The Information War: How Partisan Think Tanks Fractured American Democracy with E.J. Fagan

Khullani Abdullahi (00:01.579) Hello and welcome to the AI in Chicago podcast. I'm your host, Khullani Abdullahi, the founder of TechniAI, a Chicago-based AI governance risk compliance and strategy firm. AI Chicago spotlights, local academics, operators, entrepreneurs, and thinkers, as well as policy leaders who are scaling applied AI from their home in Illinois, but with a global impact. Each episode delivers practical stories and actionable insights, empowering leaders to understand AI and its use cases. minus the hype. Today I'm joined by Professor E.J. Fagan. He's an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago and the leading scholar on how political institutions process information and make policy decisions. His research focuses on the role of expert knowledge, interest groups, and political parties in shaping outcomes, especially inside the U.S. Congress. He's the author of The Thinkers, The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American politics from Oxford University Press. In the book, Professor Fagan examines how think tanks evolved from technocratic research organizations into central actors in partisan politics. His work has appeared in Policy Studies Journal, Party Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of European Public Policy. Dr. Fagan also co-directs the US Policy Agendas Project and regularly contributes to policy discussions. in the public in Illinois and beyond. He's also the host of the Bronx Beat podcast where Yankee fans unite. Welcome Professor Fagan. EJ (01:41.57) Thank you for having me. Khullani Abdullahi (01:42.785) Thanks. This is a very timely conversation. You are the first author I've ever had on the podcast. So thank you so much. So let's dive in. America is in a very polarized moment. I think the world is in a polarized moment. You are the author of, think, one of the most timely books that I have read in the last few years, where you talk about think tanks and this moment of polarization. Let's take a step back. How did you get here? Why was this work interesting to you? And why now? But I looked at your graduation from college. think that was 15 years between that and your PhD. Sorry to age you. You're still younger than I am, so you're fine. Tell me. EJ (02:25.433) I'm getting old. Well, there we go. You don't have to tell me how old you are. I graduated in 2009, bad year to graduate, 2009, and I moved down to DC. Kind of found, you know, worked around for a little bit. It worked for a copywriting company, writing copy for pet food companies. And eventually got my real job, which was at a think tank. Small think tank, it's called Global Financial Integrity. It's still around, though it's much smaller than it used to be. Khullani Abdullahi (02:35.711) Yes. Khullani Abdullahi (02:39.786) Okay. EJ (02:58.114) And we were working on IT money laundering issues as a nonprofit trying to essentially keep money in poor countries, money that was flowing out of poor countries. We wanted to keep them in poor countries. And we were really successful. We were releasing a couple of reports a year, and then we were using those reports to go out and to do policy advocacy. I was on the advocacy side. And for a $2 million, 10 million, 10 person organization, we were winning up against a bunch of big banks. Banks don't like anti-money laundering policy. They'd prefer to keep the laundered money in their banks. It's profitable for them. And they'd prefer not to spend money on enforcement. But we made them do it. And we, think, I'm pretty proud of the work that we did and eventually some of the work that after I left, they were able to kind of get written into law. And I go to grad school, so I get bored of that. I say, you know, I love this job, but it's not intellectual enough for me. I go and I start grad school in 2014. And we're reading all these theories of power, reading about why certain people win and lose in politics. And these theories had no room for think tanks. There was no theory to explain why we, with no resources, with no real ability to affect politics in any way, were successful at accomplishing our goals and I think doing some good and lots of other organizations like us exist in DC and around the world. And so my eventual dissertation advisor in my first seminar, you know, we're talking about these things, these things, he says, okay, AJ, well, go measure it, go figure out how to measure it. And I say, okay. And I decided I wanted to look at the most interesting think tanks. And there's a lot of think there's like hundreds of think tanks in DC. Lots of people call themselves think tanks. My organization was just, you know, one of many. And I decided that the most interesting think tanks were not organizations like mine that were working with both parties, that were trying to produce basically academic research, then use it, know, injected it kind of into the policy sphere. But they were think tanks that were much more partisan. When you kind of walk around DC, the impression at the time, and I think certainly now, was that places like the Center for American Progress, the Heritage Foundation, Khullani Abdullahi (05:06.56) Bye. EJ (05:16.846) the American Enterprise Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which are the four think tanks I follow in the book, were the most powerful organizations in town. And even though they were large, they were not as large as some others out there. And even, you know, they didn't have the kind of money that like the Chamber of Commerce had in those types of places. But these were powerful organizations. I said, want to study them. And it took me a while to figure out kind of I kind of knew how I wanted to study them, which you can talk about. But it took me a while to figure out kind of what's the interesting question. you know, scientific questions surrounding them. And eventually I realized that, well, if they get what they want, they are going to polarize American politics. That is, Republicans will become more conservative and Democrats will become more progressive. And that will lead to, I think, the situation we have today. And we can talk about the findings of the book, but then I went off to do the research and did the research and the book came out. Khullani Abdullahi (06:05.43) Right. Khullani Abdullahi (06:13.185) And then here we are. Okay, so I just want to frame a little bit of my takeaways from the book and then dive into questions, right? So everyone who's listening should go read this book, especially if you want to understand the moment that we're in. Okay, so over the last few decades, American politics hasn't just polarized ideologically. One of the takeaways from your book that I got was that it's also polarized informationally. And so since the 1970s, one of the things you mentioned is the growth in the number of US think tanks. And then also you pegged the 1970s as a moment in time where... party polarization is rising. And explain the relationship between the growth in the think tanks and the rising polarization in Congress. You suggest in your book and assert that prior to the 1970s, in the 60s, we saw a lot of bipartisan legislation from the civil rights. Walk us through what happened in the 1970s. and how these two elements of polarization or these two factors in increasing polarization relate to one another. EJ (07:36.206) Sure, so the early 1970s really is the kind of the low point in polarization in the United States. There's other periods where we've had very high polarization. So right after the Civil War, it's kind of the most obvious one. But in the 1970s, you have Republicans and Democrats working very closely on pretty much all issues. If you knew the party of a member, you probably knew less about how they're going to vote than if you knew what state they're from. Khullani Abdullahi (08:02.592) interesting. EJ (08:03.054) And that's no longer true today, right? You have members from the same state who are very different. So you go to look at, know, Tina Smith and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, they are very different members, and yet they have the same constituency that they're representing. That didn't used to be the case. It starts to diverge in the late 1970s and really accelerates in the 80s and the 90s. And by that 1995, you have political elites who are about as polarized as they are today. The public is lagging that lags that quite a bit, which we can talk about if you'd like. And the question is why? And I don't have to go through all the science with you. There's a lot of people try to explain this. And I think having found very good explanations of what changes in the 1970s, right? So things like gerrymandering don't change in the 1970s. And a lot of these explanations, they're bottom up explanations, right? They're essentially blaming polarization on the American people. So the American people led that polarization and elites responded to Khullani Abdullahi (08:36.182) Yes. Khullani Abdullahi (08:57.035) Mm-hmm. EJ (09:01.422) you know, changing political geographies, changing preferences of people. And there's just very little evidence for that. And I think, you know, I got very unsatisfied with those studies. And so I decided to think about what's happening in the 1970s. And this is concurrently where I'm thinking about this Think Tank project. And I go, well, in the early 1970s, before the Heritage Foundation was founded, it's 1973, you have a lot of policy making that's occurring. Khullani Abdullahi (09:06.923) to support that. Khullani Abdullahi (09:31.008) Right. EJ (09:31.23) And the, by this time you have a fully fledged conservative ideology that's very similar to what we have today. That