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So before we begin today's episode, I'm recording another Ask Me Anything episode for New York Times subscribers soon. You can send a question to srclintshow.com using the subject line AMA. We'll consider anything in the inbox on or before the morning of Monday, November 10th, right in soon. So Democrats had a big night on Tuesday.
They won New York City, where Zora and Mamdani has been the big story of the political year. They won in Virginia, where Abigail Spandberg became the first woman to become governor of Virginia, in that state's history. They won in New Jersey, a state where the polling had showed it unnervingly close for Democrats, but it turned out to not be close at all and Mikey Sheryl won by double digits. They won in California, where Gavin Newsom's Prop 50, his mid-cycle redistricting counter-taxis, passed with at last I saw 65% of the vote, but it's California.
We'll be counting votes there forever. They won in Pennsylvania, where there were Supreme Court seats up for election. They won in Georgia, in these very little-notice statewide utility board seats. They just won everywhere.
Every kind of voter move towards Democrats. And where the polling had made it look like this was still a pretty mixed political moment, these results looked much more like the prelude to a wave election in 2026. Now, the counter-argument is that these were mostly in states, the Kamala Harris had won, New Jersey, Virginia, New York, California. These were not the places where Democrats had been really struggling.
But both sides are going to be looking at the selection to try to take some big lessons for 2026 and even, I think, for 2028. So to help me parse hope from Hopium, Fact from Fiction here, I'm joined by my esteemed editor, Aaron Medica. Hello. Aaron, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Ezra. Let's start where you left off there. So if you are a progressive, there was much to be delighted by. If you are a moderate, there was much to be delighted by.
If you are a Democrat, there was much to be delighted by, right? But already people are starting to say, no, no, no, no, no, this shows a moderation. It's the way to go. No, no, no, no, no, this shows that an aggressive left-wing agenda will do it, right?
A populist agenda. It seems, though, to show actually that simultaneously pushing both in different places. Are you saying the Democratic Party needs to be more things and more places, Aaron? Yeah.
I mean, there's different versions of this argument, right? Our colleague, Jamal Booby, makes a different version of this argument, but right that the party has to be what it needs to be in each of its places, but that the overall coalition has to be pushing one way or the other. But what do you draw out of what happened? I have seen, so I wrote, people can go back and listen to it, if they haven't yet, a piece about how Democrats beat Trump and Trump is.
I mean, the core point of that essay is that the problem Democrats have is they're not competitive in enough places right now. They nationally are pretty competitive. The presidential popular vote is quite close, election to election, but there are 24 states that Donald Trump won by 10 points or more, and if Democrats want power in the Senate in any significant numbers ever again, they're going to need to be competitive in places where they used to be able to win elections, places like Ohio and Florida and Iowa and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota, Alaska, but they've not really been competitive there for some time. So I don't know how much I think this was a positive test of that.
I know everybody's saying, well, look, Abigail Spandburger is a moderate in Virginia and Zoramam Donnie is a Democratic socialist in New York City, and my view is that is great. But also by any historical measure of politics, they're actually just not that far apart. Abigail Spandburger is a moderate within the current Democratic Party, but she is not a moderate, you know, from the perspective of 1998. I like Spandburger's politics for focus on affordability.
I like Mikey Cheryl, her focus on affordability. I like Zoramam Donnie, his focus on affordability. The thing about all three of these figures is none of them challenged Democrats in any significant way, except maybe Mom Donnie actually from the left. I know some Democrats were genuinely uncomfortable with him.
The question of what would you need to do when election in Ohio and Florida in Iowa is not, I think, yet answered. Matt Glasey's made this point where he says, look, if you look at how Cheryl and Spandburger ran and how Harris ran, they both ran about five points ahead of her. And if you just say, okay, what that tells us is that the off-cycle electorate right now, and this would be a big extrapolation, but just for the sake of argument, that the off-cycle electorate right now is plus five Democratic compared to 2024. That is almost certainly enough to win the House.
But it is maybe enough to win you Ohio. It is not enough to win you Iowa, Alaska, places like that. The 10% states that you were. The 10% states.
Donald Trump is unpopular. He has been going down in popularity. He has some more recent polls I've seen take him out of the low 40s and into the high 30s. Things are actually looking fairly out of him.
In terms of the situation nationally, the mood, the mood is anti-Trump. But in terms of have Democrats solved the set of problems, they will ultimately need to solve in order to become a durable coalition capable of sidelining MAGA. I don't think that is answered. What I will say is that I do think it is relevant to this.
You are seeing the way MAGA is beginning to crack under its own extremely bad political habits and culture. The fact that the right over the last week and a half has been consumed by a debate of what level of white supremacy to welcome into their coalition, of whether or not Tucker Carlson is a hero for having a friendly conversation Nick Fuentase or he should be ejected for it. Let me put it this way. This doesn't look to me like a coalition spending a lot of time thinking about how to appeal to the media and voter.
