The Ezra Klein Show - The Blue Wave Cometh?

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Democrats won big on Tuesday. It looks like the MAGA coalition has started to crack.Ezra is joined by his column editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss the big lessons for Democrats as they eye the midterms next year, and whether an anti-MAGA playbook is coming into focus.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism” by Ezra KleinOrdinary Vices by Judith N. ShklarMarc Maron's podcast with Barack Obama“Zohran’s Smile” by Anand GhiridharadasThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Marie Cascione. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Thank you. So Democrats had a big night on Tuesday. They won in New York City, where Zoran Mamdani has been the big story of the political year. They won in Virginia where Abigail Spanberger became the first woman to become governor of Virginia, in that state's history. They won in New Jersey, a state where the polling had showed it unnervingly close for Democrats, but it turned out to not be close at all. And Mikey Sherrill won by double digits. They won in California, where Gavin, New York. Sam's Prop 50, his mid-cycle redistricting to counter Texas, passed with at last I saw

65% of the vote, but it's California. We will be counting votes there forever. They won in Pennsylvania where there were Supreme Court seats up for election. They won in Georgia in these very little notice statewide utility board seats. They just won everywhere. Every kind of voter moved towards Democrats. And where the polling had made it look like this was still a pretty mixed political moment, these results looked much more like the prelude to a wave election in 2026. Now, the counter argument is that these were mostly in states that Kamala Harris had won, New Jersey, Virginia, New York, California. These were not the places where Democrats have been really struggling. But both sides are going to be looking at this election to try to take some big lessons for

26 and even, I think, for 2028. So to help me parse hope from hopium, fact from fiction here, I am joined by my esteemed editor, Aaron Reddica. Hello. Aaron, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Ezra. Let's start where you left off there. So if you're a progressive, there was much to be delighted by. If you are a moderate, there was much to be delighted by. If you were a Democrat, there was much to be delighted by, right? But already people are starting. starting to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, this shows that moderation is the way to go. No, no, no, no, this shows that an aggressive left-wing agenda will do it, right? A populist agenda. It seems, though, to show actually that simultaneously pushing both in different places works. Are you saying the Democratic Party needs to be more things and more places, Aaron? Yeah, I mean, there's different versions of this argument, right?

Our colleague, Jamal Bowie, makes a different version of this argument, but right, that the party has to be what it needs to be in each of its places. but that the overall coalition has to be pushing one way or the other. But, like, what do you draw out of what happened? I have seen, so I wrote, people can go back and listen to it if they haven't yet, a piece about how Democrats beat Trump and Trumpism. And the core point of that essay is that the problem Democrats have is they are not competitive in enough places right now. They nationally are pretty competitive. The presidential popular vote is quite close, election to election.

but there are 24 states that Donald Trump won by 10 points or more. And if Democrats want power in the Senate in any significant numbers ever again, they're going to need to be competitive in places where they used to be able to win elections, places like Ohio and Florida and Iowa and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota, Alaska, but they've not really been competitive there for some time. So I don't know how much I think this was a positive test of that. I know everybody's saying, well, look, Abigail Spanberger is a moderate in Virginia, and Zora and Mamdani is a Democratic socialist in New York City. And my view is that is great.

But also, by any historical measure of politics, they're actually just not that far apart. Abigail Spanberger is a moderate within the current Democratic Party, but she is not a moderate, you know, from the perspective of 1998. I like Spanberger's politics, her focus on affordability. I like Mikey Sherrill, her focus on affordability. I like Zara and Mamdani, his focus on affordability. The thing about all three of these figures is none of them challenged Democrats in any significant way, except maybe Mamdani, actually, from the left. There are, I know some Democrats who are genuinely uncomfortable with him.

The question of what would you need to do to win an election in Ohio and Florida in Iowa is not, I think, yet answered. Matt Iglesias made this point where he says, look, if you look at how Cheryl and Spanberger ran and how Harris ran, they both ran about five points ahead of her. And if you just say, okay, what that tells us is that the off-cycle electorate right now, and this would be a big extrapolation, but just for the sake of argument, that the off-cycle electorate right now is plus five Democratic compared to 2024. That is almost certainly enough to win you the House. But it is maybe enough to win you Ohio.

It is not enough to win you, Iowa, Alaska, you know, places like that. Right, the 10% states that you were. The 10% states. Donald Trump is unpopular. He has been going down in popularity. He, some more recent polls I've seen, take him out of the low 40s and into the high 30s, right? Things are actually looking fairly bad for him.

So in terms of this situation nationally, the mood, the mood is anti-Trump. But in terms of have Democrats solved the set of problems, they will ultimately need to solve in order to become, a durable coalition capable sidelining MAGA. I don't think that is answered. What I will say, though, because I do think it's relevant to this, you are seeing the way MAGA is beginning to crack under its own extremely bad political habits and culture. The fact that the right over the last week and a half has been consumed by a debate of what level of white supremacy to welcome into their coalition.

of whether or not Tucker Carlson is a hero for having a friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes or he should be ejected for it. Let me put it this way. This doesn't look to me like a coalition spending a lot of its time thinking about how to appeal to the median voter. It's definitely not about affordability.

