. good evening from los angeles i'm tavis smily. tonight a conversation with republican strategist david frum about what it would take for the republicans to gain control of both houses of congress. the author of six books, including "combat conservatism." he has a warning for republicans then we'll turn to a columnist alex tizon whose "big little man" takes a deep dive into the asian american men and examines why maniy of the negative ste o stereotypes surround them to this day. those conversations coming up right now.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. focus on campaigning and the midterm election just around the corner some pundits insist the

gop will regain both houses of congress come november, but senior editor of "the atlantic" david frum says hold up, not so fast. his most recent title "crashing the party while the gop must modernize to win." david, good it have you back on this program, my friend. >> thank you very much. >> let me jump right into your piece. three arguments about why the gop has to make some changes if they want to win. the first is, their reliance in years past on votes from the elderly. >> right. look, one of the biggest trends in american politics and%v it's really driven so much of what we've seen, both in the bush years and the obama years is that it used to be the baby boomers, the people who were born in the 15 years after world war ii were considerably less conservative than the people born between 1930 and 1945. what's happened since about 2006 or '06, a reaction not just to the obama presidency and also

the financial crisis has been in all kinds of ways you can see the baby boomers suddenly becoming a lot more conservative, as conservative as people now in their 70s and 80s. we're talking about people in their 50s and 60s. that has made, that has pushed republican party quite far to the right. but it creates a problem because the republican party is the party of business, enterprise limited government but older people and the people who get most of the dollars the government spends here at home, not counting the military budget. the party of limited government and depends on the votes of older people and the people who get the most from government hard to focus on voters' ideology and that creates a lot of the tensions we've seen in the republican party. >> before we move on to items two and three in your column, not just it me an argument of being against big government and for limited government. it is that the gop has gotten to the point of just demonizing government, making government the enemy and that's even farther, that's even more

extreme to me than just pushing for, i mean, i could intellectually debate youlr ong government versus little government but when you bash the government, that's a whole other issue. >> the point i make in the article, this is one of the great ironies in all of this. about the biggest thing the government does is provide health care security for people over age 65. so, when you unpack and i use all kind of survey data on this. this is not just me popping off. these are the numbers. on what baby boomer voters think. what makes them conservative is not, they're not hostile to all government. they're hostile to all nonmedicare government. they're very, they're more protective. back in the '80s, people in their 60s back then, the one of the liberal groups in the country. very protective of medicare, but also very protective of other social programs. the baby boomers, as they get past 65, want to throw the other social programs off the boat in order to save medicare. and that's not, people say hypocritica

hypocritical, that's not true, very rational. what they're worried about is there isn't enough to go around. and if you want to protect medicare, you have to sacrifice everything else. that's the core driver of baby boomer politics. and that's the thing the republican party has to deal with. the party of limited government is also the party of voters object to any changes in medicare. >> move on to issue number two on your list of challenges that the gop has to deal with. the conservative donors over the years have become moreidia logically extreme. unpack that argument for me. ook, supposing you have a lot of government bonds. one of the things as someone who holds a lot of government bonds you want is government going on and paying interest on the bonds. that's your money, after all. normally the most richest people are the most cautious. the people with the greatest stake in preserving things the way they are. what we've seen since 2008 and 2009 is this rise of real radicalism and it symbolized by

the two crises over government debt ceiling. in 2011 and 2014 where the government nearly went off the cliff and there's a real risk that interest wouldn't have been paid. for sure government suppliers wouldn't have been paid and that was driven by the donors. i have a lot of examples from the article on how the republican donor base has become more and more radical. actually, the professional politicians who have been more cautious. the people they get money from in the business world are pushing them to do things that politicians don't want to do. >> why is it, again, before i jump to point number three, how is it the party doesn't understand that? >> they do understand that. that is the horrible nightmare. if you're john boehner, the horrible nightmare is that you're surrounded by people who control your party, have the fate of your party in their hands and they're telling you to do things that you know are not wise. but if you, so your job is, you're trying to restrain them, you know if you restrain them too much, they'll fire you and get somebody else to do more. this is the dilemma that, you

