Populism After Trump
2021-01-17 · Guest: William Howell and Terry Moe (Authors and Professors) · 52:00
Populism and the Crisis of American Democracy
Bob Zadek interviews William Howell and Terry Moe about their book, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. They explore the roots of populism in the United States, the impact of the Trump presidency on democratic institutions, and propose structural reforms to the executive and legislative branches to address government ineffectiveness.
Topics: Populism, Donald Trump, Administrative State, Institutional Reform, Executive Power, Fast-track Legislation, Electoral College
Speakers: Bob Zadek, William Howell, Terry Moe
Introduction to Populism [00:16]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this winter Sunday morning. We are this morning, and as always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude.
Four years ago, give or take, I don’t think anybody heard on the evening news, on your favorite political podcast, hanging around Starbucks and the like, the word “populism.” At least we didn’t hear it in reference to American politics. We heard it in reference to what appeared to us to be dysfunctional governments around the world. It was not a very flattering concept, and we, if we were political junkies, we paid passing attention to us so we could feel smug that that wasn’t us. These other countries were suffering from populism. We discussed the causes and the effects and how populism might be destructive and what the dynamics of populism were.
Along comes the Trump presidency and the word populism now enters the political vocabulary of four years ago, where it has resided almost nightly for the past four years. But we don’t know much about it. What exactly is populism? Is it something to be welcomed? Is it a political phenomenon to be feared? Are there advantages? Are there disadvantages? Do we favor political figures who are populist and who gain power and influence by being populist, or is it something to get to be alerted about and understand the symptoms, if I may, and to understand the cures?
To help us understand it, whenever we have these voids in our information, of course, we often have scholars, wise authors, and observers to help us get the lay of the land, populism-wise, if you will. And this is the perfect time on this Sunday before inauguration, when perhaps the first populist president we have had in a hundred years, give or take, is now leaving the White House. It is a good time to have both a retrospective so we understand what happened to us, good or bad, in the past four years, why it happened, and is it something to be alert to in the future. To help us understand these difficult, but to say the least, important concepts, I’m happy to welcome to the show William Howell and Terry Moe. They were good enough to benefit all of us by writing Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis—wow, crisis—of Democracy. William and Terry will be joining me, are joining me this morning to help us understand the phenomenon of populism and where does it fit in a democratic system such as ours. So William and Terry, thank you so much for joining us this morning and welcome to the show.
William Howell: Thanks for having us.
Bob Zadek: I’ll address it first to Terry, somewhat randomly, but William, you can join in, and Terry, you of course can defer to William. Populism. Let us start with the premise that it’s a new concept, at least new in the consciousness of American voters. So what is populism? It’s not a system quite. So when you chose to write about the subject of populism, what is populism? Is it a system? Is it a phenomenon? What is it all about and how does it fit into the system of government we have now?
Defining the Populist Playbook [04:00]
Terry Moe: Okay, great question. So let me start by giving a little background. Donald Trump’s rise to power was propelled by a white backlash to growing social diversity, but also by enormously disruptive socio-economic forces of globalization, automation, immigration that brought economic harm and cultural anxiety to millions of Americans. These were serious problems that our government has been entirely ineffective over the decades at dealing with. And the result has been a surge of anger, populist anger, against a system that doesn’t work in their view, and support for a strongman who can attack that system, our democratic system, and get things done on his own, democracy be damned.
So these are the conditions that Trump took advantage of in getting himself elected, and these are the conditions that have shaped his populist, anti-democracy presidency. So the way to understand Trump is not just that he has a bizarre personality, it’s that he’s a populist demagogue and he does what populist demagogues do. So if you look across history and across nations, from Juan Perón to Huey Long to Viktor Orbán, there’s a common playbook and they all do basically the same kinds of things. They embrace the role of the strongman. You know, Trump says “only I can fix it.” They attack democratic institutions—the media, the courts, and as we have now seen, the electoral system. They lie and they wage war on the truth. They demonize the other—minorities, immigrants, foreigners—and use them as scapegoats to blame for the country’s problems. They purposely create anger and division and grievance. These are strategies that are very familiar to us. Trump does all these things, but the fact is they’re common to all populist demagogues. And the reason is that they work in stirring up populist support during a time of populist anger. And populism as a result is inherently anti-democratic and dangerous.
