Lee Drutman

My name is James Wallner, and I am a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation.

And I'm Lee Drutman.

I'm a senior fellow at New America and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

Well, hey, James.

How you doing, Lee?

Well, yeah, it's, uh, it's the end of summer.

Kids back to school.

But you definitely, if you look closely, can see age, um, in the Senate and in the House, and that is old age.

The survey finds that much of the public's appetite for help from the government has been unaddressed.

Lee Drutman, who focuses on Congress and governance issues at New America, a center-left think tank, said, The puzzling thing is why neither party has figured out how to do this, given that there's such widespread support.

One theory, both parties avoid steps that might help the other party gain credit with voters.

Moreover, proposals that require taxpayer funding are often expensive.

They built up their trade associations.

And the work of Lee Drutman, for example, is a really good introduction to how that process happened.

And so you've got a relatively small number of very large firms that essentially stand ready at all times to block action.

And they're very effective at it.

We don't disagree on policy nearly as much as you would think when you look at the data around elite polarization and how much we hate each other, effective polarization.

There's a political scientist named Lee Drutman, and he did a study where he asked a couple people about their social views and a couple questions about their economic views.

Then he plotted those points on an axis, on the social conservatism axis and an economic progressivism axis.

He found that there are large swaths of Americans who agree on a lot of stuff.