Assimilation, Latinos, and life in America: a conversation with Linda Chavez

Linda Chavez joins Luis and Gil to talk about assimilation, immigration policy, and the growth of Latino conservatism in the United States. Linda discusses her autobiography and the experiences that made her a conservative, the divisions over immigration policy within the GOP, anxieties over assimilation, what identity politics gets wrong, why Donald Trump improved among Latino voters, and how young people can work to overcome polarization. Afterwards, Gil and Luis discuss the difficulty of defining Latino identity and talk about the possible electoral shift happening in American politics.

About the guest: Linda Chavez is a commentator and syndicated columnist who has served in two presidential administrations. Chavez has also authored several books, including Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation and An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal . In 2000, Chavez was honored by the Library of Congress as a "Living Legend" for her contributions to America's cultural and historical legacy. In January 2001, Chavez was President George W. Bush's nominee for Secretary of Labor until she withdrew her name from consideration.

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Transcript

Gil Guerra:   Linda Chavez, welcome to Panorama!

Linda Chavez:   Great to be with you. 

Gil Guerra:       So we want to talk about a few specific issues like immigration and assimilation, but this podcast is also about delving into why some Hispanics are conservative and also about challenging political stereotypes. Your autobiography is titled “An Unlikely Conservative” and one of the things you do in your book that I really appreciate is that you go into your family history, and Luis makes fun of me all the time for this because one of my main hobbies is genealogy and I'll talk to anyone who gives me a chance about my family tree research. And in reading your book I actually discovered we are distantly related! We are both descendants of Pedro Gomez Duran y Chavez, who was born in Spain in the 16th century. You’re from New Mexico, my family's from Chihuahua, some of his descendants wound up fleeing there and staying after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 so we're actually distant cousins, he's my twelfth Great-Grandfather.

Linda Chavez:    Yes and in fact I was featured on finding your roots with Henry Louis Gates. And I actually went to Spain and went to Sevilla, they trace the Armijo part of my family history, did less work on the Chavez part. But I later was able to get some more research on the Chavez family so I can send you some material on that. And my family was also affected by the Pueblo Indian revolt, that accounts for the small amount of Native American ancestry that I have according to 23andme because I'm descended from a child who was born after her mother was taken by the Pueblo Indians and was not returned to the community for 10 years.

Gil Guerra:     So all that to say, maybe there's some sort of conservative Latino gene, but even, even if that's not the case I found there was really a lot in your autobiography that really resonated with me despite the difference in setting, despite the difference in circumstance. And I think there's probably a lot in it that will resonate with a lot of young conservative Latinos as well. So for anyone in our audience who might not be familiar with your book, can you give us a snapshot of the different sorts of issues, intellectuals, and environments that made you a conservative?

Linda Chavez:     Well, I started out in my autobiography talking about my youth, my college experience. I was one of the first people to teach in the affirmative action program at the University of Colorado. I actually helped devise the English language program for the students that were coming in. And that was really a formative experience and formative in terms of my deciding that I really was pretty conservative because I believe that while it was great to let students come in who didn't quite have the preparation, I thought they needed to spend a year brushing up on their skills, being able to compete on an equal footing. And I found myself very much in the minority. And then when I went to UCLA, I taught the very first Chicano literature course at UCLA. And again, found myself at odds with the Chicano community at UCLA because I had this very radical notion that students should actually attend classes and read books, and that did not go well for me. So all of these experiences really taught me that at heart, I really was a conservative. You know, in a previous era I might've been considered an old school liberal in the more 18th century notion of liberal. But today that sentiment, that feeling really is found more in the conservative movement than in what we call progressivism today.

Luis Parrales:   I'm very glad that you brought that up. Something that I found interesting was you mentioned you know, that you voted for president Reagan in 1980 to 1984 while you were still a registered Democrat. I'd be interested to hear more about that, on the one hand you weren’t a cradle conservative, so what drew you to him? And on the other hand, what have you disliked about the changes in the Republican party or the conservative movement since then?