goes back to the national review in the 1950s, right? And you have people calling themselves conservatives and you have conservative activists who feel betrayed when Richard Nixon doesn't act like a conservative a lot of the times. Richard Nixon founded the EPA and appointed a very progressive administrator to set up the EPA. Richard Nixon proposed a national basic income basically. Khullani Abdullahi (09:47.797) Yeah. Right. EJ (10:01.262) and something called a negative income tax. And we can go down the list. And this is true of Gerald Ford. This was true of Dwight D. Eisenhower. This is true of Republicans in the Senate and the House. so some of these are causing all of these people who call themselves conservatives to act like moderates, essentially to act like everybody else. And the answer, my answer, is to think a little bit about how people make decisions. When you go out and you have a problem that you need to solve and politics forces you to attend to problems. In you often don't get to choose what problems you attend to. Things hit the agenda and you got to do something. You have to apply some solution to that because voters are demanding it. So when Cleveland's lake or river lights on fire, there's only so many ways to solve that. or, you know, there's smog in every American city. And one of them is to establish something like an EPA. Khullani Abdullahi (10:41.217) Yeah. EJ (11:00.462) And so you have this dynamic where Republicans are forced to solve the same problems that Democrats are. And then they're forced to talk to the same experts, because there's not any alternatives. There is no Heritage Foundation. And so they all go out, they all talk to the same experts, there's a range of ideas. Republicans have a slightly different politics than Democrats, and so they might pick a slightly different solution. Democrats didn't like the idea of a negative income tax as a means of distributing welfare. Republicans did. But it's all basically in the same kind of range of ideas. Khullani Abdullahi (11:33.857) Is it fair to say that they were drawing from a common pool of data and expertise? EJ (11:40.31) Absolutely, right. And those experts were in places like universities, the heyday of universities influencing public policies in the 50s and 60s, in nonpartisan think tanks, places like the Brookings Institution, the Rand Corporation, the Urban Institute, and probably most importantly in the federal bureaucracy, where you have bureaucrats who have been working for a very long time on very specific issues, and they have advice to offer people. And so conservatives, they look at Republicans betraying them because every time it's time to go out and do something in politics, they come back with an option, which is usually establish a new government program. That is that that's usually the advice you're going to get. You how do you solve this problem? You establish a new government program where a libertarian really kind of wants the opposite. The libertarian kind of says, I don't want to do anything. Right. Like, I get that there's a problem out there. I don't think government should do anything. But these. What's that? Khullani Abdullahi (12:28.607) Yes. Yes, let the market come up with a solution. EJ (12:39.022) Let the market solve it, you know, it is not government's business to suffer. Grover Cleveland, who was a president in the 1800s, you know, responded to a major hurricane in Texas by saying, it's not my problem. And conservatives don't like, conservatives like that. That's how conservatives think about most public policy problems in America. And it's not how progressives do. But this agenda setting dynamic. Khullani Abdullahi (12:42.389) Right. EJ (13:01.662) is just creating a world where whenever a new problem pops up, a new government program pops up. And so the government had seen massive growth between the 1950s and the 1970s kind of within the system. You these well-evolved experts. There's a system of experts that's created. And then that system of experts is fueling the growth of government. And a group of conservative activists, three conservative activists who are... unhappy with this, led by the eventual president of the Heritage Foundation who recently passed away, Ed Fulner, they decide that they want to create a different model. These are three congressional staffers. There's an origin story that we can tell if you like, but I think it's probably not true, but there's an origin story. So they're meeting in the basement of the house office building, I think, in the cafeteria. Khullani Abdullahi (13:44.801) I want to hear it. EJ (13:54.414) And the president of the American Enterprise Institute, which is kind of the leading, you you would say Republican-aligned, I would even say conservative think tank in D.C. at the time, is there a meeting with them? And they had just released a report on why the federal government shouldn't fund a supersonic jet. I believe this is eventually what became the Condor. I actually don't know. never looked that up. And they release a book about this the day after the appropriation passed with the Condor. with federal funding for a supersonic jet. And the three staffers led by Ed Folner go, why didn't you release that a week ago? Maybe we could have won. Maybe we could have affected the vote. And what the president of the American Enterprise Institute says is, we're not playing on that time scale. We're intellectuals. We're academics. It's very much the way the American Enterprise Institute thinks about stuff to this day is that they are a university without students rather than an interest group. Khullani Abdullahi (14:43.667) and trust. Khullani Abdullahi (14:51.553) Interesting. EJ (14:52.75) And so the three of them say, well, we can do better. We can do what they're doing, but we can be more strategic about it. And so 1973, with the help of one of their fathers, one of them is Joseph Kors, heir to the Kors Brewing Fortune, they found a small interest group called the Heritage Foundation. And they decide that they are going to produce not only very conservative public policy ideas, Khullani Abdullahi (14:57.355) Yeah. EJ (15:21.902) they're going to produce it strategically. We're going to act like an interest group, they're going to be smart in manipulating the media, and they are going to use that to take conservatives and get in between them and the experts. Instead of the neutral experts giving them neutral advice, they're gonna give them conservative advice to say, the way you can actually solve this problem is with this conservative idea, whether or not that actually works. Khullani Abdullahi (15:23.776) interesting. Khullani Abdullahi (15:50.859) So there's a portion in the book where you talk about ideology and the definition of ideology and how it relates to kind of a reflexive commitment to a single worldview, then almost in a fait accompli necessarily predetermining a priori any positions you'll take later. Was that a moment of ideology over any objective facts? Was there like a fissure in that moment where it was, American Enterprise Institute is producing some conservative research. We have an objective that is not going to be accomplished unless we research and deploy that research in these strategic ways. So was there like a clearly defined objective and goal that they articulated that they were working towards? And if so, what was it? EJ (16:49.56) So I don't think that there was, there's not a breaking point. Let me back up and think about what is ideology, right? There's some stuff that you want. You want government to look a certain way. And that's actually not the way that politics, electoral politics, thinks about public policy. Electoral politics thinks about public policy usually in a problem solving context. There's a problem on the agenda and people are asking me to solve it. Those could be my voters, those could be interest groups and stakeholders, those could be my friends and family, right? People are yelling at me, solve this problem now. And that relies on a non-ideological factual basis, which is, does this public policy change solve the problem? What is the effect of this public policy change on that problem? Or even how bad is the problem in the first place? That's kind of another kind of precursor question. Is the climate actually getting warmer or not, right? Khullani Abdullahi (17:42.079) Or does the problem exist? Is it real? What is its nature? Yes. EJ (17:47.694) Or, you know, do tax cuts increase the deficit or not? These are basic questions that have a cause and effect element to them. Exactly. I teach research methods to my graduate students. So every is my favorite class to teach. I teach grad research methods every spring. And the thing I tell them... Khullani Abdullahi (17:57.193) independent of ideology. EJ (18:12.042) is that you are social scientists. Your job is to be objective. Your job is not to make normative judgments when interpreting your data. Now, you can talk about normative implications of data. That happens all the time. But we leave that to the philosophers. We leave that to politicians, to theologians. They decide what's right and wrong. We decide what is and is not. We work on those factual questions. But when we get into the realm of politics, there's a couple of Khullani Abdullahi (18:31.964) is. EJ (18:41.326) things that make that more complicated. you don't actually care why a public policy change gets passed. You just want it passed. You want our taxes lower. arguing that lowering taxes makes the deficit smaller, you'll do that, right? If you can make that argument and it'll result in lower taxes, then you can make that argument all day. Kevin Hassett's in the Trump White House. He's been doing that his entire career out of these conservative think