It Could Happen Here - GlobeCon: The New Liberals Take on DSA

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Garrison travels to Washington D.C. to attend the New Liberal Action Summit, an annual conference put on by a group of young center-left policy wonks who went from posting memes about neoliberalism to building an organization to counter the DSA. Sources: https://cnliberalism.org/posts/nlas-2026 https://nlas.cnliberalism.org/schedule https://www.politico.com/newsletters/massachusetts-playbook/2025/01/14/auchincloss-take-on-the-tiktok-case-00198039 https://apnews.com/article/technology-science-oddities-israel-massachusetts-11b4dc6e42afd2d68be28dedf86fd25a https://www.newtonbeacon.org/protesters-call-out-auchincloss-on-palantir-executive-donations/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/11/08/neoliberals-millenials-genz/ https://www.cjr.org/covering_the_election/center-new-liberalism-cnl-jeremiah-johnson.php https://cnliberalism.org/posts/press-release-greg-schultz-joins-center-for-new-liberalism-as-senior-advisorhttps://www.progressivepolicy.org/release-young-neoliberals-link-up-with-ppi/ https://cnliberalism.org/posts/new-website-newish-name https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/upshot/poll-democrats-times-siena.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/us/mamdani-nyc-voters-election-demographics.htmlhttps://dockish.com/analysis.html https://www.cnn.com/election/2025/exit-polls/new-york-city/general/mayor/0https://www.michaellange.nyc/p/the-mamdani-coalition-goes-national?r=e53xe&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=truehttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/us/politics/michigan-primary-election-results-what-next.htmlhttps://x.com/BayAreaNewLibs/status/2020215361573122556?s=20See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO, rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters,

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And listen now. All Zone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. The past few weeks I've been covering the midterm primaries and the battle between the left and the establishment for the future of the Democratic Party. As evidence just this month in Michigan and Wisconsin, left populism continues to be on the rise. A few weekends ago, the Democratic Socialists of America held their national organizing conference, the Socialist Summit, in Chicago, Illinois. I did not attend the Socialist Summit.

because instead I wanted to check in on the other side of the aisle. So last month, I went down to Washington, D.C., to attend the new liberal action summit. Or, as it's affectionately referred to by attendees, GlobeCon, named after the blue globe emoji used by liberals on Twitter, symbolizing globalism, free trade, free market capitalism, liberal immigration, and yimbiaism. The new liberal action summit was a three-day event with one main conference day, filled with panels featuring policymakers, fireside chats with liberal politicians, and networking opportunities for young liberals who share a passion for center-left policies.

I went to eight of the 14 panels. One of the first panels was on energy policy, featuring two former politicians turned fossil fuel lobbyists. Next, Representative Don Byer spoke about the need for AI regulation. A panel of policy advisors discussed why, quote-unquote, sloppulist tax proposals are stupid. Representative Richie Torres promoted abundance. Congressional representatives from the New Democrat Coalition had a panel about how their caucus is fighting back against DSA. And I listened in to a live recording of Francis Fukuyama's podcast.

Abundance was probably one of the most frequently used words at the conference. There was a big focus on building housing, zoning reform, permit streamlining, and a lot of speakers were nervous about the growing anti-tech backlash and the public support for data center moratoriums. Interestingly, most panelists and attendees were impressed by Zora Mamdani's reign thus far, but still very oppositional to stuff like, like wealth taxes, the rent-frees, populism in general, DSA as an organization, and their other candidates. About 300 Libs attended the summit last July. They mostly ranged between their

early 20s to late 30s. These are econ, polysci and law students, young professionals, campaign staffers, influencers, policy wonks, and aspiring policy walks. Just as the use of the blue globe emoji online was in response to socialists identifying themselves online via the red rose emoji, this whole conference and the org behind it is a response from young-ish liberals to rising populism in the United States and especially the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party. The New Liberal Action Summit is put on by an organization called the Center for New Liberalism, or CNL. CNL is a nonprofit 501C4

quote, digital first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the age it is most under attack, according to their website. At the summit, they were giving out CNL stickers, which they sell on their website for $5,

One of the stickers reads, quote, We believe in economic growth through free markets, a robust social safety net, the free flow of people and goods, deregulating barriers to housing and employment, immediate criminal justice reform, a tech-optimist society, a tax on carbon, freedom regardless of gender, age, race, religion, or sexual orientation, pragmatism over populism. C.N.Liberalism.org. forward slash join. The Center for New Liberalism claims to have about 11,000 members and 50 local chapters in cities across the U.S. Though, according to their website, C&L's private Slack channel has just about 700 dues-paying members of the organization. In contrast, DSA is about 120,000 dues-paying members.

