The U.S. federal government shut down on Wednesday morning with both parties unable to come to a budget agreement. It’s the third budgetary shutdown of Donald Trump’s presidencies as he and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought are trying to aggregate as much power as possible to rebuild the administrative state in their image as they unilaterally seize funds allocated by Congress and try to circumvent civil service laws to fire public employees.
Being mostly a con artist and grifter, Trump is primarily interested in being praised and using the public treasury as his personal piggy-bank. But Vought has much larger ambitions, ones that are far more dangerous.
In a 2023 interview with a far-right Christian podcast, Vought said that his public policy was motivated out of a desire to force America to “understand the reality that it has to obey God.” New York Times reporter Coral Davenport profiled earlier this week the many ways in which Vought is implementing this fanatical vision, even as she (unfortunately) downplayed its religious origin.
While Vought is historically talented as a Republican administrator, his larger vision of a government that focuses its spending on military and policing rather than public service is very much in line with decades of reactionary Republican tradition.
In this podcast discussion, we give an overview of what Vought and Trump are doing and how it fits within the “unitary executive theory” which was developed within the Reagan Administration during the 1980s.
We also discuss how shutting down the government seems to have been forced upon Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as his popularity among the Democratic base has plummeted to such a degree that more of his voters disapprove of him than approve. It’s clear that the American people need and want a real opposition party to manifest as Trump and Vought are assaulting American liberty and public administration.
Please visit Matthew’s website, Flux, and Don’s website Can We Still Govern, if you would like to hear more from us individually in the future.
Audio Transcript
You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. this is another Live Theory of Change episode. Thanks for being here and, thank you to Don for being here. so, Don, just if you can, for let’s maybe give a little brief introduction of ourselves to our respective audiences, just to let people know. so why don’t you go ahead and go first.
DON MOYNIHAN: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. I’m Don Moynihan, I am a professor of public policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I study government, I study public administration, and so I’m very interested in what’s happening right now.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, this is definitely a time for your field of research, no question.
Hey everybody, I am Matthew Sheffield, and I am a, podcaster and writer, and I write about the, psychology of politics and the history of religious authoritarianism. And so, Intersects well with, who Russ Vought is, and we will talk about that, as we get into it. so, but why don’t we, kick off here as we’re getting started with, let’s just do a bit of a lay of the land.
So, today’s Thursday, October 2nd, and the government was shut down as of midnight on Wednesday Eastern time. So, where do things stand right now, Don?
MOYNIHAN: So, a shutdown has commenced, what is standard at, this point is that some percentage of federal employees are deemed as essential and they continue working, but without pay.
Some federal employees are deemed non-essential, and they are basically told to go home. Do not open their computer, do not perform any tasks until the shutdown is resolved.
SHEFFIELD: Yes, that’s right. And, are they being paid during this shutdown or.
MOYNIHAN: They are not being paid. [00:02:00] And typically we assume that federal employees will get back pay, after the shutdown ends.
So Congress will usually pass some sort of legislation to ensure that they do not lose out financially as a result of it being unable to pass, appropriations bills on time. But currently, if you’re a federal employee, you are not getting paid.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. and, during the, or leading up to the shutdown and as it’s been continuing, the, Trump regime has been saying that they’re going to use the, shutdown as an opportunity to engage in massive layoffs, as a threat to kind of attempt to force Democrats to, reopen the government, at their, with the Republican demands and.
It’s a, it looks like at least as of now, that the, Senate Democrats, and this is the Senate Democrats who we’re talking about here because the house already passed the continuing resolution, the de Democrats have said that they believe that Trump was going to do these layoffs anyway. And that’s a very good surmise, I would say.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. and this is where we start to move from what is typical with shutdowns to what is now, I think, pretty unprecedented. so we don’t have any previous shutdown where one of the negotiation tactics on the part of the president was to say, if you don’t go along with me, I’m gonna fire a bunch of employees.
Like that is completely new. And from a legal perspective, there is nothing happening with the shutdown that requires Russ Foul or Trump to fire employees or reduce services in, in that way. Right? There’s no legal mandate. And I think this is an important point because there’s gonna be a lot of disagreement about this in the coming days.
You heard [00:04:00] Trump, I think yesterday saying If, there’s a shutdown, there has to be layoffs. Not true. The layoffs are a choice. They are not required by law, and we certainly don’t see them in precedent. and so this moves the ball much further of away from what we’ve seen in the past. Senate Democrats are the only actors here with a real opportunity to negotiate because they are the only ones who can filibuster continuing resolution at this point.
And they’ve chosen to make healthcare subsidies. the thing that they’re going to argue over, whether that’s a good strategy or not, we’ll find out. but that, as of a week ago, the dynamics were basically, you have Senate Democrats saying. Extent healthcare subsidies, they’re very popular.
You cut them during the summer. and Republicans say no. And now we have Democrats saying the same thing and Republicans saying, not just no, but the longer this goes on, the more we’re gonna fire public employees and increasingly the more we’re gonna cut money going to blue states. So this is another thing that is new vote is also, impounding spending going to blue states, billions of dollars in infrastructure to New York City, billions of dollars in environmental spending going to eight blue states. and so this sort of aggressive one ups one upmanship is really a break from the past.
