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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on Kristi Noem’s removal as head of the Department of Homeland Security. David warns that the chaos at the department, combined with President Trump’s demand that the SAVE Act be passed before he will sign any budget for the DHS, could endanger Americans as the United States wages war against Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Then David is joined by former Representative Beto O’Rourke to discuss the hotly contested 2026 Senate primary in Texas between James Talarico and Representative Jasmine Crockett. Frum and O’Rourke discuss what this race means for the future of the Democratic Party, why Texas Democrats always seem to fall short of victory, and the importance of the Texas Senate race for control of the chamber.
Finally, David is joined by Samuel Fleischacker, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and discuss how Smith would fit in politically today.
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Beto O’Rourke, who ran for U.S. Senate from Texas in 2018, ran for governor of Texas in 2022. We’ll be discussing about the politics of the state of Texas after the March 3 primary.
For my book talk this week, we’re gonna be doing something a little bit different. This week marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s [The] Wealth of Nations, and I will be joined to discuss that by one of the world’s leading experts on Adam Smith, an old friend of mine named Samuel Fleischacker, who teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And we’ll be doing a short book dialogue about Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.
Before turning to either Beto O’Rourke or The Wealth of Nations, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about events of the recent days. If you traveled over the weekend just past, you probably encountered snarling queues at TSA or any of the other airport check-ins. This may have been maliciously organized by the Department of Homeland Security to drive home a point. It may be a general, genuine problem. I can’t assess that. But it is true that the Department of Homeland Security’s budget is stalled in Congress, and it is true there is no leadership at the Department of Homeland Security. President [Donald] Trump just removed the head of DHS, Kristi Noem, and her deputy Corey Lewandowski, and he has proposed to nominate someone else, but there’s no action on that nomination, and so there’s no leadership, there’s no budget at the Department of Homeland Security in the middle of a U.S.-led war against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror.
At the FBI, which is also a bureaucracy in charge of keeping Americans safe against terrorism, many of the leading counterterrorism experts have been purged from the FBI because they had worked on cases involving President Trump. Now, just how bizarre is this?
A week ago, the United States started a war, or joined a war, or resumed a war, or intensified a war—you can put it however you like—against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. It is a predictable response by the Iranians to this military confrontation with the United States that they would try to turn on all of their worldwide terror networks, and the United States is without leadership and without a budget for the agency that is most responsible for keeping Americans safe against terrorism. That’s something you would think that would be thought of in advance, but apparently, it has not been.
Okay, all right, maybe they didn’t think about it in advance, but now, now that the war’s actually here, you would think there would be a big hurry to get the Department of Homeland Security on a counterterrorism footing, to stop the inessentials, like detaining grandmothers and shooting Americans at street corners, and to focus on the core mission for which the DHS was created back in the George W. Bush years: counterterrorism. Focus on that. But no, no. President Trump posted on his social-media platform this past weekend that he would not sign any budget for the Department of Homeland Security unless he got first the passage through Congress of a voting measure to make it more difficult to vote by mail.
Now, why President Trump cares so much about voting by mail is a little hard to understand. Let me just go down this rabbit hole for a second. Who votes by mail? Above all, active-duty service personnel and older people—typically Republican constituencies. So even from a narrow [Republican] Party maximizing point of view, this makes no sense.
But Donald Trump seems to be motivated by a fear that, or by a theory, that he lost in 2020 because of vote-by-mail; therefore, vote-by-mail must be punished. He may also be thinking—and this is pretty sinister, but it’s not, I think, beyond the realm of imagining—that if what you wanna do is a crackdown on voting in 2026 in the congressional elections, and if you wanna use ICE and other agencies to intimidate people at polling stations, you’d better remove the vote-by-mail option because a lot of people who might be afraid to confront federal force at the polling stations may still be willing to vote if they can put their ballot in an envelope and mail it safely and in privacy and not have to worry that, because of the accent of their voice or the color of their skin, they will be wrongly accused of voting illegally and detained and held for however long the government wants to detain them. So they have that fear. They vote by mail. Their vote still counts—they are American citizens, naturalized or native-born, but with just a different accent or a different skin color. So maybe that’s what Donald Trump has in mind.
But whatever he’s got in mind, whether it’s some strange or crazy reaction to his defeat in 2020, whether it’s a strategic plan to stop or harass voting in 2026, or whether it’s just a misconception of who votes by mail—that, in fact, it is a Republican-leaning constituency that mostly uses this option—whatever his motive, the point is, he’s holding hostage, he who started the war or who intensified this war, he’s holding hostage the national security counterterrorism budget of the United States in a war with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, in a war that he timed and that he chose. It just seems like a bizarre abdication of responsibility.
Now, if you watched my dialogue with Tom Nichols last week, you’ve noticed I have a lot of sympathy for at least the stated goals of confronting Iran: to punish the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, to stop the Iranian nuclear program, and to deliver the promised help to the brave people of Iran, who rose in January against an oppressive government, one of the most repressive and aggressive governments in the world. They rose in hundreds of thousands and were killed in the thousands. The president of the United States promised to help them, and I think, even when the president is Donald Trump, the promises of the president should be made good. But the anxiety that Tom and I discussed last week and that I’ve discussed in articles with The Atlantic is, These guys? These guys? These guys are supposed to lead the war? They don’t seem capable of organizing a lemonade stand. What do you mean, they’re going to lead a war, and such an ambitious war? And the proof of all of those anxieties being well founded is what is happening now with the counterterrorism.
