The Bulwark Podcast - Matt Yglesias and Tyler Austin Harper: Popularism v Populism

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

The origins of the Democratic party's current malaise include ineffective messaging on climate and economic policy, too rigid a tent on cultural issues, and Dem politicians just too scared to speak their mind. Like, Kamala could've turned the trans youth in sports convo into one about parents spending boatloads on sports camps so their kids can get into a good college. Plus, Christopher Wray chose the worst option. Matt Yglesias and Tyler Austin Harper join Tim Miller to hash it out. show notes: Tyler's new piece in The Atlantic Matt's "Common Sense Manifesto #4" from Slow Boring Ben Wittes piece in Lawfare on Chris Wray Book recommended by Tyler, "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America"

Hey, y'all. I had already had a little debate pod planned for today, which I'm super excited about, but wanted to talk a bit about the Chris Ray resignation first, as I think it's probably the most significant news of the transition so far. Bill Kristol called it a pre-surrender in the newsletter this morning. I think that is extremely apt to me. Eventually, Chris Ray was probably going to be pushed out by Donald Trump, but he was appointed by Donald Trump. He was appointed to a 10 year term. You know, if we weren't all so numb, this would be a five alarm fire and shocking

to think that the incoming president would push out an FBI director over personal grievance with them, rather than over any performance issue or scandal or anything such as that. I think from the Wray perspective, you've got Cash Patel. Cash Patel could crack. Cash Patel might not get confirmed, and I think he's probably going to get confirmed. But to me, that's why this is a pre-surrender. It should be Chris Ray's obligation and other people in the government's obligation to stay for as long as they can until an action, until something precipitates their departure. So they're forced out, forced down Trump's hand, forced the Senate's hand because Cash Patel is clownish and unqualified

for this job. And who knows what might come out during a confirmation hearing. And so to quit now and see who's going to quit January 20th if Cash Patel isn't confirmed, that lets Donald Trump put in some acting FBI director via the Vacancies Act and who the hell knows who that could be. I just, I think it's a big mistake. So briefly, I want to read Ben Whittes, a friend of the pod wrote about this for Lawfare. You can read his whole column if you want. The headline is the situation colon Ray rolls out the carpet for Cash Patel. It says Ray face no good option here, but he chose the worst with its flashback to a conversation he had in 2016 about Jim Comey or Jim Comey for all his flaws said this, if he

wants to get rid of me, he's going to have to fire me, which is exactly the right mindset in this sort of situation. Wittes then points to Ray's longer statement, I won't bore you with the entire thing, but as Wittes describes it, it basically is a muddled, long mess and it boils down to I didn't want to drag the FBI into a messy political fight. As Wittes writes, one thing Ray's statement does not address is why the right thing for the Bureau is for me to step down and avoid this fight. How exactly will this avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray while reinforcing the

values and principles that are so important? As Wittes writes, Ray's resignation is not the right thing for the Bureau, and it will absolutely not prevent the agency from being dragged deeper into the fray. The only thing it will do is mitigate the degree to which Chris Ray personally gets dragged deeper into the fray. So I understand why this is Tim. Now back to Tim. I understand why Chris Ray would not want to get dug deeper into the fray, but we

have obligations sometimes greater than ourselves. And I think that Chris Wray had an obligation to stay in this job until Donald Trump forced him out. Much more on that in the coming weeks, much more on Cash Patel in the coming weeks. But my guests today are Matt Iglesias. He writes the slow, boring newsletter on Substack and he co-hosts the Politics Podcast with Brian Boitler.

He's a columnist for Bloomberg and Tyler Austin Harper. He's a professor for environmental studies at Bates College and he's a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Why I chose to have these guys together today, they got into a little Twitter kerfuffle over some of the Democrat autopsy stuff. Matt is more of kind of a moderate reformer. The in vogue term is popularism. Taylor Austin Harper is kind of a Bernie fan, more from the left, more of an economic populist. I saw them arguing and I was like, let's try something different on the pod and kind of hash this out in a space where there's more room to find disagreements and agreements than you have on the on the X platform. I respect both of these guys and both of their points of view. What I really respect is that they say what they actually think, which is the core tenet

of this podcast. I try to only have people on that say what they really think so that we can do better at getting to the truth of the matter. And so I'm excited to have this conversation. And now is the moment for me to bring in Matt and Tyler. All right, gentlemen, thank you for doing this. We're taking it off of the X platform. You all, I guess, don't really know each other off of social media.

No. Not off the social media, no. That's exciting. That's exciting. Well, you know, popularism versus post-neoliberalism. This is what the people of the Bullock podcast demand, I promise. I wanted to start by kind of summing up what you guys were saying online was one of the problems that led to the two Trump presidencies, led to the democratic losses.

And I want to give you the opportunity to expand, you know, revise and extend those remarks. So, Matt, you were pointing to, you know, politicians not emulating the successful Obama and Clinton model and pointed to the Dems went left on guns, immigration and crime after 2012. Tyler, you are pointing to the Clinton and Obama policy failures, NAFTA, the bailout, embracing big tech, failing to confront the opioid crisis, saying that is at the root of our present discontents.

I will admit that my priors are aligned towards Matt. So since you're going, you know, since we're on a power play, since it's two on one, Tyler, I'll let you start off. What is the origin of our current malaise? Yeah, I mean, I think you summarized it pretty well. I mean, in my view, it's decades of deindustrialization. It's the opioid crisis. It's the concentration of wealth and power in big tech in particular. The first thing I would say is I think it's important to make a distinction between Obama and the legacy of Clinton and Obama. Obama is charming. I like Obama, and I'm opposed

to many of the things Obama stands for. I totally concede if Obama could run for a third term, I think he would win going away. To that extent, I agree with Matt that we should run politicians who are popular and who people like as a starting point. I would also say I agree with Matt, and I think our emphasis is probably a bit different. I agree on certain stuff like gun control, et cetera, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of those cultural issues. I think Dems really radically under price how many sort of independent leaning liberal-ish people there are who are single issue two-way voters. So, we agree on some of those things.