Linda Chavez:     Well first of all, the thing that drew me to President Reagan was his strong anti-communism. I grew up in the fifties and sixties, the fight against communism was very real at that period. I mean, I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I remember staying home from school preparing a shelter in my basement, which would not have done much good because Denver would have been a direct hit. But yeah, it was really president Reagan's views on foreign policy and defense that got me to vote for him. I was more of a standard Democrat on economic issues in those days. I always joke that it's only when I began earning more money and having to pay more taxes that I became a little more conservative on those issues. But it really was Ronald Reagan believing in America, standing up for America being a bulwark against communism, fighting back against what had happened in the 1970s, which was, if you'd looked at a map of the world and seeing the spread of communist influence, it had spread all over Southeast Asia. It had spread all over Latin America. It had spread over. And that to me was very concerning. 

So when I first voted for Ronald Reagan, it was a hard decision to make. I worked at the time for a labor union, the American Federation of Teachers and pulling that lever for the first time for a Republican was hard for me. But what was interesting was that I later had lunch with some of my fellow union workers at the AFT and all of us over lunch, sort of guiltily with the exception of two people admitted that we'd all voted for Ronald Reagan. I didn't have to watch the election returns that night. I knew that if you had half a dozen top union officials voting for Ronald Reagan, that Jimmy Carter didn't have a chance.

Gil Guerra:    And to Luis's second point, you've worked around some different issues like affirmative action and labor policy, but we want to talk a little bit about immigration and particularly the debates around immigration that exist within the Republican party. Immigration really blew up in 2016 as an issue under the candidacy of Donald Trump. And I think that one of the critiques of the Republican party's immigration policies from the populist wing that Donald Trump has represented is that Republican attempts at immigration reform have been essentially too friendly to business interests, that they're too aimed at keeping wages down. How do you respond to those sorts of arguments coming from the populist wing of the conservative movement? Do you think they have any purchase or how would you counter them?

Linda Chavez:    Well, first of all, the reason I favor broad-scale immigration to the United States is because I believe it's good for America. I believe it's good for our economy. I think immigrants come here and they create jobs. They also open up opportunities for other people. One of the guys who painted my house, the first time he painted my house, he did it himself. The next time he painted my house, he had a crew of largely immigrant Hispanic workers. He'd gone on to be the manager of his own company. So you see that kind of job creation. I also believe that it says something about who we are as a people. We are a nation that I believe is built around an idea, an idea of freedom of opportunity, of the importance of the rule of law, and all of those things I think are exemplified and are we have sort of living proof of their success with the immigrant population.

So I’ve really pushed back against the populist notion that people are coming here and taking jobs from other people. I think that the studies that have been done have shown that really has not happened. There is some marginal effect on wages in certain where immigrants are usually competing with older immigrant groups or competing with for example, a Mexican immigrant competing with a Mexican American. And they've had some small effects on wages at that level. But the bigger issue is that they create opportunity and I believe that one of the great things about immigrants is that you have people who really want to succeed, who come in and are willing to take jobs that aren't glamorous, that don't pay that well, that are often difficult, sometimes dangerous.

And they're willing to put their whole heart into those jobs and they essentially save many jobs. Car parts is a good example. The manufacturers can just get up and leave and go elsewhere to produce more cheaply, or they can use labor in the United States, which is more affordable. And that may be immigrant labor. So I don't think that the populists are right. I think their bigger concern has to do with culture. I think a lot of the people who listen to Donald Trump on immigration were concerned because they saw their communities changing, particularly in places like the South where you'd never seen people with names like Chavez or Guerra or Parrales, they just didn't exist in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. So I think they were concerned.