The idea you would go to war against Iran with a nonfunctioning Department of Homeland Security and, now that you know it’s nonfunctioning and that the queues are snaking around the block at America’s airports because Global Entry isn’t working and TSA isn’t there and the Department of Homeland Security is not doing its job, it says because it doesn’t have enough budget, that you would not hasten to get that budget passed by any compromise necessary, hasten to install the most professional counterterrorism leadership you could find, and not pick the next DHS leader because that person is good at going on TV and defending President Trump, no matter what he does—and by the way, also hasten out of the building the last DHS leader, who delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising contracts to her friends and supporters on a no-bid basis—that you would not just bring some professionalism to this suggests a kind of negligence in the prosecution of a war of choice.
It’s really hard to wrap your mind around. Nothing like this has been seen before. The United States has gotten into military conflicts that didn’t go as well as Americans hoped, but not because no one did the basic thing of making sure that the agencies of government you need to prosecute the war have a budget and a leadership. That’s, like, 101; you would think that would happen automatically. But it didn’t happen.
So the United States finds itself unprepared, unready for the most frightening possible Iranian counterstroke on the U.S. homeland. There seems to be no progress because, for President Trump, protecting the homeland is a lesser priority than stopping voting by mail, for whatever reason he wants to stop voting by mail. And here we are, here we are as the war continues, as the price of oil surges, as stock markets fall, as Americans face terrible risks in conflict, and as the people of Iran wait for the rescue they were promised that may or may not ever arrive in a way that means any difference to their lives.
And now my dialogue with Beto O’Rourke.
[Music]
Frum: Beto O’Rourke represented the El Paso district in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019. He challenged incumbent U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. He lost that race despite winning more votes than any Democrat before or since in a statewide Texas contest, winning 100,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton won in Texas in her 2016 presidential race.
Since then, Beto O’Rourke has worked in Texas political organizing and fundraising. Last month, I turned to him for some insight into the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2026, and we agreed to reconvene after the state primaries on March 3. That primary was won by James Talarico, who will now face either incumbent Senator John Cornyn or state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Assuming neither drops out beforehand, that Republican nomination will be decided in a runoff May 26.
No Democrat has won a statewide contest in Texas since 1994, ao nonincumbent Democrat has won since 1990, and no Democrat has won a U.S. senatorship from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in the 1980s.
Beto O’Rourke, thank you so much for joining The David Frum Show and for enlightening us about Texas today.
Beto O’Rourke: Oh, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me on.
Frum: So here’s the first question: I sort of gave a summary of what has gone on in the longer view of Texas—what is your interpretation of Texas politics as it stands after March 3?
O’Rourke: It’s one of the most exciting times, at least in my lifetime, especially if you’re a Democrat in the state of Texas. You have a generational talent in James Talarico, who not only won the [Democratic] primary for U.S. Senate in Texas but won it against another generational talent in Jasmine Crockett. I think this contest only made him a stronger candidate. It allowed him to introduce himself not just to the voters in Texas, who are the most important constituency in this, but also to the rest of the country. The Texas Senate race is, by definition, a national race. If Talarico wins this in November, he could very well be the 51st vote in the United States Senate, so the position that he’s in right now, I don’t know could be any better.
And you contrast that, David, with the Republican Senate primary, where John Cornyn and Ken Paxton and their allies have spent more than $90 million—I think it’s the most expensive Senate primary in world history—$90 million tearing each other apart, only to have to face each other again in a runoff to that primary on the 26th of May. There’s two more months of this unless, as you alluded to, one of them drops out at the behest of the president, but I don’t see either one of them doing that, even if Trump demands it. So Talarico has the opportunity over the coming two months to consolidate support, to go out and earn the votes of Jasmine Crockett’s constituency and the people who were most excited about her, and to go into the final stretch into November in a very strong position.
In addition, and this has never happened before, at least not in the last 50 years, there is a Democrat running for every single state House seat in Texas—there’s 150 of them; every open state Senate seat—there’s 16 of them; and every congressional race—there are 38 of them. We have a full ticket for the first time since 1974. And even if many of those Democratic contenders do not win in, let’s say, the Panhandle or Abilene or Odessa or East Texas, they are still gonna draw in net new Democratic voters and send those votes all the way to the top of the ticket, which is only gonna help James Talarico.
So this set of conditions that I just described, when you add that to the fact that we’re in the president’s midterm and he has never been more unpopular, including in Texas—the policies he’s pursuing, the tariffs that are decimating farmers and ranchers in this state, the ICE raids that are breaking up families, the fact that we were already the least insured state in America and now hundreds of thousands more will be kicked off Medicaid—none of this stuff is popular, and it’s really kind of a perfect storm not just for James Talarico but for Texas Democrats. So I’m very optimistic and very excited by what I’m seeing right now.