Was 2016 a Fluke? [07:12]
Bob Zadek: Now, William, Terry said a whole bunch. Terry just said a semester’s worth of political science. So let’s unbundle it a tiny, tiny bit. And my first question is—and I may be in a minority making this observation, don’t know, never did the math—but in the 2016 election, I have always felt that Trump didn’t win, Hillary lost. Now, what I mean by that is when you read political studies of the campaign of the 2016 campaign, and you read those who know how to run campaigns, Hillary ran a tactically bad campaign. She didn’t campaign in important battleground states. A lot’s been written about that. We’re not going to discuss that on this show. Start as a premise, because it’s not that controversial. If Hillary would have won and Trump wouldn’t have lost, a lot of conclusions about the state of the psyche, the collective psyche of the country, would be very different. We wouldn’t be talking about disenfranchised or disaffected lower-middle-class and lower-class white males. We wouldn’t be talking about that. The conversation would be entirely different. I am just a tiny bit reluctant to draw conclusions about the country—that’s a big concept, the country—based upon the fact that Hillary had a bad campaign manager. It doesn’t indict the country, it indicts the campaign manager. So we’re going to get into the populism in a second, but just am I off in making that observation, how different our conversation would be this Sunday morning if Hillary had won, conversation about the state of the country?
William Howell: Sure. I mean, we would be having a different conversation. And Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote. And yet, I think it’s worth recognizing that, you know, Trump’s rise to power in 2016 was not just, you know, a fluke because she ran a bad campaign. He also had to emerge from a deep bench of—I mean, there were 16, 17, many of whom were well-established and well-funded, highly experienced Republican candidates in the primary season. And he rose up and got the nomination as an outsider, and as somebody who was tapping into anger and disaffection and grievance from the very get-go. That was his ticket to rise up within the Republican party and to grab ahold of the Republican party in order to channel this populism.
Now, another thing which is true is that then the last four years has been an opportunity for us to learn about what populism looks like and what kind of a threat it represents and the ways in which it degrades our democracy, it threatens our democracy. So, and having seen that, we can’t unsee that. So a big part of the book that Terry and I have written is trying to underscore what these—is to underscore it’s not just kind of a fluke of 2016 or what do you know, it’s all about Donald Trump, is to say we need to recognize the deep structural foundations of government failure that have led to the rise of this anger and disaffection. And then what that anger and disaffection sets into motion. And what we’ve seen over the last four years is we’ve seen it capture a major American party. We have seen it degrade small-d democratic commitments. And we now are in a moment of real crisis, as the last two weeks have put in stark relief in terms of our system of government and its health. And so it would be a mistake—and this is something which the Democrats need to kind of guard against—it would be a mistake to say, “Oh, well, that’s right, 2016 was sort of a fluke and now we’re back on track and Biden can return to a kind of normalcy and civility and lower the temperature in the room and all will be well.” There are big forces at play here and we need to understand them and to figure out how to address them.
Populism: Style vs. Substance [12:09]
Bob Zadek: Help us—now, the question about populism, and then we’ll discuss—by the way, your book is strongest—I’d hate to be a spoiler, but your book is quite strong and intriguing and thought-provoking in its cures. And we’re going to spend lots of time on the cures, because the book is so strong and so creative in that part of it. But just a bit more about populism. Is it clear from your book that when you talk about populism, you’re not talking about something as banal as style? It’s not a question of political tactics, how you present yourself to the voters, a sort of a manipulation. Every president, or many presidents, have their own style, and likability is always important, which Trump didn’t have, of course, at least not broadly. So help us understand how populism is more than just style. Because if it is only style, it doesn’t pay to write a book. People have different styles and you go to the theater, you don’t have a good time, you say, “I’m not going to follow that writer anymore or that actor.” So we’re not talking about a performance, are we? We are talking about something deeper, because style, we hope, would never be a threat, an existential threat to democracy. So tell us how it is, briefly, how it is more than just style.
Terry Moe: You know, this is Terry speaking. As I started this thing out, you know, populism in the United States is partly due to a white backlash to social diversity and to these very real, powerful, worldwide socio-economic forces of globalization, technological change, and immigration that have brought real economic harms and insecurities and cultural anxieties to tens of millions of Americans. These are real things. People are really feeling these things and they are angry at a system that hasn’t solved these problems, at an ineffective government. And so as you said, you know, what if Hillary had won? Well, if she had won, those people would have still been angry. All those millions of people, the populist base would have still been there. It would have been like a volcano ready to explode. And Trump simply took advantage of that in 2016. And if he hadn’t won, someone else would have taken advantage of it later on. This is a very real thing and it’s really dangerous.
