Transcript of Where Do Democrats Go from Here?

From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Michael Moynihan. For the last few months, we've heard one warning repeated ad infinitum. A Donald Trump re-election would precipitate a fascist dictatorship, and the United States would soon resemble Nazi Germany. Then, on November fifth, Donald Trump again won the presidency. Democrats didn't take up arms to defend the ramparts of democracy. They didn't repel Trump's stormtroopers who descended upon Washington. Something more quotidian happened. Well, Mr. President, Elect and former President.

Thank you. Donald, congratulations.

Thank you.

I'm looking forward to have a, like we said, smooth transition.

Do everything we can to make sure you're accommodated, what you need. We're going to get a chance to talk about some of that. Exit polls show that working class, non- College-educated, and minority voters, once the sturdy base of the Democratic Party, voted for Donald Trump by unheard of margins. It was the most devastating defeat for the party in recent memory. And the question now is, why? Why did the Democrats lose? And what will 2024 mean for the future of the Democratic Party and the American left? Do Democrats need to move further left on economic issues and embrace something like the strident left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders? Was Kamala Harris simply an unlikable candidate? Or did she lose because she and the party lacked a coherent identity and message? And what is up with all those people who voted for AOC and Trump in New York City? Here today to discuss these questions with me are Freddie DeBore and Rui Tashira. Freddie DeBore is a writer, self-described Marxist, and longtime critic of social justice identity politics. Rui Tashira is a political demographer, democratic strategist, and co-author of the book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? We talk about how the Democrats have become the party of the Elites, whether Harris's loss is the death knell of identity politics, why abortion wasn't enough to save the Democrats, and whether the party will learn any significant lessons from their historic defeat.

Stay with us.

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Rui Tashara, Freddie DeBore. Welcome to Honestly.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having me.

Rui, let's Let me just start with you. Obviously, the topic today is the future of the Democratic Party. I mean, the man who wrote the Coming Democratic Majority a couple of weeks out for the election. I mean, let's just start big and say, what is the future of the Democratic Party and a party that had its ass handed to it, what do they need to do to get back to a Democratic Party that could have a majority at some point?

Right. Well, that is a very, very, very big question. You You alluded to the book John Giudas and I wrote in 2002 called The Emerging Democratic Majority, which looked at the way the country was changing demographically, economically, ideologically, and said Democrats had a shot at becoming the dominant majority Party if they played their cards right. Though we did flag what turned out to be a real morning sign, you got to watch out for the white working class because they're still a big part of the population. You've been losing ground among them, and the math doesn't work for you if you start losing even more of these voters. Of course, that turned out to be true, did undercut the Democrats. That's why Trump, in an accounting sense, got elected in 2016. And then we saw the Democrats process that as hashtag resistance. We've got to push back against the impending tide of fascism. There's no need for us to compromise in any of our social justice commitments. In fact, we're going to push the accelerator on that stuff because that's what good Democrats want, all of whom, coincidentally, are college-educated liberals. We saw that define the party more and more over the course of the teens and late teens and then into the '20s.

Of course, it crested with the George Floyd summer. John and I actually wrote another book that came out about a year ago called Where Have All the Democrats Gone, which tried to tell the overarching story about how the Democrats were evolving away from being the party of the working class and evolving evermore toward being the party of educative professionals, and this created huge contradictions in their coalition and put a real ceiling on their support. We argued that while we didn't think Republicans were necessarily poised to have a total realignment, it made the Democrats very vulnerable. We might continue to see this back and forth, 50/50 toggling between the parties, depending on which negative aspects of which party were the most salient to give an election. I think that's what we saw in this election. So Democrats really got their hat handed to them on the basis of their economic performance, on their basis of their laxness at the border, their laxness on crime, their embrace of ideologies and even language that is foreign to, I think, most working class people in this country. They thought they could not do anything about that by basically running the antifascist playbook.

People didn't buy it. People didn't think Donald Trump was a Nazi, and they voted accordingly, and they wanted something different. Democrats, I think, have to rectify those problems they have on the cultural front on making a more convincing economic offer to the American people that they find credible and just basically stop acting like their values and priorities of their most activist-educated members are those that can be sold to the mass of the American public because they can't. So they do have to rebrand the party as something closer to what ordinary working class people want. And of course, that's a tall order, but I think it can be done, but it can only be done if they basically decide that's what we need to do and move in a unified manner to do that. I'm not so sure that's going to happen in the aftermath of this election.

Freddie, I think Rui identifies as a Democrat. I mean, I've read your writing for years, and you've said that you're something of a Marxist. You have Marxist leanings on a lot of things. I mean, from that perspective, does the Democratic Party need to move left on economic issues? I mean, in the Clinton years, it was the party of what people derisively call neoliberalism. And I saw this video of AOC on her Instagram Live saying, How did I get voted back in with an overwhelming majority, but people are at the same time dashing towards Donald Trump in my district. And she's saying to her viewers, explain it to me. I mean, do you think that economic populism, which is what we call it on the right, there's left populism, too. But Is it economics that Democrats have to focus on to get voters back into their camp?