But I think it's important to separate Obama the man and Bill Clinton the man, both of whom were popular and charismatic, from the legacies of their administration, which are certainly not uniformly bad, but did coincide with, again, a lot of things that have caused discontent, like deindustrialization, the opioid crisis, which Obama was warned about fentanyl and really failed to confront it, big tech, et cetera. And so I would advocate separating the man from the legacy a little bit. Maddie. Well, so you have a piece that I just read before we started recording, profiling Chris Murphy,

center from Connecticut, who's been talking about these things. Reading the piece, I felt like narrowed the gap between us, because you and he both say very clearly there, that you have to have a bigger tent party on cultural issues. I think that that's just a logical necessity. Whatever taking on big tech means, if you want to build a coalition that does that, some of the people in the coalition are going to be pro-life, they're going to be, you know, gun hobbyists, they're going,

they're going to, you know, be homophobic, they're going to have problematic opinions. And unless you can at least work with people across those kinds of differences, you can't tackle these concerns. Reading the piece though, I felt like if Democrats did what Chris Murphy says they should do, it would probably work. But also all of what's doing the work, it seemed to me, was the moderating on cultural issues. And what makes me nervous when I hear people starting to talk about NAFTA or whatever else is that it's, because you know, Tyler,

I mean, you know how it is in progressive spaces, right? I do. It's so much easier to go along, get along by being like, oh, you know, we got to talk more about opioids. And like, clearly, like that is a real problem. You should try to address it. But I think it's just a little bit fantastical to think that talking about, you know, trade deals that happened 30 years ago, or an opioids problem, which is already

somewhat in decline, I feel like that's what Joe Biden tried to do, was to say, Look, I can just like personally downplay cultural issues without addressing the kind of roiling. I kind of hate the word cancel culture, but I know what you mean, right? The idea that if somebody transgresses on this increasingly large laundry list of topics, we need to shun that person. It just strikes me as like so much more core

to politics than any amount of fussing around neoliberalism or whatever that's supposed to mean. So Tyler's article that you referenced is headlined, is this how Democrats win back the working class? I do want to get more to the forward looking stuff, but I think Biden is maybe a good way, and Tyler, you can respond to anybody. I think the Biden frame is a good way to look at this, right? Because in a lot of ways, Biden did what kind of both of you want, right? Like Biden did do more populist economic stuff than Obama did. For example, he did pivot to the party to a more pro-worker frame on policy, didn't work.

Biden didn't have his pronouns in his profile. He did de-emphasize some of the cultural stuff in a way that other candidates did. So he did both of those things and still, I guess he didn't lose, but I mean, he had basically lost. He forfeited. And so within that frame, looking back at Biden, putting the age stuff aside, or maybe don't put it aside, maybe that was the only problem and the Biden model would have worked. I don't know. What do you think, Tyler? Go ahead. I mean, I think the, the Biden of it all is a huge part of it.

And I don't think you can set the age stuff aside. I mean, you know, my view is that Biden had so many things not working in his favor. Core among them was his age, which isn't just related to how the public perceived his competence, but also just his basic ability to communicate, craft a story, push a message, right? I mean, my basic view on the Biden of it all is it's really impossible to disentangle the age stuff, the competence stuff, inflation, which obviously he had some role in, but was also a global phenomenon. It's worth noting that the Democratic Party ran better than most other incumbent parties across the world. So you could also make a case that they overperformed a bit given the reality of other incumbent parties. They also had a stupider, more clownish,

more ridiculous opponents than most of the other incumbent parties throughout the world. You can't discount the buffoonishness. No, I totally agree. But I really think part of this is about storytelling. And the Dems are really, really bad at storytelling. There was no economic narrative coming out of the Biden administration. And so this is where, again, I think it's really important to separate policy questions, which I think are extremely important from the question of what is the Democratic Party selling and what does it stand for? And I think under the Biden administration, to the extent that there was a story,

that was a story about NATO and America's might globally, and that we were restoring the international order. Right. And people don't care about that. I am, I'm not trying to blame you. You're on the bulwark. Okay. I know, I know.

Have some respect. Sorry, but these people care so much. No, no, but like, look, however you feel about, and I'm not trying to blame everything on foreign policy, like I'm not doing that, doing that, but however you feel about an issue like Ukraine, the reality is that Democrats were 20% more supportive of Ukraine than independents and way more supportive

than people who lean conservative, right? Gaza was extraordinarily unpopular among the Democratic base. Almost 80% of Democrats supported an arms embargo. The youth was even higher. 40% of Republicans supported an arms embargo, right? So there were these foreign policy things that were also part of the problem.

And I don't think you can neatly reduce to any one of these, right? Again, I'm not one of these leftists that's gonna say that Harris lost because of Gaza. I don't think that's true. I think there were a lot of things that were not working in her favor. But I think cumulatively, when you take Biden's age, when you take the

foreign policy stuff that was more popular with Dems than it was independents and Republicans, when you take the global inflation question, I think there's a limited utility to thinking about how did Biden's legitimately progressive economic platform translate or not translate into electoral viability. I think it's just too muddy. So here's the thing, though. Inflation, in part, clearly a global phenomenon. There's commodity price shocks. There's a lot to do with COVID, et cetera.

But if you look at neoliberalism as a historical phenomenon, the reason this arises largely is the inflationary experience of the 1970s. That is what makes people in the Democratic Party, it's what makes Jimmy Carter start saying, I need to care more about inefficient regulations that labor stakeholders may like, because it turns out people care a lot about consumer prices.

So I think it's like at an adequate level of abstraction, like Biden needed a stronger economic message. He needed to stand with working people, etc. Like, yes, I think that's definitely right. But then the question of like, what would deliver what it is people actually want? I don't think it's necessarily like more or less neoliberal, but Murphy and you had this schema of like cultural issues and economic issues, but kind of in between them is climate change. And immigration. Which like, yeah, which like was described by Joe Biden repeatedly as like an existential

threat to humanity. And if you're in a race against extinction, then you'd be like, sure, your heating bill went up, but at least we're not all dead. But that's, I think, not really true, and certainly not how the voters think about these things. So I think a question for progressives, the hard question is,

are you willing to sort of come down to earth, right? That when there was some bill House Republicans had, it's like the Appliance Freedom Act or something. And it was gonna like roll back what are efficiency regulations that the energy departments, no, I don't wanna say like Joe Biden lost because- Our fridge broke the other way

and the repairman came by and was complaining about some, I don't even know what the word is, you know, efficiency regulation. And so all of a sudden it was making me think Mr. Trump might be on to something. I don't know. Right. Well, and it's like- It was a $157 bill for the guy to come by, you know? It's not nothing.

There's a question of like, what does it mean to sort of be populist on economics, right? And I think sometimes, you know, left intellectuals, some of my best friends are leftist intellectuals, you know, want it to be that populist economics is like what they think is important. But what it's, I mean, what it's supposed to mean is like listening to people and what what they think is important, which yes, sometimes is like we need to regulate big banks or you know, some of this FTC stuff like about fees like that all seems totally reasonable. But a big point of emphasis of the modern Democratic Party is like eliminating the fossil fuel industry or telling you what kind of car you can buy, things like that. And, you know, on one level, I think, like, you need to back away from some of that to be more

populist. But you also need to think about, like, I mean, if our moral commitment to addressing climate change is really, really serious. And part of the reason we're so committed to that is that we care about, you know, coastal flooding in Bangladesh and Nigeria. We need to think about having a coalition of high-minded people who care about this kind of thing, for example, bulwark listeners. And, you know, and it, there's like actual deep reasons, I think, for the drive to try to incorporate

into the coalition sort of ex-Republicans who are people of character and dignity and care about institutions and values and democracy. And it's sort of easy to dismiss that, you know, because it's like after you lose, you can be like, well, you know, Harris, she campaigned with Liz Cheney and it clearly didn't move lots of people, which is true. But also you could imagine a world, especially with Trump not on the ballot, where he keeps the voters he gained and just wins back the voters who Democrats gained

and certainly wins back, you know, the volunteers, the media support, et cetera. And it's worth taking seriously, I think, the pros and cons of that. There's a lot there, as is Matt's want. There are two elements that I pull out, right, like that are related to these questions, right? Is the Liz Cheney of it all, right? Like, was that really the main problem for the Harris campaign? That the vibes were just more associated with Liz Cheney, not that Liz Cheney was supporting

her, but that she was more oriented to that messaging. And then the climate thing I do think is interesting because that is like a real trade-off question when you look at quote unquote populist or left economics, right, like a lot of the money that went into the stimulus bill that Biden passed as part of these big initiatives was around climate and infrastructure, which is populist, right?

