How Can America Rebuild Its Identity Without Expanding Big Government?

Two things have always struck me as complicated in this view. One is that national identity is itself malleable. And what different people feel is the nature of attachment to America and the nature of the instantiation of American ideals differs from place to place. I'm Californian. We are a state with very high immigration, very high immigration of people who don't come speaking English. I grew up in Orange County, in a part of Orange County, with very high Asian immigration. A lot of the people I grew up with didn't speak English. Amazing Americans work hard. Their children are amazing Americans. They contributed a huge amount also to the economy of the country. And part of being Californian, at least in the way I am, part of my national and state identity has to do with the way America assimilates and mixes in immigrants. Trying to get at that in a test. One of the things I sometimes find interesting about an argument like yours is I get where you're coming from. But there is this part of you that will, in a minute, tell me about the government's incapacity, all the administrative agencies we need to shut down, all the regulators who might be well-intentioned and want to make the world a better place. I get where you're going, yeah. And then you're going to be like, but what we can do is give people a test on paper that is going to tell us what kind of American they're going to be. So let me just start with a basic premise, because it's a fair point for you to raise, totally. What I've said is, at the very least, for example, just to people who may have not followed my entire campaign, but are listening to this conversation, just understand where I'm coming from. I'm looking at these principles not just to the outside, but also to the inside. So one of the controversial positions I adopted during my campaign, which I stand by, is I think every native-born high school senior should have to pass the same civics test that we already require of every legal immigrant who enters this country, which I think every native-born high school senior should be able to pass that, arguably even be fully viewed as a capital C citizen in the United States. In order to vote. Well, I think that we could debate the way that you implement it. But at least I think every high school senior, let's just say the mildest version of this, which I think should be least controversial and most adoptable, is to graduate even from high school. You should be able to know the same thing about our country that every legal immigrant is required to know before they become a full citizen. So this is a civic nationalist view that goes far beyond just immigration policy. As it relates to immigration policy, it speaks to me when you talk about your identity as a Californian and the different attributes that compose identity. Identity is such a complicated concept. There's a lot of layers of one's own identity. Religious identity, ethnic identity, what foods you eat, the cultural traditions that make up who you are. And I am not of the view, I hope I haven't ever represented myself to be, even inadvertently, I'm not of the view that you need to abdicate those other forms of your identity to opt into the American identity. It would be a bizarre thing for me to say because I am the kid of legal immigrants to this country and there are many elements to my own identity that go beyond just the civic commitments to the U.S. ideals. But I think that that is a necessary condition of actually being able to opt into those ideals. So I draw a distinction between your knowledge of the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, our constitutional system of self-governance, your ability, and I think this is the most controversial one, but your ability to speak English, which I think is a precondition for assimilating into a country of other people who share those same ideals, versus whether you like to play baseball, soccer, or cricket. And I bring that up because I think that is an issue for certain cultural vision of what identity actually is. Like, do you have to like hot dogs and baseball rather than, you know, enchiladas and soccer? I don't think that that matters to me. To distinguish between the two things here, because this is actually not even meant to be a hostile question, I think that the question I am getting at is within your framework, not even within my framework. What do you believe these tests can really do? A minute ago, you said to me, right? I don't want to fetishize the test as one attribute. English as a national language, I think, would be high on the list. I understand that. A minute ago, you said to me that our immigration system, what it prioritizes above all else is a willingness to lie, right? Because if you come and you'll claim asylum in your view falsely, that gives you, you know, you get brought into the country, at least for a period of time. It's not my view, Ezra. Don't just say in your view. I mean, it is what's happening to me. People can disagree on what is, and in fact, you disagree. You have a whole thing in your book about the rates at which different judges grant asylum claims. So the question of what counts as a credible asylum claim is not just contested, but is itself ambiguous. And in, among other things, the bill that Donald Trump helped kill, we were going to change the sort of levels of asylum claims you need to be able to make in order to claim that successfully. So I think I'm actually saying the same thing you are. Asylum claims are ambiguous, although I don't always think that the same people you probably do are falsely claiming it. I think, you know, different levels of fear are understood differently by people. The thing I am saying is that how do you just avoid this being a teaching to the test, right? Coming to America is great. You know, being able to say on a form that the Declaration of Independence was about equality for all men is easy. So now we're talking about plumbing and implementation, which I don't want to reject. I don't think we are. Isn't this how you want to instantiate it? Well, I think a test is just one example. I think proficiency in English is high on the list. And I don't want to dismiss the question about implementation. But what I do want to just draw the distinction of is there is a very different competing vision that this is at all the thing that we're supposed to be concerned about versus saying if that person is going to work harder and more hours for a lower wage, that's a problem. So that's the basic distinction I'm drawing. Now, how you implement it? I mean, I'm not trying to just be a philosopher in the clouds here. Those are important questions to get to. But at least you've got to know what you're solving for before you actually even solve for it. And there is a deep-seated divide, even on the right, about what we're actually solving for. And I think right now, especially if we're successful in winning this election, as I'm rooting for and working hard to make happen, I think it will actually be really important for us to just see with clarity the why of why we're advancing each of these different visions of trade and immigration policy and especially attitudes towards regulatory reform. So why don't we talk about, just at a philosophical level, the difference you see between the way that the national patronage side, as you call it, and your side think about what should be done with the administrative state? Sure. And I use the word national patronage and national protectionist sometimes interchangeably. But I think there's two competing visions of how we view the administrative state and the regulatory state. One is that we want to use the levers of power to advance affirmatively pro-American and pro-worker ends. You could even call it more broadly conservative ends. There was a moment where, I remember it was Bill Clinton kind of in the, I think it was the late 90s that he said something like, the era of big government is over, which if a Republican said it during that same period, it would mean nothing. But of course, the fact that he was the Democratic president of the United States carried a lot of weight. And though it hasn't been articulated in so many words yet, I think there's a version of the Republican statement right now from the protectionist or patronage camp that says the era of small government is over. Nobody said in so many words, but effectively that's what's on offer. The separate vision is to say that we don't want to replace that left-wing regulatory apparatus and bureaucracy with a conservative or pro-American or pro-worker version of anything. We actually want to get in there and actually dismantle it and shut it down. And my view is that we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past if we take the short-term approach of empowering the CFPB to cap credit card interest rates and implement a statute that would do so and use a regulatory apparatus to enforce it. Or to empower the Department of Transportation to include a broader set of regulations to make sure, something we all want to see not happen, trains aren't going off the tracks in East Palestine. None of us want that to happen, but is the right solution more regulation or less regulation to make that happen? The Department of Education, do we want to continue subsidizing four-year college degrees? That hasn't worked out so well, but is the right answer to then redirect that to subsidize two-year college degrees or vocational programs? Or is the right answer actually to shut it down and send the money back to the states and respectively then to the people? Those are very different competing visions. And my own view is that we cannot claim to reform this administrative state by just incrementally clipping it around the edges, cutting off one-headed of an eight-headed hydra as an analogy I sometimes use. It grows right back. We have to be willing to take on the project of actually just gutting the thing versus the protectionist or patronage view says, okay, that's already here to stay. It's not going anywhere. Conservatives have been talking about this, to give fairness to this view, for 60 years and it hasn't happened. We might as well use that machinery to at least achieve positive ends for American workers and manufacturers and pro-American goals. And that's, I think, a well-intentioned but very different view than the one that I hold.