>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made in an admission.

The relatively rare case these days when a writer or public figure puts their hand up and says, I was wrong.

In this case, the writer is political scientist and author Lauren Hall, who writes the Radical Moderates Guide to Life Substack.

A recent piece was titled I Was Wrong About Trump that got my attention wrong.

In what way, I wondered?

Here's Hall quote since one of the radically moderate virtues is humility, I'll admit I was wrong.

Trump is way more dangerous than I thought he would be.

I misjudged his motives, misunderstood his intentions, and underestimated the depth of his selfishness.

After watching his first term, I thought I had him largely figured out, egotistical and uninterested in governance.

But maybe not completely pathological.

I was wrong.

End quote.

Hall goes on to say that while she has serious concerns about specific policy areas, the bulk of her concerns are in areas that she would have thought to find alliances among traditional conservatives.

She calls the behavior of elected Republicans a kind of GOP derangement that she finds mind boggling, at least, as she puts it to someone who has spent a lot of time studying conservative thought.

And she adds, quote, what makes him uniquely dangerous is the damage he is doing to the institutions.

In many ways, conservative institutions that made the balance between liberalism and democracy possible.

End quote.

As Hall often does, her subsequent posts have addressed ideas on what to do about all this, and she notes that there is a lack of talk about how, for example, the Democratic Party can learn lessons.

I should say there's a lot of talk about how the Democratic Party can learn lessons and get stronger as a party and fend off the next iterations of Trumpism.

Or maybe the Republicans can repair themselves.

But she writes that relying on the parties to essentially save the country is a bad idea.

Instead, she proposes a coalition of Americans who oppose authoritarianism, even while they might disagree on a wide range of policy issues, she calls it a radically moderate proposal to save America and says, quote, we can create a coalition for America and explicitly nonpartisan and intentionally pluralistic, compact of powerful civil society organizations built to protect keystone institutions of liberal democracy and designed to realign the broken incentive structures that fuel toxic polarization.

End quote.

I'm very curious to know how this would work, how you would achieve that.

And Dr.

Hall is kind enough to come back on the show to talk about it.

Lauren Hall author, and I should say the author of the Radical Moderates Guide to Life on Substack.

Among a number of other works, and a political scientist.

Welcome back to you.

It's nice to have you.

>> Thanks, Evan.

It's always wonderful to be here.

>> You know, you're not allowed to say I was wrong in public these days.

I don't know if you knew that.

>> I've gotten that message.

>> Yeah, sure.

So I didn't expect to read that piece going, wait, I didn't think Lauren Hall was a Trump fan.

And you're not.

But the wrong was on the degree of the danger to our society as opposed to, is he going to be a good sort of policy guy?

Is he going to be good for the country?

Right.

>> Yeah.

in the first I think in the first, Trump administration, I was and I don't think I was wrong in, in the sense that I thought that institutions would hold the United States has a lot that other democracies don't have.

We have a very strong civil society.

We have very strong institutional norms.

We have a lot of people sort of within the political establishment that care deeply about institutions.

And, and so the first Trump administration, I think, was was alarming in a number of ways, but it was not as as harmful as I think a lot of left leaning folks thought it would be.

and so I sort of thought when in the most recent election, I thought we might be dealing with something similar, what I had underestimated was how how much forces were moving in the background, primarily the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.

I had not really realized how organized they were, and I had not realized how quickly they had moved to remove the adults in the room who were there.

The first round we had a lot of establishment Republicans in, in the Trump cabinet, the first in the first administration.

And so there was a lot there were a lot of people who I think were were interested in protecting sort of liberal democratic institutions.

And that is not the case this time around.

>> Do you want to just briefly explain, for listeners who don't know you, that you're not just a typical Democrat who hates Trump?

>> yeah.

>> so I'm, I consider myself politically homeless these days.

That's sort of my that's my tagline.

and and I write a Substack about radical moderation.

I think that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have failed us in, in deep ways.

and I actually come from a, an intellectual tradition that is heavily steeped in classical liberal and conservative principles.

I spent my PhD studying at a largely conservative PhD program, reading Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek and, you know, all of these sort of major players within the.

>> And you still have a lot of affection for those ideas.

>> I have deep affection for those ideas.

And in fact, I think a lot of those and this is, you know, you and I have talked in recent episodes on where I think one of the big dangers that I see of the Trump administration is that I think it will effectively, it is in the process of hollowing out principled conservatism.

But I also think that once that happens, we're going to have a real loss within the sort of American political dialog, because I think conservatives, principled conservatives, have really important things to tell us about how political institutions should operate.

>> Yeah.

And I want to get to your diagnosis first, this idea that the parties can't necessarily save us.

And then we'll talk about some of your prescriptions.

But in general, when when I hear sort of small c conservatives, people like my father say, well, you know, if Spencer Cox or Larry Hogan can win the next election and I'm thinking the odds that Utah Governor Spencer Cox or Maryland Larry Hogan is coming through a Republican primary seem very low.

But there are Republicans out there who are hopeful of that because they see politicians who are still exist, who are in the mold and the model that you just described, and they would want the party to go back in that direction.

Are there people out there that you see, even the Republican Party, and go, listen, I know that they're not likely to grab power back.

And a lot has changed in ten years, but they're trying to hold on to that tradition.