Frum: So national Democrats have this feeling about Texas that it’s like Lucy and the football: It’s always about to happen, but it never quite does happen, and you have the bruises to show for that. Why is Texas so inhospitable to Democrats? It’s a highly urbanized state. It’s a state crammed with knowledge industries. It’s a state with rising levels of education. And it’s a state, of course, that depends heavily on export industries. It’s not just an extractive state; it’s a state that sells to the world. Those are the kinds of places where Democrats tend to do well and better over time, and yet it never seems to quite happen, not even in 2018, another midterm year when President Trump was very unpopular.
O’Rourke: Yeah, going back to 2018, though, though I lost to Ted Cruz by about two and a half points, beneath me on that ballot, you saw people break through who had no business winning, much less even running: Colin Allred, who defeated Pete Sessions in that year; Lizzie Pannill Fletcher won a congressional seat against an entrenched, well-funded incumbent in southeast Texas; and James Talarico, who no one had ever heard of, defeated an incumbent state House Republican in that year. It was a sea change for Texas, and, David, the response from the governor, Greg Abbott, and the Republican legislature was to make it even harder for people to vote in Texas. This is the state that makes it harder than any other not only to register to vote but to cast a ballot, the highest forms of voter suppression—ironically, in the state that produced [President Lyndon B. Johnson] LBJ and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 in the first place. So those targets are on Black voters. They’re on young voters. They’re on census tracts in communities like Houston, Texas, the most diverse city in America, where Republicans cynically believe that, if they make it harder for people in these communities to vote, they can hold on to power. And so far that has proven true. You see these restrictions getting more onerous with each passing election cycle.
I think this perfect storm that I just described is the best way to overcome that—not that it will be easy. Despite all those conditions that I described earlier, you also have now a president hell-bent on retaining power because he understands the consequences of a potential loss. There will no longer be impunity for his crimes and corruption. There will be the very real prospect of free and fair elections in 2028. And you will have Democratic chairs who have subpoena power to be able to disclose the full Epstein files, for example, or to lay bare the connections between money and influence and outcomes in the White House. He understands what’s coming for him if he loses, hence asking Greg Abbott and the Republican legislature to gerrymander five congressional districts in Texas, which they did last summer; his threat to cancel mail-in voting; and I would not be surprised if he sent federal agents—Border Patrol, ICE, or otherwise—to popular polling places in big cities in Texas.
But here’s a glimmer of hope: In addition to the monster turnout that we saw in Texas over our primary that concluded on March 3 and shattered records across the state, in five of those newly gerrymandered seats, more Democrats voted in the primary in those congressional districts than did Republicans, and that’s with a hotly contested Republican primary for Senate and a hotly contested Democratic primary for Senate. So the momentum is with us right now, and if we needed more proof, you probably saw this, but on January 31, in a special election for a state Senate seat, a Democrat defeated the Republican by 14 points in a district that Trump had won 14 months earlier by 17 points—it was a 31-point swing—in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth.
So there are really good things happening here, but we know that we’re gonna meet the threat of the president trying to control the situation in Texas.
Frum: Can I hit a pause button there? So the claim “Texas is not a red state; it’s a nonvoting state” is a favored talking point, especially of Texas progressives, and it was the theory of the Jasmine Crockett campaign: If only we could get more people out to vote and the voter suppression weren’t so bad. But isn’t it true that every Texas political scientist who has studied this question said if Texans vote in higher numbers, they will actually be more red and less blue because the places where people are not voting are exactly the kind of disaffected, disaffiliated sectors of the population where President Trump does well, and the high-commitment voters are the people who actually are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party?
O’Rourke: I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m smart enough to be able to divine the answer. I spend most of my time with our group, Powered by People, registering young voters, and then it’s important that we not just register them, we stay in touch with them, because we don’t really have so much a registration problem as we have a turnout problem. When I ran for governor in ’22, 9 million registered Texans didn’t cast a ballot. A lot of them were these young people, very often first in their families to be registered to vote, who are intimidated by the voter-suppression, voter-intimidation regime that we have in Texas. So my theory of the case, in part, is that meeting these young voters where they are, getting them registered, staying in touch with them, and having them turn out at much higher rates is going to help Democrats.
But I will concede this much, David, that I don’t think that’s sufficient for the task at hand; I think persuasion is in order as well. And I don’t know that you can do it at a distance, through technology or money. I think you have to be in the 254 counties of Texas, reaching out to people everywhere. We saw what happened when Democrats took places like the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas for granted. It had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats for the last 100, 150 years, and as we saw in 2020, then 2022, and certainly in 2024, there was a big shift that moved over to Republicans and Donald Trump. What we’re seeing from the exit polls from the primary is that population is now open for persuasion. It’s in the game, and it’s not spoken for already. I think that’s an exciting dynamic in Texas.
So I think it’s both a turnout issue and a persuasion issue, and I think we have an amazing candidate at the top of the ticket who can help us accomplish both.
