Vox Co-Founder Advocates for a Bigger American Population

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And our next guest says that when it comes to America’s population size bigger is better. His latest book is called “One Billion Americans, The Case for Thinking Bigger.” Matthew Yglesias is an American journalist and co-founder of Vox News. And here, he’s speaking to our Walter Isaacson about this thesis.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Matthew, welcome to the show.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS, CO-FOUNDER, VOX: Very glad to be here.

ISAACSON: You are one of the co-founders with Ezra Klein of Vox, that wonderful explainer news site. And recently, you just left. Why did you leave?

YGLESIAS: Well, you know, I was a co-founder there but hadn’t been in management for several years and, you know, I was just sort of trying to be a writer. But it’s hard when you’re so closely affiliated with a place to also be an independent voice on your own. And I think we’ve seen some trends in digital media in particular that don’t really rub me the right way. I think less interest t in provocation and challenging people than it used to have or than I’m interested in doing. So, it seemed like a new time to explore new opportunities and do something more independent.

ISAACSON: Well, certainly digital media has a lot of provocation. It seems to me the problem you were facing there was that there was sort of a newsroom and woke newsroom that was in a bubble that didn’t like the progressive view being challenged too much.

YGLESIAS: You know, I mean, you know, you have a lot of people, young people, college graduates living in a couple big cities, a lot of very left-wing ideas sort of being mainstreamed, and I think it’s not a really healthy environment. You know, I think people need to have some of their perceptions challenged. I think that’s the role of journalism to, you know, tell people not necessarily what they want to hear. And I think at Vox and at lot of places the prevailing temper really sort of goes against that.

ISAACSON: Give me some examples of pushback you got.

YGLESIAS: Really early on after George Floyd died. I wanted to write a piece about how police departments were actually killing fewer African-Americans, particularly fewer unarmed African-Americans, and I didn’t mean that as a critique exactly of Black Lives Matter so much as to say that, you know, activists were having some success here or a reform process was working. But a lot of people reacted very negatively to that idea. It was like to say that progress was existing was to be dismissive of people’s complaints. And to me, like that doesn’t make any sense, right. Like we need to get a realistic view of problems and of solutions and what is happening, and, you know, that then moved on to the debates about do we need to defund or somehow abolish the police because if you think institutions are unreformable or unredeemable, of course, you’ll go in that direction. But the facts just don’t support that analysis. Relatively small changes that had been made since Michael Brown, since Ferguson, were making a real difference, and you could continue on the path of changing things. And, you know, any time you try to make progress, some people will be frustrated, some people will resist, some things won’t go fast enough, but we potentially had this going in a healthy direction, and then instead it spun out. There was an incredible fad across so many media organizations for these police defunding and incredibly superficial reads of the literature on policing and crime, and then we saw it blew up, right. There’s been great reporting more recently out of Minneapolis where suddenly all kinds of people there, black, white, you know, all kinds of people are saying, hey, wait a minute, crime is soaring now and that’s really bad. And to me it was just a really odd environment over the summer where there was incredible pressure not just at one institution but at so many institutions to sort of not talk about the full complexity of urban crime as a political issue.

ISAACSON: Do you think the fact that almost all people in these mainstream newsrooms and digital newsrooms, college educated, puts them in a bubble where they are somehow clueless about what a lot of people in this country were feeling about words like defund the police?

YGLESIAS: I mean, I think we’ve seen it time and again. We saw it first with Donald Trump where so many people were surprise that had he could win the Republican nomination. So many people were surprised he could win the presidency. Then so many people were surprised that had Biden could win the Democratic nomination for the exact same reason, not paying attention to older and more working-class people who are simply the majority of the electorate. And then we saw it again, I think, with defund the police type of rhetoric, and when you see a group of people — I mean, you know, I’m 39, college graduate, living in Washington, D.C. I’m not so different from anybody else in the media, but it’s when you don’t realize that you are not typical of the country, right, that the average voter is a bit over 50. The average voter didn’t go to college. The average voter is just more conservative on social and cultural issues.

ISAACSON: You have a sentence which I’m going to read to you and I’d like you to unpack it for me, it’s pretty powerful in, I guess, one of your latest newsletters that says, Democrats have increasingly got themselves sucked into a vortex of highbrow cultural politics. What do you mean by that?