tanks. Khullani Abdullahi (19:07.051) Does he believe that though? EJ (19:09.024) I think, that's the second part, I I think because of the way our brains work, I think he does. I have spent a lot of time talking to people across the political spectrum who work at think tanks. And with a few exceptions, some of whom are quoted extensively in my book, I think that people are true believers. They think they are right. And we know this, we have lots of studies that when people who are smart and educated and have lots of information hold a strong opinion, Khullani Abdullahi (19:13.621) head. EJ (19:37.816) they will find information to confirm their opinion, regardless of how well it is true. It is actually easier to fool somebody who is smart and educated and really motivated than it is to fool someone who is dumber and less educated and less motivated. And that is, it explains a lot of politics, right? When you think about how people relate to politics. Khullani Abdullahi (19:54.197) That's insane. That is so significant. How do you, so you're saying that the literature and the data supports the idea that the people who argue that, or some of them who argue that vaccines don't work, that the EPA guidelines on whatever are chemical exposure, right? Yeah. EJ (20:18.722) think RFK Jr. is a very smart man, right? I think these are very smart people who believe that they are correct. And they... Khullani Abdullahi (20:28.199) on the basis of what? They have data completely. EJ (20:31.918) You know, on the basis of the evidence they have seen, right? I mean, the way to think about this is that... There's a reason why science is deductive and not inductive. Induction leads to confirmation bias. You can always find data to support the conclusion you would like it to support. You can say like, well, Ronald Reagan cut taxes and the deficit went down the 90s. It's gotta be a long-term effect of that. And then if I add 10 years to the tax increases in 1993 and 1989, well, then I get a deficit 10 years later. Khullani Abdullahi (20:55.368) Right. Khullani Abdullahi (21:01.857) Yeah. EJ (21:12.334) That's, you can find that, you can find information to tell you that you're right. And if you're smarter and you're looking for more information, you'll find more of it. And we've done all sorts of experiments, in fact, I'm teaching my students about this on Thursday. We've done all sorts of experiments where you put information, you have some sort of misinformation that somebody believes, and you put some good high quality, like best practices, science communication, information in front of them and they read it and they after you retest them after they have spent some time with it they are more certain of their misinformation than before you started. That's why I always tell my people who have family members who you know might believe some things they don't believe just don't bother arguing with them right you're only going to make it worse. Khullani Abdullahi (22:02.369) There's no data that you can send. There's no report that you can share. There's no argument that can be constructed for the vast majority of people, whether they are experts or not. EJ (22:12.152) for a lot of people. I'm not gonna say the vast majority. I'm gonna say people who are really into politics. There's something that politics does to our monkey brains that makes it difficult for us to think rationally about things. And I train social scientists, right? And the social scientists I train are very into politics. I am very into politics. And you have to have your guardrails up. Khullani Abdullahi (22:21.13) interesting. Khullani Abdullahi (22:34.773) These are the people that go into the think tanks, EJ. Right? There's a question by, I was reading, I think, in your book about how many people have PhDs in the think tanks, right? The people that you are shaping and teaching and the environment in which you were shaped. is one, is this inevitable? And if you think that it's not inevitable, what would need to happen so that we are not EJ (22:38.506) And there's a selection, right? EJ (22:44.302) . EJ (22:56.223) It. Khullani Abdullahi (23:03.989) that the people shaping policy, our greatest experts in the country, are not falling victim to this inability to see epistemic and empirical facts independently of ideology. EJ (23:17.76) It is not inevitable. There are lots of good people, even at ideological think tanks, who have a very sober mind. Usually it is in their subject matter expertise. And so even at the Heritage Foundation, there are people over the years who have done very good work on issues that they are very well informed about. The problem become, there's two problems. One is that these organizations select for ideologues. Khullani Abdullahi (23:24.532) Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (23:44.721) All right. EJ (23:45.228) I mean, if you talk to people, these organizations, they are clear-eyed in their belief, they are revolutionaries. It's like you're talking to Robespierre, right? They think they are correct and they're gonna hire people who think like them and they're gonna reward people who produce reports showing that they are correct and their donors are going to pay or are going to spend more money or give them more money when they produce those reports. But there's a lot of people working in DC who are not like that. So I'll shout out one who... Khullani Abdullahi (24:14.273) Please. EJ (24:14.312) I think if you read the book is very of a constant character in my book. His name is Bob Greenstein. Greenstein was the founder of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And I, through my conversations with him, through my research into Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, through talking to other people there, I was very impressed with their ability to stay objective. There's a couple of ways that they do it. So one is just as an organizational culture, their culture has always been to stick to the facts. And this is actually, think, serve them well. throughout history where they've actually been able to convince people who are not progressives that to support them. So Bob Creasoning had a great relationship with Bob Dole and was able to kind of fight off some conservative policy changes by convincing Bob Dole that they were bad public policy. And the other thing is that they don't expand outside of their core issues. They have a set of things that they work on. They believe, and I think they're correct, that Khullani Abdullahi (24:47.425) So, yeah. EJ (25:11.298) Progressives are on the right side of the facts on those issues, and they don't go work on other stuff. They're not doing work on, I'm not going to comment on whether or not progressives are on the right side of things, but foreign policy, climate change, civil rights, right? These are not questions, abortion, that the Senate Budget and Policy Priorities talks about. They talk about how if you increase food stamp spending, child poverty is going to go down, and that type of thing. Or, you know, you Khullani Abdullahi (25:22.549) Right. EJ (25:37.55) You change the child tax credit in this way and it's only gonna cost this much money. That's what they're good at. And there are Republican think tanks who are trying to do something similar. And the last half of my book, I actually talk about a couple of them because I've been very impressed with them. The R Street Institute is one that I've always been very impressed with. And they decide basically that they're going to do the Heritage Foundation thing where they produce information that conservatives like. Khullani Abdullahi (25:45.343) Very empirical, Khullani Abdullahi (25:54.872) That's it. Right? EJ (26:07.566) and they're gonna aggressively market it and use it in a kind of in a lobbying context. But they're only gonna do it on issues where conservatives have a point. And they're not gonna pick a fight on every single issue the way that a politician would. These other think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, Center for American Progress, to a lesser extent, the American Enterprise Institute, they want to, there are political organizations, they will pick fights on every single issue. They will take a very progressive position on lots of issues. And I think that that leads to intellectual environments which are kind of silently dishonest. And I think it's bad for politicians. I think it's bad for political parties that they've made these alliances with these think tanks. think that one example I tell in my book is about the Democratic Party. Khullani Abdullahi (26:54.209) Right? Like how does this dishonesty, how is it operationalized? Right? Is it operationalized in very like tactical ways where we are finding, presumably people are discarding data and refusing to consider it. People are ignoring data. People are fabricating data. Like how are mechanically are they? EJ (27:01.931) It. EJ (27:18.722) Yeah, I I don't think it's fabricating. I do believe that most people, and I used to say all, I used to tell my students that the best way to understand politics is to make sure that everybody's a hero in their own story. Everybody's acting for what they think is good public policy, good for America, and everybody just has very strong disagreements about that. I don't know that's true anymore. I'm not sure I'm willing to give Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation that benefit of the doubt. I'm certainly not giving the Trump administration that benefit of the doubt. Khullani Abdullahi (27:47.07) Right. EJ (27:47.118) But ignoring that for a second, I don't think that they're fabricating data. But I think that especially when answering kind of tough questions about public policy, it is difficult to, or it is easy to come for