I think, the practical problems with how this would or would not work. But I'll throw it to you, David. Am I missing something? Are you like, why is Jonah completely buttering his explanation of the vaccine passport issue? Or do I have it about right?

You know, I was, I've been thinking about this argument for like the last 24 hours because I want to write about it. And I finally have figured out exactly what I think about the conversation right now, that it's wildly premature and unnecessarily and therefore unnecessarily divisive. And why do I say this? We're still in a stage where there is more vaccine, I mean, more demand for the vaccine than there is vaccine. And we're still in a stage where we're working through the persuasive aspects of breaking

down vaccine hesitancy, where we're making steady progress in getting a greater and greater number and percentage of Americans vaccinated. We don't yet know what the world is going to look like by, say, July 1 or when you can honestly say there is now more than enough vaccine to vaccinate every single person who is of the age that they need to be vaccinated. And therefore, we will now start to impose limitations or restrictions on those people, whether coming from government or private sources on those people who choose not to be vaccinated. So we're a long way away from that. I mean, not long way, weeks, a couple of months. Once we get to that point, we're going to know a lot more. We're going to know what is the current rate of infection?

I mean, how flat and gone is the curve? How many people are getting sick? Is this a thing where the combination of the number of people have been vaccinated plus the number of people who've already had the virus means that we really are in a situation where it's been largely stamped out? So we don't really have to have this conversation. And then in what context is the, are we going to be sort of requiring the vaccine? I think if it's left up to private entities and private businesses, those public-facing

businesses like grocery stores, like shopping malls, like Walmart, Costco, highly unlikely that they would say, you've got to have a vaccine card to enter. Highly unlikely. I mean, number one, they're going to trigger a big public backlash. Number two, they're going to limit their customers, people who have. I've been shopping for throughout the pandemic in their, you know, in their corridors. What about people who live, an employer says, okay, it's time for everybody to get off Zoom, come back to our cubicles in our small office, but we need you to be vaccinated. Well, that's much more likely.

And that's something that's going to trigger a whole lot less public outrage than saying, I can't even get like milk. Costco without a card? Are you crazy? Or what about big indoor events where people are closely packed like arenas? Well, that's a, you know, that's a different kind of issue. So again and again, what we're racing towards is here's my government, you know, I'm holding up my phone, everybody. Here's my, here's my government app that gives me my pass into life. And if you don't have my government app that gives me a pass into normal life, then I'm a second class citizen. That seems to be the way the argument's breaking down. And I don't think that's the way the argument is going to break down once we know and have a sense of how many people have been

vaccinated. What is the state of the virus? And so for now, I kind of want to say, let's just chill for a minute. Let's just wait for a minute and see where we are. We are making progress on vaccinating. We are making progress on vaccine hesitancy. And, hey, if corporations decide by July, August, September, hey, to come back and work in our cubicle farm, you've got to be vaccinated. Fine. Fine. But I seriously doubt a Costco is going to be saying, you got to wave a green card to get into this building. And I doubt the Biden administration will want to pick that fight. For one thing, there's going to be a lot of constitutional limitations on their power. So wildly premature as a debate and therefore unnecessarily divisive.

Steve, did you listen to last week's interview with Dr. Tom Frieden that we did, I assume so? Yes. So I was surprised but thought he made a persuasive case for why we actually don't want employers mandating vaccines for people to come back to work. You know, I expected because of his job and his role, and he'd be like, yes, we need to do everything we can to incentivize people to take vaccines. And instead, what he said is, look, it's not necessary and it's going to backfire. And that's not a world we want right now. At the same time and separately, you know, I have several girlfriends who are pregnant. And look, doctors are saying,

like, yeah, you can take the vaccine if you want. We don't know any particular side effects on pregnancy at the same time, there really hasn't been enough to study. And so we don't know what we don't know. It's up to you. And so a lot of those women are deciding not to get the vaccine until after they've had the baby. It would seem outrageous to me, for instance, to David's somewhat extreme point, but maybe not if CVS, which is a private company, for instance, said no one can enter our CVS's unless you've had the vaccine, you know, unless you're under the age of 16 or something. And so all these pregnant women can't get milk, you know, like, well, that's not going to work. So, and that's not going to happen, I think, is also David's point, which I agree with, because the second we are in a

