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John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency. He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency. He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted.

John Boehner says he couldn't win an election as a Republican these days.

"I think I'd have a pretty tough time," he says. "I'm a conservative Republican, but I'm not crazy. And, you know, these days crazy gets elected. On the left and the right."

Boehner has a new memoir, On the House, about his time in politics.

His refrain is familiar a retired politician bemoaning increased polarization and partisanship, laying the blame squarely on both parties though as a member of House Republican leadership for much of his career, he has more experience and more stories about dealing with the "noisemakers" and "knuckleheads" within his own ranks.

Boehner was first elected to the House in 1990 as a firebrand conservative from Ohio, rising to become House speaker with the help of Republican Tea Party victories in the 2010 midterms. Until his retirement in 2015, he led a Republican caucus largely focused on undoing former President Barack Obama's signature health care overhaul even if it meant shutting down the government.

Boehner's memoir tells of his attempts through the years to corral his members. As he tells Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition, often that meant going in directions he personally opposed.

He relates the situations to one of his folksy sayings "Boehnerisms" that says, "A leader without followers is just a man taking a walk."

"There were a couple of times where I found myself taking a walk. And I was going one direction, the team was going some other direction," Boehner says.

One of those times came in 2013, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other hard-line Republicans forced a government shutdown in a failed attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act.

"And even though I didn't really want to go the direction where the team's going, they were the ones who elected me to be the leader and I had an obligation to go lead them," Boehner tells NPR. "So that means I had to go jump out in front of them, even if I thought what they were trying to do really made not a whole lot of sense."

Boehner's retirement in 2015 allowed him to avoid working with former President Donald Trump in the White House. By the time of Trump's swearing in, Boehner writes that he was "not sure I belonged to the Republican Party he created."

Boehner tells NPR that when Trump refused to accept his election loss, "he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him."

Here are excerpts of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

You describe the way that you ran meetings when you were speaker of the House or really in any leadership position. You say that the key thing was to listen to other people and figure out what was on their minds and which way the room was going.

Well, I was in the sales and marketing business before I got into politics and learned a few things about sales. The most important thing about a salesman is not his ability or her ability to talk. It's their ability to listen. Because if you're listening to the person across the desk, you have a pretty good idea what it is they're looking for and you can figure out a way to get there.

And no different in politics, because in politics especially in the Congress you've got this large body of people that you're trying to move in a particular direction. You really can't even begin to move them until you understand where they are and why they are where they are.

Your party captured the House in 2010. It was driven by the Tea Party movement. You make it clear that there are a lot of people in the Tea Party movement that you consider "crazies." But at the time, you made sure there was no distance, no gap between mainstream Republicans and Tea Party types. You knew that was the way to power.

Well, the fact is they got elected as Republicans, they were members of the Republican conference and most of those so-called Tea Party candidates became what I would describe as regular Republicans. There were a few who I would describe as knuckleheads who all they want to do is create chaos. But the fact is they got elected. I was the speaker and I had to find a way forward as a team.

What do you think about some of the leading figures in your party, the way that it has gone in recent years?

Well, the people of governing in Washington today on both sides of the aisle have an even more difficult task than I did. The country is far more polarized now than it was 10, 12 years ago. And that means the people trying to govern have an even more difficult time trying to bring two sides together, or for that matter bring one side together.

I get the impression, though, that you think that a lot of leading personalities in your party don't really stand for anything, don't really believe in anything.

Well, listen, I've been around politics now for 40 years, and I thought I knew something about politics. But clearly today, I don't know as much as I thought I knew about politics. Because, you know, I'm a Republican, actually. I'm a conservative Republican, but I'm not crazy. And then they've got, I don't know, these noisemakers, I'll call them. But Nancy Pelosi's got the same problem on her side of the aisle.

When you talk about noisemakers, who do you mean? Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan?

Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan. I could go down a long list of people who are more interested in making noise than they are in doing things on behalf of the country. Sometimes I get the idea that they'd rather tear the whole system down and start over because I've never seen anything that they were for. I know what they're against, but I've never really seen what they're for.