The Expectation of Government Protection [15:02]
Bob Zadek: The petri dish, fertilizer, that fueled the attraction of a populist was dissatisfaction by voters or a feeling of powerlessness. And a lot has been written that the core constituency, even though it’s probably about 30% of the voting population, but that’s enough. The core constituency who were disaffected, they felt government wasn’t solving their problem. And you wrote a lot in the book about the problems, and you mentioned them just a second ago: globalization as a problem, exporting jobs—a concept I don’t buy into, but that’s still a concept people feel like it is, even if it’s not, and we’re not going to discuss—this is not a trade show, we’re discussing the politics of populism. But all of these forces and the changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and the importance of brainpower over muscle power, which leaves people who have less developed brainpower and more developed muscle power, “Hey, what about me?” So of course there’s lots of people who are unhappy.
There’s a premise in your book, and just—and you mention it enough in your book to be worthy to deserve a few seconds of discussion. Where is it written in political theory? Where is it written in the Constitution? Where does the concept arise that it is the government’s job to insulate citizens from market forces? If a citizen is selling service, whether it’s personal service or selling a manufactured product, and somebody else comes along and offers a competitive service or product cheaper and better, that citizen will be out of work. And is that a fault or is that a simply a byproduct of market forces? And so there’s a premise there, and I’ll ask, sort of where does it come from that somebody is entitled to be protected from offering a service or a good that nobody else wants?
William Howell: Let me highlight two things. The first is that when we point towards these big structural changes to our economy and our modes of social organization, we’re not saying they’re unmitigated, you know, harms that through and through these are things to be resisted. That in fact, they generate a lot of wealth, they do a lot of good. But there are those who suffer. There are those who—whose communities have been decimated, who have lost their jobs, who experience greater levels of economic inequality. And then the question is, how are we to respond to that? Your point is, well, one answer is we needn’t respond at all, because if you read the Constitution, there’s no part of the kind of political or social pact that dictates that every harm receives some kind of redress.
But we live in a world in which people on the left and the right, for good or ill, people on the left and the right routinely look to the government to solve problems. That—and this is what—100% right. Right? And so there’s this—there’s this—when they look up and they say, “What are you going to do about it?” I mean, there are arguments by Democratic and Republican presidents about what constitutes a proper response, but they all come forward with plans. They’re all coming forward and saying, “I’m going to do something.” And the failure of the government to attend to those manifest wants, those manifest expectations, the persistent failure of the government to do so has then borne all kinds of anger and disaffection. Now, whether or not those needs and wants and expectations are justified by reference to one reading of the Constitution or another, that’s a separate matter. I mean, there’s a real reason—I mean, we can have that conversation. But where we come in, Terry and I come in, is to say, there they are, and they’ve been there for a long time. That’s a wonderful answer and I really appreciate it. And it’s the failure to meet people’s expectations of government that then leads to the anger and disaffection. Now, whether or not those needs and wants and expectations are justified by reference to one reading of the Constitution or another, that’s a separate matter. I mean, there’s a real reason—I mean, we can have that conversation. But where we come in, Terry and I come in, is to say, there they are, and they’ve been there for a long time.
The Populist Strategy of Deconstruction [23:30]
Bob Zadek: That’s a wonderful answer and I really appreciate it. And it indicates an very interesting—we’re not going to discuss it in detail, but just mention it and then we’ll pass on. The interesting sort of fault line is the expectation. You’re exactly right. People have come to expect from government that if there is anything amiss in your life, you look to government first. And of course, as a libertarian, as of course you know because you’re observers of the political scene, we say, “No, no, no, where does it written? Look to yourself first.” It’s not the government’s job. And more importantly, a government would be unable to fix many of the problems because the fix is simply like wealth redistribution, is to impair the rights of somebody else to fix the squeakiest wheel for the minute. And I’ll just mention it and then we’ll move on. Government ought to just say, “No, we can’t—we can’t fix it. It’s not fixable by government.” Certain things—it’s like, “I want to be smarter.” Well, government can’t make you smarter. They can give you tools, they can get out of the way, but they can’t make you a smarter person per se. They can’t make you taller. It’s just that’s what it is.