And J.D. Vance, by the way, right, the succession of Trump, who does not have Trump's personal charisma and control of the coalition, he has been quiet on this. He has been cowardly on this. I mean, so is Trump, by the way. It's not like Trump has come out

denounce Fuentes. But to the extent Vance has said anything. He had dinner with Fuentes. Yes. But he says he didn't really know who he was. But yes, he it would have been very easy for Donald Trump as president had come out and say this is ridiculous, right? When Tucker Carlson attacked Donald Trump

for the Iran bombings, Trump put out a true social post calling Carlson crazy. Trump has said nothing as of now on Carlson and Fuentes. And Vance's statement was along the lines of can't we all just get along? And so you see ways in which the right is opening up some really profound vulnerabilities for itself.

So the Democratic Party can expand its tent and be normal and competent and sane and welcoming. You know, we may not be at the terminus of how anti-Trump this electorate can get, right? If we go into recession, if there is significant acceleration of the group verification of the right, We might go from a Democratic plus five to a Democratic plus eight. If Democrats make some good strategic moves, maybe it becomes plus nine, plus ten. And all of a sudden, politics looks very different. So if I were the Democrats, what I would say is not, hey, look, we got no more work to do here. It's, hey, look, we have an opportunity here.

How do we maximize it? So the really happy chart, can a chart be happy? The thing that... Aaron, you know I think a chart can be happy. A chart, read it there. Everybody you could ask that question of me. Come on, man. The one that was really making liberal hearts beat faster

was the chart of counties in New Jersey that have 60, I think it's 60 percent or more Hispanic residents because those swung hard towards Cheryl. So swung from Harris to Cheryl. So why is that? Let's focus first on affordability, right? which is the thing that unites all of these people, right? Whether it's Zoro Maldani or Mikey Sherrill or Abigail Spanberger.

So affordability, obviously, was an albatross for Democrats in 2024. It is very possibly why they lost. And here we are with affordability being their key issue. How much do you see affordability as the ticket to success in 2026 and maybe even 2028? So one way of thinking about the 2025 election is that the 2024 election, you had the Biden-Harris incumbent on the ballot. And the Biden-Harris incumbency was blamed for the very high cost of living. And in the 2025 election, you have the Trump administration as the incumbent political force. And in addition to other things people may not like about them, they are being blamed for the high cost of living.

Trump has lost his high polling on that. He has used the tariffs to increase prices in a way that people understand. In New Jersey, electricity prices were a huge part of the campaign. Charles was very, very focused there. So in a period of people are just angry about the cost of living. You could see sustained political ricochet against the national and common party that gets blamed for. particularly when that party is doing things that are highly public as a tariffs are.

Right now, the Supreme Court is trying to decide if Trump has this tariff power. And you have to imagine that every Republican House member and Senate member is just praying. Right, they were cheering Gorsuch on as he went off yesterday. Yeah, that five members of Supreme Court take the tariff power away from Trump because they don't want to take the, I mean,

is their job, right, the House and the Senate to take the tariff power away from Trump who is misusing an authority that is not meant to, say, punish Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro is it's not meant for the way he's using tariff power at all. But they don't want to challenge Trump. They won't challenge Trump. So they're hoping the Supreme Court takes his power away from him,

which would bring prices down functionally immediately, and that would be good for Republicans. So within that, Democrats have moves they can make, too. And the question is then, how do you persuade voters? that you, the party that just a couple of years ago failed to bring down prices will now bring down prices. So one answer is

Mamdani in New York City where the thing Mom Dani had was, and I know you hate it when I use this term, but a memetic policy agenda on affordability. And what I mean by that is that he had functionally

four policy ideas that fit on an index card, that if you were getting Mom Dani mailers and, you know, door hangers as I was were always there, and they contained the whole of his, like, idea. Well, let's rattle them off because I'm thinking of three. So fast and free, fast and free. Fast is important. Uh-huh. This is your disabled friend here says fast is very important. Uh, freeze rent. Right, free grocery stores. Oh, the grocery stores and the, okay, and the universal

free child care. Right, which is the understated part. And you could say the grocery stores. I mean, but again, this is why to me, this is why to me the grocery stores thing mattered. It was never meant, it's not a big policy, right? It's a pilot program of five grocery stores, one in each borough, run by the government. But it was Mamdani saying, I will experiment in ways that at least you feel others haven't to try to bring down your prices. I will do anything and I will do things other people have not been doing. And so, Mamdani, of these four elections, right, of Prop 50 in California, Spanberger, Cheryl, and Mamdani, when you look at exit polling, the Mamdani election is the only one. where a majority of voters said that Trump was not a significant

or was not the driving force behind their vote. This was not a Trump-resistance election in New York City. This was a Mamdani anti-Mam-Dani election in New York City, and Mamdani just absolutely dominated on cost of living. Now, the question of can he deliver on that is going to be very important for both the future of that form of politics and his political future individually. Child care in particular is going to be very expensive and very difficult.