>> Yeah, absolutely.

But I think this is where and this is where the my, my most recent Substack posts, I think, have pointed to the broader problem.

It's not that we lack good people, and in fact, there's actually a lot of research that we can talk about that when it when we look at toxic polarization, for example, it's not the majority of Americans.

We are not broken as a people.

We are not broken as a country.

But all of the political incentives point in the wrong direction.

And increasingly, all of the media incentives point in the wrong direction.

So we know the power of algorithms and negativity bias within media, and the negativity bias is very much apparent in our modern politics.

So the problem is not that there aren't really amazing GOP candidates who could come to the fore.

The problem is that we've lost control of the primaries.

And so no decent Republican is going to be able to win a primary when we have the the the only people who come out for primary elections are typically the most motivated voters, who tend to be the most extreme.

And that's true on the right and the left.

So one of the primary things we need is primary reform.

But neither party has any incentive to engage in primary reform.

And so there's these there's these sort of mechanisms that keep us trapped.

And so it's not about whether there's good people out there.

It's about whether those good people have levers that they can pull to get us out of this mess.

>> So centrists or moderates are going to have a hard time with primaries going forward.

>> They're going to have a really hard time, okay.

>> And then can you address some of the claims that I've seen from a wide range of people who don't want moderation?

And on the political left, one of the refrains in the last week or two since the election is that, for example, take the Mamdani election, one of the refrains I'm hearing on the political left is if we just listen to the Ezra Klein's or the sort of the the moderate voices in the party who want us to run a wider range and be a bigger tent, we're going to stay in the neoliberal hell we're in where you can't afford an apartment in New York City, or you can't afford to buy a house anymore, or your grocery bill is through the roof.

And that's not the world we want to stay in.

But the the neoliberal shills want you to stay in that world.

Can you address that?

>> Yeah.

I mean, so Mamdani is an interesting example because actually, I think we we are misinterpreting what that election actually told us.

Musa Al-gharbi is a sociologist who also teaches at Stony Brook, now Suny Stony Brook, and he did a beautiful analysis.

Mamdani ran and won on the same coalition that most other moderate Democrats went on.

He actually did not he didn't galvanize young voters.

He didn't get sort of the the average person sort of to be aware.

I mean, he, he the same people voted for him as typically have voted for sort of moderate Republicans in the city.

I don't.

>> Think moderate Democrats or.

>> Moderate Democrat.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Moderate Democrats.

and so I think, you know, he won because he's a really effervescent candidate, right?

He's a he's a young, very very charismatic person.

And so I don't think that necessarily I mean, certainly there were aspects of his affordable housing is something that any candidate really needs to run on because that's a major concern of Americans across the board.

But this is where I think our political dysfunction is so deep, which is that we we have two political parties who we know what the problems are that Americans care about, right?

We have inflation, we have housing, we have a broken immigration system.

We have a broken health care system.

And yet neither party cares enough about the American people to actually worry about solving those problems.

And so we get we get a lot of political messaging.

We get a lot of virtue signaling, but we actually do not get any kind of real coalition building people who are willing to work across the aisle.

And that's again, because the incentives are are poorly constructed.

>> But I think that's where the David Sirota's of the world, they'll say, you can't solve those problems from the middle.

They don't exist in the middle.

The middle is where we get stuck.

>> Yeah, I think he's wrong.

I mean, so I've spent the last five years sort of writing about different ways that we actually can and again, the middle, I think is a really.

>> It's a nebulous term.

>> It's a nebulous term.

And I think there's a there's deep misconceptions about what moderation can look like.

So if if by moderation you mean you take a midpoint between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Well, yeah, that's a probably a pretty bad place to be, right?

Because that's not necessarily a place where you actually have any solutions, because neither side is starting in a solution kind of oriented space.

But when you actually get people together into rooms to talk about what solutions look like, those solutions tend to be relatively non-ideological.

They tend to focus on sort of a mix of government activity and free market activity.

They tend to look at sort of loosening up regulations in some areas and tightening them in others.

And, you know, in my work on health care policy, a lot of the sort of policy prescriptions that I came to, and this was a really sort of exploratory process, I did not come into healthcare thinking that I knew what the answer was, but a lot of the policy prescriptions that I came to really were a very mixed bag.

I mean, I think you absolutely need some kind of catastrophic coverage for people.

It's not it's simply not possible to live in a modern society without some kind of government subsidized health care.

but we also have a terribly structured system where we have third party payers and, and escalating prices because we have third party payers.

and and increasingly poor quality.

So, you know, when I look at the vast majority of serious problems that we're facing, immigration reform, criminal justice reform, housing reform, all of them have actual solutions that people have tried in different cities that have actually worked, and yet they can't spread because they're non-ideological.

And so neither party has any incentive to say, hey, let's try this because it means that they lose their grasp on owning this problem.

>> What's an example point to health care?

Where is it going?

Well.

>> Well, so there's actually some really interesting.

I mean so one one example that I've looked at is is sort of areas where you have a combination of concierge care.

So people have the ability to sort of pay out of pocket for specific kinds of specific kinds of treatments.

but then have a fairly comprehensive sort of catastrophic coverage.

now, the problem with the U.S.

is that it's really hard to see those spaces because we, we have this blanket system sort of across the board.

but I think we do see areas where you can create carve outs for people.

