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How has the welfare state itself actually changed since President Clinton's reforms more than 30 years ago? Well, it's grown. What we're doing is not working. We need to try a new approach. You're alleging that America has a more generous welfare policy than its supposed socialist European countries. for success with these kinds of things is welcoming in the private sector as a partner. If the DSA hate the Democratic establishment as much as they actually do, why not just start your own party? Because they're having success hijacking and cannibalizing the Democratic party.
How big of a threat is the DSA? Can these DSA candidates win in swing states? And welcome back to The Brief. We have a great conversation with Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute, but before we get into it, make sure you like, follow, subscribe to ensure you do not miss any new episode of The Brief. And with that, we're joined today by Jesse Arm. Jesse is the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute and one of the few people I follow on Twitter. Jesse, thanks for coming on the show. Good to be with you. Thanks for having me. So, I'm going to do something a little annoying and that's going back 30 years.
Let's go to 1992. President Bill Clinton, of course, promises at this time to end welfare as we know it. For so long, government has failed us. And one of its worst failures has been welfare. I have a plan to end welfare as we know it, to break the cycle of welfare dependency. He signs the comprehensive personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act. That did a lot of things to change the welfare state as we know it. It introduced work requirements. It introduced a five-year lifetime federal limit on assistance itself. It had fixed block grants to states. Now, you and the Manhattan Institute, you have a new poll and it highlights Americans' attitudes towards the welfare state. I do want to dissect
it, but just before we do, if you can just educate myself and educate our viewers, how has the welfare state itself actually changed since President Clinton's reforms more than 30 years ago? Well, it's grown. It's grown a lot, Shobus. And I think that one of the most interesting findings from our survey 30 years out from President Clinton signing this landmark welfare reform is just how much the kind of concept of a social safety net itself has changed in the mind of American voters, right? Americans are by and large very supportive of work requirements for receiving any kind of government assistance. They are not Well, I should say that more broadly,
there is this public consensus in favor of some kind of assistance, but they want to see it much more targeted, not necessarily universal. Like I said, they want to see it tied to work where appropriate. They want to see a welfare state that is much more focused on providing a basic standard of living as opposed to kind of trying to enforce a new standard of income inequality or rather reducing income inequality. Voters also place a very high emphasis on reducing waste, fraud, and abuse within these government assistance programs, and I think that is one thing that this administration is very wise to tackle. So that just so I understand, are you saying that when it comes to Americans' attitudes on welfare, the fact that they
want, you know, basic requirements, they want a basic standard of living, is that actually being reflected in federal policy as it pertains to welfare, or are there still this disconnect between what Americans actually want and how the welfare state actually looks like? Well, look, the truth is that Americans will tell you that they want a skinnier welfare state, and then you can list all kinds of government handouts and programs and freebies to them, and most polling will tell you that they're enthusiastic about those, too. But I think that the main takeaway here is that there is an appetite for somebody who's willing to come in with a sort of Javier Milei-style message of what we're
doing is not working. We need to try a new approach. And for a lot of folks on the right and a lot of folks on the left, there has been this baked-in assumption now that it's youngs versus olds, and it's really just about grievance politics and envy, and that generation got generous social spending, so our generation needs a similar level of generous social spending. And what we see in this data is actually something in between. There is definitely a generational divide, right? That difference between younger voters and older voters that is, you know, talked about so frequently in the discourse does come out in this polling. We see younger voters consistently more supportive of universal benefits, unrestricted cash assistance, and
universal basic income, as opposed to older Americans who are um much more skeptical of those kinds of ideas and suggest that many I think that this suggests that many of the assumptions underpinning the modern welfare state are less firmly held by the next generation or the rising generation. But, that all said, it's not to say that someone couldn't come in and make an argument rooted in the sort of Clintonian welfare reform vision of the 1990s. It remains popular. There is an appetite for it. So, whether it is kind of the traditional right or whether it is the center left that is looking to articulate some kind of identity, uh some kind of affirmative agenda that extends beyond just we hate Trump, but
