He believes that we can go on just with a constant state of warfare and unrest. And I believe that we have presented for discussion a pretty good solution that would remove some of the problems besetting the people in the occupied territories. Prime Minister Shamir has already expressed his opposition to Secretary Shultz's plan. He will be coming here next week. What kind of additional pressure do you intend to put on him? Well, I don't think it's so much pressure as it is just an attempt of persuasion. But also I'd like to point out that his cabinet is pretty evenly split on the solution. So it isn't a case of outside pressure there. He has a great element in his own government that sees merit in the proposals that we've made. Will early Israeli elections be considered an American success in your view? Frankly, I haven't given much thought to that and to their election process there as to whether it would or not. I know that he has now broached that subject. And yet, if they were held, maybe it is that he would believe that he might have more support for his position because the other faction then in the election is the one that is already differing from the Prime Minister and supportive of what we've proposed. Do you share the view that Israel should ban all television coverage from the troubled areas? Well, I'm a great believer in a free press and the right of the people to know. And so I would have to be opposed at thinking that they want to conduct operations in which they would rather not have public knowledge of them. What would be the ultimate goal if Secretary Schulz was to succeed? Would it be to have an international conference on the Middle East with a seat for your friend, Mr. Gorbachev? Well, this is a problem because you have a situation there where the Soviet Union is not recognized Israel as a nation. It's very difficult to have someone participating in a conference of that kind who doesn't even believe in the right of statehood of the other country. What we've also thought is not the kind of international conference that would seek to impose a settlement. I don't think that really is the province of the other countries. But to be helpful and see if we could not join in helping arrive at a solution that would once and for all end the hostilities, I think most of the world tends to forget that war between Israel and the Arab states still is a fact. It has never been settled. There has never been any peace agreement arrived at and it would be a great achievement if once and for all that state of war came to an end. Mr. President, after more than seven years here at the White House, in a capsule view, how would you qualify the global shift of economic power in the world? Would you say that this country is a fading empire, that Europe is an economic decline and that Japan is the emerging world power today? Well, I'd say quite the contrary, not as to whether Japan is an emerging power. I think that having been governor of a state on the Pacific Basin, the western part of our country, I believe that the old adage will go west, young men, still holds true that the Pacific Rim is something very great economically for the future. It is coming into being as a great economic force. Is Europe an economic decline in your view? No, I don't believe so. But I'm speaking of the developing nations when I speak about the other. But I would think the reverse is true. I believe that with our economic summit, that our turning away from protectionism to the extent that we are and our efforts to even do more of that with the GATT Treaty and all, that we've made great improvement in world economy. And we have to face the fact that it is a world economy that none of us anymore can believe that we can stand off and just achieve prosperity by ourselves. The U.S. budget deficit has reached unprecedented proportions. Not you feel that in a way it means the failure of liberal economic policy that you pursued? You were speaking of our federal budget deficit, not any trade deficit. Yes, for over 50 years, this country has been running deficits. As a matter of fact, it's almost 60 years now in which there have only been eight individual years in which there was not a budget deficit. It was a false economic theory that was adopted by one of our two political parties and that party happened to control the legislature for most of these 60 years. And it has been proven false. So what we've been doing for these seven years is trying to get on a path leading toward a balancing of the budget, the elimination of deficit spending. It has reached a point that you couldn't do it in one year. You couldn't suddenly pull the string and say... Not even in two terms, two presidential terms? Well, you see, I was still up against that legislature with that other philosophy. But I do believe that that's one of the things that's happened in these seven years, is that instead of the argument, as it had been for more than a half a century, in which those who believed in deficit spending defended it. And they said, this brings prosperity. This is necessary to do this. Now that argument, which was a fallacious argument, is gone. And the only debate between us now is how best to achieve the balanced budget. There is no longer anyone defending deficits. You don't want to take sides in this presidential election in this country, but whom would you support in France? I think I should remain neutral there also, that that would be best for all of us. And I wouldn't want to seem to be trying to involve myself in what the course of the French people should be. You wouldn't have no personal preference? Because you know all our candidates, or most of them. Well, I think my philosophy there would have to be the same as it is here in our own election process, that until decisions are made as to who the nominees are going to be, I will remain neutral. Has President Mitterrand given you any tip in Brussels a few days ago as to what his own personal behavior would be? No. No, he hasn't. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, do you trust Mr. Gorbachev? Well, let me say I used a Russian proverb. I'm not a linguist, but I did learn this and have used it several times in his presence. If I'm pronouncing it correctly, it is dovii no provii. It means trust, but verify. And I think that's the policy that has to be followed. I have cited Demosthenes, 1,000 years or two, back in the Athenian marketplace, said what sane man would let another man's words, rather than his deeds, telling who is at peace and who is at war with him? Then are you not in a great hurry to get a strategic arms agreement with him that you can sign in Moscow? Well, this is one of the problems. It's a pretty complex negotiation that is going on. Apparently, both sides would like to get this 50% reduction in weapons. But it's a little more complex than the INF Treaty that we did agree to because of the verification features and all. So I think I am acting on the supposition that he also wants the treaty. And it's a case of not setting a deadline whereby you have to hurry and maybe accept something less than is possible, simply to meet a deadline. So we've set no date, but we're working just as hard as we can to arrive at an agreement. Will you go to Moscow if you can't get an agreement in advance? Well, yes, because I think there are other things. Our negotiations at the summit meetings and our discussions have been on a number of things, not only the arms control, but the regional problems, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, things of that kind, and also human rights. We believe that that is of great importance if the relations between our countries is to improve, that there must be some solution to these things that we think are such violations of human rights. And we've made progress in all of our meetings on all of these subjects. And so I'm looking forward to the summit. It will be nice if we have reached a point at which, as we did here, we could sign that treaty. But if not, I think we would continue to discuss it, make progress and eventually come to a signing. Why do you suppose Mr. Gorbachev would want to make progress with you rather than wait, say, for your successor? Well, you know, there might be some merit in the fact that we now know each other. We've laid a groundwork of relationship. And someone coming in new, and he remembers his own experience coming in, there would be probably a wait while someone else established themselves in the position. And you discovered what their ideas were and so forth. So I think that probably he would like to get some things wound up because of all the groundwork that's been laid. Do you agree with Mrs. Thatcher that it would be foolish for anyone to expect a nuclear-free Europe for many, many years? I do agree. And I think that probably what she is saying is something that I have also said, but that hasn't been recognized as much. And that is that this idea that came into being of a nuclear-free Europe, at the same time that we're all aware that in conventional weapons, the Soviet Union is far in advance of NATO. And it is only the presence of some of the nuclear, particularly tactical weapons, that have redressed that imbalance so that before you could ever look to a nuclear-free Europe or world, you would have to have an establishment of parity between the forces and conventional weapons. On the other hand, I believe that as we continue with our strategic defense initiative, the seeking of a defensive weapon that never has been an offensive weapon yet in the world that has not led to a defense, even the sword and the shield. And I believe that it is possible to come up with a defensive system that can render the nuclear weapons obsolete, because I have said, as a matter of fact, to your parliament when they graciously allowed me to address them, I have said, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. It can't be a victor in a nuclear war. Where do we live after we have poisoned the Earth? Are you reinforcing America's nuclear capacity in Britain? I try to refrain from speaking in such details as matters that are strategy and that I don't think should be discussed. But so I can't go beyond that. I don't want to talk about systems that I think is information that should be held. But many people do think that the INF Treaty, for example, made it necessary for you to reinforce American nuclear capability. Well, the truth is that there are still a great many nuclear weapons in NATO and the tactical and battlefield type weapons. We still have our tried-and-submarines and so forth and are going forward with those programs. And I think the enemy is well aware of that. So I don't think that that first fear that was expressed by some people, that INF, was in some way lowering our defensive strength. Let me point out that it was the Soviet Union that came along with a nuclear weapon that was based and targeted on all the leading targets in cities and so forth of Europe. NATO had nothing to match it. NATO appealed to us. This was before I was in office here and for weapon systems to provide a defense, or not a defense, a deterrent, I should say. And when I came in office, I inherited this situation. Well, first we asked the Soviet Union to withdraw those weapons. And they refused. And then we went forward with the deployment of our own match to their weapons. And if you remember, there was great objection in the part of many people to that. At the same time, however, that we went forward and the Soviets were quite upset and left the table, I proposed to the Soviets that we would join them in a 0-0 option. And again, there was some scorn about that as if I had done something that could not possibly happen. And the Soviets left the bargaining table. But they returned. Would that be the special advice that you would give to your successor after seven years in the White House? Yes, the special advice, and it was proven very simply with this particular thing we were talking about. And that is, deal from strength. Twice the Soviet Union walked away and said they wouldn't discuss things with us. We persisted in implementing and putting the weapons in, deploying them. And they came back. And now we have a treaty that 0-0 and has eliminated an entire weapon system for both sides. So peace through strength is very common sense. And who is your successor going to be? That I can't say. In this position in our country, I'm the titular head of the party. And therefore, with all of the primaries going on, until a nominee is selected, I must remain neutral. Thank you, Mr. President. My pleasure. Mr. President, when you have been last year in Germany, you said that the wall should be torn down. Is this a topic you might take up with Mr. Gorbachev again when you go to Moscow? That could very well enter the conversation. I've made no secret about my feeling about that. And yes, I'd be very happy to speak to him about it. Do you think German reunification could be taking place