And, and so I've been really interested, you know, one of the reasons I got interested in in healthcare was because of my own experience in the maternity care system and just being really frustrated by how difficult it was to get quality care.

while I was pregnant with all three of my kids.

and so I looked at what we have.

There's all of these really interesting, innovative people out there.

There's birth centers, there's midwives, there's people who are doing really wonderful work that's low cost and high quality.

But the problem with the current system is that those people are priced out of the of the system.

So in New York State, for example, if you want to if you want to start a birth center, you have to go through the certificate of need process, which means that you have to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars out of the gate to open a very small outpatient clinic.

That's kind of insane, right?

But neither party has any incentive to tackle certificate of need.

and in particular, in New York State, the Democratic Party doesn't have any interest in tackling certificate of need.

So so I think that when you actually look at solutions, they tend to be nonpartisan at the very least, if not non-ideological, but because they are nonpartisan, neither party has any incentive to take them up because they don't they don't activate the base.

>> So when it comes to the reason I wanted to ask about that is that's kind of the prelude to the coalition building that you want to see happen in response to what's happening in this Trump administration.

And the the, the feeling I got reading your piece is that you feel like we are in a crisis worse than you foresaw, and that that should overwhelm almost anything else.

The idea that we need a coalition that will work to save, as you say, these keystone institutions, and we're going to talk about what those are and how to save them.

But how much of a crisis do you.

What's the diagnosis you have for how bad the problem is or how dangerous the moment is?

>> I think it's pretty dangerous.

I think we have we're seeing a gutting of the Justice Department.

one of the primary foundations of a liberal democratic society is the rule of law, right?

The ability to predict and to be able to to have faith that the the same rules that apply to you apply to everyone else.

and so I think the my biggest sort of fear, I think has been the gutting of the Justice Department and the weaponization of the Justice Department.

If you're looking at the, you know, the prosecution of Comey and, and others.

I mean, I think this is really deeply disturbing, and it should deeply disturb Republicans and Democrats.

you know, we can talk about a number of other failures.

I mean, I think the weaponization of of the IRS, the weaponization of the SEC against media companies, these are supposed to be neutral bureaucracies.

And and this is where I think the sort of vicious cycle becomes so vicious.

you know, looking through the comments on my I was wrong about Trump post you know, I saw both sides arguing, hey, we can't defend these institutions because the other side already rejected them.

It's too late.

Like we can't possibly defend these things because they've violated them, quote, unquote.

Now that's the that's the definition of a of a vicious cycle, right?

If no one is willing to defend what is right because the other side has violated it, well, then we we can't we don't have any way of actually protecting what's most important.

Now, what I'm optimistic about is that I think most Americans actually don't believe that, you know, but I think that when we when we get into these hyperpartisan spaces, it is really easy for Republicans to say, well, of course we have to violate rule of law because the Democrats have been violating it for years, or Democrats saying, well, of course we have to, you know, give up on these neoliberal institutions, you know, like rule of law, because the Republicans have have been abusing them.

Right.

and and so what we really need is for some clear sighted people to get together and say, wait a second, right.

It's in everybody's best interest.

If we have functioning liberal democratic institutions, let's figure out what those are, and then let's figure out how to protect them.

>> We are well, we'll talk more coming up here if we're starting to see more of that, or if our guest is shocked at how little of that we are seeing at the moment.

a couple points here on the Justice Department.

we had a conversation with some retired judges on this program last month, and two Republicans, two Democrats, all very, very concerned for the reasons you described.

They looked and they all, you know, they agree that the Comey case is not the James case is not the Bolton case.

But they were horrified at the way the department is being, not even subtly weaponized.

I mean, explicitly so a month later, my feeling is if what happened this week had happened before all of that, it might have been bigger headlines.

I'm I'm amazed that what Bondi and Trump did this week didn't get more attention.

And by that I mean this.

Trump has said there's nothing in the Epstein files.

You know, it's asked and answered.

Let it go.

He's a sleaze.

He's a jerk.

Who cares?

Pam Bondi has said we've given you all there is to give you like it's a closed case.

And then just a couple days ago, the Trump administration is reversing and the president says, okay, fine, I am going to ask the AG to look at this, and I want her to look at Democrats.

And she says, great idea, sir.

I'll do that.

After just months ago saying asked and answered, we've closed it.

There's nothing new.

It is the most ham fisted obvious deflection.

And an obvious weaponization of the department that had Comey not already happened, I think people would be going, whoa!

But I think already we're getting used to it.

Am I wrong?

>> No, I think you're right.

And this is my fear.

So I think a lot of a lot of Americans don't realize how much, liberal Democratic.

And by the way, I'm using the term liberal in the really traditional, very big tent term that goes all the way back to Locke and Hobbes.

Like, this is not left leaning or right leaning.

>> It's this is not a synonym for progressivism.

>> Yes.

>> Politics.

>> so what I think people don't see is how much liberal democracy really rests on norms.

And what I mean by norms is that there are certain lines that you just don't cross.

And so for a long time, people pushed those boundaries, right?

Obama pushed those boundaries.

Bush pushed those boundaries.

>> Where did Obama and Bush push them?