During the summit, I spoke with C&L's deputy director Tobin Stone, and he told me that the Center for New Liberalism is specifically intending to serve as a counterweight to the DSA. Stone said that the populist right has their own little organizations like TPPUSA, the populist left has the DSA, and the Center for New Liberalism wants to be both a political, organizational force, as well as a social body. for young, center-left liberals who believe in, quote-unquote, lower-case-L liberalism

to meet with each other, organize, and advance their ideas. Stone did admit that most moderate Democrats are kind of dropping the ball right now. The Republicans are super unpopular and voters are expressing all these things around affordability, but moderate Dems have failed to seize this moment. There is a big window open for Democrats, and really the only people taking it are the What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, no, we can be central-left moderate, whatever we want to call us, but actually have a real agenda that excites people and offers an alternative to what the DSA is saying.

Because none of these, a lot of these current moderates, like, in some ways we'd rather have them than a DSA person at the same time. Like, the moderates can't just be sitting there doing nothing. They have to, like, be willing to take on the fights, like, fight the NIMBY's and build more housing because young people can't afford housing anymore. So that's what we're trying to do is, like, be a counterweight and offer. A real alternative. About two years ago, C&L deputy director Tobin Stone told the Columbia Journalism Review,

quote, were Hillary Clinton Democrats, basically? Now, that was two years ago. But last month, I asked Stone, what kind of politicians does CNN want to see taking power? Say federally, like, you see people like Jake Ockin-Gloss. I think when people hear him talk, they're residents. Like, he's incredibly smart and he knows how to talk to people about the issues that they're not about. Jake Ockengloss headlined C&L's opening reception on the first day of the summit. Ackinclos is a congressional rep from Massachusetts and a former Marine.

After Zornamamandani won the Democratic primary last June, Akengloss wrote a blog post on Substack reading, Neither Democratic socialism nor crony capitalism will deliver financial freedom. I propose a 10-word agenda for financial freedom for the middle class. Treat cost disease, reduce the debt, and save Social Security, unquote. Earlier this year, his re-election campaign accepted over $25,000 from Palantir, including $7,000 from Palantir's CEO, Alexander Karp. In January 2023, Akken Klaus was the first congressman to read

an entirely chat GPT-generated speech on the House floor. This speech was in support of a bill to create a joint U.S. Israel AI center for the development of AI research. And last year, Akkenklaas told Politico that it's quote unquote readily apparent that TikTok's algorithm is, quote, amplifying anti-American anti-Israel content disproportionate to its actual frequency. Stone told me, quote, we need more people like Jake Ockincloss. And not all of the electeds in this room, but like a lot of the folks here.

But also, what we're trying to do and eventually want to do is like have our chapters be the group that identifies some potential candidates, unquote. Stone also pointed to state rep Jasper Martis, who became friendly with CNL

through the organization's anti-tariff advocacy. We want to see what we we can do as an organization to help elevate what was like him who can be young, charismatic, and without offering an agenda that we think would do more harm than good. Do you see a point where you will not just have to kind of offer an alternative to what the DSA is offering, but in primaries specifically kind of like, like, like, counter them like directly? That is like part of what we want to do is we have always been and will continue to be willing to get directly into those primaries, whether it's supporting someone we already know and work with,

like to be up here today. If someone tries a primary Jake Ongon class, our Boston chapter is absolutely going to be out knocking doors to support him, especially if it's a DSA candidate. But then also, again, long term, we would love to be able to be the group that can identify the candidates who can run against the DSA. We want to do the work to find those young charismatic candidates

and get them to run against the DSA candidate and offer that real return of it. We really just want to see, like, organization than five-year-olds be even bigger. We want to not just be doing this conference here in D.C., but then go over the, all over the country and say, like, we can go in Denver and host a whole conference in Denver with all our members of a chapter and talk about the work of me too

to elevate the pragmatic politics in Colorado or New York or whatever. Like, that's a long-term role. The Center for New Liberalism's annual impact report for the election year of 2024 claimed that the organization made $5,500 in, quote, successful campaign contributions and gained 186 new members. That's 186 new members during the year of a highly impactful presidential election. DSA gained over 7,000 members in just the two months after the 2024 election.

