The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Anand Giridharadas: Why the Left Has Failed in the Trump Era

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

As the second term of President Trump enters its third month – yes it's only been three months – where has the left and the Democratic Party been? Have they risen to the occasion as President Trump pushes the bounds of executive power and ignores the judiciary? Or have the Democrats failed to meet the moment? Is it time for the younger generation of Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to take over from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi? And what exactly do all those billionaires, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, lining up outside Mar-a-Lago want? Anand Giridharadas joins the program to answer these questions are more. He's the author of "The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy" and "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's also a story about a system that is supposed to protect patients. From TVO Podcasts, I'm Krisha Collier, and this is The Oath. Subscribe today wherever you listen. As the second term of President Trump enters its third month, yes, it's only been three months, where have the left and the Democratic Party been?

Have they risen to the occasion, or are they failing to meet the moment? To help us understand where we are in this uncertain political time, we welcome back to our program Anand Girdardas. He writes the newsletter called The Ink and is the author of The Persuaders at the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds, and democracy. And also, winners take all, the elite charade of changing the world.

He joins us now from Brooklyn, New York, and Anand, it's always great to have you on our program. How you doing today? Always great to be on your program, one of my favorites. Thank you so much for saying so. I think people understand that we are living through a major moment, a major era in world history right now, but I'm not sure we know what to call it. How would you characterize what we're living through at the moment?

I don't think Canadian media regulations allow me to characterize it in the language that would be most appropriate. Look, you know, we are living through an absolute earthquake, maybe one of those earthquakes that causes a tsunami that wipes out lots of people and places because the United States right now, and it's really important, I think, to say this to an audience outside the United States,

I know you and Canada have been on the receiving end of a lot of this, the United States. I know you in Canada have been on the receiving end of a lot of this. The United States of America is living through a hijacking by an autocratic regime bent on destroying the liberal democratic order in this country, bent on destroying the global architecture of security and freedom that people in Canada and elsewhere have come to depend on, blowing up the flow of trade and connection and communication between and among countries that everyone watching this will have taken for granted in recent decades. And it is doing this not under the regime, a regime led by someone even concertedly and capably doing these things,

but one of the most chaotic, corrupt, mendacious, and frankly low IQ administrations in the history of this country. And I want to say, friends in Canada watching this, first of all, we are really, really, really sorry. This is not all of us. This is not even most of us. And second of all, we need your help. Um, you know, the United States for good or ill has butted into the affairs of a lot of other countries over the years, sometimes for good, sometimes not for good. We need to be butted into right now.

We need y'all calling out what is happening here because we are at risk of losing our republic and we need friends in the world. Is it, and I'll play devil's advocate here, is it fair to say that one of the reasons that you are being led by the man you're being led by is that your side of the ideological spectrum took its eye off the prize for far too long, ignored the needs of what had traditionally been the Democratic Party base, and as a result, they fell for somebody else. That is 100% correct. And it pains me to say it, but it is true. Let me put it even more strongly. And this will probably annoy my fellow travelers on my side. I would think about the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump, second

presidency of Donald Trump, as a kernel of truth presidency. And what I mean by that is if you look at each of these areas of destruction, from the trade architecture to NATO and the security architecture to, to doge and, and, and gutting government programs and government agencies, on and on and on. In each of these areas, Donald Trump and people who work for him seized on each of these areas, Donald Trump and people who work for him seized on, insightfully, an area of silence or failure, an area where the left, the democratic party, the establishment, the media, different, different forces,

sometimes all of them, were not quite able to name and see and solve problems. So for example, on trade, is it true that America's trade with the world has not been managed in an intelligent way that made most people's lives better? Yeah. Did we begin trading with China in a thoughtless way without thinking of, for example, a bunch of men, millions of men in North Carolina make furniture right now, like none of them are going to be making

furniture very in a few years after we pass this trade agreement. What would that do to the marriage market in North Carolina? What would that do to those men sells some to themselves? What things might they replace that esteem with? What secondary or tertiary consequences might that have? No, that analysis was not done. You could go down the line of security apparatus, the security architecture, domestic policy, government efficiency.