SHEFFIELD: It is, yeah. And one of the other aspects of in which they’re doing that is that they are forcing, or I guess they’re not forcing yet.
But they are advising employees and administration officials to put up anti-democratic messages on their websites or in their auto out of office replies. and that is unprecedented. And, it’s, it is using the gover, the machinery of [00:06:00] government to, for explicitly partisan ends.
And, everybody often talks about the Hatch Act, quote unquote. but that’s, it’s obviously dead, but, to be in, in, all honesty, it was never really enforced, the way that it should have been. And this is one of the results of it, I would say.
MOYNIHAN: I think it, it can be selectively enforced.
I mean, there was a period not so long ago where it was sort of enforced, but imagine if you were a federal employee and you posted on the government website that Trump was to blame for the shutdown. You would probably be investigated for Hatch Act violations. You’d probably be fired first, and then maybe investigative for that, or imagine that your emails contained anti-Trump messaging.
And that was deemed to be a violation of the, norm and legal expectation that federal employees don’t use resources for campaign purposes. you could expect to be investigated. And so partly it feels like the Hatch Act is a, like a sort of dead letter, not because the law has been repealed, but the Office of Special Counsel is just not going to implement it any longer.
We saw numerous violations in the first Trump administration, and it became clear that Trump political appointees could basically. Do whatever they wanted. but if I was a federal employee, I would still be very worried that saying anything negative about Trump would get me fired. And we know, for example, before the election, tens of thousands of federal employees had foer requests for their emails from a heritage funded, set of actors.
So the Heritage Foundation wanted to go through these emails, wanted to see if someone had said something negative about Trump, and then I think convey that information to the administration to help fire these employees. what we’re seeing now is sort of a step beyond that, which is where, if you go to government [00:08:00] websites, there’s explicit language blaming Democrats.
So it’s very partisan. These government websites are public resources. You also have the administration telling employees in your communication with the public, please use this language that blames the Democrats. And so it feels a lot like coerced speech. it’s, putting words in the mouth of these public employees that is intended to help Trump in his negotiations with Democrats.
and so it goes beyond, I think, even Hatch act violations to really weaponizing the administration. So they become this sort of partisan set of soldiers in Trump’s army.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, and it is, yeah. And it is unprecedented. And, and I, and it goes to something that, we’ll get into a bit later, but I wanna kind of preview it here first is that, the, rank partisanship, the vicious hatred.
of fellow Americans, to weaponize government directly against them in a way that deprives some of their livelihood, of forces them to say certain things. these are all things that, republicans have imagined, has been going on to them, for many decades, when in fact it never did.
that, and, but they’ve been imagining this for many, years, because, well, I guess we can get into it a bit more. So, so on your, on your site, you published a, piece from two authors that really did, talk about this from a governing standpoint that, that, talked about that the, two parties have fundamentally different viewpoints of government.
And so, we’ll, get into the sort of philosophical and moral one later, but let’s talk about the, governance side first, if you would. It may not be.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, so [00:10:00] you’re talking about a piece by, Terry Mo at Sanford University Hoover Institution. He’s written a lot of critical work about public sector unions, for example, so not a died in the Will progressive by any means.
I think more center right as a writer and a Will Howell, who’s the dean of the Policy School at Johns Hopkins University. They have a new book about the presidency. They’ve written about that topic for a long time, and typically they’ve, written the argument that presidents should have somewhat more authority, and in this book they’re saying, let’s revisit that argument and see, why Now that has become sort of a dangerous topic when you have a proto authoritarian like Trump saying, if you give me this authority, I’m going to use it in really abusive ways.
And they make basically. One big point about how the parties think about government. The presidents that come from a Democratic or Republican party have a shared interest in accumulating power to achieve certain goals like that. you want more authority, you want more political appointees, you want more control over policy implementation, and that’s been true of both parties.
Clearly since the 1970s, like both parties have been centralized in authority in the White House, adding more political appointees. So that’s the symmetric symmetrical part of how Democrats and Republicans think about government. The asymmetrical part is Republicans have become, especially since Nixon, just deeply suspicious of the administrative state, assume that the administrative state is there to undermine their authority.
So have built up sort of theoretical frameworks and legal frameworks to try and work around that suspicion. and so if you think about something [00:12:00] like the unitary executive theory, which maybe you haven’t heard of before, but, and certainly 10 years ago, none of us were talking about this is this novel theory about the constitution that, effectively the presidents have king like power over the executive branch.
And so the Republican solution to this problem of distrust of the bureaucracy is to put more and more power into the person of the president, at least when it’s a Republican president. when Joe Biden is in power, then maybe that’s a different story. The risk of that is that it’s also a recipe for authoritarianism.
If you put immense power into the hands of a single individual, that is going to lend itself very much to centralizing authority in the way that an authoritarian would want. And so this theory of government is coinciding with the arrival of Trump on the world stage and in particular in the presidency, and taking control in a way that I think is quite dangerous for democracy.
