Gluesenkamp Perez on The Ezra Klein Show: “The Urgency Here Is To Have a Positive Policy Agenda That Is Relevant to More People”

Last week, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) joined The Ezra Klein Show to discuss her priorities and work in Congress as an independent voice for Southwest Washington.

Video of the interview can be found here. The following are key excerpts of the interview:

“KLEIN: I wanted to start with a clip of President Donald Trump from Wednesday, talking about China and his tariffs.

REPORTER: Did you speak to President Xi of China?

TRUMP: Look, right now, and I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. They made a trillion dollars with Biden. A trillion dollars. Even a trillion one with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don’t need. Somebody said: Oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

KLEIN: What did you think of that?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: You’re talking to a lady who doesn’t give my child toys. I’m a big believer in dirt and string and sticks. But at a broader level, tariffs are a tool. A tool can be used destructively, or it can be used productively. And it depends on how it’s wielded.

Talking to folks back home who really don’t care at all about most politics, they have very sophisticated views on Canadian lumber-dumping practices – we lost seven mills in my area last year. I think it’s about seven.

We want domestic manufacturing. We want self-sufficiency. We want the ability to make things ourselves. I think it’s a mistake to defend our identity around being just consumers and not producers, as well.

But these reciprocal trade deals are a back-room deal for multinationals. How it’s used is what matters.”

“KLEIN: Well, maybe we want contradictory things. On the economy specifically, I think we want plentiful, cheap goods, and we want the self-determination and resilience – an economy that values and rewards production in exactly the way you say.

I always think one of the real problems for politics is the collision of those two things. People want policies that will get us to that self-determination and sovereignty. But then, as we saw a bit during the Biden administration, if the price of things at the grocery store goes up, people get [expletive] real quick.

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Yes, I think that under the North American Free Trade Agreement, there was this argument presented to the American public of: Well, look, you’re not going to have jobs anymore, but you have a bunch of cheap [expletive].

And then when people don’t have the cheap stuff and they don’t have the jobs, it accelerates into a really profound anger – and I think a righteous anger.

So one point is: We don’t just want cheap stuff. We want stuff that will last. I think that was one of the issues with the CHIPS Act. It’s like: Well, what’s driving the chip shortage? Do I want a washing machine that can play Tchaikovsky? Or do I want a washing machine that will last more than three years?

My washing machine is from 1997. My stove is from 1954. And I think about how many times that has been bought and sold on Craigslist – how much durable wealth that has created in the middle class. Not just because people were paid a living wage in America to make those things, but because then they held value and created value for the household who owned them. And then they were sold and bought again – and bought and sold and bought and sold.

So the durable wealth – people kind of belittle this argument about washing machines and dishwashers, but it’s real. And particularly for people who are in the trades, it’s like: [Expletive] it’s got 0.5 percent lower energy consumption or whatever. But they put the control panel right underneath the drip line. So of course it’s going to blitz.

The marriage not just of the technical but of the applied. I used to run this bike shop, and I will never forget teaching a physics major how to hold a wrench – like: Move your hand back.

It is this overspecialization that has deprived the underlying value itself.

KLEIN: One thing that I think is always challenging in this discussion is: Is what people buy the signal for what they want? Or is what they will say in a deeper conversation the signal for what they want?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: That’s one of the things. We’ve replaced the idea of freedom as the freedom to consume. And I would argue that we’re not just consumers, we’re stewards, we are producers.

So it’s not just what you can buy, but it’s what you can make and how you can make things last. And your values. Your inner values manifest in the world around you.

I have a bill that would require manufacturers of household appliances to put on the sticker the average life expectancy of that washing machine along with the annual maintenance cost. Because I think the persistence of Speed Queen – or something like that – does show that people will pay more. But having a class of buyers who has that information available changes consumption habits.

KLEIN: Do you think of these as economic policy arguments? Or arguments that are almost more moral and spiritual in nature?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: They’re both. My dad used to say: You can talk about your values all day long, but you see somebody’s tax returns and you know what they really think.

The depowering of the environmental movement has been supplanting real environmentalism with a consumption habit. True environmentalism is not just buying a matte package at Target. It’s not a consumer good. It is a way of being in the world. It’s a relationship to the natural world around you. It is the way that you spend your life developing skills and allocating your time to live in relationship to the world around you.

One of the things I really love about where I live in rural Skamania is that we don’t have trash service. So I have to look at all the trash. And it’s why I’m not going to buy a single-serving yogurt cup. Because I’m going to have to smell that for two or three months before we go to the dump and load up the truck and take everything. You have to see it. And I think it enforces the reality that there is nowhere else. You can’t export emissions. The climate is global, and your relationship to the world around you – not just as a terrarium but as a dependence and as something that informs your life daily – I think that really matters to informing what trade-offs people will make.”