And since then, DSA membership has more than doubled from 50,000 to 120,000 members. Just 10 years ago, DSA had only 5,000 members. Before Bernie Sanders' first presidential campaign, which breathed new life into the organization. But in order to fully understand C&L, you have to understand their deeply online origin, because they essentially internet trolled themselves

into something resembling a real political organization. Center for New Liberalism can be traced back to R-slash-Neo-liberal on Reddit, where, after the 2016 election, a new team of moderators tried to grow the sub-reddit as a place to discuss liberal policymaking and free market economics in response to online conversations

about politics being dominated by populism, whether from MAGA or the rejuvenated socialist left following Bernie's 2016 campaign. These moderators, turned the subreddit into an online community of policy wonks discussing economics, as well as neoliberal shitposting in an attempt to compete in the arena of internet politics and make center-left liberalism cool and memeable. And I don't know about you, but when I think of

cool, the first thing that comes to mind is Reddit memes about liberal free market economics. In 2018, two moderators from the subreddit, Colin Mortimer and Jeremiah, Johnson started to consolidate this loose online community into a real organization called the Neoliberal Project. They started a at-neoliberal Twitter account and launched the neoliberal podcast. All of this neoliberal branding was sort of a troll. At the time and still now, the word neoliberal was mostly used as a pejorative in current political parlance. So the neoliberal project's use of the term was almost this form of slur reclamation. A tongue-in-cheek, semi-ironic, but largely sincere embrace of neoliberal economic policies.

To quote a 2022 article in the Washington Post, quote, Carl Nielsen, a 24-year-old aerospace engineer who leads the D.C. chapter, told me his brother turned him onto this neoliberal community a few years ago, and he was immediately smitten. Quote, I was like, dude, this is it. This is where we belong. The memes were fantastic. They were doing a neoliberal shill bracket,

which is a Twitter tournament where you vote to determine who's the chief neoliberal shill. That was really easy to get excited about, so I jumped right in, unquote. The neoliberal shill bracket on Twitter is like a March Madness style bracket for Twitter users to rank which politicians, columnists, lobbyists, or influencers

are the biggest neoliberal shill of the year. This basically amounts to standing figures like Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, Nate Silver, and the streamer Destiny. The Washington Post described the organization as being on, quote, a quest to bring market-friendly moderation into the age of internet meme politics, unquote. In 2020, the neoliberal project was absorbed into a centrist think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. In the announcement, Will Marshall, the president of PPI, said that the young liberals, quote, fill a vacuum in our politics for a pragmatically liberal alternative to right-wing

populism and democratic socialism. Colin Mortimer, the neoliberal project's executive director, is quoted in the announcement, saying, over the last several years, we have built the neoliberal project into an online community of politically engaged young individuals who are pushing back against the ideological extremes that put our country in peril. Now we are proud to join one of the most storied think tanks in the country as we develop and advocate for a radically pragmatic agenda for change, our country so urgently needs, unquote. A quick note on the Progressive Policy Institute. PPI was founded in the late 80s by the Democratic Leadership Council,

when the word progressive referred to center-left pragmatism, as opposed to the modern connotation of the term, as used by left-wing progressives today. In the 90s, PPI functioned as the idea factory of the Clinton administration. and was a big part of the shift in the Democratic Party away from New Deal, great society, redistributive liberalism towards the neoliberal politics

of maximizing economic growth that defined the Clinton era. Soon after joining PPI, the neoliberal project rebranded into the Center for New Liberalism, displaying some awareness of the massive unpopularity of neoliberalism, and that it is a lot of,

it might actually be pretty hard to grow a political project under such a banner. C&L co-founder Jeremiah Johnson, who also hosts the New Liberal podcast, told the Columbia Journalism Review that neoliberal is a great word to use, quote, when what you want to do is get in fights on the internet, but it turned out to be less great for recruiting Congress people to their cause. Two years after joining PPI, the central for New Liberalism started doing their annual New Liberal Action Summit. 2026 was the fifth year of Globecon. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote in 2024

that the Center for New Liberalism is, quote, Biden's fighters in the meme trenches, doing what they can to make his brand of politics trendy again, unquote. Hey, I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Oncore. Check out our brand new episode. Featres featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak. Heated rivalry. Join me as I go behind the songs that brought Shane and Elia together.

