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I think on the judges point, he knows that he would not be president but for the Supreme Court.

What does that suggest to you about his character or about the way he is as a politician, or how unstable versus calculating he is?

Well, I’ve always thought that Trumpism is … it’s not an ideology, it’s a personal ambition of one man. He’s very clearly focused on his self-interests. He may be undisciplined in other areas, but I think he’s pretty focused on his self-interests, and he has rightly deemed that it is absolutely in his self-interest to be focused on and to deliver on the court, and he’s done that.

I want to circle back to the Warren thing. As someone who has followed Fox News, talk radio, conservatives on Twitter, for a very long time, it seems that there are a variety of issues involving what they perceive to be political correctness regarding race, and all these issues drive them up the wall. How do you understand that?

I think it’s a pretty safe thing to say that there are two things that really ignite the right more broadly. One is the judges that we’ve been talking about, and the other one is that academic brand of identity politics. You’re not going to find somebody on the right, whether they’re a Trump skeptic, if they still identify on the right, you’re not going to find anyone who thinks that that sort of extreme brand of academic identity politics is anything but toxic.

For an Elizabeth Warren, to see somebody who has seemed to have gamed that system to her advantage, or at least attempted or tried to game that system to her advantage, and then to sort of retreat from it as if it was no big deal, when anybody who knows anything about academic identity politics knows these categories are of extraordinary importance, I think that’s one reason why people won’t leave it alone. They know that these designations and these listings in these directories, if you have any knowledge particularly of controversies at the time … I was in law school at Harvard when she was a visiting professor. The idea that having a minority female professor was not an extremely big deal at the time is just … it’s almost ludicrous.

There is also gaming the system like getting hundreds of millions of dollars from your family and finding tax write-arounds or loopholes or illegal maneuvers to keep your business going. There are all kinds of gaming the system.

I’m not going to argue about that.

I know you’re not. I just mean there are all kinds of gaming the system, and it does seem to me that there’s a certain form of it based around race that really unites all the conservatives. I’m just trying to understand culturally what you think that’s about.

I would say there’s a spectrum on this, OK? I would divide it into three categories: good-faith critique, bad-faith critique, and just apathy and indifference. The good-faith critique of this is what I think you’re seeing in a lot of the folks who are opposing Harvard’s treatment of Asian Americans, and the good-faith critique of this is, “Look, we do not deny that there are people who have advantages and disadvantages that are not their faults, or they have advantages that are not due to their virtue, and there are disadvantages that are not due to their vice.” Nobody, I don’t think any human being, could look at this country and look at reality and not see that as true. What is objected to is the notion that the paramount or the principal way of viewing advantage and disadvantage becomes race, and that the prism of advantage and disadvantage is then viewed primarily, or sometimes almost exclusively, through race, and that that is a very, very blunt instrument and often even a quite divisive instrument, and there are other better instruments for dealing with these advantages and disadvantages. That’s the good-faith critique.

The bad-faith critique is … and this is something that we saw just emerge on the right quite honestly and openly during the Trump campaign … is white identity politics. Sort of a fixed pie. “You’re coming for our culture, you’re coming for our economic position, you’re coming for our political power, and we’re just flat out going to resist it.” Then there’s the indifference section, which I think is an underestimated segment, which is kind of like, “Can we just stop obsessing about all this stuff? I don’t really care. It annoys me how much people obsess about this.”

You’ve been following what’s going on with voter purges in Georgia?

Yes.

It seems pretty clear what the intent of that is.

Yeah.

When Trump is the president and when aspects of the Republican Party seem fairly intent on the idea that fewer black people voting is a good thing, I get a lot of the frustrations about PC culture, but I just sort of can’t care that much because this stuff seems so much more important, and I wish more Republicans and sane Republicans would denounce it.

Right. Well, you know, I think there’s a couple of things on the voting issue. One … is the notion of I’m going to gerrymander, say, to maximize Republican votes and maximize Republican power and minimize Democratic power. Is that per se racist? I would say no. I mean, that’s just normal gerrymandering. You would see Democrats do it if, say, for example an ethnic minority was heavily Republican. You would see gerrymandering around political lines, and that would be the primary criteria.

What’s happening in Georgia seems to be an extreme, so extreme that it’s very difficult to analyze that as, “Well, this is just political, this is just, quote/unquote, ballot integrity, or this is simply a political Democratic/Republican kind of maneuver.” It seems to be an order of magnitude beyond that, but the question that I have is, as with many of these issues, it’s very difficult to determine at the end of the day what’s going to be the real-world impact. That’s the thing that I’m having real trouble discerning. A lot of these voter suppression arguments and vote fraud arguments appear to me to be really at the end of the day sort of tinkering along the edges.

I agree with you about the impact being uncertain, but people fought and died for the right to vote in this country, especially in the South, and there are black Americans now who are trying to vote in the South whose ancestors and even themselves lived through segregation, and the government is making it increasingly hard for them to be registered to vote. I don’t know what the impact is going to be, neither do you, but that seems really like something we should be upset about.

Right. I mean, I think I draw a distinction between, say, purging somebody from the rolls unjustly, which that, to me, there’s no excuse for that. That is something that I cannot … I cannot see the excuse for that. The best-case scenario for purging someone from the rolls unjustly, the best case is bureaucratic error, which needs to be and should be corrected immediately. Purging somebody from the rolls as an eligible voter, in my mind that is … I just can’t see any excuse for that under any circumstances.

Now, the thing that I differ from a lot of my progressive friends on is when you impose, say for an example, an ID requirement, and then you call that voter suppression. I find it difficult to believe that requiring all people who go to the polls to have a picture ID, a government-issued picture ID, is in any way any kind of material impairment of the right to vote that people died for.

• Elizabeth Warren
• Republicans
• Voting Rights