somewhere along the line in the East-West dialogue? Well, couldn't that grow from such things as I also suggested in addition to tearing down the wall and without going so far as to offer an opinion about reunification? I said that couldn't Berlin then become a city in which maybe some things, for example, Olympics games, meetings, international meetings and so forth could take place and also a change in the whole aerial position, aircraft position, so that Berlin could once again become a hub for international air traffic. And then maybe from all of those things, reunification could grow. Is the summit in Moscow just the continuation process of the East-West dialogue? Or could there come out some concrete results? Well, we have achieved some results with them. Because mainly we have talked about regionalism, things like Afghanistan and Nicaragua and so forth. We've talked about human rights and the violation there and what an effect that has on our trying to improve relations with each other. And we have made gains. There has been softening in their position on human rights and they have freed political prisoners and so forth. We think they have a long way to go to meet our standard of human rights. And also we see now his determination to leave Afghanistan. So we talk about all those differences that are between us as well as the arms matters. And obviously we've made progress now in that with the treaty that has already been signed and the one that is being negotiated now. Mr. President, you have another nine months and you have presidency. What is the problem number one in USA you would like to tackle during these remaining nine months? Well, there are a number of things that we've made progress that I would like to see us speed up the progress. Economically, for example, we're on the path now toward returning to the balanced budget idea for almost 60 years. The opposition party has been in control and has practiced a policy of budget deficits. We at least now, the argument about whether you should or should not deficit spend has changed to where for these last seven years it is only a case of, well, how fast do you restore the balance and how do you, what methods do you use to restore a balanced budget? So we've made a gain there. I would like to see us act faster with that, some modernization of our budgeting process that I think is very lacking right now. Then we have one spending area in which there is controversy. And that is when I took office on any given day, half of our military aircraft couldn't fly for lack of spare parts. Half of our naval vessels couldn't leave port for the same reason or for lack of crew. And I said that even with my intent to try and eliminate the deficit, if it was a choice between eliminating the deficit or rebuilding and refurbishing our national security, I would have to choose the national security. And we did, we made great progress only in this last year. So that now that again the opposition party has a majority in both houses of our legislature, they have forced reductions in defense spending on us that I think are very detrimental and are going to remove some of the advantage that we had gained. And I would hope that we could change and continue to restore and reach our defense targets. I think that peace comes through strength. There are some other things of that kind, some changes. We as you know, the unique thing about our country, we are a federation of sovereign states. And a great deal of authority has been left in the hands of local government and the state governments. Clear back when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for election, his promise was to restore the authority and autonomy to those local levels of government that had been unjustly seized as he put it with the federal government. Well, things didn't get better over the years, but we have embarked on a program of restoring that federal balance, restoring the sovereignty of the states. And we've made progress in it, just as we've made great progress in improving the management, the business management of government. We estimate that in these few years, we have reduced the amount of paperwork imposed on our citizens, on our businesses, and on our local levels of government by 600 million man hours of work a year. And I would like to see this continue. There are some social reforms I would like to see also. Do you still enjoy to be president? Or do you're looking forward to? Well, maybe people are surprised to hear this, but yes, I do enjoy it. I was out there as a citizen making speeches and arguing about things and campaigning for individuals, for government posts and so forth. And then to, I never expected this, but to find myself in a position where I can actually deal with the problems is very exciting indeed. Is it, if you look back the last seven years, that it's mainly the accomplishments you'd like to remember, or is there some failure you would say, I wouldn't repeat it again? Remembering, for example, your visit in Bitburg, 85 on a war cemetery in Germany, do you regret that? Not at all. Not at all. I thought that it was very worthwhile and I came home with a message also for our own people that I think the courage of your country in maintaining those evidences of the horror of the Holocaust and bringing your own young people in to see them so that this can never happen again. I think it's something that you have every reason to be proud of. Mr. President, our last question, the President of the United States especially in such a large country and considering the complicated governing system is very heavily reliant on his advisors. Is it that your wife is your main advisor? No, and she's very embarrassed about the press stories that for some reason continue to say that. No, she has been a good and faithful wife and I share secrets with her and my problems and all of that. But no, I'm surrounded by people that I have appointed to the cabinet positions and all and I have made it very plain from the first that I want to hear from them their views on these problems. Even if they differ with what my own might be, I want to hear that from them and one thing I do not want to hear, I do not want to hear the political ramifications of any problem, whether it is good politically to do something. All I want from them is their opinion as to whether is it good or bad for the people of this country and then I will make the decision having heard them out. Thank you very much. You give me the signal. Mr. President, you have less than one year's work left as a president ahead and do you still expect to achieve something important in the final 10 or 11 months left? Well, there are some things pending that I think are of importance and that I believe we can achieve and I'm going to keep working right down to the last minute. Which things? For instance, a strategic answer agreement? Yes, oh yes, we're going to pursue that and hope that well before my time is up we will have that resolved. But there are other things here and our own domestic problems. I think that our budgeting process that has led to the deficit spending over the last almost 60 years must be corrected and I'm going to be fighting for legislation to achieve that. And for my successor that he could have some things I haven't had such as what's called a line item veto, the power to pick things out of legislation and veto them and we still have further to go in the building up of our national security and that is important to me as is our relationship with our allies in Europe in NATO. You have made very important agreements and there may be others to come with the Soviet Union. Now people remember that you had once called the Soviet Union and the evil empire and they also wonder has the Soviet Union changed or have your views changed or both? My views haven't changed but you must remember that the Soviet leaders when I first came into office kept dying and finally there was little chance to work with any of them on some of the things that I thought should be straightened out. Now there is a new leader and he does seem to want to make some changes in their system. I have read his book Perestroika and I know of his theories on Glasnost and so we have been able to reach agreement on some of the things that we've discussed in our summit meetings that I always take up the matter of human rights and there has been an improvement in that. Regional conflicts and we see them now this leader wanting to get out of Afghanistan so I think progress can be made but as I have frequently said to him I'm not a linguist but I do have learned Russian proverb that I use on him every once in a while. Dovii no Provii, trust but verify. Does he approve of your proverb? He once complained that you tell him that too often. I know, I know, he told me that. But you do like each other. It's an important question for people of the whole world. I have found that yes, that we can discuss things and in an affable manner and he is totally unlike the other leaders before him that I had dealt with. Mr. President, you sometimes have been described as the first pacifist at the White House meaning that your aim is to make nuclear weapons obsolete through SDI. Is that a forgotten and lost hope? No, not at all. As a matter of fact, we're still going forward and we've made progress and there have been breakthroughs. I believe that the strategic defense initiative that we're working on can be such an effective defense that it makes so much more sense than thinking that a deterrent in which we're trying to keep the peace by threatening to blow each other up, that if we can come up with a defensive weapon and I have expressed to General Secretary Gorbachev my belief that we'd be willing to share it, that if we could have a defense that did render those weapons obsolete because I have stated many times that I do not believe that a nuclear war can be won nor should it be fought. Where would a victor live after we'd poisoned the earth with an exchange of these multiple weapons that we have? Do you feel that you have made some progress in convincing Gorbachev and the Russians in general of the importance of defensive systems? Well, we have the one treaty signed already now, the Intermediate Range Weapon that was targeted on every principal city in Europe and now it no longer exists and we're now trying to negotiate a treaty that would reduce by half the strategic ballistic missiles but to those people who talk denuclearization and think that somehow I am suggesting something that might be dangerous to Europe, not at all, I recognize that the tactical nuclear weapons that we have and the airborne weapons and so forth are necessary to balance the great superiority that the Soviet Union has achieved in conventional weapons and until those weapons can be reduced and we achieve a defensive parity there, then you cannot, until then, you cannot go on with further denuclearization. What would you like future historians to remember as your main achievement and what would you like them to forget as your main failure? Oh my. Let's take one at a time, maybe we have time. I don't know, that's so hard to pick out. The achievement or the failure? On the economic side, I think we've made great progress in changing a philosophy that was here in our land in which the political debate was between how much more spending, how much more deficit spending the government should do. Now, that whole argument has been changed and it's down to, well, what is the best way to eliminate or reduce the deficit spending and the argument is how to reduce the spending not between one side that wants to spend more against the other. I'm proud of that and I hope that before I leave we can have some improvements in our budgeting process that will be adopted by our government. I am proud of that. I'm also proud of the fact that when I came into office our national defense was quite a shambles on any given day, half our military aircraft couldn't fly for lack of spare parts. Today, we have achieved a great improvement in our military and I think the fact that we have signed this INF Treaty, the Soviet Union, is an evidence of the fact that peace comes through strength. We didn't say anything about what failure was but the girl says you have no time to remind us of your failures. Maybe there were none, that's too much. No, I'm sure there were things I would, I think there were some things that, whether they were failures or whether they were just terrible disasters, one, namely the terrorist murder of some 240 of our young Marines is a tragedy I will never forget and I will never forget the families that I met with those young men. You feel good looking back at your eight years at the White House and beyond that your career and actor and union organizer, how does that make you feel? Well, I think the Lord has blessed me very much and I am truly grateful to him. I hope I can be deserving of the good things that he's bestowed on me. Thank you, Mr. President.