But that could have been, you know, that could have been a different priority. that could have been a different priority. It could have been, I don't know, healthcare. It could have been something else. So anyway, what do you take of those two points? Yeah, I'll take them in order. So again, I don't want to attribute Harris's loss to any one thing.

I think part of it is also, she's just a bad candidate who's bad at public speaking. And I don't think that can be underpriced either. But in, you know, in terms of the Liz Cheney of it all- Some people are going to bristle at that. Well think maybe more accurately, she was good at speeches. She just wasn't particularly good at extemporaneous. And she did it well in the one debate. She just wasn't particularly good in interview settings. So unfortunately, the one debate was only one night and all the interviews were a lot of other news cycles. But anyway, I don't want to

obsess over that. Yeah. So in terms of the Liz Cheney piece of this, I think what has been clear to me, and I've been yelling about this online for two years, is that it was very obvious in the lead up to this election, going back 18 months or two years, that Donald Trump was betting on anti-war and anti-war platform, right? And we can absolutely point out that Trump is not actually an anti-war president and that it is hollow and, you know, pseudo whatever. But the reality is, if you paid attention to his rallies and speeches, and I paid attention to his rallies and speeches for two years, he hammered the threat of nuclear war, World War III, anti-war, over and over and over again. And his campaign made a bet that immigration and anti-war sentiment were the moves. These were the pillars of his campaign.

Again, I don't want to attribute Harris's loss to any one factor, and I don't want to attribute Trump's victory to any one factor. But I think we have to recognize that one campaign won, and it was the campaign that made a bet in part on immigration and anti-war sentiment. And so I think Harris leaned into that through the Liz Cheney stuff, right? Where it became very, she was already saddled with Biden's foreign policy, which people had mixed views about.

And then on top of that, by campaigning with Liz Cheney, right, then that just doubles the impression that she's not gonna break with Biden foreign policy. She's not meaningfully gonna distance from, distance from the kind of overseas posture. And so I think that was part of the problem. I don't want to attribute it to, again, why she lost, but I think it's part of the picture.

I'm glad, actually, that you linked immigration and anti-war in this, because I think there's a construct on the left of what is anti-war politics. And I think that what Trump was advancing, it's not just that there's a certain fakery to it, it's something other than anti-war as the left construes it, right? Like the left's idea of anti-war politics is that the American empire is like bad to foreigners, that it's extractive, unfair, etc. Trump is advocating on both immigration and NATO military farm policy issues, and I would say also on climate, a politics of selfishness. Right? He's saying you are doing

too much to help Ukrainians. A guy who from the first Trump administration, who I guess may come back, I mean, he told me our message is going to be that you prioritize Ukrainians, refugees, and climate freaks over the interests of working in middle-class Americans, right? And linking all three of those things together, not as like anti-war in the manner you would hear on a college campus. manner you would hear on a college campus. And I think that is very potent, right? And it's something that you have to account for. And that I do think that, you know, aligning with the Cheney family is maybe not the best way to sort of address it.

But I also think that people on the left, you know, when you see like Elon Musk doing a tweet and he's like, we're wasting all this money on foreign aid. Like, why are we even doing that? Like I know that's good politics. Like that, that is authentic populism, but it's also like, it's a tough one. You know, like I think these are legitimately hard questions to think about how do you kind of modulate and to think that it would be convenient. Right.

and to think that it would be convenient, right, if just distancing from ex-Neocons who don't like Trump would sort of cure these problems. But it's like, you actually have to confront like the immigration piece, the climate piece, the foreign aid piece and say, cause I mean, I think this is a real question among high socioeconomic status Democrats. Like, do we care more about the American working

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This deal is exclusive to listeners. So get yours now in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions apply. Tyler, I want you to answer that very quick question, but I do in the defense of Liz Cheney, I do want to say, I have to say one thing always when this debate comes up. Liz Cheney really, really wanted to help. Absolutely. That makes a difference in campaigns. And a lot of the leftists who are throwing rocks at Liz Cheney right now, spent most of the campaign throwing rocks at the campaign and not really, really wanting to help. And had there been some working class populist leftist socialists that like really wanted to help the campaign and talk about the importance of the campaign and how they were willing to sacrifice some of their ideological priors in order for Kamala to win, I think they would have been campaigning with

Kamala at the end too. I'm interested in your answer to Matt's question about the global human rights kind of element of leftism versus the American worker side of it. I think actually Matt has landed on a bugaboo of mine and I'm going to again, I feel like JD Vance and Tim Walls in that debate where they just, you know, were agreeing with each other on things. Yeah, you keep agreeing. I'm going to find a disagreement here soon. No. So I think Matt is right in the sense that, you know, a conversation I'll often have with

leftists when I point out that Trump positioned himself as the anti-war candidate, they will say, but he's promising to drone strike the cartels. And I keep saying people don't think that's war. One. And two, they think that's in America's interest because they think the cartels. And I keep saying, people don't think that's war. One, and two, they think that's in America's interest because they think the cartels are screwing us with fentanyl. And so they understand immediately what America's interest has to do

with combating the cartels in Mexico. They do not understand necessarily what America's interest has to do with Ukraine or what's going on in the Middle East, right? And so I think you're absolutely right. Like the way in which Trump is not anti-war, he is pro-America wars that are about like what he sees in a narrow sense as our immediate national interests. Right.

And so I think Matt is right that the way in which the left understands anti-war is different, but on the climate piece. So I teach environmental studies, climate change is something I care about I am literally an expert on human extinction. That's what my academic work is on and so are you for human extinction or against? Oh, yeah That is a question in left circles. So, you know sometimes exactly it is Yeah, it is it is and there is like I actually something I've written about is there is a deep This is a separate point the misanthropy in certain corners of the environmentalist movement where there is a deep loathing of people.

Every time I write about human extinction in public, I get emails saying, you know, I hope we go extinct. But anyway, you know, for the climate change piece, look, one thing Republicans are really good at is telling voters what to believe, right? Where they will say, here's what we stand for, you're coming along for the ride, right? They're very good at that and largely pretty successful, not always, but on the whole, that's something they're good at. Where Democrats are very much like, well, what is popular? Let's look at the polls, let's look at the focus groups.