There's a case to be made that the Republican Party today is abandoning the idea of democracy. So many people supported the effort to overturn the 2020 election. So many state lawmakers now are pushing for voting restrictions based on false claims about that election. What do you make of that argument?

Listen, the election is over. I listened to all that noise before the election, after the election. And, you know, there's always a few irregularities, but there's really been nothing of any significance that would have changed one state's election outcome, not one. Nothing even close.

I just find what President Trump did before the election, especially what he did after the election, he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him by continually telling them that the election was going to be stolen before the election. And then after the election, telling them that the election was stolen without providing any evidence, no facts. And that's the part about this that really disturbs me the most.

People who were loyal to me, people who trusted me, I felt like I had a responsibility to be honest with them, straightforward with them. And to see this loyalty and trust be abused by President Trump, it was really kind of disheartening at best.

Bo Hamby and Reena Advani produced and edited the audio interview. James Doubek produced for the Web.

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John Boehner On The 'Noisemakers' Of The Republican Party - NPR

GOP Rep. Peter Meijer has warned that the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement could destroy the Republican Party from within in remarks to CNN.

Meijer is one of few Republicans who've spoken out against the rise of conspiracy-theory-driven beliefs among a swath of the GOP grassroots. He was one of only 10 Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the Capitol riot on January 6.

"The fact that a significant plurality, if not potentially a majority, of our voters have been deceived into this creation of an alternate reality could very well be an existential threat to the party," Meijer, a freshman congressman from Michigan, told the network.

GOP Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan said lawmakers are taking new precautions amid fears of violence following President Donald Trump's second impeachment. Jeff Kowalsky/Getty Images

The QAnon movement emerged from messaging boards 4chan and 8chan, to be adopted and promoted by Trump allies on the far right as it spread through the Republican Party. A Republican congresswoman, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, pushed the conspiracy theory before her election last year though in recent weeks has claimed she does not believe in it.

Adherents claim, groundlessly, that a Satanic cabal of Democrats and Hollywood stars secretly manipulate world events and run child trafficking networks. They revere Donald Trump as a savior figure, who will dismantle the cabal.

But the belief of adherents that Trump would halt Joe Biden's inauguration and defeat his foes in a day of violent reckoning has failed to materialize, and Meijer warned that the dispair could fuel political violence.

"When we say QAnon, you have the sort of extreme forms, but you also just have this softer, gradual undermining of any shared, collective sense of truth," Meijer said. He told CNN that conspiracy theories fuel "incredibly unrealistic and unachievable expectations" and "a cycle of disillusionment and alienation" that could lead conservative supporters not to vote or could even lead to more violence like the January 6 attack.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger is another GOP congressman who has publicly criticized the movement and has formed a PAC to fight the rise of conspiracy theories in the GOP and provide backing to anti-Trump Republicans facing primary challenges.

He told CNN that the QAnon movement could fuel conflict: "Do I think there's going to be a civil war? No. Do I rule it out? No. Do I think it's a concern, do I think it's something we have to be worried about? Yeah."

In the wake of the Capitol riot, a small group of GOP lawmakers has called for the party to distance itself from Donald Trump's legacy. In an op-ed in January, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska warned that QAnon was destroying the GOP.

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QAnon could destroy the Republican Party from within, warns GOP Rep: CNN - Business Insider

At the time, the Obama administration was cracking down on illegal immigration in an attempt to bring Republicans to the table for a grand bargain on comprehensive immigration reformbut it was more effective politics for both Democrats and Republicans to pretend that Obama was less of a border hawk than he really was.

Again and again, Republicans have targeted groups they believe too small or too powerless to spark a costly political backlash. By attacking them, the GOP seeks to place Democrats in a political bind. If they decline to bow to demagoguery, Democrats risk looking either too culturally avant-garde for the comfort of more conservative voterswhose support they need to remain viableor too preoccupied with defending the rights of a beleaguered minority to pay attention to bread-and-butter issues that matter to the majority. This strategy has worked in the pastPresident Bill Clinton, who signed the federal statute outlawing same-sex marriage in 1996, was no Republican. Many people across the political spectrum accept the premise that defending a marginalized groups civil rights is identity politics, while choosing to strip away those rights is not.