know, that we always have this idea when we talk about politics politicians and they need to be, they need to go talk to the people and get some sense. but inside the republican world, it often happens that the politicians are the people who are the most cautious and who know the limits of what can be done. where the donors who increasingly talk only to themselves and these elderly baby boomers who are so frightened about the future of medicare that they want to burn down the rest of the government to save their &0pmedicare, the push the politicians in directions that the politicians know are unsustainable. >> you would not be suggesting then that money controls our politics, would you? >> well, it doesn't, it's one of many things. but what money, money is hugely influential in politics, but not all politics. and there's a dynamic. but the last element and i think this is the thing you're getting to next, the republican party is internally ridged in a way, very different from the way it was in the '70s and '80s. makes it hard to learn from

mistakes. like, one debt crisis in 2011 is bad enough. how is it you have two in a row? one in 2011 and 2013. why can't the party learn? and it's full of smart people, individuals learn, but collectively, the party doesn't seem able to learn and that's the third problem that my article points to and tries to analyze and offer hope for. >> and that third issue, again, the party is too ridged and suffer from an inability to change. i take that point, but i wonder why one of the things on the list isn't the fact thatp, theye just wrong with regard to the direction of the country. your article was talking about the party and how it needs to be restructured and the issues it needs to face. let me extend that, again. one of the arguments is that they seem to be out of step and out of touch with where the country is headed. the issue of immigration. how is it your party could be losing votes and losing elections and you be on the wrong side of the immigration question, particularly given how fast the hispanic electorate is

growing. that's not rocket science to me. just being on the wrong side of the issue, which has nothing to do these other three things. >> i'm a republican and i'm a conserve. i don't say these things about the party to say, you're wrong. at the level of deepest values, i think they're right. and i agree ewith them. those are my values, too. so, the challenge is, how do you do it effectively? on the immigration issue, for example, a lot of different kinds of immigration policy. and america's policy which is very different from the policy of canada or australia has been one that increases the number of poor people inside the country and makes so many social problems from education to preparing to pay future pension benefits that much more difficult. and that's one of the, i think the republicans are right to push back on president obama. what they're wrong to do is to do it in a way that makes people feel disvalued or underappreciated. that there's a case for caution on immigration. and it is to say, you know, this is a country where upward

mobility is getting harder and you do not want to emit people from the bottom of the skill ladder, you want to emit people of the skill ladder. >> who are already here, what do we do about that? >> my views are quite different than most republicans. my answer would be, if you're asking, that we should have much stricter enforcement on employers of who they employ. that there's no, there's no real, there's no obligation. if you are an employer, you hire illegal labor, the government has to prove that you knew. the fact that you, obviously, should have known, they have to prove that you knew. well, proving what people knew is very hard. with all other areas of employment law and i have to prove you intended to violate wages per hour. you get a whacking big fine and that's the way, in my view, it should be with immigration. if we were enforcing immigration law at the point of the workplace, you would find we would not be such a magnet and a

lot of people who are here would go home because they wouldn't be working. >> i don't mean to grind this ax, but maybe i do. i get tired with your wonderful piece but i get so tired of this argument where people try to make excuses for why the gop is not gaining ground the way they should when it fundamentally, i repeat, comes down to, i think, being out of step with the direction the country is headed. for example, we just talked about immigration and hispanics. when it comes to african-americans look at the last few years on human rights, civil rights, they've been on the wrong side of the issue. on the environment, the party too often makes a mockery of climateqa warming and global warming and we can talk about what they need to fix and fundamentally on some of these things it comes down to being on the wrong or right side of history. >> look, on climate change. the thing we talk about is the mechanism. these are republican ideas using prices to price pollution. you know, remember the acid