They don't will a politics and a coalition into existence in the way that the GOP is really good at taking an issue and saying, now this is our thing and this is what you guys believe. And so on the climate piece of it all, like, look, I get that certain climate policies are unpopular. I think partly that's because Democrats are terrible at talking about them. It's not just communication, though. Some of them are legitimately unpopular. And I think you just need to be able to make a more forthright case that is believable,

that the Democratic Party cares about workers. They also care about climate change, and these things don't have to be mutually incompatible. forthright case that is believable, that the Democratic Party cares about workers. They also care about climate change, and these things don't have to be mutually incompatible. It's worth noting that Biden in 2020 did win, basically making that kind of pitch where he said he was going to incorporate elements of the Green New Deal. I think climate change is something that... Look, it's a hard issue for Democrats. I'm not disputing that. It's a hard issue in the same way that immigration is a hard issue for Democrats. I'm not disputing that. It's a hard issue in the same way that immigration is a hard issue for Democrats.

But I think how we talk about it matters. A huge problem in this campaign was silence about unpopular issues. We're just not going to talk about them. We're not going to be woke anymore, but we're not going to talk about them. We're going to hope everybody forgets about the things we used to say. I think that strategic silence is not especially strategic, you know, and that forthrightly confronting unpopular positions and saying, hey, here's why you should care. That matters.

Yeah. I mean, I guess, I guess this just gets me back to the fact that, you know, in that kind of Murphy mix, right, the thing that would really move the needle far is if you were, we talked about Joe Biden's infelicity as a speaker, as he got on in years, Kamal Harris's, I think, shortcomings as an interview subject. I think everybody agrees, in principle,

you want somebody who's good at talking and charismatic. But the real way that that delivers value is you can take a question about something like trans participation in youth sports, and you can give an answer to the question that seems compelling to most people, right? Because those kind of issues are just more transparent, right? Like, I could hear somebody say, oh, this regulation is going to be really good. It's going to make your nursing homes better. And then the other politician is like, no, right? These are out of touch freaks and it's going to backfire. And I'm like, it's hard to say, right? Whereas you can just tell if somebody says something about immigration,

like, do I agree with what this person is saying or don't I? And so it's like, obviously, you need candidates who are more verbally dexterous, candidates who are more charismatic, but all of that is for the purpose of delivering messages that are acceptable to the broad range of people. Is it more though about the authenticity? I mean, to me, I'm just listening to you guys hash this out. And I mean, if each of you could have designed a Biden presidency, you would have designed the policies different, but like in a weird way, he did, he did kind of appeal to both camps.

Like he was a coalitional president, like he feels both camps. And so listening to you, I just, I wonder if the actual thesis that you both have is if Mike Rowe had been the presidential candidate and ran on the exact same policy platform that Biden had, but he did so by more emphasizing the plants that were getting built in red America and how much they care about that. And he did so by de-emphasizing whatever, the democracy stuff or the woke stuff that that like he probably would have won. Would you agree with that or do you think there was something fundamental about the

policies going too far left, do you think that was a problem? Or too far right and maybe in Tyrone's case? Different things happen at different points in time, right? So they came around, I mean, Senator Murphy was involved in coming around on immigration. I think a huge question that I think we're waiting for people to leave the administration and write their memoirs is like, what took them so long? Exactly. And why did Harris, when she was invited repeatedly to break with Biden, it seemed like the most

obvious thing to say was like this thing he already did, that like the base has already swallowed, like he was way too slow. Well, I can answer that one. Biden didn't let her do that. He was, he was interested. He forbade her? I mean, I mean, he was going to create problems for her. Yeah, I mean, I just like, I think that the whole vibe was like, you need to be very, walk very lightly and gently around me

because I'm sensitive about my legacy. I just think that that's obviously true. I mean, maybe so, you know, and there's other, Rachel Cohen did a piece in Vox about how, you know, the administration in the end tried to hew a kind of moderate common sense line on the school sports issue, but like never articulated that because they were afraid of blowback from certain kinds of people. It matters, like what you say, what you do. But another thing is, you know, I was talking to somebody post-election in the White House, and she was saying,

you know, at one point, some of the people on the team came up with a bunch of ideas that we thought might help bring grocery prices down. And it was like, maybe we could do a Jones Act waiver. And the president didn't want to do anything that labor unions were going to oppose, which is part of his populist appeal. And I get why he had that view. But also they kept saying

bringing prices down is our number one priority. But the fact is it wasn't, right? Their number one priority was bringing prices down in ways that are consistent with solidarity, with blue collar labor unions, with our climate goals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're saying that there is some areas where they went too far left, immigration, trans, regulations maybe would be the three that you're- Yeah. I mean, I think- That had a tangible impact on the result.

The beginning of the administration on climate, I mean, they actually did try to shut down all oil and gas leasing on federal lands. That didn't happen because they lost in court. But it's like, why? Why did they do that? Tyler, did I find some disagreement now? Or are you more on the micro side of things? I mean, I think they were right to try to do that. You know, I mean, I really do think that there are but but there's no, again, with any of these things. This campaign and this president should have been saying that insurance companies are literally stopping insuring houses in Florida and other places because the climate problem is so bad. The military believes in climate change.

Insurance companies believe in climate change, and you better believe in climate change too because it's coming for your pocketbooks. They didn't have a message like that. Look, I just think it's not all framing, but I think framing was part of it, and they had no message and they had no story. On the trans piece, look, I think it was egregious that Harris didn't talk about and reframe the sports issue, because there was a very easy... Look, if she wanted to avoid stepping on toes, the easiest way to have that conversation is not to ignore it because everyone was talking about it and there were the ads right the easiest way to frame that conversation is we are talking about under 100 athletes across the country and who are trans where this is actually an issue maybe we can debate

what the policy should be there but if you're worried about fairness in sports you should be worried about the parents around this country who are spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for year round camps to get their kids to win college tuitions for their kids who are already rich. Right? Like that's a way to reframe this issue and say this isn't about this tiny group. This is about this big group. I mean, one of my frustrations with the way in which we talked about the trans issue post-election in the aftermath, there was that blueprint survey, right? Which showed that a lot of Americans thought, you know, that Harris cared more

about, was more worried about minority groups and trans groups than they were about, you know, regular people or, you know, the rest of the country or however they put it, right? And that was framed as Americans are angry about trans stuff. And I think the way to read that question is it wasn't clear to the public that the Democrats care as much about working people and about these other issues as they care about some of these smaller issues, right? And so, you know, I just think the strategy of silence was really damning on a lot of these issues. You have to talk about it. You can't just hope people

forget, you know? And so is the way to care then by just having a candidate that's doing more populist demagoguery against big corporations? Maybe one way to frame this is the Ohio Senate races in 22 and 24. Tim Ryan ran a pretty in a glacius-y, like directionally type campaign, you know, trying to get more to the middle on cultural issues. Is he the one who shot the TV or something with a gun? Did Tim Ryan do that? I forget if he had a shoot the TV.