There is a kernel of truth in each of these things that yes, Democrats, the left, media, should have highlighted, should have solved, didn't solve, left to fester, and therefore created this opening for a mendacious, corrupt, anti-constitutional movement to come in, claim they were serving underserved issues, and do their rampages. The problem is, even though we have a government efficiency problem that is real,

they go after government efficiency in a way that just destroys government instead of making it more efficient. Even though we have a trade problem that's real, they just shut down global trade instead of making it work for Americans in a way that's going to impoverish the people they're claiming to want to help. On issue after issue after issue, they have seized on a real thing and have instead of helping people by identifying that thing, used it as a cudgel to beat their own supporters and others over the head.

Well, let's do a deeper dive on this. And to start with, I'm gonna quote you back to you. This is from an interview you did in March. I disavow. No need to OO, it's just gonna set it up. This is from Brian Lehrer's podcast in which you said, we are being failed repeatedly. We're being failed by bullying billionaires,

a rampaging right, a lackadaisical left, collaborating corporations, and often a mushy media that doesn't know how to call things what they are. Okay, let's pick that apart. The mushy media. How are they part of the blame here? way to say it is that I think if I am remotely right about what we are living through, none of us was trained for this moment. Probably you growing up in Canada, me growing up in the United States. We were not trained, journalistically trained in our history, middle school history classes think about living under like a New York Democrat real estate magnate turned fascist, trying to bring kind of autocracy to America. So the question is, can you then adapt to the moment you're in? And what we're seeing in the media is in corporate media, big media is several things.

You're seeing fear, you're seeing fear of being sued, you're seeing fear of other businesses, you know, if you have a TV network, but you also have amusement parks, or you also have other interests, as many of these companies do, you're seeing fear of them coming after your other interests, blocking mergers you might be interested in. So you're seeing a kind of chilling effect

of corporate fear. You're also seeing, I think, a media that was trained for a different era in which, you know, there was like was trained for a different era in which, you know, there was like an argument about low taxes or slightly higher taxes. And you gave a quote about the low tax view and you gave a quote about the high tax view and a media that doesn't quite know how to say things like, you know, Elon Musk unilaterally cutting spending programs is like an unconstitutional usurping of power.

Um, that's a fact, right? But, but, but in a lot of our most prestigious newspapers, that would be presented as an opinion, you know, uh, uh, what, what, what some activists describe as a usurping of power. By the way, I used to write those stories in New York times, right? And what they, what, what editors would say, just to be really transparent, you write something, and sometimes the editor would feel like you shouldn't own the claim as the New York

Times reporter. And so they would literally just be like, the phrase, this is very interesting. They would say, can you find someone to say that? So think about this. You've written a phrase, you've written an article, you've used your judgment. I knew I was a reporter. I knew I was supposed to be objective. But I about this. You've written a phrase. You've written an article. You've used your judgment. I knew I was a reporter.

I knew I was supposed to be objective. But I felt like that was an objective observation that I could just make in my name. I would submit the article. And they say, can you find someone else to say that? So think about what that means. They're not denying that it's true. But they're saying, the New York Times reporter

doesn't have the authority to say this. Well, I think in this kind of moment, we actually need people to know what they know. New York Times reporters actually are very smart people often and they do have the authority to say when a demagogue is a demagogue, when something is unconstitutional, everything should not be outsourced.

And you could go down the line, but I would say more broadly in terms of the motion is, we are discovering the United States is not a very courageous society. We're seeing law firms capitulate. We're seeing university leaders capitulate. Harvard's got more money than God, you know, just full of fratikats. This is a society that venerates stories of how grandfathers stormed

the beaches of Normandy, right? But these people won't, you know, modestly stand up against the autocratic pretensions of Donald Trump. Let me follow up on one word you use there though, and that word is fascist. And we just went, well, we didn't go through it. You just went through a whole campaign where many, many democratic candidates, starting with Kamala Harris and going down the food chain, kept calling Trump a fascist this and a fascist that, and then he wins, and you can argue about whether or not he's moving the United States closer to actual fascism,

or whether your rhetoric is getting, whether you're getting out over your skis too much with the rhetoric. What's your view on that? Because I've talked to, here we go again, I've talked to plenty of people over the years who say, you know, every time a Democrat calls Trump a fascist, he goes up in estimation.

