On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Syracuse City Auditor Alexander Marion. He was elected to the position as a Democrat in November 2023. Prior to that, he served on the staffs of State Senator Michael Gianaris and Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner.

USAID has been in the news more lately than at any point since its founding during the John F. Kennedy administration. What exactly does the government agency do? How does it fit with all U.S. foreign aid? Could its work be done more efficiently elsewhere? This week, Grant Reeher talks with Catherine Herrold, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, and an expert on USAID.

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Julian Zelizer, a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and the author of the new book, "In Defense of Partisanship."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Governor Kathy Hochul has given her State of the State address and presented her budget for the year. Back with me today on the program to provide reactions to that and also offer a preview of the legislative session are New York State Senator Rachel May and Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. Senator May represents the state's 48th Senate District and leader Barclay represents the 120 Assembly District. Leader Barclay and Senator May welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you both.

Rachel May: Thank you.

Will Barclay: Thanks for having me on.

GR: Well, thank you, thank you both for making the time. Senator May, I'll start with you. A very basic question, and if you could be brief, I'd appreciate it. But what do you think are the most significant new initiatives that the governor has set forward here in the State of the State and also the budget?

RM: So, I'm pleased that she's leaning into issues about both affordability and child poverty. Obviously, here and in central New York and Syracuse in particular, child poverty is a major issue. So the fact that she wants to expand the child tax credit to continue putting some specific money into Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo for fighting child poverty, universal school lunches, all of those are really important measures, I think, to help lift our kids out of poverty and make life more affordable for parents raising children. Her child care initiatives, I think, are great, but I haven't really seen the money being put behind it. So I feel like that's one where we need to fight for more investment to realize some of those child care savings that she's promising. But I would say on those fronts, it's a pretty exciting budget or at least a budget plan. I would say for agriculture she's done some really good things with dairy farm sustainability, with investing in farm worker housing, a number of the agricultural products that we produce here locally, like maple syrup, she's leaning into as well. So I feel like those are good things. On housing we need to do, I think more than she's proposing, but at least she's proposing some things that I've been calling for, like a revolving fund for housing construction. So, you know, on balance, I think it's a pretty good budget for some of the really key critical issues that we need to be pushing for.

GR: And Leader Barclay, as you took all this in, what was front of mind for you in both what you've set forward in State of the State and the budget?

Will Barclay: Well, in the State of the State, I was, after the State of the State I was pretty complimentary, oddly enough, with the governor because she did what Senator May said. She talked about the issues that seem to be important to New Yorkers and certainly were key issues in this past election. That's affordability and crime. So I was pleased, you know, she talked about it, she talked about a middle class tax cut, which we certainly would support. She talked about the child tax credit, which is a bill that we've had in the assembly that interestingly has been blocked by the assembly majority over the last few years, but hopefully now that the governor's proposed it, maybe they'll look at it in a different view, a different light. So I was happy with that. However, and she also talked about the rebate program, which is a little inefficient, about taking our money and giving it back to taxpayers. But in my mind, any time we're giving money back to the taxpayers, I think it's probably a positive thing that I could support. But then we got to her budget address and it was curious because I was very quiet about how much she was going to talk about spending and she blew the doors out. The budget proposal that she has, which is usually the lowest starting point in this whole budget process, is $252 billion. It's an 8% increase on state funds, I think seven point on all funds percent. And, you know, that's simply the trajectory that I've talked about on this show, I talk about anywhere I go that New York cannot afford to continue on. And I know revenue has been coming in pretty well in this state, but it doesn't seem like there's a political will, either governor or the two majorities to cut taxes. And ultimately, the problem is we're losing people in New York State because it's too expensive to live here. And I didn't see much in this budget other than those few things I mentioned that's going to change that trajectory. So I was sort of disappointed in her budget address. The $252 billion, we're going to be, you know, we spend the most and tax most of any citizens in the United States. And it simply it's just not a system that we can continue on with.

GR: Well, you've anticipated the question I always ask at this time of the year of the two of you or others. And Senator May, I'll kind of just channel what Leader Barclay just said and say, I did want to get your reaction to sort of the big picture of the budget, you know, putting it in context because when you think about specific programs like the ones that you mentioned, you know, it is compelling. I mean, you know, there are good things that you want to do with those things. But, you know, it is this, if my understanding is, it's another record high budget and New York is always on the top or near the top of the list of tax burden relative to other states. The last time I checked, we are still projected to have outmigration from the state that, you know, may cost us another congressional seat the next time we do a census. So, I mean, Senator May, how should New Yorkers be viewing the state's spending and the future trajectory of the state spending from kind of this bigger picture? I don't know if there's a crisp question there, but you have the specific programs that are compelling, but when you look at the whole thing, it does seem like there's a problem.

RM: Well, I will say we are actually being very fiscally responsible, not like increasing deficits or that kind of thing. We have a lot more money to handle some of the real problems in the state because we increased, we made modest increases on the super wealthy a few years ago, everybody predicted that they would all move out of the state when we did that. But in fact, we have more millionaires and billionaires in the state now than we had before, and they are way wealthier than they were before. So that's one of the reasons why the state is bringing in more funds. And honestly, the Republicans in the Senate complain about this every year and then they say, and why don't we have more money for this, this, this, this and this? So it's like, everybody wants more money. We are facing a situation where the Trump administration is probably going to take away a lot of funds that we have depended on, like for Medicaid. And so we have to be making investments now that we can make so that we can put ourselves in a position to weather the storm that is coming, because we can certainly expect to be in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. I do think some of the investments are really good ones. The $200 million for upstate, we were asking for more than that, but I'm glad she put that in there for upstate. I think, you know, really thinking about ways to beef up our infrastructure, get us in position to weather both the climate storms that are approaching and the political storms that are approaching. I think this is a smart way to spend the money.

GR: I want to come back to the Medicaid issue, you brought up something that that I did want to pursue, but Leader Barclay, I’ll come back to you. The senator mentioned the extra tax on millionaires and my understanding is that this calls for the earlier, I guess, renewal of that tax before it was set to expire. Is that, what is your view on that? I mean, would it be possible would it be smart to double down on that effort and to and to really try to get more money out of the very, very wealthiest in New York State? Because, particularly downstate, the senator is right, we've got a lot of those people. New York City has a high concentration of them relative to other parts of the country. So is that one way to go?

WB: Well, first of all, I've never seen a tax that's been instituted in New York State that doesn't continue on. So, which, the Senator is talking about is altering the millionaire's tax so it's put on when we had a fiscal crisis. And oh, we’ll just put it on a few years, but lo and behold, we're not a fiscal crisis now, apparently. But guess what? We're going to take the sunset off and extend that tax going forward. Now, the Senator points out that there's, you know, millionaires and billionaires in the state and they may have increased, but everything's increased. And New York State is growing those millionaires and billionaires at a lower rate than any other state in the country. So, you know, they may not be leaving, but they are leaving New York State. And to further things, the more dependent you get on these wealthy people to cover your revenue requirements in the state, you know, you can just lose a couple of them and that becomes a huge hole in your budget that, in fact, that happened in New York City just a few years ago when, you know, there were something like 29 billionaires were responsible for something like 35%, 40% of New York City's budget. A couple of them left and they had some real deficits on it. So again, it's just not a sustainable system going forward, we have to look at ways. For instance, the governor says on the rebate program, sales tax, we, because inflation, the state's got a windfall from sales tax, which is great. But why don't we look at reducing sales tax? There is a so-called regressive tax that I would think some of the Democrats would want to look at to maybe ease the burden on that. But no, we don't want to do that, we'll just take your money and hand it back, and not back to everybody, just a few, you know, some of the people we, you know, we want to try to be helpful to. So to me, again, it's just more tax and spend more tax and spend in New York. And we're going to just end up with the same results that we've been seeing with people flocking out of our state, unfortunately.

RM: We actually have the lowest middle class tax rates in 70 years and we have been cutting those. And one of the reasons is because we've been able to, you know, have the super wealthy pay a little bit more of their fair share. We have a situation in America where the richest few have gotten infinitely richer. Our state budget is about one Jeff Bezos this year and about 1.6 of a Elon Musk. And we we're seeing people get extremely wealthy and we're seeing ordinary people just falling behind and falling behind. And so we're trying to make the investments in reversing that trend here in New York State. And so far, it's, you know, this budget, I think, shows that that's working to some extent.

WB: One thing I'd ask is, are people leaving New York State because their taxes aren't high enough? Are they leaving New York State because, you know, the cost to live here? They're leaving New York because there is an affordable crisis. They're going to states with lower tax burdens. I mean, it just is evident, it's happening. So we're just going to continue on that same path that we've been on? It doesn't, you know, the facts are the facts.

RM: Most of the evidence is people are leaving because housing is too expensive and we don't have enough of it. And so the more we have more and more housing, the better. But, you know, we've got all these difficulties with local governments refusing to permit more housing, with, you know, zoning codes that are so restrictive that we, it's really hard to build more housing. And so that revolving fund money, the whole point of that is to make it more affordable for developers to build more housing so that they can get the housing that we need.

WB: I think we ought to look at the costs of why housing is so expensive in New York. Developers don't want to take the risk because it's incredibly hard to build a new house in New York. Even upstate is really, really expensive because we put all these requirements on these developers to do it. You know, it's just getting worse instead of better. We now want, you know, heat pumps in every house. Looks like it's going to be $26,000 more money if you require that. So it's just one thing after another in New York State that makes no one want to take the risk of developing housing. That's one of the reasons we have high housing costs.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with New York State Senator Rachel May and New York State Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. And we've been having a very spirited discussion about the upcoming legislative session and the larger picture of spending and the size of government in New York State. Senator May, before the break, you wanted to get in (what) leader Barclay had been focusing on, the number of regulations and new requirements that the state puts on housing as a major contributor to its increase in costs, because developers don't want to take that risk unless they know they're going to get a certain kind of return and just making it more expensive itself to build the houses. That makes sense to me, just thinking of some of my own personal experiences, but you had a response that you wanted to make to that.

RM: Yeah, well, I agree about the regulation, and that's why I have carried several bills that are designed to reduce the kinds of regulations that make it really expensive to build housing. We have one, and the governor picked it up in her budget, it's about the environmental review process for multifamily housing, which is, you know, there are really good reasons to not want to be damaging wetlands or having toxins in the soils or something where you're building housing and I definitely think we need to keep that kind of environmental review. But the review process has been so onerous and has opened projects to lawsuits to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to build multi-family housing in infill areas, places where there's already public transportation, for example, or walkable communities that the lawsuits that they get hit with are so frequent. And they delay the projects so much that a lot of times they just don't get built and the developers end up building sprawl development way out in a cornfield somewhere, which is not good for the environment either. So we are trying to streamline that and the governor agrees that we should do that. I had a bill last year that got put in the budget that was about new configurations of multifamily housing that make it easier to build more affordable housing and more pleasant kinds of housing for families. So we're working on some of those regulations. I think something like the heat pumps, if we can electrify the buildings, in the long run they will be much cheaper to operate and safer. We won't have all of the dangers of gas in the houses. So you know, sometimes things are more expensive, but in general, I think we are working on the regulations to make it affordable to build more housing.

GR: Okay, I want to get into two big issues with the time we have left. Leader Barclay, I'll ask you my Medicaid question. When I've looked at the New York Medicaid program, it really is mind boggling because of the per capita expense of this program that we have in this state. And it's double or more than double that of California, which just blew my mind when I first realized that. So it's obviously a huge part of the budget. And my impression, though, is that neither party is really serious about doing any serious thinking about how you would go about trimming that back. You hear about waste, fraud and abuse, but at some point some hard decisions are going to get made. And I just, you know, every year when this budget comes out, I see the Medicaid part. Does your party have any plan for doing something about that?

WB: Well, one, I would totally agree with you, Grant. The idea that trying to find a solution to the Medicaid growth is very difficult because it's going to take those hard decisions to make. And unfortunately, you know, we've made some decisions over the last decade or so. Where, just increased the idea, let’s just increase Medicaid programs as much as we could in New York because we would get the federal reimbursement for that, with no guarantee that that was always going to be the case. And maybe in the future, the Medicaid federal portion is going to go down, what are we going to do with that? We have, you know, really high levels of income to still, you know, still qualify for Medicaid in New York. There's been a huge increase over the last, since, I guess, you know, maybe the last six or seven years. And then, you know, every health care organization is dependent on those Medicaid dollars. So somewhere along the line we’ve got to look at it. And it's not incentivizing the right efficiencies in the system because there is ultimately going to be winners and losers in that. And when there's winners and losers, those (unintelligible) get very, very difficult. But, you know, that's what we need leadership from the governor. She probably needs to spend some political capital, and is probably going to go against some of her constituencies that don't want to see that. But, you know, if she could do that, I would be with her. If that meant the overall lowering the tax and spend budget she has.

GR: So, Senator, May, it's tough to talk about this without really getting into the policy weeds and I'll try to summarize what I'm about to say as quickly as I can. But you mentioned something that really caught my attention, which was a concern that you have that under Trump, the federal portion of Medicaid is going to go down and that's going to hurt New York State and it will hurt a lot of other, “blue” states. Prior to Obamacare, this is what I understand, prior to Obamacare, the reimbursement to the states varied from 50% to 75% depending on the states. New York was in the 50% category, so it's a 50/50 split. But then the extra part of Medicaid to bring all the states up, and New York was already pretty high, that part the federal government has paid all or most of that additional expense. I think I've got that about right. So I'm very curious, though, what are you worried about that the Trump administration's going to go after here in this Medicaid formula?

RM: Well, reproductive health first and foremost, but also just in general, they are trying to figure out how to cut federal support for the poor, for people they don't like, whether it's immigrants or LGBTQ folks. So they are strategically trying to figure out how to attack the groups that they have gained so much political capital by demonizing. And we are worried about that. I was at an event yesterday, the Bipartisan Pro-Choice Caucus in the legislature, which isn't actually bipartisan, had a series of presentations from experts about the kinds of ways that both executive orders and taking advantage of right wing judges who are making really extreme decisions in different ways that the administration can really interrupt our ability to offer the kinds of reproductive health care that our population expects.