In 2004, Republicans pursued a good-cop/bad-cop strategy: Bush sounded notes of tolerance and acceptance in public, while Republican strategists pursued an anti-gay-rights agenda behind the scenes. In 2012, the partys presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, ran to the right of Bush on both immigration and LGBTQ issues in order to prove that he was severely conservative. In 2016, the Republican base wanted a nominee who would sound their hatreds with a foghorn rather than a dog whistle. Trump obliged, promising to ban Muslims from coming to the United States and build a wall on the border with Mexico. Trump had previously mocked Romneys harsh self-deportation policy as maniacal, but the reality-show star knew what the Republican base wanted in a president when he finally ran.

That brings us to 2021. Republicans lost the fight over marriage equality so decisively that some now pretend not to have vigorously opposed it in the first placemuch to the alarm of many religious conservatives, who are their most dedicated supporters. The fight over immigration is locked in a stalemate, because Trump showed national Republicans that embracing nativism is less politically costly than they had supposed. Anti-Muslim animus has hardly disappeared, but it is no longer as useful a tool to oppose the current leader of the Democratic Party, an elderly Irish Catholic man.

Read: The GOPs Islamophobia problem

Conflicts between civil rights and religious freedom can certainly present thorny legal dilemmas, but most of what Im describing here involves Republicans consciously choosing not to leave people alone. There was no threat to life or liberty that demanded same-sex-marriage bans, Sharia bans, or draconian state-level immigration laws. They embraced these causes because they believed that picking on these particular groups of people was good politics, because of their supporters animus toward them, and because they believed that their targets lacked the votes or political allies to properly fight back.

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The GOP's War on Trans Kids - The Atlantic

Groton Two Democrats one the partynominee and the otherthe incumbent running as a write-in candidateand both former Republicans, arevying for the city's top office inthe Maygeneral election, without a Republican opponent.

In the unprecedented and contentiousrace, the City of Groton Republican Committee chairman said the committee plans to stay neutral, even if individual members support either candidate.

Meanwhile, some Democrats in the city are supportingTown Councilor and former stateRep. Aundr Bumgardner,who won theDemocratic primary after he challengedMayor Keith Hedrick,while others are backing Hedrick, who is the chairman of the city's Democratic Committee and isrunning as a write-in candidate after losing the primary by five votes.

The City of Groton Republican Committee, which did not put forward a slate of candidates after citing a hostile political climate for Republicans, recently issued a news release that the committee "is not involved, supports, favors or endorses in any way either individual candidate in this process."

"Any statement to the contrary is false and misleading," the release states.

Republican Chairman Robert Zuliani said by phone that while he, as an individual, is supporting Hedrick, the committee is not involved.Zuliani said heissued the news releaseafter Bumgardner made statements in a campaign fundraisingemail that his opponent "decided to put personal ambition and love for power ahead of what it means to be a Democrat. He has announced a write-in campaign led by the leadership of the Groton Republican City Committee." Bumgardner added that his "opponent refused to concede, turned his back on the Democratic Party, and is now working with Republicans."

Bumgardneralso posted on Twitter: ".@GrotonDems, I heard we won the Democratic primary for Groton City mayor. Why is our Dem leadership, including (Democratic Town Committee) Chair Conrad Heede, promoting the candidacy of a write-in candidate now colluding with the local GOP City Committee? Asking for 100s of Democratic voters in our city."

In a phone interview, Bumgardner cited that Hedrick's campaign treasurer is Irma Streeter, a member of the city's Republican committee. Hedrick said Streeter brings experience, and Irma and her husband, Jim, who are Republicancommittee members and longtime volunteersin Groton, said they are supporting Hedrick as individuals.

