>> text, newsmakers with arthur brooks. trump's announcement that he is withdrawing the united states from the paris climate change agreement. debatehat, a free-speech on campus. >> is the resident of the nearly 80-year-old american enterprise institute. he is the author of 11 books. his latest is "the conservative heart." i am pleased to have at the table mark fisher, senior editor of "the washington post." and the co-author of the book

written by more than two dozen post reporters. up first.are mark: donald trump has never been known for ideological consistency. he has at various times in his life called himself a liberal and a conservative. he changed party registrations six times. boon to the conservative cross or a hindrance? >> nobody knows. we are have a lot of data. really depends on the reactions that conservatives have. we know that populism will largely evaporate in the next few years, depending on what happens in the bottom 80% of the comedy. -- economy. time, we would see the

popularity of conventional republicanism, or what is left of the conservative movement. we don't know. it depends on the aspirational leadership the republican start showing today. >> is donald trump a conservative? mr. brooks: that depends on what you call a conservative. most conservatives, the buckley-ite conservatives would probably say that he isn't, but my guess is that donald trump would not be bothered by that. his point is that he is practical, living to the exegesis of the time. mark: why are you solidly convinced that populism will go away? isn't it part to -- is it a purely cyclical phenomena? mr. brooks: there is some very interesting research on this. as a big tank president -- think tank president, there is

something we are looking at. what the study says is, when you that hasnancial crisis highly uneven growth afterward, which we are seeing today, the bottom 4/5 of the economy has had 0% income growth since barack obama took probably -- took office, that is when you see about a 30% increase in support for populist candidates and economies. when strong growth comes back, populism recedes. particularly in the united states. this is a country that does not hate people who come in from the outside. when there is and the, company -- when there is envy, that is when you see an appeal to populism. usually, in the past, it has not

lasted long. >> i wonder what the impact is with the rise of a tea party movement and the election of donald trump. even if there is greater prosperity in the future, what impact does this have on the country going forward? >> that is a good question. a lot of it has to do with the republicans now. forseeds they sow pro-aspirational politics, but also the democratic party. i know that you are writing about this an awful lot. americans do not realize how dysfunctional the liberal wing of politics is today. there is a week bench of upcoming leaders. hillary clinton and bernie sanders. it is like the recreation committee at sun city arizona. it is supposed to be the youth movement. and it isng left,

getting more populist and left-wing. if that is the case, it does not bode well for the alternative to trumpism. we have to watch that as well. populism, we the are going with a period of revolt against the elites and intellectuals. when you look at what has happened with such results across history, do societies come back from that in a healthy way? when you look at russia and germany over the last century, two different paths, what do you see for us? mr. brooks: we could talk about revolts against intellectuals and elites, and talk about cambodia. they have never come back after getting rid of a quarter of the population, including everybody who had eyeglasses.

but that is not the united states. you find a little discomfort with the conceit of the anointed. i say this with humility. i am running a think tank and have a phd in public policy. woe to me if this were cambodia. i think it is healthy that we have some suspicion of those who have been anointed. the concept of scientific, public administration, that came out of the anointed. it came out in the 1970's by the progressive movement, coined by woodrow wilson. that did not lead, in my view, anywhere good. when we try to treat society not as communities, or families, but as groups of people united in their faith, when we treat it like a scientific experiment, in a newtonian way, that is an

elite intellectualism that is worth rebelling against. i don't know what this one will do, to let me stick up a little -- susan: conceit of the anointed is a great phrase. one of the few people who might rebel against the conceit of the anointed would be the president. he has had an anti-intellectualism that is part of his appeal. if you are running a think tank, people who read, write treatise you adjustheir ways to an administration with an anti-elite sentiment? mr. brooks: donald trump has not said anything hostile to the

american enterprise institute, or think tanks, but he is just not as interested. i understand why. that is part of his appeal. it is part of why he was elected. so the question is, what can we do to the helpful? the american enterprise institute was founded almost 80 years ago. the point was to get a freer, country toward a freer society. the point of the free enterprise is to lift up the people who are poor. that is why i am in the movement because i care about poverty the most. when i look at the despair that led to a trump victory, that is a huge part of the understanding. we have to look at the cause that led to this and say, what

is the opportunity to lift up people? to truly make the country critic and. susan: is there anything that the american enterprise institute does differently now compared to the obama administration? i understand the relationship would have been different, but it was also a different group of people. is anything you have changed in the way you operate? peopleoks: we have more involved overtly in the administration. at the fda.lieb, another person becoming the chief economic advisor. one of our board members is betsy devos, the education secretary. that never would have happened under obama. we did things with the obama administration, we had good relationships with them as well, but the relationship will be

