Elizabeth Warren on America's Next Story

0:01Elizabeth Warren:This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

0:37Elizabeth Warren:America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you.

0:55Today, I'm talking to Senator Elizabeth Warren. I wanted to talk with Senator Warren because she has always been driven by ideas. And her main idea, that the American economy is rigged against ordinary people, is much more widely accepted today than it was a quarter century ago when she started making that case as a little-known bankruptcy law professor. She was ahead of the curve. and her skill at telling that story propelled her to the forefront of American politics. But a funny thing has happened along the way. The country elected someone else who says the economy is rigged, Donald Trump, and his policies seem likely to aggravate inequality.

1:36So I wanted to talk with Senator Warren about why this has happened and what could be a more persuasive story for her side going forward. In the conversation that follows, you'll hear us agree about the importance of housing policy and disagree about the importance of social issues. You'll also hear Senator Warren make a fascinating comparison between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

2:03Senator Warren, it's good to see you.

2:05Elizabeth Warren:Oh, and good to see you, David. You and I got to know each other in the early 2000s when I was an economic columnist here at the Times, and you'd just written a book about struggling middle-class families. And I remember there was this moment when you started getting a lot more attention, specifically because you were explaining the financial crisis in ways that people could understand. You obviously weren't the first person to say that the modern American economy was failing hardworking families. I mean, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both centered their presidential campaigns around that message.

2:40And I'm curious, how is it that you think your story was different from the story that people had previously been hearing from politicians?

2:49Elizabeth Warren:Yeah, I think of it this way. I just kept punching harder because nobody was listening. Okay, nobody overstates it, but people just weren't paying attention. My work was all about what's happening to America's middle class. And you point out the book where you and I began to hook up. It was sort of my first popular book, effort to write a popular book. I'm not sure, you know, read by tens of people. But looking at what was happening to America's families in the 80s and 90s through the lens of bankruptcy. And the answer was, here were all these middle-class people who had had one of three things happen to them, usually two out of three, huge medical debt, an extended job loss, or a death or divorce in the family.

3:46Elizabeth Warren:That's how they end up in bankruptcy court. Bankruptcies are going through the roof. And the conflicting story here is those are layabouts. Those are people who are just trying to cheap the system. Those are not hardworking folks like you. Let's ostracize them. Let's push them out. Let's make bankruptcy laws harder. And so that's the context in which I wrote the book you're talking about, which is The Two-Income Trap. And the point of all this is to say the problem is structural. It's not you. You didn't not catch on. You didn't fail to work hard. It's that the structure changed. And so when I come along to talk about this, it's obviously to talk about data because I'm a data nerd.

4:40Elizabeth Warren:But it's also to talk about what the human story is behind this and the damn political story that is being fed to Americans and just how fundamentally wrong I believe that is. And you connect that to what causes the financial crisis. The New Yorker has this nice line in her profile of you that you represent a throwback to a more combative progressive tradition. It's obviously not just you. It's Bernie Sanders and others, too. And there have clearly been some big successes as a result of this progressive economic movement. I mean, on a personal level, it catapults you into the Senate. And on a policy level, there's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which you help create.

5:20The minimum wage rises in a lot of states. And then the Biden administration comes along and it enacts a really progressive economic agenda relative to previous Democratic administrations. You help shape that agenda. And I imagine when you look over the last 15 or 20 years, you're quite proud of those developments.

5:39Elizabeth Warren:Oh, God. No. I feel, oh, wow, I hadn't even thought of it that way, David. I feel so frustrated that we didn't deliver more, that when we had the opportunity, we didn't deliver more. And frankly, when we got into those elections, that we didn't lay out a more ambitious agenda. More was needed. Damn, I wrote that book, Two Income Trap, what's it been now, 20 blah, blah years ago? I wrote it at a time when I talked about how I couldn't get childcare 25 years before that, how I almost ended up not being able to go to school, not being able to finish my education, and ultimately quitting my first job.

6:27Elizabeth Warren:I was literally on the floor in the kitchen crying on the phone to my Aunt Bea because I didn't have childcare. I didn't have childcare. And there I am 22 years later with my daughter who has her first baby, who's on the phone crying, trying to hold down a job. And her problem is she can't get childcare. And now here I am. My granddaughter is gonna be out there. And it looks like for her, there are no better prospects for childcare than there were for her mama or for her grandmama. Am I proud? No, I am furious. This is a problem we should have solved long ago. And I think that takes us right to the current president.

7:16There's this huge contradiction in American politics. The story that you and others have told about how broken our economy is, is a much more widely accepted story than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Even Republicans now admit that the free market has a lot of big problems. But it's Donald Trump who has proven especially effective at using a version of that story, right? The game is rigged against you to win elections and then to enact policies that I think you and I would agree usually make the problem worse rather than better. And I'm interested in how you analyze Trump's ability to tell that story so well.

8:02Like, when you diagnose it, what is it that he has done that has worked politically?