They heard a lot of Spanish being spoken. They assumed that people were going to stay off in their own little enclaves, never assimilate. And I've spent probably 40 years trying to tell the story of Hispanic assimilation. And I always compare it to what America looked like at the beginning of the 20th century.  It does take a while for immigrants to assimilate, but Hispanics have done an excellent job of assimilating. By the third generation they’re predominant English speakers, by the fourth generation most have forgotten their native language. There's tremendous amount of intermarriage and there's upward mobility economically and educationally. So that's the thing that I think that conservatives need to understand and get comfortable with, and not assume that if you're looking at a newly arrived group of immigrants, that what they look like today is what they're going to look like 10 years from now, or what their children are going to look like 20 years from now.

Gil Guerra:    I'm glad you brought the South because I was raised in Mississippi for most of my life, which I think definitely had as much of a cultural impact on me as being raised by two Mexican parents did. I want to talk a little bit about a little bit more about assimilation. There are two theories that I've heard that I'd love to get your opinion on both in favor of Mexican assimilation and against it when compared to previous historical trends, the one in favor of it is that Mexican culture is in many ways, much more similar to preexisting American culture than the culture of say Italian or Irish immigrants were because a lot of Mexican pop culture is already sort of American pop culture and the North especially, there's a lot of Spanglish, a lot of loan words from English so it's not that big of a cultural leap. And then the argument against it is based on that same sort of proximity, that Mexicans and other Hispanic immigrants won't assimilate at the same rates because whereas Italy, Ireland, all those are countries were over an ocean away, it's very easy for them to go back, visit their home countries because they’re more geographically proximate. So can you talk a little bit about whether you've encountered those theories and how current Hispanic assimilation stacks up to previous waves of immigration?

Linda Chavez:     Actually, I have written quite a bit about that, particularly in the writing I was doing in the early 1990s. I was more concerned about that phenomenon you described than I am today. Part of that was that at the time Hispanics were much more geographically concentrated. You didn't see Mexicans in places like Mississippi. You saw them in California, Texas along the border States. And when there were lots of people coming all from one language group, many of them from the same village, the same town, then the push to assimilate seemed to be less. And I was concerned about that. But frankly I think the pull of both pop culture for young people, but also the economic drivers have really meant that Hispanics do assimilate. 

I was part of a movement to try to get rid of what was called bilingual education. It really wasn't bilingual education. It was trying to maintain Spanish as the first language of Hispanic immigrant children. And one of the interesting things about that was that the movement was led by recent immigrant parents who understood that they had jobs as janitors, as groundskeepers, some of the lower paying service jobs. They didn't want their kids to be doing those same jobs. And they understood that learning English was the only way those kids were going to be able to advance economically, advance in terms of their education. And there was a real push in California to roll back those Spanish dominant classes. And now we hardly see any place that tries to keep Hispanic kids speaking their native language. Everybody seems to understand that acquiring English is the key to integration into American society, but also the key to success in the United States. 

Luis Parrales:     Well, I'm glad that you brought up this bit about language because I think you've alluded to some of the more economic arguments that I think some people that have reservations about immigration bring up, but I'd even say that sometimes people use economic justifications to give some credence to cultural anxiety. So on the topic of language, I mean, how, how important do you think it is for recent immigrants to learn English, to speak English in order to become assimilated? And how well do you think that Latinos have or haven't done that?

Linda Chavez:      When I wrote my first book, Out of the Barrio: Towards a new politics of Hispanic assimilation in 1991, I actually commissioned original research to look at economic data and attempted to find out intergenerationally what was happening with Hispanics learning English. One of the things that I found was that when you looked at earnings differences between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites or all other American groups, the single biggest factor was language acquisition. A high school educated Hispanic is not going to earn as much as a college educated white, but the factor of language made all differences disappear within educational strata. So it was clearly very important.

And I think it is very important, but one thing that I think is misunderstood is a lot of people expect that immigrants, when they come here are going to magically learn the language overnight, and they're going to do so very quickly. Now, if you happen to be college educated and know multiple languages, that's more likely to happen than not, but it's not gonna happen if you come with fairly low education skills to begin with. And so what you see happening is that it isn't that the cohort of people who come that are going to fully assimilate and fully learn English. What is important is to look at what happens to their children and their children do learn English and their children become English dominant by the third or fourth generation.