>> Obama certainly pushed them when it came to executive orders.

both pushed it when it came to overseas interventions.

and sort of where Congress should be acting and was not acting.

so this is not a new thing.

but it was very important that presidents, at least avoid egregious and public sort of rejection of liberal democratic institutions and basic norms of not just civility.

I mean, some of the things that I think have really shocked me about Trump are civility.

norms.

like, for example, his true social posts with, you know, A.I.

generated.

>> Dropping excrement on the project.

>> Extra.

Yeah.

Excrement.

>> Yesterday he called a woman a reporter.

He called her piggy.

Yeah.

I don't know if you saw that.

>> Yeah.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff that.

No, no.

Politician, Republican or Democratic, could have gotten away with.

And we are becoming immune to it because it's now just sort of business as usual.

And so the problem with that is that the more that we become immune to it, it's harder and harder to get back to a baseline where people do respect each other across party lines, where people are capable of having civil conversations with people who disagree with them, where people don't weaponize each other and basic institutions just to get their way.

So part of the reason that norms are so important is that they set expectations for how people will behave in the public sphere, and Trump has thrown all of those out the window.

And and the the response from folks on the right is, well, he had to.

Right.

It's time to break things because, you know, the institutions had been captured by the Democrats.

Right.

And that's, I can sort of see the argument, but I think they're really misunderstanding a key conservative principle, which is that revolutions of every kind are deeply dangerous.

I mean, if you look, if you read Edmund Burke, right, his whole criticism of the French Revolution is, hey, when you throw norms and traditions out the window, you have no idea what's going to replace them.

And you actually are probably going to really dislike what replaces them.

And so this is what I find so mind boggling about this current moment is that you have conservatives acting in deeply anti-conservative ways, right?

Throwing out traditions and norms and principles of governance and behavior.

in a way that, again, I mean, if you look at like the number of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump, these are people who claim to follow Jesus and they're following this adultery.

You know I mean, it's just it's bizarre to me.

>> I think they would say, well, we got Dobbs.

>> Yes, they would.

Right, right.

and again, that's just, you know, as if you read the Bible, it just strikes me as bizarre.

>> Sure, sure.

But take this to its conclusion, then.

If, as you say in your Substack, you were wrong about how authoritarian and how dangerous this moment can be, if it is more dangerous than you feared, what's the conclusion?

If there isn't a coalition to slow it down or stop it, where are we going?

>> Well, so I try to be optimistic, and I think that I am.

I think we're starting to see.

>> I don't want you to predict where we're going.

I want you to tell me where you fear the worst that we could be going.

>> Well, all right, so the the worst where we go is that is that I think both sides fracture into extremism.

Right.

So we already have rising rates of what we call toxic polarization or affective polarization, which is that despite the fact that people are not actually that ideologically divided, we are increasingly scared of each other.

We increasingly fear each other.

So affective polarization is that feeling that I don't just disagree with this person, but that person is an actual danger to me and my way of life.

>> An enemy.

>> An enemy.

And so the more that we start seeing fellow Americans as enemies we start seeing increasing political violence.

We start seeing increasing, you know, justification for the use of force.

You start seeing increasing justification for violent protests of all kinds on all sides.

and so this is how civil wars begin.

Now, I don't think we're there yet.

And so this is why I don't want to I don't want to sort of overstate the danger.

I don't think we're there yet.

And I think we are seeing fragmentation within the MAGA movement.

I think we're seeing people on the inside saying, wait a second.

you know, I found myself in the bizarre position of agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene recently, and that's like a very weird place for me to be.

but I think we are seeing people push back.

but I do think that there's a lot of people who study authoritarianism.

There's a lot of people who study democratic decline.

And they say we're exhibiting all of those signs.

>> So for those who argue political violence was way worse in the 70s, we had bombings happening in, you know, in response to Vietnam.

There were not only protests, but there were bombings, 60s and 70s was worse.

We have recency bias here, and we're overstating it.

What do you think?

>> Yeah, I think that's true.

So and that's partly why I don't want to claim that we are we're on a precipice right now.

What what concerns me.

And this is why I think we have to move into solution finding mode much sooner rather than later.

and this is, I find really frustrating on both the left and the right is that there's lots of people wringing their hands and sort of complaining, but very people, very few people who are actually saying, wait a second, let's actually figure out how we can how we can move our way out of this.

but it is absolutely true that we are actually living in we have a much more awareness of political violence, but we are not actually living in an increasingly violent time.

But again, if you look at Trump's response to the political violence, right, he has not toned it down.

And in fact, he has ramped it up.

Right?

He has he has made various political assassinations deeply polarized.

He completely ignored the political assassination of Democratic leaders in Minnesota.

and then he held a state funeral for Charlie Kirk, who's a private citizen.

I mean, this is just very, very bizarre behavior.

So my fear is not necessarily that we are at some uniquely violent point, but that we have leadership that seems absolutely unconcerned about animating and encouraging that violence.

>> Could could get a lot worse.

Yes.

Okay.

So the last bit of diagnosis and then we're going to spend the second half hour and we're where we're going to go with this coalition here.

For those who say fix the parties, the Democrats have learned lessons.

They're going to learn lessons.

They're going to do better in 2026 and 2028.

They'll get us out of this mess, or the Republicans will have that Spencer Cox, white knight, somebody coming in, riding in to bring a sensible approach and civility back.