First of all, I want to say that, yes, I am a Marxist, but it's about as meaningful as the fact that I'm a Gemini, meaning that neither has much tethered to reality at this point. So I don't usually waste my time talking about it. But look, it is all about economics, except for when it's not, and we shouldn't be over deterministic. To me, the foundational political moment in my life was the election of George W. Bush in 2000, where Al Gore, Bill Clinton himself, had become a divisive figure because of his scandals. But the Clinton administration was wildly popular. Even by the end of his presidency, he had very strong favorables for the presidency rather than for him personally. They were presiding over a really strong economy, and they had a record of peace for those eight years. And he still managed to screw it up because he was such a horrifically bad candidate. I tell the story whenever I can because everyone's forgotten it. But there was one of the debates, Bush was the shorter man. And apparently, Gore's people had read the little dictum that like 90 % or whatever of the time the taller candidate is elected.

So they said to him during the debate, find a way to get close to Bush, the voters can see that you're taller. But because it's Al Gore and he's such an awkward human being, Bush is in the middle of giving a debate answer and Gore just sidled up to him in the most In a bizarre way possible. He looks like a lunatic. And George Bush just gives him a look like that. And of course, it totally broke in Bush's favor. You can't just dismiss the salience of these personality elements. And I think a lot of people don't particularly like Kamala Harris. I think that people do notice that she was running as a San Francisco liberal in 2020 and then was tacking to I was the borders are, and I sleep with the Glock under my pillow, that stuff. But as far as economic thing goes, I do think we should remember that there's really two biggest things that contributed to inflation, which really dominated the campaign, which was number one, COVID introduced serious supply shocks. So the supply chain was bottled up all over the world because they couldn't move things in and out of ports because of COVID.

But also number two is that the United States undertook a really aggressive fiscal and monetary response to COVID to try to prevent what legitimately could have become a worldwide depression. I mean, there was a real chance of that happening. And for the record, the person who started that stuff was Donald Trump, right? Donald Trump, when COVID broke out, was not preaching austerity. He was not saying, what about inflation? He was participating in this. There's a world where he wins in 2020, and it's the Republicans who are getting all this blowback because of the inflation the past few years. I don't really know what to do about it because inflation, obviously, is a big deal, but wages have been increasing, too. And the Democrats I've never found a way to say to people, Hey, yes, inflation is bad, but if the average wage is going up at a rate that is commensurate in many, many areas of the country, it's not that big of a deal. I don't know how you make that message to the American people. And I just think that Obama era inflation and low rates really imprinted on a ton of people as the basic economic reality, and it really hurt the Democrats.

Freddie, I want to ask you something about this, and then we get your opinion on this. I've seen a lot of people on the Democratic side and just, you know, liberals in general, talking about the voters and saying, well, they don't get it. They don't understand that inflation has gone down significantly, that crime isn't up. I mean, you saw John Stuart the other day in his autopsy saying, Well, people talk about this wokeness, but she didn't run a campaign, presuming that Americans don't have much of a memory of this stuff. I only have one problem with the woke theory. I just didn't recall any Democrats running on woke shit. When people are doing their own autopsies, you see this a lot on MSNBC and stuff, and they say, What is wrong with the American people? They don't get it. What has to happen in the professional classes of Democratic politics? Because they seem to really not understand their voters, it seems, in this post-election couple of weeks. I say, God, really? You guys have no idea why Hispanic people would vote for a Republican?

Yeah. So I would say, look, to extend the point you just made, look at the way that we talk about deindustrialization. So in 2016, you have this shock victory for Donald Trump. He wins the Rust Belt, the Blue Wall that were solidly democratic, that Democrats thought they could campaign on. They were so confident that Hillary didn't campaign in Wisconsin or Michigan in 2016. And so the story, this meme bubbles up, and you have a lot of like Bernie Sanders people, people like me, but also some people on the right saying, Hey, you had NAFTA and all these free trade agreements, neoliberal order and globalization kicked the stool out from under these people. You go to their towns or these devastated places, everybody's getting high on fentanyl. And so then a counterargument comes from the Hillary people and establishment Dems, and they say, that's a racist argument. They say, to talk about deindustrialization. It's inherently to privilege white people. Here's the problem with that. Nobody was more hurt by deindustrialization than the black middle class. The reason why Detroit looks like it does, why it's so black, is because black people came in the great migration to Detroit, to that whole area, looking for industrial jobs and manufacturing jobs.

And their way of life was really devastated by the things that happened. Now, you can have a whole debate. That was probably inevitable. The point is, is that The Democrat response to a very obvious point about a real piece of financial and economic pain being felt by all kinds of people was to find the identity angle to dismiss its salience. There's a lot of places on Twitter Now, if you go and say, Hey, I think that deindustrialization had something to do with this election, they'll immediately say, Oh, so it's only white people who matter, huh? You just care about the white working class. But there's a reason why the Black vote has been moving towards Donald Trump, and one of the big reasons why is the same conditions that are affecting the white working class or affecting the Black middle class.

Yeah, Rui, to that point and to the follow-up book you did with John Giudas, and we did an interview on Honestly About It, and you should listen to that. But if you look at these numbers And a lot of people have gone over them quite a bit in the past week, but just to give you a few of them, 3 in 10 black men under the age of 45 went for Trump. That's an astonishing number. Sixty five % of Native Americans voted for Trump.