I'll tell you the stories of Fice, My Moon, My Man, wolf parades, I'll believe in anything, and tattoos all the things she said, and how they all became a part of this global phenomenon. Stream encore on IHeart Radio, Crave, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know. We know them, Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast.

Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here.

You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. I thought he was going to write. I thought you're all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stillard. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere too, right?

What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured. some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves Mouthins. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great.

I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachy Sobiesky. Yeah, I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that.

Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin. Why are you guys talking? to me like, why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here.

Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. If you come over here to play games, I'm a little. check you. Okay? If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'm gonna play you. Join Yomeneika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast. You're the problem with Yamanika.

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The past few years, the Center for New Liberalism has tried to legitimize itself beyond its Reddit shit posting and humble Twitter-troll beginnings. Earlier this year, C&L brought on Greg Schultz as a senior. advisor. Schultz was the campaign manager for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential primary campaign and general election strategist. One of the aspirations for the new liberals is helping to secure a center-leaning candidate for president in 2008. One of our big goals is definitely to influence who are an express. And maybe there ends up being a more compromised candidate, or I don't know what we're saying any compromise is the wrong word, but like, you're just a seeing right now, like, a lot of people are gravitating

towards Ossoff if he does end up running. Like, people like, um, but we would rather not see, like, a further left candidate. And we also want to see the platform that we run on in 2020, is not, I mean, isn't that sometimes you have to have a little bit of possible. It's kind of, like, sloppily easy right now.

We're just like, oh, cut everyone's taxes. Like, we want to see, like, a real concrete platform that doesn't overpromise, can be enacted and can maybe repair people's hope in government again. Senator Bennett talked about it earlier or alluded to it, but like people don't feel like government works anymore, so we want to make sure that the agenda in 2020 is one about making government work again.

Obviously, we have to workshop that message and figure out what it's going to appeal to the American people the most. Obviously, we're fighting the DSA. We are aware they're going to exist in America. They are a part of the global climate. We don't want to take them all away. But we also, like, think it will be extremely harmful if they're in the driver's seat.

They should absolutely have input, but like, if they're in the driver's seat, the presidential election, like, we're going to lose again. And we want to make sure that we win, because obviously if we lose again to Donald Trump or whoever his heir is, like, it's not going to be great for America or the rest of international institutions.

I mean, I think some of those DSA people would look at centrist candidates going up against Trump in, like, 16, 24, or like, you know, more center-le-level. leaning. That would be very hesitant to call either of those centrist or even center left. Like, if you look at the exit polling data from 2024, 24, everyone thought Kamala is much further, like, from the center than Trump, which is partially good at marketing, but like, yeah. I mean, there's, no, it was not center. Like, you ask anyone in this room who's worked for, we all work for a central left, modern organization. We all, so come that was not center left.

There's a reason we lost in this because of Democrats, or voters thought we were too far to lever. Not mean true part of a little, too far to live. of touch. I think that's a good right, right. I think it's really important to understand that too far left and too out of touch are vastly different things. And secondly, what is considered quote unquote left is not at all clear. Does left refer to left-wing economics, wealth redistribution, or like the sort of performative liberal wokeism that was completely can't. captured by corporations and the elite before being quickly dropped as Trump took back power. Because the recent batch of left-wing populists are running on economic policies to make life more

affordable. Their focus on uplifting workers and the poor would materially improve the lives of large swaths of marginalized populations way more than corporations posting black squares, academic language policing, White House pride events, and Nancy Pelosi wearing a West African kente cloth stole as a scarf. A New York Times poll from May of 26 found that the majority of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independence do not want the party to move to the center on health care or economic issues and should embrace economic populism. According to the Times poll, 63% of likely Dems said our political and economic system needs major changes, and 20% said it needs to be torn down completely.

88% said the economic system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans. 74% of Dems oppose sending aid to Israel. Most respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. 91% had not heard of abundance. only 5% said the economic conditions were good or excellent, and 49% said they were favorable to socialism versus 22% unfavorable. Only 20% of respondents said the Democratic Party was too far to the left, and respondents were evenly split on whether the party in general should move to the center.

But most said that the party should move to the left on things like health care. A frequent topic of discussion at the new liberal action summit was how the Democratic Party can win back, quote-unquote, working-class voters. And a spoiler, they think it's by moving to the center. Something you've talked about that. We've been back a long time. It's winning back the support of non-college voters, working-class voters. We have the new report that showcases how Senate elections are doing much better in that in regards in their progressive counterparts. We do a lot of polling of non-colleors, working-class voters, if you will.