And one thing I want to point out, you mentioned the weaponization, argument. so Rual, Rusal will talk about him a lot. I think about shutdowns when he finishes first. Oh,
SHEFFIELD: and I’m sorry, we should say he’s the office of management and budget director. Just for people who don’t know.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. he is again, in a normal administration, a person you would never hear about, right.
And he was in that position at the end of Trump’s first term, left government, created the center for Renewing America. and basically articulated a lot of the blueprint for Trump’s second term in documents he published there. And also, as part of project 2025, but the weaponization of government. trope really comes from votes, like if you can see [00:14:00] that language in his center for Renewing America publications and documents.
You can see him push that language into Congress. You can see Jim Jordan then taking it when he’s creating the weaponization committee. and so there’s this incredible irony. I think Vol has done more to weaponize government than almost anyone with the possible exception of, Pam Bondi. but he’s also the person who’s probably most responsible for creating the, nomenclature around this idea of victimization of Republicans that the government has been weaponized against us in the last few years.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, exactly. And that is an, important point. And, this, what he’s doing, there is a historical parallel, in the, well, the Nazi Germany government. They had this concept that they called, glide, she toon, which, was for them, that was, that they needed to take control of the administrative state, and so they were going to fire as many people as they could fire.
and they were going to seize control of the bureaucracy and use it to their end. And, this was a systematic, approach that they followed. and, and I think that’s, it’s a, critical thing to know that historical parallel because again, like, and this is why I wanted to do this space with you, because you understand this institutional history and the power politics of administration in a way that I think most, American Center left people really don’t pay attention to the politics of governance and what it means.
And, Russ Vought is. The, the person really since the beginning of the administrative state to, he’s, he has a, masterful understanding of how this works and he is executing it, [00:16:00] in every way possible.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. Thi this is an important point, I think right after Trump was elected, you had a lot of voices saying, well, they were elected before.
How bad could it be? They’re pretty incompetent. They’re not gonna get stuff done. And one of the big lessons is that the time that Trump was out of office was dedicated to learning the rules of the game and learning how to subvert those rules. And so I think, votes and Stephen Miller are two prime examples of people who are very competent, very loyal to Trump’s agenda, can actually get things done.
I think some cases are. behaving illegally, but have created an infrastructure where those illegal actions are moving forward and having an impact. And, we can look at history, but we can also look around the world today. If you look at countries like Hungary or Turkey, their current administrations performed the same sort of checklist for con taking power.
You seize control of the bureaucracy, you seize control of the legal system. And once you have that, you are in a very strong position to take control of the rest of society. I think we saw this week also Trump. Checking through another one of these items on the checklist of authoritarians, which was to try to weaponize the military against, his political enemies.
and we’ve seen cases where in places like Poland and Brazil where those patterns have been reversed. And so there is hope there if, elections still matter, it’s possible to unwind some of that, weaponization of government. But once the bureaucracy has been sort of moved to your side and is full of loyalists and they’re the ones who are shaping how government works, it is much harder to undo that than it is [00:18:00] to prevent it from happening in the first place.
SHEFFIELD: It is. and one of the other, one of the points that was in the piece, that you published also was that this idea of. That, sustaining a governing path is much easier, than changing it. and so, and, and I would expand on what they were saying in the, this is also the fundamental difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is that the Democratic party is functionally a conservative party in terms of how it understands, the politics of governments and the, the way in which it explains itself to the public because, it, because the Republican and the Republican, ‘cause the Republican party, for the first part of the 20th century, at least a significant portion of them, like Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and others, and had they, they participated in the building of the administrative state.
they wanted it to be this way. and even Richard Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Administration. And, it had extended it in a number of, well, frankly, positive way. and so, this was a joint bipartisan project. And the Democrats in their, they, lost, the message of what was happening in the Republican party, that it was being taken over by a reactionary faction that wasn’t just wanting a slower expansion of government or a non-expansion of government, but was actively seeking to destroy government, because it side as some sort of parasitic entity that was harmful to the economy and, also to the morality.
and I’ll get into that after, you, talk about just this, dynamic here.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, the, periods of growth of the administrative state sort of happened during periods [00:20:00] of national emergency, and then you have some more incremental growth in between. But like, a lot of administrative capacities were built during the Civil War under Republican President Lincoln.
the civil service, was created, or at least it was signed by Chester Arthur, who was Republican president. certainly the post World War II period, saw an expansion of the administrative state where things like America’s investments in science and sort of building up the scientific infrastructure.
That was, I think part of the backbone of the actual greatness of America during that time was very much light.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
MOYNIHAN: Led by the interstates. Yep. the interstates, and I think it’s after that point, like then in the sixties and the seventies, you see this sort of bifurcation within a Republican party where you have people who just become a much more suspicious about the role of government in their lives and the damage that they’re doing.
and, picks up steam during the Obama administration and the tea Party movement. But I think Trump is really the first national political figure to take advantage of that while holding a leadership position within the Republican party.
SHEFFIELD: he is. And his key ally, who we’ve been discussing already is, Russell Boat.