Yeah. Most people don't know. That's a really interesting one. I mean, small sample, but still, boy. Yeah.

I mean, Donald Trump had campaigned and said, We promise certain tribes, one in North Carolina, sovereignty from the federal government. The Biden administration Mission didn't do it. We'll do it. This isn't land acknowledgments. No one cares about that stuff. This is federal recognition, which they do care about.

Show me the money.

Show me the money. 50 % of Hispanic men voted for Trump. I've been banging the drum about this. What How did you make of those numbers? Did it surprise you in any way the size of the movement? Or is that like, Hey, we've been predicting this, and you guys took your eye off the ball, and you've been too involved in identity politics and less involved in what works working class people of color, to use that useless phrase, what their actual concerns are.

Yeah, there's an opportunity cost to a political party when they focus on non-economic issues. It takes energy, time, resources away from economic issues. There's a limited bandwidth there. I think that contributed to the problems they had because of economic issues. They weren't as focused on them as they should have been. They didn't really have the right perspective on them. Back to what Freddie was saying about how 2016 was interpreted. I mean, I was gobsmacked hanging out as I was in the left institutional world about how quickly people who had been talking for 30 or 40 years about the depredations of neoliberalism and how they were tearing communities apart, enriching the rich, impoverishing the poor, devastating the working class, leaving communities in ruins. And all of a sudden, it's like there's this Trump election where a lot of these people voted for Trump and delivered the election to them. And it's like, well, okay, economic anxiety, come on. It's not really about that. It's all about the fact these people are racist and xenophobic, and so they're attracted to a horrible person like Trump. And that's really what it's about. And no matter how much I tried to argue with people, it was essentially useless, almost to make the argument that we should care about the white working class and factor that into how they voted was considered borderline racist.

As we evolved from that point and see the non-white working class, particularly, Hispanics, but also Blacks, to some extent, moving away from the Democratic Party, I think there's this same cluelessness about not understanding that the way the American political economic model has evolved in the last 40, 45, 50 years has been to the disadvantage of working class people of all races, and they remember. They're sensitive to that. And then when you pile on top of that, Democratic administration that presided over a spike in inflation, which really did reduce people's living standards for a few years. I mean, now they're starting to recover, but there was an actual diminution in the standard of living there for a while. Plus, people expect things to get better over time, not basically to hold their nose above water. So the verdict on the Biden administration was they basically screwed up the economy, and that comes on top for a lot of working class people of decades of feeling like they're not getting ahead the way they would like to, and that the way the people are getting ahead in this country, the people who live in Washington, DC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, the big cities, the professionals, they're all fine, and they look down on people like me.

Their view, when they look at people like me, is basically we don't get it. We don't understand how great things are getting, that we don't want to live in this wonderful multicultural, multiracial America, and we're just under threat for our status, and we just need to get with the program. And I think that lands like a lead balloon. You can't get away with that approach, and it doesn't even make any sense given the historical view that Democrats and people on the left were taking toward the evolution of the American economy. It does not compute.

Freddie, on the cultural front, we'll get back to economics, obviously. Something struck me the other day. Seth Moulton, congressman from Massachusetts, had talked about this on MSNBC, and he posted something about it on his Facebook page. He said, A lot of us don't understand that the trans-sports issue, for instance, actually means something to us. It means something to voters. Moulton said this, and was attacked pretty ruthlessly. He said, See, this proves my point. You can't have these conversations. In an interview on WBUR, they asked him to apologize. Tufts University today in Boston contacted his office and said, Please do not contact us about internships or any future cooperation between your office.

Transphobic swine. Yeah.

And Moulton keeps on saying, This is my point. How much of this do you think is actually saddling the Democratic Party with issues that the average person not only doesn't concern themselves with, but just doesn't think the Democrats are right on.

I mean, the first thing I would say is if I was someone like Seth Moulton, if I was acting as a spokesperson for the Democrat, I might find it very tempting to grab onto that issue and say, This is why, this is the problem, rather than the party's complete lack of identity, its inability to build anything like a coherent economic policy. Last year, a video game came out, a Harry Potter video game. It was the biggest video game of the year. And of course, Harry Potter's creator, JK Rowling, is controversial because of things he says about trans people. And there were all these debates in a like some Conservatives crowing and some Liberals were lamenting, Oh, all these people bought this game. And as I said to many people, I would be surprised if one in 10 people who bought that game had the slightest idea that there was any trans controversy going on with JK Rowling. The reality is, I think it is clear that Donald Trump was able to make some hay out of an unfortunate quote that Kamala gave at a ACLU meeting five years ago. I absolutely don't think that that's determinative of anything.

I think what happens is that when you have shitty economic politics, you're opening the door for the other team to introduce divisive cultural issues. I have been saying this my entire adult life. I don't know what the Democrats are and what they stand for. And you can go issue by issue through the party and say, okay, what do What does the Republican stand for with immigration? Close the border, kick out the people, deport the people who are already here. That's America for Americans. Let's have a really harsh restrictionist approach to immigration. That's like a agenda that I agree with, but it's very coherent. You can sound bite that easily. What's the Democrats immigration agenda? I have no idea. My job literally is to write about politics. If I tried to sit down and say, Okay, what the Democrats want is, especially after watching this election, Kamala is trying to out-Republican the Republicans. She's trying to be this tough immigration leader. It sounds completely disingenuous. No one who's voting on an immigration restrictionist urge is voting for or her. They don't have any clear sense of this is what we stand for, right? Taxes, Democrats are not going to go out there and say we want high taxes, but they also don't say, hey, we need to be able to have a system where everybody pays their fair share.