Zuliani said he is not sure whom the other members of the 11-person committee are supporting individually, and he thinks at least one is supporting Bumgardner. He said they have not discussed it as a committee and the committee has never endorsed a Democrat in the general election.Jim Streeter and Zuliani said they are supporting Hedrick as individuals because they feel he is the best candidate.

Zuliani said he was disappointed with the accusation of "colluding." He said there are Democrats and Republicans supporting both candidates and there's nothing wrong with that.

Hedricksaid he is a registered Democrat and is running a grassroots campaign with support from hundreds ofpeople across the city, including Democrats, unaffiliated voters, independents, Green Party members and Republicans.He said he is running as a write-in candidate because voters asked him to get back in the race so they could have a choice, and his campaign is not about "partisan politics."

"The race is about the residents of the City of Groton and about who is qualified to lead the City of Groton for the next two years," Hedrick said.

Bumgardnersaidthat while individuals in the community are entitled to support the individuals of their choice, he committed to supporting the Democratic candidate if he lost the primary. He saidHedrick,as chair of the city'sDemocratic committee,"is obligated to support the entire Democratic slate, just as I have committed to doing."

"I would challenge Mr. Hedrick to reassess his involvement with the Democratic committee, considering he is chair of the very committee that has an endorsed Democratic slate, and he has now launched a write-in candidacy against the top of the ticket of the Democratic slate," Bumgardner added.

Hedrick said individuals on the committee can make their own decisions about whom they support in the election and don't need to be "in lockstep." He also pointed out that the Democratic slate of councilors andcity clerk are running unopposed.

"The race is between me and my opponent," Hedrick said. "There is no need to drive the Groton City Democratic Committee into this. They can support who they want to support and once the election is over, then the Groton City Democratic Committee will need to determine where they will go in the future."

The town committees also said they are staying out of the city elections.

The Groton Republican Town Committee responded on its Facebook page to campaign text messages sent by Bumgardner "stating that the Republicans are working with his opponent. WE ARE NOT. People working with Keith Hedrick, who may or may not be Democrats, are doing so as individuals and their efforts do not represent Groton Republicans in any way shape or form."

Meanwhile, Heede, chair of the Groton Democratic Town Committee, said that committee has "never endorsed candidates for City elections. Since the only two candidates competing in the May election are both Democrats, we expect some of our members will support one or the other candidate."

k.drelich@theday.com

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As two Democrats face off in unprecedented Groton City election, Republicans say they will remain neutral - theday.com

One new frontier of libertarianism: mining for Ethereum.

Photographer: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg

Photographer: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg

A little more than a year ago, a lifelong libertarian (quotes very much necessary) took stock of the movement and declared it pretty much hollowed out. For one thing, he wrote, it cannot solve or even very well address a number of major problems, most significantly climate change. For another, Internet culture encouraged smart and curious people to seek out and synthesize eclectic views, making capital-L Libertarianism pass.

Its successor was something he called State Capacity Libertarianism an ideology that acknowledges both the power of markets and the need for government. To quote from the article: Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.

As it happens (spoiler alert), I happen to know the author here: It was me. And given the importance of Operation Warp Speed in getting the U.S. out of the pandemic, I remain happy with what I wrote. Still, not all libertarians liked my approach, especially the state capacity part of state capacity libertarianism.

Fair enough! And given all thats happened in the past year, its worth considering the question anew: What does it mean to be libertarian now? I would say that the purer forms of libertarianism are evolving: from a set of policy stances on political questions to a series of projects for building entire new political worlds.

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To understand this path, some history is necessary. American-style libertarianism in the 1970s was a novel movement that had many useful (and I would say correct) policy recommendations. Libertarians complained about high inflation, excessively high marginal tax rates, airline regulation, extreme protectionism and labor union privilege (especially in the U.K.), among other issues.

The good news is that many of these battles were won, at least partially. Libertarian views had significant influence on the mainstream. The paradox is that they were no longer defining issues for libertarians.

Principled opposition to central planning and communism was another defining stance. But the real world did us the remarkable favor of dismantling most of the major communist regimes, and at least moving China toward significant and growth-enhancing market reforms.