reasonable people to come to different conclusions, especially if you're not being very careful about what you're arguing for. In an example in the book I give, I talk a little bit about the 2009 stimulus bill. talk, I graduated in college in 2009 and all of sudden we're losing 500,000 jobs a month. It's a bad time to be in the job market. It's a bad time to be an incumbent political party. And the democratic party rightly understands that they have a problem on their hands they need to solve. They need to do as much as they can to fix the economy or else they're going to pay for it in the next election. And so they're going to pass a big stimulus bill. And there was a very large stimulus bill. passed in January of 2009. That was put together very quickly. And if you know you're going to spend a whole bunch of money, well, you have to spend that money on something. And there's better and worse ways, especially in terms of your short term political interests, in spending that money. Rahm Emanuel was actually asked about this before the Obama took office. This was November, shortly after the election. He was at a Wall Street Journal panel discussion. And they asked about, know, there's a crisis, what are you gonna do about this crisis? And he said, well, you never let a crisis go to waste. He said that this is an opportunity to get something done, right? We know that public policy is gonna move through Congress swiftly over the next few months, and we wanna make sure that we get stuff done that we like. And that's a problem. That's a problem for a political party because they have stuff they've wanted to do the whole time, regardless of whether or not there's a crisis. Khullani Abdullahi (29:30.241) they're just collecting in the event that there's an opportunity or they're back in power. Was this before or after Naomi Klein's shock doctrine? Was it? Right? Because I think she... I don't know. You have? Yeah, okay. But I'm assuming that was... Yeah. EJ (29:36.428) Yet we call this the multiple streams process in political science. The idea that experts are, yep, go for it, sorry. EJ (29:49.516) I don't know when that came out. I've talked to Naima Klein before actually, but I don't, Naima Klein by the way, interviewed me at the Money Laundering podcast back in the day. The anti-money laundering organization. this is November of 2008 that Rahm Emanuel says that. But before that, in September of 2008, actually one day before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, John Podesta who is the Khullani Abdullahi (29:58.452) I love Khullani Abdullahi (30:13.557) Mm-hmm. EJ (30:17.614) the president of the Center for American Progress, released a report saying we should spend $100 billion on green energy. We should do a bunch of things. We should, you know, spend money on solar and wind and loans for innovative new clean energy companies. And, there's a whole list of things he said, we should spend this much money on that. And it didn't say we should spend, it did say like, yeah, this will employ some people, but it didn't say like, hey, we're in the biggest recession of my lifetime. and we need to spend a lot of money in an efficient way to get the best bang for our buck. And this is the best way to do it. Now you said like, yeah, they'll employ some people, but really we care about green energy. Well, then Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt the next day. It is clear by the November election that we are going to be in a very bad recession and that a large stimulus bill is going to have to pass. Podesta being the president of the largest democratic think tank has then appointed the chair of Barack Obama's transition committee. And there he's charged, among others, with coming up with what's going to happen. What are we going to do? And he says, well, why don't we spend $100 billion on clean energy? And I might think that's a good public policy. I think it actually has paid off in the long term. I think that that's the reason why, for example, Tesla exists, because it got a clean energy loan from the Department of Energy in 2009. It's the reason why I think climate change is Not as bad as it was as we thought it was going to be in 2009, that we are are we're on track to at least get closer to to to to to where we thought we would be. And and that's great. That was good environmental public policy, least from his perspective. But it was really bad for Democrats in the 2010 midterm because it's not the best way to spend money. I'm sure if you had asked a neutral economist, you know, at one of those neutral think tanks or at a good academic department, someone who wasn't being motivated, they would have said, Well, here's this other way to spend that money. You'll get more jobs out of it. And maybe some Democrats wouldn't have lost if they had done that. know, there's, know, if you're going to spend $900 billion, $100 billion is a lot of that, right? That inefficiency really matters. And I quote some studies in the book showing that basically it created net zero jobs by 2010. That $100 billion did eventually help. Khullani Abdullahi (32:40.065) It was wasted for the purposes of job creation in like a 12 to 24 month window. EJ (32:44.484) Yep. For the problem that Democrats are being held accountable for then, right? It did not. it, and that was gonna be a tough election for Democrats for variety of reasons, but it was a really bad election. Khullani Abdullahi (32:50.858) Yes. Khullani Abdullahi (32:54.977) was a poor strategy. So it was good public policy on the longer time horizon, but it was a poor strategy for the short term incentives for maintaining elect. Yeah. EJ (33:04.654) Yeah, it was bad advice, right? And I think is I don't think Podesta was really lying. I think he believed it, right? I think he believed like, you know, it's pretty good. It's going to create some jobs, maybe not as many jobs, it'll be close since then. You know, if we're going to spend $100 billion, this is good public policy. Khullani Abdullahi (33:18.497) In that analysis, was he relying on data that was outside of the scientific consensus? Because this is the part that I think worries me, right? And this is what feels different about this moment as a lay individual who pays attention to politics but is not in that realm, is that it feels like, you talk about knowledge regimes, and I think this is a good question for this moment, is the way in which expert EJ (33:28.215) No. Khullani Abdullahi (33:48.129) data is being created, disseminated and implemented. Has that changed or evolved? How and why? I know we talked about this in your book, but I want you to share that. EJ (33:57.686) Yeah. So has it changed and evolved? It absolutely has changed and evolved. Scientists used to have a monopoly on expertise. It was difficult 30 years ago for an anti-vax believer to get a platform, to have credibility, to get the ear of policymakers, and to put their information out there. Khullani Abdullahi (34:06.677) Mm-hmm. Khullani Abdullahi (34:16.277) Mm-hmm. EJ (34:27.79) I'm a big believer in professional norms and peer review. And if I publish something in a journal that's bullshit, I'm going to be professionally punished for it. Somebody might replicate the data and find that I'm wrong. We have peer review to try to prevent me from publishing it in the first place. And professionally, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be Andrew Wakefield. I want to be the guy who's right. And I get rewarded for that, right? If someone wants to hire me for my next job, right, it's gonna be because they respect my work. That is not the case at an ideological think tank. You are not necessarily rewarded for being right. You're rewarded for affecting public policy. And those are two different things. And there are some think tanks that jealously guard their reputation to make sure that people can trust them. Khullani Abdullahi (35:14.869) interests. Right. EJ (35:25.262) If you think about the perspective of a policymaker, there's a lot of information hitting them at any given time. It is underrated how difficult it is to be a policymaker and to just have this fire hose pointed at you at all times. Everybody's telling you everything. And you have to kind of siphon through that information. And there are some places that they want to be very clear. Like when we say this, that means it has gone through the scientific rigor and you can trust it. Khullani Abdullahi (35:33.109) to keep up. EJ (35:53.422) But when you also think about like a Heritage Foundation or Center for American Progress, they can tell a narrative and say, no, all those neutral people are wrong. The Democrats might say they're corporate. The Republicans might say those university professors, they're liberals. And you should listen to me, because I'm going to tell you what you think is right in the first place. And that's something that's very powerful to a human being. I up in New Jersey, and my parents are big hockey fans. I think about watching my mom at a hockey game. And there is no call that the ref can make against the New Jersey Devils that is correct. Right? I mean, my mother will yell and curse, my sweet little mother will yell and curse at a referee that says that that was tripping when it clearly was tripping, right? And that plays out on a larger basis in ideological circles. There's something we could call the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you have a situation where people who know a little are often Khullani Abdullahi (36:24.987) Wow. It doesn't matter. It's plain, baby. Khullani Abdullahi (36:37.825) Right. EJ (36:50.094) too confident and are extra confident. As they start to know a little more, they become less confident and then their confidence increases as they become true experts. And I think