Yeah. Well, I think there's two separate issues here. Um, I think you're, you're right to point that out. One issue is you and I just talking, not me not doing political strategy. You and I just talking about the truth. He's a fascist. He ran as a fascist. He won as a fascist.

Lots of people voted for fascism. But the issue you raise is an issue of strategy. Now, I'm a writer and I can say whatever I want. I'm not standing for any election. The issue you're raising about how people who are on ballots should speak is a real one. And I think we have learned, I think you're right, that people who are on ballots probably should not speak the same way I do, right? Because I'm speaking without a sense of responsibility of,

like, will this be more popular or less popular in Florida? Right? I'm just trying to describe things as they are. That's my job. That's my lane. That's what you do also. Is it the case that Democrats as a political party have leaned too much on an anti-democracy fascist message when in fact what we are seeing now is a corrupt leader who is in cahoots

with these bullies and billionaires to make your stock portfolio disappear, to imperil your retirement savings, to make life more expensive and chaotic for you. Yeah, that stuff is always going to work better electorally. And, you know, I write about the importance of being smart about language, but I, you know, I'm also just a person who calls things as they are, and I don't need to win anything. Let me get your view on what James Carville, the long-time Bill Clinton associate said the other day,

which was, the Democrats need to just get out of the way. It's time for a strategic retreat, let these guys implode through their own malfeasance and stupidity. What do you say to that? With all due respect to James Carville, having mentioned the invasion of Normandy earlier, he was born in the year of the invasion of Normandy. He had a great career up through the 1990s when I was a teenager.

And he worked in a serious way in American politics in that era, helped elect Bill Clinton. It's a really, really, really long time ago. And I think a lot of his understanding of media and political communication is from that time. And I would say James Carville, James Carville strategy is, is absolutely the strategy you should use if you are running in 1992. Like, do not listen to me if you're running in 1992, listen to him

for anything 1992 related. Um, here's the problem with it in 2025. Uh, the problem is the media has completely changed, right? Uh, there are not three channels in the United States or one channel in certain countries that are just telling you what happened. There's a fragmented landscape of TV, newsletters, social media, radio, memes, you name it.

And people are forming their own bespoke realities and sense of what's happening in the world from all of these things and assembling, forging their own kind of truth. And when in that kind of world that is so fragmented, meaning does not make itself. Walter Cronkite is not helping 30 American, million Americans be like, this trade deal is this, right?

People are self-assembling. And if you are doing what he, the rope-a-dope strategy as it's been called, just playing dead, rolling over and playing dead as he advised Democrats to do, you are not participating in a meaning-making process that is crucial in this media ecosystem, in this attention economy.

I have no shade to James Carville for not understanding the modern media environment. He's not operating in it. He didn't come up in it, right? He's not raising children in it. Um, but meaning does not make itself. Meaning does not make itself. If, if right now, as we're going to see in the coming days and weeks, this global right now, as we're going to see in the coming days and weeks, this global trade,

like world war that Donald Trump has unleashed causes pain, causes people's prices to rise and their 401ks to die, but they already are. Hanging back and letting that happen is actually not going to self-organize the meaning around what that is because Donald Trump can, and I assure you will, get in there and offer a story that will be a convincing story. It'll be inaccurate. It'll be a lie. But it is not beyond Donald Trump to get in there and say, this is all because of Hunter Biden's laptop in China.

This is all because of, you know, Barack Obama's visit to China in that year. Right? Now it may be complete BS, but it doesn't matter. It is a story and it will get in there unopposed if you are not in people's brains 24 seven making meaning. Democrats in general have not understood the imperative of meaning making in the 21st century. Chris Hayes has a great book called The Sirens Call.

There are others who are writing about this. It is incredibly important that people like James Carville learn to, frankly, step aside and learn from people who kind of understand the new world that they haven't been around for. Is it possible, though, that in 2025, the biggest chunk of people, not a majority admittedly, but the largest plurality in your country right now, simply wants, for lack of a better expression, a strong man who can puff his chest out there, look like he's handling the problems of the world in a very tough, robust, macho fashion.

Yeah. I think that, I mean, I think that a very slender majority of people who voted clearly did want that. Uh, my guess would be, my guess would be it's not a slender majority anymore. I think, uh, the pain has already been enough that, that, you know, opinion polls slide suggests that's probably a narrow, close to majority, close to even minority. But here's the thing.

