Breaking News from Pod Save America - The Democratic Civil War over Zohran Mamdani

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Derek Thompson and Waleed Shahid join Jon Lovett for a spirited debate over Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York—and what it says about where the Democratic coalition goes from here. Was it a win for economic populism, Abundance-pilled technocrats, or both? They debate strategy, slogans, and a real blueprint for how Democrats can win—and govern. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think Mamdani has shown some extraordinary promise on the campaign trail and in conversations on television and on podcasts. That said, those are just words. How is you going to be as an executive of the mayor of New York City? I have no idea. The center and center left should chill out a little bit and let the left win and govern in some places. I think we need more of these opportunities for this generation to be not expelled or exiled from Democratic Party politics, but allowed to govern in some areas, particularly in some of the... bluest areas in the country.

Hey, everybody, I'm John Lovett, and today we're going to try something new. There are a lot of big and hard political questions facing us and no one has all the answers, but what we do know for sure is that the answer to a rising authoritarian right-wing movement is a broad, diverse, democratic movement, big enough and strong enough to fight back and defeat it. And that means having messy debates where parts of the coalition do not see eye to eye or times when the parts of the coalition don't see each other as being parts of a coalition at all. And so we want to create a space to have those conversations, bringing together everybody from

Mamdani socialist to bulwark conservatives and all the Obama bros, neo-lib shills, and abundance-pilled technocrats in between to kick it off in what will either be our first or only episode. We're going to talk about the debate around Zoran Mamdani's victory in New York, the lessons we should and shouldn't take from it, and how it has touched off a bigger conversation about progressive politics and policy and the way forward for Democrats to help us make sense of it. We've got Derek Thompson here. He's the co-author of Abundance. He's the co-author, Gavin Newsom, did not mention by name when signing this housing bill in California.

He mentioned Ezra. Ezra's names in lights. Derek's just in the back cooking, making pies, getting everything ready. And we're also joined by Lee Juhid, Director of the Block and former spokesperson for Justice Dems, who's worked to build electoral success for left candidates from AOC to Bernie Sanders. also wrote a piece in the nation about how to synthesize some of the ideas in abundance and some of the ideas of the more populous left. Thank you both for being.

You're good to see you. Thank you, John. It's great to be here. I've been making so many pies. It's really an honor to be doing anything else right now. I think it's time for Derek to come out of the shadows. Well, here it is. Your abundance, technocratic, neo-lib, shill.

I'm trying to remember all of the very specific adjective in nouns that I felt. really quite identified. I only got Lombonical. I need more. Yeah, I mean, pinko, comment, I don't know. But, yeah, you know, we originally, you know, one potential name for this show is left. Wait, it's impossible to remember,

but I think it's, it's center, center, left, left. Left center. Oh, or left center, or left center, left center. Sorry, the name of the podcast I'm appearing on right now is called center, center, left left. No, I'm sorry. I misspoke. Because I'm about to close this riverside window in three seconds, if that's the ultimate name. Center left, center left.

It could also be left, left, center, center. I'm sorry, we've dragged this on long enough and Wili's a busy man. All right. So first, I want to start by talking about the Mamdani win itself. There was something I thought was interesting about Mamdani, what his skill as a kind of communicator allowed him to do. And I think it was do something that the left has been begging the more mainstream Democrats to do for a long time, which is stake out some big and bold, clear positions that break through. A, because from the left, you believe in them in terms of the policy, but on a pure kind of mercenary political calculus, that when you stake out a position like freeze the rent or free buses, it may have some blowback.

there may be some political controversy around it, but it sends a signal to a group of people that care the most about that issue and brings them on board in a deeper way. And so that someone like Mamdani may pay a price as being viewed as too far left in some broader sense, but he's slowly building credibility deeply, whereas a more mainstream Democrat would take a set of popular views across a broad swath of issues that are kind of less dynamic, less interesting, and not build that same level of connection. I'm just wondering what your reaction is to that. Yeah, I think since basically the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, I think a lot of the

progressive left has had much more of a monopoly on the ideas debate and policy debate than kind of more moderate mainstream Democrats. Maybe that's starting to change now. but part of the simplicity of things like free college, Medicare for all, a green new deal, these kinds of things is that they're simple and easy to remember, just like freezing the rent or public grocery stores or free buses, free child care. These are obviously socialist, social democratic demands that take things off the market and have the government step in to provide, you know, to deal with inequality.

