This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
It is a wild thing to release a book into the world. “Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, has been out for a month and a half. It hit No. 1 on The New York Times’s best-seller list this week.
Thank you to all of you out there who have read or listened to it. There’s no way that would have happened without you.
And the book is doing things out there that I never really expected it to do, including creating arguments that I didn’t see coming — which is amazing.
So I wanted to have on today two people from the left, which is where much more of the pushback has come from than I expected. One guest is from the antimonopoly left, which I think sees abundance politics in ways I didn’t initially foresee as a threat, a challenge.
I also wanted to have somebody on from the part of the left that has become obsessed with building — the Green New Deal left, the industrial policy left, the left that thinks we have lost the ability to accomplish the missions the left set for America through the government.
My guests today are Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running for Congress in San Francisco against Representative Nancy Pelosi. He’s the president and co-founder of the New Consensus think tank and was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first chief of staff. He helped recruit her for Congress and ran her 2018 campaign.
Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and a key figure in antimonopoly thinking. She has mounted runs for governor, state attorney general and Congress and has written a number of books.
I found this conversation both great about abundance politics but also about some of the broader goals, questions, animating impulses and theories of the left as it tries to define itself for this next era.
Ezra Klein: Saikat Chakrabarti, Zephyr Teachout, welcome to the show.
Zephyr Teachout: Thanks so much for having us on.
Saikat Chakrabarti: Yes, thanks for having us.
My simplest summary of “Abundance” is that it’s an effort to focus people on the question of: What do we need more of? What is stopping us from getting it?
I’d like to hear from both of you about what you think of the book’s arguments: where you agree — and where you disagree.
Zephyr, why don’t we start with you?
Teachout: I appreciate how you led off, because I do actually think there’s a deep disagreement, and then there’s some areas of genuine agreement. But I gather you’re having us on really to fight out the —
I want the deep disagreement.
Teachout: There’s an area of deep disagreement, and there are areas of specific disagreement. The deepest disagreement is actually what you started with, which is the question of focus.
I think that we should be focusing Democratic politics, and politics in general, on the problem of concentrated power and the way in which concentrated power is making it impossible to do things and also really crushing our democracy.
We really do have an oligarchy problem. And the antimonopoly tool kit is a response to that. So with that focus, I would say: OK, something good the Biden administration did was getting over-the-counter hearing aids — a life changer for millions of Americans.
Who blocked that? Well, it’s an oligarchy in the hearing aid market. There are basically five companies that control the hearing aids, and they did everything they could to slow down the procedure. The best friend of the Chamber of Commerce is a long notice and comment period that slows down the government from doing something really good and meaningful.
So I use that as a micro-example, but the macrocritique and disagreement is around focus.
Chakrabarti: I actually agree with a lot of the goals of abundance politics, and I think everyone here agrees that America is really stuck. The specific reasons we’re stuck might be where there’s some disagreement, or is broader than just process.
But the thing I really want to add to the discussion and the question we’ve been studying at New Consensus has been: How do countries get unstuck? Because if you look at the history of the 20th century, every modern developed nation, most of them liberal democracies, went through these phases of rapidly transforming their economies and creating absurd levels of prosperity for pretty much everything in their society.
And they often did it after these periods of being really stuck. America mobilized for World War II after years of stagnation and the Great Depression. And what we’ve seen is countries seem to do it by pitching a sweeping transformation of the whole economy and then executing at breakneck speed. They flip into this whole other mode of operating that I think is really different than how we operate today in America.
Countries in mission mode have this whole other kind of leadership that pops up that doesn’t just pitch a mission. They actually follow through and execute. They organize society actively to be a part of it. And really importantly, they capture the national attention. They really make a show of the progress. They call out the heroes, and they use that as political capital to blow through obstacles, whether that’s corporate monopolies or process.
The second part is they make comprehensive plans. They don’t just pass a bunch of policies and take their hands off the steering wheel. They actually plan for all the things that need to happen to make things happen.
The third piece is they create financing and executing institutions. America used to have a bunch of these all across our society. During World War II, the largest we’ve ever had was one called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. And the R.F.C. wasn’t just a public investment bank, it was a project manager. It would go out and find problems and find bottlenecks and push and actively make sure stuff got done, things got built, and do whatever was necessary to push things along.
We’ve really tried to find examples of societies that managed to do this kind of broad-based prosperity through iterative, slow reforms. And it’s really hard to find a single society that did it. There’s something about the scale and speed of a sweeping transformation that creates this momentum and gives you this escape velocity, where these countries finally get the gumption to tackle all these obstacles that are standing in the way of progress.
So that’s the big piece that’s missing: How do you actually get past all these obstacles that we’re talking about?
Oh, this piece is superhard. [Laughs.] Sorry, Zephyr, do you want to jump in?
Teachout: I just want to make sure that we keep something that is really important, really central, which is democracy. You’ve done a lot more research in other countries, but in the United States, obviously we’re going to look at Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We aren’t going to spend all our time on the New Deal, but we see that, for F.D.R., in the first term, it was more of a top-down vision: Let’s just get things done.
And he found it didn’t work. The buy-in for that was he needed to bring an antimonopoly agenda. When you and I worked together, I think eight years ago —
Chakrabarti: Yes.
Teachout: — on visions of the Green New Deal, I think an underappreciated aspect of the Green New Deal is it’s not just a technocratic top-down vision, it is very much about a vision of power.
One of the places where I maybe differ with your school is I tend to work backward from a policy outcome I want to what I think are the obstacles that are getting in the way. Those obstacles are almost always related to some kind of power wielded by someone or some group. But it can change pretty dramatically in different places.
So I want to ground this. The single biggest item in virtually every household’s budget is the home they live in. It’s the rent, the mortgage. There’s a new RAND report that came out after my book was written that found it costs more than four times as much per square foot to produce publicly subsidized affordable housing in California — which the left supports — as it costs to produce a square foot of market-rate housing in Texas.
This is to both of you, but I’ll start with you, Saikat, because you’re in California. Why do you think that is?
Chakrabarti: We have a huge housing shortage in California.
I think the process we use to build housing is crazy. Everyone knows it’s not going to build enough housing. We have this process in San Francisco where you approve using a parcel-by-parcel method to decide which housing gets built.
That process is a big part of the problem. But I don’t actually think it’s just going to be process that will fix it. Because what we see is often financing is a problem.
Last year, a bunch of construction projects in San Francisco got stalled because interest rates went up. So construction loans got very expensive. And our current approach to that is throwing up our hands and saying: Well, I guess that’s too bad.
But that’s why it’s really key that we have public financing institutions to try to make sure this stuff moves along and keeps happening.
We can’t have just this one solution. There are going to be so many bottlenecks that come in the way. Even if we fix the financing, there might be something else that pops up.
So it’s this whole other mind-set we really need to get into to try to figure out how to make sure the houses get built.
Zephyr, what’s your take on this?
Teachout: Housing is a global crisis right now. It’s not just an American crisis. Especially the cost of housing —
But California versus Texas — I want to keep grounded there.