the defense against, yep. Khullani Abdullahi (37:00.243) I think there's another phenomenon where now they're easier to manipulate with a little bit of confirmation data. So as you grow up the expertise curve, now it doesn't necessarily ensure that you will not fall prey to things that are factually incorrect. EJ (37:20.64) Right, I think you need more expertise than people think to insulate yourself against that type of information. I mean, it looks like a PhD. I mean, it's little self-serving of me to say, you should just defer to the experts. know, I spent six years. Khullani Abdullahi (37:28.417) What does that look like? Khullani Abdullahi (37:39.275) There are a lot of PhDs who are compromising the democratic republic of United States. EJ (37:42.612) I, you got it, like, and it's true, right? If I, here's one. If I am telling you what you already want to hear, I would be skeptical, right? If the conclusion benefits me, that should be a red flag. So I'll give you an example. So there's a report from the Heritage Foundation. Khullani Abdullahi (37:47.169) So what training is HD training? EJ (38:11.278) or a series of reports from the Heritage Foundation about the cost of a climate change bill that was being considered in Congress in the early 2010s. There's several iterations of this bill, there's several iterations of the reports. But there was one report, I forget exactly the year it was that I quoted in the book, I think it was 2011, that was asking basically what would the effect of passing a cap and trade bill be on electricity costs? And their answer was effectively a catastrophic answer. Right? If you pass this cap and trade bill, there will be huge increases on American household electricity spending and a massive cost to GDP. And they said that, and then there were five other experts who estimated a much, much smaller number. Now, the Center for American Progress estimated that it would have no effect on GDP. Khullani Abdullahi (38:43.681) The world will fall apart. Khullani Abdullahi (38:56.213) Did they have a? EJ (39:09.08) that essentially you have, their math worked out so there was a perfect zero number, right? GDP will be the same whether or not you pass this bill. That is implausible, right? But it was also implausible about the Heritage Foundation's number. I dug into their methodology and I looked at their numbers and they assumed that the cost of wind and solar would be constant for 30 years, right? So installing a new solar panel, or installing a new kilowatt hour of solar electricity. That's a bad faith assumption. But you have to do the real expert thing to get there, right? I had to read the footnotes. I actually... Khullani Abdullahi (39:38.177) That's a bad faith assumption, right? Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (39:49.089) You had to actually dig in between the model that they used to arrive at their conclusions. EJ (39:54.476) Yeah, and that's how I train my students to think. That's how good experts think, right? They slow down and they say, okay, what is the argument that you're making? Politicians are generalists. They are busy. There's a Heritage Foundation, one of their first kind of innovations is that they made their report short. The idea was that they wanted to write a report that you could read on the taxi cab ride between your office and the airport. Usually a two pager. And that irons out a lot of those nuances. and makes it very difficult for people to judge the credibility of information. These reports, they look more credible, they're better formatted and published than my stuff. They have more money for figures. And mine is actually peer reviewed. And I wanna tell people just to take peer review naively, just to assume that everything is right. That's not how the scientific system works. Khullani Abdullahi (40:34.121) and yours is actually peer reviewed. Khullani Abdullahi (40:44.897) You've seen some of the academic pride, EJ (40:49.902) When we're talking about things, you might say, use the word consensus, right? Whether there's a consensus. That is developed through many different studies, right? Through debate, through interrogation, through a long time. It takes time to get there. You asked me about whether or not that Green Jobs Report was the consensus. And the problem is, I'd say probably not, right? I think a good economist would look at that report and be like, this is not very good. But also it was a novel question. There weren't. Khullani Abdullahi (40:59.009) Christmas. EJ (41:19.118) 10 reports on it. There was one report making one claim that I don't think held up very well. But if you are Barack Obama or a Democratic senator and you don't kind of know what the answer is, but you also know that it'd be nice to fund a bunch of solar energy, you're willing to believe it. And that's really problematic in politics. Khullani Abdullahi (41:38.463) You might say, yeah, yeah. Right. EJ (41:45.102) I think that the best politicians, they are good at judging that information because they ultimately are held accountable for it. Ultimately, whether or not, I don't know, this is an AI podcast, right? Whether or not there's massive negative social impact related to the deployment of AI over the next decade is a political question, or rather it has massive political implications. And you... Khullani Abdullahi (42:05.601) Mm-hmm. Khullani Abdullahi (42:10.475) Yeah, but it's also an empirical question. EJ (42:13.268) It's also an empirical question, right? And it's hard question. It's a question that's really difficult to understand and no one really knows the true answer. And getting it right is important. And it's going to be important for political parties. If you see a job loss similar to the manufacturing crisis of the 2000s. across America, like that's gonna cause problems for political parties. And if you're smart, you'll find ways to at least, you know, do your best to solve those problems. But it's not an easy task. There's a reason why I'm on a run for office, That's not, that's hard. I prefer to ask my narrow, deep questions and not try to balance between all of these others. Khullani Abdullahi (42:49.857) You want to tell Khullani Abdullahi (42:54.611) and producing the books. Well, hopefully people are reading the articles and the books. One question that your most recent comments. EJ (43:02.136) don't read our articles. Our articles are awful to read. Read those political scientists who do the yeoman's work of synthesizing all of that into something that's written in English. My book is sort of written in English, it's kind of homework. Khullani Abdullahi (43:09.585) translating. I wanna... I skipped over some of the charts, but I thought it was very accessible for a lay audience. EJ (43:21.038) It, it, I, I look, recommend people buy it. costs me, I get 90 cents when you buy it. so, you know, buy the hard car, I get three bucks. But, but I'd say like, you know, the scientists are not good at communicating to normal people, including the politicians. It's not our job, right? We're not, it's not what we specialize at. We are hyper specialized people and think tanks in when they're operating well. Khullani Abdullahi (43:43.179) Yes. Khullani Abdullahi (43:47.658) Right. EJ (43:47.688) are the bridge, right? They are the link between the world of basic science, of complication, and the world of politics, and to some extent the media, though the think tanks don't play as much in the media as people would think. Khullani Abdullahi (43:51.499) they can try to out. Khullani Abdullahi (44:00.767) Let me ask about that last point where you said when they operate well. In your book, you talk about the rise of the Heritage Foundation and the right, and even later on when you were quoting Rush Limbaugh, of all people, you talk about this fact that there was once a neutral knowledge regime and there were areas of expertise that were neutral and that neutrality was seen as undesirable and that it needed a counterweight. So that, this is the phase that we're in. EJ (44:29.942) It was seen as undesirable by conservatives, right? Khullani Abdullahi (44:32.337) by conservatives, right? And so now there is no neutral knowledge regime. There's a progressive knowledge regime and there's a conservative knowledge regime, but other countries don't operate like this. So I think one thing that you pointed out in your book is that the model of think tanks and their relation to policy in Congress in the United States of America is not the same model that exists elsewhere. like as, so two questions, one, How do think tanks operate and relate to policymakers in other countries? And then two, your book almost lays out a phase one and a phase two. Rolling this out into the future, what does the evolution of American think tank and their evolving role look like? And what are some of the factors that will shape that? I know big questions, but you're an academic, so yes. EJ (45:20.29) Yeah, that's the job, right? So you... first question. Sorry, can you repeat the first question? My brain just completely farted on me. Khullani Abdullahi (45:35.315) Yes, so I can cut this part out, no worries. So think tanks in the rest of the world don't necessarily opt in the West. EJ (45:38.99) It's okay. EJ (45:45.366) Okay, yeah, yes, okay, gotcha, yeah. All right, so if I go to most other countries in the world, the political parties will have some thing that looks like a think tank that they control as a political party. This takes a variety of forms. It can be through university systems. In Germany, I think it's kind of the clearest where you have think tanks which are publicly funded by the government. the political parties, MPs, members of parliament are sitting on the board and they are directly supervising that think tank. There are some