also not quite uh we're not the DSA, there's something in the middle here, and it's it's a popular lane that someone's got room to grab. You know, I do have to just throw a quick curveball that I was not planning on discussing, so I apologize in advance, but I want to piggyback on that waste, fraud, and abuse you were alluding to. This obviously doesn't pertain to welfare in specifics, but DOJ obviously had the goal of eliminating the waste, fraud, and abuse. I don't know to what degree it's still active. Of course, Elon Musk is not a federal contractor anymore. But, in your eyes, was DOJ effective at eliminating this massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse that the federal government is
spending every single year? I think there's more waste, fraud, and abuse available to tackle. Uh I do think um from a political standpoint, it was a resonant uh policy area to go after. Uh there's now a waste, fraud, and abuse task force that the vice president is overseeing. But one of the challenges that Republicans and conservatives are going to run into is that you don't want to negatively polarize this stuff such that you're speaking about it in the same frame as all of the other issues, right? If waste, fraud, and abuse is merely a immigration problem, uh and it's it can be solved by just deporting every Somali, that's kind of not taking the problem uh as seriously as it needs to be contended with. The United States
government is massive, bloated, and needs to be trimmed down. Not just at the federal level, but at the local and state level, too. So, there's a lot that can be developed here, uh and obviously, it's not going to be President Trump's fight to pick. He's been pretty clear since uh coming onto the political scene that tackling entitlements, for example, is not going to be something that he pursues. I think it was probably a politically prudent choice to do so, but as the economic dynamics change over time, and as both parties are kind of trying to identify uh and consolidate around what they're going to be for, there's an intra-left civil war playing out. It's not crazy to conceive of a
post-Trump battle within the American right as well, um especially along some of these economic policy lines. Uh and this kind of fiscal prudence, it's it's important to remember that there is still a lot of popular support for it, but one would have to frame it uh very carefully, and I think DOJ was ultimately a step in the right direction, if a little clunky in the execution. Right. So, let me just go back to a different Manhattan Institute study. We at PragerU are big fans of Manhattan Institute. We read all your stuff.
There's a 2024 Manhattan Institute a report that actually argued that the American welfare state, when you factor in things like taxes and benefits, it can actually be considered more redistributive than its European counterparts. So, essentially, you're alleging that America has a more generous welfare policy than its supposed socialist European countries. Can you just explain to me, educate myself and the viewers, how could that possibly be that America has a more generous welfare state? Well, I don't know that we're necessarily more generous, but we're certainly wildly ineffective in how we dole out our assistance programs. We spend a lot of money. That doesn't mean that we're necessarily more generous, right?
Some of the best public programs that have been executed today have to date have been done so in partnership with private entities. Think about Operation Warp Speed from President Trump's first term. When you invite some of the people who are the best in the private sector at instituting policies, effectively tackling really hard problems, and getting them solved. Think about some of this right to try legislation that has been another effort that the president has championed over the course of his time in office. I think a lot of times the recipe for success with these kinds of things is welcoming in the private sector as a partner and ensuring that you're giving them the regulatory room
to run with to tackle big problems and solve them. So, let's let's kind of shift back to politics for a second because you had mentioned this middle ground within American political culture. Approximately 2/3 of Democrats hold a positive view of socialism. That's according to data from Gallup. When you factor in just Gen Z, that number, of course, is a lot higher. The numbers more or less reversed when it comes to independents. You have at least 2/3 of independents who are opposing socialism. You've been pretty outspoken against the DSA. You're on CNN quite often discussing this. Where did the DSA come from? And then, on the most elementary way I can ask this, Jesse, what do they actually believe?
Mhm. Yeah. Well, you see a lot of graphics on like Fox News and CNN, right, describing exactly what the DSA believes. Much of that is exactly accurate. Um it's been exposed in large part by one of my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, Stew Smith, who does a lot of reporting on DSA founding charter and documents and platform. But a lot of this stuff is just out there available on their own website. These notions of ideas, right? One of the DSA correspondents, I believe, went on a Fox show the other day and was asked like sort of one by one, defunding the police, defunding or abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, abolishing the border, uh defunding the Department of War, the Department of Defense, abolishing the Senate. These are all
things that she's willing to agree to. You know, she comes on the spokesman and says, yes, yes, and yes, or yes, and sometimes aspirational yes, we'll get there eventually. So, we're going to put up on the screen a few of the things that are part of your platform. And I want to ask you, just give me sort of a true or false on these. Uh abolish the Senate. True. Okay. Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them. Yep. Abolish ICE. Absolutely. Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the US illegally. As a long-term plan, yep.