But what he did was he had a set of policies that he repeated relentlessly, that people could imagine what life might feel like if they were in force, and they came to define him. And Cheryl tried to do something sort of similar to this, but in a more complicated way around utilities and rate setting and electricity in New Jersey. But electricity is going to become a growing issue across the country. It already is because a variety of things are converging. but one of the big ones being AI and data center demand, which is driving electricity prices up very, very, very rapidly. By the way, we're in a shutdown as we speak over health insurance premiums. My census shutdown is probably, I don't want to predict it,

but the reporting is that the moderate Democrats in the Senate do not really feel this is worth pushing for all that much longer. The Trump administration does not want a deal. They have not come to the table. But quietly, a lot of Democrats are like, is that the worst thing? If Donald Trump wants to have health insurance premium spike for millions and millions and millions of Americans

on his watch and be blamed for it in the next election, is it true the Democrats should take this much ongoing risk in order to protect him from that outcome? So I think the question Democrats have nationally is if they want to make their affordability pitch legible to voters, what are, if Democrats, is going to come up with something like a six for 2026, right? Their version of the contract for America, or their six for 2006 that worked in. A six pack for America. What's on there, right?

What are the three or four or five or six policies that Democrats want everybody to be able to rattle off as the coherent core of the democratic agenda? And probably in that world, you want four of them to be affordability and two of them to be anti-Trumpist. corruption or authoritarianism. So we're going to have to take some of this slowly here because there's a lot of different elements in what you just said. But let me just say that as someone who's younger daughter is about to turn 26, the question of the subsidies, right? It's intruding into our lives in a way that it's very real. It's very real. The Mamdani Coalition, right? One thing that's

so interesting to me is, right, people want to portray it as a bunch of kids in a story and Bushwick and elsewhere in New York, who are AOC fans and, like, the precarious, some people like to put it, high education, low-income voters who think they should have a different life. But the truth is, if you're winning half of the vote in the largest electorate since 1969,

you are reaching a much broader group of people. And one thing that really fascinated me about all of this is that there are Trump, Mamdani voters. There are voters I mentioned earlier who switched from Trump to Cheryl and Trump to Spanberger, but there are also, it looks like, Mamdani Trump voters, they are concentrated in immigrant communities in New York City, right? So the affordability agenda has the ability to cut across that whole problem, right? Of, oh, you can't win over the center with someone like Mamdani because you won't, right, the policies will be too out there, et cetera, et cetera.

But actually, he does seem to have won some people. I think it's really important to say this about Mamdani. His policies were not too out there for this electorate at all. And I mean that not just in the sense that he won the election, right? I think you could look at Mamdani's win in a number of ways. On the one end, it's an incredibly impressive political victory for somebody who was in political unknown two years ago. On the other hand, he won last time I elected the vote with 50.6 percent.

of the vote. It was in the end of Mamdani anti-Mamondani election. So he both brought out a lot of voters for him and brought out a lot of voters against him. But if you talked to the voters or paid any attention to the ads or watched what the anti-Mam-Dani coalition and fears were,

none of them were about fast and free buses. The anti-Mam-Dani energy was about Israel. It was to some degree about crime and safety. And to some degree, a general vibe of socialism. But if you imagine a Mamdani who...

And that he was young and couldn't actually do it all. I don't think that's what brought people out, though. Okay. Fair. I don't think that was where the energy was. Right. That's the eye rolling. It's not the voting. Right. Okay. If you imagine a Mamdani who just, for whatever reason, his past politics, who he was, you know, I think there was a lot of Islamophobia in the election and the attacks against him. I don't think that's arguable. But if you just imagine a Mamdani, who is the same in every way,

but Israel never becomes an issue around him, that actually drains the Andy Mamdani coalition of a fair amount of its energy. Crime and safety, it probably would have remained there. So the reason I'm saying this is not to say anything actually one way or the other about Mamdani, but his policy agenda was actually, it was amazing to me, how little his opponents ran against it.

They, you know, there was poo-pooing that say free daycare is not plausible or likely, given the complexity of that policy and the cost of it and the fact that Mamdani doesn't control tax increases. That's a totally fair critique, but it's actually a very different critique than free daycare would be bad.

You actually don't see a lot of people running against free daycare. Taxing the rich is understood to be a popular policy that is maybe not good for New York City in the kind of critique of it because New York and New York City taxes on the rich are fairly high and you don't want to create capital flight because then you have to raise taxes

more on the middle. class. People can argue these different ways. I'm not myself that concerned about taxing the rich a little bit more, but I do think. Nor can I just say, nor am I worried that multinational capitalism is going to be slain by the election of Sir Ron Monta. Yeah. So I just think there's always been this like shimmering quality of what's going on around Mamdani where it's an incredibly exciting election and a collision of things within American politics like democratic socialism or Zionism or the words like globalized the intifada

that at other times in American politics they would have been red lines that if a candidate crossed them that candidate was understood to have no chance and the fact that Mamdani could cross them and still win shows you things are changing and on the other hand the actual way that he ran the election