exceptions, there's some countries where there are none of these, but for the most part, you go to a democracy, you're going to find these think tanks to the point where the United Nations Development Program, when it sets up a new democracy, if you have a transition to a democracy and the UNDP goes on the ground, one of the things they do is they create think tanks because they're important to policymaking. They're important to translate kind of that information together. Khullani Abdullahi (46:36.833) interesting. EJ (46:42.222) And in the United States, there is no such public funding. Think tanks are interest groups. They are privately controlled interest groups that are trying to change political parties, not working, not being controlled by political parties. And that really changes their incentives. When a political party controls a think tank, they are trying to win. The goal of a political party is to win the next election and win it as big as possible. And so they want information that helps them win, which is usually good factual information. They don't want the think tank trying to change them. But a private interest group has their own policy goals, like any other interest group, right? Like the American Petroleum Institute, the Heritage Foundation has goals that it wants to accomplish, and it will try to manipulate policy makers to do that. But because there's no other alternative for political parties, the political parties are kind of captive to this. And there's a couple of other countries where we see this. Israel is the most prominent one where you see these kinds, especially that the right in Israel has these think tanks which have sort of captured them. And that leads to the kind of breaking their decision-making process. You mentioned that there's two knowledge regimes. I think there's three, right? I think there's still a neutral knowledge regime that political parties can draw on, but that's competing now against these partisan knowledge regimes. It's competing against confirmation bias, which is just very difficult. Khullani Abdullahi (48:03.457) Right. EJ (48:06.19) The future, I think, if I had to make a strong prediction, people think I'm crazy when I make this prediction, I'm gonna make a prediction that when I write my next book, which hopefully won't be about think tanks, I've been talking about them for years, but if I write another book about think tanks, that the Heritage Foundation will be less powerful than it ever was. And the reason for that is that as they've kind of gone through these cycles of being more revolutionary and more extreme, Khullani Abdullahi (48:13.952) Okay. EJ (48:35.022) they lose touch with reality and so they become less useful to policymakers. I actually don't think, we can talk about project 2025, but I don't think that if you just deleted the Heritage Foundation from the earth five years ago, that the Trump administration would be very different. I don't think public policy would be more conservative in any real way. And I can't say that about, the R Street Institute, a much smaller think tank that's doing real work and is actually impacted policy change in important ways. And to me, that tells you about, yep. Khullani Abdullahi (49:07.521) It's the claim that you just made about that last point about the Heritage Foundation's impact and efficacy. So I think lay people think of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 corpus and blueprint as one of the more and most effective think tank policy blueprints ever. you are suggesting I think that if they had not okay EJ (49:37.902) Yes. I think they are less powerful than they were 30 years ago because they've begun, they've lost the ability to kind of touch reality. There's an interesting, there was a resolution introduced to the United States Senate on Heritage's 50th anniversary. So this is 2023. was introduced by Senator Mike Lee just in time for me to write the book. So this is one of the last things I add to the book before it was published. Khullani Abdullahi (49:50.43) Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (50:00.948) New talk. EJ (50:04.59) And the resolution was congratulating Heritage on 50 years. And like any resolutions, it starts with a bunch of where as's and it says, you know, here's all the great things about the Heritage Foundation. It listed their accomplishments. And it goes in chronological order. And so they start talking about all the stuff that happened under Ronald Reagan, know, tax cuts under Ronald Reagan, know, changes to American foreign policy, treaties that Heritage helped write. And under Newt Gingrich in the 90s, he mentioned some stuff related to welfare reform and this, it goes further into the future. And by kind of the end of the Bush administration, there's no policy mentioned in all the things that he's talking about. It's all, Foundation started a media organization or they got a bunch of rich people to sponsor endowed chairs that have scholars at them. And there was nothing listed that Heritage did. Khullani Abdullahi (50:58.249) Is it because we are no longer trying to influence public policy but change the nature of governance and government? EJ (51:08.194) I think they're making content. I think Kevin Roberts wants to be, or until recently wanted to be a Fox News host and now he wants to be a podcaster. No offense. I, I, yep. Khullani Abdullahi (51:19.051) They've captured the executive and legislative apparatus of the United States of America. Khullani Abdullahi (51:28.767) Who's captured it then? It's not them. EJ (51:32.834) the conservative movement, right? The people in the Heritage Foundation. For example, if you look at the people who are kind of most prominent in the Trump administration, they didn't come out of Republican think tanks. Stephen Miller, not a Republican think tank guy. Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, not Republican think tank guys. And then you look at all the domestic policy agencies in the Trump administration, and other than immigration, they're not doing a lot. Khullani Abdullahi (51:35.233) So, okay. Khullani Abdullahi (51:46.561) Right. No. Khullani Abdullahi (51:52.758) No. Khullani Abdullahi (52:01.665) Right. EJ (52:01.742) And the stuff in immigration, they're not doing the stuff that was written in Heritage Foundation reports, right? They're doing the stuff that the white nationalist interest groups want to do. If you actually read Project 2025, it is amazing. Some of that stuff ends up the Republican party tries to do. A lot of it is too official for the Trump administration. And a lot of the people who wrote those chapters, which is unique for... Khullani Abdullahi (52:10.977) Right. Khullani Abdullahi (52:23.169) Right. EJ (52:29.198) these policy documents the Heritage Foundation put out, but they also didn't work at Heritage. I think they've raised a lot of money off of it. I think Heritage is good at claiming credit. I think they like that the Democratic Party had a giant Heritage Foundation book on stage and saying, hey, look at this. But again, the question is, who does that benefit? Khullani Abdullahi (52:30.315) actually in government. Right. Why did hair partner with them? did was hair? So was hair the derivation? Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (52:48.769) Yeah, it's so stupid. Right. Right. EJ (52:58.286) Like I think it benefits Trump, right? I think Trump gets to do a bunch of illegal stuff, but does it benefit conservatives? I don't think it does. don't think America is spending more money in 2025, 2026 than it spent under Joe Biden. It has a larger deficit, it lower economic growth. Khullani Abdullahi (53:07.061) which can still. Khullani Abdullahi (53:13.045) Well, I mean, I think something that your book makes clear is that conservative ideals, like from the Barry Goldwater Republican era, are not necessarily what Republicans today are bringing about, right? The government is not smaller. They're not being fiscally conservative or responsible. EJ (53:36.14) And I think that's a failure of their think tanks, right? I think that if you were a successful think tank, what you would do is you would have some ability to really like, you know, touch grass and understand how public policy works and convince a bunch of members to solve the problems they wanna solve. Here are some solutions that are conservative. And they would move issue by issue public policy in that conservative direction. I actually think the progressive think tanks have been more successful kind of in their version of this. But, you we can kind of talk about them if you'd like. But the reason why I think that these other startup think tanks have been successful and there's an audience for them and they are, for example, being called to testify before Congress on a per capita basis much more is because they have something to say. Right. Like if you want to say you're concerned about big government, the post office is a big government agency. And I'm sure there's lots of things you could do to make the post office smaller and more efficient. And the Heritage Foundation doesn't have anything to say about that. They don't have any ideas. But our Street Institute does. They hired a conservative who used to work at the Congressional Research Service who did post office stuff. And he wrote a lot about the post office. And if you ask me why Republicans don't have a legislative agenda, it's because the Heritage Foundation and their most powerful think tanks aren't putting one on the table. Khullani Abdullahi (54:34.753) Mm-hmm. Khullani Abdullahi (54:58.657) Right. So this is. EJ (55:00.155) The Trump administration passed less legislation in 2025 than any president's first term or first year of their second term ever. Khullani Abdullahi (55:08.517) Because