And for the second generation, they tend to be bilingual, but that bilingualism even disappears as it has for every immigrant group that comes to the United States. But language is very important and I've been involved in efforts over the years to try to provide at least basic level English skills, even to newcomers so that they can open a bank account, so that they can get help when they need to. Having some English is very important, but we shouldn't be surprised when particularly an older immigrant comes to the United States, comes with low education levels and does not immediately or even over their lifetime become fluent in English. The question is what happens to their children? What happens to the grandchildren? And that is a universal success story with Hispanics, as much as with any other group, there is no slower transition to English among Hispanics than there is with other groups.

Gil Guerra:     I think in our discussions about assimilation there's some times an assumption that because assimilation is a good thing, you might get the impression that it doesn't necessarily have any negative side effects. But there has been some research done and some arguments made about ways in which assimilation might actually have some negative side effects. One of them has to do with language. For example, if both parents only speak Spanish and one child stays more fluent in English that can sometimes cause family problems. I remember when I would get in trouble as an elementary school child and I had to call home and tell my parents what I had done, I would often just speak in Spanish and tell them that I was out of lunch money and that they needed to send me more lunch money. So I escaped parental discipline, which as you can tell led me to spiral out of control-

Luis Parrales:      That’s what you see before you today, right!

Gil Guerra:          Exactly. But even in other, in other instances you can see some differences. You mentioned in your book that typically immigrants tend to be less race-conscious and that it's a second generation Chicanos that really have more of a racialized view of themselves. Could you talk about what factors come alongside with assimilation, what we should still be on the lookout for, still try to be addressing?

Linda Chavez:      Well, I think one of the big problems among lower income Americans in general of whatever race and ethnicity is out of wedlock births, which actually go up with assimilation, they don't go down. The immigrant population is less likely to have births out of wedlock than subsequent generations. And I think that's one of the problems. So assimilation to sexual mores in a very permissive of society can not always be beneficial. I think there are always going to be these cultural clashes. And again, if you go back and look at the beginning of the 20th century and look at the same kinds of problems, these are not new problems, they're old problems.

And they take time to, to settle out. But in general, I think the snapshot of second and third generation Hispanics is a very good one. Second generation Hispanics, like most second generation immigrants in general from Asia, from other places actually have the biggest leaps in terms of progress in the educational area and often in income as well. And I think you Gil, as essentially a first-generation American, I'm sure you’ve experienced that as well that there's a lot of pressure on you to succeed that if your parents sacrificed in order to come to this country, they gave up everything. They knew they gave up their home. They gave up the people who were their friends and their family. They had to come to a country that had different customs, that spoke a different language. That's really hard. And so there's a lot of burden placed on the kids to make that worthwhile. And that's why we see such enormous progress among the second generation.

Luis Parrales:         You know, I'd be interested to hear about the disconnect that there might be between academics and, I don't mean to say this in a glib way, but basically people that are very steeped in ethnic and cultural studies in colleges and universities versus the conceptions of identity that for a lack of a better term, ordinary Latinos have. How do you describe this gap that might exist between very highly educated Latinos and their conceptions of what a good way of thinking about and talking about identity is versus someone who maybe completed high school, maybe didn't complete high school or someone who's just not steeped in academia thinks about race and ethnicity within Latinos?

Linda Chavez: I think the whole identity politics movement stems from the Academy. It's really something that's come to us out of universities, out of colleges. This notion that each of us has a racial or ethnic identity and that it's pretty much fixed and that it should be the most important central part of who we are. This is something that is really hammered into kids in school where they do take things like Chicano studies. I mean, when I first taught the Chicano literature class at UCLA, the most difficult part of teaching that class was to find something that could qualify as Chicano literature. It didn't exist in 1970. I'm sorry. There just weren't a lot of Mexican-American writers. First of all, all the classes were in English and all what we read had to be in English because most of the students only spoke English and I was only fluent in English.