GR: So and then Leader Barclay, I'll bring you in on something related to this. But, so the way I understand what you're saying then is, the strategy is going to be going after covering certain kinds of things that are related to these other groups or, in that way, then putting federal restrictions on if you're getting Medicaid dollars, you can't spend them on X, Y, and Z and it comes back to that. And so that's going to be the mechanism then, rather than just, we're going to go from 50%, I thought maybe you were saying there's going to be an effort to say we're going to change your formula from 50% to 40% or 30%.

RM: Well, we don’t know. How can we possibly know? Their stock in trade is throwing curve balls and making it impossible to plan ahead. So my expectation is that that kind of change can't happen as fast as some of the other changes that they're making. But, you know, it wouldn't be this year's budget, but next year's budget that it would affect. But we'll see.

GR: Okay, interesting. I'd be stunned to see if you could get the change in the formula writ large across the board, through the Senate. But I understand what you're talking about in terms of targeting, you know, certain kinds of procedures that then are to the benefit of certain people. But Leader Barclay, I want to bring you in on this. More generally, what the senator is talking about relates to this more general point, more generally after Trump was elected in November, there was a conversation in a lot of states, mostly among Democrats, about whether the states are going to form a resistance, you know, what's going to be done in in light of this, and even some competition you know, who's going to be the leader of it? Is it going to be Gavin Newsom in California is going to be Kathy Hochul in New York? What's your sense of where the mindset is now? Is this is New York going to be sort of a fortress of resistance? And if that's the case, if that's what you're getting from the governor or other leaders, is there a danger there of kind of putting yourself in such stark opposition to the presidency?

WB: No doubt. You know, I was pleased right after the election that it seemed the governor softened, maybe her former viewpoints on the president, but now she seems to be ramping that back up. You know, I always think it's best to try to work with somebody before you start attacking them. We just got through an election where the president won, you know, not only the electoral vote, but won the popular vote. So clearly, there is a move in this country that people want change. They want change from the last four years of the Biden administration. It seems to me the president ran on a bunch of these things and he's acting on those things currently. So, New York could, I guess, try to put up some, I don't know what specifically you would do, but some try to Trump-proof New York. But I think you do that your own political peril. And I'm not sure New Yorkers are so in agreement for trying to Trump-proof New York.

GR: Well, Senator May we've got about a minute and a half left. I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that, I mean because it sounds like you see yourself as part of this resistance. Can you talk a little bit about kind of the strategy and how it might end up benefiting the state rather than hurting the state?

RM: Yeah, well, let me start by saying we had this interview two years ago together, and Leader Barclay said that Trump was a thing of the past, that we didn't have to think about him anymore, that he was so damaged by the by the January 6th insurrection that we were going to move on from him and I feel like we are in this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ kind of rabbit hole situation where responsible Republicans are refusing to hold him accountable in any possible way. He wasn't held accountable for that, he hasn't been held accountable for appointing really dangerous people to his cabinet. It looks like the Senate is going to cave on those appointees. And so we are…

WB: How about the people, Senator, how about the people that voted for Trump?

RM: Sorry?

WB: How about the majority of Americans who voted for Trump? He won the popular vote.

RM: He didn’t get a majority, he got a plurality.

WB: Plurality. He won more votes than Kamala Harris.

RM: Right. And so many people were saying…

WB: Because they’re dumb? They don’t know what they’re talking about?

RM: …really going to do what he says he’s going to do, we’re just going to vote for him because he’s…

WB: We’re dumb. We’re dumb, we don’t know what he’s going to do, but we just want change?

RM: No, but like, he kept saying he was going to bring down grocery prices and then almost the instant he was elected, he said, well, honestly, I can't really do that. So he was presenting a set of policies that he couldn't actually carry out.

GR: I hate to I hate to do this, but we…

WB: Unlike Kamala Harris, who was, she was being truthful and honest about everything she ran on and people are just, they just got caught up in the whole thing and they didn't know what they were doing, so they voted for Trump because he was, fooled everybody. Is that, was that the sort of idea?

GR: Well, I am sure the two of you, at this point I am sure the two of you are not going to find common ground on this president.

WB: No.

GR: But I do appreciate both of you making the time, we'll have to leave it there. Obviously, the next year is going to bring up a lot of strong political feelings and views and we saw those here today. That was New York State Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay and New York State Senator Rachel May. I want to thank both of you for taking time and I want to wish you both good luck with this session. It sounds like one way or another it's going to be interesting. So thanks to both of you.

WB: Thanks for having me on.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

One of the most competitive, watched and costly congressional elections last November was right here in central New York, in the 22nd Congressional District, where Democrat John Mannion defeated incumbent Rep. Brandon Williams. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Rep. Mannion about his transition from state Senator to member of Congress, his early impressions of the House, and the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term.

Program Transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Last November, right here in Syracuse in one of the most closely watched congressional races in the entire country. New York's 22nd district, Democratic state Senator John Mannion defeated first-term incumbent Republican Brandon Williams. My guest today is that newly minted Congressman John Mannion. The 22nd district contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland, and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica, and Auburn. Congressman Mannion, welcome back to the program and congratulations.

John Mannion: Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be on Grant.

GR: We really appreciate you making the time. I know you're really busy getting up to speed here, so let me just ask you a first basic question. How is the transition going?

JM: I'm enjoying it. You know, it's really been a great experience. Obviously there's a lot to do. I was a state senator and we had to shut down an Albany office and a Syracuse office. And then we are kicking into gear hiring staff. Many of my, staff at the state Senate are with me. Some new folks and certainly some people who have experience here in DC. So I think the the biggest things in the first, from Election Day to now would be a hiring staff, getting the offices up and running. And I will say that, you know, everybody that comes on board has to get an official, email address before they can start communicating with constituents. That seems like a small thing, but it doesn't happen on day one. Doesn't happen the day they sign the papers. So while we're getting our office, going here in Syracuse, which it is, and our website is up. So I encourage everybody who has a constituent case or concern or whatever it might be, to please contact us. And then we will have a Utica office as well, which is a part of this process where we have a goal date of March 31st at the latest. But as far as the team goes, we've got a robust DC team. We have a robust, Syracuse team. And we do have, people hired who are dedicated to the Utica office once it's up and running and they're already working with us.

GR: Well, it sounds like you're getting a fast start. So I know that, at the beginning, and prior to to taking the oath of office, new members of Congress attend a couple different orientation sessions. And I was curious to ask you a question about that, because as a state senator, you already know quite a bit about the legislative process. So I was curious to know what was the most surprising new things you learned when you had this orientation at the federal level?

JM: First of all, I want to say that they were fantastic. The first thing that happened, we were ten days in DC. Then about a week or two later, we were three days at Harvard. And then after session started, we were in Williamsburg, Virginia. Not everybody participated in everyone. I did and found it incredibly helpful. And yes, some of, we know that, knowledge or words or vocabulary power and there's a lot of things that translate from the state legislature to here, but some don't. And one thing that I've found is that while I'll give you an interesting number and then I'll tell you something about the job, if you had to guess. Grant, I hate to turn a question on you in the history, in the history of the House of Representatives, how many people have served in that capacity? And I won't make you answer if you don't want to, but it's a it's 11,000, 11,000.

GR: Okay. Okay. Yeah.

JM: The 11,000 really is an honor and a privilege. Now..

GR: That's a small number. I mean, when you think about it, I think I would have I think I probably would have aired on a higher number I think.

JM: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I would have too. The reason I share that information is because it it took me back a step to think. I'm one of only 11,000 people that have ever run, taken the oath and voted on legislation here. Of those 11,000, how many have been women or are currently women?

GR: I'm going to say, boy, 200.

JM: 250.

GR: I'm not bad.

JM: Yeah. But again, it's a it is a reminder. You know, I look at the, freshman class right now, 17 women in that class, and you go, this is 10% of about 8%, maybe of the women who have ever served. So one one thing about the process that I learned is, committee work is different here. Changes in legislation happened in the midst of the committee. And honestly, in Albany, it felt like those changes in legislation happened more in the conference, meaning the Democratic conference, the party in the majority. So, again, I have not been in the throes of committee work other than just being established on committees. And, some really preliminary, preliminary stuff, but amendments to legislation as it moves and the process, the reconciliation process that we're all going to see coming up here and trying to make sure that we have our spending, our budget in place is also different from the state legislature. And in an ideal world, they both would be very bipartisan on the scale of bipartisanship, we'll see what this Congress brings. But there certainly is opportunity for the minority party to get amendments in. I don't think they'll get in as frequently as the majority party members amendments do. But they will they do happen and they will.

GR: Well, that's good, that's good. That's good to hear. I was also curious to know if you've had any particular, sort of chill down the spine or, you know, civic, civic moments that you started any sort of particular times where it just other than that, other than that number that took you by surprise? Sure.

JM: You know, listen, I, I'm, I'm a Democrat. I've been a Democrat all my life and I've, certainly, you know, Hakeem Jeffries came to the district. I've met other, leaders in the party, President Biden, President Clinton. But I day one down here, we got to meet, or, you know, we were more sort of either was the freshman class or it was just the Democratic freshman class. And then the next day we had a caucus meeting. And in that caucus meeting, you walk into basically what's a briefing from Catherine Clark and Pete Aguilar and Hakeem Jeffries, and you walk through that door and they just keep coming out of the door getting a coffee, which is, you know, Nancy Pelosi comes in and then AOC comes in and, and a lot of people that I had spoken with on the phone, but that was a moment where I'm like, I am in this room right now. I'm in this room right now. And, that was impressive. Also, when we were certifying the Electoral College vote, you know, I was shaking hands with people. And the guy I spoke with was Jon Ossoff, and I didn't recognize them. Probably because I wasn't expecting it. And, he said, I'm John. I said, I'm John. I said, where are you from? He said, Georgia. And I went, oh, yeah, you're that John, I got you. Yes.

GR: So it sort of sounds like a little bit of the experience of you're a, you're a rookie and you're, you're, you're in the majors. And then the coach says, you're going to bat after Jeter.

JM: Yeah. It is, it is a little bit like that. Yes. Yeah. The gravity, the gravity of it is real. And, you can appreciate it here. And of course the, the beauty of it, the majesty of it, the, decorum. So far, it's been it's been really, amazing to be a part of.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion, who has just begun representing New York's 22nd district. So, just tell us a little bit about your committee assignments, how they are going to be able to fit with your desire to work on behalf of the district?

JM: Well, people know my background, and I would not have this job if it was not for, really a passion for public education and it being the great equalizer and all that it does. So I was hopeful that I would get on Education and Workforce, and I did. And, you know, this is a committee that does much more than just education. There certainly is a lot of funding that comes out of it. Title One funding, that is to help some of our, neediest communities and education and, you know, our, our disabilities funding, but also there's workplace protections in there. There's a lot based on, health insurance coverage provided by employers and then apprenticeship programs. So I wasn't just a teacher while I was teaching, I was also a union president. And then I was chair of the disabilities committee in the New York State Senate. The only one. And this is the space where I can really make some positive impact, in, in all those areas. And that's where my knowledge base is coming from. And, you know, when the President was in the campaign and he was talking about dismantling the Department of Education, I disagree respectfully, particularly because of some of the things that I cited around individualized education and funding for students with special needs. So, that's one committee. And then the other one was a little, I had a feeling that was going to happen. This one was a little bit of a wild card. But I was. But I served in the state Senate, and that was to be on the Agriculture Committee and in central New York, you know, we know we've got a very robust agricultural economy and history. I, we have a farm bill that we have to get over the line, and there will be opportunities to me, for me to fight for things that are good for central New York farmers and those that are in that space. And, you know, I again, you asked what surprised me, we know what we're known for here in central New York. There's a lot of things, but but, you know, front of mind is usually dairy or apples. And when I found out apples were a specialty crop, it got my New Yorker up. Let me tell you, I was like, this is a specialty crop, but as you can imagine, those crops that, we don't call specialty crops corn, wheat, soy. We do a lot of that in that space, too. But I'm looking forward to serving on that committee. And I've got a great relationship with local farmers, visited farms, and, and I, I tried to do my best to be their voice in Albany. I'm going to do the same here in DC.

GR: That sounds like a good combination. You know, you mentioned, bipartisanship before, when we were talking earlier and I was wondering, have you on that point or other points, have you, have you spoken to, your, the predecessor to your predecessor, John Katko? So to get any tips about that because he, he made that a priority for his service.

JM: I have. And of course, John and I have a good relationship. If you look back through the annals, you know, I certainly supported Democratic candidates that ran against him, and he supported Republican candidates that ran against me. But we didn't we didn't take shots at each other. We touted the positive things about, the people we were supporting. So he has been helpful and, we, have a lot of common connections being sort of West Side folks here. We actually attended the same schools. I bring that up because he's a little bit older than me, so we weren't in the same grade. But, he has been helpful, and, you know, there's room for bipartisanship. He was a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus. And that caucus that is bipartisan is currently filled. And I've spoken with the leaders of that caucus and expressed interest in it. Hopefully, you know, I'll find, I'll find a spot there eventually. But right now they have their numbers. And as you probably have witnessed, it is a it is a unique, it’s going to be a unique Congress. So, you know, and I and I've already had, very good conversations, certainly with my freshman colleagues and members of the New York delegation that are Republican, because we've got a lot of shared interests, with our with a number of things, you know, the tech hub, the drone hub, salt taxation. So where we, we, we have absolutely going to find common ground.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Congressman John Mannion. The Democrat defeated incumbent Republican Brandon Williams in New York's 22nd congressional district in last November's general election. On that point that I just mentioned there in the in the re-intro, your seat was considered one of the top Democratic targets for, for 2024, really got identified. And, I imagine, in the next two years, your party is going to be very keen to defend it. It's going to keep it in its sights. And I was wondering if you think that fact might help you to be able to leverage some additional funding or projects for the district, you know, through that, through the Democratic leadership?