We know throughout history that periods like this are periods that produce leaders like this. And when I say periods like this, it is everything you described. It is a sense, sometimes real, sometimes imagined of chaos and disorder. It's often related to prices and inflation, which again can be sound technical, but it's about your freedom to take care of your family by being able to afford things they need. It's very important, very fundamental. But it's also larger things that have been happening in the United States, been happening in Canada also

in this era and you're in my lifetimes, which we forget, which is the greatest advances and changes in demographics and pluralism, in race relations, in gender relations. We have changed more in the status of women in the last 50, 60 years than the previous 5,000. Like the problem with progress is as soon as it happens, we put it in a bucket of things

we're just not grateful for ever again. But we have actually done, progressive movements have won incredible victories, right? I spend time in your country. Your country is a remarkable place of people from every part of this globe, who have voice and have freedom and have rights and who are participating in the conversation. That's a huge achievement. Right? I know we

all supposed to review our ancestors, most of our ancestors go back far enough lived in monocultures, and we're awful to anybody who didn't perfectly fit, didn't fit sexually didn't fit fit. Didn't fit sexually, didn't fit this way, didn't fit that way, didn't fit religiously, right? That's the human heritage. We have built in Canada and the United States elsewhere a new story of places that draw on people from everywhere, make them all get along and have ideas, creations of a kind. You would not be able to put on the show you do if everyone putting it on looked like you. You avail, as I do, of the bounties of every kind of brain, every kind of sensibility, every kind of life story,

making this show, making this broadcast. And that kind of progress is awesome. It is a worthy undertaking. And I think people on my side of things, people who want that world, often undercount how psychologically difficult it could be, how hard it can be for people to cope with what you and I might call progress.

To cope with, not because they're bad people or they're evil, just because change is hard. In my persuaders book, someone doing kind of race education training said, look, if you get like a heart attack and you go to the doctor and the doctor is like, you have to change these five elements of your diet or you'll be dead in a year. The percentage of human beings who can comply with that is vanishingly small. Think about that.

Forget changing your mind on race. We are people who cannot usually change what we eat, a highly elective, relatively costless thing, to stay alive. And this race educator was saying, so imagine how hard it is if you grew up in a certain kind of country, certain kind of town, certain kind of understanding of gender, and now things are new.

So I think we have to want a future for progress, but I would say that progressive movements in general around the world have been smug and arrogant about the self-evident truth of the future they want. They haven't treated it as something you have to actually sell to people, a vision you have to actually invite people into, right? With all respect to Thomas Jefferson,

there are no self-evident truths in a democracy. The truth is what you can invite people to believe and want and aspire to. With all respect to Thomas Jefferson, there are no self-evident truths in a democracy. The truth is what you can invite people to believe and want and aspire to. And I think we have extraordinary work ahead to invite people into a vision of the future that has space for everybody and do so in a way that is more attractive to the kind of vision

of clinging to a strong man. Let me ask you about the billionaire class, which you know well, having written a book about them. And here's a quote from Sigel Samuel in Vox, "'For the tech bros,' or as some say, the broligarchs, "'this is about much more than just maintaining "'and growing their riches. "'It's about ideology, an ideology inspired

"'by science fiction and fantasy, "'an ideology that says they are supermen, "'and supermen should not be subject to rules because they're doing something incredibly important, remaking the world in their image. It's this ideology, he argues, that makes MAGA a godsend for the Brolygarchs because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power

to the powerful. What do you think about that? It's really interesting. You know, I mean, I think the Silicon Valley mega alliance was a somewhat surprising development, because a lot of those folks in Silicon Valley, in spite of their oligarchiness, were Democrats for a while. And there was a real migration to the right in 2024 and, you know, provided

not necessarily numbers of votes, but money and, and Elon Musk most prominently among them now in the government, but lots of others also. And what's really interesting is I've spent time in Silicon Valley. I've reported on Silicon Valley. I've spent time in Silicon Valley. I've reported on Silicon Valley. It's hard to think of a group of people who have more contempt for Trump's base, the kind of people who are die hard for Trump than Silicon Valley elites.