position where we could have these sort of mandatory vaccines, people are going to realize that like, oh, wait, actually, that's not feasible. Well, I think it's really cute that you and David both think that the facts of this and reality is going to help shape the debate as this moves forward. I would love that to be true, but as we've seen, I think, early, it doesn't. I mean, you're going to have this kind of back and forth from proponents and opponents, and I think pretty much precisely the way that Jonah laid out at the outset. And then it probably isn't the case that reality will shape those debates, maybe until the very end. I mean, I think David, you know, as you're looking at sort of late summer into the fall, it's possible that that reality

intrudes and helps shape how we approach this as a society. I mean, I think this is one of these issues that's just a really hard issue. There are good arguments on both sides. I do share the concerns of folks that the White House's insistence that there, would be no uh that there would be no federal vaccine registry or anything like this notwithstanding i share the i share the privacy concerns i share the concerns uh that jona mentioned about uh this as a punitive measure or as a primarily a punitive measure um and i think there are real there are real issues um around that on the other hand we mandate vaccines for kids going to school on a pretty routine basis. Kids are not allowed to go to school if they don't have certain vaccines, virtually everywhere

in the United States. And we haven't seen the kind of apocalyptic language except from sort of fringy anti-vaxxers around those mandates. And, you know, at a certain level, mandates around hepatitis and measles bumps and Rubella and other things are why we're able to flourish the way we're able to flourish. But I think that we're likely to see this kind of pitched culture war shouting back and forth because it works for the people who are involved in it. Naomi Wolf, who's now become a staple on Fox, former Clinton advisor now become a staple on Fox News. Also a crazy person. I want to be clear about this. I mean, she's increasingly making arguments that certainly sound unhinged of the possibility of vaccine passports.

This is the most dangerous tool humanity has faced in my lifetime, if not ever, in terms of human liberty, setting aside minor concerns like slavery and other issues. The nuclear bomb. She equated this to slavery. And unfortunately, I don't think that's nutpicking. She increasingly represents a sizable chief. chunk of this kind of right-left hysterical group on these questions, on questions of lockdowns on questions of vaccines.

So I'm not confident this is going to get better anytime soon in terms of our public debate. Two quick points. One, fascinating Gallup poll data came out showing, fascinating. Fascinating is also another synonym for depressing. That showed that the people least likely to get the vaccine are also the least likely to social distance, the least likely the mask, the least likely do all of these things. And I'm not for the punitive aspect of the passport stuff, but at the same time, if my colleagues and my family and my friends are vaccinated and the people who aren't vaccinated want to be foolish. I think that's bad for the country.

It's going to get somebody infected who doesn't want to be infected and all that kind of stuff. But it does minimize the harms in terms of the moral hazard of it. And second of all, I think, and this is a heartwarming tale. It's one of my favorite stories. And I don't know when I'm ever going to be able to tell it again where it's going to be relevant. But this is sort of, to Sarah's point, people are going to use their receipt as a passport for anybody who wants proof that you have been vaccinated or they're going to use the app. My kid's school requires an app and that kind of thing. And it reminds me of back when I guess Sarah was in kindergarten in the early 90s, late 80s,

there was a David will remember a big hullaboo. It was the first hullabaloo about flag burning. And in Louisiana, they passed a bill that said it would be a $25 fine to, beat up a flag burner caught in the act and the next day or the next week there was a line outside the municipal building in a couple towns for people wishing to pre-purchase what they considered to be their flag burners beating license so that if they caught a flag burner in the process cop comes over hey what's going on here you pulled out of your wallet and say hey i have a it. And I think that that shows you that everybody is going to, in a Hayekian faction,