But so many kind of cookie-cutter D-TCC approved candidates or even, Democratic Party establishment candidates like Andrew Cuomo. Kind of almost, it sounds like, it sounds a little bit like chat GPT generated policy of what is just the center point of the Democratic Party that is going to cause the least amount of friction around me that is basically aligned with whoever is in charge of the Democratic Party. In this case, it would be someone like, you know, Biden, Kamala Harris Schumer, Jeffries. And I think that's kind of boring.

It's very conflict-averse. And the goal is to just upset the least amount of people possible. say the least amount of possible. So if you go and look at kind of purple state, purple district candidates, often their policy platform, one, it's hard to find what they're for oftentimes. And two, there's a thing where they all kind of look the same. And so even for, you know, one of the things I appreciate about the abundance faction or abundance like wing of the party is throwing out some ideas that Democrats from across the

political spectrum can actually cling to rather than just say we are for, you know, defending Obamacare, we believe in clean energy, and we want comprehensive of immigration reform. Like we've been saying that for 10, 20 years, and it's a little stale now. It just so happens that Zoran is someone who has a clear ideology, clear value, so it comes much easier and naturally to him in a way that's authentic. Part of this also is certain critiques just didn't seem to have purchase with the electorate this time, a whole bunch of them. And so I'm just curious if you could just talk a little bit about what efforts to kind of

come at Zoran, you thought were ineffective and what that says about the electorate in New York City. And then also, what are ways in which we should not overlearn lessons from a race in New York City, which is obviously very different than a lot of other places we're going to need to win if you want to have power again? Yeah, on your second question, so many of my friends who live in other cities are like, why do I go on Twitter and blue sky? And all it is is New York City politics for a month, like, every couple years. like, aren't there other cities in this country? And the answer is, no, there are not other cities.

Turns out there aren't. There is not. Once in a while, if LA catches fire, LA gets to exist. But other than that, no, that's it. Every once in a while. Once every 10 or 20 years. So for Zoran, you know, I received probably maybe 10 times as much mail and 10 times as much advertisement from Andrew Cuomo and his super PACs,

backed by, you know, Dorb Dash, Pallentier, and Michael Bloomberg, real estate lobby. And most of those pieces of mail I received or the ads I saw on TV or on YouTube were about number one, Zoran's inexperience, number two, that Zoran was a radical who supported defunding the police, and number three that Zoran was anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. And on all three of those levels, I don't think Cuomo was able to land the hits very effectively because, one, people wanted something fresh and new. And I think the experience argument, even in a city as complicated and difficult to govern as New York, where you do need managerial experience, the fact that Cuomo was the standard bearer of that experience, I think, rendered that

argument difficult. Like, it was very clear that he was making an argument for himself. Number two, on the, on defunding the police, Doron said he didn't support defunding the police and then had a positive solution to what he wanted to do, which was that after speaking to cops, a lot of cops don't want to be mental health professionals. and what he meant by defund the police perhaps was better explained through wanting to create a department of public safety to deal with mental health crises. And then three, the vast majority, you know, despite the fact that New York City is the most Jewish city in the country, you know, I think many people were just disgusted by what is happening in Gaza,

what both Biden's policy and Trump's policy and most of the Democratic Party electorate across the country has become much more sympathetic to the plate of Palestinians than to pro-Israel or pro-Netanyahu talking points. I think, again, this is like Cuomo running a playbook from 10 years ago, which is that you could never get, you know, you could see from the debate stage that everyone said they were pledged to go to Israel except for Michael Blake who said he'd go to Jamaica and New York, and Mahdani who said he would stay in New York about which country they would travel to first. I just think that the Democratic elector has radically shifted on that issue, and because Trump and Republicans attack everyone on the Democratic side as anti-Semitic, even Chuck Schumer,

like it just doesn't land, which I think is bad for actually combating real anti-Semitism. Well, yeah, I think there's some truth to that. I also do, like, there's a little bit of throwing spaghetti against the wall, both actually, honestly, against Cuomo too. But there's a little piece of this is like, well, what does it have to do with being mayor of New York? I think people are smarter about that. Like, what is going to Israel? What does position on Gaza have anything to do with governing the MTA and figuring out funding for the buses. Derek, what do you think of some of the ways in which we should avoid overlearning lessons from an electorate that's like plus 50 Democrat?

Yeah, I think there's probably no limit to the number of ways that we should not overinterpret this primary victory. I think that there's always a rush in the media. to describe political phenomena like Zora and Mamdani. And he really is, I think, phenomenal at not only being a political communicator, showing up in all sorts of different favorable and friendly and unfavorable and unfavorable and unfriendly environments and talking about what he wants to talk about. He's a really, really unique person.