“KLEIN: For my younger audience members who might not remember: The Blue Dogs of the 1990s were traditionally the more moderate Democratic coalition. And it may still be that now, but the argument you all made – and I thought this was interesting – is that what you really want to bring back is localism – that politics have become too nationalized.

Tell me a bit about that. I feel like this is actually pretty important to your politics – a sense that nationalization has maybe broken the way politics is supposed to work, and one answer is going to be bringing back a localism that we’ve lost.

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Yes. My dad is from Mexico, and my mom’s family has been in Washington state for five generations – pre statehood. And the last time that people in my gene pool were Democrats was when they were Blue Dog Democrats. That still means something to people – when Blue Dogs were a large caucus because we were holding seats that we have lost and not regained.

And so it is a clear urgency of having a gavel and having the ability to govern. But it’s also the question of on whose behalf and toward what end.

I think having loyalty to your soil and to your community – and not something that has been focused-grouped in D.C. or that came from a think tank but what matters to people at home – that is what is fun.

I don’t want to be a mouthpiece for any agenda besides my community. Because it matters to me. This is where I’m trying to die. It’s where I got married. It’s where I’m really trying to give birth. And that loyalty and the lens that: If you can build a political body that is bringing that local lens together – fierce loyalty to the specifics of our community – that is how you build the Venn diagram of what is a useful federal policy. That’s how we break the stranglehold, this duopoly. It’s being useful and relevant and building good policy out of the urgent, specific realities of our community.

KLEIN: I think something you have correctly criticized the Democratic Party for is a politics of dignity and indignity – where things that you value are not well-valued by either the party or cultural elites more broadly. You talked about the physics major you showed how to hold a wrench. There is a valuing of office work and a devaluing of shop work.

One thing I hear you saying is that, in some ways, we should reverse the moral hierarchy – that it’s actually bad to have this trash service that alienates you from your trash. It’s OK for people to live in cities, but you have to understand that we’ve probably gotten off track in a pretty profound way in modernity.

There are a lot of people in politics whose critique is very surface level – that we should change the dials on the tax code a little bit.

But when I listen to you, I hear something much more fundamental – a sense that we’ve gone off course in terms of what and who we value and the correction. Stickers on home appliances is a good start to tell people how long they last and what they cost, but there’s something that has gone wrong to you morally here.

Is that fair? Or would you say I’m overreading you?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: I think that telling a child that what they’re interested in isn’t interesting, or what they’re good at isn’t good enough, is deeply toxic. There are a lot of forms of intelligence – millions – and exactly one of them is academic intelligence.

To your point, it’s like: Well, we’re going to shut your mill down, and we’re going to stop harvesting timber. But hey, here’s a grant that you could apply for. If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll give you money.

That’s not what people want. People want self-determination and agency. And I think it presupposes a hierarchy that is pretty offensive to a lot of people I know – that you’re going to tell me I have a problem, and that you’re the one that knows how to fix it.

It’s this masturbatory interest in policy without a reality of implementation or localism. You can’t be all brain and no muscle. They’re equally necessary to have a healthy body.

There is also a false dichotomy: Not everything worth knowing you can learn in a book. We don’t all want to go to college. Don’t tell me we need to go to college to be useful and to be self-realized or whatever.

We can know things and be in the world in a way that is not strictly capturable – or capturable at all – by a spreadsheet.

KLEIN: This is why I started with this Trump quote. Because something really interesting and strange is happening in politics and economic politics right now.

Donald Trump has been, for decades, the living, breathing embodiment of materialist excess. And Republicans broadly have been quite free trade and very excited about cheap stuff from all over the world. Generally speaking, Democrats have been a little bit more pro-tariff and a little bit more skeptical.

And even during the campaign, Trump is running aggressively on the cost of living – how much everything costs, how much things would be at Walmart. And as he has layered on these tariffs, you’ve begun seeing this other argument that was burbling around the edges of the New Right for a while become more central.

And all of a sudden, Donald Trump is talking about how we have too much cheap stuff in this country, and kids shouldn’t have all these dolls, and we’re too materialistic, and we’re not valuing the right things.

And the Democratic Party and liberals in the Democratic Party are becoming very pro-free trade, which is not their traditional stance. And you’re watching this thing reorient really fast.

And Trump is good at that. He reorients politics around him. But when you watch this and you talk about the Democratic Party becoming the party that is defensive of the line on the stock market – how have you experienced this? Do you feel like your allies are changing?

I guess I asked this before, but do you feel like your critique is being hijacked for something that doesn’t really serve it?

