4:00

it's almost like the

4:02

economic situation finally exposed this deeper

4:04

problem that's going on that hasn't

4:07

been addressed. I was saying, I

4:09

was kind of happy being a Democrat, you

4:11

know, and voting for this administration,

4:13

but I was happy that we lost in

4:16

the way that we did, because it forces a

4:19

reexamination that has to be a little more

4:21

forthright than just a cursory one. If

4:23

you felt like, well, we won the popular vote, it's

4:25

not our fault. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's

4:27

exactly how I felt too. In a weird way, it's

4:29

just like, if the situation is that bad, you'd rather

4:31

be forced to face up to it now than to

4:33

live in denial. And that's the weirdness of 2016, the

4:37

fact that you had Comey you could point

4:39

to, the electoral college, all

4:41

these mistakes that Clinton made not campaigning in

4:43

Michigan. Basically every excuse from 2016 was taken

4:45

away this time. I think Kamala ran like

4:47

about as good a campaign as she could

4:49

have in the circumstance. It's not perfect, but

4:52

it was a really good one. She didn't

4:54

neglect Pennsylvania, she didn't neglect Michigan, she didn't

4:56

neglect Wisconsin. Trump wins

4:58

the popular vote fair and square. It's after

5:00

two impeachments, it's after 34 convictions. Basically

5:03

this are Democrats and really the American establishment. It

5:06

feels like they threw everything they could at the

5:08

guy. And he seems to be

5:10

stronger than ever and is taking the Republican

5:12

party with him, which just means that we

5:14

can't count on some fix from the outside.

5:16

The courts aren't gonna save us, another impeachment

5:18

isn't gonna save us. There's not gonna be

5:21

some big demographic change that wipes Republicans off

5:23

the mat forever. If Democrats are gonna

5:25

stop this, they're gonna have to take a hard look at

5:27

how the party got here. Yeah, one distinction that I

5:29

like to make is there

5:32

are electoral shifts and

5:34

then there are cultural shifts and

5:36

they're not necessarily aligned. Sometimes they

5:38

are, but not necessarily because

5:41

sometimes people fall in love with

5:43

candidates. Sometimes it's a rejection

5:45

of status quo that is a natural

5:47

ebb and flow of electoral politics. And

5:49

sometimes they do align with cultural shifts.

5:51

I think Reagan definitely represented a kind

5:53

of a cultural shift because you had

5:55

the moral majority coming in at that

5:57

time. There was a lot of... conservatism

6:00

was like just waiting to kind of

6:02

pounce. You know, it had kind

6:04

of, it wanted to rise in the 60s, but

6:07

the culture saying, no, no, no, not so

6:09

fast, you know. So that kind of aligned

6:11

it seemed like, you know, but here

6:13

I'm not so sure if Trumpism represents

6:15

a cultural shift so much as an

6:17

electoral shift. What do you think? Well,

6:19

this, I've been thinking about this a

6:21

lot because the moment it

6:24

really came to me where I think that there is

6:26

something cultural here that's at work is, God

6:28

help me, I was thinking about Joe Rogan, J.D.

6:30

Vance and Elon Musk and how 12 years

6:32

ago, two of those guys are probably Democrats.

6:35

You know, I'm not sure about Musk, what

6:37

he was up to, but Rogan, probably an

6:39

Obama guy, Musk probably an Obama guy, and

6:41

he's guest voicing on the Simpsons. And J.D.

6:44

Vance, yeah, he's a conservative, but he's every

6:46

liberal's favorite conservative. And thinking about the shift

6:48

of those guys, and granted they're just free

6:50

people, they're three really born people. And

6:53

I don't wanna say that it is Trump

6:55

doing it, but I think it's this combination

6:57

of Trump winning and showing that if you're

6:59

gonna go through American politics, it's gonna be

7:01

on the right, that's gonna be through this Trumpian

7:04

path, combined with just a lot of blowback to

7:06

where American culture has been going in the last

7:08

four years. I think that we are Trump's success.

7:11

And then the backlash against just, in

7:13

this case, not just Biden, I think,

7:15

but a lot of sort of post

7:17

pandemic liberalism, I think it's laid the

7:19

foundation for this new, yes, political, but

7:21

also cultural force. Now, whether this means

7:23

that it has to have a cultural

7:25

answer, I think that's more complicated. But

7:27

just thinking about how the ways that

7:29

the country, it's not become Trumpy overnight.