And don't don't worry, we're just in the throes of this madness.

But we're going to the parties are going to save us.

You don't believe the parties will save us?

>> No, I don't I think again, going back to this incentive problem we have a political parties who have completely lost control of their own primaries.

That means that they have very little power over who actually their candidates are.

I mean, it would be wonderful if the GOP could actually say, wait a second.

Right.

Let's refocus ourselves.

But they don't have the actual power to do that.

>> What about on policy?

What if they want to intervene and say, or even just the norms that you describe, an intervention that says this is out of bounds.

We will invoke different measures to try to cap some of this.

You think we would have seen that by now?

>> We would have seen that because all of the incentives point in the wrong direction.

So if you are if you're a GOP leader, right, watching this ship go down you are going to say, well, okay, let's actually bring some candidates forward.

Well, what happens then?

As soon as those candidates go through the primary, right, they get trumped.

They get they get shot down by extremist voters.

Who are the people who show up for primaries?

People who show up for primaries are a very small and very non-representative portion of the electorate.

>> The moderates get left out.

>> The moderates are not there.

Right.

and because we don't have open primaries in many states moderates who who are not politically affiliated like myself can't vote in primaries.

And so the moderate voice is actually excluded from the question of who our candidates should be.

And that's a real problem.

>> So when we come back here, a coalition for America that Dr.

Hall wants to see created a nonpartisan mutual protection society that vigorously protects the foundational institutions that make productive disagreement possible and create a bulwark against authoritarianism.

So what are the keystone institutions that Lauren Hall sees at threat here, and what are the ways to build this kind of coalition?

That seems very, very hard to do at this time when we are so polarized, or maybe we feel so polarized?

I think Lauren would say a lot of Americans agree and a lot more than they realize.

So we're going to talk on the other side of this break with political scientist Lauren Hall, author of a number of publications.

And on Substack, The Radical Moderates Guide to Life, which you should be reading.

We'll come right back on Connections.

Coming up in our second hour, we sit down with Dr.

Kinari Webb, one of the leading voices around the world, in the effort to stop deforestation.

She's in Rochester as the recipient of the 2025 Seneca Park Zoo Society Conservation Warrior Award.

We're going to talk to her about her career, what she has learned, about what works, about making human beings healthy and the environment healthy.

That's next hour.

>> Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Mary Cariola, center.

Proud supporter of Connections with Evan Dawson.

Believing an informed and engaged community is a connected one.

Mary Cariola.

>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

So it's the coalition for America.

Lauren Hall that's what that's what you'd like to maybe call it?

Sure.

Why not?

>> Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, I'm terrible at titles, but.

But I wanted something that was not, you know, I don't want anything.

The, American Coalition for American Democracy or coalition for American Blank, you know.

Yeah.

No, no, I want just hey.

>> Looking at.

>> Your America, right?

Just America.

>> Coalition for America.

and I'm going to read a little bit from what you write, you say that it would focus on two key processes to disrupt the current vicious cycle of toxic polarization.

Number one, adversarial collaboration.

People who don't agree get together to decide on the rules of the game.

In this case, coming together to agree on the keystone institutions that need protecting.

And number two, realigning incentives specifically intentionally using existing levers to realign civic virtue with self-interest, enforced with influence and money.

All right.

So the first one, adversarial collaboration.

Tell me more about that.

>> Yeah.

So this was originally proposed by Kahneman, the economist.

And the proposal was actually in the scientific world.

Right.

The proposal was a way to generate innovation in scientific progress and sort of move, move science forward.

And so the principles of adversarial collaboration are that you get two people who have very different hypotheses about something that's going that's happening in the in the scientific world in this case, and you have them jointly design the methods for an experiment.

And so what that does is it controls for bias, which we know in science.

You know, people bias the design of their experiments all the time, often unconsciously.

So if you if you bring in your adversary, they're going to keep an eye on that bias and you're going to be able to catch their bias in return.

So you have joint design.

They hold each other accountable, and then you also it creates a commitment mechanism so that you both parties commit to the process.

And by by this I'm using parties in the sense of like these two different adversaries.

and so this works really well.

There's actually a center for adversarial collaboration at Penn, for example.

And, and one of the things that they do is help bring scientists with very different views together to do this process.

I have not seen adversarial collaboration talked about in the political world.

And I actually think it's it's a really underused way to think about these problems, you know, but if we brought people from different sides of the aisle.

Now, here's the wrinkle.

It's got to be people who are willing to engage in good faith.

Yeah.

Which means that you can't just choose any random person off the street.

You've got to find people who care deeply about the basic principles of liberal democratic governance, but who have very, very different views on how to achieve different policy goals.

And so I'm really clear in the in the post that this is not about policy.

This is not about finding some moderate middle ground on gun control or something like that.

This is getting a group of people who come from very, very different.

You need progressives.

You need libertarians, you need conservatives.

You need all of those people in a room.

And then they decide on what the really critical institutions are.

>> So if you and I are on the polar opposite sides of policy, but we're on part of this coalition, you and I would say things like, hey, this isn't about health care today.

This isn't about gun policy.

This is about making sure that an independent judiciary is not threatened.

And we have to come up with ways that we see to solve that, because we both agree, no matter what happens on the policy side, we can't lose checks and balances.

We can't lose a judiciary.