the actual policy agenda Mamdani ran on was neither that activating to his opponents and by the way is not that socialist build back better had a bit effort to make child care, at least to expand child care very dramatically. Bloomberg had some free buses. Bloomberg had some free buses. So the actual affordability agenda he was running on was not that activating to his opposition and highly popular. He's going to struggle to deliver parts of it. I think fast and free buses is completely doable. Running a couple pilot groceries is

completely doable. It's interesting about the buses. So I am on the buses constantly. And they have a sign across the front, like one of the lit up parts, says, you know, fare required. And I was looking at it last night thinking, like, what will it be like if it says no fare required? You know, and it's an interesting thing to think about. First of all, you know, as Native New Yorkers know, like 30 to 40 percent of people have already decided that the buses are free. They're not fast, but they've already, they don't pay as it is now, right? So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. The places where I am really interested to see what he does are one crime and safety

because that's going to be a complex place for him to the child care because that's just a maniacally hard policy to get right. Child care is just really expensive. Infant level child care

is really, really expensive even though we really should figure out a way to do it. And then freezing the rent is a tricky policy because I don't particularly have a problem with it for a limited amount of time.

But what you're doing is what is functionally saying we are going to limit the future income of building affordable housing, right? Running affordable housing just became dramatically less profitable for anybody doing it. So you then need to say, okay, that is in a mechanical way going to reduce the future construction of affordable housing. And if you talk to people in the affordable housing world, they will tell you this, right? These are not people who are generally making a ton of money. Many of these are nonprofit developers.

But if you say that we're just going to have extended rent freezes, right? Already there's a lot of worries about whether or not there will be enough upkeep of the affordable housing stock we have, but it is definitely going to reduce how much is built. So Mondani is a plan where he wants to build a lot more public housing. In order to do that quickly, he's going to have to change the way New York City builds public housing. Will he do that? He has not been nearly as focused as some of the other Democrats were like Lander on accelerating

the construction of market rate housing. He has been generally positive when he talks about it and talks about how Tokyo builds and other things, but it isn't something where he is focused a lot. It's very easy to freeze the rent. It is much harder and much harder within his coalition to build homes. Yeah, okay.

We could have an entire discussion about rents, and I won't, except to say that, again, as with multinational capitalism, you hear a lot of complaining from developers. I understand that. I really don't think, I mean, first of all, the rent has been frozen a couple times before, right? And what we're talking about to be specific is the percentage increase that the rent stabilization board allows, right?

Yes. This is not... This is for affordable housing. Right. It's not... You're saying affordable housing, but it's rent-stabilized housing, which is a slightly different thing. And I live in an apartment that is rent-stabilized myself. And all I can tell you about it is that when we were much younger and we were an elementary school teacher,

and a writer and editor, it made it possible for us to stay in New York, which helped create a stable middle class, right? There's a lot of arguments for rent stabilization have the nothing to do with the housing supply and have to do with the, why is New York? I believe in, I mean, to be clear, I believe in rent-stablish housing. I know you do, but.

No, but I want to push on it because... Yeah, but you need to build more of it. Right. Yes, I know someone who wrote a whole book about that. Right, you know, like, I want more people to be able to be able to be able to to have your living situations. And if you make rent-stabilized housing, I mean, one of the things you really learn when you report on this is a developers, both nonprofit developers, developers for market rate

housing, developers of affordable, developers have rent-stabilized. They're all trying to make developments pencil out. Like, they actually do have to make the money that is coming into their company and the money that is going out of their company match up. and the number of developments that you watch fall apart because the cost of construction is high, the cost of land is high, it's just harder to get these things off the ground, and it's much harder than people think in the non-market rate area because you have a lot more rules and regulations. You have to abide by. So the thing I am saying here is that the worry I have is not that it's a bad thing to do a rent freeze. I think we could do a rent freeze for a while, but it is easy to do a rent freeze. whereas what it requires to set off a building boom of non-market rate housing such that the people who are not currently in those units

can get into them in the future is a lot harder. And I worry that they will get the easy thing done and not the hard thing done. And most of the, I mean, I don't know about the exact numbers, but a lot of the affordable housing that has been built in New York City over the past 10 years has been built

alongside market rate housing, right? Yeah, as a deal. as a deal, there's a specific program we won't get into that comes and goes. And so people do it. And then, of course, that creates its own controversies because then you have people who are living in these places who are going through the poor door, as people sometimes say, they're not, you know, full participants in the housing. But I will say I actually am a big supporter of that general idea. What I think you want to do is tie the fortunes of the rich and the poor together in any city or in any country. And so this idea that what you can do is, and in the area I live around Guantanis, which has had a huge building boom, they've really been able to do that.

They have been able to put up huge amounts of new housing, but a lot of it is affordable housing. And there's like set asides for artists, and there's a lot of different things. And what you're basically creating is a tie-up between you're making it easier to build, but if you're going to build, you have to build more of this too. Okay. So let's go, um, east coast, west coast for a second, since you will not cop to being from the east. I'm not from the east. I know you're not from a part of the east. Right, fair, fair.