Most of our data says that people that vote degrees are on tend to be heavily-caught-educated, whereas people without degrees voted for a quote-in-law, which the best split lens for working-class is not. I think it's just, has a college degree, just don't have a college degree. The new liberals believe that DSA is out of step with the working class, and by working class, they mean voters without a college degree. Moderates will often point to high-profile races like Zoran or Abdul al-Said, where the more center-leaning candidate often, quote-unquote, wins the non-college or low-income demographic. Now, these wins are often in the single digits.

In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo, quote unquote, won the under 50K a year income bracket by eight points. Cuomo also won the highest income bracket, $250,000 and over, by 11 points, while Mamdani dominated the middle income brackets. Almost this exact same trend appeared in the Abdul al-Said versus Haley Stevens primary in Michigan. Left-wing populist candidates are doing so well with college-educated voters, in part because they're just driving such high turnout, especially among millennials and Gen Z. But center-left liberals will often use the support of DSA from possibly downwardly mobile college graduates

to point towards socialism as this kind of disgruntled elitist phenomenon that's not actually connected with the quote-unquote real working class, which again, to them means a voter without a college degree. and while income level or education can be an indicator of class, just defining working class as meaning a voter without a college degree doesn't really make sense, nor does it tell you anything about the class interests of voters, because it doesn't actually point to anything regarding their place in the capitalist production process. Just whether or not you have a degree doesn't even point to what your income is,

which is itself kind of a flawed way of understanding what working class means, which, in a Marxist sense, refers to whether you live off selling your labor for a wage, that is being a worker, or if you own private property like a business, and make your money off of controlling other people's labor. But all that matters to these liberals is voters' proximity to higher education based on looking at election data where DSA-type candidates do very well with college-educated voters and maybe don't do as well with what is categorized as a non-college educated or maybe sometimes a low-income voter, even if the difference is only a few percentage points.

The liberal analysis of class, simply being whether or not a voter has a college degree, offers no insight into why a middle class of educated workers are moving in droves towards social democracy or some form of democratic socialism and are voting for policies that benefit people largely more poor than them instead of just supporting the center-left Democrat who would advance elite interests. To this point, I talked with Ben Rose Porter,

a professor of sociology at the City University of New York, about why class analysis is important. It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be regarding, you know, the politics when it comes to how should the economy, how should our society be oriented? If you are a worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal. If you are an owner, your interests are going to be geared oppositely.

They're going to be geared oppositely. They're going to be geared. towards capital, towards ownership of private property and the making of profit being protected against the interests of labor. And so this is the conception of class that I think paints a much more lucid picture of the world than one that just sort of treats, you know, the poorer you are, the more working class you are. It's absolutely true that the base of the working class is always the poor, relatively speaking. I mean, the bottom strata of the working class is its source of power, and it's the better paid workers who, while, you know, they are in a theoretical sense in the working class, they often are the ones who are comfortable with capitalist production because they're being compensated fairly well. But again, it's a kind of analysis that can't comprehend.

The liberal view cannot really comprehend how college-educated people who may be securing somewhat, you know, decent middle-class jobs. They can't understand how they are also a part of the working class and respond to the economic, squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy, when capital is so unquestioned by its liberal administrators that it just squeezes the whole of the working class. Yeah, and there's these certain

moments with like technological advance, like you're seeing with like AI that lead to the deskilling of certain workers or the past 20 years. Adults have been telling kids to just learn coding. Work in tech. This is like the last growth area of the economy, learn coding. And now

those skills are not not as useful as they used to be because an AI can do it. And there's this like proletarianization of tech workers happening that just this like liberal model of the working class then can't really understand why wise people are going to maybe turn against liberalism. Capital produces its own gravediggers, Marx rights, in the manifesto, right? That, you know, the socialist project sees that there is a fundamental antagonism in the capitalist mode of production.

Not only in that capital appropriates, exploits, exploits workers, The capital's class survives parasitically by squeezing the worker that's fundamental to the capitalist system. Not only that, but it also is continually growing the working class. It's constantly pushing people out of their positions of property, but also out of positions of skilled labor into having to move down into proletarianized positions where you are not going to be paid as much. And by constantly doing this, it's building a class that goes against it. It's the socialist project which recognizes those antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production. And it is a liberal project that is utterly blind to them, that just to the liberals, no, capitalism is good. It increases GDP, right? It leads to economic growth. These antagonisms do not exist to the extent that you can show them to them.