And it's very easy, I think, to take the wrong lesson. So you think about, for example, this idea that slogans, are good, right? That it's important to find a way to simplify your message into a slogan. Well, everyone's trying to do that, and everyone's been trying to do that for decades. It really matters what the slogan is and the degree to which the slogan appears to solve people's problems. There's all sorts of slogans that are albatrosses around the next of Democratic candidates. One of those slogans, we just said, abolish the police and defund the police, were very popular slogans in 2020

that Mamdani smartly ran away from in 2025, and his instinct to run away from those slogans, I think, was really important in terms of his bringing along moderate voters in the Democratic primary. What's important about freeze the rent to me or free buses is that these are slogans about affordability, period. And if you ask Democrats who switched the Democratic column to the Republican column in 2024,

What are the biggest issues that they care about? According to polling that I saw, the four biggest issues were cost of living, the economy, inflation, and housing. In other words, affordability, affordability, affordability, and affordability. So it's not just his ability to come up with a slogan that tells us that what the Democratic Party needs is to stake out more dramatic positions on any given idea. But rather, the lesson I take is that he was unembarrassed about answering the process. problems that New Yorkers said they had, which is that they felt that their city was no longer affordable, and he said, and he had a set of ideas to respond to that. So the lesson I would, the lesson I wouldn't take here are big picture lessons about like, you know, just find a way

to come up with a slogan, just find a way to take the policies that work in a Democratic primary in a plus 50 Democratic place and use them to run in, say, negative three Democratic states around the country. I don't think that makes a lot of sense. What I do think makes sense is, What does make sense is the idea that voters can smell authenticity. They can smell sincerity. You can say a lot of terrible things about Donald Trump, and God knows that I have. One thing that Donald Trump is incredibly sincere about is the fact that he freaking hates liberal elites, and he has since the 1970s the 1980s.

They kicked him out or wouldn't let him into the cool Manhattan clubs. They wouldn't let him into the cool Manhattan areas. He despises these people. And folks who hate liberal elites can smell that on him. For all of his strangeness and his bullshit, they can smell that one nugging. of authenticity. It's very, very difficult, I think, to lie to people over and over and over again about something that you truly don't believe in. And so if you really do want to solve people's problems, if you do want to solve problems of affordability, right, abundance has a

theory of how to do that, Democratic socialism has a theory of how to do that, but at least there's a clear theory of how to do that, such that I want to go on Leftist's podcast and talk about my ideas. And Mamdani wants to go on conservative podcasts and talk about his ideas, because he actually has what he considers a diagnosis and prognosis to the most important. problem of our time. That is what's important to me, the ability to be specific and clear about ideas you have to solve the problems that people are actually feeling. It's only getting every customer's order right. It's only a point of sale system connected by spectrum fiber-powered business internet, helping you track hundreds of secure transactions. And it's all backed by 24-7

US-based customer support and local technicians. It's only everything. Get business internet advantage free forever when you get four mobile lines from Spectrum. Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to find out how. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. Willid, Mamdani kind of moved away from defund the police because it was a controversial term. He's faced a lot of blowback around this phrase, globalized the intifada, which he has said he does not use. He does not embrace violence.

He denounce his violence. But he's sort of unwilling to critique the phrase in a way that has drawn. a lot of negative attention. And I'm just curious as to why what you think that means, like, what you take away from that, what is it meant to say to his supporters? Why does he seem unwilling to kind of give there? When on a phrase like, say, defund the police, he's been more willing to kind of move. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really complicated dilemma.

I think the reason why he's taken the position he has is, because of Donald Trump's crackdown on anti-war, pro-Palestinian activists in universities and communities all across the country who are being picked up for op-eds or things that they've written or protests they've attended, including people like Mahmoud Khalil, including professors and grad students at Columbia

and Georgetown and other places around the country that Zoran doesn't want to add to that sort of crackdown on people's free speech. You know, he's also someone, I don't think he's used the term. I don't think he thinks it's a strategic term. His father is the literal professor who's written books about things like

when the American media uses scary Arabic terms that mean one thing for one community and mean something else when it's deployed in American or in this case, Jewish context. You know, if you go on Wikipedia right now and type an intifada, you'll find probably 10,000 intifada most of which have nothing to do with Israel or the Jewish people.