Frum: Persuasion versus turnout was kind of the abstract issue in the primary: Crockett saying, We don’t need to persuade anybody. We just need to turn out the voters who are not turning out—flying in the face of the political scientists, who said, The people who don’t turn out are more Trumpy, not less Trumpy—and Talarico saying, I think I can persuade some of the people who formerly voted for Trump. And that was the question: persuasion versus turnout. And those are both plausible points of view.
Why, given that there were two plausible theories of the election, why did the election turn so nasty? Why can’t Democrats in Texas play nicer with one another?
O’Rourke: I think, to some degree, it’s just a function of a contested primary, which we haven’t had in Texas in as long as I can remember. There nominally have been primary contests, but there really hasn’t been one like this, where you have two people who can raise more money than God, who have almost universal name ID amongst Democrats, and as you pointed out, have two really distinct theories of the case, whether it’s persuasion or whether it’s turnout. And stylistically, I don’t know that you could pick two more polar opposites than Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico.
I think it was a great thing, honestly. Having that spirited contest drew in precisely the kinds of voters who’d been missing from our politics and our elections in the state of Texas—overwhelmingly young people, who turned out at much higher rates in this primary than they ever have before in the state of Texas. And if we can keep them engaged, now that their interest is piqued after this contest, if James Talarico can consolidate that support, especially from Jasmine Crockett’s base and the folks who were most excited about her, I think this just adds more wind to our sail. So I’m not, perhaps, as disturbed as you might think I would be by the nature of that contest. I think overall it was a good thing. It’s a reflection, if the market is telling us something, that this is a very winnable seat.
I take all of this as a good sign, and, David, it’s not just because I’m an optimist; it’s because I really see it in the turnout, where you had really tough contests on both sides, but 100,000-plus more Democrats voted in Texas on March 3 than Republicans. That never happens. It happened in 2020 only because we had a contested Democratic presidential primary, but that’s the anomaly. Otherwise, this never happens in Texas. So that many more Democrats turning out in the primary bodes very well for November.
Frum: But when the race did turn nasty, the weapons everyone reached for were the nuclear weapons in the Democratic arsenal: accusations of race. And it escalated very fast, and Colin Allred—and I know you don’t wanna talk about personality, so I’m not making this a personal issue about anybody—who had also done a statewide race, instead of being, as you have been, a kind of calming force, became an accelerant force. What is missing from the party that it doesn’t have a way to sort these inevitable disputes—as you say, they are inevitable in a hotly contested primary—but in a way where people do not reach for the deadliest weapons at hand?
O’Rourke: It’s really the Wild West out here, David. There’s no Texas Democratic Party relative to, say, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party or the California Democratic Party. This is a party that had been allowed by national Democrats and the DNC, probably going back to the 2008 presidential election and the loss of the 50-states strategy from Howard Dean, to just wither on the vine—no resources. We’re a net donor to Senate and congressional races across the country: more money flowing out of Texas than coming in. You don’t have a senior stateswoman or statesman. If Ann Richards were alive today, I think she’d have the gravitas and the standing and the basis to bring these parties together. Where there’s decentralization, no strong central party, no strong, universally revered leader, you have this fractiousness and sometimes an inability to control these fights.
And here’s the great thing: All of that was settled on the 3rd of March, and you probably saw, the next morning, Jasmine Crockett, I thought, graciously conceded and encouraged everyone who follows her and voted for her to get behind Talarico and other Democrats. I expect to see her, in the coming weeks and months, on the campaign trail across the state of Texas.
One of the things you saw in the election returns from the 3rd is that Jasmine Crockett did overwhelmingly well amongst Black voters in Texas, and as you probably know, David, there are more Black voters in the state of Texas than there are in any other state in the union. And this is a constituency in Texas, as it has been throughout the country, that I think my party has taken for granted: Your skin is Black; you’re probably gonna vote for me. I don’t have to work on it or earn your vote or spend time in your community. That’s one of the great sins committed by this party. Jasmine was able to electrify, energize, and turn out people who felt like they had been taken for granted by the Democratic Party before. If she and Talarico can work in tandem to make sure that these voters know that they are a priority in this party not just in the primary but through the general election, I really think we have something there, and that hopefully is gonna be the other side to the story that you’ve begun to tell today about this division within our party. These two people coming together, bringing the rest of us together, I think could just be the most positive thing to happen for Texas, and given the outsized role our state plays in our national politics, for the country as well.
Frum: You keep reminding us of the size of Texas, and as obvious a point as that is, it’s really important to keep in mind, and sometimes people in the rest of the country just—the idea that Texas is not just massively large in physical space, but so overwhelmingly populous—I did not know the point you just made, that there are more Black voters in Texas than in any other state. If you’d asked me that in advance, I would’ve guessed that question wrong. So that’s another reminder.