rain, we don't talk about that any more because what do we do? we price sulfur dioxide and acid rain isn't gone, but it's massively reduced from what it was. on african-american concerns, a lot of this is about being realistic about what a party can achieve. obviously, the first african-american president who has a source of tremendous pride for subjugated people to rally to this historic break through. you're not going to make any progress of black voters until the post-obama era. >> that just happened six years ago, my friend. number two, we're headed to ank election two years from now and if they want to appeal to the black voter, i don't see a path to get there. obama is only an eight-year period, my friend. >> the way you do it, you have to be conscious. be conscious during this period. peggy newnan talked about the

impact on her on the john f. kennedy. irish catholic background and supposing she had memories for5 where the three and a half years he was president that republicans had said, he's a traitor, he's an alien, he takes orders from the pope, he's a potato eater. and just, that would still be with her 50 years later. today, the majority of people of irish catholic decent in congress are republicans. who would have believed that when john f. kennedy was president? my question is not, parties are not supposed to win 100% of the vote. the question about ethnic politics, i understand why the recently arrived guatemalan gardner who is making $9 an hour is not a republican. i don't understand why the indian american who owns 15 hotels isn't a republican? i don't sndz why the retired african-american general is not a republican.

you know, republicans are the party of some people and not of other people. the some and the other shouldn't be defined on ethnic ground. in canada, where i'm originally from the largest nonwhite group are chinese canadians. a majority of chinese canadians who speak chinese at home vote for the conservative party in canada. they found these voters have interest in common but being kept away because they felt a cultural distance. take away the cultural distance and those who have interest of voting for the center right will vote that way. those who havez] interest nor should they. but you don't gratuitously keep people away and that's one of the things i'm very concerned about with the republican party. >> somebody once heard elections are about the future and not about the past. your question about the lesbian and the african-american retiree, it's because they think the gop is out of step with where the country is headed but

i digress on that point. david frum, good to have you on this program. thanks for having you on. >> thank you. a conversation with alex tizon about his tone "big little man" we're back in a moment, stay with us. race and gender stereotypes dominate much of the american experience but in a black and white dynamic. a groundbreaking new text from pulitzer prize winning journalist alex tizon called "big little man in search of my asian self" which combinesz(bt personal experience with a historic historical perspective. honored to have you on this program. read one paragraph that will, got your cheaters in your pocket. >> i got my cheaters. >> i'll put you on the spot that way. one paragraph here that just struck me as fascinating and

illuminating about your e=uiñparents.rough the lens of i wonder if you might read this paragraph that starts out, my grandparents bowed -- >> my grandparents bowed to the americans and sought to learn from them. my parents thought to be them. it was part of the grotesque progression. the desire fueled my family's journey across the ocean leaving everything familiar behind to plunge into a vast uncertainty with little thought of the perils. the final result of hundreds of years of cumulative reaching for the beloved. the fingers of desire struck the match. >> a lot packed in that paragraph and i wonder if you might unpack it for me. >> yes. i, well, i grew up with a certain amount of embarrassment and shame about being asian in america during '60s and '70s.

and i didn't understand it at the time, but looking back on it now as a man in his 50s, i'm older than you. >> barely. >> i see that much of that baggage was passed on to me by my parents and grandparents and by my great-grandparents. it was part of this, the colonel experience. i come from a country that was colinized by spaniards and then americans and i think that that sense of shame and inferiority t that i grew up with that i didn't understand i was given at birth anda# i didn't understandt until i was much older. >> how is that different from other cultures. we could have the same conversation i had in the past about hispanics, the latinos, what makes that a simulation ist journey or drive or longing

different than when we look at it in the asian culture? >> you know, i don't know if i can explain that in any kind of, with any kind of scientific certainty. i can say that the intermarriage race between asians who come to this country and whites is much higher between asian women and white men than any other combination. i think that a lot of asian cultures bow to the west. and look to the west for guidance in how to become quote/unquote civilized. so there might be a stronger tendency among among asian populations to unquestioningly seek out to be like the beloved, which, in this case, our former