7:31

Again, this really is just a lot of people

7:33

being pissed off about inflation more than anything else.

7:35

But the fact that Trump is coming

7:38

in with people like Rogan, Vance, and

7:40

Musk, this is a coalition that could

7:42

fall apart overnight. That's normally what happens when parties take

7:44

power. But still, it's a sign that we aren't where

7:46

we were in 2016. Well,

7:48

if it is a sign of something else, which

7:51

certainly, of course it could be, and if you're pointing

7:53

out those people, then

7:55

that means that Trumpism is representing something

7:57

else, that it's not just representing this.

8:00

person who, you know,

8:02

is just swept people off their feet

8:04

or something that there is

8:06

and some people point to anti-wokeism or

8:08

that the left maybe has gone too

8:10

far, you know, with

8:13

its, you know, being

8:15

in control of the cultural lever, you know,

8:17

for a good amount of time, it seems

8:19

like. What do you account for that? It's

8:21

tough to say because I think this is

8:23

again another case where people just project their

8:25

own biases onto things. It's not like, oh

8:27

man, people are angry at Star Wars has

8:29

gone woke. Or they vote Trump. That's not

8:31

how the world works at all. But I

8:33

do think that at least my own perspective

8:35

is that it seems as if people like

8:37

me as our college educated lefties have been

8:40

pushing the hegemony lever on the culture industry

8:42

like as far as it could go. This

8:44

is what I'm saying. You are the problem.

8:47

The call is coming from inside the house. But this

8:49

is like the books are one of the big arguments

8:51

of the book is that us college even

8:54

worse, I just got educated college professor types

8:56

that we've earned a place in the Democrat

8:58

coalition. A lot of us out

9:00

there. So it doesn't make sense to say

9:02

goodbye completely. But that even

9:04

if we get to be on the bus, we

9:06

don't get to drive the bus that we get

9:08

to have a place there, but we don't get

9:10

to be in charge of the thing just because

9:12

we don't know the numbers. And there are lots

9:14

of ways in which we are just out of

9:16

step. And I think not so much with the

9:18

cultural issues, but more with just day to day

9:20

concerns a lot of voters felt like one of

9:22

the, it must have been brain breaking for people

9:24

who felt like they were struggling to make ends

9:26

meet during the Biden years to have the one

9:28

time Joe Biden seems to pop up into the

9:30

media is saying that we have the best economy

9:32

in the world that Bidenomics is working in all

9:34

the rest. When if you're

9:37

doing well enough to reflect on the state

9:39

of democracy and be afraid of that, you're

9:41

probably not concerned about those day to day

9:43

kitchen table issues. And I think for a

9:45

lot of people, that stuff, jobs, housing, education,

9:48

health care, that counts for so much more

9:50

than abstract cultural war stuff. And maybe it

9:52

says that the left can get lost in

9:54

those issues more than anything else that explains

9:56

this drift over the last few years. to

12:00

run against something twice. Running for something

12:02

is much better. And

12:05

as you point out, this is a resistance

12:07

party. What are the, how the Democrats gonna

12:09

figure out what they're for? Because the Republicans

12:11

have already stolen the populist type of thing

12:14

that Bernie Sanders was kind of running on

12:16

in 2016. Like

12:18

that's what Trump represents, populism, but it's not,

12:20

Bernie Sanders, when you have populism, it was

12:22

kind of linked to socialism. But now Trump

12:24

has a different kind of populism, which

12:26

I don't know what it's linked to. But this is

12:29

the opportunity that Democrats are gonna have now. So one,

12:31

we know there's a problem, so we can say that

12:33

it needs to have a real solution rather than just

12:35

waiting for Trumpism to implode as you could kind of

12:37

hope in 2016. But

12:39

the other thing is that now that he's

12:41

empowered, this is, you never look stronger as a

12:44

political force than in the immediate aftermath of

12:46

winning an election, because you have sort of the

12:48

high victory and no problems have happened yet.

12:50

Like as like a hardcore Obama groupie from

12:52

back in the day, 2008, 2009, I

12:55

remember the adjustment to reality that

12:57

happened in that first year.