And Jay D Vance, by the way, the success of Trump who does not have Trump's personal charisma and control of the coalition, he has been quiet on this. He has been cowardly on this. I mean, so Trump, by the way, Trump has come out and denounced Fuentase. But to the extent Vance has said anything, he says he didn't really know who he was.
But yes, it would have been very easy for Donald Trump as president to come out and say, this is ridiculous. When Tucker Carlson attacked Donald Trump for the Iran bombings, Trump put out a true social post calling Carlson crazy. Trump has said nothing as of now on Carlson in Fuentase and Vance's statement was along the lines of can't we all just get along. And so you see ways in which the right is opening up some of really profound vulnerabilities for itself.
So the Democratic Party can expand its tent and be normal and competent and sane and welcoming. You know, we may not be at the terminus of how anti Trump is electric and get right if we go into recession, if there is significant acceleration of the group verification of the right, right, we might go from a Democratic plus five to a Democratic plus eight, if Trump has made some good strategic moves, maybe it becomes plus nine plus 10. And all of a sudden politics looks very different. So if I were the Democrats, what I would say is not, hey, look, we got no more work to do here.
It's, hey, look, we have an opportunity here. How do we maximize it? So the really happy chart, can I chart be happy? The thing that Aaron, you know, I think a chart.
You can ask everybody you can ask that question of me. The one that was really making liberal hearts beat faster was the chart of counties in New Jersey that have 60, I think it's 60 percent or more Hispanic residents because those swung hard toward Cheryl. So it's one from Harris to Cheryl. So why is that let's focus first on affordability, right?
Which is the thing that unites all of these people, right? Whether it's Zoram and Donnie or Mike Cheryl or Avi-Kos-Mamberger. So affordability, obviously, was an arbitrage for Democrats in 2824. It is very possibly why they lost.
And here we are with affordability being their key issue. How much do you see affordability as the ticket to success in 2026 and maybe even 2028? So what am I thinking about the 2025 election is that the 2024 election, you had the Biden-Harris incumbency on the ballot and the Biden-Harris incumbency was blamed for the very high cost of living. And in the 2025 election, you have the Trump administration as the incumbent political force.
And in addition to other things, people may not like about them. They're being blamed for the high cost of living. Trump has lost his high polling on that. He's used the tariffs to increase prices in a way that people understand in New Jersey.
Electricity prices were a huge part of the campaign. Cheryl is very, very focused there. So in a peer to people who's angry about the cost of living, you could see sustained political ricochet against the nationally incumbent party that gets blamed for the party when that party is doing things that are highly public as a tariff star. Right now, this record is trying to decide if Trump has his tariff power.
And you have to imagine that every Republican House member and Senate member is just praying. But they were cheering Gorsuch on as he went off the court. Yeah, the five members of the court take the tariff power away from Trump, because they don't want to take the, I mean, it's their job, right? The House on the Senate to take the tariff power away from Trump who is misusing an authority that is not meant to say punish Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro.
This is not meant for the way he's using the tariff power at all. But they don't want to challenge Trump. They won't challenge Trump. So they're hoping the Supreme Court takes power away from him, which would bring prices down functionally immediately.
And that would be good for Republicans. So we think that Democrats have moves they can make too. And the question is then, how do you persuade voters that you, the party that just a couple of years ago, fail to bring down prices, will now bring down prices. So one answer is, Momdani in New York City, where the thing Momdani had was, and I know you hate it when I use this term, but a memetic policy agenda on affordability.
And what I mean by that is that he had functionally four policy ideas that fit on an index card. That if you were getting Momdani mailers and door hangers, as I was always there, and they contained the whole of his idea. Let's round them off because I'm thinking of three. So from fast and free, fast and free, fast and important.
This you're disabled friend here. That's fast and important. Freezer rent. Freezer rent.
Freezer rent. Freezer rent. Freezer rent. Freezer rent.
Freezer rent. Free resource. Free resource. Free child care.
Free child care. Right, which is the understated. You can say the grocery stores. I mean, but again, this is why to me, this is why to me, the grocery stores thing mattered.
It was never meant. It's not a big policy, right? It's a pilot program of five grocery stores wanting each borough run by the government. But it was Momdani saying, I will experiment in ways that at least you feel others haven't to try to bring down your prices.
I like, I will do anything. I will do things other people have not been doing. And so, Momdani of these four elections, right, of Prop 15, California, Spamberg or Cheryl, I'm on Donnie. When you look at exit polling, the Momdani election is the only one where a majority of voters said that Trump was not a significant or was not the driving force behind their vote.
This was not a Trump resistance election in New York City. This was a Momdani, anti-Momdani election in New York City. And Momdani just absolutely dominated on cost of living. Now, the question of can he deliver on that is going to be very important for both like the future of that form of politics and his political future individually.
Childcare in particular is going to be very expensive and very difficult. But what he did was he had a set of policies that he repeated relentlessly that people could imagine what life might feel like if they were in force, and they came to define him. And Cheryl tried to do something similar to this, but in a more complicated way around utilities and rate setting and electricity in New Jersey. But electricity is going to become a growing issue across the country.