Defund the Pentagon. Absolutely. Abolish prisons, at least in large part. Yeah, again, that as part of a long-term program, yeah. Okay, so no prisons. Uh government or public ownership of most large corporations. Yeah, absolutely. Socialism, when you're seeing the positive polling numbers among Democrats for socialism, I don't think that uh it's typically being associated with things like abolishing police, prisons, and borders. Um socialism, because there are a lot of people on the hard left who are out there, good communicators. And it's sort of unfortunate that in a lot of these uh electoral contests where it
is a socialist or a sort of socialist-adjacent Democrat against a more establishment option. If you think about Cuomo versus Mondaire in New York or Platner versus Janet Mills in Maine or even Abdul El-Sayed versus Haley Stevens, who I think is quite charming, Haley Stevens in Michigan. But in each of these instances, it's not controversial to say that the more telegenic and the more capable communicator is the socialist. This is something that they're placing a really high degree of value on. So when you see Abdul El-Sayed or Mondaire Jones show up on your television screen and tell you that actually the post office is socialism or actually the police department, which we want to get rid of, is socialism or the fire department or
any of these other things that is, you know, government paving the roads, all of that is socialism, that messaging begins to land with Democrats. We don't have a lot of evidence that is landing with Republicans or independents. In fact, the negative ratings for socialism are still very, very high among those audiences. But it is a reality now that socialism is just like any other kind of democratic buzzword at this point where left-of-center poll respondents are going to be primed to say, "Yes, this is something that is on my team, that I'm latching onto, that I like." Um and I think that's not totally dissimilar from how the Israel issue has become much more polarized along party lines.
Like if you're on the right, you sort of know to say, "Yeah, Israel, kind of on their side." Or if you're on the left, you kind of know to say, "Uh yeah, yeah, Palestine, we're sort of on their side." Um we live in an incredibly polarized moment and despite the fact that we're going through this period of, I think, kind of rapid-onset political realignment, that hasn't necessarily trickled down to the median voter or the median poll respondent quite yet. So I think I know the answer to this question, which is essentially they won't win, but you have, and your own polling shows this, tremendous levels of anger against both parties, tremendous resentment against the two party system.
You have Tucker Carlson who's flirting with the idea of making his own party. What I don't get is if the DSA hate the Democratic establishment as much as they actually do, and they hate Hakeem Jeffries, and they hate Chuck Schumer, why not just start your own party? Why do they insist on the only way that we can achieve political success is by sort of cannibalizing our own? Why not just branch out and do their own thing? Well, I think because they're having success hijacking and cannibalizing the Democratic Party. So, really would make no sense for them to reverse course and then try to advance their policy agenda through some other vehicle when they're
having so much success consuming this party from the inside out. Um look, it's it's not the first time in American history that an ascendant movement is sort of making significant gains and changing the ideological outlook of a given political movement. I think a lot of this the DSA is actually just a really much more organized entity. Um in the era in which political parties no longer do what they once did, right? Act as like pillars of the community, right? A third place, a point where people who might otherwise meet in church or synagogue or any kind of other community center gathering place, like the political party was almost an institution unto itself, a social club of the same order that gave people kind
of community and purpose. And in an era in which people are much more sort of siloed and isolated, and young people in particular are much less religious, the DSA has provided that kind of third place organizing environment, sometimes second place because a lot of these people don't have day jobs, or they have day jobs that are functionally just organizing for hard left causes and candidates. The nonprofit sector has really, really grown in this country. There are a lot of people whose professional job it basically is to advance hard left political ideology. They're funded by a nonprofit, and I think some of these donors who have actually given a lot of money to, you know, whether they thought they were
giving it to climate change or sort of, you know, abortion access maximalism or gay rights, all of this stuff, all of these organizations have a basically zeroed in on a on an omni cause, and the DSA is just the door-knocking operation associated with advancing that omni cause. So, um, I think a lot of donors, left-of-center donors, who have been giving to these groups for a very long time are disturbed by what they've created. We now live in a world where, you know, the RNC has $129 million cash on hand into a cycle where they're ostensibly positioned to do really poorly, while the DNC has $2 million in debt, is in the red. Why is that?