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Jonathan Rausch, a senior writer for the National Journal Magazine in Washington and a contributing editor for the Atlantic Monthly and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His recent short essay is political realism, how hacks, machines, big money, and backroom deals can strengthen American democracy, which ties in nicely with a recent Atlantic piece called How American Politics Went Insane. Now we are recording this on the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland of 2016, the Trump coronation, or that's what he would like it to be. So this is particularly timely. I could, I just say, how did everything get so crazy, but I think I'll start a little bit back in just with the title of your short essay or your longish essay. What is political realism and how is that related to how we got to where we are today? Thank you for having me, Trevor. Thank you. Political realism starts with the idea that governing is really hard and politics is necessary in order to do it. And then in order to do it, you have to have things that look like political machines and hacks and professionals and pork barrel spending and log rolling and money that feeds into the system and sloshes around. And the reason you have to have all those things is that so politicians can organize their world because there's nothing in the Constitution about how to do that. So every day they have to wake up and they have to try to get other politicians to follow. So in order not to have complete chaos, you need some incentives like anywhere else in life.  So that's how these guys built alliances. So that's political realism. Its intention with political idealism, which is that politics should be conducted in a pure manner without any taint of personal interest, should all be in the public interest. And that I'm arguing that forgetting about realism and going with idealism got us into this mess. As you described it, what's the difference between these parts of political realism, the I'm going to give you campaign contributions or I'm going to give you a post office or the other sorts of support and a system based on bribery? Well, that's a good question because a lot of both progressives and libertarians has spent the last 40 and 50 years demolishing that system on the grounds that it was akin to bribery. This will tell you campaign contributions are nothing but legalized bribery, so we should get rid of them. Jay Kost, who's a libertarian, wrote a book saying that congressional law rolling, pork barreling is a form of bribery. So like the Supreme Court, I believe there is a very important difference between bribery that enriches oneself personally and on the other hand what the great Tammany Hall sage George Washington Plunkett called honest graft. Do you guys know Plunkett? Oh, yes. Plunkett of Tammany Hall.  Oh, yeah. That'd be great. When did that come out? 1870 or something? So can I say a word about who he was? So back in the 1890s, this Tammany Hall mid-level boss functionary named George Washington Plunkett used to hold forth on the steps of the courthouse in Manhattan, kind of Tammany headquarters, and a reporter would take down these lectures he would give on how politics needs to work. And one of his lectures most famous was honest graft. He had this distinction, dishonest graft is what people do just to feather their own nests, you know, just to get rich, makes himself more independent and more wealthy at the expense of the party. Honest graft is graft that loyal partisans do in order to make politics work, to grease the wheels a little bit, to build up loyalty to the party. But honest graft, he said the system won't function, it'll fall apart. And it turns out there's a lot of political science that backs this up right up to the present day. The right amount of corruption in a political system is greater than zero. Well, a lot of reformers came along and said, well, it's all graft. We don't need it. We're going to vote for these guys. They're all going to do the right thing. And then good policy will result. So one by one we began systematically dismantling all of the systems that we use to make deals like pork barrel spending and smoke-filled rooms, otherwise known as private negotiations. Campaign money became very heavily regulated, much harder for the parties to use. And I could go on, but maybe the most important was it became very difficult for parties to influence their own nominees and that's the mess we're in this year. But when, I mean today, if you can use the word Tammany Hall as essentially a synonym for corruption, which is maybe you're saying it shouldn't be. It should not be. But are you just actually supporting Tammany Hall in the sense of like, that's how things should work. We should go back to a system that is, because there were a lot of problems with Tammany Hall. Sure, yeah. Tammany gets a bum rap because history is written by the winners and Tammany was demolished by progressive reformers who hated the Irish, the working-class Irish who ran Tammany. Tammany was a mix. It did some bad things, but it did a lot of very good things. It was effective. It created a kind of privatized social welfare network in New York. So we have a lot to learn from Tammany and the other machines of its era, but no, we can't reestablish them even if we wanted to. What we can do is try to learn from what they were doing, try to remember that our grandparents and great grandparents who built these political systems were not all fools and crooks. They had some pretty smart ideas about politics and it worked better when they were able to execute those ideas. So the question that political realists like me are trying to figure out is how can we begin to restore some of the systems that are necessary in politics to get the basic organization done? How can we learn from the past and extend it into the present instead of just looking for ways to demolish and demonize it? You're pretty down in the book and the essay on the zero tolerance towards corruption beliefs of progressives and populists and libertarians, but two general characteristics of corruption is that first, the corrupt are always going to want more of it than the uncorrupt are going to want because they benefit from it. You can see some of it, but it's an iceberg thing. There's going to be a lot of it that you can't immediately see because the corrupt tend to hide a lot of the action. And so could the zero tolerance policy be prudent in the sense that if you aim for zero, you're going to get non-zero, you're going to get some amount more than zero, but if you aim for some middle ground, if you aim for the right amount of corruption, you're naturally just going to end up with substantially more than that aimed for right amount. No, that's the wrong answer. And here at Cato, you guys would understand better than anyone else why. Someone says, well, we can't get rid of all drugs, but let's have a zero tolerance policy because that will get us closer to getting rid of it. You'll say, well, no, that's a bad idea because the costs of the zero tolerance policy far exceed the benefits of the marginal decrease.  Political realists believe that the heart of politics is what political scientists call transactional politics. And that's give and take. I do something for you. You do something for me. Maybe we can cut a deal and reduce social security. We'll have to do it together. Otherwise, we won't have the vote. So maybe I'm going to give you something. Maybe you're going to give me something. It's not going to align my personal pocket, but maybe it's going to be some pork from my district. Maybe it's going to be an endorsement. Maybe you won't send someone to run against me next time. That stuff isn't corrupt. That's the day-to-day give and take of politics. The problem is some idealists came along, including some libertarian idealists, saying, well, anything that smacks of political horse trading is corrupt because it's not public interested or it's not market driven or it's not the people speaking. But that, I think, is wrong. I think that's over defining corruption to turn the political marketplace itself into a form of corruption.  It turns into a black market. And that's where we are right now, all this so-called dark money on the outside, not accountable to voters, very hard to know what's going on. Weakened the parties, made it much harder for politicians to get organized. Maybe we need to take a step back and look at this in a broader sense, which is, what does it mean for politics to work well? How would we know that something is doing a good job and you'd have to have some sort of end goal, I mean it could be representation of the people, it could be getting passing laws or whether it's able to do, or how do we know that it's not working well now, maybe is a better answer and is there a gold standard you have of what it could do to work well? Well, here's where we get into a pretty interesting conversation between a realist and a libertarian, at least a certain type of libertarian. I don't know what you think, Trevor or Aaron, but a lot of libertarians I know would say, well, you don't want government to function well, you want it to do as little as possible, gridlock, good thing, so let's have bad government or let's have non-government. I disagree for a few reasons. One is that from a realist point of view, a society where politics does not function and where conciliation doesn't happen is a society where social pressure is built and you can get a whole lot of serious dangerousness. A second reason that's more immediate and pragmatic in the United States is in case you hadn't noticed, most of government now is on autopilot. Most of the reforms that people want to do in this building require statutory changes and they're hard changes. They're like reducing entitlement programs, containing, spending, stuff like that. You can't do that unless you have systems in Congress that allows bills to get through, for example. Just to cut spending, for example, if you want to do something about entitlements, you're going to have to ask members of Congress to take tough votes. You're going to have to get people on both sides. You're going to have to give them stuff. You're going to have to have transactions going on and backroom negotiations. Without that, you're stuck with government that grows and grows and grows and grows and you know what the numbers look like. So all of that is true. So what do libertarians do in that situation? I mean, I agree, but there's another view of politics which, I mean, libertarians aren't averse to, which is that the representatives are supposed to represent the people and if the people become polarized and become highly, you know, unable to compromise, then maybe their representatives should also be unable to compromise, too. And that sort of factor you're talking about when Ted Cruz comes in and tries to blow up the government, if he's representing his constituents or maybe more specifically a House member is representing constituents, should we be complaining about that? Is that well-functioning politics? Well, this gets to a third thing I often tell my libertarian friends, which is I'm setting the bar pretty low these days. It would be nice to do a big entitlement reform. Or pass a budget. But how about not defaulting on the national debt, which we've come close to doing? How about just being able to keep the government open? You know, shutting it down and reopening, it costs $4 billion every time you do that. Just the basics of moving appropriations bills through, doing the basic job of what Congress needs to do has been fundamentally weakened. And that stuff matters, too. That's the stuff by which we just keep the trains running. So in a polarized environment, it's harder to do stuff. But more important when you can get consensus to do something like an immigration reform, for example, or a tax reform, both of which might actually happen, it's important that you be able to organize the votes behind that and not have small groups of fringe activists able to veto that stuff. Problem right now is it's very hard for Paul Ryan to prevent these small veto groups from paralyzing him and his caucus. So what sort of things happened before now? We can go get into the nitty gritty. So the machines and other things that we can discuss helped make politics more transactional. But you also say it kind of makes it more professional as opposed to having amateur politicians coming in and just throwing bombs for no good reason. How was that done before? So we talked about political realism and as politicians trading favors, scratching each other's backs, but that could happen in the absence of organizations. Like we have a bunch of people in the room and they make favors and they remember them and pay them back. But what's the difference? What is it specifically the machines historically and like what they would look like today if they were still around before we get into how they changed? By the way, they're not by any means completely gone. Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader is a machine politician par excellence and has built a pretty good re-election machine in the Senate protecting his people, his loyalists from Tea Party attacks. I think Harry Reid kind of started as a, didn't he start as the Nevada Game Commissioner too? Yeah, and places like Illinois where you have a very badly functioning machine in New Jersey where you have better functioning machines except when Chris Christie and his aides get up to bridge hygiene. So machines aren't a thing of the past. In fact, if you leave politicians alone, if you stop regulating them to death, they will naturally form these alliances and networks that we call machines. That's what they do. The problem is that we very frequently stop them from doing that. Okay, so there are two real keys to understanding how these systems work. One is professionalism. You need people who are durably there, who are careerists. I know careerists have a terrible reputation inside this building, but they have an important role because they are around to pay for the consequences of their decisions. So they're watching the brand of the party, for example, or if the policy is going to be a complete failure in the medium to long term, they will pay the price for it. They can't just engage in protest and walk away, the way amateurs with day jobs can. So it's very important to have these repeat players in the system and that's what hacks do, professionals. And then the other concept is that of the political machine. And what machines do that's really important is create coalitions. They take a diverse group of people who may not agree on all that much and say, okay, if you get this and you get this and we do this for that person, maybe we can all agree on this agenda. So they create internal brokering and then they turn and face the outside world, the other party and say, okay, here's where we are. So the Constitution doesn't provide for any of that, it's just 537 independently elected officials. There's no reason for them to cooperate. What the machines do is create incentive systems for cooperation. They're like corporations, actually. They organize a lot of individual talents into a larger effort where people kind of work for the benefit of each other. So this seems sort of, if we compare this like a parliamentary system and some of my British friends, Matthew Feeney, occasionally co-hosts here has talked about how because of the constraints within the parliamentary system in the UK, there's no way a Trump could ever come along and bomb that because you have to pay due. You have this party machine that gets elected and you have to rise up in an organized way. So they have more professional politics. We do that sort of, the machines kind of take a place that we didn't have with the parliamentary system when they were reformed. Yeah, Trevor, that puts it very, very well. The Constitution is a great document. I'm second to none in my worship of James Madison, but they left something very important out. They created a system that's really good on accountability of politicians to the public. That's elections. They created no mechanisms for accountability of politicians to each other. And you always have to worry in politics about the renegade, the Trump figure or the Sanders figure, the person who owes nothing to anyone, who can't govern if elected because they have no networks, no coattails, no loyalty, and the person who's capable of all kinds of sociopathic political behavior as we see in Trump. And in the British system, which came after ours, they build in accountability, right? People vote for the party. And then the party makes some decisions about who can run and who can lead based on their track record. We replicated that here using parties and political machines, a kind of privatized version of the same thing. If you wanted to run for office, you kind of had to prove yourself in the local party, work your way up through the state party. People would test you. They'd find out if you were loyal, you would raise money for other candidates. You couldn't be Donald Trump, just come in out of nowhere and hijack the party. Well, now you can because we've pretty much demolished all the structures that prevented it. And so some of those things we can list off that you talk about, we've changed political money. So you have a different take than a lot of people on the perversions of having money in politics, which of course we don't hear at Kato and we have episodes we talk about. It's not that bad, but you say it actually has a purpose, party money, and what we've done to money has been a big part of this. Yeah. One of the things that almost everyone agrees on these days is that money in politics is bad. They disagree on whether to regulate it. I think folks at Kato would say no. I think money in politics is pretty good actually. Do you? Yeah. Really why? Well, I think that it depends, again, this is a definitional question of what is money in politics, but I think that it increases the amount of voter information, for example. I think that independent spending increases voter information. I think it increases the amount of candidates who can get their ideas out there for good or for ill to change things, maybe even in the long run. As a general rule, I don't see corruption a ton in the quid pro quo sense. I see mostly people being upset that... The most reason people are upset about money in politics is because people might believe what the money is spent on to say. And that's what they're really afraid of. So I think there should be more money in politics, generally speaking. But it's being channeled in weird ways, as you know. Well, that's right. And channeled artificially because we've got a black market situation because of regulations. But yeah, I think part money, even if you don't like it, it's always going to be there. So it's like any other market. You need to channel it in ways that are reasonably transparent, reasonably accountable, and reasonably functional. And the best place for money to go is to political parties, which are like huge brokerages, which can collect large sums of money. They're too big to buy. You can't just bribe a political party to get something. It's typically not how it works. Well, we've weakened political parties by, until very recently, making them the most handicapped people in the whole system to raise money. A lot of that role has been outsourced to private entities. We demonized soft money. We said, you know, it's a terrible thing if people come along and give two or three million dollars because they're going to get special access. Well, they might get special access, but these money transactions also help keep politicians and interest groups accountable to each other because they have to take into account how they feel about each other. When Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders boasts, I don't have to worry about what anyone says because I'm completely independent. I don't have anyone. I don't have any backers. To me, that's an alarm bell because you don't want politicians who don't feel accountable to anyone but themselves. In the market, when we have very large firms, a small number of very large firms, we tend to see little innovation. Like there's a high degree of stasis. And it's the real innovation happens on the periphery and the small companies, to use God awful Silicon Valley lingo, the disruptive stuff from startups. And so does a system where we enable more money to flow to the parties, which is going to flow to the big parties largely, reinforce a similar structure and so push out the ability for new ideas to get a foothold that maybe, I mean, there may be bad new ideas unquestionably, but there also may be very good new ideas. And so we end up with just a system of inertia and not really much policy change, whether good or bad. So you want to mix, right? A political machine or monopoly can become too strong. Saddam Hussein, political machine or monopoly. Yeah, but not by voting, but by force, yes. Using force, but lots of other things. He didn't have to kill all that many people. He would buy and co-op the rest. But the point is you can have extremely over centralized, over consolidated machines, and those are dysfunctional because they're impervious to new ideas and change. You can have on the other hand, anarchy and chaos, which is pretty much what the Republican party, if it is a party has right now, which is an inability to self-organize, to do almost anything and complete permeability to outside forces, even hijackers. The system works best when it's mixed, when you have machines that are pretty good at keeping the system stable, but also pretty open to disruptors like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It's interesting to notice that Goldwater ran in 64 as an insurgent, took over the party, kind of a hijacking. But the party was able to absorb that. Goldwater was a good Republican. He played by the rules. When the system works, the machine is able to absorb the insurgency and govern through it, and that's the key. What you don't want happening is insurgents who can come along and say, well, I'm going to shut down the government as a career move, something like what Ted Cruz does. When you get so atomized that you're incapable of keeping the government going and absorbing these new ideas, then you have too much of, you've got too much atomization. I think American politics has been good for 150 years at striking a pretty decent balance. We had our first big political insurgency, Andrew Jackson, in the 1820s absorbed it. That became the Democratic Party. We saw insurgency after insurgency, and we would see the same pattern. They would absorb these new ideas. Reagan was one of them, the supply-side movement. We did that pretty well until we started dismantling. We put a heavy thumb on one side of the scale. We said machines, organizations, professionals, parties, money, pork, smoke-filled rooms, bad. Take it all away. The smoke-filled rooms point to another provocative point you make is transparency