Why is it four times more? If you only look at market-rate housing, California is more than two times per square foot than Texas. Why?
As I wrote in the review, I have some initial thoughts on housing. But I actually think there are a lot of areas of overlap on housing. We both agree that there are actually significant problems with zoning.
My suspicion is that there is a decent amount of problem in the concentration in the home-building market and some of the supplies for construction market. I don’t know if that’s different in those different areas —
It just seems unlikely to me that California would be much more porous to corporate power than Texas.
Yes. I don’t need to fight you on particular housing policies that you’re deep in the weeds of, on zoning policies. Your theory, as I understand it, is that the main reason for the cost difference is left-wing resistance. Rick Caruso is this billionaire in Los Angeles who was leading a big NIMBY movement to make sure that you didn’t have any reform on single-family housing. Does he fit into your story?
Yes. You cannot cover housing in California or in New York City, where you and I now live, and not find a huge amount of NIMBYism. Rick Caruso is using the California Environmental Quality Act to sue to stop the development next to one of his malls — which implies to me there’s something wrong with the California Environmental Quality Act.
But the reason I’m grounding us here first, is: Housing is a big deal. It has been interesting to me to see many of my friends on the left sort of yada, yada, yada housing and say: No, of course we all agree on that.
But I am not sure we all agree. And I want to come back to the question of financing. The reason I bring it up is I actually think power is incredibly important here. But power is very much related to process. And I think we all would probably agree the way we do regulations now has created this feasting capacity for special interests. It’s very easy for them to come in and delay —
Teachout: And in particular for corporate interest.
And in particular for corporate interest because they can hire the lobbyists, the lawyers. But one of the reasons I’m very focused on process vetocracy is because it creates entry points for all kinds of incumbent players. Sometimes that’s corporations, sometimes it’s unions, sometimes it’s local homeowners. Sometimes it’s people I am allied with, sometimes people I’m not allied with.
But what it isn’t is visible. And the more you have process that is complex and delay-oriented, but also in the shadows — you have to know the planning meeting is happening, you have to know how the notice and comment period works — the more I think what you have done is open your system to all kinds of capture. How do you take that?
Teachout: I’d have to know about the particular process vetoes that you’re talking about. I do think they matter. As you know, one of my concerns about the book is that if you describe process vetoes generally but don’t say which ones are a problem — it really matters.
The other day, I was looking at: I don’t know California housing markets, but what about upstate New York versus Texas? Not New York City, but places where there’s more capacity. And roughly, it’s not two-point times. It’s about 10 to 20 percent more expensive in upstate New York to build than it is in Texas. Some part of that is labor. And I think that’s good. I think it’s good we have a more unionized labor force in New York than we do in Texas.
Can I come back to you with another example, which is I think an area where —
I want to stay on housing for now. And we can talk about another example because what you just said about the cost of construction is important.
Saikat, I want to throw this to you because this I think is where it gets even harder.
Zephyr just said: Look, one of the reasons you’re going to have a higher cost of housing construction in upstate New York than Texas is we use union labor laws or we use prevailing wage laws, depending on what you’re looking at.
And the more I’ve dug into this, the more I have come to see that in blue states or under Democratic governments, we have made the cost of public construction very high.
The reason I started by asking why it costs more per square foot to build publicly subsidized affordable housing in California than to build market-rate housing in Texas is it begins to force you to confront all these rules the government has placed upon itself. They add delay. They add cost. If it all got done, that would be fine. But sometimes, like in high-speed rail in California, it doesn’t.
How do you think about the cost of construction in a place like San Francisco?
Chakrabarti: First off, in the San Francisco versus Texas example that we’re talking about, I just want to make one point there. Because Austin, which is a city that people refer to a lot, where they did a lot of streamlined permitting, construction went up, rents went down. Really good. But it wasn’t actually enough.
Fifty percent of Austin’s population is still cost burdened by rent. And now construction has slowed down because part of the reason costs went down was a lot of people left Austin at that time. It started having net migration out of Austin.
So now what happens? I think there’s another example of just doing the permitting streamlining isn’t going to be a silver bullet. But when you’re talking about costs, I’d say there’s not one simple answer.
I think the optimism here that I have is, you look at Europe — Europe can build stuff way faster and way cheaper than us. They have a way more unionized labor force. I wish we in America had large union bargaining deals in a sectoral way, the way many European countries do. I wish we didn’t have to jam all these requirements into legislation because we had actual societal solutions for it.
I think it’s possible. And the other thing Europe does is, on a lot of these process questions, they empower their agencies to have more power to actually make decisions. And sometimes we overindex on how much the process is getting in the way. Because what you see in a lot of cases is: We add process, but stuff still gets built.
China, in the 1980s, when it was going through massive amounts of development, bringing in American companies, made those companies jump through all kinds of hoops. They had to train up Chinese workers. They had to do joint ventures with Chinese companies. But there was this overall mind-set that we actually have to get this stuff done that was different there.
I think that’s the bigger thing that’s missing. Even in Europe, they have timelines on how long these environmental reviews can take. In America, the bigger thing that’s happened is we’ve let open-ended lawsuits and this general culture of letting things languish forever take over.
I think it is underappreciated how differently Europe does government than America. We took a pretty different path from countries that I think we imagined to be similar.
People often say: Well, of course you can’t build subways in New York City. It’s a big, old city now. But they do it in Paris, which is an older city.
And I always say, including in the book: The difference can’t be unions. Because these countries have higher union density than America does. It is a difference in the way the government acts and approaches.
Do you have a view on what the key differences are? But more the point of why America and Europe took such different pathways in the back half of the 20th century?
Chakrabarti: My theory for why America and Europe ended up differently is Europe actually did their postwar boom and all that development in a more democratic way than we did.
We had this Robert Moses era where we didn’t get a lot of public buy-in. We demolished a bunch of communities, and then we got the backlash. And now we can’t build for 50 years. Whereas Europe took more of an approach of trying to bring society in through this development.
But I think the larger theory of why everywhere is stagnating is: I think countries have to go through these periods of renewal where they really go for it. And all the European democracies did this in peacetime postwar, when they were doing their booms.
And it’s in the context of a larger society-wide transformation that you’re able to do things like change the housing rules. Because housing is a big deal, but if you just do a whole politics around housing, that’s not a big enough constituency to call for the huge kind of structural reforms you need across society.
In France, for example, they built TGV, their national high-speed rail, during their postwar boom. I know you talk a lot about California high-speed rail, but if you look at how France did that versus how we did California high-speed rail, it was this comprehensive plan where they pitched the country on the whole network.
And so because it was this huge network, they planned for all the surrounding industry. They built out universities to train the engineers. They built out rolling car set industries to build the train sets. They built out steel industries. This is when they were deploying nuclear power all over France — they planned their nuclear power deployment in a way to make sure they would have the power to power the trains.
And I’d say that whole thing was even made possible because France was in the middle of a larger national renewal, where they were building out their whole economy, which Charles de Gaulle even talked about as a mission for France.