And, the, thing about Vote, and the New York Times did a, profile of him, which I will put in our, show notes after we’re done when we publish this. that is definitely essential reading. they did however, downplay one, the most important aspect of Russell Vought, his, which is that Russell Vought is a religious extremist.
Russell Vought literally has said in public that the, that America has a duty [00:22:00] to obey God, quote unquote, is literally what he believes. So he is trying to impose a religious fanatic vision. and, that’s, that cannot be emphasized enough about when people, there, there are people like Ezra Klein and other, more center left people that have recently been saying, well, we share our country with these people.
We have to. Dialogue with, well, Russell Vought believes that you are satanic if you don’t agree with it. You are a literal servant of Satan in the mind of Russell Vog. And this is not me exaggerating. and like that’s, that is the, that level of extremism and fanaticism that hasn’t been, we, that has never had access to the adminis modern administrative state, in American history.
and so it’s, there I think a lot of people who have more sheltered lives and haven’t really had to deal with the implications of removal of civil rights. so if there were black, black people have much more of an understanding of this because black people are directly impacted.
Buy these policies every day. And if you’re, and if you’re a woman, and this is why women in the us, especially young women, are, have become much more, left wing in recent years because they know directly what will happen to them. They have something immediately at stake. Whereas, white male pundits like Ezra Klein, like Mattius, they have nothing at stake directly in these policies.
they just don’t like them. And so they don’t understand that this is a much more existential battle than you may wanna realize.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. I, think the VO is a good example of someone who has explicitly talked about Christian nationalism as a guiding force for the country and not just a series of personal beliefs that he’s articulated.
The idea that [00:24:00] people in policymaking roles should. Be driven by a Christian worldview and when they come to make policy. and I think if you’re inside the fold, that might sound great, but if that means your rights and access to power and influence are going to be reduced as a result of that. And you mentioned women, like if you were, if you care about reproductive rights, then obviously there, this is a really bad time.
I also think it’s not just Christian nationalism. If you look at research on the sort of worldview and belief system, there’s also a really strong element of race and views about race that’s built into that. And so. Some researchers will talk about white Christian nationalism to distinguish it from other sort of Christian world views.
and so again, if you think about this, from a sort of theological view, it doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? There isn’t a lot of empathy. There isn’t a lot of actual Christian, behavior in, in many cases when it comes to things like, let’s say getting rid of U-S-A-I-D, which will probably kill millions of people, was created by conservative Christian president.
That the sort of anti-age policy under George W. Bush, was massively beneficial in terms of protecting lives and now doesn’t exist. But it does align with a Christian nationalist perspective, which, would take into account, We’re not going to help people who are outside of the fold, who are outside of the United States, who are immigrants, who are not part of our broader tribe.
And I, I do think this sort of gets back to some of the founding concerns about freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Like the idea that you didn’t want your government to [00:26:00] impose a theological worldview upon you, you just wanted it to leave you alone so you could practice your religious beliefs in peace.
Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: yeah. And in votes case, there is, there has long been a right-wing Christian tradition that says, that is built around, I think it’s a verse in, it’s either first or second Thesal. Alones, I believe, that says, if you do not work, then you should not eat. and that is.
Really. and so, Ralph Dinger, who is this, right-wing Christian minister, he is, he leads prayer meetings on Capitol Hill and also in the White House. So he’s, he’s created this network, this private network in which he, feeds, the, these, far right propaganda messages in religious voting to Republican politicians.
And he recently posted that his view of how people who are lazy don’t deserve anything that’s now becoming law. He, said, this is our prayer meetings becoming law. so, this is, like that’s why I, and it’s, for people who don’t have a direct exposure in your personal life or you’ve never seen it up post, it, the, these rightwing religious doctrines kind of seem like they’re a waste of time to think about it to.
But in fact, obviously as we’re seeing now, they, are extremely relevant to the way that Republicans govern.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. And as someone who was sort of raised Catholic and was an altar boy in church on, Sundays, like, it’s very interesting to see the tensions between, the Pope for example, either the current Pope or the previous Pope and American political leaders where, the Pope has Pope Leo and [00:28:00] Pope Francis before, have basically articulated a social justice inflected view of Catholic teaching, which involves empathy, which involves, pre protecting the most vulnerable.
And then they sort of clash very much and are subject to criticism by wor the worldview of many Catholics in the US as well as the broader evangelical movement. And so it, it does reflect a tension there where. The idea that, let’s say, let’s pick adding work requirements to Medicaid, right? The idea that you shouldn’t get access to health insurance in the country where, paying for healthcare is the most ruinously expensive thing you could possibly encounter.
that, that is conditional on you. Being able to document that you worked 20 hours a week does not feel Christian for many people. But if you have a theological worldview that says, actually no, this is just, and this is fine and this is fair and it’s rooted in the Bible, that might make it a lot more palatable.
I do think, like, again, let’s stick with the example of work requirements for Medicaid. We have a lot of research about these, the effects of these requirements now, and they’re pretty straightforward. If you add a bunch of bureaucracy into these administrative processes and ask people to, log on.