JM: Well, number one, I hope so. And number two, if uh, I certainly will do my best to remind them of that. You know, in the state legislature, you want to do the right thing and you want to make sure you get your fair share. And I know that I did a good job of that and was a good voice of central New York, now representing central New York in the Mohawk Valley. The process is different. I am a freshman, but like I referenced in the previous, section, there's spaces like in the farm bill where we can get things done for the district and, you know, there's some hangover also that we have to keep our eye on. And that would be, funding that has been appropriated in the past that could be cut if we're not careful about it. And I do, you know, some of that comes from, legislation that might be 1 or 2 Congresses back. And, you know, there's talk about the I-81 funding. There's concern. This has been in the media. We have checked into that immediately and been assured that, we should not be concerned, you know, when the governor or excuse me, when the President signs an executive order that says we're going to pause these funding appropriations. We're in the midst of a project here. We have a contract. That contract is between the USDOT and the New York State DOT. And this is the largest infrastructure project in the history of upstate New York. We want to make sure that's going we can't go back. We've all driven those roads. A lot of us have anyway. And there's no turning back. We've got to complete this project and I'm confident that's going to happen. But there's going to be opportunities there. And, again, we, you know, this is this is governmental, but there's politics with everything in this world. And, I'm going to try to advocate for central New York, regardless of whether, you know, people are looking out for me or not.

GR: Same issue with Micron, too. And I've read about Senator Schumer doing the same thing that you're doing, with, the I-81, making sure that that, that that will, will happen. I wanted to ask you this question that goes back to, the last time that you and I spoke when you were a candidate for Congress, and I asked you, among other things, if Donald Trump should win, the outcome wasn't known back then, would you be likely to join a potential wholesale resistance effort in Congress, you know, to, to try to take him on? And you emphatically said, yes, I will. What? How does that how does that look now? Are we you or what you hearing is trying to figure out more ways to find common ground, or is there, are the are the lines of resistance already forming where where is your caucus and where are you on that?

JM: Exactly. Well, listen, we've got to find we have to work together, and we still have to call out the President. These executive orders, I, I have, you know, I'm participating in this show today. I've already been on other shows. We have a social media presence, some of those executive orders, and I'll start with the commuting or clemency for the January 6th rioters. That is, not the will of the people. It's certainly not the will of the justice system. And what many of the people on the other side of the aisle have said is, look at what Biden did. But I call that out. And I say, I understand that some of that was preemptive because of what the current president was saying about what he was going to do. He was very clear about retaliation and retribution. So, but we're talking about not just people who broke the law. They broke the law trying to interrupt the pillars of our democracy, which is the certification of a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And that and I that was driven by the current president, and media and social media outlets that perpetuated this lie. And it's very dangerous. Dangerous for me, for my kids. It's dangerous for you. It's dangerous for Republicans and independents, and we can't have that, you know. So these were violent acts made against law enforcement to interrupt our democracy. So I disagree. And I'm going to continue to and in every setting that I can, I'm going to remind people of that. I do, you know, this is one thing about politics, Grant, that I really don't like. You know, somebody will tweet at me from the other side and say, like, I demand that you call out, you know, the governor or you call for this person's resignation. I don't like that, but I am pleading with more Republicans to denounce this executive order, and it's very scary. Some of these are leaders of white supremacist paramilitary organizations are I'm fearful that we're not going to be left in a better place as a result of their release. So we stand up. I stand up with my conference, shoulder to shoulder. They call things out, and I'll use access to the media to do it as well and remind people of what happened on that day and before that day and after that day. People went to federal prison outside of the January 6th rioters because of, trying to overturn an election and, very dangerous. We can't have that. And we need we need everybody to call it out.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Congressman John Mannion from New York's 22nd district. Well, you've kind of given an early, I think grade on the next question, I was going to ask you, but what are your early impressions? I mean, we're in, you know, you and I are talking on Thursday. So what we all, you know, all of 72 hours into this thing. But what are your early impressions of the Trump presidency?

JM: Well, first of all, the people he has around him and himself have had four years to plan. Right? So when we flipped the switch on Inauguration Day, we saw what happened. And like, with his, nominees, he is flooding the zone. He's flooding the zone with executive orders, and presidents have dozens, if not, you know, over 100 executive orders. But some of these are really negatively impactful. And they'll be litigated out in the courts. We've already talked about, you know, the excusing of the January 6th sentences. But also, Biden had an executive order capping the cost of insulin, that's blown up, that's going to negatively impact people's lives. You know, for sure. Certainly, some of the things that are directed at our history and, to try to make sure that everybody has an opportunity moving forward, whether it's, you know, competing for a job or a, spot, you know, program or university, you know, some of those things honestly, are just, mean anti-American and appealing to his base. I don't think it appeals to the broad, you know, American public. And we we heard a lot of in the campaign about saving people money, about costs, about reducing inflation. I don't see that here. I don't see it. And, you know, again, I think he's preying on people's fears, using immigration, an us versus them mentality and demonizing. And it's so robust in what has happened with those executive orders that the Democratic Conference and my team are continuing to weed through it and push back where we can and find allies on the Republican side to push back and advance legislation, or court cases to get this right.

GR: Two, two of them, two of the things that struck me and I and I don't think probably the one I'm going to ask you about is, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I don't think it's likely to probably survive a court challenge, but one about ending birthright citizenship. And the other one that was in the inaugural address about, taking back the Panama Canal. You know, those are things that get talked about, but I guess I had thought maybe that would be things that would be soft-pedaled once he was in office. But what are your thoughts about this, this notion of rethinking birthright citizenship?

JM: I think it's unconstitutional. You know that my one-word answer is unconstitutional. As somebody whose grandparents, you know, came to this country, right? And, my father was born here. He was a United States citizen. I talked to so many people who have this situation. And if we're going to end that, we're going to be talking about separating families and it's just unconstitutional. I mean, I should stop right there. You know, the president does not have the authority to change the Constitution with a pen stroke. And, that is something that's really, you know, unbelievable to me. And I got so fired up about it Grant, I forgot your second one.

GR: No. That's okay. I just wanted to ask you about that one. I was just mentioning a couple of that that surprised me. The Panama Canal.

JM: Oh, the Panama Canal again, we have relationships around the world, our allies. We are here in 2025. NATO has been in existence 80 years or so, in between 75 and 80. And, the peace by and large, that we've experienced over those 78 or whatever my number of years are here. Has been largely because of our strength and our alliances. And, you know, one of those sessions that we talked about, we went through national security and new member training, and we've gone 78 years without a nuclear bomb detonation, in wartime, not testing. And we've gone 78 years without a world war. And that is possibly the longest period of time going back millennia, that we have not seen such a large-scale war. So the Panama Canal agreement again, let's work through that. But I was hoping hopeful that like tariffs on Mexico and Canada are going to increase costs for Americans and, and ruin some of the projects that we absolutely need related to our infrastructure and, and projects like Micron.

GR: Okay. We got about a couple minutes left. I want to squeeze two questions in if I can. One of the things that's gotten a lot of attention, obviously you alluded to it earlier is the cabinet picks that that the president has made. Just really quick here. Of of all the picks, is there, is there one you think is really the best? Well, who's the best person coming at?

JM: You think that's, you know, I will say this, you know, Marco Rubio, I believe depending on the timing of this, he he has been approved, I believe, you know. Yes.

GR: That's right. Yeah. Unanimously.

JM: Exactly. And he is someone who I think, you know, has served this country. He's he has character. I think he's qualified. I think he's experienced and I, you know, yes, he's already an elected official. And Trump likes to be an outsider and he likes to bring in these outside folks. But what we need from individuals, we need them to be qualified. We need them to have character. We need them to be experienced and have the background to do the job. Clearly not, I mean, I would say probably a majority of these candidates don't fall into that category. I think that he does. And that's that's the kind of, people we need representing our country.

GR: Well, let me let me ask you, you got to be really quick here. Maybe just give me a name. But who is there one of the picks that stands out as the worst?

JM: You know. The health policies that Robert Kennedy Jr is carrying out there to be in charge of basically the largest health care, you know, system in, and when it comes to research that this country does, when it comes to partnerships, you know, and, some of his positions on things, you know, we've, we've I was a biology teacher and we eradicated so many diseases that were so negatively impactful on families, the loss of life, childhood mortality as it relates to, the vaccinations and other treatments for kids. So, you know, I certainly question that one.

GR: I could see people can't see this, but I could watch you. You were having trouble picking one, I think. But you pick that one. We'll have to leave it there. That was Congressman John Mannion. Congressman Mannion, again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. And I do hope that we can speak again as the session unfolds. I'd like to check in with you from time to time, so.

JM: I'm looking forward to it Grant, thank you for having me on today.

GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media Conversations and the Public Interest.

Much has been made in recent years about both misinformation and disinformation among American citizens. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Emily Thorson, a political science professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, and the author of "The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions and the American Public."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Brian Taylor. He's a political science professor and director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. And he's an expert on Russia, particularly its leadership and its military. He's been on the program several times in the past to discuss the war in Ukraine. We brought him back to update us on that and also because he has a new book out. It's titled, “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.” It's part of a great series from Oxford University Press that I have frequently made use of myself. Brian, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you again and congratulations on the book.

Brian Taylor: Thank you. Grant, Happy New Year.

GR: Yeah, Happy New Year. So, we'll say that to each other before we get into some pretty depressing topics (laughter) looking at the war in Ukraine. But before I ask you some questions about what the situation is in Ukraine, let me start with something else. It's just an impression of mine, and I wanted to know whether I was right or not. It's my impression that the war, it's not getting the same level of press attention that it once was. It's beginning, in the United States anyway in terms of its attention, to fade a little bit. Am I correct about that? Or is that just where I'm going for my media?

BT: I think that's probably true. And given the way the media works, I think in some sense it makes sense, right, that this war has been going for close to three years now. Day to day, the front lines don't change very much. So in that sense, for the average person, maybe nothing new is happening. But of course, it is still quite important, has important implications, not only for obviously Ukraine and Russia, but for the rest of the planet. So, it does still, you know, come in the news and that kind of thing. But it has, I think you're right, faded a bit given other topics that sort of jumped to prominence.

GR: And sort of building off of that then, what is the current situation in this war? Is it prolonged stalemate, where are we at right now?

BT: I suppose the answer to that question depends a bit on where you start. And it's probably helpful for, you know, most people just to think about where we were, you know, almost three years ago in February 2022 when Putin launched the invasion, which he didn't call a war, he called it a special military operation and he expected it to be over quite quickly. He thought Russian forces would seize the capital Kyiv, overthrow the Ukrainian government, put in place a pro-Russian government of some kind and establish control over Ukraine that way. Obviously, that didn't happen and the Ukrainians successfully bought back, kept control of the capital, kept control of other major cities, and eventually the war defaulted to a very grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine. And that's where we are today, and that's really where we've been, you know, since the spring of 2022. So if you look at the furthest extent of Russian control, sort of back to March 2022, they controlled roughly 30% of Ukrainian territory. Now they control, Russia controls about 21% of Ukrainian territory. And that really hasn't changed very much, you know, as I said that over the last couple of years. So that's the big picture, but if we look at more recently, say over the last six months, it's clear that Russia is making very slow but somewhat steady progress in this war of attrition because they have more personnel available to certain extent, they have more equipment available and the Ukrainians are feeling very stretched, especially on the personnel side. So I was in Washington recently and I heard someone say that Russia is on a roll. That's not really accurate. Russia is more on a crawl, but they are moving forward. And I guess the final thing I would say in terms of where we are, a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia, everywhere else, are looking to see what's going to happen with the change in American administration. Will U.S. policy change, can Trump follow through on his, you know, claim to want to be able to and to be able to settle the war quite quickly and those sorts of things. So everyone's sort of expecting something to shift in the coming weeks.

GR: Well, let me just ask you that, where you just left it. I mean, what do you think President-elect Trump has promised many times that he's going to end this conflict quickly? How likely is that?

BT: I think it's really not likely at all. And I think even yesterday you saw Trump walk that back a bit. During the campaign he was saying, I'll solve it in 24 hours just with a couple of phone calls. Yesterday, he said six months was his sort of time frame for getting something done. So already he's increased the time window by 180 times.

GR: (laughter)

BT: So, you know, and the reason I'm very skeptical is really because the two sides are still quite far apart. Putin wants to control Ukraine, he wants political control over Ukraine. He's not fighting over this or that village in eastern Ukraine. His ultimate objective is to bring Ukraine under Russian control, either de facto, probably more likely de facto is what he had in mind, and turn it away from Ukraine's desire to, you know, join Europe. That's how the Ukrainians would think of it, right? They were moving to the west. They were hoping to join the EU. They were hoping at some point to join NATO and become one of the stable, you know, economically prosperous democracies of Central Europe. So those are the two objectives. They're completely divergent and sides are willing to discuss maybe, you know, a cease-fire, but talking about a cease-fire without figuring out how you're going to resolve the very big difference and ultimate objectives means there are lots of tricky issues in terms of, you know, who has control, what security guarantees, if any, will Ukraine get? You know, is Russia willing to give up anything? Is Ukraine willing to give up anything? And so far, the answer to those questions is basically no. And maybe it's just negotiating bluster but I think just conceptually where Putin is, is very different from where Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people are.

GR: I should mention for our listeners that were speaking on Wednesday, January 8, you mentioned some things about Donald Trump speaking yesterday. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, and we're discussing the war in Ukraine and also we'll get into some Russian politics here a bit later in the program. So I want to pick up on the thing that you said right before I put that break in there, which is this idea of what a future, “peace” would look like. And I've heard you speak in other venues where you've said something similar to what you just said, that you're really talking about perhaps a long-term cease-fire rather than anything that we would regard as real peace. Could you say a little bit more about that distinction? I mean, is that a way of saying this thing is likely really to never end absent one side completely winning?