colinizers. >> when you said a strong statement, it hit me in my heart. you said many in the asian culture look to the west for how to be ñcivilized. i mean, quote/unquote. >> exactly. >> you have to unpack that for me. because, i mean, i love this country, i'm sure you love this country, too. but there are a lot of stains on our record when if comes to being uncivilized so that a particular culture looking to us for how to be civilized, particularly in the era that your parents arrived here is, there's a misconnect for me here. >> well, there's a disconnect for me, too. i think there's a disconnect for many of us. we don't, it's hard to understand the reasons why. for example, i(pañ have a hard with the fact, the little known fact that the united states when they took over the philippines from spain got involved in a war with native nil pefilipinos whod

independence and that particular war resulted in the deaths of between 200 or 600,000 filipinos. entire islands were just depopulated. that was the term used. depopulated. you don't hear much of that. in fact, you don't hear it ever in history books. i bring this up to my father when he was alive because my father was very much united states first, america is the best. he wished the philippines was the 51st state of the united states. i always brought up to him, yeah, it's a great country, but do you know what the americans did to our country when they took it wmover? do you remember that, dad? he didn't. he didn't know that. why was that? because the schools in the philippines were run by americans. they were, the whole educational system was built by the americans when they took over in 1901 or 1902. he really believed, for example,

he believed completely that the united states liberated the philippines from japan during world war ii. and was forever grateful for that. >> share with me some of the stereotypes that persist to this day, as i mentioned at the top of this conversation about asian, asian men that just, you know, rub you in the worst way. >> well, i mean, the predominant one is the stereotype of asian men as being small. and i'm using small in the largest sense. small, not just in sma small, geopolitical small. when it comes to, when it comes to anything that involves strength or power, that asian men rank at the bottom. and that's the idea that i grew up with. i think it's a prevalent idea. in the west. and there's reason for it.

there's reason for it because in the last 200 years or so, asia has gone through, dominated by the west. there have been major, major famines in asia that have resulted in smaller populations. physically, a lot of southern asians are smaller. so, they're small physically. they were small economically, but that is changing. they were weak geopolitically which was also changing. all of this stuff is changing and with the economics going up and the political power increasing, that will translate down into other things like physical size. and, so, anyway, one of the stereotypes is that sense of asia and asians being small, which ignores a large chunk of the last 2,000 years in which

asian civilizations were the preeminent civilizations on the planet. >> i wonder to what extent you think those changing realities, those changing dynamics that you just referenced will change the story and the image of asians and, in particularly, asian men because, you're right, economically. china is all that and then some. but it's not just politically, i think, for example, of your countrymen, who mani pacia. this guy is, you know, has a fan base around the world who is just big ring, more often than not, not always, is knocking people out. but sport plays such a huge role in our lives. i wonder if you think even his success, say nuthing to the economic success of china and beyond will change this narrative in the years to come. >> you know, i hate to say it,

but it will have, it will actually have a larger impact on the perceptions of asian men than many other more porimporta things. athletes have that kind of, what they do is so visual. and it communicates the quintessential qualities of what we consider masculine. i think that the landscape is going to change because there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of mani paciau who have not had the opportunity to emerge. but they're there. i think as asia changes and as it gets richer and has more time for sports and things like that, those athletes will emerge and those perceptions of asian men will undergo, in addition to all that other stuff. it will undergo a slow evolution. may not happen in my lifetime,

unfortunately. >> speaking of the landscape changing, i think in the coming years the scenario will change, but every one") of us is on a search for our own identity and this is a powerful text, a wonderful memoir about his wonderful search. alex tizon is the author of the new book "big little man in search of my asian self-"i just scratched the surface tonight of what is in this text. >> thank you, tavis, i appreciate it. that's our show for tonight. thanks for watching, as always. for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. i'm tavis smiley join me with george benson. that's next time, we'll see you then.

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