So, you know, you had to use that as the basis. And it just this forging of ethnic identity that I really think is driven mostly by the left. And it is not something that I think is as widely embraced in the Hispanic community as it is in some other communities. I think the African-American community has a racial identity that is much more prominent and frankly, there's good reason for that. There’s a much longer history of first of all, slavery and then 200 years of enforced segregation and racism. And Hispanics have largely not felt that because many in this population are people like me whose families have been here since the 1600’s, most of the Hispanic population are the descendants of, or themselves are recent immigrants.

And then I think the other thing is that even within the Hispanic community there is such diversity of groups, I mean, we have Cubans and Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, but there is tremendous diversity even within the Mexican American community, the difference between people in Texas and people in Colorado and people in California and Arizona, these are very different communities and their experience is different.

And if you look census data in terms of racial identity, more than half of all Hispanics when asked what their race is, check the “white” box. Now, you know, one could say that is accurate or inaccurate, but you know, we're not South Africa, we don't assign race. We allow you to choose which race you choose to identify with. And I think more than a racial identity, what that shows is that for a large section of particularly the Mexican-American population, they identify with America, they identify with the majority population. And I think that's the reason they checked that box. So we shouldn't be surprised that they vote like others who are similar to them. I mean, it was a huge disappointment to the Democrats that they did so poorly in South Texas, along the border, they didn't do well with Mexican-American men in particular, they lost the Mexican American male vote in according to most exit polls.

They did a little better with a Mexican American women, but given that Donald Trump has hardly been a friend to Mexico or Mexican Americans, it was sort of surprising that so many voted for him. But a lot of it has to do with, they don't see first and foremost their lives in terms of their ethnicity. They see it as they're small business people, they may run a landscaping company or a restaurant or store. They may be military. They may be evangelicals instead of Catholics. So they may see those communities as having more influence on how they identify than the fact that their last name is Chavez.

Luis Parrales:         Right. And I want to turn things over to Gil because I know he wants to talk about the election, but one quick tidbit that I think is super interesting that you just mentioned is there seems to be particularly among people on the left this idea that identity is a very fixed thing. I love that you mentioned the census stats. I think another interesting aspect of that is when asked what their race is Latinos, you mentioned sometimes pick a census designated race, some pick black or another census designated race, some pick Latino or Hispanic, which is technically an ethnic term, some, even pick their country of national origin. And hopefully this election is a time for us to move away from the idea that Latinos have this very rigid sense of of what race is.

Linda Chavez: By the way, I wanted mention one little thing is that is an aside, but has always been interesting to me. Conservatives get very offended by the term “La Raza”. And what I always tried to tell people is that the whole concept of La Raza is a pan racial group. You know, the term was devised and used in Mexico to describe people of African origin, of European origin, and of indigenous origin. And the whole idea was that Mexico was a real melting pot and created this new identity. I just always found that a little interesting.

Gil Guerra:          And this conversation about academia is fascinating because it's something that comes up in your book that I also had a lot of experience with, just having different ethnic stereotypes sort of foisted upon you once you actually enter college. I had no idea what I was getting into going into college because no one in my life was familiar with elite academic institutions. None of my friends in high school wound up going to college save for a small handful so I was going in sort of blind. And for most of my life, you mentioned there weren't a lot of Mexicans in Mississippi. There still aren't. My family were one of the very few Hispanics in our town. So I was always sort of the Mexican kid at school. I went to high school in Wisconsin, which was even less Hispanic, so that sort of amplified.

So throughout most of my childhood, most of my adolescence, I was never just Gil. I was always sort of Gil the Mexican kid. And then when I went to Swarthmore College what I found I was really looking forward to was leaving that behind  and being around other students who were from different backgrounds and it didn’t quite work out like that. This is a policy podcast, there's no policy I think we can pass really to fix that. But I do think it's something that a lot of young Latino students tend to encounter when they enter college who we have a lot of listeners who are young Latinos in college currently. So you've been through that experience. What advice would you give to someone going through that right now having these sorts of different stereotypes foisted upon them and being told that they ought to be viewing their experiences primarily through the lens of ethnicity?