BT: Yeah, so, maybe one analogy we could start with is the Korean War, which still technically, formally is not a settlement, right? There was a decision in 1953 to have a cease-fire and both sides stopped actively fighting. But the, you know, line of control is still heavily militarized. And both the South and the North still have the goal of unification in some fashion. But, you know, with a political system like the one that they have, this is what they're expecting. So you can have a cease-fire for a very long time that doesn't lead to a real state of peace. I'm not predicting that's what's going to happen with Russia and Ukraine, but it's easier to imagine a scenario in which both sides agree to temporarily stop fighting than it is to imagine a scenario in which they agree on the political destiny of Ukraine and what its formal legal territory is. So as I mentioned earlier, Russia currently controls roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory. They formally claim in their constitution, that is Russia, that these territories are Russian. The Ukrainians don't agree, and most of the world doesn't agree. They say these territories are Ukrainian. It's hard to imagine Putin or someone from Putin's close circle ever just stepping forward and saying, yeah, we didn't mean that we don't want that territory, you know, it's Ukraine, we recognize its legal territory. Which in fact Russia did recognize multiple times prior to the war, including Putin, but that's not where we are now. On the other side, Ukrainians are not likely to say, okay, you know, you can have this territory, it'll be Russia from now on, who cares what international law says? So that's just one big obstacle to a permanent peace. But then there's also the question of where is Ukraine's future? Is it allowed to choose its own political and military and economic destiny? Can it join the EU? Can it maybe join NATO at some point? If not, who protects Ukraine's security, given that we know that Russia invaded in 2014 when it annexed Crimea and invaded again in 2022 and is still invading? Ukraine is going to want some guarantee that this won't happen again. It's hard to see a guarantee that Ukraine finds meaningful coming out of Vladimir Putin's government. So that's why I think we're very far away from talking about a meaningful peace. And to the extent we have discussions under the new administration about some way to stop the killing, it's going to have to be in terms of a cease-fire. And even then I'm rather quite skeptical. Putin hasn't shown any sign that he wants to slow down. I think he thinks things are going his way, even though they've got lots of problems inside Russia. But for those reasons, you know, I sadly think this is likely to go on for a while.

GR: Well, you used the analogy of Korea. I wanted to throw a different one at you and see what you thought. To me, as you're describing this, I would say it sounds like what has happened is the Russians have created another hotspot in the world similar to the Middle East in a lot of ways, because that line in Korea, you're right. I mean, it's still heavily militarized and there are little tiny skirmishes and things sometimes we hear about and then other ones that, you know, are told to us years later after they've happened on the border. But it's been relatively peaceful. It seems like this is more of a recipe of something in the Middle East where you can almost count on, every so many years, something flaring up.

BT: That's right, I think that's right. I think until there's some settlement that involves an understanding of how Ukraine's security will be guaranteed, either by its own forces or by external actors assisting it, there will always be the concern that a Russian government will try again. That it won't allow Ukraine to be free and independent and make its own choices about its political orientation and those sorts of things. So, yeah, the way people in the post-Soviet space refer to these sorts of situation is frozen conflicts. And there actually have been several there was one between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan actually won a war against Armenia two years ago. Now that in some sense settled that, but not entirely. There's this situation between Russia and Georgia where 20% of Georgian territory is controlled by Russian proxy forces, basically. There's a situation in the East European country of Moldova where part of its territory is also not really under the central government's control. Everyone calls these frozen conflicts, and some of them have gone on for 30 years now. So we could imagine a scenario in which eastern Ukraine in some sense becomes a frozen conflict. But everyone's waiting to see, will Russia, you know, try and do something more at some point in the future, even if they agree to stop fighting temporarily.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Brian Taylor, the Syracuse University professor and director of the Moynihan Global Affairs Institute, has recently published a new book and it's titled, “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.” We've been discussing the war in Ukraine and we'll start discussing his book soon. But Brian, there was one more thing that you wanted to add about the war, and then we'll get into Russia itself. But go ahead, it's actually kind of a good segue way, I think, in talking about Russia. Go ahead and make that point.

BT: Sure. So we've been talking about the war in fairly abstract terms. But I think it's worth reminding everyone just how costly this war has been for both countries. On the Russian side, over 700,000 casualties, by the term casualties, I mean dead and wounded, but probably well over 150,000 dead already. An astonishing figure, really. And they have lost thousands of tanks, armored personnel carriers. They're pulling old equipment from the 50’s and 60’s out of storage and throwing it into the battle. They have to keep increasing the amount of money they're paying people to incentivize them to sign up for a war in which they're quite likely to get wounded and maybe killed, you know, offering people, you know, 10, 15, $20,000 just to sign up, which may not sound like that much to an American, but from someone from a poor rural region in Russia, that's, you know, more than multiple times an annual salary just for the sign-up bonus. So there's a lot of stress on the Russian economy, on parts of Russian society that are providing the soldiers and the military and its equipment. And we see similar problems on the Ukrainian side. We have less clarity on their number of casualties, but clearly well over 100,000 and probably well over 70,000 killed. They're having trouble recruiting people for the war. It's become a real manpower shortage problem on the Ukrainian side. And if the United States stops supplying military assistance, that will be a very heavy burden for Ukraine. Europe is doing a lot but can't replace some of the things the United States can do and, you know, some of the people around President-elect Trump have talked about cutting off aid. It's not clear there's appetite for another aid package. So it's worth just reminding everyone how bloody, how destructive this war has been and is and how much strain it's putting on both sides. And especially, I think on the Ukrainian side where the personnel problem is one they're going to have to try and find a solution for in the coming months.

GR: Now you mentioned 150,000 estimated dead on the Russian side, 70,000 on the Ukrainian side. It's worth remembering that United States lost about 55,000 people in Vietnam. And so that really puts it in perspective. So, well, let's turn to your book and I want to, O have so many questions about this, so I'm going to have to really limit myself. But let me start with kind of an odd question, but it came to me as I was looking through your book. What do you think is the most important aspect or thing about Russian culture that most Americans don't fully grasp, don't fully appreciate?

BT: That's an interesting one.

GR: (laughter)

BT: I guess I would say, and this ties into one of the themes of the book, that sort of, you know, reappears in various chapters is the historical primacy of the state in people's lives. And by the state, I just mean the sort of political, administrative apparatus that governs, you know, a country and its territory. And Russians both expect a sort of powerful state that can make, you know, demands on it and protect them. But they also are highly suspicious of that state and don't really trust it simultaneously. So it's this weird kind of expectation of state primacy while also sort of rebelling against the manifestations of that in their personal lives and not really expecting the state to perform the way they want it to, but still feeling the need to sort of give some authority to it, despite all their complaints about, you know, its inefficiencies and mistakes and that kind of thing. So it's this weird dual attitude about the state that persists across time in some sense and is something Russia will have to continue to wrestle with. And I think, you know, those of us who hope for a more open, you know, pluralistic Russia, at some point they need to recalibrate that balance and have a state that's not only something that rules over the people, but that treats its people not as subjects, but as citizens who deserve respect and deserve some say in what happens in the country.

GR: Yeah, that was one of the things that struck me when I was reading through your book. And the phrase that came to my mind was sort of, cynical dependence or something like that. But the other theme that I picked up was not just the state, but also authoritarianism. That in one way or another, these people have lived under authoritarian regimes pretty much, you know, for as long as they're going to be able to remember historically. Is that something else that's important for people to understand?

BT: That is certainly true. But I'm going to inject a political scientist cautionary note here.

GR: Okay. (laughter)

BT: I think people look at that and say, you know, they've always had authoritarian rulers, you know, Russians expect a czar with a strong hand kind of thing. And certainly historically, yes, that is the pattern. But it's worth noting that most of the planet for most of human history has not lived under democratic constitutional government.

GR: Right.

BT: And lots of places that 50, 70, you know 80 years ago didn't have democratic constitutional government, now have it. And I don't think there's anything about Russians per se that make them incapable of democratic governance any more than, you know, people used to say Germany was incapable of it. Or, you know, Latin America or you know various places around the world that have proven that they can have a functioning democracy. And in some respects, not in all respects, Russia has the kind of society that might succeed at democracy. It's heavily educated, it's relatively well-off, it's fairly urbanized and professionalized. Oftentimes, countries like that are able to establish stable democracy. So although obviously things like democratic, constitutional sort of pluralistic government look very far away from where Russia is now, that doesn't mean it can't happen at some point, just like it's happened in many other places around the world and maybe surprised observers that it happened so quickly and so successfully in these places.

GR: Yeah, it's important to remember that democracy is the exception, not the rule. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Brian Taylor, a professor at Syracuse University. So you're not going to like a lot of these questions because you put that political science caveat in there, but let me try this one. I want to take Lenin out of the picture and what I'm going to ask you. But after Lenin, if you had to pick what you think, who was the best leader of Russia in terms of making that nation better for the people who lived in it, who would it be?

BT: Well, my answer is going to be very different than the answer you might get from an average Russian. But my answer is going to be Mikhail Gorbachev because he took over the Soviet Union when it was one of the two superpowers. It bent under complete domination of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since Lenin, right? Since, you know, shortly after 1917. And he grew up a believer in that system and yet his efforts to make it better led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Communist Party and the transition of all of the countries of the former Soviet Union, all 15, Russia, one of them, to new forms of government. And there's been lots of heartbreak and disappointment and so on in Russia and in other countries, but the Russia we see on the map today, you know, has only half the population of the Soviet Union. The rest of those people are now an independent countries and the amount of territory the Soviet Union lost is bigger than the European Union, right? So this was a world shaking event and ultimately it led to countries like Ukraine and Georgia and Estonia and others to having their independence. And also I think, this is maybe more controversial to some people, but it gave them a chance to develop further. The Soviet socialist economic model had run its course, it clearly was not going to provide a higher standard of living for all of its people going forward. They needed to, you know, change and adopt a capitalist system, hopefully one that has protections in terms of a welfare state and that sort of thing. But ultimately, getting rid of that economic system, I think, in the long run was necessary. And although Gorbachev didn't want or expect any of those things, the fact that he started the transformation and didn't use extreme violence to try and hold everything together, although he did use some violence, but for the most part, he decided the political outcome was one that was the one he could live with, and that was the best for the people of Russia in the Soviet Union. So he's my answer for number one.

GR: Well, you made me feel better because that was my answer in my head too. I find him a fascinating figure for the reasons that that you put out. We've only got about a couple of minutes left, but I want to make sure I can squeeze two questions in here. So, and again, they're going to be equally strange I think, to your political science ears. But let me say the first one is, and you have to do this really quick, and I'm sorry. Imagine that I am a Russian boy who is born into, say, a family in Russia with a median income right now. I'm smart, I do well in school, I have ambitions, I want to grow up to be well off, make something of myself. What do I do if I am that kid? What's my best path in this society? Is it joining the military, what is it?

BT: Interesting question. I mean, a lot is going to depend on where in the country you are because Russia is very unequal, sort of socioeconomically, depending on if you're born into a small village or born into Moscow or Saint Petersburg. But the recipe is not going to be that different than you would hear in almost any other country in the world, which is study hard, go to university, get a good education, you know, choose a career. Russia does have prospects for people growing up, you know, maybe not in the most privileged of circumstances, to do well in college and move on. So that's what I would advise and I would not advise joining the military, the risk to one's life is too high.

GR: Got it. And we've only got a few seconds left, but I want to put you on the spot here. This is a more personal question, if I may. Why did you ever decide to study Russia and make that your life's work? It seems like it's (a) depressing topic to me. I suppose one could say the same thing to me about American politics, but just in a couple of words, why are you so devoted to a Russian guy?

BT: I got into it as a college student, you know, in the 1980s, and I got into it because I was interested in nuclear weapons arms control and disarmament, and I didn't want to die in a nuclear war. And a professor said, well, maybe you should learn Russian if you're interested in nuclear weapons issues. And that started me down this path. So that's how I ended up here.

GR: Well, that sounds like one depressing thing lead to another, but I'll call it a serendipitous story. (laughter) That was Brian Taylor and again, his new book is titled, “Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction.” If you're looking to become an overnight expert on Russia, this book is your best bet, I highly recommend it. Brian thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.

BT: Thank you. Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Last week on the program, during my conversation with Lauren Hall, I mentioned that I'd be speaking this week with a writer that she invoked in making her arguments. That writer is Musa al-Gharbi and his new book is titled, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” Mr. al-Gharbi is a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Communication and Journalism. Professor al-Gharbi, welcome to the program and congratulations on the book. It's making quite a splash.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

GR: I appreciate you making the time, I know you've been really busy with this. So let me just start with a term clarification and we'll go from there. So, “woke” obviously has become a contentious term. How are you using that?