figure out how to deal with these problems proactively, because that's the great pragmatic spirit of America. I have one thing I learned during this vaccine rollout that I was wrong about on the front end and think that I now understand more about on the back end that I wanted to share with you guys, which is on the front end, I thought sort of dividing up into one A, 1B, 1C, kind of made sense. I thought that would be just fine. Now watching it in action, I now believe it was the worst possible way to do this vaccine rollout. We should have done it more like we were doing grocery stores at the beginning of the pandemic. The first two hours are only for people over the age of 65, but then it's a free-for-all because it's causing a lot

of friction and transaction cost to force people into a line. A lot of folks feel like it's morally, you know, wrong to jump the line. But then there's, you know, vaccines that aren't getting into people's arms and slots available. So I hope that everyone learned something from this. I feel like I did, which is, aha, it turns out, and someone could have told us this in advance, right, the more you divide things up and try to put people in order like we do on airplanes, actually, that causes friction and slows things down. So we need to do it more like Southwest, where, you know, people kind of get into a line and then you get them all on the plane.

All right. Next step. Yeah, well, one quick thing on that. Not only that, Sarah, I couldn't agree with you more, but then you put everyone in 1A, 1B, 1C and then impose the honor system. So it is completely based on whether or not you're going to check a box, and if you check a box, there's no question asked.

And then number two, having wildly different demands by geography. And not wildly different supply, as it turns out. Yes. And so you end up with vaccine, you know, people traveling for the vaccine. You have entire regions where, you know, you have people who cannot seem to get it and then other areas where they cannot seem to give it away. And yeah, it turned out to be incredibly inefficient. I think all the states need to open it up now to everyone over the age of 16. And, you know, they ask for your birthday or whatever when you sign up for an appointment, then fine. Then prioritize people. by their birthday age, um, okay, and then give them their appointments that way. You could just set up an algorithm to do that. But this idea that you can't sign up or then you pre-register, but you pre-it's a mess. It's a total mess. It's unnecessary. We've learned from it. Let's let's not do this. Okay. Uh, guys, this week was exciting because C-SPAN started Road to

the White House 2024. Now before you judge C-SPAN, I will note that the association Press says that this is not the earliest that C-SPAN has started a presidential campaign cycle. In February of 2005, C-SPAN started Road to the White House 2008 covering Mitt Romney and John Edwards in South Carolina and New Hampshire, respectively. So, hey, that's fun. This time it was Mike Pompeo speaking at the machine shed, which is like a local chain in Iowa. He was in Urbondale, speaking to the Westside Conservative Club for breakfast. By the way, Steve, they serve Midwest comfort food. What does that mean?

Is that just all casseroles all the time? Just lots of mayo? Lots of casseroles, tater tots, cheese curds. It's, you know, really the height of culinary excellence. Okay. So at the same time, echelon insights has been polling Republicans and lean Republican voters. if Donald Trump does not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024

and the Republican presidential primaries were being held today for whom would you vote? So what I like about this poll, of course, is not that I think it reflects anything about who will be the Republican nominee. It does not. But because they're doing it every six weeks or so,

we can compare who on the Republican side is gaining and losing traction. So, for instance, Mike Pence lost five points in that poll. Mike Pompeo gained three points in that poll. Tucker Carlson gained three points, interestingly. But the big winner for March was Ron DeSantis, who is now in first place gaining nine points over the February poll,

up to 17%, although I will note that the winner overall also gained nine points. and to 35% to Ronda Sandses to 17%. 35% up 9 points from February for unsure. Steve, how do we start thinking about 2024? Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating. You pointed out in the sweep, I encourage everybody to read the sweep for now this is my second reference. Just read the whole thing and read it every time it's published.