But lemme test a theory on you: that one of the consequences of the vastness of Texas and the fact there are so many different large metropolitan areas means it just takes a lot of money to mount a competitive campaign. And Texas then becomes a magnet for money from all over the country and especially from national donors who are much more progressive than Texas voters, and so you get this push of candidates farther to the left than really suits the Texas electorate. And one of the reasons the Texas Democrats have not done well since the time of Lloyd Bentsen and Ann Richards is they are pushed, unlike Bentsen and Richards, away from the Texas voter by the national donor. And when you look at Talarico, he seems to have staked out a lot of issue positions in pursuit of donations that are not going to suit him as he becomes a general-election candidate against whoever the Republicans produce, especially if it’s John Cornyn.
O’Rourke: Yeah. I guess I’d compare that to Colin Allred, who ran against Ted Cruz in 2024. I haven’t put their voting records or their positions on given policy issues side by side, but my gut is that Colin is a more conservative politician, a more conservative candidate, and has not really staked positions to the left of the center of our party; James Talarico, perhaps a little more progressive or a little more liberal, as you suggest. I don’t know all the dynamics that took place in 2024, but Colin Allred lost by a lot more than I did to the same man in the same state. That might, in part, be a test of whether centrism can work in Texas, although there are a lot of other variables and factors.
The thing with Talarico—I’m sure you saw his Joe Rogan interview; I’m sure you’ve seen his clips of his engagement with Republican colleagues in the state House or speeches that he’s given or his performance in the debate with Jasmine Crockett—I think he really has a way of bringing a lot of people into a shared position by finding the common ground on the issue. He really made his name in Texas, in large part, by fighting for public education. He’s a former public-school educator. He helped, with Republican colleagues, to rewrite our public-education financing and then led the fight against vouchers, which is the privatization of public tax dollars, taking those monies away from public schools and sending them to private schools. He also helped to cap the cost for insulin in the state of Texas at $25 for a co-pay. These are very popular and maybe even populist issues that don’t just play well in Austin and Houston and Dallas, but maybe even more so in remote rural and even red counties, where the public schoolhouse is the largest employer in that given county, where public hospitals have shut down because of Medicaid cuts, and where these two things—public education and reducing cost of prescription drugs—are just incredibly popular, regardless of your party affiliation.
I think if you can keep bringing us back to those things that bring us together, that most of us care about, regardless of where we live or who we voted for for president in 2024, he’s gonna continue to do well, even if he scores to the left of the middle of the Democratic Party on a few hot-button political issues. But even with those, I think he’s got such an incredibly calming manner of listening to people, demonstrating respect, and then trying to find the common ground on those issues.
So you’re right—this will be a test, and I think the A/B is Allred in ’24 and Talarico in ’26.
Frum: Well, let me push you a little more on this.
O’Rourke: Sure.
Frum: It seems to me, and again, I’m looking at this from outside, but that the theory of the national Democratic Party is that the way you hold together a coalition is, you find candidates who give the progressives what they want on the issues, but have some biographical element that, in theory, should appeal to nonprogressives. And that’s how Tim Walz found himself [Kamala] Harris’s running mate in 2024. He was very, very progressive on the issues but a former football coach, and he had this kinda shuffling-dad-from-a-TV-comedy-show demeanor. And so the biography, the physical presence would appeal to the center and the right, but the positions would appeal to the left. Result? Failure. And you can’t blame it all on him, but it obviously didn’t work.
And there seems to be some similar theory about Talarico, which is, he’s very liberal on the issues, much more so than Allred or than you were in 2018, but he speaks a lot about religion. He’s a seminarian. And the theory of the case is that by talking about religion and his background in seminary, that that will offset the issues. He’s a much more refined version of the Tim Walz proposition, but it’s the same proposition. What do you think of that theory?
O’Rourke: I don’t know, and I don’t know how calculated this approach is. I really like to think that this is authentic and genuinely James Talarico and his approach to the world, but I understand how it could seem programmed, right? You’re gonna be a straight white male who’s conversant in Bible verse and New Testament theology and has a way of breaking through to audiences and parts of the electorate that maybe were unavailable to Democrats before and might also kind of buffer the impact of liberal or progressive ideas on hot-button issues.
What I think that people want even more than that package is change from what has failed them so far, and James Talarico is just so different than anything that we have seen, or at least that I have seen, in the state of Texas. That package that you just described—his extraordinary ability to connect with audiences, whether he’s doing it on TikTok or Instagram, digitally through a screen, or in person in large gatherings, in town halls, in rural communities and big cities alike—this feels different to people because I think it is different for all of us. And if 2024 was a change election, I think 2026—and I guess they’re all change elections—but I think the premium on change and something different is gonna be greater than perhaps at any other time. So I think he’s gonna represent that to people.
And kind of interestingly, just from my experience—and we’re very different in many, many ways—but running in Trump’s first midterm in 2018, you’re right, David, I had probably one of the most bipartisan voting records in Congress. I was in the minority the entire time I was there. The only way to get anything passed was to find Republican colleagues with whom I could agree on and then to get Donald Trump to sign that stuff in the last two years that I was there. But I would go to communities where people would say, Man, I love you because you’re one of the most progressive guys I’ve ever seen here. And I’d go to other communities, and people would say, I love you because you’re so conservative. I was different than anything that they had seen before, and they would pin their hopes to somebody breaking through a system that had so badly failed them, wherever they happened to live across the state of Texas. And I feel that same energy as I travel the state right now, in 2026, as I did in 2018, but perhaps even more so. So I don’t know that this is in any way a conventional year, where conventional theories of the case are going to apply.