They absolutely refuse to acknowledge them or else to understand how they are fundamental to the capitalist system. and so they have no answer to this. You can see how these people who are themselves sort of like intellectual, you know, sycophants to the liberal institutions, they perceive like, well, if you're smart and you have the right policies and you believe the right things,

you'll get taken care of. It's a very different experience from, I think, a lot of college grads who have tried very hard to do the right things and who do not have a place in the economy or a very limited place with very limited power and very limited resources. While Andrew Cuomo slightly outperformed Mamdani among the lowest-income voters in the 2025 Democratic primary, come the general election in November, that ceased to be the case.

In the general, Mamdani won low-income districts by 11 points. To quote the New York Times, quote, Mamdani largely expanded on the base he built during the primary in neighborhoods across the city. He swept communities of every income. level, save for New York's wealthiest enclaves where his top opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, performed best. Unquote. In the November general, Mamdani also won districts where less than 20% of the residents have a college degree by 13 points, though a CNN exit poll of less than 5,000 voters showed that Cuomo did just 5% better than Mamdani with voters without a college degree.

I think it is also worth reiterating that one out of 10 people who voted for Zoron in 2025 also voted for Trump in 24. That's something that liberals never talk about. And something else they never talk about is just how much these non-college low-income statistics graph onto age. more than anything else. Both Mamdani and Abdul al-Said overwhelmingly won with voters aged 18 to 45. Young people who are low-income, who maybe have not graduated college, or are in college, or maybe just graduated college, but are still low-income. Those young people are backing DSA candidates. Those young people are not going to Andrew Cuomo in the general election or the primary election. The sort of low-income voters that are going towards either these incumbents or more traditional

moderate candidates are generally older voters. And if we want to have a real discussion on how the DSA can appeal to older voters, maybe voters who are not as politically engaged as younger voters, then yeah, that is a real discussion to be had. But just breaking that down as DSA does not attract low-income voters is just completely not true. Many low-income people without a college degree are old retirees who tend to vote more conservative, even if they're registered Democrats. Another factor is the effectiveness of ad spending. Abdul al-Said was outspent 11 to 1, and that is going to have an effect on the election results. Blanketing the airwaves with misleading attack ads can be hugely impactful in rural areas and districts with low information or

less engaged voters. This same general trend happened in the June 26 Democratic primary in New York City. That election was not divided by income or race. The largest indicator that skewed whether someone was backing the incumbent or the DSA was age. By and large, younger voters, whether they were middle class or lower working class, backed the DSA candidates like Claire Valdez, while older voters backed the incumbents, the moderates, and the establishment politicians that these voters were maybe more familiar with, that maybe has been representing their district for anywhere between five to 30 years. But what makes this whole college-educated working class debate so absurd to me is that most of the city-based Center for New Liberalism chapters don't even seem interested

in trying to appeal to the voters that they think DSA is overlooking. Like, if the DSA can only appeal to the people with a college degree, that's 60, 70% voters. We are missing, and we need to do better. Do you think that the new liberal should be going after, like, a totally different voting block and what DSA is trying to go after? I don't know if that's our role. Like, most of our chapters do operate in cities where it is a more college-educated thing, so our role we view as, like, trying to convince the college-educated people that we have the better ideas in the more optimistic vision. Whereas then it's other groups.

Like, if we have a chapter in a swing district, obviously that's going to be cool. But, like, our chapter in San Francisco is going to be focused on. Not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, I think there are groups in the same stuff that should be doing that. I don't know if it's all. So C&L has already foreclosed themselves to really only going after college-educated voters, despite insisting that their ideas are what actually can appeal to the working class.

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Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast.

Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life.

Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song.

I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes. Those with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride.

He loves Mawba. Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah.

Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachy. Obiaski. I don't think she was an American pie, but I still liked that. Haven't looked it up. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Then Mary Steenbergin.

Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. Why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really. I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nick Tuttle.

You probably know me from NYPD, Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. But I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Toto, I deliver pizza from Prince Street Pizza to a new guest. Are you delivering pizza now? Then we sit down for a real conversation. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins.