12:59

And we saw what happened when Trump took office

13:02

in 2016 and started the

13:04

unfolding disaster. So we can have, it's not

13:06

a guarantee, but it's as close as you

13:08

can get to a guarantee in politics that

13:10

there's gonna be ideological overreach, that it's gonna

13:12

go too far, there's gonna be bureaucratic incompetence,

13:14

there's probably gonna be outright corruption, and there

13:17

could be some really, really dreadful stuff. And

13:19

this is like the scary thing to think

13:21

about, is like, what does mass deportation look

13:23

like? What does the conversation around it look

13:25

like if it could get shot? Which is

13:27

a non-zero possibility. And there's always this sort

13:29

of tendency in American politics to counter react,

13:32

to react against whoever's in power to go

13:34

to the other side. So I think Democrats

13:36

are gonna have lots of opportunities from the

13:38

sort of hilarious fuckups of the Trump administration

13:40

to probably some downright tragic stuff. The question

13:42

is, can they move from that just resistance

13:44

coalition, which I think is kind of inherently

13:47

conservative because you're always letting the conversation be

13:49

dictated by the other side. You're always reacting

13:51

to what someone else is doing. Can

13:53

they move from that into building something new? Which I

13:55

think Obama did do in 2008, which

13:58

I think Bill Clinton in a different way did. Yeah,

26:01

what's interesting, as we're talking, I was thinking, well,

26:03

who is the heir? Like when I look at

26:05

1968 was an inflection

26:07

year, as you know, you know, as

26:10

we've had 1980s, another one, you

26:12

could argue 96 maybe with

26:14

the Republican takeover there or with

26:16

the Clinton re-election, maybe it's 94,

26:18

I'm thinking, 94 is probably a

26:20

better year. 2008, 2020, maybe, possibly,

26:22

or maybe this one, 2024. I'm just trying to, but let's go to

26:25

1968, because

26:30

there's two figures from there that

26:32

have grandchildren, political

26:34

grandchildren now, that are very interesting to

26:37

me. George Wallace,

26:39

I believe that Trump is a better

26:42

version of George Wallace, you know, and

26:44

ironically, Bernie Sanders came out of George

26:46

Wallace in a different way, you know,

26:49

he was a

26:51

more, you know, Marxist

26:53

version of that. And, you know, but when

26:55

he said workers back then, he still meant

26:58

white workers, you know, but he just didn't

27:00

have the racism attached to it that George

27:02

Wallace had. But, you know, and

27:05

he was considered radical politics back

27:07

then. But George Wallace, his working

27:09

class coalition and that type of

27:12

thing, that is Trumpy, very

27:14

Trumpy in that sort of thing. And that's

27:16

the part that the Democrats, it was a

27:18

very important part of that Democratic establishment. In

27:20

the same year, RFK, who was assassinated, you

27:24

know, was attracting, you know, the

27:26

Tim Shanks, you know, these, you

27:29

know, this part, the elitist part

27:31

of the party, you know, kind of came

27:34

out of that, you know, the, it's funny,

27:36

because Hubert Humphrey, who knows, and I'm sorry,

27:38

I'm being real wonky for us, but Hubert

27:40

Humphrey was kind of in that mushy middle,

27:42

right? He, you could, it didn't

27:45

matter who you were, you could kind of latch on to

27:47

Humphrey because he seemed like a decent guy, you know, which

27:50

I think was the biggest thing going for

27:52

him. But it is interesting that the RFK,

27:55

because now you have RFK juniors out there

27:57

representing something completely different, but

27:59

that RFK, part of the party, which

28:01

they imbued upon Obama. Obama was that

28:03

second coming of RFK, I think to

28:05

a lot of white liberals especially. But

28:09

that's the part that to me has fallen

28:11

short, where Hillary was

28:13

kind of caught in the middle of that.

28:16

And it's kind of

28:18

interesting. Does any of

28:21

that make sense by the way? No, it all makes sense.

28:23

But let's start with Wallace though, because this is where I

28:25

was in 2016, and I feel

28:27

like a lot of liberal progressive types were

28:29

as well, is thinking that sort of the

28:31

rise of Trump, you're connected to Wallace definitely.