MaG: Yeah. So one way I don't use it in the book is as a pejorative. So I don't use woke as a way of denoting anything bad. In fact, one of the things I do in the book is I usually put the term, I often put the term, “woke” in quotation marks to signal the point that it's a contentious term. I don't define the term in the book. I think that it's kind of an error that people often make, or they think that you need a crisp analytic definition in order to talk about something sensibly. So, for instance, in my interpersonal communication class, a thing that I do often is I'll have my students define apple. I'll say provide for me, please, the necessary and sufficient conditions for apple that include 100% of apples, exclude everything else, and that's not toxicological. So you can't say like, it's the genus x, the species y because that's just saying an apple is an apple. So we'll spend like 20 minutes in class with 30 people because like 30 intelligent people who know English and know what apples are, and we'll spend 20 minutes in class and it turns out it's actually really hard to define apple. Now that doesn't mean they don't know what apples are, that if I go tell them, hey, grab me an apple, they're going to hand me a fish or they're going to give me a chair. And so there's just this error that often happens in the discourse where people want some kind of clean, crisp analytic definition and then they haggle about the analytic definition instead of the actual thing they want to talk about. And if you don't provide an analytic definition, they go, aha, therefore you don't know what you're talking about, you're not referring to anything, it's just a moral panic. And that's a ridiculous way to understand language. That's just not the way language works, in my opinion. So in the book, I don't do that game. What I do instead is I provide a history of the term, “woke” and some of the different ways that people have come to use it, the trajectory of the term over time, and show how you can actually get a lot of insight into what people mean about woke and a lot of the contestation around the term woke by looking at a predecessor term, “political correctness,” which was a term that was previously used to mark out basically the same set of phenomena. And then I provide some examples of views and dispositions and things like this that, when people talk about when people evoke the term woke, whether you're on the left or the right, there are a few things that people across the political and ideological spectrum would agree. Like if you reject this thing, you're certainly not woke and if you embrace this thing, you might be. So, for instance, the idea of trans-inclusive feminism. So if you reject feminism, you're definitely not woke. If you have a conception of feminism that excludes trans people that does not recognize trans women as women, you're not going to be considered either. So J.K. Rowling is an example of someone who self-identifies as a feminist but has a trans-exclusionary understanding of feminism. No one goes, oh, wow, J.K. Rowling is so woke. And so there's a bunch of these kinds of things that I walk through just to provide texture, I don't think they provide a definition. I don't think you need a definition, but just to provide some texture for what people seem to be talking about when they talk about, “wokeness.”

GR: Okay, great. I appreciate the point you're making there, but I did want to ask you a question where you do use the term and it's the title of one of your chapters. You write about great “awokenings” and by the way, I thought that was a great play on words, very clever. But as a way to sort of get at what there is and you mentioned political correctness. What are some of the most important maybe one or two sort of, “awokening” moments that you've discussed?

MaG: Yes. So in a nutshell, a great awokening is a period of rapid change in how a knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice. So looking at a lot of empirical measures, you can see that after 2010 there was this big shift. The kinds of research and reporting we put out changed a lot. It grew more political, more focused on race, gender and sexuality. Entertainment outputs, if you look at the way we answer questions in polls and surveys, if you look at political protest activity or things like this, you can see that something changed after 2010. And I show in the book that in the 20th century, so in the previous century there are three previous periods of awokening. There was one in the 1920s to early 30s, one in the mid 60s through mid 70s, one in the late 80s and early 90s, that was the last time we had the blow-ups around PC culture and so on, and then the one that started after 2010. And I show that by comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get leverage on questions like, well, why did these periods of awokening happen at all, why do they end? Do they change anything, do they influence each other? And so that's the project of chapter two of the book.

GR: And so you write about then and you mentioned this already, but the heart of it is sort of breaking down this symbolic economy and this notion of symbolic capitalist, you mentioned the knowledge economy before. So just briefly, who are these people that are symbolic capitalists? What are some of the groups, academics obviously being one of them?

MaG: Yeah. So the “we” in “We Have Never Been Woke” is this constellation of folks I call symbolic capitalists. So a nutshell version, symbolic capitalists are people who make a living based on what they know, who they know and how they're known. So there are people who are not providing physical goods and services to people, but instead, they manipulate symbols and data and ideas and so on. So think people who work in the media, who work in arts and entertainment, people who work in finance or consulting or administration and H.R., people who work in education and things like this. So again, people who are who are not providing physical goods and services to people are symbolic capitalists, typically.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Musa al-Gharbi. He's a professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University, and we're discussing his new book titled, “We Have Never Been Woke.” So I want to get into some of your arguments now about these folks and one of the pieces that struck me as particularly powerful and that resonated is the critique that instead of revealing and laying bare the social processes and economic processes that produce and reinforce elites in elitism, a lot of the work of these symbolic capitalists actually obscures it. It makes it harder for the general public to understand. And that at the heart of it, this separation from the average person is part of the status. It's part of what makes these folks valuable. I'd just be interested to hear you discuss that piece a little bit.

MaG: Yeah. I mean, so one of the things that's interesting, if you look at the views and dispositions that people usually associate with wokeness, they're often in the name of the marginalized and the disadvantaged. So things like, a lot of the ways that we talk and think about race or gender or sexuality and so on. But what's striking is, in practice, these are not the ways that working-class people talk and think about the social world, these are not the languages of the trailer park or the global south or the hollowed-out suburb or anything like that. In fact, what I show in the book is that people who are from less advantaged backgrounds, less educated backgrounds, people who are immigrants and non-whites and religious minorities and so on, they're actually the slice of America that's least likely to subscribe to these views and to talk and think in these ways. And in fact, what you can see looking at the 2024 election, for instance, is if you look at which sectors of society have been moving towards the Democrats and which have been moving towards the Republicans. As the Democratic Party has been reoriented around symbolic capitalists and shifted a lot after 2010 because we shifted a lot. Highly educated, relatively affluent white people have shifted more towards Democrats. Meanwhile, racial and ethnic minorities, religious people, lower-income people, working-class people, less educated people have been shifting towards the Republican Party, which is to say the very people that we think of ourselves as allies to and advocates for, they're the people who have been driving the backlash against people like us.

GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that a little bit later in the conversation, but I would think that this book is going to figure in some of the conversations that are happening and will happen within the Democratic Party and thinking of this. But let me just push along this path here for another question or two. So would it be too much to say then, based on what you just said, that in terms of moving the needle on social justice concerns in a(n) actually meaningful way, that these folks claim to be animated by, that we claim to be animated by, that they're largely talking to themselves and justifying their status? I mean, is that too strong, is that too harsh?

MaG: No. In fact, I have a section in the book called, “Tempest in a Teacup,” which is in chapter four where I stress this point, actually. When you look at a whole bunch of data, we are increasingly talking to ourselves. So institutions, like media institutions like The New York Times are reaching an increasingly narrow slice of society. We're pretty much only, in journalism, we're increasingly writing just for other highly educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites, basically. And you can see this kind of consolidation, this narrowing, this growing parochialism in a lot of symbolic economy institutions, in fact. And as a consequence of that, you see a growing disconnect in a lot of other sectors of this country, a perception that's growing for a lot of people in society that these institutions, symbolic economy institutions, don't represent people like them, that they don't have a voice or a stake in it, that the people who run these institutions don't respect them, don't care about their values and their interests and their priorities and so on. And this perception is not entirely inaccurate. But it is very damaging for the work that we do and for the legitimacy of us and our outputs and our institutions and so on.

GR: Why do you think, and I want to pursue this in a couple of different ways, but why do you think this group, the "we," I guess you and me are part of this group in a way, are resistant to this self-awareness?

MaG: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the issues is actually that we are, that the symbolic professions tend to select for people who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated and so on. And you might think, well, oh, okay, well, there's all these really smart and well-educated people, so they must be really cued to the facts and be willing to change their minds and think objectively and so on. But as I showed in an article recently in my Substack and that I argue in the book as well, in a section called, “Disciplined Minds,” there's actually a lot of research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences that shows people who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated are actually more prone to motivated reasoning, less likely to change their minds in accordance with the facts. Like our cognitive and perceptual systems are seem oriented in a deep way towards furthering our interests and advancing our goals. And so actually what you would expect to see and unfortunately what you do see in a lot of institutions that are, that select for people who are really smart and sophisticated and educated and so on, is that we are masters of motivated reasoning.

GR: (laughter) Masters of delusion.

MaG: And so this is one of the problems. And the other big problem is that a lot of the systems and institutions that we've set up, so like for instance, in journalism, you have this kind of adversarial relationship in principle, adversarial, collaborative relationship between editors and writers or in higher ed, you have all of these decisions that are supposed to be made by committees like for hiring and promotion or for admissions and things like this for peer review publications. And the idea is we all have kind of limitations and biases and by getting people with different values and perspectives and priorities kind of making these decisions together, we can produce something that's more objective and so on. Okay, it's great in principle. The problem is these systems only work as intended when we actually do have a lot of substantive diversity in terms of how people think and how people feel and what their interests are and what their backgrounds are in the world that we actually live in. The symbolic professions are increasingly dominated by this relatively narrow and strange slice of society. People who are highly educated, who are from relatively affluent backgrounds, who live in cities, who are politically liberal and identify with the Democratic Party. And in that kind of a thing, when you have this very narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society dominating these professions in a homogeneous way, a lot of these institutions that are supposed to correct our biases can actually exacerbate them. It can make it easy to have misinformation cascades. It can be harder for people who dissent from the dominant view to actually get their view out there because the gatekeepers shut it down. And you can see this, a lot of my own research has shown that because, for instance, almost all of us in journalism and academia are on the blue line of charts when we want to understand something that's bad, that we think of as bad, like political polarization, we don't start by going, well why are we so weird? How are we contributing to this problem? Where are Democrats going wrong? Our starting question or starting assumption is to assume that the red line is driving the thing that we think is bad, and we try to explain the thing that we think is bad by appeal to deficits or pathologies that are supposed to hold among the red line people. Those people on the red line must be racist, sexist, misogynistic, and so on. And you can see, and the striking thing is, I showed this in a lot of my talks some of which are available on the internet and I have a peer reviewed paper published on this. But you can see in a lot of the charts that we ourselves produce, like we'll produce a chart that clearly shows the blue line is driving the polarization, but the people producing the chart can't see their own data. And so the article, the actual body of the article is here's why the red line people are driving polarization, when you can just look at the charts and see that the blue line is the one that shifted first and more. But not only can the scholar not see it, but the editors can't see it, the people citing the work can't see it, the people sharing the work on social media can't see it because we're all on the blue line and we all assume it must be the red line so we can even produce data and charts ourselves that show that we're driving the problem and we literally can't see the thing. Once you point it out, you can't not see it. But it's hard to get anyone to see it to begin with, right? And so this is a big problem that we have for understanding a lot of social issues, how a lot of social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how, why a lot of things don't go the way that we want to would expect. It's because these institutions are dominated by really smart people who are good at motivated reasoning. And we're also really homogeneous in terms of our values and interests in politics and things like that. And so we just sit around agreeing with each other and talking about how everyone else is stupid most of the time, in a way that really interferes with our ability to understand why things are going wrong.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Musa al-Gharbi. He's a professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University and the author of a new book titled, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” I want to just pick up on what you were saying before the break. And I guess I'm going to give myself a pat on the back in terms of your book, because your description has resonated so strongly with experiences I've had and things that I have been trying to point out, but it's tough. If we have time at the end I may share a quick story with you and see what your reactions are. But I wanted to ask you this first, and you're obviously aware of this in writing this book, you have a good sense of history, but there have been many previous writers over the years that have come from some of the same places that you're coming from in terms of values who have asserted that there has been this establishment of new elites based on similar exclusive grounds and pointing out ethical contradictions of various kinds. And so, you know, writers like George Orwell, Robert Michels, Christopher Lasch, Milovan Djilas, among others come to mind. I'm also reminded more simply of a song from the 1960s by the satirist Phil Ochs that was called, “Love Me, I'm a Liberal” I don't know if you ever heard that, but the question I guess I have for you is, is there something distinctive about this new group of elites that's different from these other kinds of pointed out contradictions and new classes of the past?

MaG: No, in fact. Well, so actually I think, so this group of folks that I call symbolic capitalists, they've been called other names in the past by other scholars. So they've been called the professional-managerial class, the new class, class x, a lot of classy terms. But yeah, and so I don't call them, I'm not a fan of neologisms, but I didn't want to use this class terms because I actually don't think calling this elite constellation of class is actually the best way to understand what they are. That would be a tangent, I'd be happy to go on, but I'll just bracket that for now. (laughter)

GR: We'll leave that one for next time.

MaG: But all to say, yeah, I think the argument of this book, it's participating in a genre of work by people like Lasch and Michael Lind and Burnham and Richard Florida and a lot of other people who have studied the rise and formation of this new elite. My book makes a few contributions that theirs don't and in some cases couldn't. So, for instance, looking at these periods of rapid shift among people like us and the causes and consequences of these shifts, these great awokenings, that's something that no one else has done yet so far, it's a novel contribution of this book. Looking at, a lot of the books don't really focus on the legitimizing narratives of these professionals. When they do, they focus on meritocracy. But there's this other element of social justice. And so what my book does is it shows how these two things relate, relate these narratives about meritocracy, these narratives about social justice, how they relate to our justifying our bits for power and status and so on. So that's a novel contribution. And then lastly, over time, the composition of these elites has changed a lot. So we're increasingly female, increasingly non-white, growing numbers of symbolic capitalists self-identify as neuro-divergent, disabled and queer and so on. And so these are important changes in the constitution of the knowledge professions. And so one of the things that this book does is actually explore in a deep way, in a way that no other book has done to date, how the changing constitution of these knowledge professions has changed the ways that we talk and think about why we deserve power and status, has changed the nature of these power struggles within the professions.

GR: Yeah, well, that struck me as well. So obviously some people are going to be listening to all this and are going to say something like the following, and I do want to squeeze a couple of other questions in if we could before the end, but they're going to say something like the following, look, just, you know, give me a break. Look at Trump, you mentioned Trump before, look at Trump, look at some of the supporters, look at what's going on, this is really kind of a low-level problem in comparison with all that, and people are going to read this and sort of interpret it as is some kind of perhaps a justification in some way of that frustration on that side of the political spectrum. They might even say something like, look, you know, you're just going around an intellectual barn of your own three times to sort of, you know, to indirectly defend him and his supporters. Briefly, how do you respond to that?