Here's what we think. They're forever acting in a reactive fashion, whereas Republicans need to say taxes as low as possible, cut them all.

I mean, fair share is never really defined. But Freddie, to the point about immigration, you mentioned Bernie Sanders and your politics being similar to his. I mean, Bernie Sanders was once fairly restrictionist on immigration.

The whole party was fairly restrictionist on immigration. Yes, from a working class perspective is it pushes down working class wages.

Rui, How much do you think immigration, which is usually in the top three issues of people coming out of that polling booth, say in exit polls, these are the things that concern me. Economy is usually top. Immigration is usually within the top three or four. How much do you think that hurt Democrats? Because as Freddie says, the argument that I heard is, well, we've gotten tougher in the past couple of years. That's not a policy. That's saying, please don't attack us because we're tightening up the border now.

Right. No, I think immigration did really hurt them. I mean, it's a general comment on these kinds of issues. Very few people know this. It's not something I put in my bio, but I was once a Marxist, and I was trained at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, under Eric Olen Wright and people like that. And one thing I learned or we would talk about in that program is what I would call the relative autonomy of the cultural moment. There was a lot of big debates within Marxist academia at the time between people who would basically take essentially a quasi-economic determinist position, There's a material base and there's a superstructure, and the arrows only go one way. People who basically like the Structuralist Marxist from France, Louis Althusser and Nico Spolanzis and people like that who talk about what they call the relative autonomy the different moments of the social structure. To take it out of graduate school ease, that means that you can't just reduce a cultural issue, a cultural problem, a cultural conflict to a question of economics. It's not as simple as that. When people react, for example, about the trans issue, and they don't like it, they're basically opposed to it, and they think it represents how clueless the Democrats are in these kinds of issues and how far away from their values they are.

No, they don't think biological men should be in women's teams. No, they don't think gender affirming care is a great idea for 10-year-olds. These things are important. They're part of the way people look at the world. That's how the prism through which they see life in politics. The idea that we can reduce it all to economics, I think, is just wrong. That's really true of something like immigration, which gets at very fundamental values people have about who should come into the country, what's fair and what's not fair, and actually does have an economic component as well, because Mass immigration does undercut the low-wage labor market in unions. The Democrats used to believe that, and it does put a burden on a lot of different towns and municipalities to wind up absorbing these huge tranches of immigrants all at once. These are real problems that are felt economically and have a very strong cultural component to them as well. One thing I had the most difficulty with arguing with my fellow Democrats, is taking that seriously. You cannot solve the cultural issue simply by turning up the volume on economic populism. It will not work. It has not worked.

It's not going to work.

After the break, does the future of the Democratic Party look more like AOC or Josh Shapiro? Our guests disagree. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Rui, to this point that you hear from people like Jon Stewart, and I mentioned him because I just watched it this morning, saying, Well, that was not the campaign that they ran. So don't pretend that it was about so-called wokeness because they ran away from that stuff.

It wasn't just about wokeness. It was about the economy, too. It was about a lot of things. It was about whether people trusted the Democrats or they didn't. So the idea that Democrats could solve their laxness on crime and on the border in the course of a short campaign, building on the idea that I've got a clock under my pillow and I'm really going to enforce the border. You can trust me on it this time. I mean, the idea that you could completely restructure the Democrats approach on the basis of a short campaign where you say things that are somewhat different than you said before, I think is ludicrous. If they wanted to sense really strong signals on the border or in crime, they could have done it in a much more aggressive way, but they didn't do that. It would have been hard to do anyway. I mean, the idea you can fix the problems of an entire four years in a couple of months by adopting a different rhetorical slogan. Look, people aren't dumb. They know what you did and they know how you did it. They live in the real world. They saw what happened at the border.

They did experience a spike in crime, which we could argue about how much it's gone down. The crime victim survey is really different than the FBI stats that have been collected. There's a lot of debate about that. But clearly, people care a lot about crime and public safety, and they feel the Democrats just freaking dropped the ball in it. You weren't going to convince them of anything different simply by not running on bail reform or something, You don't say really stupid things, but you don't really convince people that you're smart in this either.

Freddie?

I do think it's a complicated question. Let's look at abortion. That was the big motivator for the Democrats, this election, what some people hoped would save the Democrats. We do have tremendous evidence that it has been an upward push for Democrats since the end of Roe v Wade. It's worth saying that that has been predicted for generations. Smart Republicans have been saying for many years, I know because they've told me that if you really cared only about Republican victory, you would never actually allow Roe to be overturned because it was such a powerful fundraising mechanism for Republicans, et cetera. But I mean, that's an example of what's a cultural issue, right? But that is not in any sense airy or immaterial. I've got a baby in me that I don't want is a very material thing. Years ago, I briefly dated a woman who worked in a Planned Parenthood clinic, and she said the thing that always stayed with her was the number of women who would come in to get abortions who the entire time would be telling everyone who would listen that they were personally pro-life. It was just different for them. And so that's a good example of a cultural issue in which there is a strong self-interest involved.