Upload a PDF of their work in the last week. A lot of people just struggle with that. And the people who struggle the most with that are people in poor health, like people in poor, physical or mental health perform really poorly on these administrative tasks. And so you’re going to make it harder for those people to actually get access to healthcare because of all of these new administrative burdens that you’re imposing upon them.
Most of the people who will lose access to health insurance because of work requirements will be working. They’re not [00:30:00] failing because they’re lazy or because they’re sitting on the couch playing video games all day. They’re failing because of the administrative barriers that are being placed in front of them.
And again, from historical irony perspective, if you are a Republican who hated red tape, you are also weaponizing red tape and imposing it on millions of Americans in an unprecedented way.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that is a very important point. because yeah, that, they, and, but what we see, I think is that they want no red tape for businesses, but they want lots of red tape for citizens.
because, and again, this goes back to their, idea of, so within, the history of humanity, there’s this larger through line of what I call the sort of authoritarian epistemology. and essentially how it, and it’s evidence in every, historical tradition and region of the world and in different ways.
But, in, in, the west. It manifested through this idea of the great chain of bee. and which is what, which they, based on Aristotle. And that was developed within, Catholic theology and then later developed, within pro various Protestant theologies, which is that, you were born into a certain state in this world, and you have to accept your fate.
This is who you will always be, and you can never improve this. You can never improve your station. Or, maybe some people who are geniuses and amazing, wonderful people like Elon Musk, as they, as he tells, wants people to believe, like, or, the billionaires, the, what few of them that actually, had, didn’t inherit their wealth.
they are the only exceptions to this rule. Everyone else must accept how you were [00:32:00] born, because that’s who you are, and to try to improve the situation for the public. That’s actually destabilizing and will destroy the world, because it violates the natural order of things. And that’s also why women should not have rights.
That’s also why we shouldn’t have same sex marriage. That’s also why transgender rights should not exist. Transgender people are faith. They don’t ex they, it’s a lie in this world because, so it, all comes down to that. And, you can see it once you have that understanding, everything that they do makes sense.
Whereas before, I think if you don’t have that understanding, it kind of seems random what they’re doing.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, this is so interesting because like these are part parts of the world that I don’t fully understand myself, but it does help me understand, and so, I’m a social scientist.
If I bring to you a bunch of studies that says actually giving people access to healthcare or giving people access to food stamps, we can show you without a doubt that makes people more prosperous. It makes people healthier, it makes them more likely to live a better life like that. These benefits have an empirical effect.
On, being good citizens, being economically productive, being more peaceful. for example, people when they get access to Snap are less likely, to engage in criminal behavior downstream, right? So I can show you all of those empirical studies, but if that contradicts your religious worldview, that somehow, giving people food stamps is upending the natural social order of things, there isn’t gonna be enough, research in the world that’s gonna change your mind.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it won’t. It won’t. And, so that’s why they’re doing these things. That’s why Russell Vought has been so [00:34:00] fanatical, in trying to break down, the bureaucracy and destroy the Department of Education. and it’s also that, they see, and, so recently, Elon Musk.
Had said he’s gonna start his own Wikipedia alternative. He’s gonna call it Wikipedia, if I remember it. or some other stupidly named thing because Stephen Colbert in his comedy Central Days, he actually coined the perfect phrase to describe what we’re, talking about, the epistemology.
He said that, things are true. when he was doing his right-wing character. Things are true. My beliefs are true because I believe that, and that really is the, animating, proposal, behind what they’re doing. And so, like, to go back to what you were saying, that all people are going to be harmed by these, by the healthcare, removal of the subsidies that the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans pass just recently.
The people who will be harmed probably most directly by this will be. Trump voters. and we keep seeing that over and over with Trump policies, is that the people in many cases who suffered the most or the first are his own voters. And we’re seeing that with the, tariffs and, the, soybean farmers, US soybean production was, al overwhelmingly reliant on Chinese buying.
And since Trump did his tariffs, they haven’t bought anything. and so, and it has absolutely decimated the, soybean market in the us And, this is just going to happen over and over. And it keeps happening. tourism to various states has just dropped off a cliff from Mexico and Canada, and, and, the Trump voters.
But the thing is, they, and this is, this goes back to what I was thinking about the problem that Democrats have [00:36:00] had is that they haven’t understood. You have to explain to people why things. And how things, how things work, you can’t just assume that they will understand and then they will like it, or that they will be upset about something bad.
You have to tell, you have to give them a narrative because people have other things to do. They’re not political professionals. They’re not political scientists, they’re not politicians, they’re not policy analysts. there are a variety of other things, whatever it is that they do. And politics for most people is not a hobby.
That’s, like, that’s the thing that Democrats have failed to understand. And so they built, originally in cooperation with, SANE Republicans, they built this, great achievement of the administrative state, which is remarkably efficient, at, sending money to people, compared to many other, states around the world.
but they never explained to, people why it was good and what it was doing for them. And so now you’ve got this, the tens of millions of people in this country who hate government and think it does nothing for them, even as they collect social security checks or even as their child, their receives, federal funding for autistic, children or disabled children, they, have no idea how much good it does for them because no one ever told it.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, I, think that’s a crucial democratic question. it’s what political scientists would think about as a policy feedback question. Do people see. The consequences of these policies. And then do they change their mind when it goes, when they go to the voting booth the next time? And like the classic example of this from the Tea Party area, era was the protestor, holding the, sign saying Keep your government hands off my Medicare.