On the flip side, we got California high-speed rail where they had this project, which is one line. And I just think it wasn’t big enough to use the political capital of that project to push through the CEQA reforms, or whatever other reforms we would need, to make that go faster.
Well, they also didn’t try. I think it has been more recent that there’s an appreciation that something has gone wrong. These examples have stacked up — the Big Dig, the Second Avenue subway, high-speed rail.
It takes time to realize you’ve gotten into a hole.
Chakrabarti: Well, I think we’ve totally lost that muscle of: How do you actually do the kind of comprehensive planning and execution of these big projects? And transforming your whole economy?
So I don’t think they thought they weren’t trying. They were just doing the normal thing politicians do.
Zephyr, there was an example you had wanted to bring in.
Teachout: I actually do want to turn to green energy because I think it’s really important. But I do want to pick up on what you’re talking about with the Second Avenue subway. As you point out, Ezra, it’s not because of labor costs, because comparable projects have similar labor costs in Europe.
I don’t think you can look at what has happened in New York public transit, subway and real estate without telling a story of money and politics. One of the big differences between the United States and Europe during the period you’re talking about is that we allowed for unlimited campaign spending. We basically made the job of politicians to be a fund-raising job. And then Citizens United supercharged that by allowing corporate spending.
So in New York, to be particular about housing and the subway, it meant that the Real Estate Board of New York has this outsize power in state politics and gets a lot of giveaways that most people think didn’t make that big of a difference and led to really expensive per square footage housing. So that occupied the space on housing.
And then it led to New York’s state government, under Andrew Cuomo, starving the subway. So then it had to spend all its money doing fixes that would have been much cheaper to fix earlier.
Something you point out in the book is they also starved state capacity. They really said: Let’s consult everything out and pay big consultants. But that is downstream from the centralized corporate power over politics.
And I think one of the things that’s underappreciated is how enervating big-money politics is — how it drains politicians of dynamism. How much big donors actually want government to not act, not just in the lobbying front, which we’ve talked about earlier, but in talking to governors and congressmen. The tendency of big donors is toward no as opposed toward dynamism. And when you actually have a popular politics, people want to exercise that power.
One of the things I am trying to do in the book and in my reporting across these domains — because rural broadband is different from the Second Avenue subway, which is different from high-speed rail, which is different from building housing. You could sort of go down the line. They’re all different. Each unhappy policy is unhappy in its own way — to paraphrase Tolstoy.
But one thing that I think about is the centralization versus the fracturing of power. I don’t disagree with you that, oftentimes, you’ll dig into one of these things and you’ll find a lot of corporate power acting. Internet service providers, in the rural broadband example.
And look, you’re building high-speed rail. You’re building the Second Avenue subway. You are inconveniencing not just big businesses but small ones, too. And that matters.
I was covering this part of high-speed rail. They spent years in litigation with a small ministorage facility that just didn’t want to be moved. It’s totally reasonable that storage facility didn’t want to be moved. But in Europe, they moved the storage facility. They just have different laws around that kind of thing.
But one thing that I have been fascinated by, and that led to some of the inquiry for me, was: That enervation you’re talking about? How many politicians I talked to — and they would not all describe it to me as about corporate power, but they do describe it as: There’s a thing they want to do, and all they can do is tell me all the reasons they can’t do it.
The real estate board. The planning board. The fractured zones of authority between different councils in L.A. and the way that the L.A. municipal structure actually works.
During the fight for congestion pricing in New York City, I talked to the head of the M.T.A., and he was so frustrated by how much time he was spending working on environmental assessment with the Biden administration at that point.
It’s always a different story. But what you often see is we just don’t give the people we’ve imbued with democratic authority — a mayor, a governor, honestly even a president — as much power as you think. So it’s enervating to them, but it’s also confusing to the public.
Obama promised a public option. Why couldn’t he deliver it? Joe Biden said I’d get this. Why didn’t I get it?
I think there’s a tension here that I find difficult to resolve — between wanting things to be very small-D democratic — and then also recognizing that small-D democratic processes can get very captured — and thinking that maybe we need more executive power — but also recognizing that then you can get a bad executive, like we have nationally at the moment. And then you have a different problem.
How do you think about the level at which power should be exercised and the ability of some central voice to say: Thank you for your concerns. We’re doing it this way.
Teachout: I love the question. I think it is just telling the truth about the nature of how power is organized in society today. And I don’t think it’s just a few instances.
This may be an area of difference, but I think that the major enervating power is actually centralized corporate power, and I think you’ll find it in area after area after area.
So let’s talk about green energy. You’re probably familiar with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. They come out with this report fairly regularly on where checks are on local rules against green energy building.
I took a look at it the other day, and it’s majority red districts in New York and around the country that there are these new rules that come in that say: Can’t build solar.
Green energy has become a culture war.
Teachout: Right — green energy has become a culture war.
So I look at that, and I say: I have a very clear story of where that came from. That came from 2010 when the Koch brothers decided to threaten every single Republican who dared to use the words “climate change” in a primary and took something that, in the McCain era, had been Republicans and Democrats both thinking about green energy and the future, and turned it into a culture war. And then they were going to local communities and saying: Here, I’ve got a way to block your green energy project.
And by the way, these are very significant blocks. There are 400 different projects that are being slowed in terms of solar development or wind development. There is Kathy Hochul vetoing offshore wind.
To give some meat to the question, you might say: Well, we’ve just got to stop local communities from doing things because we need to push through this green energy development.
And the populist story is to actually just tell the truth about where this came from. It’s to say: Big oil has been crushing innovation in electric vehicles for 40 years now.
And we know that. Ezra, I actually am curious about this: You don’t think that left NIMBYism has been a bigger deal in crushing green energy than big oil, do you?
Not at the climate-change level. But I wouldn’t call it left NIMBYism, either.
Here’s the question I would ask if I were complicating the story. Because of course, I agree that there has been a huge multibillion-dollar, now multidecade, effort by the fossil fuel industry to destroy any real action on climate change. That’s just fact.
I think where your story begins to demand complication is: Why is it easier to build green energy in Texas than in California?
I’ve gone and run these numbers, working with the people who are modeling the Inflation Reduction Act’s build-out. If you look at where the I.R.A.’s money is going, if you are looking at deployment of green energy infrastructure or advanced manufacturing for green energy, that money is going majority to red states. They’re building more of it.
If you look at money, the subsidies to buy the end products, to buy an electric vehicle, that goes more to blue states because we buy more — maybe not Teslas anymore, but at one time Teslas in California and New York.
There’s no doubt that the politics are as you describe them nationally. And there’s also no doubt that what you would assume from that politics is a much more rapid build-out of green energy infrastructure in blue states than red. But that is not what we see.
I say this in the introduction of the book: This book is not aimed at the right, because they don’t share my goal on decarbonization. But then trying to understand why Texas and Georgia have been such incredible success stories from the perspective of the I.R.A. and a bunch of the states that are much more aligned with its politics has been much more difficult — that then requires some untangling.