There’s something changing around you. I don’t think you’re changing that much, but something is changing around you, and people are talking in a way they didn’t speak before. How do you take it?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Things have moved and shrunk. You’ve got 8 percent hyper focused on the left and 8 percent hyper focused on the right. And it’s like they’re talking, they have the mic and it’s leading this.

But to your point, people in my community, their experience of the economy hasn’t changed that much. They still can’t afford rent. Can’t get a loan from the bank to get a house. Still working three jobs. Still worried about their truck getting repossessed. People’s experience hasn’t changed that much.

And it is kind of wild to me to see the same playbook getting picked up again from Trump’s first term to today, where it’s like reflexive resistance.

And I would argue that the urgency here is to have a positive policy agenda that is relevant to more people. If you’re somebody who has the ability to go to a protest every day, that is not reflective of the average American experience.

Thinking about: How do you build an agenda that is more useful to your neighbors, that is relevant? If you want to bring in more people, you have to present a policy position that is more popular than the policy position Trump is proposing.

And I think he has done a good job of amplifying and echoing broad dissatisfaction with the way things are going. And we can’t put ourselves in a position of just negating and refuting everything he has said. It’s about presenting an actual policy agenda that will address those concerns and the rage that people are feeling about their loss of agency in the world.

Sometimes there are critiques about: The world is on fire, and she’s talking about bananas and washing machines and right to repair?

But talking to people about the things they care about and fighting for the agenda and priorities of my community – that is the job of a representative.

I held a lot of roundtables with farmers in my community when we were working on the farm bill, and not a damn one of them said antitrust. But farmer after farmer was telling me: Yes, I used to be able to sell my chickens to 12 different buyers, and now I can sell them to two.

That matters to people. Having a level playing field for their business, having economic self-determination matters to people.”

“GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: When they shut down the paper mills, like: Congratulations, now we’re packaging everything in disposable plastic from Saudi Arabia, and we’ve got wildfires at home because there’s no value in the residual – in the slash piles.

So I would say that the policy position can’t just be anti, anti, anti, anti. But saying: All right, what is it going to take to build manufacturing? It’s going to take permitting reform. It’s going to take some antitrust work. It’s going to take shop class in junior high. It’s going to take the elite re-evaluating and acknowledging the nobility of people in the trades and the reality of dirty hands, clean money.

So I think it would be a mistake to just be like, anti, anti, anti. But instead saying: All right, if this is the thing they’re going to do, how do we harness it in a way that is productive in the long term for having the things that we actually want?

KLEIN: Tell me a bit more about what that looks like. I hear you on permitting reform. The argument the Biden administration used to make was: We are trying to compete with China by building our capacity here. We’ll put tariffs on a limited number of things from China – electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, things like that. And we will invest a bunch in domestic manufacturing capacity and infrastructure, and that’s going to get us where we need to go.

Then you have Trump, who says: No, what we need to do is actually make the things unaffordable, and that’s what’s going to get us where we need to go.

What would you keep from the two approaches? Or would you keep nothing from them? When you say it should be a positive agenda, what should that agenda look like?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ:  I mean a re-evaluation. There’s been this obsession with technology and whatever lobbyist is in your office shilling triple-glazed, argon-filled windows. And a blindness to the actual skilled trades of: You know what? If you put the long side of your house facing south, you put an eave on it – if you put a skirt around a mobile home – a metal sheet that connects the bottom of the mobile home to the ground – that creates an air gap and saves a [expletive] ton of energy. And now those folks, a lot of whom are on fixed income living in a mobile home, their energy bill just went way down. You don’t put a hip and valleys in your roof line, you’re going to get a roof that lasts for 50 years.

We ignored a lot of the things that we know in the trades are the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency and utility and a progressive tax system.

That’s one of the things that bothers me. The electric vehicle tax credits, the heat-pump tax credits – those were profoundly regressive tax strategies.”

“KLEIN: Your position now is tricky. There are a lot of Democrats whose marginal voter right now is absolutely furious. Their marginal voter is a Democrat, is somebody who might read The New York Times or listen to my podcast, and they just hate Trump. They hate what’s going on. They don’t see any good in it. And all that person has to do is show up and tell them how bad everything is, and they’re good.

Your marginal voter is somebody who is at least open to this. Your marginal voter is somebody who maybe voted for Donald Trump –

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Who definitely voted –

KLEIN: Who definitely voted for Donald Trump.

So put aside the people paid to talk to you. I agree that the lobbyists and the government affairs class are different. How are the two sides of the people who just vote for you – where do they diverge, and in your experience of your own constituency, where do they converge?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: For a while I was getting a [expletive] ton of letters about Hunter Biden’s laptop from people who are mad he wasn’t being investigated. And I think it’s easy to dismiss that as silly. But if you lift up the hood on that, what a lot of those folks are saying is that they feel like there’s a legal system that works better for you if you have a different last name or you have the right lawyer.