We can't use the value of federalism.

You know, some state and local control we can't have.

We can't lose transparency in the electoral process.

So what are we going to do about that?

Exactly.

So it starts with that.

But even the notion of adversarial collaboration, it makes all the sense in the world, in science, to me, it makes all the sense in the world, in politics.

To me, if people were sort of humble about it or if these incentives weren't there for all of the carnival barking that we get everything from punditry to the people in power who act like if I ever admit that I was wrong, it's some sort of fatal flaw and I'll be cast out for it.

We have to realign all kinds of incentives here before you even start with this, don't we?

>> Well, this is why I think you start with a very specific group of people.

and I'll admit, I'm not entirely sure that this is the right group of people, but I think that this is my sort of starting point.

So I think what we need to do is start with the big foundations.

there's a reason for starting with the big foundations.

So I'm thinking about people like, for example, the Ford Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Templeton Foundation maybe Hewlett.

and there's a reason for starting with those folks.

First of all, they are directly affected by toxic polarization.

so a lot of these organizations, they fund policy and social issues.

They want to make the world a better place.

Right now.

There's no way to make the world a better place, because the policy machine has essentially ground to a halt.

Right?

We can't actually get any solutions off the ground in this current environment.

So so I think they have a vested interest in just if they want to continue their mission, they need to have a functioning political political governance system.

So there's that.

But then there's also the fact that internally, I think these organizations really suffer from toxic polarization.

Right?

Everyone suffers when you're the, you know, your board of trustees is at odds with each other, right?

They're at each other's throats about, you know, who knows what, right.

Culture wars.

So I think they have a really vested interest for their own sort of long term health to tackle problems of polarization.

So, so they so that's where I would start with them.

And so you would get leaders in that space to participate in this adversarial collaboration project.

And I think they would be they would have sort of critical they would have skin in the game to engage in this process in good faith.

>> Okay.

And I take the point that it's hard to get policy done right now, but how do you grapple with the argument that says it should be hard to get policy done in a republic?

It should.

It should not be as easy as just changing your clothes in the morning.

There should be a lot of gridlock and getting it policy over the line, which means a lot of change for a lot of lives should be difficult.

So what's wrong with that?

>> Oh, I am a big fan of gridlock.

That.

>> Kind of.

>> Gridlock were gridlock is not my problem.

My problem is that we are not even capable of getting together to solve basic, serious problems, like the fact that our immigration system is fundamentally broken.

so people talk about getting in line, right?

You know?

Well, of course, you know, we should get rid of, you know, people who are here illegally.

Just get in line.

Like, you know, my grandfather did or whatever, right?

Whatever that argument is, people ignore the fact that the immigration system is broken.

It's almost impossible to get through the immigration system in a legal way unless you come from a couple key countries.

So we need to solve immigration.

We need to solve housing.

And by the way, I use the term solve.

I actually don't like using that word.

We're actually not talking about solving these problems.

Right.

Like housing will always be a problem that we have to deal with.

But we are completely leaving voters.

And just the average American without any resources, right, to deal with these really critical problems.

So it's not that I think.

>> Is not healthy gridlock.

>> This is not healthy gridlock.

This is not deliberative gridlock.

This is not, you know, different sides coming together to have conversations about how to solve this really critical policy problem.

That is not the kind of gridlock that we're dealing with.

It's not even gridlock about like, which level of government should this be?

You know, handle that, right.

The federal or the state level, right.

That's not what's happening.

What's happening here is just total whiplash and inability to react to just increasingly egregious violations of shared principles.

>> All right.

So if you get this adversarial collaboration system that you are envisioning that kind of a group is going to have to decide on the keystone institutions to protect.

And I, I listed a few, but I'll just read your short list, which you concede is a partial.

And this is all up for debate.

Separation of powers and checks and balances and independent judiciary.

Federalism that respects state and local governance, the rule of law, not the rule of men.

Free and independent media, including a commitment to avoid spreading misinformation and disinformation.

Academic freedom and independent universities, and a fair and transparent electoral process.

So that's your first crack at a list here.

I can already hear the Chris Rufo's of the world saying, well, academic freedom and independent universities, they've been captured by the far left.

And of course, the reform that this administration is doing is necessary.

And what are you talking about?

Protecting the status quo.

>> Yeah, but here's the deal.

Chris Rufo is not in that room.

Right.

>> Chris?

Chris is not on the coalition.

>> Chris Rufo is not invited to the adversarial collaboration project.

Right.

Because you want people who are willing to engage in good faith with each other.

and that's why I think these these foundation leaders are in a much better position than pundits or or ideologues because the pundits and ideologues have an incentive to be as extreme as possible, because that drives views.

That's not the case for people who have billion dollar endowments that they need to protect and employees that they need to protect.

And missions that they need to protect.

>> Okay.

So right now, again, you and I are the coalition, okay.

It's a two person coalition.

It's Lauren Hall and Evan Dawson.

And we agree separation of checks and power, separation of powers and checks and balances is number one.

And I think there's two separate problems within that issue.

Number one is intentional abuse, which what we're seeing at the Justice Department, the weaponization of the Justice Department, the way that the executive branch is asserting control in spheres where it was never designed to have control.

But then the second is the utter capitulation of Congress.

>> Yes.

>> The ceding of its authority at all and the neutering of itself.