Saikat, you focus very much on this. I’m curious how you think about that.
Chakrabarti: First off, I do agree that money in politics is this hugely enervating force. But even if we got rid of money in politics and all the other forces that get in the way, I don’t think our politicians on their own would do things at that scale.
Even looking at Texas versus California, people are building in Texas because, in a completely nothing else going on kind of scenario, there are fewer rules in Texas. It’s cheaper to build in Texas. So you build in Texas. But that’s not going to build out enough clean energy to make any sort of dent in the global problem of tackling climate change.
I think money in politics and all that just supports the general feeling that our politicians have been trying to do less and less. I think one of the really bad parts of money in politics is that politicians spend all their time calling big donors for money, and they think that’s their job. And they’re really confused by the job of actually trying to build stuff or make things happen.
There was an interview with Hassan Khan, who worked on the CHIPS Act, on the podcast “Odd Lots” yesterday. He was talking about the stuff that actually got in the way of the CHIPS Act. And a big part of it was trying to negotiate with all the different special interests and groups that had stuff to say.
And he said: That’s fine. That’s an important part of the process. And again, Europe does this, as well. But there’s no real —
And they’ve lost semiconductor manufacturing. [Laughs.]
Chakrabarti: Yes, that’s fair. But, there’s no real focus from up top. There’s no political leadership that was saying: We’ve got to get this fab built. That’s actually an overwhelming priority here.
And what happens when you create a political moment that’s bigger than any of these forces is: You can actually blow past it. And we’re kind of seeing that with Trump and tariffs right now.
Dark abundance. [Laughs.]
Chakrabarti: [Laughs.] Dark abundance. Because I’m sure all the businesses are calling up Trump right now and being like: What the hell are you doing with these tariffs? And they’re calling all their congresspeople and senators.
But Trump has created such a political moment and a reality within the Republican Party where you’ve just got to go along with the tariffs. The Republican congresspeople can say: Sorry, this is just too popular in the party. My hands are tied. I’ve got to go with the president.
Let me ask about money in politics. I think this is an important question. I would support functionally the strongest money in politics regulations and laws anybody could imagine. I would repeal Buckley v. Valeo.
I don’t think money is speech in politics. I think we’ve been on the wrong path on this for 30 to 40 years. I completely believe that it’s enervating. I believe it leads to levels of cynicism and distrust that, even if you take out every other bad thing it’s doing, is complete toxicity in the veins of the body politic.
Teachout: You’re here.
So I agree with all this. But I also think when I look at individual issues — when we say “money and politics,” when we say “corporate power,” when we say “concentrated power” — we make a fractious plural into a singular. Money in politics often lines up on many different sides of an issue.
So I was having a conversation recently with very big money — not a group you would love me talking to, Zephyr — that had been trying to finance now, for some decades, major — well, not major in terms of the build-out, but major in terms of the significance — pipelines that would bring clean energy from one place to another.
I’m not aligned with them on everything, but I’m aligned with them on building these pipelines. Because we have to get this power from the place where we are generating it as clean power to where we can power homes in New York City. I want it to happen, and it has been decades.
And that’s a very common story on transmission lines. Transmission lines are built by private companies. They’re financed privately for the most part. These companies want this to happen. They end up facing a lot of other fights. Now some of those fights on the other side are also money. Sometimes even fossil fuel interests. But it’s not just one thing.
Something I have come to believe — and this is maybe more Saikat’s perspective — is that, over time, we just flipped the default to make it easier to veto, easier to stop than to create.
Now that empowers money that wants to stop and makes it hard for money that wants to create. It empowers groups that want to stop, and it makes it hard for groups that want to create.
To me, it’s not that money should be in politics. But as a monocausal explanation, money is often on many different sides of the political fight, including climate change. The entire theory of the I.R.A. is leveraging private dollars to build a huge green energy infrastructure build-out. We are trying to align the markets alongside a political vision.
Do you agree with the premise that, in any given instance, money is often fractious — it’s not one thing or trying to achieve one thing? Some of it may be on the side of a project you like and some of it against.
Teachout: What I believe is that we should not have centralized corporate power governing our system — that there is a real —
But in any given instance — I don’t want to just be in the abstract.
Yes, and what that means is that I don’t think it’s good to have oligarchs fighting each other. A system of two oligarchs being on a different side of a thing is still a deeply broken system. And we should recognize that brokenness.
The example I would use is from the left. Think of the oligarchs we were embracing just eight years ago, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. Like: We’re aligned with them on this, so we should stay aligned with them and make sure the Democratic Party is building up their power in order to, in that case, take on Donald Trump.
But the truth is that if you engage in enhancing the political power of oligarchs because you have short-term alignment on an issue, it will end up actually degrading the political process over time.
I don’t believe, even if I would like to get money out of politics, we are going to get money out of politics in a full-on way, and end oligarchy, on the pace we need to decarbonize. We have to build things in the next couple years.
Donald Trump is now the biggest problem with this. But nevertheless, even if Kamala Harris had won the election, we would still be in this condition.
The theory you offered earlier was that money slows politics down. And what I’ve seen in many things I have covered is that money sometimes wants to speed things up, but it sometimes wants to slow it down. It sometimes wants to build, it sometimes doesn’t. There are developers who want to build housing. There are other moneyed interests that maybe don’t — Rick Caruso next to his mall.
So it’s not just the fault of money in politics, because there’s money on all sides of the issues. There’s something else going on. If we want to be able to build these things fast, we’re going to have to take it at a systemic level. And the interests around that are going to be fractious and not unified. We have to make choices.
Teachout: There is a deep difference. And I want to use a specific example.
The deep difference is: What I care about so much is I believe in the future. I believe in dynamism. I believe in a country in which people’s full selves are brought to bear. I believe in a far more equal country where we actually stand up for working people. And I believe that in order to stand up for working people, we need a dynamic country. And I absolutely believe that the biggest block to that is centralized power.
In individual fights you can say: Oh, I think this moment of centralized power might force things through but will fundamentally lead to highly concentrated, top-down, calcified power in the long term.
And the example I want to use is: You and I first met over 20 years ago when I was working for Howard Dean —
And I was living in a flophouse in Vermont. [Laughs.]
Yes. And I don’t blame Howard for this because I don’t think he even knew about it.
We wanted to put out a new dynamic campaign. We wanted to put out a new open-source policy. And somebody was like: Just run it by the general counsel of Microsoft first.
And I was new to politics. I was totally shocked. That is a veto. That is a slowing down in that particular campaign. Those little veto points are happening in every congressional campaign and every statehouse. And it’s that kind of veto.
One of our problems on the left is we said: Let’s align with the big money. Like the Reid Hoffmans. And then Reid Hoffman basically says: We can’t have Lina Khan’s dynamic use of government.
But she’s somebody you would love. She was willing to break eggs, to get things done, to cut through the bureaucracy to actually achieve things.