Maybe threw a football at it. He did something. Oh yeah, that's right. And then Sherrod Brown in 2024 ran a directionally more Tyler-ish campaign talking about populist economic issues. Sherrod Brown got 46.47% of the vote in Ohio. Tim Ryan got 46.92% of the vote in Ohio. So like absolutely no difference

between the two different approaches, which maybe just speaks to the Democratic brand broadly or I don't know. So I guess my question is maybe the policy doesn't matter at all and it's just more about what you're emphasizing and trying to demonstrate that you're more of a populist fighter might be your pitch Tyler and maybe Matt pitch is that it is actually more policy and that Tim Ryan was just drugged down by Biden. So, anyway, I don't want to speak for both of you, but I'm just trying to define the contours of the disagreement. Well, I mean, I think in terms of, you know, there's a national brand, right, which is

shaped by different kinds of things. I think the line between policy and how do you talk about things is a little bit fuzzy at times, right? One thing that how parties define themselves is like, what is room for reasonable disagreement? I think that one reason lurking behind the kind of failed strategy of silence is that Democrats, even Democrats in safe seats, are a little bit afraid of what they are going to say because they are afraid that if they cross some kind of line, people are going to jump on them. So one person pitched to me a version of this, something similar to what you said on sports,

said like, look, there's a very small number of athletes. There's a lot of strong feelings about this. I can understand that reasonable people might disagree, blah, blah, blah, and then something about school. And so like, that makes sense to me. But the line reasonable people can disagree is actually a policy, right? Like, not a policy that like, you will get death threats on blue sky, if you say that. And it also begs the question of like did the federal Department of Education Need to promulgate a policy about this at all or could the policy have been reasonable people can disagree I'm working on inflation social security tech like the thing is that the federal government has to do they did do something though

Like right, you know, so it's actually like a Trump on abortion. This was a big problem for Republicans in 2022, a big millstone around their neck. They adjusted to trying to say, different states are going to be able to go different ways on this. From what I've seen, people bought this. Most of the women who I know are like, Trump is full of shit. This is awful You know, he's responsible for Dobbs, etc, etc

but he gained the votes of a lot of pro-choice people by adopting a Policy that at least he says like abortion is gonna remain available in the blue states If you're in a red state, you're gonna be able to travel Medication will be available. I mean, we'll see, like, what he does with that is going to be a big deal politically. But like, actually creating space for people to agree to disagree on cultural issues is largely about how you talk, but it does always like, it touches on policy, right? Like, you can't write a rule that says every elementary school in America has to handle things

a certain way and then also say, hey guys, it's not that big a deal. If it's not a big deal, it's not a big deal. No, I mean, I think that's, I think that's right. I mean, I agree with that. And I think, I mean, I do not think the Democrats, where I take a holistic view, like I said, on why they lost. I think there's a lot of things. I think the legacy of 2020 WOCUS, it's in there. I absolutely dispute that that's the driving factor, but it's one of them. There's foreign policy, there's the economy, there's a ton of different things.

But I do agree that Democrats need to get over this terror they clearly have of people yelling at them. And I make this point in academia all the time where I will have tenured academics reach out to me and I'll have complained about something about academia online. I'm so glad you said that. I would never, I could never say that.

It's like you literally have tenure. Yes, you can't, what's going to happen? Who cares? And I think it's really similar with politicians where they'll point at Seth Malt and they'll say, oh my gosh, people yelled at him outside his office. Who cares? A couple staffers quit, okay. And I think there's this real terror of being yelled at, but it's totally incommensurate with the actual ramifications

of being yelled at, which are in political terms, I think, extremely minor, but in psychological terms seem to weigh on these folks a great deal. I mean, I do think Democrats needed to do a way better job on the trans issue because there was room to work with. If you look at polling, a majority of the public, including Republicans, believe that trans people should be protected in civil rights, in housing, in employment discrimination, etc., and 70% disagree on the sports thing. That's quite a lot to work with, right? It's not as though the public is anti-trans.

I think Democrats have done too much to portray the Republican Party as, oh, they want to bring back employment discrimination, all these things. Most Republicans don't agree with any of that. It's this particular issue. And you can rightly say that this is a minor issue and it shouldn't matter in a campaign because it's a small number of people. But I think Democrats have failed to understand that this minor issue is a proxy for a bigger sense that Democrats just sort of legislate what the cultural values are going to be.

They tell you things that sometimes seem more wellian, and then if you don't believe them, they're going to shriek at you about it. So I think when we make quantitative arguments, arguments that I think are fundamentally right, I think there are so many bigger issues with fairness in college and sports than the small number of trans folks. But I think there's a mistake when you think it's just quantitative and that you don't understand the way in which these cultural issues are proxies for a bigger sense that the elites tell you what to do, you know, and there's this concentration of wealth,

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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Invest in the health and longevity of your skin with Oneskin. Your future self will thank you. So this is where I want to dig in on what I think is our biggest three-way agreement. But baby Tyler, I might go back to you first because you might be the one that would have a caveat. The thing that frustrates me the might be the one that would have a caveat. The thing that frustrates me the most about the fact that the answer is to go populist on economic policy issues,

is that Trump hasn't done anything. Trump didn't do anything for these people, literally nothing. 100%. I guess you could say that he does, in his, in his word salad, like he kind of, you know, talks about how he cares about them. But like from a policy standpoint, just objectively speaking, sure, the results of inflation might have hurt people more during Biden, but like the actual policy initiatives put forth, Biden was much more focused on working class people and on jobs and on re-industrializing the country, et cetera.

And so to me, like when you look at that set of facts, it's like, I don't know that the economic policy stuff actually matters. Like that it's this stuff that matters. It's culture. It's that working class people of all races and rural people of all, which are mostly white people, but of all races feel disconnected from the cultural elites. And like, it's really just that and like they and that there has to be a way to deal with that and it's not the economic stuff at all.

Tyler, what do you think about that? Yeah, so I mean, I agree with you that policy in, you know, immediate terms does not drive people to the vote. The thing I would point out about populism is that the last three elections have all every election since Obama, every presidential election has been won by somebody espousing populist rhetoric. 2016 Trump was going after Wall Street and he was going after people who voted for the Iraq war. Even oh eight Obama was just Obama is the only one that wasn't.