MaG: Yeah, so for one, I'm someone who's been canceled by Fox News, very famously. So I mean, I wouldn't classify myself as a supporter. But you know, setting that aside, the thing about it is, if folks actually want to stop the appeal, undermine the appeal of Trump and DeSantis and these kind of people, like a key thing that drives their appeal actually is the sense of disconnect that a lot of people have between people like us and the rest of society. And if they, if a lot of Americans feel like we don't represent their values and interests, that we're not living up to our obligations we're not delivering the goods, that we look down on them and disparage them, they don't have, that people like them are not represented in our institutions. And a lot of these narratives aren't wrong. Like, it's not it's actually the case that these institutions have grown more parochial along many lines. It's actually the case that many of us do disparage and look down upon people who are sociologically distant from us. They're not making that up, it's a fact. And if they're presented with two options, if they perceive, see that there's these problems in society that aren't getting fixed, that people like us, that they see this growing distance, they don't have a voice and a stake, and they're presented with two options, one of them being, the people like the DeSantis and Trump, who say, look, these institutions, you can't fix them, they're lost, you can't trust these people to reform themselves, and so on. We have to burn them down and start over. And then the other people are saying, hey, nothing to see here, don't believe your lying eyes, actually these things are great and awesome. Like, it's easy to see who's going to win that debate. It's going to be the burn-it-all-down people. So if we want to stop the burn-it-all-down people, we need to acknowledge and address these problems.

GR: Important point. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is the journalism professor and writer Musa al-Gharbi. You know, what you just said there reminded me of something that my brother-in-law texted my spouse several years ago. He does not have a lot of formal education, but he's quite perceptive, and I shouldn't say but, and he's quite perceptive. And he texted this, it was while he was watching something on CNN, he said, they think we're stupid and they don't know that we know they think we're stupid. It's sort of encapsulates what you just said. I want to try to squeeze in, we've got about three minutes left, I want to try to squeeze in a couple questions. I want to start with the most important one and maybe this is the only one we'll get to. But I want to ask this question, it's a very blunt question. It circles back around is something that you had been mentioning before. It really gets at the heart of what you're talking about with some of this homogeneity of points of view. Well, what do you think the reception of this book would have been in the media if it hadn't been written by somebody like you? Someone with your name, someone who looks like you, someone who's, you know, I don't know, like a, you know, white male from a Protestant upbringing or something. You know, what do you think would have happened to this book?

MaG: Yeah, would have been a lot different. So one of the cultural contradictions of this book is it's in some ways a literal embodiment of some of the things it criticizes. So it criticizes the use of elite degrees from places like Princeton and Columbia to decide who's worth listening to. But part of the reason it was published is because I was at Columbia University. If I had been writing from, you know, North Dakota State University, fine school, but it probably wouldn't have been published by Princeton University Press. The book criticizes the ways that people leverage their identity in service of their power struggles and status struggles. But it's the case that is part of the reason this book was sexy to the publishers because I'm a black Muslim who writes for The Guardian and so on. If I had been a conservative, cisgender, heterosexual, white male, Republican anything like that, the reception would have been different after publication, but probably wouldn't have even been published in the first place. Or if it was, even the exact same texts, right, the exact same arguments, but from a white person, if it was published at all, it would probably have had a whole bunch of sensitivity readers and all of this kind of stuff. The only reason I was given the freedom to go pew pew pew and just tell the truth as I see it (laughter) it was in part because I'm a black Muslim who writes for The Guardian and stuff like this. So I hit all the right social signals for the publisher. But yeah, I agree. Like, one of the things the book criticizes is the way that identity is and elite credentials and stuff like that influence who and how people talk and think about like, but the book is itself a product of these very things that it criticized. Rather than denying that, I think it's important to just lean into it and be honest.

GR: Yeah, well, and frankly, I think it makes the book more interesting as well. We've only got literally ten seconds left, so this is going to have to be a yes or no question. But have you lost many, for lack of a better word, woke friends over this book?

MaG: Not yet.

GR: Good, good, that's good to know. Well, we're going to end on that really positive note. I wish we had more time to talk, this is really fascinating. But that was Musa al-Gharbi, and again, his new book is titled, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” It's an important book and it's a very provocative and good read. Musa, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, this has been really interesting.

MaG: It's been great to be here. Thank you for having me.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Lauren Hall speaks on the theme and ideas behind her recent op-ed, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies.”

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. The aftermath of the November elections, at least in terms of political rhetoric, has sounded much like the last 12 years. Deep division and urgent claims about the evils intended by the other side. My guest today thinks we've had more than enough. Lauren Hall is a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology and she's a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center's Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse. She's also recently penned an op-ed in Real Clear Politics titled, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies.” Professor Hall, welcome to the program.

Lauren Hall: Great to be here, Grant, thank you.

GR: It's good to have you. So I want to just say at the outset, perhaps as a disclaimer of sorts to you and to our listeners that I think I've encountered much of what you are observing in your recent writing on this subject. So I might end up participating in the discussion more than I usually do, as well as asking the questions, but I'll try to discipline myself. But first, before I get to the questions about this recent issue that you've been writing about, I want to get and share with our listeners some background on where you're coming from. So you describe yourself as a radical moderate. So first of all, tell us what a radical moderate is for you.

LH: Yes, great question. I've been thinking about this a lot. My 2014 book was on, it's called, “Family and the Politics of Moderation.” So I've been thinking about what political moderation is for a long time. But when I was trying to think about how to explain this concept to broader audiences, what I realized is that moderation has a kind of serious marketing problem. It often sounds like bland compromise or just, you know, you kind of pick a point between two extremes, and that's moderation. And so when I was trying to think about what I was actually going for, it's not actually moderation just for the sake of moderation. Moderation is actually radical in the sense that it's a complete reframing of the political landscape that we're living in. So I think a lot of times we tend to place ourselves on political binaries, right versus left, Democrat versus Republican, but if you actually look at the political landscape, it's really complex, it's really variable. People occupy different parts of it at different times. There's an enormous amount of overlap. And so what I really want people to think about when they think about moderation is an exploding of these political binaries, and that's the radical part. We're rejecting the political binary altogether and trying to map a more accurate shared landscape.

GR: Well, and the way you describe that gets at exactly the question that I wanted to ask you as a follow-up, and maybe you've already answered it. And that's that, I think the media tends to see it in the way that you described what it isn't, what moderation isn't or the way that you don't see it. And I wondered, is that why it tends to get downplayed by the media? Because it's just like, oh, this is just splitting the difference, not thinking differently.

LH: Yes. Well, I think there's a couple of things going on, right? So the media responds to incentives and one of the primary incentives we have in in modern media, especially with the 24-hour news cycle, is clicks, right? Clicks and views. And moderate, thoughtful nuanced, complex positions don't get clicks, they don't get views, the more extreme positions do. The other thing that I think as political scientists, we're all aware of is the fact that when you can activate people's tribalism, when you can activate people's in-group outgroup instincts, you get more clicks, you animate people, right? You trigger the emotional parts of their brains. So it's not just that we have a marketing problem, but it's also the fact that it's really easy to shift people out of a nuanced, moderate mindset and into this tribal, partisan binary kind of mindset. So that's where I think the media, there's some really perverse incentives built into the structure of how we're thinking about news reporting. And by the way, I think there's some hopeful indicators. So I don't want to be too pessimistic, but right now, at least there's some real incentives toward extremism.

GR: And just also to cover a little bit about your background. You're also, in addition to the things I mentioned at the outset in my introduction, you're also a board member of something called the Prohuman Foundation. Now, I mean, my first thought was who could be against that? But tell us what that is and what it's about.

LH: Yeah, great, great question. So I'm on the board of advisors for the Prohuman Foundation, and it's a relatively new foundation, just about a year old. And one of the goals of that foundation is to try to sort of reinvigorate areas of connection between people. So one of their taglines is, you know, that everyone has unique identities but shared humanity. And so rather than getting fragmented with identity politics or trying to sort of whitewash or sort of, you know, melting pot people, we can live with kind of tension. It's not even tension, but the fact that every individual does have lots of unique identities that affect the way that they move around the world. But we also have enormous areas of shared humanity. And so a lot of the work that they're doing overlaps with my own work in terms of trying to reinvigorate public discourse, make it more nuanced, make it more clear how complex political and social issues are. One of the founders of that foundation is Daryl Davis, who's very famous as an incredible black musician for making friends with KKK members and actually converting KKK members away from extremism and white supremacy. And part of the way that he does that is by creating these pathways to showcase the shared connections that he has with them, and a lot of that's through music. But so anyway, he's a very inspirational figure in general, but he's one of the co-founders of that foundation.

GR: Interesting. So you have been experiencing something politically, again, going back to your editorial and Real Clear Politics, from your colleagues and your liberal friends that I have to say, and I said at the outset, it sounds very familiar to me. But it's a demonization not just of Donald Trump, but more importantly, the slightly more than half of the country's voters who voted for him over Kamala Harris. Tell me a bit about that experience as you've experienced it.

LH: So a lot of it was what social media, watching friends of mine argue that they have relatives that they'll just never see again or they didn't realize that friends were white supremacists or fascists or Nazis. And I remember thinking to myself, well, this is actually crazy. I mean, it's like we often have this, and I just know this from being in an academic environment where people are generally there's a liberal slant. We talk a lot about misinformation and the kinds of myths that, you know, for example, climate deniers have. But then I was watching all these well-educated liberal people accuse 50 plus percent of the American population of being fascists. And it was just, you know, we have our own myths that I think we need to confront. And the broader point of that op-ed was this actually does deep damage to the people that we want to protect. So if you believe strongly that Trump is a danger to civil society and to liberal democracy, there's a lot of people who are going to be vulnerable under that regime. You need as many friends as you can possibly get. You need to build coalitions and you need to be able to reach across the aisle to people who you may not have as much in common with as you might want. But we don't get to choose the people that we that we share our country with. We have to work with the people that we have. And there are lots of complicated reasons that people voted for Trump, and very few of them were outright fascism.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Rochester Institute of Technology Political Science Professor Lauren Hall. So there's a particular aspect of all this I want to plumb a little bit that has really struck me in, not only recent months, but recent years. And it's a more of a feature of political polarization and it and it afflicts both sides of the aisle in my experience. But it's the assumption that what is motivating people on the other side of the political divide are the worst goals and values imaginable. For example, that people voting for Trump, we already talked about this, people voting for Trump are primarily motivated by bigotry or a desire to control women or a desire to harm vulnerable populations. Or the people who voted for Harris are motivated by a desire to, in the extreme in the abortion case take innocent life or elevate certain minorities over majorities or they want to confiscate everybody's gun. Just curious to hear your reflections about that, about jumping to those motivations.

LH: Yeah. So I'm not a social psychologist, but I do, from what I understand, right, there's a thing called one of the cognitive biases that's very common as the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency of people to attribute good faith motives to themselves and bad faith motives to other people, right? So the guy who cuts you off in traffic, right, he's a jerk. But when you accidentally cut someone off, it's because you were distracted because your child is sick, right, so you have all sorts of reasons for things, whereas other people have bad reasons for things. And, you know, I think this is a really common part of human life. But I think we see that perfectly when it comes to how people vote, right? When people think about their own voting decisions, right, they think about them in terms of their own complex, four-dimensional political landscape, right? All of the things that they care about and some of them may say, well, you know, I'm a single issue voter usually, but in this particular election, right? So people introduce complexity and nuance into their own voting decisions. But when it comes to other people, we very quickly reduce them to a single one-dimensional point, right? A one-dimensional motive. So either it's bigotry or it's something else, right? And, you know, conservatives and Trump voters do this to liberal voters as well.

LH: This is not a, this is a two-way street, absolutely. But I think that when we look at the liberal reaction to the Trump win, I think we see the fundamental attribution error in really clear, really clear relief. And it's a serious problem because it prevents us from finding those common connections that make civil discourse possible and in fact, that make political communities possible.

GR: And just as a follow-up to that, I'll give you a specific experience I had, I'm curious to get your reaction to it. But a few years back, I was at a small group dinner with a, and I won't mention the person's name but they were very prominent award-winning historian from the academy. And she, in the course of this dinner, casually referred to all the racists who had voted for Trump. And I gently said, you know, certainly all Trump's voters are not racists, right? And then she just said, well, I'm over that. And the certainty of her statement shocked me. So what do you or what do we say to someone like that? Because they've got the imprimatur of the academy behind them. They've been, you know, given these awards, but they're just saying this stuff.

LH: Well, I mean, there's a little bit of irony, right? Which is that a lot of us as humanists, as social scientists. Some of us trace our, I’m a political theorist, so, you know, we sort of trace our ancestry back to Socrates, right? And the Socratic sort of humility, which is that you only know that you know nothing, that was supposed to be the foundation for philosophic and political exploration, right? This idea that you don't know what you don't know. And so that's why you have to ask questions. That's the platonic, the Socratic method. So it's deeply ironic that we now have this kind of certainty that a lot of higher educational institutions and workers, the Professoriate, I think being a great example of this, we've replaced that humility with hubris. We think we understand why other people are doing what we do. There's a great book that just came out, “We Have Never Been Woke” by Musa al-Gharbi. And one of the things that he argues in that book is that knowledge workers have become, that is in fact, the new gulf in America. And knowledge workers fundamentally misunderstand how other people live. They misunderstand their motivations, they misunderstand how their lives actually play out. And that leads to a lot of really, it leads to obviously miscommunication and bad polling, as we've seen in all of these elections. But it also leads to making really awful generalizations about why other people are behaving the way that they're behaving.

GR: So this is an instance of great minds think alike. But I am going to speak to him either next week on this program or the week after.

LH: Oh, wonderful.

GR: And the intention was that the two of you would be kind of a pair, it would be kind of a matched pair, a series, if you will. So you've done a great job of previewing that for me.

LH: (laughter) Wonderful.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Lauren Hall. She's a political scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, who's recently published an op-ed piece titled, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies” and we've been discussing the issues that her essay raises. So more generally, you often hear that, from folks that push this more extreme view who are on the left, you often hear from them that, look, the existential threat to democracy that's posed by Donald Trump justifies all this hyperbolic language or language that might seem hyperbolic or over-the-top. And if it does seem too much that way, it just means that people aren't paying enough attention. Now, my own view, I think, sort of kindred to yours is that that kind of language makes the supposed problem worse rather than better, both strategically and tactically. But I wanted to get your sense to that as well. What are your thoughts about that kind of language that we often hear?