Frum: Well, not to speak for you, but isn’t the difference, to put it a little crudely, that your message in 2018 was, actually, if anyone cared to look, moderate content but a progressive affect, whereas Talarico is trying to do it the other way around?
O’Rourke: I don’t know; I never thought about it that way, but that could be the case. But I think that the greatest success accrues to those candidates who are most genuinely and honestly themselves. And so, whether it’s an affect or not, I think this really is Talarico, and people really believe that and respond to that, and it energizes them. And in this competition for eyeballs, this premium placed on authenticity that has so richly rewarded Trump, who no one believes that anybody has written any of those speeches for him or the crazy things that he comes up with, I think having somebody who’s equally honest and authentic but is coming from a good place, who says things that we can agree with, that make rational, logical sense and hopefully bring us together at a time of extraordinary division, that might be the ticket in Texas.
Frum: I had a chance to talk a little while ago to a member of the House of Representatives who was a Democrat who had won in a Republican-leaning seat, and I was able to ask, So what’s the secret? What did you do that broke through? And he said, I ran my race for the House as if I was running for mayor of my district. Every water project, every bridge, every bad pothole, I knew them all. I knew the leader of every community group, every chess club, every church. I ran as if for mayor. And he ran on very local issues—he had strong national views, but he ran on local issues and won. Does that formula work for the Senate? Does it work in a year like ’26, when the country is so in an uproar about what the president has done nationally and when now there is a war on, maybe a big war and maybe still on in November? Or is that always the right formula for breaking out in unlikely places, like a Democrat in red Texas?
O’Rourke: Yeah, no, I think there’s so much to that. It’s a challenging moment, though, to pursue that path because of what’s happening in the country. Everything is on the line in November. If Democrats don’t win a majority in the House and perhaps, through Texas, pick up the 51st seat in the U.S. Senate, this slide to authoritarianism and fascism, I think, is unstoppable. There’s no argument that has convinced me that we can get this country back. That Republican-majority Congress will roll out the royal red carpet for a Trump third term or for his designee. We will no longer have real elections in this country. And that’s very much on my mind, it’s very much on the mind of Democrats across this country, and I think it’s what’s driving, to a point that you made earlier, so much of the donations and attention and interest and national media that some candidates, like Talarico, are enjoying right now.
But to your other point, which I think is absolutely excellent, the way that you win on the ground, the way that you win these votes in a general election is by ensuring that the people in this state know that you know who they are and where they live. When I went to King County in 2018, for example, small rural county in Texas that voted for Trump 96 percent in the 2016 election, I knew I wasn’t perhaps going to win a whole bunch of votes there. But meeting the county judge of King County, other people who lived in that community, and understanding their water issues—their water is literally undrinkable, and they were pissed off at the EPA that had come to impose a solution without asking the people of King County what was on their minds or how they would wanna address this in the first place—I knew, if I were to win that Senate seat, that that was going to be a priority for me, and the people in King County knew that I was gonna make that a priority. And I did that 253 other times across the rest of the counties of the state of Texas.
So, David, yes, those were my issues. I wanted to make sure that every single person in every single county knew that I was gonna fight for them, because I had met them where they lived, listened to them, understood their challenges, and we’d agreed we were gonna work on these things together. I think that was so much of the success that I enjoyed. It wasn’t my position on reproductive health care or foreign policy or any other issue. It was that I had been to every county. I had opened these town halls to any person. Whether you liked me, didn’t like me, Republican, Democrat, had a gun on your hip or came unarmed, you were welcomed into our meetings, and there were two microphones so everyone could have a say. That became the story. That’s what you knew about me if you knew nothing else in that 2018 race: That fucker went everywhere. He showed up for everybody, wrote nobody off, took nobody for granted.
And that’s the way that you run for mayor or city council—I was a former city council member here in El Paso, Texas. They aren’t partisan issues. It’s: Do you know my neighborhood? Have you been to my door? Have you seen the streetlight that’s out on my block? Those are the things that matter to people in their day-to-day life. So it’s being able to do both of those things: run a national campaign, because national dollars have to flow into this state in order to win—five of the most expensive media markets in America right here in Texas—and then to win the actual voters, you’ve got to be in their communities, meet them where they are, and reflect their concerns and their aspirations in the campaign that you run.
Frum: Let me end by asking you to lift your eyes a little bit out the time horizon. There’s gonna be a census in 2030. Texas is a growth powerhouse, both for wealth and population, increasingly dominant state in the country. What does American politics anchored in Texas look like in the years after 2030?