So you’re exactly right. And I think that’s a wonderful observation that people have come—and for another show, we’ll talk about it—people have come to expect that if something is amiss, government is expected to fix it. And if government doesn’t fix it, the fault is government, not that it’s not fixable by government, but the fault is government, and therefore throw the bums out and let’s try something else. And therefore into the void—and this is where we come together—into the void, if we start with the premise government must fix it, then of course, a populist who says, “I have the secret sauce. I can fix it,” that’s very, very appealing and very seductive. And I think that’s where we’re together. That’s exactly the dynamic of—we start with expectation, and then we end up with frustration because government fails. And then along comes somebody, “I’m special. I’m an elite.” And what’s interesting is here we have a populist, Trump in this case because that’s what we’re talking about, who offers himself without ever using the word elite, and it wouldn’t even apply to him. He says, “I’m the special person. I’m the elite,” without using the word, “who can fix the problems.” And that describes a lot of the first part of your book.
Now, you in your book, you mention and you explain to us readers that one of the great dangers of a populist in general, Trump specifically, is once they take power, they use the tools of government in a way that in your view is contrary to core principles and is destructive of the very government that he’s—or she is running. So help us understand a bit about what you meant by that. Help us understand how one of the attributes of populism is using the tools of government to, in effect, weaken government or have it leave its core principles.
William Howell: Why don’t I take the first stab at this, Terry, then you can clean up the mess that I’ve left you. Which is, so look, what does a populist do? The populist steps forward and offers a wholesale, undifferentiated critique of a political order. He calls it rigged and broken and antiquated and not attending to the interests of the true people, the true Americans, which in the United States, the reference here for Trump is conservative white Christians. So that’s the first move. But what then the populist does not do, once in this case he assumes power, is say, “All right, let’s remake the political order constructively. Let’s set to work and actually try to attend to the problems at hand.” What the populist does, both in justifying his rise to power but also in maintaining power, is to continue to sow anger and disaffection and maintain this oppositional stance. It’s about—and therefore, it’s not about tearing down in order to build up. It’s strictly about tearing down. And every time there’s an observed failure or something that is blocked or something that isn’t achieved, the populist claim is, “You see, I told you. What we’ve seen is this just further serves as further justification for my hold on power because the existing order is so broken and is so antiquated and rigged.” And so in that sense, it’s not a turn towards, “Let’s come together and constructively set to work and build a smaller but better government.” It’s about—it’s about tearing down all the way through. And in that way, not only do you have an attack on democracy and small-d democratic commitments, you also have an undermining of the apparatus of government itself.
Defending the Administrative State [25:49]
Bob Zadek: You mentioned it—I believe you used the phrase “the hollowing out” of government, “hollowing out” of the administrative state. It’s interesting because in your book, you clearly support the evolutionary rise of the administrative state, probably started back with Woodrow Wilson, perhaps, the wise people running the country and give unelected wise people, and I say that with no disrespect, I don’t have to buy into the administrative state, but again, this is not that show. So how does, in your view, how—and we’ll talk generally and specifically if you wish, but it’s a general discussion of populism—what did you mean by the hollowing out of the administrative state? And speak to along the way, why is not hollowing out of the administrative state a good thing? After all, they are unelected and therefore not an extension of small-d democracy. So why do you put so much faith in an un-hollowed-out administrative state, and therefore the hollowing out of the administrative state is a bad thing? Why is it not a good thing?
Terry Moe: All modern governments have administrative states. And the administrative state is nothing more than all the government agencies that carry out the programs of government. And governments have programs because as democracies, they’re filled with people who experience all sorts of socio-economically caused problems that government is expected to solve, is expected to take action on. And government does, you know, from antitrust to poverty programs to environmental programs to agricultural programs, you name it. Government does all kinds of things, not just in the United States but in every modern government. And the administrative state is just the organizational means by which those things are carried out. The only way you would have no administrative state is if you went back to some kind of primitive government in a primitive society where you don’t have any of these problems and you don’t need government agencies and government programs. But that’s not the society that we live in. The founders did, but we don’t. And so that’s why we have an administrative state.
And what Trump has done is he has sought to hollow it out by undermining professionalism and expertise and science and the capacity of government to actually solve governmental problems, societal problems effectively. And in his view, this is a good thing, but all it does is undermine the government’s capacity to actually do what citizens want to have done.