But, you know, in the context of politics and in communications when you're explaining you're losing oftentimes. And so I think this is a complicated thing for him. And, you know, I will say that part of it, part of the person beating, the person on the media beating the drum about this is Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League, who engages in a lot of defamation of Muslims and Arabs and even, you know, Jews who are critical of Israel. And so I don't think Jonathan Greenblatt is going to be happy with Zoron at any point in his

political career. And so it just feels like sometimes there will be one controversy. here and then there'll be another one. But it will be something that Zoran has to navigate through his political career in New York. Like, I don't know, you know, I don't see a situation where the ADO or Jonathan, Jonathan Greenblatt will ever be happy with Zoran, given Zoran's positions on U.S. policy toward Israel. No, I know. I feel conflicted about being conflicted about this myself, because I can't stand the way Jonathan Greenblatt has been weaponizing anti-Semitism. I find it, I find it disgraceful. He's become like a tool of the Trump.

administration in being willing to entertain what Trump is doing to crack down on Harvard and Columbia and other schools. And so this is sort of, I think, what's interesting is I hear what you're saying. And a place where I think that the kind of pro-Palestinian movement has gained a lot of ground is by saying, hey, we're not going to privilege feelings about words over what is an ongoing atrocity in Gaza. What is an ongoing, what is an ongoing, systematic abuse, murder, war crimes against an innocent people. Feelings should not be so important. But I don't think the phrase is useful because I think we need to be building as big a coalition

as possible to be against Netanyahu, to be against ethnic cleansing in Gaza. And as someone who wants to see the success of this movement, I don't use the term. And I would encourage other people not to use it while understanding that we all have to come together to fight back against what Israel is doing in Gaza. And I want to understand why saying that seems like a concession. Yeah, I think you raise good points. I think we're also in just uncharted territory where I don't think there's ever been someone from the pro-Palestinian movement or a Muslim or an Arab at this level of political power in as Jewish of a demographic as Zoran. And so, you know, we're like in the transition period right now where, you know, nobody ever has raised the

question about like when Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo, you know, parade around with a thousand Israeli flags a year after war crimes, like what if that would make Muslims uncomfortable or Arabs uncomfortable or is that Islamophobic? And I think what will end up happening because of Zoran's passion and convictions on this issue is that something akin to the more perfect union speech of Barack Obama in 2008 in response to the manufactured controversy over Jeremiah Wright's remarks like if he wants to be mayor of the city at some point he will need to articulate. I don't know how speeches do in today's information environment, but something along the lines that is able to bring people together that isn't just a sound bite or a clip.

I think Zoron feels really deeply about this stuff. I think Brad feels really deeply about this stuff. And I would hope they would be able to build something that isn't just like a media hit on NBC, but something that's really thoughtful about, you know, this has never been done in American politics is build this coalition between someone like Brad and someone like Zoron. And so I think it's happening in live time. And I don't see it going anywhere else, but some sort of big kind of thing like that that articulates his vision on the issue. But he wants to deal, he wants to be known as the affordability candidate and the person who's fighting for

working class New Yorkers. And I, I don't imagine that speech will happen in the next, you know, few weeks. Derek, you've talked about there being kind of a connection, a thread. from this, I think, often heightened and hyperbolic debate on what is a deeply sensitive issue in New York to some of the more policy-oriented debates around governing a progressive place like New York, right? When you have to pick a fight with your own side or when you have to hold the line to prove your kind of bona fides to keep your coalition together, whether it's activists on a college campus or kind of public sector unions. I'm just curious what you think about this. I think Mamdani has shown some extraordinary promise on the campaign trail and in conversations

on television and on podcasts. That said, those are just words. How is he going to be as an executive of the mayor of New York City? I have no idea. And the truth is, I'm not sure that anyone should have like a really, really clear idea of how great of an executive he's going to be because this is like, this is not like. a job that he's previously had. I was talking to Nate Silver about this yesterday on a substack podcast. And the analogy they came up with there is like, and of course you were. And of course

you were. But like, tell me if this lands or not. Like in sports scouting, right, in NFL scouting, for example, sometimes there's a quarterback who's drafted in the first round, who's played very few games in college. But the promise that they show in those few games is electric. Like the combination of skills that they have is like something that nobody's ever scene. They can throw the football further than anybody that's ever been tested at the combine. They're faster than anybody that's ever been tested at the combine. But how many reps do they actually have under center? Very, very few. You should have an enormous amount of uncertainty about what exactly this person is going to be like when they become the leader of an NFL team. And that is

fundamentally how I feel about Zoroamdani. He has a combination of communicative skills and political instincts that I think seem really quite special. But running New York City is not about choosing the right words in the right moments in front of the right cameras and mics. New York City is an unbelievably complex organism and he has to put people around him, I think, like Brad, who really understand how to work the buses, how MTA works, how the interplay between state government and city government works. I'm really interested to see who he surrounds himself with on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm interested to see who he's willing to disappoint. I think running New York City or really any political job.