is not always good. We also went to over transparency, which I mean, another thing that everyone would say, well, this is obviously okay. We need more transparency, but you're saying, no, smoke-filled rooms and these are good things. As Bill Galston of Brookings likes to equip, the only thing wrong with smoke-filled rooms, it turns out was the smoke. Yeah, if you've got thousands of interest groups and hundreds of coalition partners and hundreds of politicians and millions of voters, and you have to work out something like a budget or an entitlement reform, you're going to have just to scrape together a majority is going to be damn near impossible. You're going to have to make a lot of deals and float a lot of trial balloons and nothing's finished until everything's finished, right? Until everybody knows what the package looks like, they can't sign on. If you expose that kind of negotiation to full public view, it falls apart because immediately people start demagoguing it. They say, well, Trevor Burris is up in arms because we cut his program. And then seeing Trevor Burris up in arms, Aaron, who's in the competing industry, says, well, cut his program, don't cut mine. We're off to the races. So you've got to give these folks some space to do what they need to do, which is make some deals and then come out and say, here's what we got and try to sell that to the voters. Now, interestingly, the constitutional convention had a secrecy rule that everyone agrees that it would have been impossible otherwise. I mean, there were people complaining at the time, but it would have been impossible. And that's probably true for similar reasons. They had to be able to have an open conversation and trade things back and forth. So I guess it's always been true. And now- It's always been true. It always will be true. People accuse me of wanting to go backward. And I think, no, I'm just really reminding people of home truth, some things that will never change about how politics works. Well, here's some things that have changed, though. How much, and I think Aaron's going to have questions along these lines, too, how much is this theory of politics? And we can give the libertarian pushback, which you're well aware of, but how much should it change or should it be related to the size of government, for example? I mean, we're talking about transactional theory of politics and we have a government in Washington, D.C., which is beyond the ability for anyone to pay much attention to. That's very different than the government in 1870. Would anything about this change in terms of how much we can expect the political class to take care of the country and not take care of themselves? I mean, that seems to be the huge concern that you don't really get much into in your essay, in your Atlantic piece. The assumption there is that they should not take care of themselves? Well, again, we're going back to the definition of what transactional politics is and what transactions should not be allowed. But if we throw in the fact that the more things are done in the shadows, and I don't mean the transparency thing, I mean the basic fact that there is a Southwestern Peanuts Grower Association that exists to regulate peanuts that did not exist in 1870. And one story I think I've told a few times on Free Thoughts is a story of a panel where a guy stands up, it's a panel on agricultural policy, and he stands up and he says, there are two people in the world who know how peanut regulation works in the United States, and my job is to keep it that way. And the question of whether or not, I mean, this is a type of graft. We don't need a Southwestern Peanuts Association, but it will build these organizations in order to feed itself. It will create its own unnecessary, unneeded government organizations in name of transactional politics, and it won't go back, it will only go up. I mean, maybe that's okay, it's not a libertarian, but that's something it seems like libertarians should be pretty scared of. Well, you'll find no greater opponent than me of the peanut subsidy or the wall and mohair subsidy. Wrote a whole book about how subsidies and special interests accumulate over time, but if you know your Mansor Olson, he's the famous economist who pioneered this. Yeah. You know, this is a social problem. This isn't something that's in the Constitution or a parliamentary system. This is because stable societies over time organize into more and more of these coalitions for self-interested collective action, and you can get rid of them by having a nuclear holocaust, for example, or a military coup for a while. It seems suboptimal. But those are suboptimal solutions, and I continually tell my libertarian and conservative friends, in the world we actually live in where it's not 1870, if you actually want to do something about the steady accumulation of this stuff, you're going to have to reform some things, right?  You're going to have to change some sending programs. You're going to have to pass some trade initiatives. I've argued that foreign trade is a good way to keep pressure on special interests, so I'm especially sad to see the Republican Party turn so hard against it. In order to do any of those things, you're going to have to be able to have people who go into rooms together and say, okay, what do you need? What do you need? And come out with something that seems to make sense. It was done with tax reform, transportation reform, welfare reform. We almost got a big farm bill reform that could have worked in the 90s. That process is pretty much ground to a halt. So now you really are stuck with the completely robotic, mindless accumulation every year of government size. Every program is simply there forever. It's reauthorized in a brain dead, automatic continuing resolution every year. Keep telling my libertarian friends, the political process, if you have any hope, it's got to be in Congress and revitalizing the political process. You've got to wade in and fix this and start doing it because the imaginary alternative in your head of wishing it all the way isn't working. From a communication standpoint and a strategic standpoint, there's often this argument within... I mean, it happens within libertarianism, it's going to happen within any radical political movement of idealism versus incrementalism and what should we aim for. So we have a quite radical view of what the ideal government and state would look like compared to what we've got now. We being libertarians. But again, this would apply to pretty much any group that's outside of the middle of the road, is going to have something that looks quite different. Given that a lot of these changes that you are arguing against came about because the people decided they voted for people who were more extreme or less willing to compromise as they became more partisan or whatever the causes happened to be and then instituted these reforms that you say have broken things, does this mean that not only should we not be idealistic in the sense of we ourselves as individuals pushing for the kind of radical extreme change that's going to result in this bad kind of gridlock, but also that we as policy elites, the people whose job it is to communicate policy ideas and influence the political views of the American electorate, hopefully in a direction more aligned with our preferences, should not communicate that idealism that we shouldn't, we should kind of mask how radical we are and only talk about wanting incremental change so as to keep them from running too far with things and breaking stuff. I wouldn't want you Aaron to mask how radical you are. I'd want you to change how radical you are. I think the radicalism and idealism of the modern libertarian movement has become self-defeating. I think libertarians punish the people who try to help them in politics because when they see what actually can get done, which if you're really lucky looks like tax reform 1986. That was a pretty good bill. It was a pretty good bill, but it was far from a clean pristine tax code. If the answer to that when a politician comes back and says, look what I was able to do with all this sweat and all this hard work and all this compromising, we got this.  Government is still too big. I'm not voting for you.  What you do is punish the people who try to help you and put in people who won't help you at all because they'll go up there saying, I'm going to fight, fight, fight, and if you vote for me, government's going to get smaller by magic. Once you substitute the fantasy for the reality, then you're playing into the hands of the other side, which is playing the transactional game. I'm trying to get libertarians to be, can I use the term more politically realistic? Right. I think that's what I was trying to get at because we can, so we all have, no matter our political views, we all have a vision of utopia potentially. In an ideal world, this is what it would look like. So, is the argument then that even as sticking with libertarians, if I think that the absolute ideal society is Noziki and Minarchism, and which is a long way off, no matter how quickly we could move, that- I don't know what that is, by the way. So that would be the case. So all of them is radical. Yeah, like Robert Nozik, Night Watchman, state that does nothing. But provide police protection, basically. But that I should, when talking with anyone outside of my own head, I should act as if I only want- No, no.  I would like to persuade you that your utopianism is misguided. I would like you to engage in less of that, because the founders, for example, and Hayek and Popper and most of the other greats of the Austrian school understood that utopianism is the enemy. As Popper said, efforts to create heaven on earth invariably create hell. Does this mean then that- So we can say like, look, we've got things like the setup we've got today is relatively good and incremental change is all we should aim for. But you could have made that same argument in 14th century Europe, and we wouldn't necessarily have wanted to just stick with the status quo then. Well, no one's talking about sticking with the status quo. We're talking about, can we move to a better world in the only way that's ever been possible to do that in a stable political order? Maybe your model here should be Lincoln. Is Lincoln in good order with libertarians? With us, yes. There's some people in Auburn who have a problem. No, Lincoln was second to none in his deep opposition to slavery and in his commitment to equality. Lincoln was also, by modern standards, shockingly willing to compromise with racists and white supremacists in order to keep the union together. He actually offered, in his first inaugural address, to write slavery into the constitution, which had never been done before in order to save the union. Lincoln was trying to figure out how to get to a better world from where we actually are without a disruption which could itself be so dangerous. You could have lost the whole government. One of the things, you know, utopian libertarianism is a luxury born of the fact that we've had a very stable, pretty high functioning political system for a long time. A realist looks at the world and sees Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, growing chaos here in the Republican Party and says, you know, governability should never be taken for granted. Well, so here's a version of libertarian political realism because one of the difficulties here is understanding the tendency, as my previous question, of that political class, of the people who can use government for graft and