O’Rourke: Some people look at Texas as a state that would be nice to win. To your question, this is a state that we must win if Democrats are going to be a national party. In the 2032 presidential contest, if we have one, the Democratic nominee could win all of the so-called blue-wall states, but if they don’t also win the state of Texas, there is no viable path to the White House. After the 2030 census and the reapportionment, those states will lose population, Electoral College votes, to the benefit of Texas and other Sunbelt states. This is a state that we have to win, and you cannot start working on 2032 in 2032 or even in 2030; you have to be working on it yesterday. And that’s what so many of us have been doing. The Senate race in 2018, the governor’s race in ’22, the work that we’re doing on the ground organizing with Powered by People, this is all trying to build the voter power that I wish had existed in 2018, when I took on Cruz in that very close contest.
So you mentioned this—it’s kind of a zero-sum equation on national Democratic dollars and where they flow. We’ve got an important Senate race in Michigan, one in Georgia, another in Maine, another in North Carolina, and then this one in Texas, and I understand people who are saying, Hey, can we really afford to invest in Texas? I don’t think we can afford not to invest in Texas. This is the path to the White House. Last time that a Democrat won it [in Texas], as you know, was 1976, Jimmy Carter. As you mentioned, Lloyd Bentsen, the last Democrat to win a Senate race here in 1988. If we’re in the wilderness, it’s not just to the detriment of the Democratic Party; it means that we may not have democracy in America. This state is absolutely critical, and thank God that the people of this state have not been waiting for the rest of the country to figure it out. I mentioned James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett getting after it, risking their political careers on this prize in November, 150 state House Democratic contenders, 6 state Senate, 38 for congressional seats—this state is doing everything it can with what it has right where it is. As national Democrats also pitch in, I think that this state will ride to the rescue of the country in 2026, in 2028, and then, importantly, in 2032, when I think that the Democratic nominee for president can actually win Texas.
Frum: Beto O’Rourke, thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
O’Rourke: Thank you, David.
[Music]
Frum: So, as mentioned at the top of the show, we’re doing something a little different in the book segment this week. 2026 is the 250th anniversary of a lot of events in English literature and English political theory, not just the Declaration of Independence, of course, in 1776, but as we discussed earlier, February of 1776 saw the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s [The History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and March of 1776 saw the publication of The Wealth of Nations. Rather than just talk about The Wealth of Nations myself, I thought I would take advantage of the fact that one of my oldest friends in the world is one of the world’s leading experts on the philosophy of Adam Smith. Sam Fleischacker, as I mentioned above, teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and he is the author of a 2004 study of Adam Smith’s philosophy, and I’m gonna ask him to back me up on my limited knowledge of things Smithian today.
Sam, thank you for making time.
Samuel Fleischacker: Oh, thank you very much for having me, David.
Frum: I’m hoping we can get to two questions, but here’s the one that is most important: I think a lot of people have a mental model of Adam Smith as a kind of early libertarian, someone who thought, It’s all about the individual engaged in business and transactions and laissez-faire, nothing to do with society. Is this an accurate reading of Smith?
Fleischacker: So I’m tempted to say it’s totally inaccurate and has his picture of human beings exactly reversed, but that’s not entirely fair. There is some truth to the picture. Smith was very insistent throughout The Wealth of Nations on the advantages of having individuals make their own economic decisions about what to invest in, how to run their business, and what to buy—this is as against sumptuary laws that restricted, especially, the purchases of luxury goods among the poor. On all these things, he thought government should leave people alone and let them do what they think is best in their own situation.
So that idea and the idea that governments actually just don’t have the knowledge base to run an economy, that isn’t Smith. And if that’s libertarianism, that part of it is correct. But his picture of human nature is perhaps the most socially constructed, or the most socially shaped, that you’re gonna find among the thinkers of his time and place in mid-18th-century Scotland and England.
Frum: Lemme pause you there. What do you mean, his theory of individuals—do we need a theory of what an individual is?
Fleischacker: Well, philosophers think we do, and he was a moral philosopher first, and in his [The] Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is his great book of moral philosophy, he says we don’t even recognize ourselves as a self until we start interacting with other people. We’re always concerned with how other people are looking at us. We start incorporating into ourselves a kind of a spectator, an “impartial spectator,” he says, that watches our actions, which is built on the people around us, and we want to be the kind of person other people can approve of. So in that sense, we’re very intertwined with other people. We have benevolent feelings towards them. Friendship, he thinks, is the most important thing in human life.
So in these senses, he’s not at all a believer that everyone should just do their own thing, that individuals are on their own, and he really sees us enmeshed in a society and relating to other people.
Frum: And you’ve always insisted that you have to read both books, not just one, that the two form a unity of understanding how the individual works in the world.
Fleischacker: Yes, and actually, that goes with his life, where these books come from. He was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, following his own teacher, Francis Hutcheson, and he taught a yearlong course, which started with moral philosophy, then went to philosophy of law—he never published that part—and that ended with a discussion of policy, mostly economic policy. So he published the beginnings and the ends. He published the moral philosophy as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He published the economic stuff with The Wealth of Nations. He didn’t put in the law stuff in between. But he saw this all as one large project.
And I think, among other things, if you do see the project as a whole, you realize, for one thing, why he doesn’t want governments to run our lives morally. That’s also a core of truth in the libertarian view. He didn’t think government should impose religion. He didn’t think they should give moral instruction. And one reason for that is that he thought everyday social interaction with your friends and neighbors would do that better than government could ever do.