different. we have a responsibility to look for cases no matter who is controlling the white house or congress to lift people up and make them better. we do not change the work we do, we just look for the opportunities on the table. that changes according to the politicalw winds. one of the things we are doing now is, we have a new project called the human dignity project. the basis of that is looking landscape, itical is clear we have a despair-based political movement. whether you are talking about the unbelievable popularity of bernie sanders or donald trump. when you look across the united white, and you see, men, without a college education, 320% increase in drug

overdose deaths. a 70 -- 78% increase in suicide. that is an economy of despair. we are putting together entire new programs. it is a social entrepreneurship. .i. to talklike a.e about how we work and deal with education? how do we deal with the opioid crisis? how do we deal with criminal justice reform that gets every oar in the water? 98% of people in prison will come out? 70% of people who were in prison are unemployed. -- it is what gets me up in the morning. mark: everywhere that i went in the 2016 campaign, whether

democratic or republican rallies, they wanted to talk about what they saw tearing the communities apart, the heroine and opioid use. the way it is ripping families apart. their was tremendous frustration with all candidates that they might pay lip service as clinton and trump did durin g the campaign, but it has already vanished. i haven't heard anyone talking about this in recent months. why do politicians not engage on that issue? mr. brooks: drug abuse is hard, because it is not clear what to do. that is why we are putting policy together to give suggestions to policymakers. without that information, policymakers can ring their hands. they can go to the hospital sent console the parents of the constituents, but it seems like there is little more that they can do.

when there are more and more people addicted to opioids, and it is connected to the medicaid system where most people who are poor are getting opioids for pain prescriptions and cheaply. there are a lot of angles. our job in this policy infrastructure is giving people solutions. politicians say, tell us what we can do, and we say we will tell you, what the medicaid prescriptions can do differently, how we should separate pain clinics from pharmacies, all of the policies and things we can do. and how this connects to the education system, to workforce training, to opportunity and dignity, the sense that every human deserves to feel needed. if i don't, it is a knock on

pathologies. susan: it is the politics of despair that propelled donald trump into this unexpected election and his remarkable victory, how would you assess how he has responded to that now that he is in office? what grade would you give him? mr. brooks: it is hard for me to give him a grade because a lot has slowed down his agenda. you can give him a grade based on his intentions or results, but they are different. susan: give us a great in those areas. mr. brooks: with his intentions, some people like it and some hate it. he said he would pull out of a bunch of treaties. he has been pulling away because he said they were job killing and ceding sovereignty to others. it is beside the point whether we like it or not, he is trying to follow through.

it is unclear whether he can do all the things he thought he could do. i think he is fulfilling his promises with respect to his intentions, but not with respect to his outcomes. his supporters would say that it is not his fault. susan: would you agree that it is not his fault? or do you think he has missed at in ways that has squandered early opportunities to have actual results? mr. brooks: that is the case with every president who has not been president of the united states. anybody who is a new executive squanders tons of opportunities because they think they can do more than they can. you think you can drive all over the place, but the truth is you can only drive between the rails on the freeway going south. that is what trump is certainly finding out, that is certainly what barack obama found a early in his presidency. he is doing less than he thought he could do. the only real question is how

much he learns. mark: are you saying that the opportunities he has squandered and his inability to move forward is equivalent to barack obama in his first year, or is a different because donald trump had no political experience and want to to take on the white house as a ceo? mr. brooks: certainly that is the case. it is always a different situation for each president. obama came as a senator, and had advice from the clinton administration who said do not try this, try this. trump has not staffed up to the extent he can have experienced around him to tell him the things he can do. different circumstances, but it is important for us to realize that there but for the grace of god goes anyone. mark: you suggested that

political parties are part of the solution to populism, that they need to have a program that appeals to american people. do ideologies and parties matter as much in an american society where automation will take away far more jobs than outsourcing ever has? that we are heading into a period with the nature of work for many people is in doubt. mr. brooks: ideology is not important as someone who has been sleeping on his brother-in-law's couch and hasn't had a job for a long time. that is where it should be. ideology is a way that you express your values. ideology should be the way that we try to instantiate the concept of human dignity. i would like to see democratic and republican parties duking it out into way sthat lift and dignity better.

republicans can do it more through the free enterprise system. they are fighting on behalf of the periphery of society. that is the example of ideology that can be fruitful. then, people who are just trying to get from one end to the other, who don't have that much ideology, they can pick from the menu.ratic little d. that is what we need, not just parties with more ideology, but aspirational leaders. the problem with populism is that it says there is a parade going down that street, i have to jump in front of it because i am a leader. that is not leadership, that his followership. we need people who want to stand up and say, do you see the better country?