I lived in California for a long time. I really loved it. Not a long time. I lived in California for a while, and I really loved it. Gavin Newsom, there is someone who makes eyes roll everywhere. And yet, he is the leading contender right now for the 2028 nomination in part because of what he's been doing. So how do you, as a southern California, Southland native,

see what's happening with him. So Newsom has put himself in a stronger position than I would have thought at all plausible a year ago. And I think that's a lesson in what he is doing for other Democrats, which is you can make decisions to try new things and see if they work. So you think of what are the four-ish big ways that Newsom has acted since the 2024 election, which remember Newsom was a very, very, very prominent Biden surrogate in that election, very, very close to Joe Biden personally. And so not an obvious candidate for a big rethinking. But right after the election, he launches his podcast where his first guest is Charlie Kirk. And Newsom sort of ends up agreeing with Kirk on trans kids in sports, making a lot of Democrats very, very angry.

He goes on to have Steve Bannon on that podcast. He goes on to have Dr. Phil on that podcast. He goes on to have a lot of figures on the right Michael Savage on that podcast. So on the one hand, you see Newsom doing one thing, which is seemingly to choose the lane of reaching out to MAGA and trying to hear them out and learn from them. But basically at the same time, he begins to do a few other things too,

which is to first shift his own policy positioning in a way that someone delights me because he moves very far towards abundance and signs very, very big housing bills, much more ambitious than any of the housing bills he had signed at any other point in his governorship and sort of accepts the critique that the way California has been working is not good enough, right? The Democrats really do need to figure out how to build again.

He also steps into this role as an attention-grabbing resistance leader, you know, having this all caps trolling on social media of Donald Trump. But he actually found a fight that he could pick. There was an unusual fight to pick, a ballot initiative for a mid-cycle redistricting. And that he could deliver on. And by the way, initially the polling on it was bad because people in California don't like redistricting. We, you know, are partisan redistricting.

We created nonpartisan redistricting under Schwarzenegger for a reason. And so what I'd say is interesting about Newsom is that you might have said before the election, Well, there are two obvious pathways for Democrats. You can try to reach out to MAGA and listen, or you can retrench into resistance. And Newsom's answer to that was, yes, there are. And he's going to do both. The other thing that I like about Newsom,

and in many ways he is a very tricky profile for Democrats nationally. He has done a lot of things in California that would be very unpopular If they became national ad campaigns, California actually does give, in some context, health care to illegal immigrants, California, you know, did get pretty far along the way of phasing out in the future, you know, gas, combustion engine cars. And I mean, there's a lot that makes Newsom a very difficult contender if what you want to do is win back states where Democrats would become sort of uncompetitive. But just talking about his political positioning right now, that what is interesting to me is

that Newsom does things that are high risk. And he does not seem afraid. And in particular, he does not seem afraid of making people mad on his own side in order to try new things out. And so, you know, some things he's done have made people happy on his own side, right? Like trolling Trump on social media. Democrats enjoyed that. But other things, you know. I don't enjoy the old caps, but.

Well, other things like the podcasting and, you know, some of his policy movements, he just, I think one of the really. damaging things for Democrats and national Democrats is they seem afraid. Timidity. Timidity. That's not true for all of them. Bernie Sanders,

famously not exactly a Democrat, but nevertheless a Democratic leader, does not seem afraid. AOC largely does not seem afraid. But a lot of the others seem afraid. It radiates off of them. You can feel them checking what they're about to say to make sure nobody on their side

is going to get mad at them. And not seeming afraid is actually quite powerful in politics. because not being afraid allows you to try new things politically and to see how they work out. And if they don't work, you could do something else. Right, it's right. See what sticks.

Yeah, but it's a politics of experimentation. Politics are throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it's real. It's a real issue. I mean, that was FDR. Right, absolutely. And Johnson, all the high points of left, liberal, democratic governance were spaghetti that sticks, policies, and not all of them worked.

But some did, right? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, right? These are all things that emerged from throwing spaghetti against the wall. Well, there's that, but there's also just the way some of them did their politics and their moment. I mean, FDR moved all around. Sometimes he was worried about budget deficits. Sometimes he was, you know, everybody knows, like his famous, I welcome your hatred speech, but at other times he was much more solicitous of business.

interest, he made all kinds of weird compromises. My point is not that Gavin Newsom is an FDR or that he's a Lyndon Johnson. My point is that in a way that actually relatively few of his contemporaries are he seems like a politician. And this is the flip side of what people don't like about him, to your point about eyes rolling. Newsom reads to many people as a politician, and that's always been a big weakness for him. He has a slick affect. But you're seeing right now the positive side of that, which is Newsom is acting like a politician who is looking at the landscape and making moves to put himself in a stronger political position, even when those moves are a little bit difficult. And by the way, he was doing this before, too. I remember him going on Fox News to debate Ron DeSantis with Sean Hannity moderating. News, like, what a politician is supposed to do.