LH: Well, you know, I mean, I think it's one of these weird, again, sort of going back to this tribalism that polarization supports. When we start thinking in tribalistic terms about our side versus their side, I think we end up with ideological purity tests. We end up with this kind of existential, you know, the other side is an existential threat to our side. And so, first of all, I think it makes it really hard to identify when we're actually dealing with existential threats. And I think that is a tough line to draw a lot of times. I mean, certainly I watched January 6th and was deeply worried and felt that a line had been crossed in a serious way. I worry a lot about political norms because they're hard to build and very easy to tear down. So this isn't to say that I'm not concerned, I'm very concerned as a political scientist. But I do think that there are some real problems on the left with the way that they think, or at least what I hear from students and some faculty about civil discourse. And so sometimes I'll hear comments about, you know, civil discourse is just, you know, it's ignoring, right, evil or it's collaborating with evil.

GR: Right.

LH: I sometimes hear people talk about civil discourse as though it's tone policing, right, the idea that you would moderate your message to meet your audience, right, the basic elements of rhetoric or somehow not they don't function anymore because we live in this in this existentially threatening time. And again, I just think that we are, it's not that I'm not sympathetic to people who are operating in a place of fear and it's not that I don't share some of those fears. But the problem is whether your response is going to make things better or worse. And I think we have so much evidence that this kind of response makes things worse, right? How do you push people toward more and more kinds of extremism? Well, you do exactly what we're doing, right? Which is that we keep, we alienate them, we attribute horrible motives to them, we stop having conversations with them, we cut them out of various kinds of civil discourse, we segregate them off of different media platforms. So, you know, it seems clear to me that you might think that you are doing a good thing by censoring people on whatever, you know, social media platform you're on. But that actually feeds the problem. And so what I'm trying to think about as a political scientist is, is how do we move forward knowing that we have four years where we can either lose a lot more or find a way to protect what we have and sort of stay the course, if possible.

GR: Do you have maybe like one or two best suggestions or recommendations for moving forward in that regard?

LH: Well, and this is going to be, it's going to be unsatisfying to a lot of people. I wish we had top-down kinds of solutions, but a lot of the most promising work I'm seeing is happening from the bottom up. It's sort of grassroots, the bridging community. If you look at the, I'm a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center this year, and they do these wonderful the pluralist labs where you actually get people together who disagree in fundamental ways on hot-button issues. And it's about engaging people in curiosity, right, asking people curious questions about why they believe what they believe, as opposed to the way that we usually approach these kinds of civil debates, which is, or, civil society debates, which is to go in and say, this is what I believe and this is why it's right. And so what that automatically does is it puts the other person on the defensive, it puts you on the offensive and it makes you want to defend your position. And what we really want to do is actually ask people questions. We want to say, hey, why did you vote for Trump knowing his position on immigration, given the fact that you have Latino relatives? Like, what are you thinking about the world, right? And I think if we ask people questions, we get a lot more information. We also make it clear to them that the other side is not the enemy, that the other side is actually just a bunch of curious people wanting to know more about what they're thinking. So I think there's a bunch of examples of that. There's the Builders Movement is another, there's a great documentary on the Tennessee 11, was a group of people that they put together with very different political views, but they actually put them together to try to come up with some kind of common sense policy for Tennessee on gun violence. And so these are people who range from hard core Second Amendment right folks all the way to, you know, extreme sort of pacifists. But they were able to come together and talk about things because the structure of the conversation was non-adversarial. And then Solutions Journalism is another great format for really thinking about local-level solutions, they're nonpartisan. The goal is, hey, let's look around us at our local communities and let's look for problems that we can solve together. And what that does is it takes the identity of being a Republican or a Democrat out of the picture. And instead, your neighbors trying to solve this local problem together.

GR: So, two things strike me there as observations. One, with the second example that you used as we kind of get practice a little bit at the local level and then maybe we can scale that up. And the other one about asking questions, you've kind to gone back to the roots that you already mentioned with Socrates because that's exactly what Socrates did, was simply ask questions of people.

LH: Yup.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is the political scientist Lauren Hall. So I have this one question about, and you write about this in your op-ed, that the fact that when you look at the specific views that people have on policies, you do see a lot of overlap, whether you're looking at immigration or you're looking at LGBTQ rights or other kinds of issues that are normally seen as very divisive and very conflictual. And so we're more centrist than we'd like to think if we want to think about it in terms of centrist, but there's more overlap. But it seems to me, though, that that's still separate from the fact that in terms of behavior and the way that we see the other side, once there is a line of division down, either along party lines or along some other issue, that we're still quite polarized, that we still have this tendency to demonize once the parties take different stands on it. So how do you get at that? How do you actually leverage the fact that, beyond perhaps what you've already suggested as some remedies, that we might have overlap on the specific content of things, but that still doesn't influence the fact that I'm always going to vote for Democrats or I'm always going to vote for Republicans or I'm going to see Democrats as the enemy.

LH: Well, so at some point and this is where I think my, I try to see both points at the same time. I'm a localist, I tend to focus on grassroots kind of bottom-up solutions. But I think we also have to talk about the structures of our electoral system, as well as some of the incentives that that electoral system as well as the media landscape create. There was a great podcast interview with, I'll have to remember the podcast’s name, but it was with Yuval Levin. I think it's pluralism conversations actually with the Mercatus Center. But he actually made a really important point, which was a lot of people talk about ranked-choice voting in general elections. And he actually said, we don't need that, right? What we actually need are, in a sense, stronger parties, which people often think of as an odd thing when it comes to polarization, but stronger parties actually allow the party to filter out extreme positions. And if you had ranked choice voting at the primary level…

GR: Right.

LH: You actually could filter out a lot of these extremist candidates. It would undo this this cycle that we have now, particularly in the Republican Party, because they have fewer super delegates, they have they have less party control over their candidates. If you had ranked choice voting at the primary level, it introduces nuance, right? It allows people's actual preferences to emerge and then the party has a better sense of what their electorate actually stands for. If you look at a lot of the people who are becoming serious players, and this is absolutely if you, I mean, if you look at what happened in the 2016 election, why Trump got the nomination in the first place, that was not what the GOP wanted. That was not the direction they wanted to go. So I think there's two things that we have to think about as political scientists. We can think about the structural questions, we can think about what kinds of incentives build stronger and more reliable and more accurate electoral outputs, right? How are we actually reflecting what the electorate cares about? Because right now we're not. Our candidates are more extreme than the average American and they're more divisive than the average American wants. So we're in this weird space where our elections are not representing the desires of the people.

GR: Yeah. I think you've really hit on something important with the idea of rank choice being more important at the primary stage than the general election stage. Well, we've got about a minute and a half left, so I'm going to put you in a tough spot here. But I want to try to squeeze two questions in if we can. So sort of like a lightning round. First one is, I just had my last class with my Introductory American Politics students and they don't like this stuff either, they made that very clear to me. And one of the things I said to them was, and I should have said, ask questions, like you said earlier, but I said, you know, model the change that you want to see, which is a cliché, but it's got some wisdom to it. Any other thing that you would say to young people? Really quickly, like in 20 seconds or so.

LH: Yeah, I would just say ask questions, be curious. When you find yourself afraid, stop for a second, back off and get curious. Especially when it's about someone in your family or someone in your community.

GR: Then the last one, again, equally quick on an answer if we could. Any political figures out there now who you think are modeling a better way that come to mind?

LH: I unfortunately can't think of anyone right off the top of my head, which is depressing. But I will name a couple of organizations that I think are doing amazing work. Amanda Ripley is a journalist, her work, Good Conflict (High Conflict) is incredible, there's tool kits on there. And if you're interested in pluralist labs in the classroom, you can actually find a pluralist lab tool kit on the Mercatus website. So there's a couple of places that I think you can try out ideas.

GR: Okay, that's great, that's super helpful for everybody listening. That was Lauren Hall and again, her recent op-ed and Real Clear Politics is titled, “Liberals Must Stop Treating Trump Voters as Enemies.” Lauren, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. It's been fascinating and a really important topic.

LH: Thank you so much, Grant, it was great to see you.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is New York Congressman Marc Molinaro. The Republican was elected in November 2022 to represent the 19th District, a large geographic area that spans from Ithaca and Cortland in the west to the Massachusetts border in the east and includes the city of Binghamton in the southwest. Last month, he was defeated in a very close election by Democrat Josh Riley. Among other political offices and experiences, Congressman Molinaro was a Republican candidate for governor of New York State and he has appeared several times previously on this program. Congressman Molinaro, welcome back to the program and I just want to say I really appreciate you being willing to speak to me in your last month of office. It's very generous of you to do that, and I appreciate it.

Marc Molinaro: Well, I appreciated our conversations. I enjoyed being on. And I'll tell you what I tell everybody else, the Constitution's pretty clear, I have a job that will conclude at 11:59 a.m. on January 3rd.

GR: (laughter)

MM: So I think that the public expects that I'm going to work until 11:59 a.m. on January 3rd of next year, and that's my commitment.

GR: Okay, well, we appreciate that and I'm glad you included this in it. So let me just start with what I imagine may be the least pleasant part of this interview for you, but I wanted to ask you about the election itself. As I just mentioned, two years ago, you won what was a close election against Josh Riley, this time you lost a very close election. What do you think was the difference between the two? What was the difference maker, if there was one you could point to?

MM: Well, last time I got more votes, this time I got less votes. (laughter) So, listen, I accept wins and losses. I think it's the beauty of this country and certainly it's actually one of the compelling reasons I enter into public service a long time ago, right? And that is, you know, the public gets to decide and we honor the vote. And so from the outset, I want to say that, I honor and respect the vote. I wish Josh Reilly success, we’ve spoken, and my office stands ready to assist in transitioning. All he needs to do is ask and our folks and I will be ready to assist. And so what I am about to say, I preface what I was about to say with that because I do think the significant difference was the amount of money spent by national Democrats. And it's as simple as that. We could pick apart my record and those who would not want to support me might find the things they, you know, they disagree with, and those who did support me find the things they did agree with. But overwhelmingly, the fact that Democrats were able to direct $250 million to four races in the state of New York is both impactful and obscene. Now, listen, Republicans spent money, too, but in my race, we were outspent by eight and a half million dollars. It’s very hard to overcome that kind of spending, it just is. And I would tell you both as a member of Congress and a soon to be former member of Congress, I’ll continue to advocate for restrictions on spending. You know, the fact is there's just far too much money being spent on these races and in candidates, you're left defending against things that just aren't true. And I'll be candid, listen, I, you know, to his credit, he ran a very disciplined race, but telling people I was opposed to women making their own health care choices is wrong. It's dishonest and it's not right. Telling them that I oppose access to birth control when I'm the one sponsoring legislation to protect access to birth control is just wrong, it's dishonest. And we just didn't have the resources to overcome it. And so, you know, that was eroded from us. The other of course, it's a presidential election year and turnout was a little bit higher. And so, you know, all that, you know, added up together to provide a very narrow loss. I accept it. And as I said, I wish him well. I just think that having done this for a very long time, you know, I was first elected as an 18 year old in 1994 as a village trustee in Tivoli, New York. And here I am 30 years later in 2024, ending my public service career, albeit I think for a moment in time. You know, as a member of Congress after 30 years, elections just have become less and less tethered to truth and it's really disturbing. And I do believe we all need to do better to really uphold the basic standard of honesty. Fight as we must, but there needs to be a commitment to doing somewhat more honest.

GR: Well I wanted to ask you a question about some of your messaging, if I could.

MM: Yeah, fine.

GR: And this is what I saw in some of your TV ads. It seemed to me that those ads portrayed you as more partisan and further to the right than my sense of your behavior in Congress. I mean, I watched a couple of them and I thought, that doesn't sound like the person that's been talking to me on the radio program. And it doesn't also, you know, your record and some of the things that you have done and searching for bipartisan ground in doing so. So I was just curious about the decision making regarding that. I don't know if there's a story there, but…

MM: Well, I mean, two thirds of the ads were neither my campaigns nor Josh's campaigns. They were funded by these outside political action committees, which, you know, we need to support us. I mean, it's the way it works. They, you know, as I said, they were able to spend about I think was about 32 or $35 million, something in that neighborhood. And of course we spent a lot less and were more in the $18 million range. But again, horrific amounts of money and there's just too much money. I was outspent by more dollars than some entire congressional races cost in this country. And so some of those ads, you know, I can't say that I enjoyed or didn't enjoy. I just had nothing to do with (unintelligible). The ads I think that mattered to me were, and I tell people, you know, there were basically two and one was with my mom looking into the camera telling you what we think. And the other was me looking in the camera, telling you what I think. I mean, the truth is, you know, we ran an entire campaign where the ads I paid for were me telling you what I think and the other side ran campaign ads that paid people to tell you what I think. And it just you know, it was a bit disheartening. But I also agree, you know, because there was so much money from the other side, we were forced to kind of run a race that defended my, you know, my right flank while trying to expand the middle. And I'll tell you, in fact, just yesterday, this political action committee aligned with the Democratic National Committee called Saving Western Civilization, it's a political action committee. They just finally filed their disclosure forms, but they ran an entire campaign in about five congressional districts. Mine was one of them in the country where they sent digital ads, text messages, postcards to Republicans telling them that we weren't Republican enough and pointing out to them that we had let Republicans down. And when you look at the math, you know, in a race in a district that basically is 50/50, you can't erode two or three percentage points on the right and one or two on the left and win. And so it was a very difficult kind of thing to maneuver. You know, Josh, again, this is not criticism, he had like 57 different ads, we had 5. I mean it just, when you have that kind of money you can do a lot of things and some of them were not honest. Some of them were very much about him and his record and God bless him. But that made it difficult at times to get out of hand.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Congressman Marc Molinaro, who represents New York's 19th Congressional District. Well, let's turn now to your time in Congress. What would you regard as your most significant achievement in your two years?