So if we offhandedly dismiss these concerns as silly or biased, we miss an opportunity to build a coalition of people who are actually all quite unified in wanting reform of our judicial system.

I think that’s the intersection of trying to delete the proper nouns out of the argument: Figure out how terms are being used differently, what things mean to people and what the path is to building an agenda that is more popular than what Trump is offering.”

“KLEIN: Is there a part of you that … feels that Trump is trying to really, fundamentally change the character of this country and its institutions and how it works? And the people who are scared as [expletive] and don’t know what to do because they don’t really have any power over it and don’t know how to get listened to – that there’s a righteousness to the way they feel, too?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Yes, people are valid in their anger. And it is a fool’s errand to try to talk somebody out of their feelings. That’s not a good idea.

But you can affirm the validity of their feelings and also present a productive strategy for resolving the drivers of that anger or that fear.

On your point about El Salvador, my dad was the pastor of a Spanish-language church. And you want to meet somebody who really [expletive] hates gangs? You talk to an immigrant who gave up a profound amount to leave a country that was corrupt and run by gangs. That same person cares passionately about due process. They understand that the only inoculant against a corrupt regime is fidelity to due process.

And if we had due process in these cases, we would be in a position to evaluate a judge’s decision about whether or not that person was involved in human trafficking or whatever the claim is. But the point is that we don’t have it, and it’s a deep strategic mistake to accept that we have to choose between really hating gangs and really loving due process.

When you have experienced truly being afraid of being kidnapped or having your business exploited or human trafficking, you take quite seriously that feeling as real and valid. And the productive strategy is fidelity to due process.

I think it’s a “yes and.” Yes, it makes sense to be scared. And if you are really believing that we are entering a totalitarian state, if you’re really worried that we’re never going to have elections again, why is the second bullet point on your agenda primarying Democrats? That’s not what people do in real scenarios like that.

KLEIN: This has been, to me, one of the very frustrating things about the Trump administration. I also hate gangs. I don’t want MS-13 operating in America. I don’t want them operating anywhere. But we have due process. So that’s a good way to find out if people are part of MS-13.

And I find sometimes it’s a political blackmail that’s applied. And I’m not saying you are, but I’ve heard this from other people, where it’s like: Is your politics really to be on the side of people who might be in a gang? It’s like: No, my politics is to be on the side of processes to protect everyone and also are perfectly good at figuring out if people are in a gang. We can cross-examine some witnesses. This is not a thing that’s going to endanger anybody.

So when you’re dealing with some of these issues that have become the cleavages, for you, is it reminding people that due process is a question that goes across the immigration divide? What do you find works for navigating that?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Where I live, we believe that countries have a right and an obligation to know who and what is coming across a border. I don’t think that’s crazy. And one of the failures or weaknesses is that words mean different things all over the place. Some people talking about immigration are talking about drug trafficking.

And whether or not you’re mad about that conflation, you do have to hear and try to get at what the productive strategy is to address it. And not just policing the conflation, but saying: Yes, it [expletive] sucks to have a family member addicted to fentanyl.

It has been frustrating for me at times in this new world I’m in. It’s not hitting. They’re insulated. They’re not hearing these horrifying stories about industrial accidents. It’s not their play date that’s getting in a car wreck because daddy is on fentanyl.

Treating that with an urgency of: How do we stop the flow of fentanyl? How do we build resilience against foreign actors who would like to see the entire middle class being addicted and unproductive?

KLEIN: Do you feel that there are fentanyl policies that we know how to do that really work?

Every time I’ve really tried to write or report this out, the level of frustration I hear from the people really working on it is almost unimaginable. Because it is so hard, so concentrated. And it has become so much easier to transport than heroin was before it.

Is there something you feel that, if we did it, would make a big difference that we’re not doing right now? That neither Biden nor Trump has put their weight behind?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: Well, a few things. Cartels don’t operate under political boundaries. So I think multi-jurisdictional interdiction works. Ensuring law enforcement has the tools to be able to communicate and cooperate.

I have issues where some of my departments transition to digital radios. And some of them are still on radio towers and they can’t talk to each other. They have to relay through a 911 responder. There are issues like that.

There is the geopolitical question of these Chinese-produced precursor chemicals. I was talking to my dad, and one of his buddies from high school was running a factory in Mexico and figured out they were bringing in fentanyl precursors on the weekends. He went to the cops in Mexico, and they were like: Yes, we [expletive] know. You can shut up or you can move to Canada.

And so he moved to Canada. It’s all of the supply chain going into it.”