Linda Chavez: I don't think that's a particularly useful way, you know, to think of yourself. I think that identities that are chosen that are you, you pick your community based on things you have in common, which don't just have to do with skin color, but rather have to do with interests and your talents, your proclivities, all of the things that make us individuals, I think that is much more important. What I always worry about is kids who come into school, not feeling themselves victims, and you know, they've managed to make it through life. And even if you were Gil, the Mexican kid, you didn't really feel yourself victimized by racism, or that somehow your life was intolerable because of of racial identity. 

Suddenly you get to college and you're told you do not have the right consciousness. You're just not conscious of the discrimination and prejudice that you encountered and turning kids into victims I think is really bad. And it is one of the things that I worry most about identity politics, that this is a burden that each person has to carry is not a particularly healthy way to live your life. And it isn't to say that there isn't racism, isn't to say that there haven't been these brutal examples over the summer of killings by the police. Yes, they do happen. But to focus your whole life around being afraid that somehow something about you is going to lead to disaster, I think is just not healthy.

Luis Parrales:          That is super interesting. On the one hand, I think we all agree on this call that there can be an excess among progressive people to make identity the central lens through which you see things and operating with this deep sense of mistrust. I think on the other hand, it would be fair to say there's a parallel mistake that happens among conservatives, which is that when there's a situation that could potentially involve some sense of racism or racial animus, there's a sense among conservatives want to downplay it, maybe because there's a worry that you know, people on the left will unjustly use that as a charge. But I think it's also fair to ask the question: Is there a way in which conservatives, Republicans may sometimes be wrong about those sorts of issues, may sometimes not recognize, that racism does still play a role? And if so, in what ways can we balance the way that we talk about the issue in a way that doesn't make it central, but doesn't also downplay the fact that it still exists?

Linda Chavez: I think the discussions around the police is a very good place to start because I don't think that there is systemic racism in all institutions, or even in all police forces in the United States. I just don't think there is evidence of that. But there is racism, there are racist individuals, the difference between racism in the more general world and racism in a police department is pretty significant, because racists who happen to be police officers have a badge and they have a gun, right. And they can exercise an enormous amount of power. So even if it's only 10%, even only 5% of individuals who have racist attitudes and who act on those attitudes, that's a real problem. And I think the failure to recognize that, the failure to recognize that you don't need to have very many bad apples to spoil the whole barrel when you're talking about an institution that wields the kind of power that police forces do.

I think that it's wrong to say that we're, you know, living in a post-racial America, that there isn't racism anymore, there clearly is. You know, while it is not something that has dominated my life, have I had, you know, racist incidents? Yes, of course. Most often today when I speak on immigration I get told to go back where I came from. And you know, I always remind people that the only immigrants in my family came from Ireland and the 19th century. And I don't think they're asking me to go back to Ireland, though I could be wrong, but it's something that conservatives have to be more sensitive to and have to realize you don't have to believe in institutional racism or systemic racism to realize that racism still exists and still is a problem. And it's a bigger problem in some institutions than others just inherently, but it's also a problem in some places more than it is in others.

Gil Guerra:           To wrap up with some discussion on the election, you wrote a piece before the election just outlining some perhaps warning signs, you could say, about rising support for Donald Trump, especially among young Hispanic men in places like Arizona, places like Texas, that sort of breaks the stereotype that the Hispanics that do vote for conservatives tend to be Cuban, tend to be “white”, and that those were their reasons for voting for them. So can you tell us maybe given the election results, what you would attribute this support for a candidate like Donald Trump to, and then for conservatives, perhaps who have been critics of Donald Trump such as yourself, what lessons do you think non Trump conservatives can take away from this swell of support among Hispanics?