It's just very good. You pointed out of the sweep that what matters in these numbers is not the actual, you know, points here and there, but the sort of broad contours of this. And the fact that this is taking place at all, as you say, Mike Pompeo going to Iowa, Tim Scott, Senator from South Carolina, who I strongly believe is going to run for president, is also making trips to early primary states. So are many others. The behind-the-scenes process of courting state legislators in places like South Carolina,

of New Hampshire and Iowa is well underway. So this, you know, invisible primary is really happening right now. And it's important to pay attention to it. I would, I guess what's, what's interesting to me is the broader contours of this debate and how these candidates would be candidates want to position themselves. We've talked before on this podcast and certainly it's been a big discussion nationally about the non-Trump Trump inheritors lane or

category of candidate. And there are a lot of people. Virtually everybody listed, and we'll drop the polling in the show notes, or you can get it at the sweep, is running as a sort of successor to Donald Trump, somebody who's taking

Trump's legacy, taking Trump's issues, and building a candidacy around them where they won't be Donald Trump, but can lay claim to Trump's supporters and hopefully get an endorsement from Donald Trump. That looks to be the most popular path. Donald Trump is still popular with two-thirds of Republican voters on at least some basis, and it's where most of the voters are, so you shouldn't be surprised to do this. What's interesting is to watch what's happening elsewhere, too. There was an Axios report today on a memo that Representative Jim Banks,

the head of the Republican Study Committee, shared with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, in which Banks effectively said we have to, Republican Party has to embrace Donald Trump. There's no other path. We have to remake ourselves as a working class party in the image of Donald Trump and took a shot at folks who don't agree with that path. I think without naming or notably, Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez, Adam Kinsiger, people like that, saying in effect there's no room for that embittered group. One of the most interesting things to follow over the coming years, particularly in this presidential context, is what happens with that group that's not as enthusiastic about Donald Trump? It's going to be

impossible for Republicans to win the presidency in 2024 without that group. And as you see candidates for playing for a Republican primary positioning, one after another, after another lining up in the pro-Trump side of things, I think it'll be as interesting or more interesting to see who runs with the opposite set of issues and the opposite frame. Jonah, why do you think Ron DeSantis is on the rise. Oh, because of, mostly because of COVID politics, because CPAC was in Florida and got all sorts of free media for it. I think, I don't know, I guess this polling doesn't take into account, Christy Noem's

recent stumbles, but I think DeSantis, in some ways, you know, the, the Floridian captivity of the GOP has, you know, because Trump's to camp down there, CPAC to camp down there, and because Cuomo's done badly, Desantis is this great foil against, you know, the

shutdowners and the mask enforcers and all that kind of stuff. It just seems like a great issue climate for him, and he's getting a lot of free media as a result. I don't think, I mean, I'm kind of with Sarah on this, I think that none of this presidential speculation stuff matters a wit right now, except as sort of fodder for sociological

tea leaf reading of where the GOP is generally. And I will be surprised if DeSantis is the frontrunner or the nominee or any of that kind of stuff, if Trump doesn't run um but i'd be surprised if basically any of them are at this point and um and i just i'm i'm i'm you know this is like punditry 101 this topic and i'm just not sure i have anything more to add that we haven't said a thousand times before on this podcast i mean i agree with steve you can't when you have a coalition that's only 48% of the public or there of the electorate, losing 4% of your coalition, might as well be losing 40% of your coalition if the goal is to get across the 50% line. And this purge, the anti-Trump people thing is, it strikes me

as folly. And on the policy side, trying to win over more Trump voters through policy, I think is dumb because there's no evidence for it. So, David, I think, it will be interesting because Ron DeSantis has sort of the most compelling message. I went against the mainstream media. I went against what everyone said we had to do. And my state actually had fewer COVID infections than California that was locked down and ruined their economy. I am a governor. Hear me roar. Are we about to see the rise of the governors again? You know, I have been thinking that for a little bit because of the COVID narrative, that they're going to be governors are going to be able to come out of this crisis moment in American history and

say, I did what these guys did not do. And if you look at my record, my record at this moment of crisis. Like a record might actually be a compelling message for the first time in a while. And DeSantis has two things going for him. So I was just looking at some of the numbers. And Florida, believe it or not, is in the bottom half of the country in deaths per million. The bottom half of the country, it's 27th in the nation. And this is with a disproportionately older population. And so he can already walk in and say, I was a governor of a big state. We didn't lock down in the same way that other states did. And we had a different policy with regards to nursing homes. So he already has a policy-based argument with actual results that is pretty