Yeah. Where, there, there was just this dissonance between, [00:38:00] I really enjoy and value this government program to the point where I’m willing to go out and protest about it, but I don’t see it as government. And there, there’s a, brilliant political scientist, Suzanne Metler, who sort of characterized this as the submerged state.
So partly the administrative state has been the victim of its own success, and partly because it’s accommodated traditional. Conservative views, which is that we want to hide as much of the state as possible. So people, for example, when they get private health insurance, typically don’t think about that as a government subsidized program, but it absolutely is, right?
It, your employer gets tax subsidies to give you health insurance. The government puts a ton of money into those programs. And so we miss this relationship between what the state does for us and how we think about the state. and you’re, you’re absolutely right. If you look at the distribution of food stamps, those are going to be mostly, not exclusively by any means, but many, Trump supporting counties are going to be affected by this.
The question is whether voters will, connect that loss of benefits with Trump. And we’ve seen these extreme examples where a husband sees his immigrant wife deported and as a result of Trump policies and will say, I don’t think this is what President Trump wanted. I don’t regret voting for him.
Like this really extreme sort of example of dissonance. But then you have to go to your question was, which is how do you make. These folks understand when, they have other lives, they’re not, reading the New York Times every day. How do you communicate them to them? What’s at stake?
And the ways in which they’re materially being heard with, also, without also talking down to them or condescending to them. And I think that’s also a challenge that [00:40:00] progressives have been struggling with where, maybe I’m not the ideal spokesperson to go and communicate to a community because I work at a fancy college.
But there have to be other ways that you can speak and engage in an authentic way about the government that your tax dollars are going for and what it is that it does for you. And why destroying it is actually not in your interests.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. yeah. And it’s really important and it’s, and it is why.
A huge reason why we are where we are today. and there’s another dynamic as well that, this is a partisan, or dynamic or of the, within the, congress. So, the Republican Party for, since let’s say the 1960s has been, this uneasy coalition between reactionaries and conservatives.
and that, that dynamic is very important. I think also for people who have a center left perspective to understand that these are not the same viewpoints and that when you call Trump a conservative, when you call these other people conservative, where you call them a populace, you actually help them, you help them with their authoritarian agenda when you use those words to describe them, they’re not conservative.
Conservatives want to keep things how they are. They want stability, they want order. Donald Trump is anything but order and stability and, conservatism. so, but aside from that, this, coalition that developed in the party, the Republican elites like Mitch McConnell in particular, they took advantage of senate procedure with the filibuster and whatnot like that.
They block the reactionary nut jobs from forcing through various laws that they wanted to do, like get rid of the Department of Education or, any number of these policies that Trump is implementing now. the elites [00:42:00] like McConnell, they never wanted to do battle with the reactionary. So they enabled them, but they stymied them.
And so basically you had this movement that was becoming ever more extreme because they never touched the stove. In their decades of the time when they had the governance because the republican elite stopped them. and so now they, they just developed this burgeoning, raging hatred of government, and now they’re going all after it.
and this will harm them electorally. very well. I mean, we’re seeing the polls that it will harm them. but, it would’ve been better for this country if they had seen that harm earlier. And when we look at parliamentary systems where the, where there is a huge amount of vested power within the, elected officials.
I mean, the prime Minister in any country is overwhelmingly more powerful than the president in this country. but they l right wing parties learned that you can’t get rid of national healthcare because the people will overthrow you if you do that. And so therefore, we were not going to do that.
And so that it, that moderated. Conservative parties, in other parliamentary systems in the way that, the Republican party never really saw those pressures, I would say.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. And I think, like another good comparison with parliamentary systems is that if politicians cannot pass a budget, the government fails and then they have to go for reelection.
Like, so they are the ones who actually get punished if they can’t get their shit together to pass a budget on time. In America, the people who get punished are. The federal employees who don’t get paid for a while or, now potentially get fired. meanwhile, Congress sort of stays as it is. There’s no real direct penalty until the next election.
and so that is like one institutional difference that I think makes [00:44:00] parliamentary systems, more moderate in general. they, they realize, and we saw this when, the UK system was cycling true prime ministers, once you got very radical governments started to collapse very quickly in a way that’s not happening in, in our presidential system.
And so the self-interest of the politician aligned more with being a moderate, whereas I think, you point to McConnell being a great example of someone who’s, on the one hand an institutionalist in many respects and instinctively doesn’t want to tear things down, but on the other hand, never had the courage to actually go against the radicals in his own party.
Even after January 6th, when I think the conventional wisdom was that Trump as a political force was done, there is like an oral history of McConnell saying, well, if, if we vote to get rid of him now, he will not be able to come back. He will be basically barred from running again. But he didn’t pull the trigger on that.