And you have Reid Hoffman and other big wealthy tech billionaires saying: We are a veto point because of big money. You can’t talk about those dynamic things in the campaign. Maybe you should get rid of Lina Khan.
So I think you’re undervaluing what happens when you actually embrace big power for individual products, projects. They become significant veto power elsewhere.
Saikat, this makes me think about your leadership point. One of the things I’ve observed covering a lot of fights in Washington is: I would say over time the leadership of the Democratic Party became less and less willing to offend almost anybody who was considered in its coalition.
And its coalition was vast — stretching from Reid Hoffman and the general counsel of Microsoft on the one side to all kinds of environmental justice groups on the other side.
And I’m not saying literally no one ever got offended, but as I watched the procession from the Obama era to the Hillary Clinton campaign to the Biden-Harris era — and I saw this in Congress, too — it felt like, as a matter of the governance culture, it wanted to run everything by everybody. And not literally anybody getting upset was an emergency, but the leadership became less and less tolerant of anybody being upset. Everybody had to get a little bit.
You were in Congress. You ran Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign. So you were part of the “Let’s [expletive] people off” caucus. I’m curious, first, if what I just said feels true to you. And second, what your account of it is — what you saw from it and what you think is behind that culture.
It seems much more dominant now on the left than on the break-every-single-egg-of-the-global-economy right.
Chakrabarti: Yes. It’s not just about not [expletive] people off. I think it’s a complete abdication of responsibility, of leading. It’s a lack of realizing that we need new ideas and we need an actual vision for how to do stuff in the Democratic Party.
Because it’s not just groups on the left.
When I was in Congress, I went to a training on how to get ideas from corporate lobbyists. I tweeted about it, and I [expletive] off some people. But it’s really hard to push new ideas.
What did they tell you in that training? How do you get ideas from it?
Chakrabarti: It was very matter-of-fact.
Don’t they come to you? I would have assumed they come to you with ideas.
Chakrabarti: They do come to you. The training was like: If you’re writing a bill, here are the people you can contact to get expertise. Similar to what you encountered on the Dean campaign.
And I think it’s this complete abdication of responsibility of your role to actually put out solutions that will solve real problems. The culture is more: We’ll figure out ideas from everybody who is around us and cobble it together into this Frankenstein monster.
When we put the Green New Deal out, the week before we announced it, something like 70 environmental groups wrote a letter saying they were going to denounce it because we were pushing something new. Because at that time, the environmental groups were really focused on just keep it in the ground stuff.
Was their disagreement substantive? Or was it: We were not consulted?
Chakrabarti: They would probably say it was substantive. But it was more the latter — that we weren’t operating in the idea space that everyone else was operating in.
But in general, the pipeline example you brought up is a really interesting one. Because I think when you abdicate responsibility from actually pushing for new ideas and solutions, what you’re saying is the interest groups — which often, as you’re pointing out, Zephyr, are the big corporate interests — are going to fight it out.
So in the case of the pipelines you’re talking about, I’m sure there are interest groups on both sides. So 20 years later, we’ll come to some resolution. But in the case of natural gas pipelines, we streamlined all that. We put permitting under FERC. We made it happen superfast. We have three million miles of natural gas pipeline in this country right now. We built it superfast because there wasn’t really a big enough opposing interest group.
So that’s what I see happening in the Democratic Party. There’s a real resistance to putting out actual solutions and putting out real ways to solve these problems and just deciding that we’re going to take ideas from everyone.
And I agree with Zephyr: That tends to be the corporate powers that have more influence there.
This is a part of the book that is in there but I think has gotten less attention. We have, over time, in my view, denuded the state of expertise members of Congress have.
I think it’s shocking how small the staff of a House member who represents a highly populous district and maybe runs an important committee really is. And I’m not saying that’s the only reason they outsource a huge amount of their thinking and their work to corporate interests and nonprofits.
But there is this whole theory in political science called legislative subsidy, which is that one of lobbying’s real sources of power is that it’s the provider of expertise. And not only is it the provider expertise, it is the provider of expertise from your former colleagues whom you liked. They leave a congressional office because they’ve got three kids, and maybe one of the kids is in private school — or all of them are. Whatever it might be.
We’ve held down congressional salaries. We’ve held down congressional staff sizes. That’s all high-polling, populist policy. And then people go into various forms of the private sector or the lobbying sector and sell back what they know to their former colleagues.
And in my version of abundance, where state capacity is very big, we need to fund the government itself a lot more. This is where I’m not a DOGE person at all. I mean, I’m not a DOGE person on a lot of levels. But my view is they want to destroy state capacity. Their view is that everybody would be more effective and productive in the private sector.
Whereas, I would like people working for Congress to be both more numerous and make a lot more money because we should have much of the very best expertise in the world helping Congress figure out its decarbonization policies. And in California, we should have the best rail engineers in the world helping on a major high-speed rail build-out.
How do you think about outsourcing of all these functions and the absence of in-house capacity?
Chakrabarti: It’s a major problem. And that’s why, as you get into lower levels of government, lobbyist capture is even higher.
In California state government, it’s worse than it is in Congress because they have even less funding. And I think if you look at what people actually want, it is not what DOGE is doing. They want effective government. And effective government happens if you have either a very well-paid civil service — as they do in Singapore or Finland or any of these countries that have effective government. But in America, the tough part of that is you’re competing against Google salaries and all these high-paid salaries.
So I think one way you do that is you do need to increase the salary. You need to fund this stuff. But you also have to make it exciting. You have to make it something where the people working in government are actually feeling like they’re making an impact. They often do. But the people I talk to who most want to try to fix how fast government goes are the people who work in government.
It’s people working in the State Department and Treasury, wherever —
They get very radicalized. It’s very underreported.
Chakrabarti: Yes. It’s because they’re going in there and making a real sacrifice. All these people could be making half a million dollars at a lobbyist firm. But instead they’re taking a huge pay cut to do something good.
One of the things I learned when I was in Congress was if you’re a former member of Congress, you can be on the House floor. So what do lobbyists do? They hire former members of Congress so they can whip votes on the House floor. They’re not supposed to. It’s technically against the rules, but, you know, come on.
Zephyr, how do you think about this question?
Teachout: First of all, I think it’s huge. The examples you use of: We’re just outsourcing this thinned and enervated state is a very significant problem.
And I just want to use some counterexamples about the direction we can go, which may help you understand why I think there’s such possibility in the antimonopoly movement. Because a lot of what happened in the antimonopoly movement is that we started learning how business actually works. Like: Oh, we’re learning how John Deere limits repairs.
Returning to the center of Democratic politics an understanding of what happens with inhalers, what happens with fire trucks, what happens with the franchise system. Asking a set of questions that, frankly, we didn’t ask for 30 years: What is happening in the vast bulk of the American economy? What is life like for working people on a day-to-day level? What is life like for a farmer?
So some of the areas where you saw the most active government in the Biden administration — and the Biden administration was not coherent on this. There were different departments. You saw Pete Buttigieg who came in, was willing to break some eggs, get things done. Stopped the first airline merger in 30 years. Really got into the weeds of how transportation supply chains work. And we had the most successful air transit summer in years in 2024. Effective, dynamic —
Everything has been going great with air travel ever since. [Laughs.]