And so we can talk about all we want.

But I mean, if we don't have elected people in Congress who see themselves as an important check, then what's the point?

What do we do with that?

>> Well, so this is where I think that this is a multi-step process, right?

So you start with these what I'm calling anchor organizations, which are private organizations that have a lot of money and a lot of influence relative to their size.

And, but they're small enough that you can get those leaders into a room and actually hash some of these issues out.

But then with their money, right, they're able to do two things.

They're able to fund initiatives that align with this broader coalition.

so I mean, I'm thinking of it in this sense, like a climate compact, right?

It's not saying to the different organizations, you can't fund the things that you normally want to fund, but it's saying like, hey, you should be sort of institutionally responsible.

You should be responsible to the principles of liberal democracy as you fund those things.

But then they also do another important thing, which is that they give cover to other institutions like universities, like the media that are feeling very vulnerable right now.

And they encourage those institutions to clean up their own act.

I mean, I think one of the things that that we've heard over and over again, and I've been in higher education now for 20 years, right?

It absolutely is left leaning.

And so I think that there is an argument to be made that, hey, why don't we actually bring more diverse viewpoints to the floor?

Why don't we have more, you know, more, viewpoint diversity baked into the way that we think about academics, teaching and research.

and so I think those are conversations.

I mean, I think public, you know, public radio is one of those spaces, public media you know, those are conversations that should be had because we've made ourselves vulnerable.

Right?

Those institutions have made themselves vulnerable to precisely this kind of Partizan attack, because we've skewed so far in one political direction.

Over time.

>> Some of the critique from the rufo's of the world has merit is what you're saying.

When you look at academia in the last decade, there's no question culturally it's moved left.

Yes, as a whole, yes.

But what you're saying is his prescription of what to do about it is not where you want.

>> To go, right?

That's bad.

Yeah, yeah, I would much rather have universities do thoughtful and internal housekeeping than have them be bombed from the outside with the kind of compact that Trump is asking universities to sign.

>> Yeah.

And so for people who haven't sort of followed, like the roof of the world, the way I would describe it is they view their current position and power as a way of saying, well, I didn't like the way this institution or this group behaved.

So we're going to use their same methods to to steer power back in our direction, as opposed to saying this system is dangerous and we have got to fix it.

So I think it is just the use of power in what is always in politics.

Temporary moments to try to move things in your sort of either culture or political direction through illiberal means, as opposed to maybe the structural, systemic change you want to see.

Is that fair?

>> Yes, I think that's absolutely fair.

>> So now that we've identified some institutions and as you say, there can be many more or there can be different ones that are not on your list here.

I just want to ask you again to kind of define, because I understand adversarial collaboration, realigning incentives.

I'm going to read this again, intentionally using existing levers to realign civic virtue with self-interest, enforced with influence and money.

So I heard the influence and money part, although, again, the sirota's the David Deans are going to say money is going to protect money and you are going to be leaving a lot of the working class behind with this.

If do you want to offer a rejoinder to that critique?

>> yeah, I can.

I mean, I think what will happen over time is that the way that those funders operate is that they're going to place levers, they're going to they're going to they're going to create leverage that then influences different kinds of institutions in a way that actually will serve the average person much better than they're serving them now.

>> Okay.

and I just want you to define for me how or what you mean by realigning civic virtue with self-interest.

>> mm-hmm.

so this is actually ripped straight from the pages of Federalist ten and Federalist 51.

Right.

This was the founders understanding of the structure of the Constitution.

we can't it's not enough to assume that the people in charge are going to be really great people.

They're not going to be, you know, we can't assume that they're going to be virtuous.

They're not all going to be Washington's.

And so what we need to do is make sure that we have checks in place, that ambition can counter ambition and that we align the incentives of politics with caring for the public good.

Right now, all of our incentives for a variety of complex reasons point in the wrong direction.

And so I'm looking at like the, you know, open primaries are one example, or rather closed primaries are one example.

and so you have a system where the most extreme voices are privileged over and over again.

There's ways that we can shift that incentive structure.

And I think that it starts with the combination of, again, political cover.

And I use political cover because I think a lot of sort of universities, media organizations, they feel so they have so much to lose by being personally attacked by Trump.

I mean, we're seeing him leveraging the IRS at particular institutions, right?

His attack on Harvard and Columbia.

Right.

These very targeted, targeted attacks, they have a huge amount to lose.

And I've seen a lot of criticism of university presidents.

But when you're talking about having to lay off maybe a third of your workforce or, you know, gut your endowment in order to respond to these concerns.

I mean, I think there's a real institutional responsibility that these presidents are grappling with.

But what they need is political cover from bigger, more powerful organizations.

And these are where these large foundations, I think, can provide that cover.

>> okay.

A couple other points here, because I think this is just the first what's going to be a series of conversations as this coalition comes together and as you are the overseer of it.

Yes.

As you become the overseer.

>> Probably not be the overseer.

>> It's a lot of work.

It's going to be a lot of work.

so the primaries again on the the way you're diagnosing these problems, I think a critic listening would say, Lauren Hall doesn't like the primaries because she says the moderates get left out.

You are free to join a party and vote as a moderate in the primary.

Just do that.

>> yeah.

I mean, I think that's that's a nice idea.

That's not how I mean, that's not how primaries are structured.