The seventh circle of hell embodies. What a politician is supposed to do is try to figure out the way to put together. winning coalition so they can wield political power in a way that accords with their values. And a lot of people want to wield political power in a way that accords with their values, but not that many people seem to want to do what it takes to put together winning political coalition. And so in a way, I guess what I'm praising in Newsom right now is the flip side of the coin of the thing that some people read on him and they don't like, which is, I think Newsom is practicing politics. And man, are the other Democrats in who,

2028 can give him an open lane if they're too afraid to do the same thing. Okay, this gives me an opportunity to talk about something. I don't know if it's bigger or smaller, but it's definitely harder. In the essay that we were working on over the past few weeks, part of the point of it was to talk about politics as an activity that improves lives, but also politics is an activity that improves everything, right? And so I want to just read you two things and sort of have you react to them. One is the famous line of Henry Adams, from the education of Henry Adams.

Politics is a practice, whatever is professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. And then I want to quote from Bernard Crick, who was a linchpin of the essay that you wrote, but this is something that we did not get in. Political activity is a type of moral activity. It does not claim to settle every problem or to make every sad heart glad, but it can help in some way in nearly everything. And where it is strong, it can prevent the vast cruelties and deceits of ideological rule. So where do you see political activity now, politics now, how we should be participating in it with some look at the election, but like what is it? What is acting in politics now?

Is it participating in the system of organized hatred and cruelty, which we've certainly seen plenty of? Between the election and now, right, there was like an arrest in Chicago where they went into a preschool, what the ice did with its masks on, right? Kids are inside of school, right? Really crazy, cruel stuff, right? And it's also a theater of cruelty as well as actually cruel, right? because they'd love to make those videos

and write the whole, it's just, it's nuts. So what is politics for now? It is those things. But I mean it, right? Politics is a wide field of human endeavor. And I do believe Donald Trump uses politics as an organizing of hatreds. I do believe Donald Trump is a master

at creating us's and thems and summoning people's fury and their resentment against them. And I think one reason he is a master at that, and this is always true, is because it is authentic to him, because that is how he is. He is able to do it for you because he is able to do it for him. And to just set this up maybe as one of the contrasts, I think that Barack Obama did not try to engage in politics as an organizing of hatreds.

I think he sought to use it as a bridging of divides, like going all the way back to his red and blue speech in Boston in 2004. And it doesn't mean that it calmed every hatred. It didn't. Just like it doesn't mean what Donald Trump does. It doesn't destroy every bond between us. But you can use politics to destroy and you can use it to build. And similarly to Trump, the reason I think that was true for Obama's politics is that was authentic to who Obama is. And I think one argument I am making in that essay over the weekend on politics and that beautiful line from Bernard Crick that politics involves the genuine relationships between people who are genuinely other people, not tasks for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy. I think I switched a few words.

That was pretty good. But it's pretty close. And what I think I'm saying when I argue, when I talk about that and about the sort of liberalism's old virtue of liberality, this emphasis on the virtues of the citizen, the ethic of mutual connectedness, is that one thing I would like to see and that I think that there's actual political power in, one thing I would like to see the Democratic Party doing in this era when the Trump administration is organizing hatreds, right, and is getting consumed in some ways. By its own organization of hatreds, right? bizarre debates about how much hatred is okay. Yeah, they wanted to do it, you know, in this way. But now Nick Fuente says, no, no, no, we need more hatred. And it's like, well, we did say we need some hatred.

So who are we to tell Nick Fuentes is too much hatred? You know, now you have Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, you know, going to war with each other, right? I don't think the organizing of hatreds is a strong politics in the long run. So it has worked for many. But it has to be beaten by its opposite. not by something mirroring it. And so one of the things I'm saying that that piece is that I think the Democratic Party needs people who are genuine, like it is authentic to them, that politics for them is an act of love and fellowship, including when it includes critique and disagreement and opposition. There are many people in my life who I disagree with on political issues profoundly.

people in my family who I disagree with on political issues profoundly and our conversations are still part of our connectedness and that seems obvious to me right I actually find it appalling

the idea that you would cut off members of your family for their politics maybe for their treatment of you that's something different but just for their politics I really disagree with that something that I thought a lot about the election in New York City to go back to here is Mamdani spent so much of the election

reaching out to people who were unnerved by him. He went to synagogues. He went to business leaders. Mamdani didn't say, hey, look, you don't like me? I welcome your hatred. Mamdani, he was a left pluralist. Anon Giridharadas in his newsletter, The Inc,

has a really great essay on Mamdani's smile as an act of rhetoric. He was always smiling at you. For him, the politics of friendliness were so fundamental in a way I thought was very, very powerful. Cuomo, for all that he was supposed to be the real politician in the race, he often seemed very powered by resentment to me. Mamdani seemed like he liked you. Cuomo didn't seem like he liked you.