Teachout: [Laughs.] I think he did a great job.
Yes. It’s not Pete Buttigieg’s fault.
Teachout: Yes, right. I think he did a great job with the Department of Transportation.
So what I want to say is: It’s capacity. It’s desire. It’s drive. I think the drive comes from a vision that you are standing up for working people against the big airlines. That is actually a motivating drive. And it’s a politically motivating drive. But the kind of expertise we want matters. It’s not just expertise generally.
I think where the Democratic Party really should go is understanding: How did we allow the greatest geographic inequality in American history in the last 20 years, where places like Utica, N.Y., are totally left behind? That’s weird and strange. And we should treat it as weird and strange.
How did we allow diapers to get so expensive when we should have real innovations and eco-diapers instead of just this incredibly expensive price gouging, frankly, during the pandemic? Real expertise in the nature of business.
And I think sometimes people think of antimonopoly as antibusiness. And we’re like: No, we’re the first real pro-business movement in a long time. It’s just not the choke-point businesses that you note in other contexts.
The problem with choke points is that they enervate. Like, why even bother making a new eco-diaper if you’re just going to get crushed?
Chakrabarti: Yes. And that’s a really important point because if we actually embark on these big missions and make it exciting enough to be in government, we don’t want to just be anti-people who know how to do stuff.
When we did the World War II mobilization, the guy who ran a big part of it was this guy Bill Knudsen, who was actually the president of General Motors. He had come up as an engineer through the factory floor. He understood how that whole economy worked. And that was why we were able to organize all the other C.E.O.s and the entire economy to do the war production.
F.D.R. almost hired a banker, who did the World War I mobilization, which wasn’t as good. And that guy said: No, you have to get someone who actually knows this stuff.
And we need to have people like that now. And unfortunately, Elon Musk is now going in and just destroying government. But we need a Bill Knudsen today.
I feel like the left has developed a very complicated relationship with expertise from the business world.
On the one hand, some of the people who I think are the heroes of this era and this movement — Gary Gensler, say, who was a high-up banker before he became a regulator — obviously come from the world that they now regulate or that they oversee.
Of course, those worlds have people with incredible expertise. There’s a granularity to how every industry works. That is very hard to attain from the outside.
And on the other hand, I will often see nominations attacked because the person worked in the corporate world. I talk to people who leave Democratic administrations now, and they become very nervous about where they work because they fear that if they work in X place, they can’t come back in a future administration.
And I feel like there has not emerged a clear criteria for: This is the kind of person we’re willing to hire. This is the kind of person we’re not. This is when corporate experience is a good thing. This is when it’s not.
So it has pushed a lot of people into the nonprofit world. And there’s nothing wrong with the nonprofit world. Many of my dearest friends work in the nonprofit world.
But I’d be curious to hear you talk about this, Zephyr. Because there are all these projects, like the Revolving Door Project, that basically say: Look, this person worked at this place. They’ve been involved in this thing. And we think that makes them suspicious.
So on the one hand, that might be true. I do think you can have a lot of interest to capture. And on the other hand, we know that a lot of the people who have been leaders in these areas — you could talk about Joseph Kennedy being the traitor to his class under F.D.R. on financial regulation — have come from these places. And you need to have that level of knowledge about the thing you’re regulating to effectively bring it under any kind of wise control.
Teachout: I don’t think that there is a single silver-bullet answer that lays out the precise criteria.
To repeat what you said, I think there is good reason to be skeptical if you see a pattern. But the Democratic Party — and this is maybe a metaversion of your microquestion — I think the Democratic Party needs a North Star that is not rejecting Trump.
I think we all probably agree with that. And I think the North Star should be standing up to monopolistic middlemen who are crushing people’s wages, raising their prices and stopping innovation in a dynamic society. And those who want to come in to join that North Star we should welcome with open arms.
So when it comes to particular appointments, I mean, Jonathan Kanter came from big law and did an incredible job. He was an assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division under Biden.
And even if you don’t know his name, you are living in Jonathan Kanter’s world. These few weeks, because we have the biggest antitrust trials in 30 years happening, with Google being found a monopolist now three times, looking toward a breakup, a really powerful dynamic. He used his capacity and was a very effective head of antitrust under Biden. And he came from industry.
So I don’t think there’s a single answer here.
I don’t disagree on a bunch of the antimonopoly questions. Like, I think Google is a monopolist.
But what problems can’t be solved by the North Star being corporate concentration in antimonopoly? I have a lot of skepticism that is actually the problem in the housing market or the energy market.
We might disagree on some of these. But I think my critique is not so much that I disagree with it, but that I disagree that it will solve as many problems as is being claimed.
What really worries you that you just don’t think this particular frame answers?
Teachout: I don’t think that antimonopoly can solve significant problems of racism in this country. I don’t think antimonopoly can solve toxins in our water — although I immediately am like: Yes, there’s an antimonopoly component right there.
And then having said that, there’s a reason that Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power. Like there is a —
Stay on what it can’t solve for a minute. Try to live in that world.
Teachout: So maybe what I would ask as an antimonopolist — and antimonopoly is not antitrust. I hope you know that.
I do know that. Antimonopoly is much more about power than antitrust. And that I understand. You said this very clearly at the beginning, but I understand your goal as being a fundamental rebalancing of social power.
Teachout: Yes. It’s a democracy vision.
It’s a fundamental rebalancing of social power.
Because if the political scientist Steven Teles were right here, he would say that people in your movement are very focused on one kind of power, but not many, many other kinds of power. That you can break corporate power and you have all kinds of other minor institutions operating at every single level of government.
There’s a great law paper by David Schleicher and Roderick Hills Jr. recently about the triumph of the law of the gentry and property law. Local governments exercise power. Unions exercise power. There are a million kinds of power exercised at every level of society.
And I think the argument some other people make, even if they agree on some of the antimonopoly stuff, is: That doesn’t get you to democracy. You can have low levels of corporate concentration, or at least acceptable levels of corporate concentration, and have unwise power used in all kinds of other ways.
Indeed, in the post-F.D.R. period, I don’t think anybody would say we were a perfect democracy. Power was exercised in horrific ways in the American South. You just said it doesn’t solve racism.
So that’s the only place where I wouldn’t say antimonopoly is synonymous with democracy.
Teachout: I think for 40 years, we stopped — to use your phrase, bottleneck detective — we basically stopped asking the power question.
Just a little bit of history here: There was this big movement that both Republicans and Democrats got on board with. I think some of the questions, if they’re good ideas that come from Republican areas, I think we should take them. I don’t think it’s a left-right issue. But they got on board with this idea that we should just focus on outputs and not on power. So that’s part of the reason you hear some resistance from the antimonopolists to your vision.