therefore subsist without competition. Honest graft. Well, I mean, I know the essay, I know the distinction, but I've never been able to bring it up and, you know, hold it in my mind because we could say that the agricultural system is an honest graft system, like the subsidy system is an honest graft system or giving away is an honest graft system. I mean, it's really hard to draw this line, but one thing I do know as a realist is that, and this is relevant to what's happening right now with the Republican Party, the average voter is pretty nationalist, not libertarian much at all, a national socialist. Split, not the Nazi, but like in the words like Brian Kaplan, the average voter wants trade protection, he wants protection of his industry, they want protection of welfare, they want all these things that libertarians don't want. And we think that there would be a better if these things did not exist even for them, but they don't know it. And so if we're asked to compromise on something like, hey, let's say it's the New Deal, and we want to compromise on the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, is that kind of transactional politics that libertarians should be compromised on knowing that it's only going to grow, that it's only going to multiply out and create a worse system and never stop and never be able to be repealed? Should we be making compromise when we know as realists that the people will want it and that's what's going to happen? Well, it depends on the compromise, right? I can't tell you whether to favor any particular compromise, you'll have to look at it and see if it's any good. My beef is with people who say, as a lot of libertarians that I know do these days, never compromise because compromise only encourages the sons of bitches. Well, when you say never compromise, you're dismantling. And when a lot of people start to do that, and when they begin to vote against any member of Congress who ever compromises, then you're removing the ability of the system to make compromises. The Constitution is a compromising forcing system. That's what it is. That's really all it does. It says anyone who wants to do anything has got to deal with other people who want other things. There's no other path to power. So if you disable the compromise system, you're disabling the Constitution, which is the only way to get anywhere you want to go. So what I'm telling you is that you're no compromise ever alternative if that's the alternative, isn't an alternative. It's total systemic breakdown. Well, how about this is the other alternative. I mean, as a constitutional expert, the other problem here is that, and this is like the libertarian tale, which I mean, I love your work and I think it's very... I think it needs the libertarian tale, which is a lot of different political systems that try to do a lot of things. Maybe you're trying to do too much with too many disparate people and saying that we need to have a politics that figures out how to make people from Massachusetts and Texas have the same healthcare program. Well, maybe the problem is that we're actually having that conversation in the first place in contravention of at least my interpretation of the Constitution, that nothing in the Constitution allowed for healthcare is a good reason. So maybe we should not be encouraging politics that facilitates Massachusetts and Texas compromising on this thing that they should never be asked to compromise in the first place. We should be looking at the scope of politics too and then a political realism within politics that we could actually have exit rather than voice. Your work seems to be about voice, but what about leaving a system that you don't want to be a part of? It's not really a compromise. Talking C-steadying? No. I mean, in a constitutional republic, like I would have visited, you would have... Massachusetts could have the Affordable Care Act and Texas would not. And so if you wanted to be in Massachusetts or you could leave and go to Texas as opposed to the mass centralization of people who are very different. And if you came to me and said, we're going to try and figure out how to make people in India, Hungary, England, and Monaco live together and we need a good political system, I might say, well, maybe they shouldn't be centralizing all their decisions together. Sure. Trevor, I couldn't agree more. One of the strengths of our system is that it is multi-level. And even as we're seeing chaos descend on the Republican Party and in Washington, you're seeing states make breakthroughs on drug policies. This is the biggest single reform of our time, arguably, is what's happening with marijuana at the state level. I argue in my book that decentralization is very helpful. So all for it. But we're back where we started. How do we do it? How are you going to make decentralization happen? Well, you're going to have to pass some legislation. And that means you're going to have to do some compromising. And it won't look perfect, but at the end of the day, if you have more room in there for, say, charter schools than you did before, if you have more discretion for states in building healthcare systems or making drug policy or even immigration policy, I've always wondered why the idea that I've heard around here of having states make immigration policy. I thought that was a great idea. Anyway, for those things to happen or even to step toward those things to happen, we've got to get out of our heads the idea of some imaginary system where we get there by magic.  Then if we accept your story. Which I can see. I largely do. Remain skeptical about parts of it, but we'll set aside that skepticism for now. I love you. Except. Like, let's say that you've identified- You're fired. Exactly. You can't work. I can't work anymore. Is Brookings hiring? You're going to go work for some other thing. Yeah. You've identified genuine problems. There's, you know, these need to get addressed. We have to fix them. And we have to fix them from within a political realist perspective. And maybe not default on the national debt. Right. But maybe pass appropriations. But I mean, figure out how to get us back to political realism because the way that you've framed it in your arguments and the way we started this conversation was we've taken all these steps to get corruption out of politics, that that's been the motive behind these reforms. But we've gone too far. We need to get corruption back into politics. But that's not- I would say we need to stop defining politics as corruption. But these things that have come to be defined as corruption in the public consciousness, like giving money huge sums of money and pork and backroom deals, if you can't like run campaign ads saying what we need is more pork, more campaign contributions, and more backroom deals because that's going to be a non-starter. So how do you go about moving in a realist direction when you've got a public that's so turned off by the very thought of the things you're asking for? What an important question. Can I here insert a self-advertisement? Read your essays, I agree. Yeah, there's the Atlantic article, which has a little bit on this. It's on the newsstands right now. But take a look at this little e-book. It's really a short monograph. It's free. The price is zero. It's on the Brookings website for Kindle or PDF or any other format. It's called political realism, how hacks, machines, big money, and backroom deals can strengthen American politics. And one of the things it tries to do is bring together some of the thinkers and some of the reform ideas that are already out there and already getting traction. So I think that there's good news and there's bad news, and you've already touched upon the bad news, but let's start with the good news. The good news is that you don't have to ask how to turn back the clock. You just have to ask, how do you make the grass grow again once you've paved it over? Well, you remove the asphalt and the grass will grow back. And it turns out if we take our foot off the windpipe of the political system with some intelligent deregulation and allowing earmarks back into the system and restoring what was called regular order on Capitol Hill, which people are already trying to do and by allowing party officials more say in the nominating process, which is important for all kinds of reasons, the lungs will reinflate actually if you take the foot off your foot off the windpipe. People say, you know, the system is rigged. Well, it is rigged. It's rigged against insiders and professionals and parties. It's heavily rigged against them. And all you need to do is de-rig it and those people will begin doing more of their job. It's not a magic bullet solution, but it goes a long way. In some ways it's like deregulating anything else. It's been regulated in a bad way. So that's the good news. The mechanical stuff isn't all that hard. The mental stuff, the attitudinal stuff, that is hard because people at places around Washington, the think tanks that we know and love, right and left, have spent the last 50 years persuading the public that transactional politics, compromise and give and take are corrupt. That attitude needs to be changed. So I'm trying to change it by writing about it. I was a gay marriage advocate 20 years ago and that seemed completely crazy. Surprisingly, I'm getting a lot of positive reaction to this article. A lot of people kind of intuitively understand that politics is supposed to be about trading and making deals. And they're not really against that. So there's an open door to push on here. And finally, Trump has scared the heck out of a lot of people. They're looking at the meltdown in the Republican Party and the rise of a demagogue and the near rise of a demagogue on the other side and saying, wow, this is not what we had in mind. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Mark McDaniel and Evan Banks. To learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


This study has identified a new mechanism by which cancer cells evade the immune system in renal cell carcinoma, RCC, and suggests that targeting this mechanism could improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies. The researchers found that a protein called EHBP1L1 is overexpressed in RCC and is responsible for blocking the body's natural ability to fight off the cancer. When EHBP1L1 was blocked or reduced, the cancer cells were more susceptible to immunotherapy treatments. This finding could lead to improved treatment options for patients with RCC. This article was authored by Ehue Pan, Guan Nan Xu, Liang Min Fu, and others.


Hi, everyone. My name is Carlos Del Toro. I'm the 78th Secretary of the Navy. And I'm so proud to be here in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Chief of Naval Operations is hosting the 24th International Sea Power Symposium. We are gathering here in Newport with heads of navies from across the globe to discuss common challenges and problems that we face together to try to come up with solutions that make sense for both our nations and our navies as well, too. And so it's going to be a very exciting week. I'm proud to be part of this process. We have heads of navies here from Africa, from South America, from Central America, from Europe, from the Indo-Pacific. And we're looking at issues that address our navies across the globe. It's wonderful to be here with them and their spouses to better understand their challenges and get to better know them as individuals as well so that we can collectively work together as a global partnership of navies across the world.