YGLESIAS: The use of the word Latinx is one that is really salient to me. In sort of activist circles, this idea arose that Latino is not a good word because it uses grammatical gender, right, as Spanish words do. So, we needed a gender-neutral term so people would start to right Latino/A, which is not pronounceable. Then they came up with the idea of Latinx. And people started using that in activist circles, but almost no Hispanic people use that is term. No Mexican-Americans, no Puerto Ricans, no Cuban-Americans use that term. And so many progressives didn’t even realize that they were sort of imposing this word that was invented outside the community for other reasons. And if you think about it with any kind of sensitivity, right, to say to people, you know, who are maybe native Spanish-speakers or learned it from their parents that the entire grammar of the Spanish language is problematic and bad and needs to be eliminated, that’s a very out-of-touch kind of thing to say to a group of people, and it’s really only since the election that I’ve started to hear some of the Hispanic members of Congress talking about this and how — like they don’t think people should be using this kind of verbiage. Again, you know, like one word does not hinge elections, but the fact that you could come up with this kind of thing and not realize that it’s out of touch with the people you’re trying to speak to was to me a big sign of trouble here, that Democrats watched non-college white voters slip away over a number of decades, and they told themselves, you know, it’s OK. We’ve got a growing black and Hispanic population in the United States. And now, those non-college non-white voters also started to slip to Trump. And Republicans could do a lot better than Donald Trump in terms of outreach to non-white people in the United States. So, it’s something, you know, democrats really ought to be worried about.

ISAACSON: What do you take from the fact that Proposition 16 which tried to reinstate affirmative action in California, probably the most liberal state in the country, failed?

YGLESIAS: I mean, that kind of racial justice politics, you see it has a very narrow constituency. California is about 40 percent non-Hispanic white. The white population of California is much more liberal than the national average and, you know, it didn’t go over there even though the governor, the lieutenant governor, almost every statewide elected official, the mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, they all lined up for this thing. It didn’t fly. And at the same time, you saw, you know, a referendum in Florida to raise the minimum wage. That passed. Two years ago, minimum wage referendum passed in Arkansas, it passed in Missouri. Those kinds of more traditional liberal issues have actually become more popular than they were in the past, but a lot of progressives’ sort of have moved beyond that kind of thing and they want to get into what I guess they consider to be anti-racist politics, very minute attention to the allocation of elite positions. A lot of focus on special diversity initiatives, and it has very little purchase with the mass public, in part, I think because it violates people’s sense of fairness but also because it has so little to do with most people’s lives. Like, exactly who gets to go to Berkeley actually doesn’t help the vast majority of people in California or any state.

ISAACSON: But, Matt, isn’t it a deep moral issue that we have to be more inclusive, have to have more diversity and have to make sure that people who have been discriminated against over the past generations get to be brought to be part of our society, including in good jobs as well as in good colleges and universities?

YGLESIAS: I mean, I think we absolutely have to be more inclusive. You know, Trump, right, put forward for most of his term this very exclusionary idea of America, this obsession with the idea that immigrants were weakening our country, and I think that’s really wrong. I mean, America is always sort of at its strongest when it is a haven for all sorts of people, when it is a diverse society, when people from all different backgrounds are contributing. At the same time, you know, the United States really is that diverse society. We had Barack Obama as president. We’re going to have Kamala Harris as vice president. When you look at, you know, European country, you look at Asian democracies, you don’t see the levels of diversity and inclusion that exist in the United States. And there is something to be said, I think, for having a somewhat more positive view of these things than either this is very dyspeptic, you know, Trumpy, like, oh, we need to make America great again, you know, things have become horrible in the recent past, and there’s a dyspeptic view on the left that like this country is irredeemable or original sins that need to be expunged. But in fact, you know, we have problems, like all countries do. Nothing is perfect. But America is pretty good, you know, in a lot of ways, right. The essence of the whole immigration debate is that people would like to come here. People from lots of different countries who are aware that the United States is imperfect are also aware that it provides extraordinary opportunities to a lot of people and we should fight to make sure that that continues to be the case.

ISAACSON: You’ve written a book called “One Billion Americans” that has just come out, and I think that what more than would triple the size of the population. Why will we do that?