What the antimonopoly movement has started to do is investigate in areas where — you wouldn’t necessarily guess that, in the Kroger-Albertsons merger, pharmacists would be on fire about it and be the biggest opponents, that they would see the joining of two big grocery stores as a fundamental threat. But once you start asking the power question, then pharmacists come out of the woodwork and say: Yes, this is killing us. We’re getting starved by this.
So it’s not to say that it answers every question, but that it is in far more areas than what you think — that the loss of our looking at questions of power was probably one of the biggest losses.
So sure, there are areas that can’t be solved by that. But there are far more areas that surprise even me today that actually have a power component and a power bottleneck.
Saikat, let me ask you about something you brought up a while ago that I turned into a cost of construction question.
Public financing is something we used to do more of — that other countries do much more than we do. It’s also been a big part of the work being done by your group at New Consensus.
Talk a little bit about what public financing can do. As Zephyr was saying, we lost a certain set of tools in the tool kit, but more than that, we lost a certain set of lenses for analyzing problems in society.
When you focus there on things like a reconstruction finance corporation for a modern era or more public infrastructure banks, what analytically did we stop seeing that you’re trying to restore? And what would things like this actually do that are not being done?
Chakrabarti: The thing that we’ve lost is a little bigger than just public financing. It’s public institutions that proactively go out and make stuff happen.
We have a little bit of this now. We have it with DARPA on research and development projects. And that’s public financing, as well. But we’ve lost it for the entire sector of creating industries and creating infrastructure.
There was a loan program for clean energy projects at the Department of Energy that the Inflation Reduction Act funded and that Jigar Shah ran. It’s a great program. But it’s a wait-and-see approach. So people apply for loans for projects they want to do, but there are all kinds of projects that just aren’t happening.
Right now, a big bottleneck to expanding electric grids is a transformer shortage. Because we only have a few companies that make transformers. And we only have one company that makes electric steel that we need for transformers. And no one is popping up to make new electric steel companies.
So what I’m imagining is that something like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation today would go out and try to push those companies to production. If they don’t do it, fund start-ups. And if they don’t do it, put up state-owned corporations.
And this is what China does.
Chakrabarti: This is exactly what China does. China got these ideas from us. This was what we used to do. Other countries in Europe have versions of this.
And it’s key to note that it’s not just if we put in this one institution it’s going to fix everything. Germany has all kinds of financing mechanisms. They have agricultural co-op banks. They have this whole range of financing for small and medium manufacturing in the country. And that has held up a lot of their economy.
In China it’s similar. They have these big industrial banks that fund all kinds of projects.
It’s really this proactive nature of finding projects that get in the way of progress and then making sure those things get built.
People talk about neoliberalism, and I think “neoliberalism” is a very complex and weird and overused term. But one thing I believe — and we write this in the book — is that Democrats stopped intervening on the production side of the economy. They more or less began to trust the market.
Maybe you had to put some rules or curbs on the market. But the idea that you were going to intervene to do things the market wasn’t going to do — or create markets for things that needed to happen but weren’t happening — fell out of favor. Not in the sense that it would be desirable but in the sense that it was even possible.
The view is that the government will fail if it tries to do this. Industrial policy fails when you try it. Picking winners and losers, as the saying goes, fails when you do it.
Then obviously over there came China. And I think that changed the intellectual side of this. But how do you see what happened there ideologically? And when you look at where the leadership of the party is now, do you see it changing?
Chakrabarti: I think that is a big part of the story. The major part of the story is after the New Deal — and there’s a great book called “Invisible Hands” by Kim Phillips-Fein, where she really details the push of that ideology over 40 years. A long-term plan.
And I think that’s why, even when presidents came in wanting to do a little bit more — Obama, I forget which book, but there’s some book where Obama actually said after a recession: Shouldn’t we do our moonshot project now?
But he was surrounded by people who were just like: No, no, no. Obviously, we shouldn’t be doing that. When they were talking about the —
Well, they tried some. High-speed rail, smart grid, electronic health markets. I always think about those as being the big signature moonshots of the Recovery Act. And none of them actually happened.
Chakrabarti: And they were so tiny. I think that was part of the problem.
In the context of the larger economy, you can’t just say one little high-speed rail line. They also funded Solyndra and Tesla, as you point out in the book. But they only wanted to do those two projects, and they just focused on the failure of Solyndra, rather than the huge success of Tesla.
Well, that guarantee program funded more than just those two.
Chakrabarti: Yes. But those are the big ones.
Those are the big ones. And everybody knows Solyndra.
I did this show with Tom Friedman recently about China. And one of the ways Republicans specifically — but then in response, Democrats also — have really hindered government is by becoming too afraid of failure. And the feeling that if you loan money to something that goes belly-up, if you fund a grant for science that can sound funny if somebody says it at a speech — one way to destroy not just state capacity but state ambition is to make the state so cautious. It’s some of the process and procedure we talk about. It’s endless auditing and oversight and procedure to show you’re doing nothing wrong, which in the end means you can’t do all that much.
Teachout: I completely agree with you. There’s one point in the book that I don’t think I’ve seen anybody talk about but I thought was great. You highlight the problem with the Golden Fleece Awards and the way in which we started —
Do you want to say what those are?
Teachout: You’ll remember exactly, but it’s the award for the stupidest government program. Who was it?
EZRA: I want to say it is William Proxmire, if I’m not wrong. But also you just saw Donald Trump doing it when he stood up and he said at the joint session of Congress speech: All this money to make mice transgender.
Which was not what was being done. We don’t know how to make mice transgender. But it’s a common thing in politics, and you even hear it from Democrats sometimes — this picking out of the thing that sounds embarrassing. And then what you do is you terrify agencies because they don’t want to be the ones blamed for an embarrassing-sounding thing.
Teachout: Absolutely. And when you look at big local things like the Second Avenue subway and procurement, it’s the way in which I think we’ve got corruption all wrong. We’re really focused on this massive compliance regime instead of focused on the corruption. Big corruption issues as opposed to little corruption issues.
But I think you’re right. And I think that does take a cultural change to be willing to accept failure.
A program that I think really worked was the Paycheck Protection Program.
Yep.
Teachout: And the Paycheck Protection Program has gotten beaten up by so many different people finding the examples of fraud where —
And there was a lot of fraud.
Teachout: There was fraud. And it was worth it. It was absolutely worth it to support businesses around the country to keep them open during Covid. It was worth it for the workers, for those businesses in order to do great things. You do actually have to do things wrong sometimes. And I really loved that point in the book.
Let me go back to this point about corruption and what you said about the Paycheck Protection Program. Because one thing you see with the Paycheck Protection Program, with unemployment insurance in that period — and this comes up a lot —when there is an agreed-upon crisis, the government will throw out a bunch of its normal rules and procedures and act really fast.
I tell a story in the book about Josh Shapiro’s rebuild of the I-95. This bridge collapses after a fire, when a truck overturns. It’s a crucial transportation artery on the Northeast corridor. And Shapiro declares an emergency declaration. He uses union labor, by the way — doesn’t throw everything overboard.
But I talked to the transportation lead in Pennsylvania about the project. I said: OK, how would this have gone normally?