Principled Small Government vs. Populist Undermining [29:09]
William Howell: Can I add one thing to this, which is that we can think about, and I think you have this in mind, Bob, a principled effort to limit the reach of government. That the problem is with government is that it is too big and that therefore we can then think about how do we, in a thoughtful, serious way, scale back the reach of government. That’s not what the populist is doing. The populist is laying waste to this vast apparatus, but not in the effort in a principled way to say, “You know, the government shouldn’t be in the business of this, so we’re going to simply scale it back.” This is not an argument for limited government or conservatism. It’s about undermining professionalism, undermining expertise, not reducing—we don’t see a reduction of the size of government under Trump. What we see is a much less effective, hollowed-out administrative state. And so in that sense, the populist and the libertarian part company early on in terms of what their projects are when they’re given power.
Terry Moe: A big part of the reason that populists can take on the administrative state is that they don’t have a constructive agenda. You know, they’re really in the business of attacking the system. They’re constantly on attack. They’re anti-expert, anti-science, anti-professional. Trump never did have a constructive domestic agenda or international agenda. And so he just tore away at all these agencies like the State Department, causing hundreds of top-level foreign service officers to depart and really crippling the State Department. And for what? You know, he doesn’t replace it with anything because really his mission is simply to attack. And so I think people who criticize the administrative state need to sit back and think more clearly about what kind of government we need in a modern, complex society that is overwhelmed by problems that need to be addressed. How are those problems going to get addressed? And if you say, “Well, they don’t need to be addressed,” well, it turns out there are 300 million people in this country who think otherwise. They think those problems do need to be addressed. And the administrative state is the way that they get addressed. And those people are not unaccountable. They’re held accountable by the representatives that we elect at the top of the government. This is the way government works. It works that way here, it works that way in all modern democracies.
Bob Zadek: I agree with you, Terry. And you mentioned just a second ago exactly the issue we started earlier, which is many voters, perhaps a majority, who cares, many voters say if there’s a problem, government should fix it. And of course, I focus on economic issues because I say things such as poverty are simply—you’ll always have the poorest 20%. So I don’t even know what it means to eliminate poverty. And the fact is, it’s a different conversation whether that’s even a problem. It’s simply a feature of a free market system, a feature of any meritocracy is some people will do better than others. That’s a feature, not a problem.
Proposed Solutions: Reforming the Presidency [33:59]
Bob Zadek: But going forward, because there’s so much in your book that’s really helpful, I want to be sure we allow sufficient time. So having pointed out and helping us understand what you see to be the problems, to summarize, we are losing—we are weakening small-d democracy. Again, to me that’s a feature, to you it’s a problem. But you mention so many creative solutions. And the reason I want to discuss the solutions, because your solutions help us focus on the problem, because you can’t discuss a solution without saying it is solving a very specific problem. So your book is so strong in that regard. Help us understand what you suggest, what you throw out for serious thought. What are the structural solutions that you propose in your book and why will they make what you observe to be a problem diminish or go away? So just you can go if you can in order of what you think are the most powerful, the most significant, or random, doesn’t matter to me.
William Howell: Can I frame—before we go down the list, because I think it’s worth framing up how we think we ought to evaluate proposed institutional reforms? And I’ll try to do it without droning on for too long. So let me get after it. So if the appetite for and the rise of populism is born of ineffective government, and we think that it is in important ways, then we need to think about how to design institutions that can more effectively solve problems that the public recognizes as the legitimate subject of public action. And so, and here we see a real need for leveraging the kind of national long-term outlook that presidents stand to offer. So we’re not arguing on behalf of shutting down the presidency. The trick is we need to find ways of leveraging what presidents have to offer in the service of a more effective government. And that’s laid out in some detail in the book.
But we also recognize that presidents, and we’ve seen when they can represent a real threat to democracy and can do unbelievable damage to our country in all kinds of ways. And so the trick is when we think about institutional reforms is to weigh these two things: to recognize at once, one, the need for leveraging the promise of presidential leadership—and our focus is on the presidency—but on the other hand, recognizing that presidents, when, you know, when a demagogue occupies the White House, can do incredible damage. And so we then lay out a whole host of reforms with those two kind of—it’s like a dual test, it’s a two-prong test that any proposed reform has to meet.
Bob Zadek: So you feel the president right now, today, today, structurally the president has too much power.
William Howell: In some ways presidents have too much power and in other ways presidents are underpowered. We don’t have a modern presidency for modern times. That’s what we need. We need a presidency that allows for a more effective government but that also can’t do extraordinary damage to our democratic way of life when a demagogue occupies the White House. And so we then lay out a host of reforms, some of which have to do with empowering the presidency, some of which have to do with restricting, taking away powers that presidents currently have, that will get us where we need to be.