I was talking to a woman who got primaried by Lauren Boebert in Colorado, and she lost her primary by something like 120 votes.

And so as a result, we have Lauren Boebert in Congress instead of this thoughtful Republican woman who would have done a great job in Congress.

>> Well, and up in Maine, for example, what's the guy's name in Maine who just said he's not running for reelection?

Producer Megan Mack was it Jared Golden?

So the only Democrat in Congress in a Trump plus ten or more district was is in Maine.

Jared Golden, moderate Democrat.

And he was going to be primaried.

And the left is all over him.

Hammer.

He's not not left enough.

He's like, yes, this is the only Democrat in a Trump plus ten district in the country.

>> Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Yeah.

>> Is it Jared Golden.

Yeah.

So he's he announced recently he's not doing it like he's like I'm out I'm going to focus on my family.

And I don't know that it was because he was going to get primaried.

But it's easy to look at that and go, I don't know that this is the best use of your energy here.

>> Well, and this is so I've been talking a lot about primaries, but it's not just primaries, right?

It's the entire political I mean, the fact that.

>> But that's an example of where things, again, move to the extremes instead of rewarding where you see more Americans spending their energy and their ideas.

Yes.

Okay.

So as we get ready to wrap here, then you have some governing principles that that you list again, open to more ideas here.

But I'm just going to read what you have.

And I want to make sure we understand your perspective here.

You said minimize special interest carve outs in legislation.

You said it's wishful thinking, but you thought you'd throw that in there.

Protect free markets while preventing monopolistic abuses.

Ensure due process and equal protection under the law, and refrain from spreading misinformation and commit to correcting misinformation when it happens.

I actually see in these four principles a lot that everyone from Matt Stoller to you know, I think it's a wide range of people who would like some of what they're seeing here.

here's my question.

As we get ready to close so much of what you've put together, which I think is a really cogent, interesting set of ideas, boils down to me to some of what one of my favorite writers, Tim Urban, wrote about recently, where he, you know, he's quirky writer, he uses cartoons, but he's got this graph where it says, you know, here are your principles that you will follow if your team is in power.

And here's what happens when the other team is in power.

And what do you do when things are are are clashing?

Are you the type of person whose principles are your principles?

Even when you've got a call, balls and strikes on your own side.

And my sense is never in my lifetime have we been more in a position for a lot of different reasons, where people will abandon their principles.

If it is a chance to prove their side is can win or is correct.

I don't think social media helps with that.

I don't think we're doing a great job of thinking through our own ideas and understanding our own biases and motivated reasoning, but it's also about power accumulation.

So Tim Urban would say a lot of this is just about challenging people and believing that we can still be collaborating with people we disagree with and willing to say when our side is wrong or willing to give a little.

Do you think the conditions exist to achieve any of this?

>> What I what I hope I've done in, in this sort of blueprint is paid very close attention to power.

So the problem of polarization started with elites, and I think it's up to elites to at least get the ball rolling to fix it.

And this is where I think foundations are a keystone anchor organization when it comes to having an enormous amount of political power.

Right.

You're talking about the Gates Foundation, right?

There's there's huge amounts of money and political power that these foundations leverage, but they're also controlled by a relatively small group of people, which means you can actually get them into a room.

You know, I love the bridging movements.

I love braver angels.

There's a ton of people doing incredible work across America right now, but they are highly fragmented and they don't have a lot of money, and they don't have a lot of formal political power.

So this pushes the problem upward to where I think the problem rightfully belongs, which is with elites.

>> You don't think the braver angels and groups of that ilk are well-intentioned but naive?

You think if they had more oomph behind them, this is where a lot of people would get on board?

>> I think they could, yes.

Yeah.

I think we can empower them in a way that we that they are not empowered now.

>> Okay, last minute, my concern is that there is so much aligned against an effort like this.

And I don't think you deny that.

I don't think you denied at all.

That's why one of my reactions at first I felt a little squishy.

When you're talking about Ford and Coke and but that is where money is, and that is where money might be leveraged to be a bulwark against the forces that will try to gut this kind of an effort.

So you probably do need some power and some force and some money behind an effort like this.

Do you think money could corrupt an effort like this?

>> Yes, but here's where I think it's really important to to, again, focus on the way that virtue is aligned with self-interest.

In this model, we are not asking Bill Gates or Charles Koch or any of these people or their foundations to do this out of the generosity of their own heart.

Right.

We are asking them to do it because it's in their self-interest as an organization, if they want to get their mission accomplished, if they want to fund the kinds of things that actually move the needle, they need to start thinking now.

>> Dr.

Lauren Hall writes the Substack that I would certainly recommend.

It's the Radical Moderates Guide to Life, and recently Lauren wrote a piece, said I was wrong about Trump and then followed it up with some prescriptions on how we create this coalition for America, a nonpartisan mutual protection society.

Yeah, it's a big idea, but it's certainly sparked a lot of interest.

You are welcome back very soon to see how this is going.

>> I would love to come back.

>> And then separately, Lauren and I hope a few others are going to join us to talk about some of the ways we talk about ourselves, the way we categorize ourselves politically, and how we understand ourselves.

Thank you for being here.

>> It's always great.

>> We always appreciate it.

That's Lauren Hall more Connections coming up in just a moment.

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