I mean, you saw this maybe in the White House. Politics is harder than campaigning. It requires making trade-offs and disappointing people that you promised certain things when you were campaigning for that job. And I do think the Mundani is going to have to ultimately disappoint some people in large part because a lot of his policies are incredibly expensive. and they require a buy-in from state government that might not be forthcoming. They might require taxes that are very, very difficult to raise.

I mean, already New York City spends more per capita than any city in the country. New York State spends more per capita than any city or state in the country. I personally would not go into a situation like this thinking that what ails New York is an insufficient amount of money being spent. I think it's more about the way the money is being spent. That requires a level of bureaucratic sophistication and understanding of the city's levers and buttons that I just don't know that he has. I will say this, though, that one of the risks, I think, of being very, very clear about dramatic promises like free buses or freeze the rent, which may happen and may not happen.

One of the risks is that people are going to remember memorable slogans, and they might judge you on what you remember. And I think that if you're going to have a campaign that is fundamentally turning politics into meme, turning policy into meme, which I think Mamdani has done very successfully, the fact that you've created memorable policy means that people will remember it and they will judge you by whether or not you succeeded and what you said you're going to do. I think that Mamdani has put a lot of really, really ambitious policies on the table, and I don't know if he's going to be able to do them all. But I do think that if he's seen as being incapable of getting his ambitious. agenda through, a lot of people who stood up behind him are going to be disappointed that they felt promised one thing by Mamdani the candidate and disappointed by Mamdani the mayor. This is not like a critique of making bold promises. I think people should. It's just a prediction that running a

city like this is very, very hard. And I don't know whether or not he is both a brilliant campaigner and a brilliant bureaucratic mind. One way in which being a phenomenal campaigner and candidate does make governing easier is it was clear as we headed into election day. who do I feel is going to be able to assemble a more competent and diverse team of professionals who are interested in serving New York? It's Mom Donnie over Cuomo. Who the fuck would want to work for Andrew Cuomo? A lot of smart people want to work for Mom Doni. There's another part of this too, though. I mean, I interviewed Zoran, and what I came away from that conversation thinking is, well, if someone who's coming from the assembly who's younger than me by too much,

He's going to succeed as mayor of New York. How is that possible? Well, he's really fucking smart and he's going to have a great team of people around him. And he's also genuinely, you know, Waleed, you talked about how passionate he is about a lot of the issues. He's also thoughtful and curious and interested in critiques, right? Another thing that can help him succeed in governing. And one thing people had noticed, I'm going to move on to abundance, is over the course of the campaign, he seemed to be more open to some of the ideas from from the abundance wing of the party.

He was talking more about the need to look at reforming the government, looking for places where money is being spent poorly. He talked about the need to build private sector housing. I asked him directly if he was abundance-pilled. He didn't say yes, but he talked about how much he was drawing from some of the ideas in the book. Lelid, you wrote in the nation this piece about how to kind of fuse these two sides of kind of the policy.

debate on the left together. But I thought I would just ask you first, what in your mind is, I'm presuming this audience has heard a lot about abundance. If that's wrong, put it in the comments. They're mentally ill. And we all are. And we all are. The 5% of voters who know what abundance versus populism means. They're all here. And they're all here. Here we are. But I just wanted to just before we get to the way to bring them together. What in your mind is the kind of best good faith critique from the left of abundance? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, there are people on, I mean, the online version versus the offline version, I think is of this debate is, can be commented on because a lot of the people in the abundance wing were taking a bit of a victory lap. But what I'll say about Zoron to your

earlier point, then get to abundance is just before Americans used the word, electable to describe a politician. The word previously in the 19th century was available. And I just think that's like such a good word to describe Zoron is like, is he available to different kinds of factions or wings or ideology or constituencies, including abundance, including maybe Bradlander's constituency. And I think that kind of describes his politics as like is this, I think he's trying to convey a sense of availability to different kinds of factions, particularly because he comes from, you know, the socialist Bernie and AOC faction. To your point, about abundance yeah I think the best faith criticism of abundance is that that the