He said: Well, just doing the contracting rules that we normally go through would have taken 12 to 24 months on the design proposals and the contracting, bidding process and so on.
Then I was on Gavin Newsom’s podcast — just a funny sentence — and he was saying: You focused on that. But we did one of those projects in nine days here under emergency declarations. And I had a different conversation with Governor Wes Moore in Maryland. I forget, but they had another big emergency declaration project.
And I began to think about this question: If every Democratic governor I talk to is so proud of what they did under emergency declaration, where they were able to wipe out a bunch of rules that — you can track them back and why they made sense.
The way they did the I-95 project in Pennsylvania was: There happened to be two contractors working on that portion of the I-95 that day. And when the emergency declaration was made, the transportation secretary basically pulled both of them off their current projects and said: You’re doing this now. And they were on the project, as he said to me, the moment the fire department released the scene.
On the one hand, that’s something to be proud of. And on the other hand, you completely understand how if the way we give out contracts is the transportation secretary just points to you — that’s an incredible avenue for corruption.
But I’d be curious as somebody who studied corruption a lot, how you think about this. Because we’ve created such slowness in our efforts to root out patronage and corruption. I’m not sure we have rooted out the patronage and corruption, but we’ve definitely created the slowness.
Something seems wrong here in the equilibrium.
Teachout: Yes. I’ll just repeat what I said before, which is: I think we focused on the wrong kind of corruption.
What you want are systems where there are lots of contractors and there is competitive bidding. It actually really matters that there are lots of contractors. That’s an antimonopoly issue, by the way.
And then when you have lots of contractors, then you want systems that don’t reward inside deals like campaign finance deals. But I think that we’ve thought we can root out corruption by doing a microchecklist as opposed to looking at structures and systems, and that we should look at structures and systems of power as the big defenses against corrupt systems as opposed to the checklist.
We need some checklists, by the way.
You can’t have no rules.
Teachout: You can’t have no rules. And I do think that there are some innovative things happening with procurement. But as I understand there is a real issue with only a few suppliers, and that’s one of the big corruption risks that you don’t deal with through checklist compliance — but instead through making sure there are more suppliers.
Saikat, this goes to your idea of mission-driven politics — that there are these periods when we agree on a mission — usually it’s a war, but not that long ago it was a pandemic — and all of a sudden we snap into a different mode.
It’s a cliché in Congress and in politics: Oh, we act during emergencies.
And then you think: Well, is climate change not an emergency?
But it has raised for me this ongoing question of: On the one hand, you don’t want everything done under an emergency declaration. Your normal rules should be good rules. And on the other hand, I’ve had sort of the same question that you’re raising, and I’d be curious what you’ve concluded about it, which is: How do you snap the system into more of a different mode?
Donald Trump has come in and shown you can do it through will. I’m not happy about what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. But the boundaries that everybody else seemed to respect seem to have been norms. Where have you come to on this?
Chakrabarti: I think it’s actually important to remember that for most of the cases in the 20th century, it wasn’t under a war or some kind of emergency like that.
There was usually some political party that came into power, in Western Europe or in South Korea, that really just pitched the mission of: Let’s get rich. Let’s make society rich. Finland did this after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s and 1990s. And that was pretty recent.
So it’s possible for a politics to come in and say: The mission is our society has been kind of declining. We’re stuck. People’s wages have been stagnating. And we actually need to fix that.
And I actually think the politics is already almost there. I think that’s what people thought they were voting for with Obama and with Trump and, to an extent, with Biden. Biden really campaigned on a bit of a mission —
And it was in a crisis.
Chakrabarti: And it was in a crisis, which increased people’s ambitions by quite a bit.
And I think there’s just been this general sense that whatever the current political order is, it’s not delivering the promise that people have had — and that America made to people — in the postwar era. So we’re looking for something new that’s going to start delivering that again.
I think the real challenge actually is for a political leader to come in and really pitch the whole thing. Operation Warp Speed happened during a crisis, but it wasn’t big enough — it was one small mission. We have done a lot of small missions. We just need Operation Warp Speed for everything.
And it’s through that mission that I think you figure out what the new rules institutions should be. It wasn’t like we threw out all the rules during World War II. There were tons of paperwork. And the companies complained constantly about all the paperwork they had to do.
But we had the War Production Board, and Donald Nelson would be going around trying to figure out what paperwork is actually creating a bottleneck and what paperwork is necessary. And that’s something we need to be able to do at the agency level.
Teachout: To me there’s just something staring us in the face about why politicians aren’t mission-driven, and it is money in politics.
You probably are familiar with the oligarchy study that’s now, I think, 10 years old. And it’s only gotten worse — that there is real responsiveness to the interests of wealthy people. And there’s almost no responsiveness to what the public wants in terms of the outcomes.
And what happens in those emergency situations, I believe, is that the leaders forget all their responsiveness to their donors. And they do so for a combination of reasons. They really care about people who are dealing with the flood — I mean, I don’t think everybody is awful. They really care about serving those people.
But also they are out of campaign mode. And in campaign mode, when half of the money is coming from people making $100,000 donations in the post-Citizens United world, the imagination of leaders of who they are delivering for, the voices in their head, are not the people who are really not sure where their next paycheck is going to come from. Who have to pay too much for an inhaler. Who have had a stagnant wage.
Their own sense of mission has truly been clouded by money and politics. And that is not an easy thing to break. But if Bernie Sanders had been president, I don’t think any of us doubt that he would have felt like it was an emergency for working people in this country. In the sense that he would have figured out how to do what Pete Buttigieg, Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter or Josh Shapiro did in those moments — to take the tools of government to serve the working people of the country.
So it’s a hopeful story because it suggests we’re not that far away. But it does suggest that we have to see the barriers as the way in which, if in your mind, you’re at a cocktail party with billionaires, it’s going to be really hard to be mission-driven about the bridge on a day-to-day basis.
I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Teachout: Two books that got me down this path — they’re not necessarily antimonopoly books or democracy books, but I think they are. One is “The Promise of Politics” by Hannah Arendt, and the other is “The Populist Moment” by Lawrence Goodwyn.
And then “Listen, Liberal” by Thomas Frank, who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and had a call to arms about the future of the Democratic Party about 10 years ago.
Chakrabarti: I’ll say “Destructive Creation” by Mark Wilson is probably the most detailed book I have read about the actual mobilization during World War II.
I’ve read the book. When you read what they did, it is shocking.
Chakrabarti: It’s amazing. It’s really amazing. I’d say my second book is “Bad Samaritans” by Ha-Joon Chang, which tells a story of how a bunch of developed countries managed to go into mission mode and evolve their countries. And the third I’d say is probably “The Defining Moment” by Jonathan Alter. It’s about F.D.R.’s first hundred days and really paints a picture of his style of leadership and how he was able to do so much without legislation.
Saikat Chakrabarti, Zephyr Teachout, thank you very much.
Teachout: Thank you very much.
Chakrabarti: Thanks.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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