28:33

And it's kind of American politics is Alabama

28:36

writ large. And this is, especially the dynamics

28:38

of 2016, where

28:40

you saw Trump really running up the margins

28:42

with white working class voters, at the same

28:44

time that there's like an inch toward him

28:46

already among Hispanic voters in

28:49

2016. And Hillary does a little

28:51

worse with black voters than Obama in 2012. But

28:53

it's easy to wave that aside at the time and

28:55

say that this is about the white working class. It's

28:57

a racial story, it's about polarization. It goes back to

28:59

the 1960s. This is all sort

29:01

of the legacy of Democrats becoming the party of

29:03

civil rights. And so of course now they're facing

29:05

this sort of Alabama populism writ large. And it

29:07

seems to me that the story after 24 is

29:10

like less about Alabama than about Queens, right?

29:12

And this is the new coalition that Trump

29:15

has put together, which is just as much

29:17

more diverse coalition. And it's more

29:19

populist and that if you want to

29:21

understand the Wallace legacy- I

29:23

could argue Queens is the Northern Alabama. Exactly,

29:27

but it's also sort of like that white ethnic politics,

29:29

for instance, which is something I get into a bit

29:31

because some of my characters are like coming of age

29:33

in New York in the 50s and 60s. They

29:36

see that it's American racial politics. It's never

29:38

as simple as white and black. And when

29:41

you have sort of the Irish versus Italian

29:43

versus the Jews versus Puerto Ricans, everything, everything

29:45

in New York city politics in the

29:47

50s and 60s, that that's

29:49

a complicated mix. Redlining started in the Northeast

29:51

by the way. That's where redlining started. Exactly.

29:53

And what we can see there is that

29:55

it's a sort of more complicated racial story,

29:57

which- allows us to make sense of Trump

30:00

being able to tap into these resentments that,

30:02

you know, I wouldn't have imagined possible in

30:04

2016. But the RFK side of the story,

30:06

what's really interesting to me is that, yes,

30:08

I'd like to think actually that I would

30:11

have been team RFK in 68. Oh, 1000%.

30:14

I was talking about Stan Greenberg was, but the

30:16

guy who that a lot of people like me

30:18

were falling over for it wasn't so much Bobby

30:20

Kennedy. It was Gigi McCarthy. He was some more

30:22

intellectual type. Actually, and we really sort of Jack

30:24

Kennedy too, was seen as a bit more cerebral.

30:26

He was always sort of a little bit more

30:28

rough around the edges and the

30:30

anti-war types, those college protesters, they got cleaned

30:32

for gene. They shave their hair. They went

30:35

into the New Hampshire primary. And when Bobby

30:37

Kennedy was too scared to take on LBJ,

30:39

it was McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, not the Joe

30:41

McCarthy of earlier, the progressive Democrat anti-war Eugene

30:44

McCarthy of 68. He was the one who

30:46

doesn't beat Johnson and New Hampshire, but does

30:48

well enough to force Johnson out of the

30:50

race. Bobby Kennedy seen as this

30:53

kind of Johnny come lately. He doesn't

30:55

have that same intellectual air as either

30:57

Jack did or as Jean McCarthy. And

30:59

there's this line that I remember Kennedy,

31:01

one of Kenny's biographers quoted saying, I

31:03

can do that. He

31:06

was, he was annoyed that he didn't have

31:08

the a students that Jean McCarthy had the

31:10

a students and jacket had the a students

31:12

and I don't have the same, but one

31:14

of those a students, Dan Greenberg, who was

31:16

an RK fan, what he finds when he

31:19

looks at in particular it's this Indiana primary

31:21

where it's RFK versus Eugene McCarthy in 68.

31:23

And he does a

31:26

study of how the coalitions for the two

31:28

candidates broke down. And what he found is

31:30

that the people who RFK did best with

31:32

were working class voters, black and white. So

31:34

he was putting together a sort of new

31:37

version of that New Deal coalition. And that

31:39

who Jean McCarthy was doing well was with

31:41

like the me the proto me is of

31:43

the world. It was college kids and their

31:45

white collar parents. And in

31:47

a sense, what Greenberg sees in that

31:49

68 primary are two different paths for

31:51

the democratic party. He sees one version

31:54

where they try and bring that New

31:56

Deal coalition back together, but without the

31:58

compromises on civil rights. should be

32:00

a party of racial and economic justice. And

32:03

on the other, he sees it where they

32:05

become more and more of that dumbbell coalition,

32:07

strong at the bottom, strong at the top,

32:09

and that New Deal class politics just gets

32:12

farther and farther behind. And the tragedy for

32:14

Greenberg is that even though he goes on

32:16

to become this really influential Democrat consultant, and

32:18

again, this sort of global advisor to this

32:20

all-star cast of characters from the center of

32:23

what center left, he feels like in that

32:25

fundamental battle, he's close enough to see firsthand

32:27

his side losing again and again and again.