It already is because a variety of things are converging, but one of the big ones being AI and data center demand, which is driving electricity prices up very, very rapidly. By the way, we're going to shut down as we speak over health insurance premiums. My sense is that shut down is probably, I don't want to predict it, but the reporting is that the moderate Democrats in the Senate do not really feel this is worth pushing for all that much longer. The Trump administration does not want to deal.
They have not come to the table. But quietly, a lot of Democrats like, is that the worst thing? If Donald Trump wants to have health insurance premiums spike for millions and millions and millions of Americans on his watch and be blamed for it in the next election, is it true? The Democrats should take this much ongoing risk in order to protect him from that outcome.
I think the question Democrats have, nationally, is if they want to make their affordability pitch legible to voters, what are Democrats going to come up with something like a six for 2026, their version of the contract for America, or their six for 2016, or a six for America? What's on there? What are the three or four or five or six policies that Democrats want everybody to be able to rattle off as the coherent core of the Democratic agenda? Probably in that world, you want four of them to be affordability and two of them to be anti-Trumpist, corruption, or authoritarianism.
We're going to have to take some of this slowly here, because there's a lot of different elements in what you just said. But let me just say that as someone who's younger, daughter is about to turn 26, the question of the subsidies, it's intruding into our lives in a way that's very real. It's very real. The Mamdani coalition, one thing that's so interesting to me is that people want to portray it as a bunch of kids in Astoria and Bushwick and elsewhere in New York who are AOC fans and the precariant of some people like to put it, high education, low income voters who think they should have a different life.
But the truth is, if you're winning half of the vote in the largest electorate since 1969, you are reaching a much broader group of people. And one thing that really fascinated me about all of this is that there are Trump Mamdani voters. There are voters, I mentioned earlier, who switched from Trump to Cheryl and Trump to Spandburger, but there are also, it looks like, Mamdani Trump voters, they're concentrated in immigrant communities in New York City. So the affordability agenda has the ability to cut across that whole problem, right?
You can't win over the center with someone like Mamdani because you won't, the policies will be too out there, et cetera, but actually, he does seem to have won. I think it's really important to say this about Mamdani. His policies were not too out there for the electorate at all. And I mean that not just in the sense that he won the election, right?
I think you could look at Mamdani's way in a number of ways. On the one it's an incredibly impressive political victory for somebody who was in political unknown two years ago. On the other hand, he won last time I looked at the vote with 50.6% of the vote, it was in the end of Mamdani anti-Mamdani election. So he both brought out a lot of voters for him and brought out a lot of voters against him.
But if you talked to the voters or paid any attention to the ads or watched with the anti-Mamdani coalition and fears were none of them were about fast and free buses. The anti-Mamdani energy was about Israel. It was to some degree about crime and safety and to some degree a general vibe of socialism. But if you imagine a Mamdani who and that he was young and couldn't actually do at all, I don't think that's what brought people out though.
I don't think that was where the energy was. That's the eye rolling. It's not the voting. If you imagine a Mamdani who just for whatever reason his past politics, who he was, I think a lot, there was a lot of Islamophobia in the election and the attacks against him, I don't think that's arguable.
But if you just imagine a Mamdani who is the same in every way, but Israel never becomes an issue around him, that actually drains the anti-Mamdani coalition of a fair amount of its energy. Crime and safety probably would have remained there. So the reason I'm saying this is not the same thing I should worry about the other Mamdani, but his policy agenda was actually it was amazing to me how little his opponents ran against it. There was poo-pooing that say free daycare is not plausible or likely given the complexity of that policy and the cost of it.
In fact, the Mamdani does control tax increases. That's a totally fair critique, but it's actually a very different critique than free daycare would be bad. You actually don't see a lot of people running against free daycare. Taxing the rich is understood to be a popular policy that is maybe not good for New York City in the critique of it because New York and New York City taxes on the rich are fairly high and you don't want to create capital flight because then you have to raise taxes more in middle class.
People can argue these different ways. I'm not myself that concerned about taxing the rich a little bit more, but I think- Can I just say, I'm not worried that multinational capitalism is going to be slain by the election that's around the time? I just think there's always been this shimmering quality of what's going on around Mamdani where it's an incredibly exciting election and a collision of things within American politics like democratic socialism or Zionism or the words of globalizing the FATA that at other times in American politics they would have been red lines that if a candidate crossed them, that candidate was understood to have no chance. And the fact that Mamdani could cross them and still win shows you things are changing.
And on the other hand, the actual way that he ran the election, the actual policy agenda Mamdani ran on was neither that activating to his opponents. And by the way, it's not that socialist. No matter how big effort to make child care, at least to expand child care very dramatically. I've heard some free buses.
Bloomberg had some free buses. So the actual affordability agenda he was running on was not that activating to his opposition and highly popular. He's going to struggle to deliver parts of it. I think Fast and Free buses is completely doable.