Libertarians promoted other ideas too, such as a critique of major government involvement in health care and indeed of the social welfare state. These ideas have not gone anywhere. Many countries have reformed in market-oriented directions, but they have not dismantled their social welfare states.

The U.S. in particular has moved in the direction of greater government involvement in these areas, both with Affordable Care Act a decade ago and the Cares Act last year. Countries such as Chile and Singapore, both successful reformers in earlier times, have moved toward a greater reliance on social welfare programs.

Past instantiations of libertarianism have emphasized the anti-war roots of the movement. Half a century ago, it drew energy and inspiration from the ongoing failures of the Vietnam War, which every day reminded people that the American state could be a force for great evil. Nowadays, however, even unpopular wars tend not to stoke outrage for very long. The current tactic of frequent drone strikes may well be a huge mistake, but it is hard to get the American public very upset about it.

More recently, the American Institute for Economic Research attempted to make resistance a central feature of the libertarian movement resistance to lockdowns. But its Great Barrington Declaration was fatally flawed. More important, with vaccinations rising, most lockdown issues are likely to recede.

The failure of the libertarian movement to generate public opposition to or even public interest in government overreach is more than a transitory defeat. It has resulted in a kind of tectonic shift: Instead of emphasizing the failures of current systems, libertarian energies are now focused on the possibilities of entirely new ones. Much of the intellectual effort in libertarian circles is concentrated in two ideas in particular: charter cities and cryptocurrency.

Very recently a charter city was inaugurated in Honduras, with its own set of laws and constitutions, designed to set off an economic boom. Entrepreneurs are seeking to create such cities around the globe, typically as enclaves within established political units. The expectation is not that these cities would reflect libertarian doctrine in every way, but rather that they would be an improvement over prevailing governance, just as Hong Kong had much better outcomes than did Maos China.

A milder version of the charter cities conceptis the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement, which is not founding new cities but seeking to transform existing ones by deregulating zoning and construction and thus building them out to a much greater extent.

Another area attracting energetic young talent is cryptocurrency. Bitcoin gets a lot of the attention, but it is a static system. The Ethereum project, led by Vitalik Buterin, is more ambitious. It is trying to create a new currency, legal system, and set of protocols for new economies on blockchains.

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum can be managed to better suit market demands. Imagine a future in which prediction markets are everywhere, micropayments are easy, self-executing smart contracts are a normal part of business, consumers own their own data and trade it on blockchains, and social media are decentralized and you cant be canceled. The very foundations of banking and finance might move into this new realm.

Consistent with these developments, the most influential current figures in libertarianism have a strong background as doers: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Buterin and Balaji Srinivasan, to name a few, though probably none would qualify as a formal libertarian. All of them have strong roots outside the U.S., which perhaps liberated them from the policy debates that preoccupied American libertarians for so long.

All this said, it is far from certain that these movements will succeed. Will many governments give up partial sovereignty to charter cities, and will these new political units maintain their credibility and integrity? Will consumers find sustainable and generally accepted uses for the products of an Ethereum-based commercial ecosystem, or will blockchains prove too cumbersome?

In essence, the new versions of libertarianism are seeking to act where action is possible. They are scaling up the vision rather than winnowing it down. Those visions probably wont be enough to arrest climate change, but they nonetheless could be transformative for peoples everyday lives.

The most radical form of the new libertarianism combines the two visions. Imagine a series of autonomous, competing cities, replacing the old nation-states. These cities are built on crypto institutions, cannot rely on resource confiscation, and they are more like start-ups than the large, centralized governments of the mid to late 20th century.

It is fashionable these days to claim that libertarianism is dead. Instead, before our very eyes, it has reinvented itself to focus less on policies than on projects. In this sense, it hearkens back to the Pilgrims and a much earlier set of ideologically driven projects that helped to build the current Western world.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Tyler Cowen at tcowen2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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Libertarian Ideas Are Evolving in Response to Covid and Recession - Bloomberg