You can go back and listen to Cuomo's interview with Barry Weiss, which is fairly early in the campaign. And I found it very telling. Cuomo felt like he was running to get revenge on the Democratic Party that had rejected him. forced them to resign. Is it really such a surprise that the man running for revenge on the Democratic Party did not win the Democratic primary? And then it seemed like Cuomo was running just like not to be humiliated and beaten. But Cuomo was not running as a pluralist. It did not feel that way to me, right? He did not feel like he liked you. And CELA was a whole different situation running because he liked cats. But I really think these dynamics are important. As you

say, like, there is a tremendous amount of cruelty emanating and being organized from the Trump administration. I mean, you look at Stephen Miller give an interview. You look at him talk, and it radiates off of him, right? It's a person where, like, the function has become the form in a very strange way. He really seems like he hates people. And, you know, when Trump was up there with Erica Kirk at the Churchill Kirk Memorial, and he said, you know, I hate my opponents. I, you know, I'm not here. I think there's a lot of power. lot of political power. And as weak as it sounds to be able to say, a politics of love, but I remember when Cory Booker ran on a politics of love in 2020, and I did an interview with him

right around the time he dropped out. And we were talking about how it's very hard to make clear what a politics of love meant. But one thing it means, love is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And pluralism is only politically interesting when it's difficult. and I think one way that you can sideline Trumpism is like, yeah, that Henry Adams quote does describe them. And when you hear it, your stomach tenses up. I don't want to be part of an organization of hatred, right? That's not what I want my work in civic life to be. If this is all about organizing our hatreds, count me out. And so running people for whom that does not feel like what they are doing, and it does feel like what they're doing because it is not who they are.

I actually think it's a very big part right now of candidate recruitment for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has to be, right, the American Society for the American Society for the prevention of cruelty to humans. humans, right? It has to be that. And then you can't talk about anti-cruelty without bringing in Judith Chalar, whose name I can never say, create political philosopher. Here's what she said. It's better just to listen to her. It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first. Intuitively, they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. Yeah, anti-cruelty is the politics and affordability.

is a policy. Right. I don't know that love is going to be the way you reconcile those two things. Respect. Respect might be the word that I can use there. I mean, dignity is a boring word, but I think it's also that. Right. Captured in the Crick quote is the idea that other people are actually humans, right? They're actually other people. I just don't believe it is an accident. I don't believe it is a coincidence. As the Democratic Party has become the party of the institutions, the party of the educated, the party increasingly of wealthier people, that the people who have been most open to Donald Trump's burn it all down approach are the people whom are being failed by this country, right? People who are poor, people who don't have college educations, people who live in areas of the country that don't

have as much economic opportunity, and also people who, you know, are not acculturated into saying all the right things and having all the right opinions by going to college. And they have become, they have felt culturally alienated from the Democratic Party, and also they have not been well served by the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has felt rejected by them and feels endangered by them in some ways right now. And I really think you have to see an absolutely central part of this moment in politics as not leaning into that divide and trying to eke out the percentage point or two that will allow you to just win the election in 2028, but beginning to erode that divide. You're not going to get rid of all of it. Not everybody in MAGA is a

plausible political recruit for liberalism. But you have to act like many, you have to act like more of them are. You need to re-knit people's connection to liberal democracy for the people who felt failed by it. For the people who don't think that a renewed liberalism is necessary for a renewed Democratic Party, I always go back to, like, quote machine today,

but like to the very famous Hine thing where he says, you know, thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder, right? I think that's true, obviously, and you can hear, for anybody listening, in that you can hear how much Aaron's depth of political philosophy influences my work these days.

But... It's just too bad for you. But I want to read, I had never actually connected with... So this Judas Sclar essay, Schlaher essay that you're mentioning, I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we're having an interesting way

and gets it, I think, something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult act but worthwhile. Virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn't be virtues. And so she writes that courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are,

and fortifies us against fear from threats, both physical and moral. This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity, a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us,

is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, older young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so, for those of us who cannot endure contradiction,

complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom. And I do find something very inspiring in that. I hoped you would. Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening, a muscle you are strengthening.

There's something Obama has been saying as he's been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting. He said it too in his interview with Mark Merrin if you want to go listen to that where he says

for a lot of us none of what we believed has been hard. We didn't grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it,

not really. There have been at other times in our history. You know, you go to Jim Crow, you go to the Red Scare, you go to World War II. I mean, but he said, you know, it has not asked that much of us

to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism, and all of a sudden it does. And right now, we're seeing who is willing to have that asked of them, right? Who's willing to believe

some of these things when it's hard? And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They, particularly compared to the first era of Trumpism.

They've bent the knee. They go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House, they are very much willing to pay to play, and not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people's freedoms, pay out in terms of other people's safety, pay out in the kind of society that if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that, right? They've not wanted to stand in the way, right? You know, universities that have been more worried about the federal funding in the near term and are not willing to use their endowments in ways that they probably could.

law firms like Paul Weiss, right? We really, pretty at the beginning of this Trump era, watched a tremendous amount of cowardice taking hold in civil society. And it's true, like, when you are dealing with an illiberalism operating at the highest levels of political power, it takes some amount of courage,

not as much courage as it would take to do the same thing in other countries right now, like Russia, but some amount of courage to tape the masked ICE agents, to stand with the immigrants, to, you know, make yourself a target for Stephen Miller and his blue scare, right? All of it. And yet, that's, I think, what's asked.