Okay, we're back live here in Silicon Angle's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. This is IBM's information on demand live in Las Vegas. This is day one of two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconAngle.com and I'm joined. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here in the exhibitor section, the big data pavilion. This is theCUBE and now's a good time to tell you, go to Wikibon.org, check out all the research, SiliconAngle.com and SiliconAngle TV to check out these videos and check out the content. And we're here with Bernie Spang, who's the director of strategy and marketing for database software and systems for the information management group at IBM. Bernie, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's great to be here. So John, we've been talking today and recently about how database was sort of a boring industry for a while and now it's the hottest thing going. Yeah, I got one of my tracks in my computer science degree in the late 80s was in database and operating systems. I passed on the compiler track, but just even three years ago, you went at a cocktail party, hey, what do you do? Oh yeah, I'm a database guy. Yes, kind of people don't really fall out of their chair when they hear that, but today it's the hottest thing on the planet. Databases are changing. Everything about big data is the key element. It's a key ingredient for what's happening, whether you're talking about Hadoop and HBase, anything on the open source side, all the way up to DB2 at IBM and everything in between. So Bernie, that's in your wheelhouse. It is. So tell us, it's cool to be a database guy now. I'll tell you, hearing you tell that sort of reminded me when I moved to the information management team from WebSphere and I was involved in the early days of Java and Eclipse launch was one of my things. People say, why are you going to database software? That is boring. Yeah, it's commodity stuff. And ever since I've been here, it's been anything but. And that's largely driven by the convergence of a number of factors. The amount of information available that the internet has brought to bear, especially now with mobile devices, really expanding that. The sheer compute power that is now cost effective to be able to apply to that information and then the advances in analytics technology. Solid state drives have a big part of that too. Well, that's a big part of that computational foundation making it cost effective. Now it's more cost effective to keep that information in flash memory. Just DRAM memory itself. You know, you could have more cost effective rate and then just the processor power. But then you apply, you add that to, or you add to that the software advances. The new techniques for analyzing information and being able to analyze not just structured data in a relational warehouse, but also the unstructured information and the text and the video, et cetera. And with our streams capability, being able to analyze information in motion, that's a whole new area. Take us through some of the dynamics in the marketplace. We'll start in kindergarten, work our way up to college in the conversation. Explaining what's going on in the dynamics of the database market right now, relative to the tech speak, meaning what's happening, what's the key drivers around, old way, new way, new guys coming in the market, new CS degrees, people who are on play with database, they get the old school who are locked in their way. So there's a little bit of a conflict there. We see that with DevOps and developers and operations in the cloud. But in the database world, you've got kind of the old BI, data warehouse guys, hardcore database, and then you got the new school who just wants things to move fast. Well, I mean, this happens in every generation of technology. I mean, I've been with IBM enough years that I saw it with the mainframe and their system Z evolution, oh, the personal computers and minis come out, therefore everything should go that way. And the days of the dinosaur discussions, meanwhile, we're growing the horsepower on the mainframes, leaps and bounds every year over year. The point I'm making is new technology comes out that does new things or does some old things even better, that does not mean it solves all problems. And so that's really the story here. When you say, you know, what's going on with the database, the traditional relational database market, there's really two things. First, there's a recognition that relational database technology is not the right best fit for every data challenge. And that's where you get things like the new kinds of technologies, graph stores, Hadoop, time series data management like we do with our Informix software is being a completely different approach. So that's one thing, the recognition that you want to apply the right best tool for each job. Then in the case where the right best tool is a relational data system because that still is the best answer for a lot of data management workloads, then it becomes cause, how do I do that more cost effectively, simply and with greater performance? So those basics have not gone away. So I'm inferring from that Bernie that IBM strategy is Horses for Courses. You've got a rich portfolio, a DB2, IMS, you mentioned Informix, others. Talk about the portfolio generally, but specifically IBM strategy. So you're right, the Horses for Courses is a good expression for what we mean. I like to say, there are others in the market who suggest that they offer a one-size-fits-all solution. And I'm quick to remind folks, no, what they're offering is a one-size-does-not-best-fit-all solution. They're asking their customers to make a compromise, either in efficiency or performance or cost or complexity of using that one thing to try to do multiple different things. So our strategy is have the right best tool for each job and make sure that they all work together. And especially in the information world, a big focus of our InfoSphere portfolio is managing information integration and governance. Now that can't just be for structured data in a relational system, it's got to be across all systems, right? And the flow of information and the governance and the security of information across all your different types of systems. So many have sort of positioned Hadoop as the batch and many of the traditional companies that said come to us for real time. What's IBM's angle on the whole unification of the sequel and the non-sequel worlds and how is that coming together in your customer base? So definitely we're seeing an increased interest in real time or operational use of information, operational analytics. One of the big exciting pieces of news here this week is our pure data system announcement. And one of the models, now getting back to our strategy, it's available in three different models. A pure data system for transactions, for analytics and for operational analytics. And that operational analytics capability is there so that you can do the deep analytics in a warehouse but also be able to access that information and tap into it for real time decision making. Another example is the InfoSphere Streams capability that's actually analyzing information as it flows through the system before it's even stored. Or even if it's never stored because it's just so much information. So there's again a spectrum of opportunities to analyze information in motion over time when it's stored, do long running analytics but also immediate operational analytics. I have to give you a props. I mean IBM does a very good job of sort of hiding the complexities of the technology behind its good names, good branding, but so but the transactional stuff would be the traditional DB2, would it not? The pure data system for transactions is DB2. And then a TISA piece fits in, talk about that. With the pure scale capability of DB2. So it's a scalable database cluster that's transparent to the application. The pure data system for analytics is powered by a TISA technology. And this is the system that is the evolution of the NETISA platform that used to be called TwinFin before the acquisition. And that's really focused on specifically on the deep analytics workload where you want to optimize and simplify that. And then the pure data system for operational analytics is built with the InfoSphere warehouse technology which is also DB2 at its core. And that enables the support of continuous ingest of data, continuous loading of data. The deep analytics and supports more than a thousand operational accesses to the warehouse to support those operational analytic workloads where you want to do real time decision making. So architecturally, you've preserved the essence of those architectures, if I understand it, but the package looks a lot different. You're bringing together storage and servers and networking into more of an appliance-like model. Exactly. So the pure data systems are the latest of the pure systems family that we launched in April. So what we refer to as expert integrated systems. So the characteristics of what we mean by that is built-in expertise, integration by design that's optimized for the target workload, and a simplified experience throughout the life cycle of that system. So each of these systems integrates the compute, storage, memory, system management workload, provides a single supportive maintenance and support for the entire system, right? And a consistency across the portfolio to do what you just said. So your organizationally, your customers are now faced with some dislocations, right? They've got, you're talking about, at least from a branding standpoint, analytics and transactional systems, and you're also talking about from an infrastructure standpoint, bringing together a lot of different disciplines. How are your clients dealing with those organizational dislocations? Well, it definitely comes up. There's definitely a mind shift that has to take place when you're talking about buying integrated systems that have that appliance simplicity in an organization that's used to buying components. You know, I buy the software, I buy the servers, I buy the storage, I buy the networking, all separate teams and put it together. But it's what I just went through, that litany of I got to design the system with all those components, I have to procure it, install it, configure it, test it, and all the experts that have to do that. That represents a huge amount of time and cost and risk of human error that our clients face every single system they put together. And so by using this expert integrated approach, you can save time, save money, reduce the risk, and shift that expense to an investment in new growth projects like we're talking about here with how do I find the resources to tap into this big data opportunity when I'm spending all my money on operations while you greatly simplify the operations, make it more efficient so that you can make that investment. So the presidential debate tonight, I don't want your opinion on the politics, but of course one of the things Republicans, Democrats do, they say, all right, look it, we stand for this versus we stand for that, they try to create these differences.  I don't mean the transaction of the execution of the code, I mean the transaction of the signing of the check. But so how are you different than the competition? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and just paint a picture there. Certainly. So the biggest thing that stands out for me is the workload optimized strategy, right? Versus the one size does not best fit all strategy. And we are focused on helping our clients deliver business value, right? I mean the name of the company is, you know, International Business Machines, that's what we are at our core, is helping our clients with their business results. And so in today's era of computing and the big data challenges and opportunities have only accentuated this opportunity, there's a great opportunity to simplify the IT infrastructure. And so if our clients allow us to do the work, to design and configure and tune and have systems that come factory ready, in fact, you know, to do specific workloads, that frees up their time and energy and they don't have to customize those things themselves. So I wonder if I could follow up on that, because what you said sounds great. We're all about business value. Who doesn't want business value? But customers will often say, okay, but I'm afraid that that means that's a euphemism for IBM services. Now you're embedding a lot of these services and knowledge, service knowledge, application knowledge into these systems. That's right. Talk about what the premium is that a customer has to pay for that and is it still a services led engagement? So no, when we talk about the pure systems, these are systems that have the expertise built in. Now the expertise comes from decades of working with thousands of clients around the world, from our services teams, but also from our lab teams, our development teams, and IBM research, for that matter. And your customers, I would imagine. Right, working with the customers. So these systems aren't just bundles or collections of things that we put together. They actually, the configurations, the automated deployment and management is based on patterns that we've seen over and over again. And we've captured that expertise and built it in so that the clients don't either have to do it themselves or hire IBM or any other service provider. Bernie, one of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE, and it's looking angle, Wikibon in the community is, we've seen this movie before. Specialism around the database moves to general purpose, back to relational, swings back to another cycle. theCUBE, a whole lab cube. Objects in relation, back to relational, more general purpose. Objects, we've seen it, now we've got no sequel. So we're in that specialty phase. And so it's not a mutually exclusive situation, you mentioned that. So where are we in that movement of the market shift? Obviously, you see in Duke World this week, we'll be there covering it. A lot of startups are coming out. You see, Taylor made suits, if you will, of solutions using these purpose-built or these specialty products. But to go mass adoption, you need to have kind of a general purpose. Well, yeah, and actually what you need is, well, when you have new technologies and no sequel, not only sequel, so let's not say it's not sequel, but things like the graph stores, the Hadoop approach, and I'll come back to the time series example in a minute is a great one. When application developers and solution providers see a new technology or a different technology that gives them a compelling advantage, compelling performance, simplicity, or efficiency, you can't ignore that, you got to go after that. Now, in order to gain that value, you then have to create applications or tailor applications to that new technology. And that's an investment. That's not an automatic freebie. So none of these new technologies are a magic silver bullet that cover everything and none of them come immediately for free. But if the value is significant enough, the investment's made. So let me come back to the Informix time series one. Informix has had time series data management capability for years now, but it really has been untapped until the smart meters and sensors generating all this data really started to come into the focus with all these smarter planets, smarter energy, smarter cities, smarter transportation. So when you have time stamped data coming from these devices and you put it in a relational data table, it's highly inefficient. It takes too long to load, too long to process, uses too much storage space. If you use a time series data structure, can use as little as one third the storage, you know, your data load times go from hours to minutes, if not second. Now the beauty of Informix software is it has that data model in it as well as the relational, so you get a benefit of both. But it's a no sequel technology. It's not standard relational sequel. And so we've got new partners now and new customers, especially in energy and utilities. I was talking to somebody from a water utility dealing with all their meters and sensors and not being able to handle that big data challenge. And they're stumped. And we show them what we have here and they go fight and go from data loads that are seven hours down to less than 20 minutes and use one third the amount of storage space. Now that becomes a compelling business value that makes me want to make this shift. I think you're right on the money on that. We're seeing the same thing with Hadoop and HBase for example. Great rows, putting things right next to each other. Low cost commodity storage. So that's phenomenal. The next question I have for you is, okay, what's next after that? So we have that, these databases. Okay, cool, check. Now, a lot of intertwined data. So developers are now looking at data and we coined on theCUBE here that data is a new development kit. So you're seeing developers start to play with data, party with data in a way that's developer centric. See how they've got a co-mingling of data, right? So it's a mashing up data, whatever you want to call it. There's stuff going on now. So what's your view on all that? Where's that tracking to? So a couple of things. First I think having the developers play with data in different ways, like we're talking about here, I think it's going to enable things to happen that we can envision. So that'll be fun to watch. But as these things start to mature and need to be rolling, roll out and become the next mission critical set of capabilities, you know, all the old things come back into play. I got to worry about security. I got to worry about privacy. I got to worry about reliability. It's no more that it's in the sandbox. I need to worry about all those other things. And we're seeing that.  And then all of a sudden there was a realization of how much sensitive customer information unmasked was on the system. Whoa, hold on, time out. It's just a sandbox sound. Right. And so that, you know, so the discussion with our big insights product is it's not just the Hadoop, it's got the Hadoop technology in it, but it builds then the governance and the management and the security stuff into it. Well, the real world, the big leagues. Exactly, exactly. And that's why when we do things like we put, you know, XML store and the RDF graph store in DB2 and the time series and spatial managements and informics, when you put that new capabilities in existing systems that have all the reliability, security and whatnot on top of it, you get that immediate benefit. And so that's why you see us in some cases where it makes sense, blending those technologies right in, so you get that immediate advantage. And then you have other cases like in the Hadoop case, that's really a separate system and we've got to take that base and build the security and the reliability and the enterprise class closet service on top of it. What's your angle and the best way to do that? So for instance, let's take security, sort of narrowly. And there have been some initiatives like the Accumulo project, you know, the big table mimics out there, but specifically people getting into things like cell level security out of the NSA, there have been some projects spawned. Is that the right direction in your view or is it more trying to get data back into traditional structures? What are your thoughts on that? I'm not a security expert, but I think the trying to get data back into a box is not the right way to go. They're here. You know, it's never going to happen. Once you get this exposed, you're going to take advantage of it. The key thing is though, to be smart about it. And to know when there are cases where, especially in the big data and using Hadoop world, you may have an area that's wide open, you want it to be the sandbox and you're just playing around and snooping around trying to figure out what's important. Now as long as you're not loading sensitive information into that pool of information, you know, that's okay.  So I got to ask you, because you're a database expert and John said it's become much more interesting in the last few years. We were at Oracle Open World a few weeks ago. And years ago, Ellison made a big deal about you don't want to do multi-tenancy, it's a bad idea, and then they came up with their patchwork of multi-tenancy solutions. And of course, Oracle 12 was announced and now all of a sudden, multi-tenancy is a good thing. And you need multi-tenancy in the database, not the application layer. First of all, do you agree with that? Let me start there. Well, I agree that multi-tenancy is a valuable thing and that's why I know we've had it in DB2 since the early 90s, contrary to an assertion that the new Oracle product was the first to happen. But you know, you know how those things go. I had to get that out there. So yeah, let me just point that out. Deny it and then act like you invented it. Well, right, exactly. But it gets back to the virtualization technology enables a greater level of efficiency. I'm going to bring it back to my point about speed, simplicity, efficiency. Virtualization capability allows you to, instead of having many things that are underutilized, have fewer things that are highly utilized. Now, when people talk about virtualization technology, they go right to, you know, the VMware, the KVM. Do you guys know anything about virtualization? All they say, right, do we know anything about virtualization? Right, and the cloud, and this is all new. Well, you know, the system Z, the mainframe has been a virtualized cloud environment for decades and it's still the India's industry's lowest cost for application user platform on the planet. Because you can pack the applications and the workloads and the user throughput onto that system because it's so highly virtualized. So it's virtualized at all the different layers, storage virtualization, operating system virtualization, data virtualization. So the multi-tenancy cuts across all these different things and in distributed environments, X86 environments, even UNIX environments, you have a whole generation of folks who don't appreciate all that level of virtualization that's even possible. So when new things like this come up, oh, this is a new thing. Well, yeah, it's an old thing that's new again. But if you could bring that kind of multi-tenancy through NoSQL to the cloud, that would be, in your view, a good thing. Oh, yeah, certainly. No, the multi-tenancy to increase the virtualization and the efficiency, I'm sorry, of the underlying platform means lower costs for the provider, which then can translate to lower costs for the subscriber. And if you can deliver security on top of that, right? That's nirvana. Right, that's exactly right. And the more you can bake things together and manage them as a collection, instead of a distribution, then that enables you to build some automation in, as well as the security. So you see that as table stakes to play in the big leagues, right? In terms of when you start talking multi-tenancy. Exactly, yeah. All right. All right, excellent. So we're here at IBM IOD. We're here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with Bernie Spang, who is a database expert, head of, you are now. Yeah, I am now. He's a senior vice president involved in setting strategy. We're kicking out having a great time. It's cool to be in the database.  And that is, take us through, just, you know, from your own personal perspective, not the IBM, take your IBM hat off, share with us the database arc. How's this market going to change for the students out there watching, for the analysts that are watching, for the users that are watching? What do you see as the next five years of trajectory? Shoot the arrow forward five years, be in the geek that you are, talk about databases. What's going to happen? What do you see as scenarios, and just share some vision? You know, it's interesting. My nephew graduated a couple of years ago and now is with IBM working on data analytics. My son is just going off to college next year and is interested in business, and he's got an interest on the whole data analytics. It's an interesting time, and I think it's going to be for at least another five years if not a 10-year trajectory going forward where the data professionals are going to be seen increasingly as critical to the success of the companies, their companies, their organizations. And it needs to go beyond the, it used to be I'm the management expert, I know all the dials and switches to get it to actually run. It now needs to be how do I take advantage of, not just making that one thing work, but how do I understand all the different options available, all these different technologies? How do I understand all the different things that business is trying to do with data and connect those up? So it's a great time for the data professionals to really think in terms of being data experts, not just database experts. And I think that's going to continue. And then I think from a product point of view, the database products are going to continue to what I just said. They're going to increasingly have different workload optimized capabilities, increased automation, increased simplification, as well as never ending demand for performance and security. Databases are hot, data science is hot, up and down the stack. Big benefits from down into the geek to the business benefits and business impact. This is theCUBE, we're live at Information on Demand in Las Vegas, IBM's big show in 2012 for information management, big data. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.


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