Fast-Track Legislative Authority [38:28]
Bob Zadek: It’s really interesting that you say that, because almost all of the power that our presidents today have, almost all of the power was bequeathed upon them by the legislature. The Constitution gives the president almost no power. Ministerial power only, not dictatorial power. And all the rest of it was done through the democratic process. That is to say, the president starts with, in 1789, like very little power. And power is accumulated not by the action of the president, but by the action of the legislature over time. The legislature is democratically elected. Therefore, it is the democratic system that created the problem. Just an observation that how the founders knew better and they were careful and they feared a strong president and they had no concept of having a strong president. No, the president had a few powers and that was kind of it. And the rest he gets from Congress.
So okay, so we start with now, as a result of democracy, the president ends up today, when we look at the hand the president is holding, too much power. So what are some of the—and most of your solutions are interesting because they don’t require constitutional amendment, they don’t require major structure. Really, this is like a—your book is in many ways a manual to the legislature. Here’s your job to get back to the original intent, a word that gets people’s danders up, the original intent of the founders and put the power where the people can see it in the legislature. So with that introduction, I hope I’m not being too general, share with us some of your observations about what changes we ought to be thinking about, we being the voters and the legislature directly, to fix what you observe to be the serious problem of too much power in the executive.
Terry Moe: As William said, the trick is to balance the promise that presidents have to offer for effective government and the fear that we rightfully have that presidents will use too much power to undermine our democracy. And so we propose both types of reforms: reforms that expand presidential power and reforms that constrain it. So the main reform that we propose for expanding presidential power has to do with the legislative process. The legislative process is a complete mess. Congress is divided into two houses, it’s got 535 people, each of them from states and districts. It’s a parochial institution. Nobody’s held accountable for actually creating programs that work. And no surprise, you know, our history is filled with programs that don’t work very well. We have an ineffective government.
And so one way to try to overcome this problem is to shift power in the direction of the one actor who really cares about crafting effective programs because his legacy depends on it. And that’s the president. Okay. And the reform is to shift decision-making to a fast-track model, the same model that’s been used in international trade for 40 years quite successfully. And the way it would work for all legislation is that the president would have the right to craft legislation on any subject, propose it to Congress, and Congress would have to vote on that proposal without changing it, up or down, in the House and the Senate. And they would have to vote on it on a majoritarian basis, no filibusters, within a specified period of time, they can’t delay, say 90 days. This would completely streamline the legislative process. Congress can still vote no. Congress can still propose its own bills, which the president could veto. But with fast-track, we know that bills would be voted on. We would actually get some action one way or another. And the actor that’s crafting these proposals is not going to craft them like these Christmas tree bills that Congress puts together where you get yours and I get mine. The president is much more concerned with crafting legislation that actually solves social problems.
Bob Zadek: That seems to me that you take all the legislative staffers, the thousands of 20-somethings who help elected officials draft legislation and hold hearings, you basically move the entire congressional staff to the executive branch. Because the staffers exist to do the research and to draft legislation. So if you need staffers, then the staffers just move to the executive branch and the legislature is just there to even not hold hearings because—well, maybe to see the bills make sense, but not to draft legislation. So isn’t that a huge transfer of all of the drafting to the executive branch and the legislature is just has a veto? In effect, you’re flipping it around. The legislature is the veto and the president is the drafter of legislation.
William Howell: Well, to some extent it is making the president an agenda setter. Right now the only agenda setters reside within Congress and now we’re going to allow the president to be an agenda setter as well. And—but the president isn’t going to be able to simply dictate that which is going to become policy. Legislators on their own and their staff can figure out—they’re going to be forced to reckon with the proposals that presidents make. I mean, right now if you look at the legislative process, the idea that they are thoughtfully attending to deep problems and trying to craft solutions to them is to kind of grossly mischaracterize that which we’ve observed for a very long time. That instead we have the legislators and their staff making sure that the local interests and the immediate interests of their constituents are attended to. But when you think about, you know, how are we going to deal with a coherent immigration policy or healthcare policy or tax policy, right? What we have right now are all those legislators and their staff running around saying, “All right, what’s the organized interest I need to pay attention to? What’s the carve-out and exception I need to give to embed in some complex bill that is going to ensure that my legislator is going to be able to hold on to power?”