But that's not the only thing that is asked. You actually have to have the correct idea, the Schlaar idea, right? The obvious example from American life is the Whitman idea of, like, what is the world, right? The world is something I am open to. I'm going to walk around in it. I'm going to take it in. I'm going to see it. I'm going to be large, contend multitudes, all that.

stuff, right? Which is critical to a conception of liberalism that, by the way, a conception of liberalism enriched by the radicalism to its left, which I think is important to mention, right? The liberal democracies that defeated fascism were very much enriched by the left that brought policies that were gay suggestions that became policies that made those worlds better. The liberal democracy that defeated communism, same thing. The left radicals pushed, right, for a world that people then wanted to defend. And it was a capacious, large, big tent, as everyone always says, but like genuinely big tent.

And that liberalism is a much more powerful liberalism than, you know, the liberalism of orthodoxy, right? I mean, it's just going to be, by definition, more powerful. How to get there, as you say, is very hard. You have to tolerate things you don't like. I don't like to do that. I mean, I... Me neither.

I'll say something that has just been interesting for me on this and my team knows this. And actually, you probably know it, but it's something I always try to do on the show that I always try to make sure the show basically within every month has people I really disagree with on it. Right?

I try to make that... That's why I'm here. Part of our programming. And those conversations cause me a lot more stress beforehand. They require different form of preparation. I feel much more like I have to be championing ideas and make sure that I don't falter and I can't just be in the exploratory mode I prefer to be in.

But I also leave them more enriched. I think about them more after usually. And this very interesting research that looks at workplaces. And what it basically finds is diversity of different kinds actually makes people less happy, but it makes it more effective because it is hard to be in spaces of disagreement and spaces of difference.

But you really do learn from it, you are enriched by it. And what you were just saying, you know, is true on the left. And, but also we, as I sort of say in the piece of the weekend, the good thing the Democratic Party

has done since, say, 2004 is open up its left side. I remember back then, And people often talked about how few would even claim the moniker liberal, saying nothing of democratic socialist or socialist. The fact that we are not afraid of that now is to me positive, right? That's an opening of the tent. But we sort of moved as opposed to widened. And as I say in the piece, you know, we want to be not left, not right, but bigger, right? Left and right. But also just more multidimensional. I've been having these conversations with the political scientist Henry Farrell, I think, is really brilliant. And just something he has been talking about in terms of representation is just recognizing that people in the sociological sense of the term are very thick and complicated. And what you're trying to do is find ways to take them in that thick complexity.

And what the Internet does, what much of modern society does, what polling does too, by the way, is it thins them. Right. Now, something like polling is better than nothing because it will help you. Maybe. It is. All right. Because the thing that you and I both see happen is it in its absence. Right, right.

People just make shit up. People make shit up, but they also convince themselves that what is around them is how everybody feels. Right. And polling, when done well, is a way of disciplining at least some of your intuitions. but it does collapse people down to their answers to questions they actually may not have overly strong feelings on. And so the question of how do you have the complexity of people contained inside your relationships to them,

I mean, you have to be in relationship to them. And that in the modern era, in the digital era, in the digitized era, I think one of the worst signs of Democratic Party right now is a Jared Golden, who I mentioned in that essay, who is a Democratic representative from Maine winning a Trump plus 10 district, which he's won four times. And he's facing a progressive challenger from the left and maybe he's facing the former

main governor, a Republican who's very Trumpy LaPage on the right, decided not to run again. Just announced his retirement. And I don't know what is in Congressman Golden's heart. You know, he says that the cost of his family has gotten too high. It's very, very hard to be in an endlessly competitive district, particularly then when you're facing, you know, challenges in the primary and challenges in the general. general, any of young kids, but he was somebody who is good at representing people and good at having relationships, so then inside the Democratic Party, and kept that sort of thickness

and a little bit more alive than otherwise would have been. And so it isn't just that losing his seat, if Democrats lose it, will be a loss. But it's that losing the relationships he has, and then the relationships other Democrats have with him will be a loss. And one way you can think of some of this politics is you want more real relationships that work across difference, not because you're trying to have those people agree with you or have you agree with them, that that might happen over time in one direction or another, or both, but because you're trying to contain more of their multitudes inside of you. Right. And that's not just to be clear. That's not compromise with the devil, right?

We're talking about people communicating with each other inside the tent of the Democratic Party, right? Where there are a bunch of givens. And it's not going to fit on a bumper sticker, but my givens are that the Democratic Party should be a machine to make people's economic lives better and that liberalism should be an anti-cruilty machine, right? And that it has been, and it should be, again,

And the two things together, by the way, also have practical effect of potentially really swinging a lot of Latino voters that the Democrats desperately need. I don't want to be that practical about it, actually. I want to be more philosophical about it. But those two things together are a very good recipe for not just success in left-wing urban areas, not just success in moderate states that trend democratic, but also in reclaiming some of the... the areas that you're talking about, where there are these plus 10 for Trump states where not that long ago, in our lifetime, there were Democratic senators. There were states that Obama won that are out of reach, right? I know that this show is meant to be you interviewing me post-election, but I think I'm going

to let you have the last word on that because that was quite lovely. Aaron Redica, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra. This episode of Issa Clancho is produced by Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Marie Cassione, our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Jack McCordock, Roland Hu,

Marina King, Kristen Lynn, Emmett Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Carol Sabarro and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christine Samaluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser.