interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Playing Populist
by Thomas Frank
February 12, 2021
This interview with Thomas Frank, author of "Listen, Liberal" and "The People, No.", was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Thomas | My name is Thomas Frank. I'm the author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. It's about people who hate populism.
frank | Who hates populism?
These days I'd have to say liberals, unfortunately, and ironically. I say “ironically” because Populism, real Populism with a capital P, started as a liberal movement. Nowadays, liberals are profoundly mistrustful of ordinary Americans and of mass movements of working-class people. They reiterate this all the time. You see it expressed in a hundred different ways: from Hillary Clinton talking about the deplorables, to the people on Twitter speaking with an assumption that white working-class people are basically scoundrels.
Populism began with The Populists – the party — around 1890. Can you talk about the origins a bit more?
We talk about populism all the time nowadays, but unless you understand where the word comes from, you're going to be really, really confused about what people are using it to mean. The word does not come from Latin. The word is not from ancient Greek. The word was made up by a bunch of people on a train between Kansas City and Topeka in the year 1891 in order to describe a brand new third-party movement that had just started up in Kansas. This was a left-wing, third-party movement. It was largely made of farmers, but it also included union workers and other working-class types. The Populists wanted federal programs for farmers, they wanted to nationalize the railroads, they wanted to crack down on monopolies, and they wanted to take America off the gold standard. They pushed for political reforms that would have made it easier to vote. Essentially, they wanted to make the voice of the people heard more effectively in Washington. That's what they stood for. That's what Populism was all about.
Until it wasn't.
Yeah. It was immediately redefined by the people who hated all of those things. The Populist platform, the things I just described, were extremely controversial, though they sound like common sense today. In 1891, the leading newspapers of Kansas and of America more broadly attacked Populism with severe language. They described it as a movement of losers from the bottom rungs of society. They said that because these people have the right to vote, they think that they can demand to run things that they have no business running.
They didn't say deplorables back then, but they said similar things: hayseeds, riff-raff, ne'er do wells. They said that these were the worst people in society.
There were a lot of armchair psychologists at the time that would speculate about what made people sign up with the Populist movement, and it was always that there was something wrong in their brains.
That attack on populism survives to this day. This redefinition that was thrown at the Populists as a political attack has stuck. And, I should say, was thrown at them by what would today be considered the extreme right-wing, though at the time they would have been described as respectable gentlemen of New York and Boston or something like that.
Was there any prioritization of race during the early days of The Populist party? And I guess, if so, to what extent?
So the Populists did something that was very innovative in the 1890s, which was to reach out to Black voters in the South, where most Black people lived at the time. In a lot of Southern States, Black people could still vote in the 1890s, they hadn't been fully disenfranchised yet.
In the south, the ruling political philosophy of that era was white solidarity. The idea that white people's interests as whites was paramount to everything else. Whether you're a rich white or poor white didn't matter, you had to vote for the party of the white man, which was, of course, the Democratic Party. At the time, they were the monopoly party in the South.
The Populists came into the South with a different proposition.
Your class interest is actually more important than your racial interests. They openly appealed to Black and white voters on this basis.
The tactic seemed to succeed at first, but then, the masters of the South came down on these guys like a ton of bricks and absolutely destroyed the Populist movement. They did so by unleashing an incredible campaign of racial hysteria directed against Black people, using every sort of ugly racist trope that you can imagine to beat Populism down. And when they were done, in a lot of states they disenfranchised Black voters. Many Southern states went around and took the vote away from African-Americans through various forms of legislation. They enforced literacy tests. They implemented poll taxes. In doing so, they wound up taking the vote away from a lot of poor whites as well. And they did all this to make sure that something like populism never happened again.
I was watching MLK’s speech at the conclusion of the march from Selma to Montgomery. He talks about Populism as a way to awake the masses and as a uniting face in a segregated society.
I'm glad you brought that up. This Martin Luther King speech in 1965 is one of my favorite moments. He is on the steps of the Capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama. He's at the very end of this era of disenfranchisement. They're just about to pass the Voting Rights Act, Black civil rights are about to be restored, and they are going to be voting again. This long nightmare chapter of history is finally ending. As he is standing at the tail end of it, King looks back and asks, how did this terrible system get started in the first place? He says it was started as a way of beating down the Populist movement, which is, in fact, correct.
Now, I don't want to romanticize it too much because the Populists were not racial liberals in a modern sense. They did not understand the issues the way that we do today. The official Populist party doctrine was that they were going to reach out to Black voters in the South, but in truth, they weren't very systematic about it, and they didn't do a very good job of it. I mean, they were a third party, so they never really got very far with their project. It ended in incredible disaster, as Martin Luther King points out in his speech.
But even so, historians used to look back to Populism as a bright spot in Southern history, because it was the only time before the Civil Rights era that poor whites and poor Blacks had tried to get together based on their shared interests.
And, so far we don't have that.
There’s a fear of a truly mobilized electorate – but mobilizing through class over other issues is difficult. It seems like it should be what the Democratic party should be about, and yet, there's a real rejection of it.
I didn't really plan on asking, but I'm curious how you see the media in this. How do you think media propels an anti-Populist narrative through criticism, many times using the same language populist critics were using a hundred years ago?
Yeah. A lot of these criticisms of Populism began on the extreme right, and now those criticisms are, word for word, enunciated by liberals. That is largely because liberalism has changed. The Democratic party today is not the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt or of Martin Luther King. It's a party that is overwhelmingly concerned with the fortunes of highly educated, affluent white-collar workers, and not working-class people. If you look at who donates to the Democratic Party, and who supports the Democratic Party, you see that it tends to be people from the knowledge industries, industries where your position is based on credentialed expertise. Wall Street is a huge supporter of the Democratic party. Silicon Valley and Hollywood are as well. Various academia, of course, too. And the Democratic Party does extraordinary favors for these industries and for these people.
They don't understand themselves as the voice of the working-class. That went out of style in the 1970s. By and large liberals today have taken up the positions of conservatives of yesterday in a lot of ways; they occupy the cultural position that conservatives did a hundred years ago. Liberals understand themselves as the best element of society, and they look down upon the riffraff. They've taken over where the conservatives of the 1890s left off.
I heard a criticism of Al Gore that I hadn't thought about, which was Al Gore was a specific kind of southerner – one who left the South, abandoned his accent, attended an Ivy League school, and then presented as elite. This was from a southerner. And it really got under his skin. Whereas Bush was – real or not –
Well, they were both elites.
Yes, but Bush was at least pretending not to be.
Pretending to be for the people, yeah.
Bush's dad was even worse. George Bush, Sr. was probably the preppiest man in America. He comes from extreme wealth that goes back generations. You can trace their ancestry back to like colonial Massachusetts. Then, when he's running for president against Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bush does this phony populist act in the most outrageous way. He goes around the country, eating pork rinds all the time, hanging around with country and Western singers, and touring flag factories.
Why flag factories? Because the entire campaign was about the culture war. They found some instances where Dukakis had said something along the lines of you don't have to say the pledge of allegiance in school, and they made this into a national issue. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous.
They always do. They walk right into it and they nominate this guy, Michael Dukakis who says it's not about ideology, it's about competence. He is, of course, the most competent of the competent. His white collar has a white collar. He's like the ultimate technocrat.
Why do the Democrats keep nominating these guys? Someone once described Jimmy Carter as a passionless technocrat. The description works just as well for Dukakis. The Democrats keep choosing these guys: Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton. Even Barack Obama to a certain degree is one. They keep choosing them and then getting beat by fake populists.
That story is absurd, but it's like, at least they have the good sense to pretend.
These guys — the Republicans — are extremely good at the game. They come out of the business world. They're endlessly dynamic. They will say anything. They will do anything. They will try anything. They're incredibly innovative. If one thing doesn't work, they drop it and they try another. They'll contradict themselves. Whatever it takes to win, they will do it.
I believe it. I so, so believe it. When I first heard that criticism of Gore, I rolled my eyes, because you think of the difference in presidencies between him and Bush.
Dukakis would have been a better president. There's no doubt about it.
You just think I don't really want to hang out with you at all. How far does that go in terms of getting people elected?
Well, take Trump versus Hillary. There's no question that she would have been a better president than Donald Trump, but Donald Trump is the epitome of phony populism. Here's a guy that seems to speak to the public outrage of the moment in a really emotional way. He's everything that the media is telling us we need in politics: he's out there, he's open, he says whatever he thinks, he would be fun to have a beer with. He becomes president. I just have to say, I am glad we are at the end of this. I'm so relieved that he's done.
I mean, there was a very good chance that this guy was going to get reelected up until COVID. The economy was booming. You had real wage growth in this country, which we haven't seen in a very long time, because the labor market was so tight. If COVID never happened or had he shown just the slightest bit of leadership during the pandemic, he probably would have been reelected. But what a dumbshit. He shows no leadership at all. His narcissism cancels everything else out.
You would think that would shake the Democratic party.
No, no, no. The leadership clique of the Democratic Party are all geared towards mentally or culturally staving off challenges to themselves. Like you think about the people that ran Hillary Clinton's campaign, they all came right back. They all have high places in the party or in academia or the DC thinktanks. There is no accountability with these people. At least with the Republicans, you see shreds of accountability. When somebody screws up really badly, they're done. With Democrats, once you're in the club, there's very little accountability. This is a problem across the board. Look at Obama and the Wall Street banks. There was a complete failure to hold these people accountable.
Could you imagine a successful new wave of populism from the left happening?
It's something that should happen. Lord knows we could use it. America as a great middle-class society has been deteriorating for decades. It's in shreds. Unfortunately, we came to a point where a reckoning had to happen urgently, in the financial crisis in 2009. People like me thought that reckoning was about to take place, but in fact it never happened. There was a time when the public anger at Wall Street was volcanic and effective. It elected Barack Obama.
But Obama failed and the Democratic Party has yet to reckon with Obama's failure. As a president that was faced with an urgent historical task, he failed. You can blame the Republicans for that if you want, because they were obstructionists. They wanted him to fail. But still, there is a whole lot more he could have done about the anger towards the financial crisis and the larger public anger, the disappearance of the American way of life. His heart was not in that fight.
I'm referring not only to the fact that he didn't prosecute these Wall Street guys, but he never made it clear what the financial crisis was about and how we were going to make sure it never happened again. Not only that, but he also rationalized what was happening to people by saying people need to be educated or have an advanced degree to survive. All these Democrats do that. Actually, Joe Biden doesn't, but he’s the exception. I was just watching CNN yesterday, and this guy came on and said that Trump supporters have no one to blame for their bad situation, but themselves, because they didn't get advanced degrees. Are you serious?
That is nuts.
I always think enthusiasm about your alma mater, rather than some embarrassment you were able to attend, means you have worms for brains.
Really? Wow. I live in Bethesda, Maryland, this very affluent place. Every high school student, every elementary school student here has internalized the hierarchy of universities. Everybody knows which university is higher than which other ones. Everybody wants to know where everybody else went to college so that they can place them on this hierarchy. Everybody does this here. It's part of who we are. I kind of admire you for being revolted by that. And I mean, to close the loop, this is an extremely liberal area. These are all Democrats that I’m talking about.
And the right is able to capitalize on it.
Right. The Tea Party movement managed to get themselves in front of the anger towards the financial crisis. They made themselves the face of public anger and captured it. They succeeded in stealing that momentum. They built a fake populist movement out of thin air and they were very good at this, but they were able to do it because the Democrats and Barack Obama failed. He never put any of those executives on trial. The public never really understood what had happened. A mass movement on the left never got going. Occupy Wall Street was too late and too little; it didn't come up until 2011 and it never really became a mass movement in the way that it needed to. The left was not able to generate that kind of populist feeling when we needed it most. And that had terrible consequences for us, the terrible consequences being the right’s capture of dissatisfaction and subsequently the election of Donald Trump.
Everybody knows the middle-class society is in pieces, but only one party is willing to talk about that, admittedly, in an upside-down way. Democrats deny anything is wrong. That is a recipe for disaster.
The theme that runs through everything I've written is the question of what happens to a middle-class society when the party of the left isn't interested in being a party of the left anymore. The Democrats, whatever you want to say about them, are our party of the left.
They don't want to be a party that cares about the economic condition of working-class people. That's not what they're interested in. They're absolutely crystal clear about that. What happens when that's the case? Well, two things happen. One is this kind of incredible inequality that we're in right now where some people do extremely well, and are some of the richest people in the history of the world, and there's no hope for everybody else. And you have politics that constantly veers further and further to the right. That's where we are. And I don't see that changing anytime soon until the day the Democrats rediscover their original purpose.
Did you think Bernie had a chance at being that champion?
I did think he had a chance. He came very close in Iowa in 2020. He won in New Hampshire. He looked like he was on a roll. He was clearly the front runner at one point. I thought it was possible.
He does represent that older tradition in the Democratic Party that's focused on economic well-being of working-class people. And I think that's one of the reasons that the Democratic Party hates him.
There's a generational aspect to this. The Democratic Party’s move to the right was a product of that sixties generation. The Bill Clintons, the Gary Harts, the Al Gores, those who called themselves the New Democrats.
A “new kind of Democrat”...
Yeah. They called themselves the New Democrats. They framed their version of the Democratic Party as a rising up against their parents, the New Deal generation, the World War II generation. They said, out in the open, that they were going to take the Democratic Party away from that Franklin D. Roosevelt orientation. Bernie Sanders is the opposite of that. Bernie Sanders represents the repudiation of that generational project. That's why he's totally unacceptable. He's a throwback to what the Democratic Party used to be before Bill Clinton came along. That’s why he can’t be spoken about in polite company or whatever.
In the end, though, Bernie didn’t have the votes. I’m sure there were contributing factors that were political, but he didn’t reach broad swaths of the working-class, especially those who consider themselves ‘conservative’. Do you think there will come someone who can cross over?
There has to be such a person. I mean, this can't go on.
As soon as I say that, I take it back.
This can go on. An increasingly radicalized Republican party versus this increasingly passionless, technocratic, Democratic Party? Yes. That can go on. That can go on for a really long time without delivering anything to anybody, as long as you have some way of blowing off their steam. We're coming up with ways to do that.
If people continue to feel like their legitimate concerns are not being heard, it's not healthy. This is not a healthy society right now, and it is going to become less healthy. And I don't see an answer on the horizon right now.
It's certainly not coming from the Lincoln Project, it's certainly not from the Democratic Party and it's certainly not from the Trump Republicans — the Ted Cruzes and Marco Rubios who will likely make a comeback after Joe Biden crashes and burns.
What a nightmare.
Well, hey, let's, let's be optimistic, Joe Biden might also succeed. The 78 year old stepping up to the plate might hit a home run.