What are you doing my belt? To Alex Rodriguez. Just to let you people know, we're talking to one of the goats here. To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind is, I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness.

Delivering happiness. Mariano Rivera. Oh, my God. And many, many more. Open your free high-heart radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. In evaluating the political potential of the Center for New Liberalism,

one must keep in mind how their online shit-posting origins still influences their ideological outlook. If you recall, CNL describes itself as a quote-unquote digital first grassroots organization. And on their website, they claim, quote, our work reaches upwards of 60 million people a month. That number seems to be almost entirely based on the impressions from their account on X the everything app. These are Twitter views. So as much as CNL likes to put on their little in-person networking events, per their own metrics, the organization is essentially a glorified Twitter account.

And I could just go through years of bad or offensive tweets. And many people at the summit were very concerned about old tweets made by DSA candidate Dariusa of Ila Chavier. But rather than focusing on posting, I would prefer to engage with the actual substance of their politics. and how CNL is trying and failing to place itself in opposition to the DSA in part because of how much it's focused on online edge lord contrarian liberalism. For whatever reason, be it their upbringing, class position, or type of education,

these liberals have not hopped on the populist train, but still feel left out from the rest of their age peers who are all having fun with DSA, and so they have decided to define themselves in opposition to populism. It's a reactionary liberalism in response to the growing influence of democratic socialism in the Democratic Party. So in effect, their new liberal politics largely manifests itself as a form of contrarianism against popular left-wing policies, while also continuously reiterating to themselves that left-wing ideas aren't actually popular with the working class. It's a politics entirely downstream from trolling online

in an attempt to make center-left liberals cool again. I went to a bar after the summit with a few of the attendees, and a law student was passionately trying to argue why we should abolish FEMA as a federal agency and just have states pay for their own disaster response so that, quote unquote, my tax dollars won't have to go towards idiots in Florida. And like, both myself and a writer

from the journal Liberal Currents had to explain from like first principles why it's good to care for poor people and care about a general public good. That's what I mean by contrarian liberalism. The Bay Area chapter of the new liberals were involved with that pro-billionaire march in San Francisco earlier this year in protest of California's proposed wealth tax. And stunts like this march for billionaires is another perfect example of CNL's overly online

irony-poisoned politics, which still display a deeper sincerity. Before I interviewed Professor Porter, I had him listen to a recent, episode of the new liberal podcast hosted by the co-founder of CNL Jeremiah Johnson. The episode argued that liberalism is in crisis, but because there is no more great struggle in America. Basically, the economy is doing too good, and that's triggered a sort of postmodern crisis of meaning, resulting in voters sabotaging our own political system just to feel something. And confusingly, C&L's co-founder proposes a centrist neoliberal technocracy as a way out of this crisis. The guy on the podcast is talking about technocrats and how one of the central liberal programs of like a revived liberalism has to be like kind of, you know, technocratic politics and a renewed like faith in technocratic politics.

And I thought technocratic politics was very interesting because, you know, the point that like you need technocratic politics. to do good policy, to do good governance, is a bit of an odd one because absolutely you need technicians to do good policy. Like, you know, complex social institutions at the scale of, like, you know, a city or a state or a federal government in today's world, you need people who know how to run systems and who are trained. You need intellectuals. You need technicians in a general sense, right? You need specialized people. What's interesting is that the whole thing elides like the crap part, like techno-crat, the idea that, well, those with technical capacities also rule this way in which it just completely conflates the idea of technical

expertise and decision-making at the highest level, right? It doesn't even think that those are two separate realms. It literally is the people who can technically do the job. It literally is the people who can technically do the job are also the people who should make all of decisions about what kinds of jobs we do, how the whole system functions, right? Which essentially rests on this like notion that there is only one game, right? That, you know, in the podcast you hear it a lot, it is essentially, you know, the unspoken aim, and for them it doesn't need to be spoken because as they conceive the world, it is the only real game to be played is economic growth, right? Is just growing, the GDP machine. Capital growth, capital accumulation. They do not entertain the question of what

kind of a society do we want to build? Their main drive is GDP growth. And so everything else is just sort of how do you technically do that best, right? How do you improve productivity? How do you grow the economy best? They have no concept of like that there's any kind of like political battle at the heart of that. It's a view of politics without politics. Many of the attendees at the new liberal action summit were aspiring technocrats often self-described as such. I think the main tendency among these overly online center-left liberals is to confuse technical knowledge for politics, for the ability to govern. They display this deep failure to question authority, not just in like an authoritarian sense, but the authority of what is true or