Like he ultimately decided it’s too damaging for me to vote against the president of my own party, even though he understood a hundred percent how big of a threat Trump was. He, decided it was someone else’s problem. and, part of the problem we have now is that someone like Vote is as knowledgeable about how government works as Mitch McConnell was, but is using that knowledge to undermine the administrative state rather than to make it function.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and now let’s, go over to the Democratic side of things. So, as you noted at the top of the recording, the Democrats have made healthcare, subsidies, their centerpiece, demand. which, I, think is they should have made more [00:46:00] demands than just healthcare.
but, this is what they’ve done. So, and it’s a good issue. people, it will immediately, if they don’t get what they want, healthcare costs are going to skyrocket for everyone, including people who are not on a, healthcare exchange funded by the government, because these markets are all interconnected.
but, anyway, that nonetheless, they’ve gone for it. and, it’s, I think it, this is. This is something that kind of seems to have been forced on Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, because, re the Pew Research Center recently came out with a poll that showed that, the, he’s more disliked by democratic voters than, than he is liked.
and this is the first time I can think of that this has ever happened, for a Democrat. And, democratic voters are, they have been desperate for a, party leader that would confront Trump after all of the horrible things that he’s done. I mean, there’s, so many layers of power that Mitch McConnell, was it seized when he was the Senate minority?
Correct. like stopping up various businesses with unanimous consent, things and like, the, all of these nominations that Trump has pushed through, Democrats could actually have done many things to block them, but they didn’t. And so now. Finally at long last, the party is, finally trying to challenge Trump.
so, that’s a good thing. But, we’ll see if they can maintain their resolve. I mean, I think that’s the thing why Trump and voters saying they’re trying to, they’re gonna start firing a lot of people.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. I, so the big question is, what is the end game for Democrats? I think you’re right.
Schumer is. Currently in a position where everyone wants him to do [00:48:00] something, but what that something is, not clear. And he’s also in a position where he is trying to maintain his coalition and potentially his job, like the idea of continuing to pass another continuing resolution while you have troops invading cities.
while you have like really radical action coming from the White House, such as, again, the messaging to the military that seems inadequate. On the other hand, it’s not clear how you stop that true budget negotiation process. And you can absolutely see the path that Schumer would’ve taken. Someone would’ve shown him some polls saying, aca a CA subsidies are very popular.
This is an issue to take a fight on. It’s a specific ask. and it was one of the things that I think was also sort of missed when, the big, beautiful bill was passed the summer, like it was so much in that bill. That the public didn’t really understand the most of what was passed. And so you’re adding salience to this one topic so that even if you lose next year when people’s health insurance costs double and millions of Americans lose health insurance, you can say, we at least fought for you on this.
But again, it’s not clear what the end game is here. Like when do you decide to fold? And I, think for now republicans are feeling very comfortable. They can just raise these continuing resolutions and Democrats will have to vote against them. I do think Republicans are overplaying their hand with the threats of firing employees and with fault.
Now impounding funds going to blue states. To me that feels like you, you’ve. Major self villain in the way that you don’t have to, it changes the message from, well, Democrats could just reopen governments to, we’re [00:50:00] going to use this shutdown to inflict a lot of partisan pain. and so I, I actually think vaults political instincts are bad here.
And it’s a mistake for Trump to decide to go along with him as Trump has. He wasn’t messaging this a few days ago, the last couple of days he’s gone all in on the vault messaging. and so I think that gives Democrats a little bit of rhetorical leverage. But after 20 or 30 days of this, and I think the last shutdown was something like 35 days, there’s going to be a real desire to, get back to the table.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, we’ll see how that goes. and the other thing with Trump, drawing closer to vote publicly, re just today he, he noted. The, very obvious fact that Russell Bo was, one of the key architects of the project 2025 plan, which when he was running, for against Kamala Harris, he pretended that he thought it was extreme and was a lie and terrible.
and, and it was, I mean, he made absolute fools of the mainstream media, because he said those things and, and they repeated it, oh, well, Trump says he’s not part of it. Well, like it, the, it was an obvious lie even at the time, because again, vote was his budget director.
So, and he also had, said explicitly in a tape recording, I’ve been in, in constant contact with Trump and his people, and, he’s gonna do whatever I say. So the media completely failed the public. and, it was, that was a bright spot of the Harris campaign. When she started talking about that, and it, just, the public needs to know how horrible the far right wing of the Republican party is, and Democrats [00:52:00] must not shirk that duty.
They have to go and point that out all at all times. Even if it seems tiresome, even if you’re, you think it’s annoying to have to repeat yourself. This is what Trump does. Like, Trump repeats his message all the time, and this is how politics is. And if you don’t like that, well then you should get outta politics.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. I, think, if you, I don’t think Trump ever read Project 2025, but the idea that he was disconnected from it was on its face, obviously untrue. And I think it, it reflects one tendency of media coverage. which is to put, Trump says as a headline, Trump says this, Trump says that, like Trump says a lot of stuff that’s not true.