number one issue in our country is not red tape or bureaucracy or you know issues of technocracy the number one issue in our country is the concentration of wealth and power at the top of our society three men owning 50% of the wealth of the country and that like it is a philosophy that is going to be unable to deal with the actual huge power imbalances and wealth imbalances in our country and that like it is fundamentally naive about that sort of stuff. I'm also sympathetic to some of the abundance critiques of populism as well, so that was part of my piece is that I think it does a good agitation of where I come from, which isn't the more populist wing of the party. But like to me,

even being in politics like whether it's Comcast in Philadelphia or Spectrum Internet in New York City or Amazon in Seattle, that there are all these kinds of corporate actors in blue cities, blue states that are actively trying to crush the redistribution of wealth or power and are also exploiting loopholes in our bureaucracy or attack system for their own private gain. And I think that the good faith critique of abundance of that downplay some of that kinds of important things. happening in our politics and our economy. And Derek, what is your response to that critique? My response to that critique is that I hear that critique coming from a political philosophy that I would think of as left populism or anti- oligarchy politics. And it is not my politics. I believe in a politics that's more oriented around a concept of liberalism that doesn't fear corporate power

specifically, but fears abuse of power wherever it comes from. Corporations build apartments that people live in. They also withhold wages. They do good and they do bad. They build solar power plants and they also, if they're oil and gas companies, sometimes lobby against the construction of solar farms, I should say. You look in politics. On the one hand, socialism seeks to concentrate significantly more power in politics. And yet we currently live. in an environment where Donald Trump is also trying to concentrate power in the executive branch in a way that is allowing him to investigate the richest man in the world for possible deportation. That's an example of power situated in government being used against the oligarchy.

You look at the fact that, for example, you would never necessarily think of like a group of people coming together to agitate for some kind of reform in their neighborhood as being necessarily bad. But NIMBY is where it exists, the Not in My Backyard movement, is precisely power located in a group of people, typically rich homeowners who come together and say that we don't want changes in the physical world present in the world around us. And for that reason, we're going to vote against or agitate for our representatives to vote against new housing construction in a way that drives up housing costs and forces middle and lower income people to move out of those cities. So it's not that I can't see corporate abuse of power, but rather I'm more interested in a political philosophy that looks for abuse of power wherever power is pooling. Sometimes power is pooling at the corporate level. Sometimes it's pooling at the level of a bunch of neighbors getting together and saying, I just don't want more low-income people moving into this area.

And so I'm going to tell my mayor or my city council no on new. affordable housing development in the place where I live. That's how I try to see the world as this really messy place where we should be sensitive to abuses of power wherever it accumulates and that attitude I think requires letting go of this idea that the boogeyman in our society and I'm not trying here to simplify Wally's point but it means letting go I think of this idea that the most important and most dangerous bogeyman of society are always corporations. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. And I think seeing reality clearly

means being freed of this idea, of this necessity to look at every problem and hunt and hunt until you find a way to blame that problem on corporate power. So it's interesting because I sometimes can't tell if what this is is at root a disagreement of emphasis, right, which is a kind of almost political and aesthetic disagreement, right? Like, and I, and this is a big part of democratic politics. Like, the aesthetics of Barack Obama and the aesthetics of Bernie Sanders are very, very different. Their emphasis is very, very different. But I'm trying to understand where the policies actually disagree. While Leeds talking about the need to focus on the concentration of wealth, I saw a lot of kind of snarky comments, basically when, as, you know, Republicans are about

to try to pass this bill to undo a ton of renter. renewable energy projects and people are saying, oh, wow, we really need to focus on public sector unions and environmental groups for how they stand in the way of progress, basically mocking the idea that our problem has to do with, you know, left interest groups when the right is causing all of this pain. But when you drill down to it, what, and maybe we'll lead this is about what you're talking, what you wrote about in your piece, like, other than emphasis, isn't most of the, of this places where like we could just pursue these agendas in tandem, people who believe

there are certain problems where corporate concentration is the thing. And equality is the thing. There are places where that's just not true. The thing in the way of passing an affordable housing bill in New York was not the five richest human beings on earth. It was a bunch of different organizations, environmental groups and others trying to stand up for this law. So I'm just, I'm just curious what your kind of way of putting these two things together is.