8:08Elizabeth Warren:So, if I can, let me just back up your question a little bit. I just want to tell you something that I don't think I've ever said publicly that fits in this conversation. and that is, as you rightly point out, you know, the crash happens 2008. I become the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel. Obama signs the CFPB into law. He brings me down to Washington. I spend a year setting up the agency. At the end, the Republicans won't let me run the agency, so I come back here and I'm getting these calls. You should run for Senate. So anyway, I end up running for Senate from Massachusetts. I start out behind a bazillion points.

8:48Elizabeth Warren:and then I, you know, get it down to maybe just a trillion points. So it's now the summer before the election in November 2012. And Barack Obama, who's going to be up for re-election, and the Democrats say, you can have a speaking spot at the national convention. They invite me to do a keynote speech. I'm going to do a keynote speech one night. and I am excited. The team that's working with me is excited. People around Massachusetts are excited. This is the big moment. So I sit down, I write my, I work on my speech. I go back and forth with the folks on my team on this speech. And the line I have in this speech is something like, people all across this country feel like the game is rigged against them and they're right it is and then i talk about the things i think we should do so we send this speech in to be approved by the powers that be in the democratic party which is basically the obama white house at this point and they say no take those lines out you cannot say that this economy is rigged.

10:11And I said, but it is.

10:16Elizabeth Warren:And they said, no, you can't say that. And the back and forth over just identifying the problem in 2012 is a huge tug of war. Now, ultimately, I got to leave it in. It was my speech, and they let me leave it in, and I'm grateful for that. But four years later, when Donald Trump ran, he talked about rigged every day. And now, if I'm just describing what happens, he becomes president. And for four years, he kind of loses that thread, right? It's more, let's go beat up on immigrants. And then COVID hits, Joe Biden becomes the nominee for president for the Democrats. Donald Trump loses. He becomes this very embittered person.

11:17Elizabeth Warren:But then the year leading into the 2024 election, what does he grab hold of? He grabs hold of this phrase that he uses over and over and over. on day one, I will lower costs for American families. I will do it. I, Donald Trump, and I will do it. Kept saying on day one. In other words, he saw the problem. He said, I get it. This is painful for you. I mean, in his words. And he said, and I am making a credible claim that I am going to make your life better economically starting on the first day I got sworn in. How do I know that was really effective? Partly because he used it, but partly because right after he was elected, you may remember he's interviewed, he sits down for his first interview, and one of the first questions is, so, Donald Trump, why did you win this election?

12:25Elizabeth Warren:And he said, because I promised on day one to lower costs for American families. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time. And I won an election based on that. We're going to bring those prices way down. That is what he promised to do. How do you think about the experience of the Biden administration? because the Biden administration really did pursue a progressive economic agenda in a bunch of ways, both symbolically, he walked a picket line, and substantively, he passed laws to promote American manufacturing.

13:04He cracked down on antitrust. And I think there are some moderate Democrats, the neoliberals, as it were, who like to say, well, the reason that didn't resonate is because it failed. And I'm confident you have a different diagnosis. And so I'm interested in how you think about the fact that Joe Biden, in many ways, pursued the kind of economic policy, not I'm sure exactly that you thought was right, but really was much closer to what you think was right than any Democrat in a very long time. And yet the economic results, at least in the short term, were not that good. And he just got almost no political credit for it.

13:42Elizabeth Warren:Yeah. You know, I start this answer by saying Joe Biden is a good and decent man, and he cared. What Joe Biden didn't do in those years was get out and talk about people's pain. And while he did the hard work, and it was hard work, to pull some progressive policies across the finish line, most of them didn't go into effect immediately. They're like the long delay things. We'll get the effects of that after the next election, Lordy. And didn't make the case that I'm making a down payment on your future. And I think that's the part that people hunger to hear. And for me, that's what this moment is about, is that we as Democrats have to show that we get it, we got a plan to deal with it, and we are by God determined to deliver on it.

14:57Elizabeth Warren:Not a nibble around the edge, not a highly diluted version, but we are willing to fight for bold change, for big structural change, and then to deliver that change and stay after it until we have fundamentally made this economy work better for working people. You've brought us right to the purpose of this podcast series, which is to imagine what comes next, what comes after Trump. And look, Trump's not going to be president forever. And because of the weird way in which his two terms have staggered, I think people sometimes lose sight of the fact that he really is in his second term. And we're just not that far from thinking about what a post-Trump America will be, even if, you know, we're still several years from being there.

15:45And I'm curious about how you think about specifically this idea of what an anti-inequality narrative, that's probably a bad phrase, you can come up with a better one, but a story like the one that you have devoted your career to telling, what is a version of that? and if we're being honest, specifically for the Democratic Party in this case, that can be more politically effective than the story that the Democratic Party has been telling. Because they've been trying to tell us a version of the story, but it just hasn't worked.

16:22Elizabeth Warren:Yeah, well, let me do both halves because these are actually separate questions. So let me do the front one. It seems very clear to me that the place we go now is it's about affordability. It's about, can you afford to live in America? And if not, what can we do about it? What needs to shift to work better? And what role does the government have to play in that? You can't fight with people and tell them they're just doing fine financially because you looked at some average spreadsheet and it looked like they were doing okay. And I think you'd agree the Biden administration sometimes committed that mistake.