It’s not your obligation to reprint that as if it’s factual or to give the impression that it’s factual. And then in paragraph 13, say, oh, by the way, project 2025 is written by a form, a group of former Trump employees and people who will be back in his second administration. and so the, the message Trump sent out that, explicitly named Ruvo as a project 2025 leader, and he was like, vote was not just the author of the chapter about how to change the executive branch.
He also wrote the secret playbook, which to, to, as my, as I understand it has never been published of like, here’s what we’re gonna do for the first few months of the administration and like breaking it down by executive order. But now Trump is sort of embracing that idea. Oh, by the way, this is the Project 2025 guy that everyone warned you about.
I mean, hopefully there’s a little bit of a lesson there to be taken from people covering government, about communicating like what’s actually happening as opposed to Trump’s version of what’s happening.
SHEFFIELD: [00:54:00] Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, it that this kind of failure to do that correctly in the media, it, it goes back to that larger, kind of failure liberalism.
I would say that, within politics, this, this, idea, liberalism unable to advocate for itself. and, when, even in the face of a political movement that is actively anti-modern, like is literally attacking modernity. if you don’t stand up for it, then who, who’s going to?
You have to do it. You have to, and you have to do the hard, you have to read, the, public administration stuff. You have to read the philosophy. these are not things, I guess, seems like that, we’re very common, in a lot of center left, political and media professionals for a lot that,
MOYNIHAN: yeah, I, think there is, or there should be a realization that the playbook of, we’ll do some polls, we’ll figure out what’s popular and then we’ll run a bunch of TV ads has not been a sustainable way to build a movement over time.
And I’m not, a political consultant. I don’t do communications, but it feels actively inadequate. at this point. when, if you’re a progressive voter and you’re getting another text message. My guess is like half the time, this just makes you more embittered towards the party that most closely represents your values.
and so I think that the communication part and the engagement part has to look different from what it’s done before. and one thing, Trump has done is he has represented a set of views that didn’t have a big platform inside a major political party. He’s given voice of those views.
He’s also changed those views along the way. [00:56:00] Like he’s used his voice to change the beliefs of people, and you don’t really see modern progressive leader is being able to pull off that combination
SHEFFIELD: or even trying to, yeah. So, all right, well let’s maybe end with, all of this chaos is happening and I think maybe people, might wonder if there are things that they can do, to kind of.
the situation, if at all possible. What do you think?
MOYNIHAN: I mean, the traditional, the traditional route, it still matters, still makes a difference, but call your congressman. a lot of folks are not going to be in, DC for the next few weeks, so, go to their town hall meetings. If they’re still offering those, go contact their staff.
representatives do respond to that sort of pushback. And one of the things that did make a difference, and led to I think, the demise of Doge as a powerful political force is that people went to town halls and they heard a lot of pushback from people who were saying things like. I’m worried about my social security.
So I think being able to articulate, I’m worried about how this shutdown is affecting X and I want you to get back to the table, would be useful. And I think there are, probably a bunch of Republicans who would like to extend the a CA subsidies. So don’t think that the Democrats are asking for something incredibly radical because they are gonna be blamed for that next year when the cost of health insurance goes up.
And so maybe using that example as the specific thing that you would like to see changed would be the way to communicate.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s good. And, also, I use that point with the apolitical people in your lives as well, because people a lot, most people don’t pay attention to the news.
They don’t [00:58:00] know what’s going on other than the broad brush strokes of what’s happening, And so if you tell them, look. Republicans are going to make our health insurance costs go up. And the Democrats said they are trying to shut down the government to stop that. that they, to keep costs down.
Like that’s something that anybody, and at least would pay attention to that. it doesn’t mean they might believe you, but it’s something that they can understand, versus, abstract arguments about presidential powers. And, what if court rulings or whatnot, like those are not things people have time for regular people, but they do have time for if you tell them your healthcare costs are gonna go up and Trump’s doing.
Yeah.
MOYNIHAN: and I think, this is one of those moments of like civic reeducation where for most of our lives we don’t pay a ton of attention to government because it, mostly works. It might be irritating sometimes when things start to fall apart. It is a moment of opportunity to sort of engage in a conversation about.
What is it that we wanna get from government and why destroying that is not actually gonna make our lives better. Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: exactly. All right. Well, this has, been a great discussion, Don. I think, we covered a lot of bases here. Are there any, is there anything else that you wanted to add before we end up?
MOYNIHAN: I do think we are in unprecedented territory, but I keep saying that, so it feels like the water is really boiling at this point. and I do think if federal employees, please recognize that they’ve faced, probably the most grim period of their work lives over the last eight months, where that, they’ve had to work in this toxic work environment that, votes and Elon Musk and others created.
And so hold a little bit of thanks and a place in your heart for them, [01:00:00] because most of them are just trying to serve the public.
SHEFFIELD: Yep, that’s right. All right, well, we’ll have the, well, I’ll publish this with the transcript then some show notes later in the day. And so anybody who, missed earlier parts in it, we’ll be, you’ll be able to get them and, hopefully, share it if you’d liked it.
So thanks for being here, Don. Thank you, Matthew. All right.