I think there's such a combination. of a bunch of different strands of things that are all getting wrapped together in a way that is not very productive. And so one is like the kind of moderate versus progressive divide in the Democratic Party, which will play out in Congress

and Capitol Hill in elections and primaries of where abundance and where populism lies and that kind of conflict. I think a lot of people are upset about this welcome fest event and some of the more moderate Democrats who tend to dunk on the left

being also branded as abundance. The other piece of this is like If you go back to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign versus Bernie Sanders, and I'm sorry to bring us all back there, like it was the Hillary Clinton campaign arguing that Bernie Sanders was reigniting the kind of sexism and racism of the New Deal and not like thinking too much about, not thinking hard enough about the ways that these kind of universal programs don't have regulations or don't have specializations on how to deal with things like race and class and gender in an intersectional way. And now, like, for some reason in 2025, we've kind of gone the reverse end of that, which is somehow that it's the more moderate abundance camp saying that some of these regulations that try to deal with anti-racism or feminism or these kinds of things are actually harmful. And so it just feels very tricky to parse out what we're actually talking about. But on the ideas level, I do think that the best of the American tradition of the New Deal was a combination that FDR's New Deal, LaGuardia's New Deal in New York City was a combination of some of the ideas.

is that Derek and Ezra, sorry, I'll just say Derek and Derek, it's because of Gavin Newsom, that Derek has put out in his book. And with like a populist critique of that there is a concentration of wealth and working people are being squeezed. I am fundamentally interested in outcomes for working people. You know, I've had friends who've worked in city government who say like part of the part of what happens is that each individual city councilor in New York City wants to take a piece of a program and then go back to their constituencies and say, I got this one thing in this program, which required them to do, you know, something in 30 languages. And that was like my little prize that I can now show my voters and say I got delivered on.

Like instead of the actual program itself, like that is like an abundance kind of critique that I agree with. And I've seen happen on the level. I just think that there is the way that this will play out in like factional donor electoral politics, I think is going to be interesting. But on the ideas level, I think they're not diametrically opposed to each other that they actually can go hand in hand. Let me make an observation here, which is that I really do think, I'm a very agreeable person. I don't like fighting. That said, I do think that there are differences between populism and abundance liberalism that are worth

fighting over, right? I don't want to freeze the rent. I would prefer to begin, I would prefer to pursue a policy that I talked with Mom Doni about that they're doing in Jersey City, where they're making it easier for private developers to build apartment units that also have below market units inside of those apartment buildings, but fundamentally it's about removing blockages and expediting permitting to allow private development to build where it has to build. That's how I would prefer to deal with our housing shortage. There are people in the left who don't want to deal with it that way at all. They think one of the most important problems is the concentration of home builders, which is something I frankly do not think is a problem at all.

They're often very critical of private development. They often want to create a much bigger role for public housing for increasing government spending, which is not something that I'm against in the biggest picture, but also I think in a place like New York, which is already spending more than any city per capita. It's hard to say that what ails a city like that is insufficient spending. There are serious policy differences, I think, between the middle and the center, between the middle and the left that are worth fighting over. That said, that said,

the schism that is most interested in me in the last three months or three and a half months since the book came out is a schism that I've called the poster politician divide. If all I did is just look at the response to abundance among left-wing posters on Twitter or blue sky, I would think that there is no one

on the progressive coalition that's interested in working with me on these ideas. But when I talk to my Donnie about private development and the lessons of everything big of liberalism that he wants to apply to his maybe future cabinet in New York, there's a ton of agreement. Rokana is one of the biggest Medicare for all advocates in America. I'm not a particularly strenuous Medicare for all guy. Nonetheless, we agree about a lot when it comes to making it easier to build homes and making

government work for people. There's a lot of politicians that I've had both on the record conversations on. that I just said, Mamdani and Kana, and a lot of politicians I've had off the record conversations with who say there's tons of ideas and abundance that we can sort of sew into our politics because fundamentally, if left-wing politics is going to be about adding government functions,

you had damn well better show that government can function in the first place. And so you need some theory of making government work to show the public. When we get power, we discharge it in a way that improves your life, now let us have power to do this other thing we think is important. Those are important dots to connect. So I think it's important to say that while on the one hand there are fights to have, there are debates to have, and I think some of those debates are like really, really worthy,

it's also the case that the level of animosity that some people see, if they just pull up Twitter, does not reflect the kind of conversations that are happening off Twitter between folks in the abundance world and folks in the left at levels of actual power and electives. Yeah. Well, to the point you made earlier around, we've never had someone like Mom Dani in this position of authority before, some of this does feel a little bit like what it means to go from being kind of a rebellion to being in power. And specifically on like an issue, say, like public sector unions, when you're on the outside fighting an establishment that has tried to,

to undermine public sector unions, make public sector unions a boogeyman for a long time, your posture is going to be, that's not our problem. Our problem are these corporate donors. The problem is a super PAC that's about to dump another $30 million on Mondani's head. But when you're in power, right, you've got to negotiate a deal and you've got to demonstrate that government can be effective. And it's no longer about kind of holding the line to prove that you're willing to fight. It's about actually governing.