But I’ll say, I mean, this is on the expansion side. We’ve got a whole host of things too that have to do with curbing presidential power and eliminating presidential power. And it’s worth recognizing those as well.
Scaling Back Presidential Overreach [45:06]
Bob Zadek: Give me one example of how you would choose—and we have about six minutes left, so we have to be very stingy with our time. We’ve got to be quick, exactly, couldn’t have put it better. Give me an example of how you would cut back on presidential power. Any cutback in presidential power would have my support 100% because I think the executive has over time, as I said earlier, acquired far too much power, unconstitutional if you go to original intent. So give us some examples of what you consider to be excessive presidential power that ought to be scaled back.
Terry Moe: Well, we would, number one, dramatically cut back on the number of political appointees. Right now, presidents make about 4,000 political appointees. A lot of these people are simple loyalists, they don’t have expertise and they politicize the bureaucracy and undermine its effectiveness. This is not a good thing for the country. And an authoritarian like Donald Trump can really use this to undermine democracy. This is a bad thing. Number two, we would take steps to insulate the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies from total control by presidents and make it much more difficult for them to control those agencies. They’re way too dangerous and too powerful for one guy to take control of. We would eliminate the pardon power. That would take a constitutional amendment, but there’s absolutely no basis for presidents to be issuing pardons. We would have legislation that would mitigate conflicts of interest on the part of presidents. We would support legislation that places serious restrictions on presidents’ ability to use national emergency powers, which are at the heart of excesses in the use of unilateral presidential power. Those are examples.
Bob Zadek: And Terry, that’s where I sort of wholeheartedly embrace those concepts. Every one of them I—I—I hadn’t thought about especially the excessive power in appointing heads of government agencies. You’re exactly right. You said they are people who support the president. I would use—I would say they’re donors. That’s all, it’s simple. They’re all donors. And so I couldn’t agree more. And also, I couldn’t agree more, and I am always pained by how political the Justice Department has become. I would of course include obviously the IRS, which is in Treasury, but as another agency that just gives too much power going back to Nixon and earlier. It’s just—so I couldn’t agree more that those—and those are, in my view, incredibly strong suggestions in your book that I hadn’t thought about, but if there was one—one bill I had to sign onto all of them that you just mentioned, that would be it. I wouldn’t change any punctuation. It’s perfect.
The Electoral College and Closing [49:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, you also—we have a few—we have just a minute or so left before I want to close down and remind folks about your book. But you—you don’t like, using a banal word, you don’t like the Electoral College. And because it’s small-d democratic. So we have about 30 seconds. You would support a national popular vote for president, I guess.
William Howell: Yes. I mean, it’s not born of the specific argument that we build in the book, but, you know, the idea that we—I mean, this, when you think about the kind of relic that is that we’ve inherited, these commitments in the Constitution that make no sense for the modern era and that no other country has seen fit to, you know, to replicate when writing their own constitutions, this one—this one clearly needs to go.
Bob Zadek: I’ve done many—for my listeners, I’ve done a few shows on the Electoral College. It can be—to me, the Electoral College, we should have proportionate distribution of electors based upon the popular vote in each state, so it’s not winner-take-all. That would fix the problem. I defer to other—to other shows of mine to learn more about the Electoral College.
The book is—is a very strong book. It—I wonder, just I’ll make an observation and then I’ll close, I wonder if the book would have been written if Donald Trump hadn’t been elected as president. Whether you would see into the future and say, “Be careful, this could happen.” But maybe to you guys, here it is. The theory is correct. Here is authoritarianism in practice and it’s kind of scary. The book is highly educational for anybody who is even remotely curious about how the political system works, the Trump phenomenon in general, and also of course the lessons of the book are exportable as you learn about what’s going on in other countries. The book is called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. It’s written by William Howell and Terry Moe. It is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand where we have come from in the past four years, where we might go in the future, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. There are some people who say we need more authoritarianism, we need more fixers in this country and less talkers. So but the book is highly educational. It’s a must-read if you are even remotely curious about politics. So William and Terry, thank you. I’m sorry we didn’t have an entire semester on the air. We had an hour. We did the best that we could. So thank you so much for the book and thank you for sharing an hour of your time with us this morning.
William Howell: Thank you, Bob. That was really nice of you.
Terry Moe: Very fun conversation.
Bob Zadek: So have a nice Sunday, everyone. This is Bob Zadek saying so long to my friends out there and so long to my new friends, William and Terry. I hope we get a chance to chat again. Thank you so much, guys.