they didn't rely on legislation, right? They were still very active and effective in some senses, but they just relied on ignoring the Constitution. Right. You can find one. So I think one of the things that I think really strikes me from this moment and your text is, do you see a path forward? EJ (55:20.46) Yeah, and you don't need a think tank to tell you to ignore the law, right? Khullani Abdullahi (55:36.747) for reinvigorating neutral knowledge regimes so that we are able to develop policy and maintain, keep our democratic republic, right? So what did Benjamin Franklin say? A republic, if you can keep it. It seems to me that we have to be thinking very differently about what it means to maintain and keep our democratic republic in this increased polarized environment. EJ (55:50.732) Huh? Yes. Khullani Abdullahi (56:06.389) with these competing knowledge regimes and not even to like add the misinformation and disinformation that's only going to increase in the age of AI when you can produce new sources of data at scale. What does that look like just from a historical political science, social science perspective? EJ (56:23.308) Yeah, we're not optimists, political scientists. I am an optimist though. And let me say what I think. Let me give you one vision of the future. And if a billionaire came to me and asked me how to spend some money to make this future come about, what I would tell them. Eventually, voters have to get involved. And voters have to say, we want you to deliver. Khullani Abdullahi (56:35.606) Please. EJ (56:50.614) We want something out of our political parties and we will reward the political parties that make good public policy, that are effective in accomplishing their goals and solving the problems before us. And I think the political party that pivots in that direction will be successful. I've been very impressed with kind of the Democratic Party's abundance movement, which I think is pretty strongly evidence-based and has been willing to kind of take on some of their... kind of their interest groups and some of their long held beliefs. I think that's a little bit of hope for that party going forward. And on the Republican Party, you if you think about power in politics, you know, on the right, it's the business community is power. And I think the business community doesn't want a government that's ineffective. It may want their taxes lower. The Heritage Foundation has lower-navigation taxes. Other Republicans have done that. They don't need the Heritage Foundation to tell them to cut taxes. What I think that, and so I think that they'll reward politicians and parties that make good evidence-based decisions, even if those evidence-based decisions may not be in furtherance of all the goals that they occur. I we're all better off in that case. How do we get there? I think if, again, a billionaire comes to me, I think the billionaire's first instinct is going to be to fund a bunch of centrists, right? To support. think tanks which work with both parties, places like the bipartisan policy center, academics, know, whatever. And I actually think that's the wrong strategy because politics will never go away, right? Political parties are political, right? They need, there's a political dimension to their decision making beyond just the cause and effect relationship with public policy. And in my opinion, we need more centers on budget and policy priorities. Khullani Abdullahi (58:33.131) Right. Khullani Abdullahi (58:43.041) interesting. EJ (58:43.386) We need more R Street institutes, more Niskanen centers, more places that are political. They care about solving the political goals of politicians in addition to making good public policy. And they work with one party. And so I would cut a check to those organizations. I cut a check to people who want to start other organizations like them that their ideologues, their left or right wing. But they have a foot in reality. They're committed to producing high quality information. They're committed to sometimes being, to not essentially taking a maximally liberal or conservative position on everything. And again, it's not easy, but these organizations exist. They're not as big as they could be. Places like the R Street Institute, they're bringing in like $10 million a year, $12 million a year. The Niskanen Center is bringing in $7, $8 million a year. Center budget policy priorities is quite large. Khullani Abdullahi (59:25.163) Great. EJ (59:35.52) Aba could be larger and they have state-based organizations they work with who do similar work. I think those organizations are better positioned to get us out of this than funding a bunch of kind of boring centrists. And those boring centrists I think will always fail. There's plenty of them in DC. We don't need more. They will always fail without that political dimension. Khullani Abdullahi (59:56.543) Give me, you have 100 points, allocate those 100 points in these three buckets for the explanatory force of this moment. So white supremacy, a revolt against secularism, I don't know what you would call that, increased religiosity, and then like traditional conservative values. For the ability for those three things to explain the the movement towards dollar denomination, move towards the world, the EU announcing they're no longer going to use, right? For this very critical moment where we've lost American soft power, where we failed to counter China and Russia effectively, where we've fired 2 million federal workers, like. EJ (01:00:29.708) Yeah, yes. Khullani Abdullahi (01:00:49.887) What explains this moment? You have 100 points, have white supremacy, have traditional conservative values, and you have increased religiosity. EJ (01:01:00.234) I don't think, first of all, think empirically there's not increased religiosity. Khullani Abdullahi (01:01:06.781) No, no, not increase religiosity in the sense that people are more religious, but that the people who are religious are more powerful. EJ (01:01:14.894) I think that's part, I mean, separating that from white supremacy is tough in my mind, right? Donald Trump is not a religious man. He is a white supremacist, right? And he's clearly one. And to me, the religious element is often used to justify the white supremacy. And so I'd say 20 % religiosity, 50 % white supremacy, the remainder of traditional conservative values. Khullani Abdullahi (01:01:19.105) He's not. think. Yeah. Khullani Abdullahi (01:01:34.079) Interesting. EJ (01:01:45.1) The foreign policy stuff is anti-conservative. It is the opposite of Ronald Reagan. Khullani Abdullahi (01:01:47.681) Don't worry, I feel very Republican when I say things like America must win the AI war and they give China Nvidia's latest chips. EJ (01:02:00.054) Yeah, look, I think, mean, give me some points for corruption, right? Like just straight up corruption. Donald Trump sued the United States government yesterday to get $10 billion out of the IRS for some reason, right? Khullani Abdullahi (01:02:05.301) Yes. Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (01:02:10.549) Yes. Khullani Abdullahi (01:02:14.43) for falsely auditing him several times. Okay, corruption you get, you, if you, was a fourth bucket, 10%, 10. EJ (01:02:17.218) Yes. EJ (01:02:23.117) I'm gonna say it's 50 % corruption, 30 % white supremacy, 20 % the other two. I think it's so hard to understand how much of this is sui generis to Donald Trump. there's this question, Donald Trump will be gone in a few years, he'll probably be dead a few years after that, he's not young. And the Republican party is gonna move on. And the question is, is in what direction does it move on to? Khullani Abdullahi (01:02:36.342) Yeah. Khullani Abdullahi (01:02:48.906) Where did they go? EJ (01:02:50.226) I don't believe, the reason why political scientists and others did not see Donald Trump coming, did not expect him to win is because he is so different. And I don't think that he's replicable. I don't think that JD Vance is Donald Trump. I don't think that, I don't think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is Donald Trump. I don't think that, I don't think you can build it again. You're talking about a guy, I grew up in New Jersey, who was on my TV screen from the moment I was born until, Khullani Abdullahi (01:02:58.079) Right. We. EJ (01:03:19.778) today, constantly, right? Who is a presence in people's lives, probably has had more makeup on than any man in world history, right? That's Donald Trump. And I don't think that, I don't know what happens afterwards, but I do know that those traditional conservative values have been destroyed. I don't think that Nikki Haley is coming to save the Republican party. I don't think that Ronald Reagan 2.0 is coming. And as a, Khullani Abdullahi (01:03:22.422) Yeah. Khullani Abdullahi (01:03:27.073) Thank EJ (01:03:48.928) as an American, what I hope is, is that the Democratic Party can build an enduring majority. For most of American history, one party has had a majority. And sometimes the pendulum kind of just barely swings enough to let the other side win a presidential election or something like that. But the New Deal coalition was a majority. Democrats were dominant. Before that, the Republican Party had a majority from the Civil War through the Progressive Era. And before that, the Democratic Republicans, the Jeffersonians had a majority, right? Like that was American politics for up until the 1970s. And things start breaking in 1970s for a variety of reasons. But I think that if there's a path forward, is voters finally realizing that the Republican Party is a problem. And I think that the Republican Party has been very lucky in the Trump era that some things have been timed very well for them. Inflation crisis. the economic growth that kind of occurred in the late 