It's because there are all of these other groups through which politics is organized and, you know, candidates are recruited and funds are doled out on the left. And those groups are not motivated exclusively by winning elections in the same way that a party committee is, that leads the party to sometimes be a little bit more pragmatic. The groups on the left are mostly, you know, consumed by enforcing ideological you know, orthodoxy. All kind of adopting the same position on issues across the board. This is why, despite the fact that Kamala Harris in 2024 saw herself losing in the polls and saw a video of her, you know, get cut into a Trump ad talking about how she supported sex changes paid for by the government
for illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and are in prison, and she couldn't say, "I completely disavow that statement. I was wrong. I shouldn't say it." Because she knows the groups that she relies on for support would have come and eaten her alive. So, this is the real problem with the Democratic Party and part of why they're being cannibalized by a far-left flank, despite the fact that the median Democratic voter does not share the policy preferences of the median Democratic or left-leaning nonprofit staffer in Washington, D.C. So, then let me ask you the obvious follow-up. How big of a threat is the DSA? Because to your point, it seems like they can't win on their own.
Instead, they simply cannibalize one of their own. So, uh Brad Lander, I think is the best example. Brad Lander, he wins the nomination in New York City against Dan Goldman, painting Dan Goldman as like an establishment hack. Dan Goldman was one of the prosecutors against President Trump during the impeachment trials. You have Mele Kyros in Colorado who's beating Diana DeGette, who again is a progressive champion in her own right. So, my question to you is, number one, how big of a threat are they? And then number two, can these DSA candidates, can they ever win in swing states? Can they actually beat Republicans? Or are they simply relegated to big blue cities, you know, like New York?
Well, I think it'll be harder for them to win in swing states, but I mean, you brought up Dan Goldman, right? And you brought up the fact that he was one of the impeachment trial captains, or whatever that means. But like, what are you running on? You Trump didn't get successfully impeached and removed from office. So, if your entire affirmative program and view of the world is that you are anti-Trump, and no one's more anti-Trump than you, and look at all these anti-Trump things you did, well, Trump got elected again. So, perhaps if that's the entirety of your political viewpoint, then you almost deserve to lose to a radical kind of social or political jihadist who just wants to take everything and blow it up
within the Democratic establishment. Unless you're going to go out there as the more pragmatic option and make the case for a more pragmatic politics, what's the point? Then you're just neither here nor there. You're flailing in the winds, and of course you're ultimately going to lose. That's how Trump was able to cannibalize the GOP establishment, because he was proposing a sort of different form a different rhetorical posture, a different approach to doing politics, but also, by the way, he was willing to moderate on all kinds of ideological questions, right? Whether it was that entitlement stuff we were talking about earlier, or whether it was functionally writing out, you know, the RNC's traditional language around gay marriage
and abortion from the 2024 platform and replacing it with, you know, more intense language about more current, I think, cultural controversies or issues relating to gender or race, but it was a point of like re-emphasizing and, you know, we're going to move right in certain places, we're going to move to the center in certain places, but like the Trump vision, you know, makes some sense. There's some coherence to it. It's like we're going to be more fiery, but we're also going to be more politically efficient. Centrist Democrats or mainstream Democrats or mainstream liberals actually do have the benefit of the fact that the far left is
out on an ideological island where most Democratic voters are not yet willing to follow them. But the far left also has all of the kind of like rhetorical posture and fighting spirit that is totally outgunning the moderate. So, I don't know, man, like moderate Democrats, like what are you for? You're going to have to articulate what the differences are between you and the hard left, and that may mean that like climate defiance or, you know, any given massive mega group, you name it, may come after you, or the George Soros dollars may not pour in quite the same way, but you have to articulate what the difference is philosophically between you and the DSA. You can't just avoid every one of those questions like