I am frequently in the position as this big lefty where a lot of people interpret left politics or socialist politics as being opposed to self-interest, in fact, to bring Uncle Karl back into this. The original Marxist doctrine was very, very clear that you appeal to people's best interest, and then that's the way that you build a mass movement. You convince people that their self-interest is shared with other people. I think Democrats have never found a way to do that with a lot of their core issues. And it's not intrinsically easy to do that with some of this stuff. I do care a lot about global warming. I think no Democrats should ever run anywhere near global warming as a core electoral thing. Maybe if you're running for mayor of San Francisco or something, but you should try to keep that as that's the thing that we take care of once we achieve power first. Being able to, again, to have coherent messages that the party says, this is what we believe in, and here's how our agenda is better than yours, remains something that's just really hard to articulate. And it gets back again to just we want that, too, but less.

We also are immigration restrictionists, but we're a little bit nicer about it. We also want to keep taxes low, but maybe not quite as low as the Republicans. You just don't have an identity. I've been saying for years that the Democrats need to go through a Goldwater period, meaning for those people listening at home, Gary Goldwater gets the Republican nomination in 1964. The previous presidential administration for the Republicans was the Eisenhower administration, which did not have what we would call a clear or coherent ideological valence, according to modern politics. The Goldwater moment is this crazy guy from Arizona. He gets the nomination with what's seen as an extremist or radical platform, and he loses a terrible blowout. And a lot of the smart people in politics, well, you'll never hear about American conservatism again, or you'll never get that movement conservatism stuff again. 20 years later, Ronald Reagan solidified the absolute dominance of movement conservatism in American political life. He only loses a single state to Walter Mondale. The Democrats start to rejigger their entire approach. The point that making is that they traded short term electoral self-interest for having a coherent point of view.

Barry Goldwater lost. Richard Nixon, whatever he was, he was not a doctrineer or conservative. That's the other part of the party, reasserting control, what the people kept working. The Democrats need something like that, a moment in which they say, Okay, we're willing to lose in the short term to define what we are as a party.

That seems basically of insane. Are you basically advocating that the Democrats should run someone like AOC in 2028? Get completely blown out as opposed to not a close election, and that would be better for them, say, than nominating Josh Shapiro, who ostentatiously moves to the center on a lot of these issues? I mean, you can't possibly believe that's a good idea.

I can possibly believe that in 2016, Bernie Sanders, who had sky high favorables across the country, who had a dramatically better polling against Donald Trump, including in key battleground states, would have mounted a better challenge than Hillary Clinton, and that he possibly could have won that election. But even if he lost, he would have lost defining an agenda as opposed to Hillary, who defined nothing and lost anyway.

Well, okay. She I'm not a bad candidate. I don't really buy the Sanders stuff. But I mean, look, I don't know what to say. It seems like a very strange idea, and I think you'll have a hard time selling it. What we need is our own goldwater. Okay, maybe. But then again, maybe not.

I think, Freddie, I think you like Goldwater because the extremism in defense of liberty as no vice was written by Karl Hess, who became a Marxist. He became a new left guy. You're so overlapped there, right?

You think the only 20th century guy who went from right to Marxist instead of the other way around?

I think he's probably the only one.

Look, I just say this. This is something I very sincerely believe, and I think that it is a core problem for the American left of center, which is, politics is just a game of tug of war. You got the rope that is American politics and policy. You got your left and you got your right. There's no transcendence center. There is no such place as a center that is just divine by God where center is. It's just wherever the rope is in the middle of these two parties that are pulling. The problem is the Democrats don't pull. The problem is that the Republicans never stop tugging the rope to the right. If you watch a Republican election, they're constantly saying, I'm the real conservative, whereas the Democrat will say, Don't worry, I'm not that liberal. I've said this in debates with Matt Iglesias for years, for example, which is if you have one party that's trying to pull the country to the right and another party that keeps chasing the center, then the country moves right even when the center party wins, right? Because there's no countervailing balance.

Rui, to Freddie's point, does the country move left even when the, quote unquote, right wing party wins? Because was to his point about Bernie Sanders. In 2016, I was at a Union Hall in Indianapolis, and everyone there was ready to vote for Bernie Sanders. Hillary said TPP was the gold standard, and they hated free trade. And when they believed that he was unfairly knived by the DNC, they all voted for Donald Trump. I mean, there was that glide between the Sanders people and the Trump people. And look, where does the Democratic Party go on economics if the Republican Party is now has the head of the Teamsters speaking at the RNC. Josh Hawley is like opposed to right to work. He's a very pro-union guy in Missouri. They seem to have taken their economic policies, I would say to the center, if not to the center left. How do the Democrats outflank them on economics at this point.

Well, I think that's something they're going to have to deal with. This is not your father's Republican Party. They're clearly a much more populace party under Trump and his ilk. There is a substantial segment of the Republican Party who is moving to the left on economics. But here's the problem they have. They're not dominant by any stretch of the imagination. There is not a coherent economic policy that we could detect from the Trump campaign and that I think we're going to have a hard time detecting it in the early years of this administration as well. They could easily screw it up, right? I mean, look, if they basically put Orin Cass in charge of economic policy, that would be interesting, and maybe it would work, but I really doubt that they will. I think there are a lot of entrenched interests in the Republican Party who are very opposed to any policy like that. They're still more interested in tax cuts than they are in other stuff. It's not clear as tariff regime is going to work. I mean, whether to what extent he tries to implement it. There's a lot of moving parts here, all of which may not mesh well together.

So the Democrats, therefore, would have an opportunity, conceivably, promulgating a different economic policy that would stand in contrast to Trump's, that would actually put an emphasis on economic growth, which I think is very important, that would get off of this obsession with climate, which I think people are not interested in, and basically restructure the American regulatory and permitting regime. So it was a lot easier to build and do stuff and hopefully spark a era of economic growth. I think the way to outflank them in economics is not to basically say, We're going to give people a lot more stuff. We saw what happened with what they tried to do under the Biden administration. Even the child care tax credit wasn't particularly after a while. You got to basically convince people, You have a program for opportunity and growth and upward mobility. That's really what it's all about. The devil's in the details about how you make that case. It could involve being tough on trade. It could involve some of the things that Donald Trump has talked about. I think actually, restriction as immigration policy would be fine, would fit right into that. Controlling the borders more, having a skills-oriented immigration system, these are all things that would, I think, help with economic growth.

You need a different look for the Democratic Party on the economic issues that's simultaneously populist and growth-oriented. I think that's possible, though, again, I think the unity of that, even on the democratic side, is not high. I think the whole debate around how much economic policies, an industrial policy, should focus around a transition to clean energy, it's a huge deal, and I think Democrats have not resolved that, and I don't think it's worked particularly well so far, nor do I think it will work very well.

It was interesting in this AOC live Instagram feed in which she was saying that the Trump people don't understand that a 20 % tariff is a tax on all Americans. Kamala Harris made, despite the fact they kept a lot of the Trump tariffs, it was running against tariffs and saying, We need less regulation on building. And so there were times when it sounded like she was the more classically liberal candidate in a way. Freddie, I wanted to ask you about foreign policy, which us people in the media, we talked about it quite a bit. We talked about Dearborn, which, of course, Donald Trump won. And after Donald Trump, it was neck and neck between Kamala Harris and Jill Stein. What do you think that the Democratic Party's foreign policy vision for the future should be? I mean, obviously, there was something confused about the Biden administration. They were trying to have it both ways, right? Support Israel, threaten Israel, support the Ukrainians, but no long-range missiles into Russia. The Trump appointments look equally as confused at this point to me. A lot of the people that were hoping that Donald Trump would more anti-interventionists are a little annoyed at some of these pics so far.

What do you think the Democrats should do in response?

I mean, the first thing I'll say is, as a lefty guy who's always been most motivated by foreign policy, I don't think Americans vote based on foreign policy. There's an act of war going on somewhere, and American kids are dying. They care very much. And beyond that, they just don't care. Look, in an electoral system that has this weird dynamics that American politics do, if this had been a very close electoral vote, election, maybe you're born and people vote saying, You're not going to do anything about Gaza. We're not going to vote for you. Maybe that could have caused Kamal in the election. Those are very rare moments. I think the problem for either party is they've got to preside over and manage relative American decline, which is literally inevitable without admitting that that's what's happening. I've been saying this recently to people like, Look, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022. In 2012, he doesn't. The things that China is doing in the South China Sea, they wouldn't be doing in 2016. And it doesn't really matter how much money you put into defense or whatever. The simple reality is that as the world has caught up economically with the United States, and we have more and more foreign powers that have the ability to project power, it's just inevitable that the unipolar American moment was going to end.

And this is a very weird moment anyway, having a scenario with this few countries that can meaningfully challenge us, just a little bit unusual anyway. But Americans didn't grow up with it, right? Americans grew up with, we get whatever we want, we're the dominant power on the block. I often reflect on the fact that the whole American conception of your kids are going to do better than you do. A lot of that stuff came from like 30 years, right? Like the post-World War II era of prosperity until like the mid '70s when stafulation sets in. We really defined an American vision of what progress looks like with that. The Soviet Union fell when I was 10 years old. So I don't even really know what it is to not be in the world with American hegemony. But if China wants the South China Sea bad enough, we're not going to change that. And so how do you create a foreign policy politics that is realistic about some of these things without going out there and saying, We're going to be less powerful than we used to, which is not going to be a electoral victory.

Freddie, to your point, I think that it's a very important one that people who remember the Cold War have a very, very different vision of what American foreign policy should be. I mean, I've always noticed that the hangar of the Cold War is very, very long, and it's still exists amongst people, even of my generation. Rui, on foreign policy, what do you make of Freddie's analysis and where do you think the Democrats should go?

Well, I do think it does create difficulties for both parties coming to terms with the way overall geopolitical situation has changed. America's position in the world is not likely to ever change back to what it once was. That's just not in the cards. To me, the most salient foreign policy issue is competition with China. Clearly, they're the real threat economically and eventually, probably militarily. It's not clear that the country is really well set up to compete with the Chinese at this point in a lot of different areas. I think that that is something that can both generate political support and could be very important economically. I think people realize they see China as the biggest enemy we have. They see China throwing its weight around. They see the economic competitor they represent, and they think America needs to get on the stick. So exactly what the components of that policy would be in terms of promoting American competitiveness vis-a-vis China has yet to be worked out. But I think that's something people are very interested in. I think that Trump administration is committed to this. Obviously, Democrats are talking about it. I mean, if we're going to have an industrial policy, for example, there's a very reasonable argument that it should be centered around some of these ways in which we need to compete with China in terms of our defense and industrial base, and other things.

You look at the way that America was built up after World War II, a lot of it was competition with the Russians. So I think that is in the car. It's how we're going to compete with China. That's very important. I think that in a more short term sense, big foreign policy issue here. I mean, Israel guys is a mess. Who knows what's going to happen with that. But the Ukraine war is really over, right? The Ukrainians have lost. They're not going to be able to push the Russians out of the Donbas Crimea. This is ludicrous. In the meantime, a lot of money is being spent. A lot of people are dying, and the Trump administration is clearly going to be oriented toward ending that conflict. Yes, you're not going to get everything you want Ukraine. I guess it's terrible you were invaded, but Realistically, I think that ending that conflict will be a priority of the Trump administration. Well, we worked out, but it can be done because basically, America, to some extent, holds a whip hand on this stuff. I think if we want to push the Ukrainians to end the conflict, the conflict will be ended.

And that's probably something that American voters would welcome. They're not really that enthusiastic about the Ukrainian war. There's a lot of war fatigue. When people are well aware, it's costing a lot of money. So getting the United States uninvolved in a endless conflict like that is probably a good foreign policy potential win for the Trump administration. What the implications of that are in the longer term, I'm not sure. I mean, obviously, people portrayed this as, well, if we don't draw the line in the sand with the Russians and help Ukrainians beat them, then they'll take over all of Eastern Europe or something, which has always struck me as completely ridiculous. But that was certainly out there. I think the Trump administration will turn their backs on that logic, and they'll figure out another way to get along with Russia other than fighting them in the Ukraine. So long-winded way of saying, we will see probably peace in the Ukraine, and probably will be under the Trump administration watch, and that It'll probably be good for them politically.

I've spoken to a lot of people who asked me the same question in the aftermath of his election, and it seems like a simple question, but it's obviously not. Does this spell the end of identity politics as we have known it in the past, say, since 2014. Since Ferguson to today really kicks up around Me Too and then George Floyd, and there's a certain mania after George Floyd, where everyone loses their minds. And you have Kamal Harris running away from some of the things, not addressing some of the things that she said during 2020. And obviously, when you have these shifts amongst certain demographics of voters, hey, this stuff doesn't work. Freddie, is it over or is that maybe too optimistic for those of us who have found it to be a bit destructive?

There's a funny personal point about this, which is my last book came out in October of 2023 called How Elites ate the Social Justice Movement, and I sold it to Simon & Shuster in May of 2022. And by October of 2023, everything that the book had predicted had come true, but it had come true sufficiently that the book was out of date. And so I just think that contributed to its bad sales. So this stuff does move quickly. Look, many a clever liberal writer has pointed out that Trump is practicing certain identity politics, right? That's not going to go away. I think that there is really deep exhaustion among the people who have practiced this stuff for a long time with a particularly corrosive identity politics. That doesn't mean that it's gone forever, that it doesn't have influence. But you would be amazed at the number... People are sometimes surprised to hear this, but I just have a really lefty academic/activist personal and social network. And even the people who work at Yale, where I'm five miles away from Yale right now, who would ordinarily be ensconced in this stuff are experiencing a deep exhaustion with it.

And one of the things I've been saying for a long time is you just can't live this way forever. You can't actually live under a system of self-censorship that's this intense for that long. And there really is a sense like, okay, fine. You can actually make fun of people for going to work. Now, look, politics is always cyclical, so things will go around in circles. But I do think that personally, I can say that there's a lot of things I get away with saying now that I couldn't get away with saying before. I still said them before, but I didn't get away with because I was in trouble. The question is, as always, can this re-evaluation of elite norms and elite language and elite communication be channeled in a constructive direction of how to talk to the country about their politics in a way that can say, Hey, we've got these good ideas we care about, and here's our values. Can we make them attractive to other people? And that remains to be seen.

Just to add to that, you said you're close to Yale. I was reading a piece by a Yale professor named Marcy Shore, who was writing in the German left-wing newspaper, the Tagessaitung. And she ended the piece about why Americans voted for Donald Trump. And it just didn't seem like she was trying to understand. And the last line of the piece was, Today, I feel ashamed of being American and human alike. And it's just an interesting thing. And I wonder if people in academia, in the circles, Fred, that you say you socialize with activists and academics. I mean, if there'll be more introspection to say, why do these people vote this way? And is it something more than just racial bias or misogyny or something like that? Rui, what do you think the future of the identity politics that you wrote about with John Judas. Do you think that has a half life? Do you think it's dying?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's maybe dying is too strong a term. It's definitely diminished. Basically, I think that politics, and I had a cultural moment, It's finally peaked in 2020 to 2022, and we're now seeing its diminution over time. I mean, a couple of things about that. I think one thing about this election is it sends signals that to the extent people are identified with identity politics, it isn't a winner. People don't want to be losers. I think that that is going to make an impression a lot of people. The people Freddie hangs around with, lots of other people who might exhausted by it already because it's really just not a fun way to live life and it doesn't make any sense, logically or in terms of evidence or standard values about how we come to decisions. I mean, people are just sick of that. People are sick of saying stuff they don't believe. It gives them another push. Not only is this stuff dumb, but it doesn't even work politically. So I think that those two things together are really going to push people away from this. However, my The caveat to this is I think there are tons of people out there, like the woman who wrote in the German newspaper, dead-enders on this stuff.

And they have power, they have position, they have money. They still occupy a good chunk of the commanding heights of cultural production. I don't think they're going to give up that easily. I think they may soften their approach for a while, but I don't think they've quite given up. There's still HR departments, there's still big DEI bureaucracies. There's still a lot of people out there are true believers in this stuff. They have a material position and influence that they can leverage to keep that stuff going. So I think we're actually fairly far away from being able to say it's dead or even dying. I just think it's weakened.

Yeah, I don't think in the university it's going anywhere.

Yeah, the universities are probably the bunker, the last bastion.

One of the things that we saw, and one of you mentioned it earlier, is that in the last month of this campaign, there was a bit of desperation, it felt like, from these precincts links, and there was a lot of reference to Nazism and fascism. This is we will scare them into voting against these people coming in because it's just going to be like Hitler and they're going to be camps. I mean, Molly Jong fast, the commentator on MSNBC said she expected to be- She's such an idiot. God, she expected to be rounded up. Charlemagne the God said something very similar, but he actually walked that back the other day. I mean, what did you make, Freddie, of that campaign to make the Republican Party and make Donald Trump's coalition seem like 75, 80 million people that would vote for either Nazis or fascists or Francoists or Mussolini type of figures?

Yeah, I just think that it's terrible politics, and it's also not true. I think this thing that Democrats have gotten into where they think that being in a permanent state of panic is to their advantage is just not helping them. So somebody went through and they found for every presidential election since Kennedy's election, they found political people saying, this is the most important election of our lifetime. And it's like, if it is true that everyone is, then it cannot be true that any of them are. Just constantly increasing the emotional salience hasn't worked. I don't think anyone cares about these abstract appeals to democracy. I think what you have to talk to people about is say, actually, life goes on, right? Rather than saying, oh, my God, it's the end of the world, life goes on. And if you look at things, look, I was 20 when 9/11 happened, and it looked for a long time like my life was going to be dominated by the politics of terrorism, right? If you watched the 2004 election between John Kerry and George Bush, there was only one issue, right? During the presidential debates, not only would half the questions be about terrorism and Al Qaeda, when they got to other questions, like about the economy, they'd say, Well, that reminds me of terrorism, and they'd start talking about that again.

There wasn't a single question about terrorism in the Biden debate or the Heritage debate because no one cares anymore. All this stuff feels permanent at the moment that it's happening. But people live in reality, and they experience the fact that people said in 2012, they've built a permanent Obama coalition that will never lose. And how did that work out? So I think it's important to remind people this stuff always changes, remain politically alive to these different things instead of constantly saying, if Trump wins, it's all over, because then the sun does rise the next day and you look like a liar.

In Rui, I think Americans also believe in the robustness of American institutions, that the American institutions won't fail. Also, you hear the sky's falling stuff, as Freddie was mentioning, the most important election ever. I was reading Tim Snyder's book. I went back to his book on tyranny, which made him a ton of money. At some point in the book, he mentions the 2018 midterm elections, and almost as an aside, says, If they happen, if we end up having these elections.

Funny, are both Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, the great antifascist, don't they write down the pipe from you there, Freddie, at Yale? I think both of them. So, yeah, there's this substantial section of academics and other lefty types who really do treat the barbarians are at the gate. It's like two seconds to midnight. We must stand up, no passerelle. And I think, yeah, for most people, it's like, that's not the way they experience the world. They do think the sun is going to come up the next morning. They do have some faith in the robustness of institutions. They do think America is not that fragile. And for people to stand up there and screaming bloody murder about how Trump literally is a fascist, it's not just a coincidence. He's having a rally at Madison Square Garden. Did you know Nazis had a rally? I mean, this stuff is so out of control, so over the top, that people just, Oh, those crazy Democrats again. We have to realize that the way those people see the world or Democrats should realize is not the way normal people see the world, that they live a material life that is much more mundane, much more day to day.

And the idea they're going to be animated by these abstract parrations about the threat to democracy and the impending night of fascism was just a huge, huge mistake. And one hopes that they've learned from that. But you know what? I bet they don't. 2028, J. D. V. V.ence, the apostle of fascism. You heard it here first, so we'll see what happens.

Well, if the Democrats want to win in 2028, it should be Freddie DeBore and Rui Tashira as co-chairs of the DNC. That's what you heard here first. Anything but that. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to give you that job. It's not one that I would envy. But Rui Tashira, Freddie DeBore, thank you guys so much for joining us, honestly.

Hey. Thanks for having us. Thanks.

Thanks for listening. And thanks so much to Freddy De Boer and Rui Tashira for coming on the show today. If you like this conversation, please share this episode with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support the work we do here, go to thefp. Com and become a free press subscriber today. See you next time.