Running a couple pilot versus his completely doable. It's interesting that the buses are on the buses constantly and they have signed across the front like one of the lit up parts that's fair required. And I was looking at it as not thinking like, what will it be like if it says no fair required? This is an interesting thing to think about.
First of all, as native New Yorkers know, 30 to 40% of people have already decided that the buses are free. They're not fast, but they don't pay as it is now. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. The places where I am really interested to see what he does are one crime and safety because that's going to be a complex place for him to the child care, because that's just a maniacally hard policy to get right.
Child care is just really expensive. Infant level child care is really, really expensive, even though we really should figure out a way to do it. And then freezing the rent is a tricky policy because I don't particularly have a problem with it for a limited amount of time. What you're doing is what you're functionally saying, we are going to limit the future income of building affordable housing.
Running affordable housing just became dramatically less profitable for anybody doing it. So you then need to say, okay, that is in a mechanical way going to reduce the future construction of affordable housing. If you talk to people in the affordable housing world, they will tell you this. These are not people who are generally making a ton of money.
Many of these are non-profit developers. But if you say that we're just going to have extended rent freezes, already there's a lot of worries about whether or not there will be enough upkeep of affordable housing stock we have. But it is definitely going to reduce how much is built. So Mondani is a plan where he wants to build a lot more public housing in order to do that quickly.
He's going to have to change the way New York City builds public housing. Will he do that? He has not been nearly as focused as some of the other Democrats were, like Landar on accelerating the construction of market rate housing. He has been generally positive when he talks about it and talks about how Tokyo builds and other things.
But it isn't something where he has focused a lot. It's very easy to freeze the rent. It is much harder and much harder within his coalition to build homes. Yeah, okay, we can have an entire discussion about rents and I won't except to say that again, as with multi-national capitalism, you hear a lot of complaining from developers.
I understand that. I really don't think, I mean, first of all, the rent has been frozen a couple of times before, right? And what we're talking about to be specific is the percentage increase that the rent stabilization board allows, right? This is not a affordable housing.
Right. It's not you're saying affordable housing, but it's rent stabilized housing, which is a slightly different thing. And I live in an apartment that is rent stabilized myself. And all I can tell you about it is that when we were much younger and we were an elementary school teacher and a writer and editor, it made a possible for us to stay in New York, which creates helps create a stable middle class, right?
There's a lot of arguments for rent stabilization that nothing to do with the housing supply and have to do with the why is New York? I believe in a lot of others to be clear. I believe in rent stabilization. No, but I want to be a transition between affordable housing and rent stabilization.
There's too. But you need to build more of it. Right. Yes.
I know someone who wrote a whole book about this. Right. I want more people to be able to have your living situations. And if you make rent stabilized housing, I mean, one of things you really learn when you report on this is developers, both nonprofit developers, developers, market rate, housing developers, affordable developers, different stabilized, they're all trying to make developments, pencil out, like they actually do have to make the money that is coming into their company and the money that is going out of their company match up.
And the number of developments that you watch fall apart because the cost of construction is high, the cost of land is high, it's just harder to get these things off the ground. And it's much harder than people think in the nonmarket rate area because you have a lot more rules and regulations you have to abide by. So the thing I am saying here is that the worry I have is not that it's a bad thing to do a rent freeze. I think we could do a rent freeze for a while, but it is easy to do a rent freeze.
Whereas what it requires to set off a building boom of nonmarket rate housing, such that the people who are not currently in those units can get into them in the future is a lot harder. And I worry that they will get the easy thing done and not the hard thing done. And most of the, I mean, I don't know about the exact numbers, but a lot of the affordable housing that has been built in New York City over the past years has been built alongside market rate housing, right? Yeah, as a deal, there's a specific program we won't get into that comes and goes and some people do it.
And then of course, that creates its own controversies because then people who are living in these places who are going through the poor doors, people sometimes say, they're not full participants in the housing. But I will say, I actually am a big supporter of that general idea. What I think you want to do is tie the fortunes of the rich and the poor together in any city or in any country. And so this idea that what you can do is, and in the area I live around Guanes, which has had a huge building boom, they've really been able to do that.
They have been able to put up huge amounts of new housing, but a lot of it is affordable housing, and there's like set aside for artists and there's a lot of different things. And what you're basically creating is a tie up between you are making it easier to build, but if you're going to build, you have to build more of this too. Hi, I'm Solana Pine. I'm the director of video at the New York Times.
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You don't have to be a subscriber. Download the New York Times app to start watching. Okay, so let's go. East Coast West Coast for a second, since you will not cop to being from the East.
I know you're not a part of East. I live in California for a long time. I really loved it. Not a long time.
I live in California for a long time. I really loved it. Gavin Newsom, there is someone who makes eyes roll everywhere. And yet he is the leading contender right now for the 2028 nomination in part because of what he's been doing.