YGLESIAS: Well, you know, my big idea in this book, right, was to think seriously about international competition with China. It’s a big topic. It’s something — Trump spoke about it. It’s something Biden’s transition team is thinking about. It’s something that Americans care about. Fundamentally, why is China a major power on the world stage with an economy that’s about as prosperous as Mexico and Bulgaria? It’s because the country is so big. There’s 1.2 billion people in China. The United States historically has been a major power in a way that say Canada is not. Canada is a nice place, you know. I’ve been there. I know Canadian people. But the reason America is a great power in the world is that American leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries acted to sort of build-up the United States, right. A lot that have was immigrants. Some of it is just, you know, domestic fertility. People have children, to be a really big country. American leaders wanted us to be a big deal in the world. And I think Americans still have that aspiration and I want to challenge us to take seriously what that means, to support families with young children so that people can have as many kids as they say they want to have, to continue to be welcoming to immigrants and then look at the problems, you know, traffic jams and other things that would arise if we had more population growth and solve them.

ISAACSON: What about the environmental impact?

YGLESIAS: So, you know, in a lot of ways I think America has natural resources we need to have more people. We have incredible holdings of federal lands where the big trade-off is — it’s really with the mining and logging and ranching interests, not with human habitation. We have a lot of fresh water. We have cleaner air and cleaner water than we’ve had in the past before. There’s an important question about climate change, right. So, if people come here from poor countries and they achieve American living standards, their greenhouse gas emissions go up, and that is an issue. That is the downside. At the same time, I don’t think if you speak to any thoughtful environmentalist and you say, well, what’s your solution to this problem? They are not going to say, well, we’re going to keep half at planet trapped in poverty forever and ever. That’s not a real solution to climate change, right. Real solutions have to come from deploying renewable energy and from developing new storage technologies and new ways to do, you know, shipping, air travel, these other kinds of things. So, if we can do that such to have a prosperous green society then we can have a being lather population. If we don’t do that stuff, I think they are trying to shrink the country or abandon economic growth or tell other countries that they are going to stay poor, that to me doesn’t work. That’s not a moral solution. It’s not had a politically practical solution. It’s not in line with how any environmental challenge has ever been met.

ISAACSON: Other than trying to compete with China or maybe India, is there a moral reason why our country should be one billion Americans as you say in your book?

YGLESIAS: I mean, I think there’s incredibly powerful moral reasons to be more open to immigration. I think one of the greatest things that the United States does for the world and has done historically is provide be an opportunity for people to move here. I also think it’s not just moral though, it’s self-interested, right. We look at the Moderna vaccine and one of the founders of that company is ethnically Armenian, born in Lebanon, immigrated to Canada, then from Canada to the United States. Other born in France, came here. The BioNTech vaccine, that’s made by people of Turkish ancestry whose parents moved to Germany. Letting people from poorer and less free countries have the opportunity to move to richer and freer ones, it helps them but it helps the whole world, right, when people are able to reach their fullest potential to innovate, to make great things, those benefits scale tremendously, and it’s so far outweighs small problems of labor market competition.

ISAACSON: But what about the increase of the challenges and problems we’ll face with everything from education to health care to even economic disparity if you open the gates to a lot more immigration?

YGLESIAS: Well, you know, when you do immigration in a smart way, you can help ameliorate those kinds of problems. So, right now, it’s incredibly difficult for a foreign-trained doctor to qualify to practice medicine in the United States. But our medical professionals, they earn much more money than foreign doctors, and, you know, they are great. We’ve got great doctors and nurses in the United States, but there’s a lot of great doctors and nurses around the world. If you can create a pathway for foreign-trained physicians to practice here, that helps make our health care problems easier. It helps solve our inequality problems. One of the ideas that I have in the book that I borrowed from the U.S. conference of mayors is that we should let cities that have experienced population decline, a lot of them in the Midwest, some in the northeast and a few in the south, we should let them sponsor extra visas for people who would like to move here. So, a place like an Akron or a Toledo or a Binghamton can get a new nucleus of skilled workers coming in and new economic opportunities. So, a measure like that could help lessen some of the disparities, regional disparities that have kind of pulled apart to an extent the fabric of this country. So, I think it’s not wrong of people to look at social problems and worry about immigration, perhaps exacerbating them, but the world is such a big place, and the desire to come here is so large that there are ways we can design our programs to actually make those problems better.

ISAACSON: Matthew Yglesias, thanks so much for joining the show.

YGLESIAS: Thank you.