useful knowledge. To the contrarian liberal technocrat, something like rent control is not just bad, but it's actually evil because it disrupts the market. It unnaturally alters supply and demand. And here's all these studies proving this, right? In this technocratic mode, there's no consideration that policies may have tradeoffs, that yes, rent control might negatively affect the class of landlords and for-profit developers. It might alter. supply, but it might be still worth doing as a measure to provide relief to tenants, perhaps in addition to other efforts to make it cheaper to build housing to increase supply. But that sort of appraisal of tradeoffs requires governing beyond a pure commitment to

serving the market, to just acting on what studies say is true. The liberal technocrat thinks that politics is just the application. of technical knowledge, which of course is a massive limitation on what you understand politics as being and what is politically possible. History did not end in the 90s. What is politically possible changes over time

and politics is about responding to different opportunities in history. They're missing the part of history, which is class struggle, right? It's the case that we're in a capitalist world and that requires economic competitiveness. You need to maintain a competitive production on the world stage and internally as well.

Totally true. But that does not follow that, you know, you just pursue that blindly. There are very hugely significant decisions about how economic growth proceeds. The biggest one that is just completely left out by these people is the notion that in growing the economy, the wealth produced by that growth,

how that's distributed. Distributive politics, these people, they don't seem to conceive of it. The podcast you sent me, I think he literally, he says something like, you know, the biggest liberal struggle is that there is no struggle. Like it literally just conceives the world

as like, there aren't really any problems. Things are fine. Big citation needed on that one. He's just sort of like, yeah, things are fine. If you look at it, things are fine. Which is just, I mean, it's just an insane thing to say. Wages haven't risen in like 40, 50 years, you know. Inequality has exploded.

Life has stagnated for so many people, especially the poorest people, which are most workers. So the idea that there is actually a realm of politics that revolves around class struggle, around, you know, how wealth is distributed and how we gear our economic growth. to them that's a that's a separate category and so their entire politics is a politics of technocracy and in that you know i'll i'll give it to them i think that they probably are pretty good at the the technical expertise of governance stuff i mean one would expect liberalism has been in power in the united states for most of its history so yeah i would expect that they would be good at technical expertise their critique is not that they don't know what they're doing it's that they they have totally jettisoned politics the the deciding what to

do you do with that expertise? How do you gear the economy? How do you consciously control where it's going? How distribution happens? Who is empowered in government and in the economy, right? This is all to discuss class, right? Which these people basically never do. This limited view of what politics is, then determines what the neoliberal technocrat thinks is worth focusing on and what they view as being impossible. Like how they view Medicare for all as this impossible goal, whether that's because they think voters will never support switching away from private health care or that a single-payer health care system might even hurt the economy and therefore we should oppose it. Their extremely narrow view of what is politically possible is the main reason why this sort of young, new liberal

organization will never succeed in rivaling DSA because the whole better things aren't possible mentality makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause, especially young people who are struggling. No, we can't pass Medicare for all because X, Y, reason. A rent freeze is actually evil because X by reason. I don't know how that kind of messaging is going to attract anyone except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the entire makeup of C&L as an organization. After the summit, an elected member of C&L's leadership steering committee got drunk at the bar and argued that child outcomes are better when certain types of fathers are incarcerated

because some study proved that the type of father who gets charged with the crime would be a bad influence on his. kids. I am Ada Hitler. Command of the Third Reich. That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project. This person was so delighted in their own contrarian commitment to cold, emotionalist, uncomfortable truths that may run counter to what's socially accepted. Their little knowing smirk fully aware that what they're saying is morally detestable,

while self-assured in appealing to the authority of technical knowledge, right, this tendency to fall back on the pretext that a study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that there may be alternative solutions to the base problem here. When your main political solution to social problems is just incarceration, then you have lost. Your politics have failed. That's Globecon, 26. Next episode, I'll be doing a deeper dive into neoliberal technocracy as a counter to rising populism. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back

the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysler, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many days. more. Kyle is going for it. Here, you fully improvised, not just words, but a song.

Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clemens. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook.

Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show's famously super accessible. so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed, and Mary Steenberg. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nick Tutero. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Tatourle, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing,

to Bill Burke. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness, delivering happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app.

Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?

If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the problem with Yamanika on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.