Linda Chavez:           Well, I think if Donald Trump had run the same kind of rallies and campaigns that he did in 2016, you would not have seen the change. You would not have seen more votes. You have to remember that back in 2016, everything was about building the wall. It was about Mexican rapists, criminals and drug dealers. That was the rallying cry. We didn't hear a whole lot of that this time. And that was certainly smart on the part of president Trump and his campaign. But I think the more important point is that the economy has done well. You know, I didn't oppose Donald Trump because I didn't like his policies of, I would say 90% of the things that he did policy wise outside of the immigration area were things I agreed with, lowering taxes, making regulations more sensible.

These are things particularly to an aspiring middle-class or even not aspiring, but a realized middle-class in the Mexican American community, for example, lots of small business owners lots of people who saw their paychecks increase over the last four years who saw their home values go up and who, you know, were not willing to try to risk. We're not willing to risk that. Also the pandemic, even though it has caused tremendous problems in the Hispanic community with much higher death rates, closing down communities has meant that many of the people who are in areas in the service arena have lost their jobs. And I think they want to see those jobs come back. And so I think that had as much to do as anything with the president's increased support in the Hispanic community.

And again, I don't think anybody is under the illusion that Donald Trump loves the Mexican American community, or no matter how many rallies he has with with his Mexican American supporters. I mean, he does not have an affinity for that community, unfortunately neither did Joe Biden. And I think that has to do with where he comes from from, Delaware. The biggest support for Republicans among Hispanics has come from people who were previous border state governors: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush. They knew the community, they had an affinity for it. And I think that was one of the reasons they did well.

Luis Parrales:        I have one more question, what do you think that the election tells us about where conservatives go from here? This podcast is very interested in the intra-conservative debates that we've observed over the past four years. What do you think the election means for conservatism and where it might be going?

Linda Chavez: It's a very big question. Because I believe that one of the reasons I voted against Donald Trump is that I thought that the United States might survive another four years of his presidency, but I didn't think conservatism could survive another four years of Donald Trump because he has so changed what it means to be a conservative in America. And I think his whole populist message conflicts with many principles that I hold dear as a conservative. So I think it's an open question. And the question is: Is Trumpism going to so define conservatism that you're going to have to see a kind of reordering? I certainly don't find a home in the democratic party. I don't agree with their policies. One of the things I look forward to when Joe Biden is sworn in is getting up every morning and finding something to criticize him for, which I'm sure we'll have ample opportunity to do.

But I think conservatism really does have to rethink the sort of nationalist bent it's taken, the white, ethnic political bent that had just taken recently. I think it has to go back to more conservative principles not just about the economy, but about character. I mean, one of the most disappointing things to me was so many evangelicals who simply didn't think character mattered when it came to the president of the United States. I think character does matter. And I think family values and the more traditional values that conservatives have exemplified and held dear are part of what makes conservatism something that is appealing.

Gil Guerra:           And just one last question, one of the broad themes of this podcast is also to help young people find ways to overcome polarization. This is a longstanding trend in American politics that seemingly gets worse year by year. So can you give us perhaps some examples throughout your career where you've had to talk or work with people who thought very differently politically from you, and what sort of advice would you give young people today who generally want to understand people who they disagree with politically and still maintain those friendships?

Linda Chavez: One of the things I think is very important is broadening your sources of information. You know, I don't agree with the New York times and the Washington post all the time, but I read them. I don't agree right now with Fox news channel, even though I used to be a commentator for them, but I watch it. It is important to know what people who differ from you and their opinions think and where they get their ideas from. And so I think, you know, not getting sucked into your own little world and particularly with social media. I mean, you know, all of us have our friends and various social media platforms. And if we're only talking to people who agree with us we can't possibly understand the larger world. So I think for young people, it is really important to reach out, to try to understand where people are coming from, where they get their information from. I'm a debater. I wouldn't think of debating the opposite side without steeping myself in their arguments. It's never a good idea to only listen to those who agree with you and to only hear the arguments from your side, you won't do very well in a debate if you do.

Gil Guerra:          Linda Chavez, thank you for joining us on Panorama, 

Linda Chavez:          Thank you.