the plague. At some point you're going to need to tell the American people and your own voters in Democratic primaries what you're for that the DSA is not. Right. And I do think one of the most fascinating exit polls of 2024 was that a majority of the American people actually thought that Donald Trump, of all people, was more moderate compared to someone like Kamala Harris. And one of the reasons, what you were saying earlier, is because she's someone who quite literally could not disavow the fact that, yes, there should be sex change operations for illegal immigrants in prison. Let me ask you one last
question while I still have you, because you're talking about the DNC, and you're talking about the future of the Democratic Party. There was this great, I mean, really greatly titled article from the New York Times. I want to make sure I get this right. Quote, "Inside the phone-throwing drama at the troubled, broke DNC." The allegations are that Ken Martin, of course, the head of the DNC, he threw his phone at a junior aide. Vendors of the DNC are asked not to send bills in order to disguise the DNC's financial problems. The building itself, I think, was put up for collateral, to your point there, too. $2 million in debt. So, the media often talks about the big blue wave that's coming in the midterm elections
in 2026. But, to your point, how do you see a big blue wave manifesting if the big blue team is just so broke and doesn't have money? Well, they're not broke. They've got the money. They're just raising it through candidates and through some of these other groups and PACs that I mentioned earlier. You know, we hear a lot about how much AIPAC is coming to play in some of these primaries, right? There's another new beastly super PAC called American Priorities, right? Very deceptively named, that is spending big money on behalf of, you know, who can advance the interests of the opponents of the United States and the West in
Gaza most aggressively. And they're coming to play in some of these Democratic primaries, too. So, there's no shortage of money. The Democrats will be able to raise a ton this cycle. More long-term, right, whether these central vehicles, like the DNC, will be able to continue raising the sums they once did, um, if the party continues its course of, you know, alienating and ostracizing everybody who has wealth or everybody who, you know, doesn't despise the Jewish state or things of that nature. Those may be relevant questions in the medium to long-term, but I don't think dollars and cents are going to, uh, ultimately decide this midterm election, despite the fact that
Republicans do look to be in better position on that particular front. Look, I think the latest Ipsos Reuters poll had Republicans only down two points in the generic congressional ballot test. Given the fundamentals of this election cycle, where the president is at in terms of favorability, in terms of job approval, in terms of, you know, where inflation is, in terms of what things how things are doing with the war in the Middle East or the conflict in the Middle East, I don't think that is a terrible position to be in late July. Uh and if the story with the Democrats becomes more uh hard left candidates winning primaries, right? Um Flanigan in
Minnesota, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, you know, they swapped out Gram Plater and replaced him with uh Gram Plater's chosen uh you know, stand-in Maine and Troy Jackson, a guy who subscribes to all of the same policy positions and is aligned with the same corner of the American left, I think they're going to have a difficult time, right? I was speaking about this with somebody on uh CBS News just yesterday making the argument that one of the least popular things that Trump has done is the big beautiful bill in this term and in the last term one of the least popular things was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and if Republicans promote working-class tax cuts, that's actually somehow a gift to Democrats. I
don't understand that at all. I think if Republicans get the good fortune of making this election about tax cuts and Democrats go out there and make the argument of why tax cuts are actually bad, then we're in very different position come November and anything is possible. I don't you know, I think the pundits and prognosticators sort of over-index on the likelihood of a Democratic sweep and a massive blue wave, but gerrymandering has also sort of muted the impact of this wave as I think many people were projecting. So, we'll have to wait and see. Nothing is certain. We don't know the situation in this Middle East is very kinetic still. So, time will tell.
All right, Jess. We got to end it there. Jesse Arm is the vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute. Thank you again for making the time, your clarity, and for kicking some butt on the Abby Phillip show. Very much appreciate it. Great to be with you. Thank you for watching the show. Make sure before you leave, drop a comment, let us know what topic you want to see covered cuz that will help amplify this episode to as many people as possible and ensuring that the conservative movement remains a fighting force in American politics. We'll see you next week.