MM: Well first, just being the second most bipartisan member of Congress. I mean, you know, to your point, a few moments ago, I spent my entire adult life trying to work with Republicans and Democrats and anyone to try to solve problems. And I brought that same commitment to Washington. I didn't sponsor a single bill that was not bipartisan. And I, frankly, was responsible for, you know, both killing very partisan legislation that some on the right wanted and strengthening legislation that some on the left wanted and sort of navigating and mediating out to better outcomes. From the debt ceiling negotiation that brought about billions of dollars in federal spending reductions, but also met many of our needs, to negotiation over policies that, you know, provided assistance to those living in mental health services, mental health needs and infrastructure investment and support for law enforcement. So just the very nature of applying that commitment and again, the willingness to work with people irrespective of party to solve problems, I think you know, is something that I'm very proud about. But I also tell you and I know you get to it, I mean, the work we did to support those with mental health and disabilities, I co-chaired the bipartisan Mental Health Caucus. I lead the coalitions for those with disabilities with dozens of pieces of legislation provisions written. The Farm Bill, which I wish we had gotten done entirely, but nevertheless, the bipartisan bill adopted by the House AG Committee includes provisions that could only be written from upstate New York and frankly, very happy about that. But the last thing I'll tell you that I'm certainly most grateful and proud of is our constituent work. The people who work with me every day in the community responding and being responsive and responsible to the people we serve. And I don't think there's a community organization or a member of the public who interacted with our team who wouldn't say we weren't kind, we weren't responsive, we weren’t responsible. I think, you know, we really try to uphold that standard and frankly, I'm saddest for that because I think, you know, the constituents and voters expect that. I'm hopeful that my successor will apply the same kind of commitment. But the people that I that I hired and the people who worked with me have a deep sense of commitment and involvement in the community and that, you know, that makes me very grateful.

GR: And that's a really important part of the job and I'm glad that you pointed that out. I did want to, you're right, I did want to ask you about your work regarding mental health and disability. And particularly your Think Differently initiative, which was kind of a(n) umbrella theme that captured a lot of different things that that you were trying to do. It struck me, I think as important, you and I have talked about our personal connections with this, but just tell our listeners about that initiative and whether and how you might plan to try to keep that momentum going forward in the future.

MM: Yeah, thank you. So, Think Differently was launched in 2015 as a local effort that became very national when I held county office. But to your point, a broad umbrella under which we could organize resources, tools and advocacy along with awareness and understanding for those with intellectual, physical and developmental disabilities. The idea that we need to break down barriers and create opportunities. And by the way, individuals with disabilities as you and I both know, still face some of the most difficult prejudices, biases and obstacles. You know, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is extended to a lot of people, but those with disabilities often are not among them. And so making a commitment to break down barriers, create opportunities was important to me. Came to Congress, sponsored about 12 pieces of legislation that are specific to that theme, everything from ensuring greater response in emergencies for those with disabilities, making sure the tools and resources were there, job opportunities for those with disabilities and access to both housing and transportation. Many of those bills have been adopted. In fact, this week we've had already one more signed into law, I expect probably two more signed into law before I'm done this term. And so I think of important advancements. But beyond that, just within that context, you know, serving in a bipartisan leadership role, advocating for those with disabilities. You know, the last major disabilities piece of legislation was from 1990 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Special education is always on the chopping block because of state aid and the way in which we sort of create secondary, you know, a secondary path to education for those with disabilities. And so we've got to keep advocating for those reforms and address the challenges that those with disabilities and their families face. Everything from good pay for direct care staff to housing, education and transportation as individuals with disabilities become more independent and obviously live a longer life. And so, you know, I'm going to keep doing that. I promised the organizations that I've worked with, both at home and in Washington, that I'm, you know, I can't be paid to lobby Congress, but I certainly can volunteer to advocate for the things that we care about. And so I'll continue to be a resource for those organizations, continue to advocate for those with disabilities. My wife and I actually had incorporated Think Differently as a not for profit some years ago. We didn't really want to put any a resource behind it, didn't want to conflict with any of our public responsibilities. We'll probably do a little, give a little bit of more energy to assist. I’d probably tell you my wife will probably take a much bigger role than I would. But to be a resource for individuals and organizations that support those with disabilities. And I'm going to continue to advocate and work with the organizations in the 19th district in upstate New York to be of assistance.

GR: Are you allowed to tell our listeners now, like where they can go if they want to help support that organization?

MM: Well, I can't really.

GR: Okay. But if we search Think Differently…

MM: Earlier this week, we had a roundtable in Binghamton with the Chamber of Commerce. One of the first things I'll do in the New Year is we're going to convene the Greater Binghamton Chamber of Commerce with the not for profit organizations that support those with disabilities to start building out a set of employment principles that businesses in the southern tier in Broome County could put into practice to hire those with disabilities. And then set out to establish some broader, you know, interaction so that the business community can work more directly with those with disabilities and create new job and employment opportunities. That's going to be one of the first things we do early next year.

GR: Great. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Republican Congressman Marc Molinaro. He represents New York's 19th congressional district. So let me ask you this, of your time there what was your fondest memory? Maybe your best day, if you will, in Congress?

MM: I have always shied away from these because it's like everything was a really cool experience. I mean, listen, being in the room when, whether it was Speaker McCarthy or Speaker Johnson needed a voice to get us toward you know, producing an outcome, is by far the greatest honors. I'm a freshman member, and I will just tell you, very, very few freshmen get invited to those meetings. But I will say, when it came to every major advancement, whether it was our conference moving legislation or trying to negotiate across the aisle, of course you had a Democrat president, Democrat Senate at the time, I was asked to be in the room in a small number of people to help negotiate solutions. Really, really big honor and fascinating opportunity. Now, I'm a kid who grew up on food stamps. You know, my parents, we were poor, and here I am in these meetings with, you know, leaders from around the country trying to negotiate outcomes in my first term as a member, I'll never forget that. But I’ll also tell you, because I know we've talked about this, you know, I jog and run quite often. There's nothing like waking up just before sunrise in Washington, D.C., we have to be here when we serve and going out for a run around the Capitol, down to the Lincoln Memorial and then back again. It's inspiring, it’s awe inspiring and it's just a, it's an amazing thing. I said this to a reporter who asked me some time ago, as much as I love running among the monuments and the buildings, it's equally interesting to run among the people because you're running past organized lobbying groups, special interest groups, American citizens who are here to petition their government, tourists from around the corner and around the world, prayer groups that pick up in the mall, protests around the Supreme Court. And, you know, I don't want this to sound arrogant, nobody knew who I was, I was just a guy in shorts and t-shirt, running. And to experience and see that as somebody who loves democracy, loves this republic, loves the act of public service, that is among the that the most wonderful parts of having served these last two years. But, and you said like, point to a day or not, I can't tell you the thousands of community events organizations we've interacted with that haven't left me thinking, you know, we can do something about that. A woman that served on one of the advisory committee said, you know, you made us feel like you were always listening, you were always taking notes, you were always relatable and we always felt like you were, you know, you were among us, one of us. And I think that I hope people who have interacted with feel that way, because I did and I still do. I mean, I've got books and books of notes that, you know, we have reflected on the move policy and ideas. And that interaction, in giving voice to people who don't often have it and just being that, you know, being able to be connected is really, really powerful and really important and I've enjoyed it.

GR: So the other side of the coin now, of course, the worst day or the low point and connected to that, any regrets about your service, things you wish you had done differently?

MM: There's always things I wish that I had done differently and I just have perfected never saying them out loud to the masses.

GR: (laughter)

MM: I make my mistakes, there are things, you know, are there tweets that I wish that we didn't send out are there comments that I wish I didn't say, there’s a frustration that sometimes overcame me, absolutely, I mean, we're all human. But I learned from those. I mean, I do think you learn from your mistakes, missteps and failures a heck of a lot more than your successes, so this is another opportunity. And those that I know of and have reflected on are opportunities to learn and hopefully grow from. But I will say, you know, the two things that, well, one sort of action here that was among the lowest is when the eight Republicans joined with every Democrat of the House to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And it isn't about McCarthy, it's about the institution and that forever set in motion these last two years, a bit of chaos that was very hard to overcome. I'm grateful to have been in the room and to have encouraged my colleagues to come together to ultimately move forward behind Speaker Mike Johnson, he's become a good friend and frankly is giving me opportunity to help shape policy in ways that I couldn't have expected. But the fact that, again, eight Republicans and 200 Democrats band together to oust the speaker, only the second time in history, and it's just not right, it's not acceptable. And it was really, it was a low point because we had opportunity. We all did, and had we figured out some way to navigate that Republicans and Democrats, we can have our fights and our disagreements, but we wouldn't have sent the institution, you know, into a bit of chaos. And that was really, really very challenging and really upsetting. I mean, among the dumbest actions I think ever taken by the House of Representatives, I mean, outside of bad policy, this was sort of a procedural thing that should never, never happen and should never happen again. I will say on a personal note, I love the work I do. Being separated from my kids and family as often as we are, I don't have the benefit of personal wealth. I don't own two homes. You know, I fly back to Albany from D.C., drive to Catskill and I'm home. You are away from your family a lot more and it's important, right? We know we're on a mission. We know we have responsibility, we make the sacrifice. But there are lots of things that you miss along the way. I couldn't bring my kids to preschool or elementary school in Washington, they need to be among their friends in their community. And just missing those things at times is heartbreaking. That said, I don't know when this airs, but we are recording one day before my son Eli who will turn 8 on December 26th, will be performing as a Tiny Tim in the Performing Arts Center Community Theater. I will be home to see that, and so I feel very blessed that at the very least, I get that opportunity.

GR: Fantastic. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Congressman Marc Molinaro. So what's the most important thing about Congress that average citizens don't know or appreciate? Two things, okay.

MM: 85% of what we do is bipartisan and without a lot of conflict and you don't ever really get to see it. Truly the media and then those show horses, and you pick who they are, distort that, they just distort it. I mean there's so much good work going on that, and again, principled arguments, certainly different opinions, but 85% of what happens in Washington, D.C. is, and in Congress is not nearly as is a dire and chaotic and dramatic as you see it on television. And I really, even some of the things you see on television that look dramatic, I always wonder where was I? Because I was there and it didn't seem that dramatic when I was here.

GR: (laughter)

MM: And so that for me, I think people should know that, you know. And it isn't smoke filled rooms where decisions get made. I mean, and even this in quotes, “special interest”, I mean, every day in my office is a special interest and usually it's somebody from the district who's with an organization to support local pharmacies, to support the breast cancer awareness, to advocate for some policy and there is the resident from Ithaca, there's the person from Binghamton, there's the business person from Norwich or Catskill or Hudson. And so, you know, you get a distorted view. And I did, too, right, I was not a member of Congress. I mean, despite the television ads, I was not in Congress for 30 years, I was only in Congress for a year and a half. You would've thought I was responsible for everything these last 30 years in America. But I spent, you know, a lot of time in local government, you don't have that appreciation until you're here. You think it is as dramatic and theatrical as you see and it isn't. The only other thing I'll say very quickly is, what I learned and have learned to appreciate, now I've served in the legislatures before, both in county and the state legislature, but neither of them rely on committees as much as the House does. The business of the House gets done in committees, and those committees have very strict jurisdiction. This comes from Thomas Jefferson, by the way, the very basic concept that you start from the bottom and work your way up in order to get legislation done and in order to ensure that, you know, that we're good at what we do, and by the way, if you're listening, you can argue with whether or not we are. But that said, in order to be good at what we do, we specialize, right? The committee specialize in topic areas, and the debate and the work product is it occurs at the committee level. And a lot of really spirited debates and disagreements occurred at the committee level. You don't always see that because, you know, you only see the end product. It's not sausage being made, it's not some, you know, discredited thing going on behind. It's actually here we are debating and crafting legislation. But it's a rigid, structured committee process. What comes to the floor must ultimately have started someplace else. Yes, we bypass that process from time to time, but every piece of legislation of note is crafted and recrafted and refined in a committee. And that really is very cool for a person who likes government. It's pretty interesting as people who celebrate democracy because, right, it's sort of compartmentalized before it gets to the big body. And it is where members of Congress become specialists in certain areas. And so it's funny, when I was a county executive, I would tell you we needed to have a knowledge base that was a mile wide and a few feet deep. In Congress, it's the other way around. It's sort of you become narrowly focused and deeply focused and have experience, deep experience in a narrower field of information.

GR: This is a perfect segue to the last question. We got about a couple of minutes left, I wanted to make sure I asked you this, but what you just said is one of the things that I tried to teach the students in my introductory American politics class this semester. I'm about to meet them on Monday for my last class meeting with them. And a lot of them, like everybody else in this country, are worried about the state of politics in America, they don't like a lot of what they see. So is there something that you can give me in about a minute or so that I could leave them with as a parting message from you to them?

MM: This is a participatory and volunteer sport. Our democracy, our republic requires your participation, and we must acknowledge that that participation is voluntary. So choose to be engaged. You want the system to be better, you have to be better. You want politicians to pay attention, you've got to engage. And it's not just in the social media, it's not just in the yelling on the streets, it's not just in the letters to the editor or the campaigns. It's every day engaging in a way that tries to move the conversation. Maybe it's toward a direction you favor, but still engage and don't give up. This place, this country is still the greatest republic the sun is ever shined upon, to quote Teddy Roosevelt. But it is always in need of our earnest engagement. Participate and volunteer to be engaged in that process. And I promise you, you'll see progress and we will continue to evolve in very promising ways as a country.

GR: Oh, that's great, thanks for that. That was Marc Molinaro, again, Congressman Molinaro, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. And again, under the circumstances, you didn't have to do it, but you did. I wish you the best in whatever your next chapter is. And let me just say, I guess bordering on editorial comment, I think the institution needs more Marc Molinaro’s and John Katko's on both sides of the aisle. I think that would make for a better and wiser and better functioning institution. But thank you.

MM: Thank you. I appreciate it. Be well and call me any time. Maybe I'll come in and talk to one of those classes sometime.

GR: That would be wonderful. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.