17:07And it's clear to me, you've got to hear people where they are and that nobody in America wants to stand up and declare themselves losers in

17:22Elizabeth Warren:the great American financial game. You know, I think back on this when I think about where we are right now. When the crash came in 2008, and you remember, I was doing this oversight panel. And I remember going around the country and we'd hold these local hearings. And I initially thought, okay, we'll get out. We'll tell them what the bailout looks like and so on. And what people really wanted to do is they wanted to stand up and talk about what had happened in their lives. And now, I can remember the guy in Clark County, Nevada, who talked about he and his wife and his two little girls were now living in a van because the bank had come and taken their house.

18:14Elizabeth Warren:And it was this sense of what happened to the America that I believed in, that I fought for. And the answer is because the rules changed and they changed against you. The game is rigged and it's rigged against families. It was in 2008. And what we've watched since then is did we make some things better? Yep. We passed Dodd-Frank, put some more constraints in place, right thing to do, put a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in place. And then money talks in Washington. Here come the lobbyists. Dodd-Frank gets weakened in 2018. The Republicans are gung-ho for that, but a bunch of Democrats sign up for it as well.

19:04Elizabeth Warren:And five years later, we see the second, third, and fourth biggest bank failures in American history. It's like nobody wants to learn the story here that we've got to make this country work better for working families so that we have an economy where a family can work hard, play by the rules, and build real financial security and the promise that their kids can do better than they did. I want to ask you to be pointed here because, on the one hand, the idea that we need an economy that works for ordinary Americans, we need to tax rich people, we need health care, we need child care. That is a very familiar Democratic message that we've been hearing for a long time.

19:56On the other hand, I know you well enough to know that you don't think the Democratic Party has the right message. So can I ask you to be very specific about why Democrats have not been able to deliver that message in a successful way and what needs to change going forward?

20:13Elizabeth Warren:Well, for openers, Democrats have always temporized on that message. They said, yes, and a little bit, right? Yes, we want to make sure that everybody pays a fair share, but we don't really want to talk about what the taxes are. Yes, we want to put a little more money into child care, but, you know, a big package would be really expensive and the big donors don't want to pay taxes. So, look, I really want to draw a distinction here because I think it's really important. The Republicans aren't even trying. Donald Trump said, I will lower costs on day one. I didn't hear any other Republicans saying that.

20:49Elizabeth Warren:And here comes the best part. We are now on day 220. And what's happened? The cost of groceries is up. The cost of utilities is up. The cost of housing is up. The cost of baby strollers is up, up, up, up, up. All of these cost. Donald Trump has not delivered. So right now, the Democrats are at a moment. We know what our values are. We have to articulate those values, and then we have to demonstrate we really will fight for them. And it's why I was in New York City with Mom Donnie. Why? Because one of the things he says it will take to make New York City affordable for people other than millionaires and billionaires is we got to make a big investment in child care.

21:41Elizabeth Warren:Good for him. I think that's exactly the right thing to be out there arguing about. If Democrats want to win, then we need to be clear on the kinds of investments that we want to make, on the fact that we have plans to pay for them, and that we damn will really fight for them. I've spent a lot of time watching the TV commercials of Democrats who've won tough races, purple districts in the House, even red districts, you know, tough states. And I think that one thing that people sometimes don't understand is actually just how populist many of those Democrats sound. Jared Golden in Maine, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio.

22:22The way they talk about the economy and the game being rigged and trade, it often sounds a lot like you, and it sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders, but they do something else as well. And that's what I want to ask you about, which is they are substantially more moderate on some social issues than the National Democratic Party. Whether it's immigration, whether it's crime, they really send these signals that I am not a faculty lounge Democrat. And I'm curious how you think about that, because I do think most Americans are left of center on economics. I think they're more moderate and maybe right of center on many social issues.

23:04And to me, that's a big part of the answer to the mystery of how is it that people could be so angry and vote for the historical party of business, the Republican Party, that many, many Americans just think the Democratic Party has become too elite and out of touch with their values. You're from Oklahoma. You're originally a Republican. Is there any part of my diagnosis that you reject or any part that you accept?

23:29Elizabeth Warren:So, look, I accept the notion that the Democrats need to be a big tent party. We're not going to agree 100 % down the line on every issue. I understand that. But look at the same data that you're talking about on analyzing where Americans are. What do they say are the most important issues to them? The economy. The economy, the economy, the economy. It's really interesting to me because it's like every time you can ask a question that really intersects with the economy, it moves to the top. That's what they care about. They care about their homes. They care about their jobs. They care about child care.

24:09Elizabeth Warren:They care about inflation. There may be a lot of different words that trigger it, but it's the economic anxiety that is driving this moment. And we were doing the retrospective. retrospective, look back at the elections. Almost every election for, I have to count back, what the last 10 have been, change, help me, you didn't do enough. And that's true whether it was a Democrat in office or a Republican in office, you, person in charge, did not do enough to shift this system. And your point about the Republicans, I want to push back on you to go back to my point. Donald Trump did not run as a traditional Republican.

25:00Donald Trump did not run as Mitt Romney. No, he ran to the left of Mitt Romney on economics.