good. But he also has something else that I think makes him in some ways a really interesting post-Trump figure. He has a fight narrative that's all his own that does not involve Trump. In other words, he can sort of say, because early on in this pandemic, a lot of people in the media, not everybody, but a lot of people in the media sort of fixated on two governors. Cuomo and New York as the model of how to deal with this and the reckless DeSantis and so they were kind of

twinned and paired up and one of them has crumbled one of them is discredited one of them is now seen as a failure and if you look at the numbers has much worse record on COVID deaths much less all the other scandals and one of them has come out of it and still in the media in many ways

as many members of the media are just fixated on DeSantis as a uniquely pernicious figure. But he's got this record. And so he has two things. He has one, my own independent record of accomplishment in combating COVID. And number two, the media hates me. And it's hard to come up with a better narrative at this moment. And I know a lot will change. But at this moment, what's a better narrative walking into a primary,

for a Republican politician. I've got all the right enemies and I've got the right record. That's a pretty formidable combination. I think it's really interesting. I think that DeSantis, unlike some of the other, like, I don't really know why they're rising in these sorts of polls,

I think you can point to the reason why DeSantis is on the rise, and I think he's got the most compelling message right now for Republican voters. A lot will change. We'll check back in April. Can I make one very self-serving point here? I deserve some praise and honor because we've been talking about the future of the GOP,

the 2024 presidential race, Florida, and I have not once taken the bait to dance a jig about Matt Gates. I'm just saying I deserve some credit for this. Jonah, we can move on. I gave you credit in our Slack channel for the best tweet of the day. Did you not see me just rollicking in hilarity?

so Jonah tweeted an hour ago the quote See I can't even do it without laughing So Matt Gates gave a quote Someone is trying to recharacterize my generosity To my former dinner companions As something more untoward And so Jonah tweeted that

The same quote Someone is trying to characterize my generosity Toward my former dinner companions As something more untoward Quote Hannibal Lecter He said to my former girlfriends I changed that to former dinner Compens but anyway

It's a, it's, it's, we're so impressed, Jonah. Thank you, thanks. Steve is making boss face because he thinks that we shouldn't follow this kind of like sewer rat, clickbait politics stuff. And Schadenfreude is no place in proper journalism. And all I can say is it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. And how about when he tried to pull Tucker into the story by saying, remember us having dinner? Tucker was like, new phone, who dis? And Tucker was, for the record, I,

I don't know who that. I don't remember that. Oh, man. And we did a great job of not talking about it. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race.

Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca. S.A. slash Y Annex. All right, David. Last up, new poll showing the church membership has dramatically declined recently. Okay. So this is, was it the last dispatch live when one of the members asked us, what's a huge story that there's not enough attention paid to it? And in my mind, I had two things that I went back and forth on. One was decline in fertility, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. The other thing I was thinking of, but then a lot of attention has been paid to it.

and more attention is being paid to it is the secularization of this country. There was a Gallup poll that came out that illustrated not just how much America has secularized, but at what a remarkable rate. So in 1940, 73% of Americans reported that they were a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque. In 2000, 70% of Americans reported they were a member. So within the margin of error. So it's 40 to 20,000, 60 years of stasis. Since 2000, the number has dropped precipitously.

And now it is 47% of Americans who are part of a church synagogue or mosque. In other words, a majority are not. And this is a significant cultural change. And one that's, I think, underappreciated in sort of the ramping up of the intensity of our politics. You know, let me go first to you, Jonah. I don't actually think necessarily Americans are becoming less religious. I think they're putting their religious impulse into other things besides church, synagogue, and mosque. What say you?