can lifte the way we people up who are at the margins of society? do this together with me. that is aspirational leadership. when that happens, you can get magic. to,: you in your work get across leaders all across the country. name for us two or three aspirational leaders. mr. brooks: in washington, we pay a lot of attention to washington, but washington matters less than we think. it is supposed to. the founders did not washington -- did not want washington to be the be-all and and all. there is a focus on what is local. you can get a pipeline of leaders who are aspirational, who have good ideas at the state and local level. susan: there are a couple. mr. brooks: i used to work with this guy, he got term limited

out. a guy named will weatherford. we should watch that name. he was the republican speaker of the house. --ad never heard anybody who i heard him speak to his conference of republican members one day, and he was talking about poverty, talking about people in need and dignity, it did not matter what his party was. he was going to instantiate those views with conservative policies, but i thought that is a guy for the future. there are governors doing a good job. i look at doug ducey, and not everybody likes him, because he is a democratically elected guy, but he is doing a lot of things on the money to help people in ways that express his political -- his particular political views. on behalf of the people that everyone should be fighting for. republican3

governors today. i have met a lot of them. utah, tennessee, many of the things in florida, texas. you say, let's get some of that in washington, d.c., because i like it and i think it is right. >> this is a conversation that could go for a while, but we only have five minutes left. mark: i would like to turn overseas and get a look at the role of international alliances that have defined policies since world war ii and which trump does not seem keen on. these were designed not only to unite europe, but to keep germany in check. that was the immediate goal after world war ii. are those goals outdated? is the president right that we should pull back from those alliances? mr. brooks: the president has a very good point when he talks about the fact that these alliances require balance, the require people to participate in

a way they hold up their end of the bargain. not just because fair is fair, the strength of an alliance requires that all parties hold up the bargain. nato is protecting the free world. it protects the concept of democratic capitalism, an unall oyed good in the world. that is what nato is all about. it is doing important work today too. the threat to nato is th ae fact that the countries of nato have made agreements. we should celebrate nato and all put our money where our mouth is. it is key to nato being able to live up to article v, common defense. let's pop champagne corks about what an important alliance this is, and let's put pressure on

our ally such that we all do our part. susan: before you were best-selling author and the head of this think tank, you were a professional french horn player. mark: i played trumpet. >> i played around with the piano. susan: we could have a little band here. your experience as a professional french warned performer, are there any lessons from that that you have applied to the intellectualism you have done since then? mr. brooks: there are. there is something i am doing called life lessons from the composers. it is behavioral science and how it relates to what was going on in the lives of the great composers. i did that for 12 years, including in a symphony orchestra in spain. almost everything that i have learned, the things that i think, came from the wiring of

the days of music. my favorite composer in music was bach. everybody has heard of bach. he is considered, by a lot of people, to be the greatest composer who ever lived. he said something that affected me still to this day. he was asked, why do you write music? he wasn't even famous in his life. his answer was the aim and final end of all music as nothing less than the glorification of god and the refreshing this of the soul. i thought, i want to be able to say that. the purpose of work is creating a better life for more people. i left music. i went from the sublime to the dismal and became an economist. the reason is that i found through studying the free enterprise system, and pushing democratic capitalism to the four corners of the world, i

could be more like bach. i can do some thing that glorifies god and refreshes other people. that is the most important thing to me. i'm no bach, but there is a little bit of that music in the work we get to do at aei. >> as we close, the twitter page solicited questions for you. asked, if you had to choose between the green enterprise system and bach, which would you choose? mr. brooks: let's say the free enterprise system and bach. it is a trick question. you can't choose between them, it turns out. in the modern world, had it not been for the free enterprise system, i grew up in a lower middle-class family in seattle, i would never have heard bach had it not been for the classical music industry, for the free enterprise which

instantiated philanthropy, which made it possible to support the seattle symphony, in the records that made it possible for me to buy and play as a kid. the free enterprise system made it possible to have classical music for me. >> it feels like a conversation we should have around a dinner table a bottle of win. thank you for the interesting conversation. "newsmakers" is back after our conversation with the president of the american enterprise institute. arthur brooks. we are here with mark fisher and susan page. one thing that surprised me was giving donald trump something of a pass at this point in his presidency. what did you think of his assessment of where the president is? you have spent so much time covering the russian investigation and so many other things. mark: i think he is hoping l it will move in a direction that he

will like and does not want to say thanks to further antagonize a president who is very sensitive to criticism. i think it was clear that he saw this president as something of an anomaly, who does not listen to advice from think tanks, who does not care especially about policy, that is a populist animal. we heard in his rather sharp denunciation of populism an implicit witticism of the president -- criticism of the president. >> some people do not understand where -- what place aei can have within a republican administration. while he is not a policy point kind of got, there are aei people throughout the administration. susan: with an administration that has a like-minded approach. while there are ways where president trump is not a classic

conservative or a classic republican, he is more closely aligned with aei policies than an obama administration was. that is one reason that he gave president trump a little bit of in the early days of the administration. and asets get made, education policy is laid, i think that there are always some think tanks that have real lines into the administration. in this case it might be more through vice president pence than president trump. arthur brooks mentioned he had a long-standing relationship with vice president pence. are: these think tanks having an impact, even if it is not at the top level of the white house. talking to senior staff at energy and state. they say that the trump transition teams and initial

appointees are working from the playbooks, the policy handbooks that have been put together by places like aei and heritage. susan: it limits influence of all the outsiders because there is so much turmoil inside. >> what about his critique of liberalism? " was his description of bernie sanders and hillary clinton as staff members at sun city, and that it should be the purview of the young and vibrant wing of the party. mark: i think that many democrats would agree with that critique. they say that their own party has not produced a bench. some people blame president obama for that, for not developing the young and rising stars at the state level that we have seen at the republican side. is a cause for concern for democrats of all ages because

most of the prominent figures of the party are senior citizens. you are looking for aspirational leadership to address poverty, you would have a hard time identifying leaders in either party that would fit that definition. paul ryan might be one. books, buted with this has not been an aspirational time. the leaders that he thinks we should be watching, a former official in florida and the governor of arizona? that's pretty far away from d.c.. spend much time do they thinking about this? >> not enough, that's clear. if there had been politicians on either end of the spectrum paying attention to the people displaying desperation in the , that group of voters

has been ratcheting up the cries for help. whether it was their votes for donald trump, barack obama, ross perot or ronald reagan, there was a clear, steady, and consistent message from middle-class americans that the economy was not working for them in the way that it had in the previous generations and that they thought it would. >> partisanship of our time, the focus on raising money distracts and defines a lot of political leaders area did when you talk about it in a forum like this, you get the sense how much many of these leaders care about these issues. >> went congress comes back from its break, what's on the agenda?

republicans are following -- >> finding a difficult past -- path. the idea of a big tax overhaul is becoming difficult. this has been a hard time to deliver on policy. we have gone 130 days or so now in this administration without a legacy and it's a tough time to get things done. the arthurwhere brooks allergy to ideology comes for the president and a lot of his supporters. if you don't have the ideas to create innovative policy, you won't get anywhere and will easily fall into the paralysis we have seen in washington. >> please come back.

>> thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] kb will beuthor met ibi will be- matt ta our guest on "in-depth." >> the person you follow love with in that moment, for me trump was like that, but the opposite. when i first saw him on the campaign trail i thought -- this is a person who is unique, horrible, amazing, and has terrible characteristics that were put on earth specifically for me to appreciate. or not appreciate, whatever the verb is. i had really been spending a lot of the last 10 to 12 years without knowing it preparing for

donald trump to happen. >> she is the author of several books, including smells like dead elephants. derangement, a terrifying true story of allah six and religion. ," the most audacious power rabbit american history." "insane recent book, clown president." during our live three-hour conversation we will take your calls, tweets, and facebook russians on his literary career. watch tonight, live it from noon to 3 p.m. eastern today. >> tonight, on "q&a," >> there was a political structure in which the primary actor was herbert hoover and those 90-year-old still govern the way

that we allow resources to be used in our economy today. >> thomas hayes lit talks about his book, the political spectrum , which looks at the history and politics of u.s. communications policy. >> when we went to this spectrum rights allocation, within a couple of years the regulators at the commission are renewing licenses, but very carefully, that propaganda won't be allowed. early on, 1929 in that time, you had left wing stations, if i could use that political term, w cfl, chicago, near new york city

purposes, free speech you might say, they wanted to espouse their opinions. when they were renewed they were told to be very careful about expressing their opinions. >> tonight, at 8 p.m. eastern on q&a. >> former fbi director james comey will testify thursday before the senate intelligence committee, investigating russian activities during last year's election. c-span3 will have live coverage of the open part of that hearing at 10 a.m. eastern. you can also watch live, online, on c-span.org, listening live using the free c-span radio app. >> thursday, president trump announced that the united states would withdraw from the paris climate change agreement a