You're talking Musk. You're talking Peter Thiel. Who else? But all of them. All of them. Right? These are a bunch of San Francisco gazillionaires who I can assure you do not respect the truck driver

in West Virginia who is voting for Donald Trump, who would never let someone like that into their home, who is trying who would never let someone like that into their home, who is trying to build an AI economy so that all human activities and work that give people esteem and meaning and yeah, income, are replaced by their bots. Those guys in Silicon Valley view human beings, particularly people they think of as low status human beings,

as expendable and disruptible and people to just be replaced by their tools. And so at the heart of this alliance between the MAGA folks and the Valley folks is a real tension and you see it. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, for example, do not see eye to eye because Steve Bannon has a real problem with the kind of musky view of the world. There is a different view of the world here, and I think it's going to be very important for progressive movements to highlight that difference, the kind of post-human, post-human, transhumanist view that's sometimes called the valley as against the kind of

nationalism of MAGA and someone like Steve Bannon. In which case let's finish up while I ask you about I guess the eternal struggle that the Democratic Party goes through but it is particularly keen right now which is do we become more moderate more like John Fetterman more acceptable to people living in rural Pennsylvania? Or do we go full Bernie, full AOC, and really indulge in the more progressive wing of the party? What's the way to go? Yeah, I was just at a very interesting dinner discussion about this that got very tense.

I'll give you my capsule answer, which is that I think the Democrats need to be more radical and more normal. How do you do both at the same time? Well, I think sometimes these things are conflated so that what happens is economic, the kind of wings of economic change get clipped, and kind of all elements of kind of how far reaching versus kind of normie you are, are kind of smushed together. Here's what I would say.

If you look at the AOC Bernie fighting oligarchy tour recently, it is catching on with people who are not necessarily, I don't think are democratic socialists, are not necessarily ultra-progressives. Just looking at that crowd, it seemed like a pretty broad American heartland crowd. Right? I'm not saying their movements have always, always been there, but that's what they're attracting now.

Because I think right now there is an appetite, as a historically moderate Senator like Chris Murphy has said to me in the Inc., Democrats have become a status quoist party, a party not for thorough going enough economic change in the big structures and systems that govern your life. However, I think Democrats at the same time have, while they need to be more

out there economically in terms of big transformative change that you would feel, right, for example, healthcare for everybody, no questions asked, instead of there was an idea that that kind of got moxed during the Kamala Harris campaign, which is your medical debt should not be used against you on your credit score. Right. That's a certain kind of flavor of democratic party policymaking as opposed to like, no one should have medical debt. Right.

So the economic stuff on policy stuff, I would say go bigger, but on what I, what, what, what I mean by being normal is right now there is a battle to claim normalcy and normalcy is wide open. And I don't mean to pick on any particular issue. I'm just talking about people's gut sense of like, who's normal. Right. And when you have a Republican party that is not talking about low taxes, right. But, but it's talking about the biggest tax increase in years in these tariffs,

biggest tax increase in years in these tariffs, talking about abandoning Ukraine in order to satisfy Vladimir Putin is talking about shutting down government programs, bringing layoffs, which is like the most hated word in the English language upon people. There's an opportunity to not allow the right to continue to define the political left as unpatriotic by claiming patriotism. There's an opportunity to not allow the right to define the left as anti-business or anti-enterprise by claiming the mantle of loving entrepreneurship, loving creation, loving ideas, but being wary of the concentration of oligarchic power. There's an opportunity to talk about front and center common sense issues that are pain points every day and not allow the right to define you

as spending a lot of your air time on issues that don't concern as many people. I think it's really important not to do what Gavin Newsom, the governor of California is doing by throwing communities under the bus in service of this effort of claiming the normal. I think what you do is you have everyone's back, you claim everyone's right to have a seat at the table and a voice, but you communicate these things, the American public, in a way that makes clear that this

is common sense, it is normal, and that what you're up against is what is strange. Well, two things in conclusion. Number one, I think there's a new competition for the most hated word in the English language, and I suspect that word is tariff. And number two, we are always grateful when you take our calls and spend so much time with us here on TV over the years. Anand, it's really great to see you and thank you for sharing your views

with our viewers once again. Thank you for you and thank you for everything you do. This has always been one of my favorite shows out of all the shows I've ever done and always love what you do and appreciate it so much.