And I'm just curious if you feel like this is now the left having to kind of embrace a new place from being on the outside to being on the inside. I mean, one of the things why I think this race is so important is that the center and center left should chill out a little bit and let the left win and govern in some places so that we can mature into having to actually like deal with some of the questions of governance. Like, the number of, like, leftists or socialists in elected positions are, you know, look at Congress. Maybe there's, like, seven members of the squad right now in the Senate. There's one senator who describes themselves a socialist. There aren't that many, like, socialist or left-wing mayors in the country. So I think, like, this will be in the same way that so many progressives and leftists went from things like Occupy Wall Street into the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. like this is a growth of that trajectory of a maturing mostly millennial generation,

like entering the formal realms of politics and having to deal with the questions that you're describing of how to navigate their vision and their ideology and their values versus the practical and pragmatic senses of governing for everyone and not just the people who elected you are the ideas you believe in. And so, you know, I think I think the, I think Derek is right that there are real debates. I'm pro real debates, especially debates about economy. It would be great if Democrats were debating these things openly, like a rent freeze versus building housing versus doing both. That's a much healthier. That's a healthy debate. I think our party needs and our party is pretty conflict diverse around these things. But yeah, I think the left, one of the beautiful things about Mamdani's campaign is we will see if

the next, if Mamdani is elected in the next four years are better than Eric Adams, that what, or better than what Andrew Cuomo was planning to do, which I don't know what he was planning to do as mayor of New York. But yeah, I think we need more of these opportunities for this generation to be not expelled or exiled from Democratic Party politics, but allowed to govern in some areas, particularly in some of the bluest areas in the country. Can I ask a question? Yeah.

Yeah. Willey. Maldane is a socialist who I think is very likely to be the next mayor of New York. Do you expect him to govern as a socialist? I think he, well, some of the socialist things that he's ran on, like rent-free or buses or grocery stores. I imagine he will do those things, but his coalition will have to grow. He is not going to appoint only people from the TSA to his administration, if that's what you're asking. And I also think, like, it'll be extremely difficult for Zoron to be able to agree with every single socialist position or DSA position in the next four years.

Like, they will, that is not going to be, you know, one is an activist organization on the outside. The other one is trying to be mayor of a very diverse, complicated city. So we will, I think we'll see. That's a great place to leave this debate. I'm just thinking, you know, I'm sitting here in the crooked studio. And, you know, we went through, it was fascinating over a year or so to go through a unionization here at this company, right? Which is something that starts out rhetorically, right, in both directions. But then comes to the table and becomes a conversation about details and facts.

And it's not always easy. but I feel like we all kind of came out the other side of that, having kind of learned a lot. And the kind of conversations that were happening at the end were very different than the ones that happened at the beginning, in part because a lot of the people at that table had never been part of any kind of negotiating like that before. I know that's seeing. I'm getting a good enough. My mic's still working. So it was fine that I said it.

Before we go, we're getting the union to say, you can't talk about our contract on air. I don't know. I never know what I'm allowed to do. I just, you know, I know I'm not allowed to use AI unless nobody's looking. That's the one thing I know for sure. Before we let you go, it's July 4th. We want to end just with a kind of a debatable opinion. Where are we hot dog people?

Are we hamburger people? I make hamburgers from scratch with kebab spices in them. Hot dogs usually are like often with pork in them, so I can't eat those as much. But I make kebab, you know, it's, this is mom donnie's New York now, so now I got to put I got to spice up my hamburgers. You know what? It's Mdani's New York, but Hebrew Nationals were here before, and they'll be here after. Derek, what about you?

What about you? I make hamburgers from whatever the opposite of scratch is. I buy them as is and throw them right on the grill, but it's hamburgers for me over hot dogs, yeah, despite my Jewish lineage. Derek Wille, it was really good talking to both of you. It was a great conversation.

Thank you so much for joining center, center, left, left. And we'll see you next time, or maybe we won't. We'll see how this edits. Thanks so much. A text says, you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800 Flowers says, you're my everything.

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