2010s. I COVID was unfortunately time for the Republican party. Those things have helped out the Republican party in ways that eventually that luck runs out. And I wonder if we're in a moment right now. I think about the generational changes occurring in the United States and how white supremacy is not a winning argument anymore when it used to be. One of the weird facts about the Donald Trump era. was that up until 2025, the Donald Trump era was a linear, saw a linear and constant decrease in racial polarization. is 2016 was the height of racial polarization in the United States. And every year since, more white people voted for Democrats and more non-white people voted for Republicans. And that peaked in 2024 when Donald Trump did very well among Hispanic voters and very well among Asian voters. Now they're his least popular groups other than black voters, right? They have snapped back. partially and aggressively, and that's the future electoral base of the United States. And it is, I think it is the biggest own goal in American political history that what the Republican Party has been doing on immigration enforcement over the last year. And they're going to regret it for a long time. That's my vision of America. And then maybe after that occurs, know, these, you know, elites can start, know, elites who care about good public policy can pick up the pieces. And that's what, for example, the Niskin Center, EJ (01:06:15.118) I think, Hank, that's at the very end of my book. That's their explicit goal. Khullani Abdullahi (01:06:18.911) Yeah. I went in to go donate because you had laid out a, like you go through like this tumultuous, like evolution and you can see the story. And then the Nisken Center, especially because they came out of the Cato Institute, which, you know, back in the day, I'm, I'll be 43 this year, but I remember having some very strong negative feelings about the Cato Institute. EJ (01:06:23.202) Yeah, they're great. Khullani Abdullahi (01:06:48.129) because I thought they were pushing forward a vision. Right, yes, right. And I remember just being, and they were very strong feelings. And to see them come out of that institute and then to be an empirically driven, like people with some integrity and epistemic commitments to saying things that are justified and true and believing them, I just thought that was a bright spot. And so I'm glad you're highlighting that. EJ (01:06:50.488) Probably more responsible for climate denial than anybody out there. EJ (01:07:13.806) Yeah. And they do good work. And the document that I quote in the last chapter of the book, it's written by a bunch of political scientists. In fact, kind of one of the weird coincidences, not really, maybe not coincidence, but weird happenings. Steve Tellis, who co-authored one of the documents that I wrote there, was the first person who ever read any of my work on Think Tank. He was my first discussant on any things. And he toured the park. was second year grad student work. It wasn't very good. Khullani Abdullahi (01:07:36.402) Thank EJ (01:07:42.606) And I found out later, he ghost wrote after I put it in the book, that article, and that is significant because he is also the lead editor on the book. Khullani Abdullahi (01:07:52.083) Interesting. Okay, it all comes full circle. Yeah. EJ (01:07:53.742) Right? It all comes full circle. this can, you know, listen to your social scientists, listen to your political scientists. They do good work because from the start, a bunch of political scientists were involved and I trust those guys very well. Khullani Abdullahi (01:08:07.867) There's a, I think a good place to end, which is also at the beginning of your book, which is, I will just share that you talked about how the Heritage Foundation's director of domestic policy in 1989 wrote a paper that would the basis of the Affordable Care Act. And then Tom Daschle at the Center for American Progress in 2008 writes another blueprint that a paper that would become EJ (01:08:21.804) Yep. Stuart Butler. EJ (01:08:28.002) Yep. Khullani Abdullahi (01:08:35.999) the blueprint of the ACA. And then the Democrats lose their 60 % majority in the Senate. And James Horny writes a memorandum that gets circulated. Yes. Yes. And I want to share that vignette because I think it was useful to see how legislation in tumultuous times gets passed, but also to see the influence EJ (01:08:48.055) The horny memo, as it was called in DC at the time. Khullani Abdullahi (01:09:03.931) of content and policies and white papers that were written decades before that become relevant later. And as you think about the future of think tanks, as you think about Americans need to stand up and say, what is it that we're going to intentionally do to protect our democratic republic? What kinds of things do we need to be writing? What kinds of things do we need to be building? What kinds of questions do we need to be answering, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum? so that we can get back to a time where there's a common source of truth, some brute facts that we agree on that we can then build on and borrow regardless of who authored it. EJ (01:09:44.782) You know, I think that... What we need more than anything is not really anything we've been talking about here today. I think that we need American renewal, meaning that we need an idea, ideas for the modern day that define what is an American. And they need to be inclusive of what America is now, not what it used to be. And when we have common goals, I think it's much easier to, you know, settle our political differences, not put aside political differences, but settle them. which is different, and kind of work toward policy outcomes that we agree on. One of the implications of my model, the argument I'm making, is that very often politicians are seeking to solve the same goals, but they come up with completely opposite solutions to get there because I think that they've been essentially, their ability to access expert information has been interfered with. But I also think that we're missing that same goals problem more often these days. And so I think that you told me you studied philosophy in school. I think the philosophers and the, I think that is what we need now more than ever. I think that we've gotten to a politics that's beyond the politics I'm talking about in this book, which is about arguing over what's the best public policy. And the thing that I worry most about is kind of the like, the idea that we are one country with one set of ideas is collapsing. we need to solve that first before we can kind of get together and talk about what tax credits to pass. Khullani Abdullahi (01:11:30.069) there's a deeper fundamental problem. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciated you being willing to be put into the hot seat for all political scientists. It's not often that you get a professor of political science. that you're the one that's on the hot seat today, where you get to say, look, this is what's happening in the country. Explain why it's happening and how we can improve it. EJ (01:11:46.162) I don't think I represent all political scientists, but yeah. There you go. Khullani Abdullahi (01:11:59.393) If there's one takeaway from for there's a there's a particular class, I think of professionals that your book speaks to deeply and a particular class of funders that I think it speaks to too deeply for that particular audience. What is the takeaway that you would you want them to have? And then you have to tell us about your baseball podcast. And then I'll let you get back to your grad students. EJ (01:12:22.958) My takeaway, I said this recently, so I'll be short, is that don't try to take the politics out of information, but try to get it right. Try to be political, to fund political causes that are acting using information that is as close to the truth as we can get. We can never get perfectly to the truth, we can get closer through good scientific methods and good expertise. And I think that those are the types of people that are often Khullani Abdullahi (01:12:30.847) Yes. Yeah. Khullani Abdullahi (01:12:45.141) the way. EJ (01:12:52.64) ignored. There's again, lots of very rich people willing to fund very ineffectual centrist, maybe even good work, right, but isn't doesn't have doesn't doesn't think about that don't think about politics in there. And, and I hope that I hope that someone reads my book. And that's the conclusion. Maybe that's the next book where I do have a grant proposal out for that argument. Baseball podcast. I've been writing about baseball since before I was a grad student. So this is Khullani Abdullahi (01:13:14.827) Please do, please. EJ (01:13:20.526) I started writing about baseball on a blog and now a blog on Substack that I started the original blog in 2005 as a college freshman. My English professor told me I needed to write every day. And I've been doing that ever since. And now we started a podcast called Bronx Beat in 2014 and we're nerds talking about the Yankees. We're the most overeducated sports podcast in the world and I love it. you and the relatively small number of people who listen to it, the 500 to 1000 people who listen to it. Khullani Abdullahi (01:13:28.609) Jesus. EJ (01:13:49.613) our kind of fellow traveler nerds and Yankee fans. So if you're one of those check it. Khullani Abdullahi (01:13:53.153) I love it. And then I have to ask about pizza. You're from the East Coast, but Chicago is your home. So answer very carefully. Who has better pizza? my gosh. EJ (01:14:01.258) is the East Coast. Chicago Tavern style pizza is fine, but you can't beat the typical slice of the New York area. Khullani Abdullahi (01:14:06.645) Bye. You're lucky you have tenure. Thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.