Yep. 2020 Joe Biden promised a public option for health care, which is worth noting that he didn't deliver and really didn't ever bring up again. Right. So he's Trump is not the only one who promises populist things and then doesn't do them. Then Trump again ran on, we're going to do tariffs, economic nationalism, protectionism. However you feel about that, those are populist ideas. The thing I would point out is that populist rhetoric has won at least the last three presidential elections and maybe going back to 2008 and Obama, you could absolutely make that kind of case. On the policy standpoint, I totally agree. And one of, I agree in the sense

that that doesn't drive voters immediately. And part of the problem is that the gains from Biden's industrial policy aren't gonna be felt for a long time. And so there are sort of two different speeds of politics we're working with. One, which is short-term where people feel unheard, both culturally and in terms of sort of corporate power,

et cetera, and then this other speed, which is the long unfolding of the ramifications of some of his power, et cetera. And then this other speed, which is the long unfolding of the ramifications of some of his policies, like industrial policy. And you need to be able to bridge that gap rhetorically, where you can say, look, this is where we're going. It took decades for neoliberalism to create the mess we're in of concentrated power and economic inequality,

and will take a long time to dig back out, but this is why we're doing it. This is what we're doing, why we're doing it. Right? I mean, what Trump did to his credit, and I completely agree, he's totally full of it in terms of things he says he's going to do. But if you watch Trump's speeches, you would come away with a basic sense that he cared about working people. Now, I think that's largely a lie. But when he went to McDonald's, liberals on the internet and in person were saying oh my gosh, can you look he's such a phony He's going to McDonald's. He's being the fry cooker blah blah blah

It would be very hard for me to imagine despite Kamala Harris saying she used to work at McDonald's They're really hard for me to imagine her condescending to put on an apron and pick up a fry cooker or sit in a garbage truck Really? Yeah, I can't see her doing it. I could have seen her doing it. So I think that we pay too much attention to that kind of pure BS aspect of Trump and Trumpism, and not enough to the fact that, I mean, we talked about climate a little bit. But again, it falls in these debates into this gap between the cultural issues

and the economic issues. But whenever Trump was pressed, I'm like, what are you actually going to do about inflation? He would say, we're going to drill baby drill, we're going to have cheaper oil, we're going to have cheaper diesel, that that's a cost input to all kinds of things. As is often the case with things Donald Trump says, not 100% accurate in his rhetoric, not like Mr. Scrupulous. But it's also not totally fake, right? Like the Biden administration raised drilling fees

on federal land for American things. They did various things to try to restrict fossil fuel output. They did put all these energy efficiency regulations on appliances. It's something that is very important to progressives. And you have to sort of decide how much you care about this stuff. It's one reason I'm a little skeptical of the idea that we're

gonna like, just go left on economics. There are some things championing Social Security, Medicare championing better health care for people. I mean, these are like the core Democratic Party messages. This is like back when Tim was a Republican. This is this is the stuff you worry about. Yeah, I'm going to swallow them because of the cultural issues. That's the stuff that makes Republicans worried that we're going to have an argument about health care for poor kids, that we're going to have an argument about social security benefits. When you put more and more stuff on the table, I think almost regardless of

what it is, it can be cultural, it can be environmental, it can be sort of more far out there, socialistic type stuff, it starts to make people nervous, you know, and you are at a kind of a risk. Trump was very good at through his gibberish, making a lot of people feel like they were welcome in the coalition. As the left has become the more educated group, it's not just you can get out of touch with people, very fastidious, right? Tons of fighting, like, is it okay to be campaigning with this person?

What are we doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, rather than boiling it down to a smaller agenda and just being like Trump is bad. We don't want to bankrupt the country with tax cuts. Let's get some medicine and like otherwise be chill. I think we have an agreement on the fastidious language police across the podcast. So I want to just before I lose you guys, I want to do two specific issues that I think might bring out some at least might inform, you know, where you think we can go going forward. A lot of discussion this week about the

assassination of a healthcare executive on the street. People do not like it when you think vigilante assassinations are bad, so I'm not gonna do that again. Well, I am gonna keep doing it, but I'm not gonna do it again. You're neutral. Yeah, I'm not gonna do it again on this podcast. So yeah, neutral on vigilante assassinations. Some, but I am curious though, there is then this conversation that is led out of that, right, which is maybe if the Democrats had been talking about how

insurance companies are screwing you, that would have been better. And maybe if the Democrats did more popular demagoguery on healthcare against healthcare executives, they would have been better. Maybe if the Democrats did more popular demagoguery on healthcare against healthcare executives, they would have done better. My instinct to that is that if this was such a passionate issue for everybody, then maybe the person that didn't even have a healthcare plan would not have been elected. But I could be wrong. I'm open to being wrong on that. So I wonder what both of you think about that.

The rabble rousers saying that going after healthcare executives and demagoguing them is the path forward for the Democrats to get their mojo back. What do you think about that, Tyler? The first thing I would say is I went to a Quaker college. I'm not a Quaker, but a lot of my leftism comes out of going through a Quaker institution that was very anti-war, pro-peace, et cetera. When I say I think killing is bad and murder is bad, I mean it not in the way that people say,

murder is bad, but I actually, like a core part of my politics and what for me it is to be a leftist is to think, killing unarmed people is bad, whether it's in foreign countries or whether it's here. That being said, people are livid because our healthcare system is really bad in this country and that crosses class divides.

I mean, there are wealthy people who also have their own horror stories about the health insurance industry. And I think it's, look, it's really easy to moralize about folks who are taking glee in a man's murder. I think that's horrible, right? But at the same time, you have to at least recognize that many people in this country are struggling and this is an expression of pain, right? And so in terms of the piece about, you know, would they have won if they would have run on health care? You know,

I mean, I think it would have helped certainly. But a thing I think about a lot, this philosopher, Ernest LeClo, is a book on populism. And he says, what populism is? Yeah, Matt, I'm doing a deep cut. And he says, what populism is. Yeah, Matt, I'm doing a deep cut. He says, what populism is. Is it populist to cite obscure philosophers? Yes. And so he makes this point that populism isn't just an aggregate of demand, like individual demands or claims.

Like I want healthcare, I want this, I want that. It's what happens when for a long time, a series of concrete demands have gone unmet and they become bigger than the sum of their parts, right? So it's no longer just about, I want healthcare and I want better infrastructure and I want union jobs. It metastasizes into some bigger thing where it's like, I want like real change.

I don't want just this piecemeal strategy, I want real change. And I think, you know, it's a mistake for Democrats to think about this in terms of, oh, if we would have just done healthcare or if we would have just talked more about labor, if we would have just done this. They need to recognize we have swung back and forth, Dem, Republican, Dem, Republican, because people want sweeping transformation of the sort that Obama promised and didn't really deliver in 2008.

And so I think healthcare would have helped, but I think we also need to recognize that people want somebody who's going to take a big swing in saying, a data point that's crazy is like 70, 80% of the country says we are on the wrong track. A similar percentage said, no matter who wins the election, things are just going to keep getting worse. You need to find somebody who's going to make people feel like they're not just going to give you a public health care option or they're not just going to do this. They're going to bring real systemic change. And so I think health care matters, but you know.

And defensive incremental change, Madaglis yes. I mean, so I mean, I think that this is like one of the big paradoxes of American politics is that people are so frustrated with the system. They are so down on politics and politicians. They love outsiders. They love like big rhetoric about change. And they kind of like the idea of upsetting the apple cart.

At the same time, whenever somebody actually tries to enact large scale public policy change, it becomes contentious, it becomes unpopular. When Obama was doing healthcare reform, that was unpopular. When Trump was trying to undo Obama's healthcare reform, that was unpopular. When Trump was doing his tax cuts, that was unpopular. When Kathy Hochul says she wants to do congestion pricing, that's unpopular. When Sam Brownback tried to overhaul Kansas's tax system. That was unpopular

So I think it's a it's it's tricky I mean, this is part of why politics is hard right is like you need to show people that you are in touch with their Disgruntlement with the system but part of that disgruntlement is that they don't trust the system to actually take care of their their lives back to micro Just need a working- class reformer to put a face on incremental change. I vote for micro. When I think about this insurance executive who got murdered, A, I am against murder. B, there is a difference when you're doing anti-corporate populism. I think it matters what your targets are.

It is true that people have a lot of frustration with health insurance companies, also with maybe with like phone companies and cable companies. These are like really shitty experiences. I think if you paid attention to politics during the Biden years, you would have seen a lot of fighting with Amazon. At the beginning, before Elon's sharp right turn, Biden was fighting with America's leading electric car entrepreneur. For sort of no reason.

Well, he was fighting with them about union issues, right? Fighting with Amazon, fighting with Google. I think insurance companies are much better, not a target for violence, but for like a politics of like, I'm with you, not with big business. You got to think about like which businesses are actually held in lower esteem by the public than politicians. Because it's not that long of a list. Short list.

You know, like Amazon delivers me packages in two days. Pretty efficiently. With my private subscription. They gave me Jack Reacher, you know, lots of good stuff that I enjoy. And it's like the government. I can't watch Thursday Night Football in hotel rooms anymore because of Amazon though.

So we're gonna attack them over that. So yeah, you know. Do it during a Thursday night game, yeah. Whereas like the insurance companies are frustrating, right? Like their business model is to sometimes refuse to pay claims that I want. So that is like a logical form of populism. Can I give one more specific policy issue to this point? The student loan reform.

So that in one mind could be seen as a traditional populist policy issue. It's a wealth transfer. We're bailing people out. We're helping people. On the other hand, we're helping people that went to college. Now, the Democrats tried to reframe this as well, but there's technical colleges and nurses and plenty of people. But still, it was specifically targeted to people that went to college. So anyway, I would like both of your takes on how the student loan reform fits into this rubric, Tyler.

Yeah. So one of the problems is that the Democrats haven't just owned that this is a policy that disproportionately not only but helps the professional class, right? It's worth noting that a significant percentage of people who were targeted for student loan relief are Pell Grant recipients, working class people, et cetera. So I think it's disingenuous to frame this as like, oh, this is for the rich college educated. But it's simply a fact. Julius Crine in American Affairs a number of years ago

had a really good essay on this. I think it was called The Real Class War. And one of the things he pointed out is if you look at who supported Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, it was basically the professional class, right? Who were downwardly mobile and angry. And in a certain sense, what he was arguing in that essay is that like the real class wars between the oligarchs

who make their money through capital gains and then the top 10% who are professional class, but basically like work for a living. I'm grinding away on my podcast here, paying the top tax rate. Exactly. Here and there, in the take minds. Exactly. But I think Democrats need to do better messaging to target both their professional class and the working class, and then make a case about the ways in which their policy helps both of these these parts of their coalition, right? I mean, one example was Lena Kahn, who was beloved, obviously, and many Democrats were very much supported her. But there wasn't enough of an emphasis on, you know, when Lena Kahn was trying to get rid of non-competes, that helps working people and that also helps professional class people who work in tech and are saddled

with non-competes all the time, right? So there are ways you can talk about issues like college relief and some of these other things and say, like, look, some of the stuff we do is for this group of people in our coalition, some is for this other group. Would medical debt relief, would it have been better for you?

Yeah, medical debt relief would have been great. If you would have chosen between those, would you have just said that they should have done? I would have chosen medical debt for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Republicans, you know, if I could recommend anything to anyone, it is to read the book,

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America by George H. Nash, which is a history of what got called fusionism, where the Republicans married traditionalism and evangelical Christianity to sort of libertarian economics and then new conservatism and foreign policy.

And it's a granular look at how they managed to build this coalition of people. Somebody sipping martinis in Wall Street and evangelical Christian in the South have very little in common, yet they were able to knit together a coalition. And the Democrats need to think in those terms, right? Like we have a coalition of people who do not agree on issues like immigration or gender or some of or climate change, right? But we need to figure out a way to say, look, we're on this tent. Sometimes these people are going to get this. Sometimes you're going to get this. And that is what it is.

And until Democrats can do that, I think we'll continue to flounder. Matt, student loan and medical bailouts. Here's the thing to me about student loan. You can debate the distributional tables of that thing. The symbolism, you know, I think clearly bad. But what really got me about it, and it relates to this whole concept of populism, right, which is that if you want to say that people who were in debt for student loans deserve help, right, who is the bad guy in that kind of story? The bad guy has to be on some level the colleges and universities themselves.

Yeah, yeah. No, okay. You're speaking my language now. Bringing in more former Republicans. This might have helped in the Atlanta suburbs. So to do this in a way that has no accountability element for the universities, I think is just really bad. So, and if you go back to the Obama administration, right, they had a rule that was going to make it harder for for-profit schools whose graduates weren't earning a decent living to be eligible for federal student loans. He fought and fought and fought for that. They got it done at the end of the administration. Betsy DeVos comes in and she says, I think reasonably it's arbitrary to saddle

the for-profit schools with this rule and not get the nonprofits. So I'm like listening to her, I'm like, that makes sense. But then her butt is, so we're gonna let the for-profits off the hook. And then Biden came back and he's stuck with that, right? But he added in, well, I'm going to do like a bailout for this subgroup of students. So I think part of an economic

populism means taking a more comprehensive look at like who are the economic elites, right? Like the Yale faculty are not like scrappy workers, the university presidents, those boards, right? Like if they are ripping off the public, like that is bad, just like it's bad if a health insurance company rips off the public. I want to add one element to this. This is how I stay in touch with real people by going to the gay bar and a gay bar employee recognized me and we started talking about politics and this was towards the end of the campaign. And he was like, I didn't get a student loan bailout.

Because that's the other thing, like it wasn't a blanket thing, it was challenging to do, right? So it ended up being a broken promise on top of all those things. It felt like it was a message to the elites. There wasn't a good villain. And to a certain category of people, they didn't qualify for whatever various mundane reason and it felt like a broken palm stem. He was pissed. He was like, I don't think that that one vote in Louisiana, I don't know if he ended up voting for Kamlo or not or

whether that really mattered one way or the other. But that was another element of it. It really did not have this broad impact that it was pitched as. It's like this was really gonna help young people. Young people in particular were the ones that weren't getting it because they didn't qualify in the right timeline. Well, most, I mean, most young people don't go to college. I mean that's just like a reality that you need to sort of cope with, right? So I mean I think this is just a great example that like some populism in your economics, sure, like by all, you know, it's the Democratic Party, you got to have a way to be like re-standing for the little guy.

But you can't just like grab shit that like emerges from the left policy ether and like assume that it will be populist. Like I kind of get why like nonprofit staffers and college professors and the other people from the Elizabeth Warren intellectual network like hatched this idea but it's like a real stinker and I think kind of obvious ways and like they just like they wouldn't they wouldn't listen like people kept saying like this is gonna look really bad like like what are you doing here guys and I don't know.

I think you're right, though, that the reason it looked bad, and I would note that still people supported it, right, like a majority of the public still supported it. And you can, you can parse out independence and Republicans and how they felt about it, but like a majority supported it. But I completely agree with Matt that the the failure to hold universities to account and say, you guys are increasing your tuition by $5,000 every year, that is not inflation.

You are screwing students, right? Or that you guys have terrible labor practices and then you're lecturing us about social justice, right? Like take it to them. And that didn't happen. And so it was just as though this was an amorphous policy with no friend-enemy distinction. I think that's a crucial part of populism.

To that, I totally agree with Matt, and I think you need to be able to pick targets where you can name an enemy who people don't like. And people don't like colleges and universities. They have a lower approval rating than Congress, which Congress probably has a lower approval rating than the devil. And so I agree that the messaging failure... The devil is popular so, like, I just I, you know, I agree that they're the messaging failure. The devil is popular.

Bates is good, though, right? Beloved. Oh, yeah. Beloved. Beloved Lewiston institution, anchor of the community. Paper mills, you know, aren't what they used to be. Exactly. I did not get to fighting over NAFTA or the Brolygarks, which I really wanted to. So we can maybe do this again in January.

But I do want to end with like a forward-looking thing. Is there somebody out there that you think is a model for what you're pushing? I would nominate potentially of interest to either of you. There's Jared Golden, who's your man up in Maine, Tyler, and whose map's kind of maybe more ideological spirit animal. But I open the floor to any other thoughts about forward-looking types of candidates that you think might work better.

Tower, go ahead. Yeah, you know, I mean, I just think it's too early to start naming people. I'm not like Peter and I in 2020. Maybe just like paint me a picture of something that you think would. You know, I just wrote about Chris Murphy. One of the reasons I did is because I think he is

onto something where at least he basically, and look, I don't know, I just wrote about Chris Murphy. One of the reasons I did is because I think he is on to something where at least he basically... And look, I don't know that I believe a guy from Connecticut is like the right vector for like... Also his haircut? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His haircut isn't giving working man... No, no. So like, I don't know...

I like Chris Murphy, but I just... Yeah, yeah. But like that basic stance he's taking, which the reason I find it appealing is it's welding legitimate economic populism, still fuzzy on the details, but like at least in spirit, to the sense that we need to let, we need to open the tent. And explicitly he is saying this isn't about throwing XYZ group under the bus, it's letting other people into the tent and saying we all get to argue, but like this is what we stand for as a coalition roughly.

And so I think somebody who can weld economic populism to social values pluralism is what is going to win elections. And like I said, I like Chris Murphy. Obviously, I'm a Bernie guy. Bernie is far too old. And AOC I think needs to run for, I think A, she's a little bit too tethered to the social justice corner. And B, she hasn't, I think she needs to try to run for I think a she's a little bit too tethered to the sort of social justice corner and B She hasn't you know, I think she needs to try to run for governor culturally social justice Yeah, like what yeah kind of identity stuff Jared golden. He's in Maine. Yeah, you know, I do Jared golden is good on a number of issues like corporate power I care about Jared golden is reasonable on things like gun control, you know

Where I think this is one thing where I think Matt and I do agree, like Democrats need to realistically confront the fact that assault weapons ban is not gonna happen. It's not the 1990s. I mean, it's not gonna happen for- This is where the former Republican is gonna get to outlive both of you.

I'm ready to go in with that out. But anyway, go ahead, you can finish. Yeah, yeah. But like, so I like Jared Golden. I think that is the kind of energy we need. Like people who have authenticity in their working class appeal. Dan Osborne, I thought was a fantastic candidate

and a number of Dems got mad because he said privately he would, does not support abortion, but supports choice as a legislative matter and use pro gun control or whatever. But Dan Osborne, somebody authentic working-class appeal and economic populism so there are some people that are are promising. Right after senate nebraska yeah uh Matt final word. Golden is good i mean i think uh Marie Gluzincamp-Perez in Washington is a great

example one reason i i like to point to her is that she is i think like less obviously like working-class vibes like she kind of looks like she might be at a cool coffee shop in Portland. She also is like a mechanic. She is, but also she messages, you know, like she picked a fight with the Biden administration about some totally obscure regulation

about some kind of table saws. It's not like this issue transforms the universe, but he was a real example of showing like she thinks about things independently. She felt that she was hearing from other people who work with their hands, that they did not like this idea and she was going to champion them. Tough on immigration, et cetera. You know, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, very successful. I don't think that the word Latininx is like of Incredible significance politically. I do think it was significant that he was the first Latino democrat to talk about this in public because then because it showed

Independent mindedness it showed toughheadedness and it showed thick skin because this is what you were talking about tyler, right? It's there's so many people in the democratic party who are running scared. They'll tell me, oh, I have all these secretly reasonable opinions, but I could never say that. Right? This is like how Republicans used to come out of the closet to me. I've had more people come out of the closet to me than any person in America because I was the visible gay Republican. It's amazing. Yeah. And just anybody out there who has shown, look, I'll step out. I wouldn't have phrased what Seth Moulton said exactly the way that he said it.

But I respect the fact that he spoke what was on his mind. He got yelled at by some people. And now he's like, we are going to keep living our lives because what it means to be a big tent party is that when somebody says something and it's like a little bit off, you're not like, this is the end of you, right? You're like, we're a coalition that has like key principles, right? And then it has a diverse set of views around these things. And that means that you have to like stand up for the people who do it and not say, ah, but you didn't like do it in

the exact right way. You know, Golden golden what he said about like Trump and democracy again When he said that I did not love it But I respected that he took a shot right like the the crisis between the debate and when Biden dropped out That was like a hairy time the obvious thing for a frontline Democrat to do would be to just like go to ground and hide from everybody. And I thought it was good that he just like tried to talk to his constituents in a way that he felt would work. And I think they respected that, right? And you have to be willing to do things that people in the base are going to be like, what the fuck, man?

Because by definition, if those voters in me too agreed with the Democratic Party base like they wouldn't be voting for Trump right right like you got you got to say something that's like meaningfully different and that includes things I don't agree with so gentlemen to be continued Matt wrote in his slow boring newsletter which is not boring a common-sense Democrat manifesto you can read more there Tyler just wrote is this how Democrats win back the working class for the Atlantic? Go check that out. We'll do this again and go a full hour on NAFTA sometime in 2025.

Let's do it. Thanks guys so much. We'll be back tomorrow with Ann Applebaum. See you all then. Peace. Now the wasteland around stone drops, now the click-click domino Now the landfill bus kill PBI and shoot through, clean up domino Oh, oh, oh, oh Populism politics You beat my prices till you make sick You bought it all on credit cause you can't push the product if you're looking like you made it Ice melting on the front teeth Hear the jets clicking into gear

Pusher on the plastic, coffee in the elastic, come on Another oyster in the run, storm drops in Another click, click, domino Another landfill, bus kill, PBR and cheap flow The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.