Oh, I'm with you. This has been a hobby horse of mine for years. One of my favorite theologians slash philosopher types was Will Herberg, who used to to say that human beings should be described as homo religio because we have a natural religious instinct. And in the last 50 years, there's been so much evolutionary psychology work, that's 30 years, so much evolutionary psychology work that sort of confirms what Darwin had written about is that we are hardwired to want to be religious. You read Jonathan Haidt and the relationship between religion and politics

and culture in our brain is so intertwined that it's sort of silly to say, oh, this is the part about religion and this is the part about politics, and this is the part about hygiene and whatnot. And I'm not saying, I'm not making this as an atheistic argument. I'm making this as just sort of,

I think this is part of human nature. This is how, to put it succinctly, this is how God made us. And that said, I think you're absolutely right. I think that social justice stuff basically maps as a religious impulse. A lot of environmentalism, you know, I mean, it's a little outdated now, but people should read Michael Crichton's famous San Francisco Commonwealth Club speech about how the narrative of environmentalism tracks a lot of the great religions narratives. We were born in a pristine time.

Then we had a fall from grace because of scientific or technical knowledge. and the world is corrupted and now we must return to it. I think that the way our politics works in, and I should also say there's this guy, Michael Burley, who has written a bunch of fantastic histories of Europe about how he made this case about Europe for a long time is that a lot of the conflicts of the 20th century were continuations of the conflicts of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries,

just the wars of religion got called something else. And so I think this is a very serious thing, It's a very rich, rich topic. At the same time, I do wonder what it means for American exceptionalism. Because one of the things that used to define American exceptionalism was this idea that we were both the most industrially advanced and also the most religious nation in the world, which made us huge outliers.

And if that's gone and sort of in the context of the conversation we had at the beginning about two parties that just like to spend money on different versions of the welfare state, this could be part of us basically turning into Europe where you don't have limited government parties and you don't and religion is a vehicle through the religious impulses is filtered through politics David I want to turn this on you though I have kind of a why now question and whether the churches bear some responsibility for this oh yeah I mean this is this is one of my hobby horses that one of you know there's a couple of things going on at the same time look

there's a lot of cultural changes outside of church and then there's an awful lot of quite frankly and this is something I've reported on most recently in in my or with distressing regularity in my Sunday newsletter that there has been there have been a number of just really terrible scandals in church stretching back for years you know the Catholic scandals we've had a number of sort of what in evangelical circles are called church to scandals regarding major religious institutions within evangelicalism, but also something else has happened. And if you really look at what's going on and you dive into the numbers, what you're going to see is that a lot of people who would previously sort of be like nominal, what you might call

nominal church attenders or nominal believers are now just switching to nuns and N-O-N-E-S is. they're not becoming nuns in U.Ns. That'd be a big story. That would be huge. Yeah, that would be huge. That would be huge. So a lot of the people who are more nominal are becoming nuns. But the percentage of Americans that's evangelical is holding pretty darn steady.

So what you're ending up with is a kind of religious divide in this country between sacred and secular where there isn't as much squishy middle. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's becoming so sharp. But another interesting thing, Ryan Burge, a statistician at Eastern Illinois University, has noted that a lot of evangelicals are becoming less churchgoing. So they're still listing themselves as quite intensely religious, but the evangelical label is becoming more of a political identity marker and less of a specific religious practice marker. And so all of this is dividing us in a really interesting way.

And I think, yeah, I mean, a church lives in a culture. The culture influences the church. But the church has had an enormous role, I think, in its own decline. Yeah, my question was along the same lines back to you, David. I mean, we've seen, at the same time, we've seen these numbers drop off a cliff as it relates to church membership from 2002 today. we've seen an attendant loss of faith in any number of other institutions in society. And on the one hand, it's tempting to chalk this up largely to that broader cultural phenomenon that people just don't believe in institutions, don't trust in institutions, don't want to be part in

institutions in a way that may or may not be sort of religion specific. On the other hand, there's data that you've written about before that church attendance tracks these same numbers, which would suggest it does. It is something that is, if not unique to religion, at least not something that's anomalous. Is that a fair way of looking at that problem? No, I think the institutional issue is an important piece of this. And so let's look, for example, at the largest institution in American Protestant Christianity, the Southern Baptist Church. They're really good about keeping records. And in June of 2020, they released that they had lost 2% of membership last year, which was the largest drop in more than a century.