So how do you as a Southern California Southland native see what's happening with him? So Newsom has put himself in a stronger position than I would have thought at all, plausible a year ago. And I think I said lesson in what he's doing for other Democrats, which is you can make decisions to try new things and see if they work. So you think of one of the fourish big ways that Newsom has acted since the 2024 election, which remember Newsom was a very, very, very prominent Biden surrogate in that election, very, very close to Joe Biden personally.
And so not an obvious candidate for a big rethinking, but right after the election, he launches his podcast where his first guest is Charlie Kirk, a Newsom sort of ends up agreeing with Kirk on trans kids and sports, making a lot of Democrats very angry. He goes on to Steve Bannon on that podcast. He goes on to have Dr. Phil on that podcast.
He goes on to have a lot of figures on the right, Michael Savage on that podcast. So on the one hand, you see Newsom doing one thing, which is seemingly to choose the lane of reaching out to Mecca and trying to hear them out and learn from them. But basically at the same time, he begins to do a few other things too, which is to first shift his own policy positioning in a way that someone delights me because he moves very far towards abundance and signs of very, very big housing bills, much more ambitious than any of the housing bills he had signed at your point in his governorship and sort of accepts the critique that the way California husband working is not good enough, right? The Democrats really do need to figure out how to build again.
He also steps into this role as an attention grabbing resistance leader, having his all caps trolling on social media Donald Trump. But he actually found a fight that he could pick that was an unusual fight to pick a ballot initiative for a mid-cycle redistricting. He could deliver on and by the way, initially the polling on it was bad because people in California like redistricting, we, you know, are partisan redistricting. We created a non-partisan redistricting under Schwarzenegger for a reason.
And so what I'd say is interesting about Newsome is that you might have said before the election, well, there are two obvious pathways for Democrats. You can try to reach out to MAGA and listen, or you can retrench into resistance. And Newsome's answer to that was, yes, there are. And he's going to do both.
The other thing that I like about Newsome, and in many ways, he is a very tricky profile for Democrats nationally. He has done a lot of things in California that would be very unpopular. If they became national ad campaigns, California actually does give in some context, healthcare to illegal immigrants, California, you know, did get pretty far along the way of phasing out in the future gas combustion engine cars. And I mean, there's a lot that makes Newsome a very difficult contender if what you want to do is win back states where Democrats become uncompetitive.
But just talking about his political positioning right now, what is interesting to me is that Newsome does things are high risk. And he does not seem afraid. And in part of it, he does not seem afraid of making people mad on his own side in order to try new things out. And so, you know, something he's done have made people happy on his own side, right, like trolling Trump on social media.
Democrats enjoyed that. But other things, you know, I don't enjoy the old caps, but other things like the podcasting and, you know, some of his policy movements, he just, I think one of the really damaging things for Democrats and national Democrats is they seem afraid to be for all of them. Bernie Sanders, famously not exactly Democrat, but nevertheless, Democratic leader does not seem afraid. AOC largely does not seem afraid.
But a lot of the others seem afraid. It radiates off of them. You can feel them checking what they're about to say to make sure nobody on their side is going to get mad at them. And not seeming afraid is actually quite powerful politics because not being afraid allows you to try new things politically and to see how they work out.
And if they don't work, you can do something else. Right. So you're right. See what sticks.
Yeah. But it's a politics of experimentation. Politics is throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it's real. It's a real issue.
That's right. Absolutely. And Johnson, all the high points of left liberal Democratic governance were spaghetti that sticks. Pause these are not all them worked.
But some did, right, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, right? These are all things that emerged from throwing spaghetti against the wall. Well, there's that but there's also just the way some of them did their politics in their moment. I mean, FDR moved all around.
Sometimes he was worried about budget deficits. Sometimes he was, you know, everybody knows like this famous, I welcome your hatred speech. But at other times he was much more solicitous of business interests. He made all kinds of weird compromises.
My point is not that Gavin Newsom is an FDR or there's Lyndon Johnson. My point is that in a way that actually relatively few of his contemporaries are he seems like a politician. And this is the flip side of what people don't like about him. You're pointing out eyes rolling.
Newsom reads to many people as a politician and that's always been a big weakness for him. He has a slick affect. But you're seeing right now the positive side of that, which is Newsom is acting like a politician who is looking at the landscape and making moves to put himself in a stronger political position, even when those moves are a little bit difficult. And by the way, he's doing this before to remember him going on Fox News to debate Ron DeSantis with Sean Hannity moderating.
Newsom, what a politician is supposed to do is try to figure out the way to put together winning coalition so they can wield political power in a way that accords with their values. And a lot of people want to wield political power in a way that accords with their values. But not that many people seem to want to do what it takes to put together winning political coalition. And so in a way, I guess what I'm praising and do some right now is the flip side of the coin of the thing that some people read on him and they don't like, which is I think Newsom is practicing politics.
And man, are the other Democrats in 2028 can give him an open lane if they're too afraid to do the same thing. Okay, this gives me an opportunity to talk about something. I don't know if it's bigger or smaller, but it's definitely harder. In the essay that we were working on over the past few weeks, part of the point of it was to talk about politics as an activity that improves lives, but also politics as an activity that improves everything.
So I want to just read you two things and sort of have you react to them. One is a famous line of Henry Adams from the Education of Henry Adams. Politics is a practice, whatever is professions has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. And then I want to quote from Bernard Crick, who was a lungepin of the essay that you wrote, but this is something that we did not get in.
Political activity is a type of moral activity. It does not claim to settle every problem or to make every sad heart glad. But it can help in some way, in nearly everything. And where is strong?
It can prevent the vast cruelties and to see its ideological rule. So where do you see political activity now, politics, now, how we should be participating in it with some look at the election? But what is it? What is acting in politics now?
Is it participating in the system of organized hatred and cruelty, which we certainly sing plenty of between the election and now, right, there was an arrest in Chicago where they went into a preschool with the ice did with its masks on, right? Kids are inside it. Really crazy, cruel stuff, right? And it's also a theater of cruelty, as well as a pro actually cruel, right?
Because they'd love to make those videos and I thought it's just not. So what is politics for now? It is those things. But I mean that, right?
Politics is a wide field of human endeavor. And I do believe Donald Trump uses politics as an organizing of patrons. I do believe Donald Trump is a master at creating us as an emce and summoning people's fury and their resentment against a them. And I think one reason he is a master at that, and this is always true, is because it is authentic to him.
Because that is how he is. He's able to do it for you because he's able to do it for him. And to just set this up, maybe as one of the contrasts, I think that Barack Obama did not try to engage in politics as an organizing of patriots. I think he sought to use it as a bridging of divides, like going all the way back to his red and blue speech in Boston in 2004.
And it doesn't mean that it calmed every hatred it didn't. Just like it doesn't mean what Donald Trump does. It doesn't destroy every bond between us. But you can use politics to destroy and you can use it to build.
And similarly to Trump, the reason I think that was true for Obama's politics is that was authentic to who Obama is. And I think one argument I am making in that essay over the weekend on politics and the beautiful line from Bernard Crick that politics involves the genuine relationships between people who are genuinely other people, not tasks for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy. I think I switched a few words. That's pretty good.
That's pretty close. And what I think I'm saying when I argue when I talk about that and about the sort of liberalism's old virtual liberality, this emphasis on the virtues of the citizen, the ethic of mutual connectedness is that one thing I would like to see, and I think that there's actually political power in, one thing I would like to see is the party doing in this era when the Trump administration is organizing hatreds, right? And it's getting consumed in some ways. By its own organization, hatred is okay.
They wanted to do it in this way. But now Nick Fundy says no, no, no, we need more hatred. And it's like, well, we did say we need some hatred. So who are we to tell Nick Fundy is too much hatred.
Now you have Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson going war with each other, right? I don't think the organizing of hatred is a strong politics in the long run. But it has to work for many, but it has to be beaten by its opposite, not by something mirroring it. And so one of the things I'm saying that that piece is that I think that the party needs people who are genuine, like it is authentic to them.
The politics of them is an act of love and fellowship, including when it includes critique and disagreement and opposition. There are many people in my life who I disagree with on political issues profoundly, people in my family who I disagree with on political issues profoundly. And our conversations are still part of our connectedness. And that seems obvious to me, right?
I actually find it appalling the idea that you would kind of remember as a family for the politics, maybe for the treatment of you. That's something different. But just for their politics, I really disagree with that. Something that I thought a lot about the election in New York City to go back to here is, Mom Donnie spent so much of the election reaching out to people who were under for him.
He went to synagogues. He went to business leaders. Mom Donnie didn't say, hey, look, you don't like me. I welcome your hatred.
Mom Donnie, he was a left pluralist. A non-girdard us in his newsletter that ain't because a really great essay on Mom Donnie's smile as an act of rhetoric, right? He was always smiling at you. For him, the politics of friendliness were so fundamental.
In a way, I thought it was very, very powerful. Cuomo, for all that he was supposed to be the real politician in the race, he often seemed very powered by resentment to me. Mom Donnie seemed like he liked you. Cuomo didn't seem like he liked you.
If you go back and listen to Cuomo's interview with Barry Weiss, which is very early in the campaign, and I got very telling, Cuomo felt like he was running to get revenge on the Democratic Party that had rejected him and forced him to resign. Is it really such a surprise that the man running for revenge on the Democratic Party did not win the Democratic Primary? And then it seemed like Cuomo was running just like not to be humiliated and beaten, but Cuomo was not running as a pluralist. It did not feel that way to me, right?
He did not feel like he liked you. And see what was a whole demonstration running because he liked cats. But I really think these dynamics are important. As you say, there is a tremendous amount of cruelty emanating and being organized from the Trump administration.
I mean, you look at Stephen Miller, give an interview, you look at him talk and it radiates off of him, right? It's a person where the function has become the form in a very strange way. He really seems like he hates people. And when Trump was up there with Eric Kirk at the Chuck Kirk Memorial, and he said, I hate my opponents.
I'm not here. I think there's a lot of power, a lot of political power. And as weak as it sounds to be able to say, a politics of love, but I remember when Cory Booker ran on a politics of love in 2020, and I did interview with him right around the time he dropped out. And we're talking about how it was very hard to be clear what a politics of love meant.
But one thing it means, love is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And pluralism is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And I think one way that you can sideline Trump is like, yeah, that Henry Adams Court does describe them. And when you hear it, your stomach tends us up.
I don't be part of an organization of hatred. Right? That's not what I want my work in civic life to be. If this is all about organizing our hatreds, count me out.
And so running people for whom that does not feel like what they are doing. And it's like what they're doing, it's not who they are. I actually think it's a very big part right now of candidate recruitment for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has to be right the American society for the prevention of cruelty to humans.
Right? That's what it has to be that. And then you can't talk about anti cruelty without bringing in Judas Chilar, whose name I can never say, great political philosopher. Here's what she said, it's better just to listen to her.
It seems to me that liberal and humane people of whom there are many among us would if they were asked to rank the vice's, but cruelty first, intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. And anti cruelty is the politics and affordability is a policy. Right? I don't know that love is going to be the way you reconcile.
That's my respect. Respect might be the one that I'm saying. There's somebody who's doing it is a boring word, but I think it's also that right. And captured in the quick quote is the idea that other people are actually humans, right?
They're actually other people. I just don't believe it is an accident. I don't believe it is a coincidence. As Democratic Party has become the party of institutions, the party of the educated, the party increasingly of wealthier people, that the people who have been most open to Donald Trump's earn it all down approach are the people who are being failed by this country, right?
People who are poor, people who don't have college educations, people who live in areas of the country that don't have as much economic opportunity, and also people who are not acculturated into saying all the right things and having all the right opinions by going to college. And they have become they have felt culturally alienated from the Democratic Party, and also they have not been well served by the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has felt rejected by them and feels endangered by them in some ways right now. And I really think you have to see an absolutely central part of this moment in politics as not leaning into that divide and trying to eke out the percentage point or two that will allow you to just win the election in 2028, but beginning to erode that divide.
You're not going to get rid of all of it. Not everybody in MAGA is a plausible political recruit for liberalism, but you have to act like more of them are. You need to re-knit people's connection to liberal democracy for the people who fail by it. For the people who don't think that renewed liberalism is necessary for a new Democratic Party, let's go back to the very famous Hine thing where he says, you know, thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder, right?
I think that's true, obviously. And you can hear for anybody listening in that you can hear how much Aaron's depth of political philosophy influences my work these days. But I want to read, I had never actually connected with, so this is Judith Schlar, Essay Schlar, Essay, that you're mentioning. I want to read another part that you had sent me, because I think it gets at this conversation or having an interesting way.
And it gets it, I think something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult act, but worthwhile. Like virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. They were easy.
They wouldn't be virtues. And so she writes that courage is to be prized since both prevents us from being cruel as cowards so often are and fortifies us against fear from threats but physical and moral. This is to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but without their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity, a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties.
If the faith was to survive at all, it would be so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel, military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, older young, male or female black or white. Far from being an immoral free-for-all liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom.
And I do find something very inspiring in that. I hope you would. Not just that that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it takes it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening a muscle you are strengthening. For something Obama has been saying, as he's been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting, he said it too on his interview of Mark Merrin, if you want to go listen to that, where he says, for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard.
We didn't grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any but not really. There have been in other times in our history, you know, go to Jim Crow, you go to the Red Scare, you go to World War II, I mean, but he said, you know, it has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism, and all of a sudden it does. And right now we're seeing who is willing to have that ask with them, right?
Who's willing to believe somebody thinks when it's hard. And this point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders, and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They are part of the first era of Trumpism. They've bent the knee, they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House.
They are very much willing to pay to play and not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people's freedoms, pay out in terms of other people's safety, pay out in the kind of society that if you explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that, right? They've not wanted to stand in the way, right? You know, universities have been more worried about the federal funding in the near term and are not willing to use their endowments in ways that they probably could. Law firms like Paul Weiss, right?
We really are the beginning of this Trump era, watched a tremendous amount of cowardice taking hold in civil society. And it's true, like when you are dealing with an illiberalism operating at the highest levels of political power, it takes some amount of courage, not as much courage as it would take to do the same thing in other countries right now, like Russia, but some amount of courage to tape the mass to ICE agents, to stand with the immigrants, to make yourself a target for Stephen Miller and his blue scare, right? All of it. And yet that's, I think, what's asked, but that's not the only thing that is asked.
You actually have to have the correct idea, the Schlar idea, right? The obvious example from the American life is the Whitman idea of like, what is the world, right? The world is something I am open to. I'm going to walk around in it.
I'm going to take it in. I'm going to see it. I'm going to be large, contain multitudes, all that stuff, right? Which is critical to a conception of liberalism that, by the way, a conception of liberalism enriched by the radicalism to its left, which I think is important to mention, right?
The liberal democracies have defeated fascism. We're very much enriched by the left that brought policies that were case suggestions that became policies that made those worlds better. The liberal democracy, the defeated communism, same thing. The left radicals pushed right for a world that people then wanted to defend.
And it was a capacious, large, big tantis, everyone always says, but like genuinely big tent. And that liberalism is a much more powerful liberalism than the liberalism of orthodoxy, right? I mean, it's just going to be by definition or powerful. How to get there, as you say, is very hard.
You have to tolerate things you don't like. I don't like to do that. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I'll say something that has just been interesting for me on this. And my team knows this and actually you probably know it, but, you know, it's something I always try to do on the show that I always try to make sure the show, basically within every month, as people, I really disagree with on it, right?
I try to make that. That's where I'm here. And those conversations caused me a lot more stress beforehand. They require different form of preparation.
I feel much more like I have to be championing ideas and make sure that I don't falter and I can't just be in the exploratory mode I prefer to be in, but I also leave them more enriched. I think about them more after usually. And this is very interesting research that looks at workplaces. And what it basically finds is diversity of different kinds actually makes people less happy, but it makes them more effective because it is hard to be in spaces of disagreement and spaces of difference.
But you really do learn from it. You were enriched by it. And what you're saying is true on the left. And but also we, as I sort of say in the piece of the weekend, the good thing that Democratic Party has done since say 2004 is open up its left side.
I remember back then, people have to talk about how few would even claim the moniker liberal. The fact that we are not afraid of that now is to me positive. That's an opening of the tent. But we sort of moved as opposed to widened.
And as I say in the piece, we want to be not left, not right, but bigger, left and right. But also just more multi-dimensional. I've been having these conversations with the political scientist Henry Ferroly, I think it's really brilliant. And it's something he's been talking about in terms of representation.
It's just recognizing that people in the sociological sense of the term are very thick and complicated. And what you're trying to do is find ways to take them in that thick complexity. And what the internet does, what much of modest ideas we're polling does too, by the way, is it thins them. Now, something like polling is better than nothing, because it will help you.
It is. Because the thing that you and I both see happen is that in its absence, people just make sure that they also convince themselves of what is around them is how everybody feels. And polling, when done well, is a way of disciplining at least some of your intuitions. But it does collapse people down to their answers to questions they actually may not have overly strong feelings on.
And so the question of how how do you have the complexity of people contained inside your relationships to them? I mean, you have to be in relationship to them. And that in the modern era and the digital era and the digitized era, I think one of the worst signs of Democratic Party right now is a Jared Golden, who I mentioned in that essay, who is a Democratic representative from Maine, winning a Trump plus 10 district, which is one four times. And he's facing a progressive challenger from the left, and maybe he's facing a former Maine governor, a Republican who's very Trumpy, LaPage on the right.
Decided not to run again. Just announced his retirement. And I don't know what is in Congressman Golden's heart. He says that the cost of his family has gotten too high.
It's very, very hard to be in an endlessly competitive district, particularly then when you're facing challenges in the primary and challenges in the general, and you have young kids. But he was somebody who was good at representing people and good at having relationships and then inside the Democratic Party and kept that sort of thickness and a little bit more alive than otherwise would have been. And so it is interesting to see if Democrats lose it will be a loss, but it's that losing the relationships he has and then the relationships other Democrats have with him will be a loss. And one way you can think of some of this politics is you want more real relationships that work across different.
It's not because you're trying to have those people agree with you or have you agree with them. So that might happen over time in one direction or another or both. But because you're trying to contain more of their multitudes inside of you. Right.
And that's not just to be clear. That's not compromise with the devil, right? We're talking about people communicating with each other inside in the tent of the Democratic Party, right? Where there are a bunch of givens and they're not going to fit in a bumper sticker.
But my givens are that the Democratic Party should be a machine to make people's economic lives better and that liberalism should be an anti-quiltip machine, right? And that it has been and it should be again. And the two things together, by the way, also have practical effect of potentially really swinging a lot of Latino voters that the Democrats desperately need. I don't want to be that practical about actually, I want to be more philosophical about it.
But those two things together are a very good recipe for not just success in left-wing urban areas, not just success in moderate states of trend Democratic, but also in reclaiming some of the areas that you're talking about where there are these plus 10 for Trump states where not that long ago in our lifetime, there were Democratic senators, there were states that Obama won that are outreach, right? I know that this shows meant to be you interviewing me post-election, but I'm going to let you have the last word on that because that was quite lovely. Eren Radega, thank you very much. Thanks, Eren.
This episode of this is produced by Annie Galvin, back checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Marie Cassione, our senior audio engineer Jeff Gell with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Jack McCordick, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristen Lin, Emma Keldek, and Jan Koppel, original music by Carol Saburo and Pam McCusker, Audience Strategy by Christine Asimuski and Shannon Bussa. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Andy Rose-Drosser.