Frum: So he was someone who believed, maybe, in what would be recognized today as a libertarian approach to governance, but the libertarian psychology of the autonomous individual, the master of his domain, the Ayn Rand superhero, that he had no time for.
Fleischacker: Exactly. In fact, he spends a lot of time arguing against that.
And then I should add, his big concern as regard to libertarian governance is that government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy, they shouldn’t favor one company versus another, and they shouldn’t favor one sector versus another—manufacturing versus agricultural, or vice versa. He did not think government should refrain from helping the poor. So the whole issue about welfare policy, it wasn’t really on the table at the time, but to the extent that it was, he supported the English poor law, and he supported public education for poor people. So he certainly wasn’t in any way clearly on the side of libertarians. And I, as a kind of social democrat, welfare liberal, I claim Smith as an ancestor, and I think both libertarians and welfare liberals can pull on different pieces of him for that. It’s just not his issue.
Frum: Now, he’s got one piece of good luck, which is, thinkers are often remembered for things they didn’t say—Charles Darwin never said survival of the fittest—but Adam Smith did mention the “invisible hand.” What is the invisible hand? What did he mean by it, and why is it different from modern thinking about pure autonomous markets that don’t need any assistance from anybody?
Fleischacker: Right. So this is fiercely debated to this day in Smith’s scholarship. There are some people who think he means the hand of God governing the market, so everything will work out right. I think that’s clearly not true, especially in The Wealth of Nations, which never mentions God and has no—
Frum: Let me pause you. For those who are not familiar with the phrase, let’s put this phrase—I’m not gonna be able to quote it verbatim—but reconstruct the larger sentence in which the phrase invisible hand appears.
Fleischacker: So it appears in the context of his argument that you don’t need to force merchants to favor their own country in their trading, because they will do that anyway because they wanna keep an eye on their goods. And he says they “are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do what is best” for their society.
Now, that’s been read in many different ways. My own version of it is that Smith thinks the opportunities for any individual to make money in an economy are made possible by what other people around them need. So it makes sense that anything that you do to further your own interest will also help the society as a whole. And this is actually, I think, part of his view that societies shape individuals so that even when you think you’re doing something for your own interests, you might be and you might not be, but you’re always helping your society—or not always; you can do antisocial things. But when people are doing their normal economic transactions, and actually, in many other respects as well, they’re helping their society, whether they know it or not, and that’s the core of the invisible hand.
Frum: We are in a world right now where the United States government has moved away from many of Smith’s ideas. There are tariffs. There are efforts to pick winners and losers. Government is taking a share of particular companies and then favoring them. People in government are receiving streams of payment from companies, some domestic, many foreign. And there’s a kind of auction of government favoritism going on in Washington. What would Adam Smith think of today’s America?
Fleischacker: I think he’d be appalled. You couldn’t have a more un-Smithian way of running the economy. He doesn’t trust government figures; he thinks they’re corrupt, and of course, we’re seeing signs of that. There’s nothing, no policy he hates more than tariffs. He thinks that that is really a way of government leaders deciding what should be imported and what should be exported, and in all cases, he thinks, tariffs wind up hurting the home economy more than they help. And that’s even true when they’re imposed for the sake of defense. One point he says, “Defense is more important than opulence,” so in some cases, maybe a tariff on goods that you need for defense purposes would be legitimate. But he actually elsewhere says that even those tariffs are unnecessary and they hurt your economy. So—
Frum: In his context, he’d be thinking, Well, what if you have one cannon factory in all of England or one place where you make ships’ sails? You might wanna protect that company, but even then, you’ll be sorry [in] the long run.
Fleischacker: That’s actually exactly his example, and he still thinks that you’ll probably do better—if another company makes those sails cheaper, you should import them, and at best, you’ll do something that’s useful for defense purposes, but it will have an economic cost. In no case does he think that a tariff will actually help the economy.
Frum: Let’s finish here with one more thought, which is, reading Gibbon, which was published 250 years ago last month, that’s a pretty daunting challenge. It’s very long, and a lot of it can be kind of obscure. But Smith reads today as powerfully as he did 250 years ago this month. People should go read him.
Fleischacker: (Laughs.) I certainly agree. I have to say, it’s funny that you say this. I was just reading yesterday a letter from David Hume to the publisher of both Smith and Gibbon—they had the same publisher—saying, I think that Gibbon will sell much better than Smith because Smith is very hard to read and Gibbon is a nice story, a narrative. And [William] Strahan, the publisher, sort of agrees, but it turns out that Smith was selling better than anybody expected. I think both are still relevant, but Smith maybe even more so.
Frum: Thank you, Sam, so much for making time today.
Fleischacker: Thank you, David, for having me on.
Frum: All right. This is bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Samuel Fleischacker for joining me today to talk about Adam Smith. Thanks to Beto O’Rourke for joining me to talk about politics in Texas. Thanks to all of you for watching and listening to The David Frum Show. As ever, if you are minded to support the program, the best way to do that, and to support all of us at The Atlantic, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.
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