And this is a church that had grown considerably throughout a lot of the earlier sort of religious conflicts in America where, you know, the mainline. churches were becoming far more progressive and we're losing a ton of members. A lot of people joined the SBC so much that it grew to like number one in the rankings by far in Protestant denominations and now it's trending down. Now, but interestingly, a lot of those people who are leaving the SBC aren't leaving Christianity. Instead, they're joining independent non-denominational churches. So they're in a situation where they are, it's not that they're leaving evangelicalism. They're just leaving the institution of the Southern Baptist Convention. And so we're back in this situation where you have a lot of institutional decline. But I still think, you know, you cannot look at

this decline in belief and track it across all sectors of American religion. That's just not the way it's working. If you're looking at where there has been decline, it has been in mainline Protestantism has just fallen off a cliff, more sort of nominal Catholicism falling off a cliff. More sort of nominal Catholicism falling off a cliff, but the sort of more hardcore much you might call hardcore evangelicals are staying pretty static. And it's in an interesting way, what that means is you're having a country that's becoming more secular while retaining its most religious core. And that's an interesting dichotomy because, you know, that's almost tailor-made for maximum

division, especially when you then lay, overlay that, that this secularization isn't occurring everywhere at the same rate. So if you're in the northeast. I'm sorry, hasn't that been true for a while? I mean, this is, I remember Michael Novak talking about this years ago, about how like, you know, if you make the leap of faith, so to speak, that you want to live the military life, you don't want to go to the easiest weird you know the the the the softest one i mean like you might join the coast guard for perfectly legitimate career reasons or whatever but like if you really have that spartan ethic you want to be a marine right and so like the people who were holding on to their congregants the ones who asked the most from their congregants the marines of organized religion

conservative and orthodox jews uh serious trad catholics serious evangelicals and um and i this sort of just the the falling off the cliff of the the mainline protestant churches that's sort of getting to to my point which i get a little bit from jody bottom which is this idea that the mainline protestant churches because they didn't ask anything from anybody and they took their elite status in society more seriously than they took their religious convictions, they're still the elites. They just gave up on the religion part and they just use the social justice stuff and said as their new gospel. And that's one of the reasons. I think that's a huge part of the culture war stuff is that the two sides aren't literate

in the other side's language anymore. Yeah. Well, and here's something to want to keep an eye on. When you drill down in the numbers, the secularization of America is not. again, it's not uniform across race and partisanship. So where you've really seen the drop, just dramatic drop, it's in white Democrats. White Democrats and in the religious affiliation of white Democrats has dropped dramatically. So what that means is the Democratic Party right now has the most and least religious American cohorts in its coalition. black democrats black protestants they are amongst the most churchgoing people in the united states

of america by some measures more church going than white evangelicals and then you also have white progressives that are the least church going so the democrats have the most in least churchgoing coalition and that that divide has grown dramatically in the last several years and i don't know that it is coincidental that post-Obama, the Republican share of the black vote is slowly increasing. Because this is a new thing. There's long, there's long been a white, progressive, black Protestant alliance in the Democratic Party, but the white progressives have never been so secular. And that's a new cultural development. And we've yet to see how that is going to shake out over time because that creates a pretty intense culture clash because it's not just that black

Protestants are religious. They're Orthodox religious, small O Orthodox. In other words, they are quite conservative in their view of the Bible. They're quite conservative in their view of religion. And I think that creates a cultural tension. And we've yet to see how that's going to play out over the long term. Thank you so much for joining us. Subscribe to this podcast. Tell your friends about this podcast. But subscribing and rating this podcast is one of the best ways to get the word out. We so appreciate your support, and we'll see you again next week. No, you won't do this as a podcast. Sorry. You, Jonah.

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