32:29

Why do you think that is? So

32:32

one of the reasons why I ended up writing this book, it's

32:34

not just sort of like the Stan Greenberg story, but there's this

32:36

moment when he, 2009, he has this

32:38

memoir that comes out, it's a really, really long book that I'm

32:40

convinced that no one except for me has probably ever read. And-

32:44

That's why we love you, Tim, because you do all

32:46

the work for us. The journalists don't want to, the

32:48

only difference between me and the standard political journalists is

32:50

that I like to read books more than they do.

32:52

Or at least I like to read the sort of

32:54

books that these people write, which is when I asked

32:56

Greenberg, why you have all this sort of like Mark

32:58

C stuff in your academic writing, why didn't Republicans point

33:00

this out ever? It was like, because I'm pretty sure

33:03

you're the only person who's actually read those things. Right,

33:05

exactly. This is, yeah, I get to cover log, you

33:07

get a buck out of it. But 2009, he has

33:09

this memoir, he says,

33:11

when I look back on the different people I've

33:13

worked for, and that's from Bill Clinton to Tony

33:15

Blair to Mandela, run down the list, I feel

33:17

like I've noticed this pattern. And the pattern is

33:19

that I can convince them to run as populists

33:21

in the run up to a campaign when their

33:23

election is on the line, which means being progressive

33:25

on those economic issues and having a more moderate

33:27

position on the culture war. And

33:30

that what happens is that as soon as

33:32

the election is over, those candidates, my old

33:34

bosses, they get called in with the folks

33:36

that, think Greenberg's phrase is, the people who

33:38

run the economy. And the people who are

33:40

on the economy, and you can see the

33:42

ghost of Greenberg, academic Marxists coming out here.

33:44

The people who run the economy, they tell

33:46

Bill Clinton, they tell Tony Blair, they tell

33:48

whoever, listen, that populist stuff was going on

33:50

the campaign trail, but it's time to grow

33:52

up. And here's how we're gonna talk about

33:54

desert reduction. Here's, we're gonna talk about fiscal

33:56

responsibility and all the rest. And

33:58

that even when you get a- little progress

34:00

on the economic issues. And maybe Greenberg says,

34:02

maybe even if some of this stuff is

34:04

good over the long run, that there's a

34:06

lot of short term economic frustration. And that's

34:08

tough to deal with as a progressive because

34:10

you feel like you're betraying the people who

34:12

you owe the most to. And for any

34:14

incumbent, you don't want to admit that you

34:16

screwed up. You know, this is a preview

34:18

of where Biden. Absolutely. So these candidates, they

34:20

get once they get in power, they fail

34:22

to deliver and they get defensive. And so

34:24

they start blaming the voters for being ungrateful

34:26

rather than thinking about how they fail to

34:28

deliver. And at the same time that they're

34:30

running into a brick wall on these economic

34:33

issues, they're discovering that they actually can make

34:35

progress on the culture war, that they can

34:37

win, they can win these gains that they

34:39

have are having a much harder time to

34:41

for economics. So they start leaning more into

34:43

the the cultural side of the story because

34:45

they can tell victories there. And a lot

34:47

of times these candidates like Bill Clinton, Tony

34:49

Blair, they might have these progressive economic principles,

34:51

but it's not as if they're Bernie Sanders,

34:53

where the reason why they get up in

34:55

the morning and eat breakfast is so that

34:57

they can go fight the 1%. I don't

34:59

think that Bill Clinton saw himself as a

35:01

Reaganite in any significant sense, but I think

35:03

he had a lot of different goals that

35:05

he was trying to achieve. And when he

35:07

can tell a story about the new economy

35:09

is booming and the American culture is becoming

35:11

more progressive than ever. And I

35:13

get to be the face of this post 60s politics.

35:15

I think he likes that. And Blair has a version

35:17

of that. And so do lots of other people. And

35:20

what was shocking to me reading this

35:22

account of sort of the dynamics of

35:24

progressive politics that came out in 2009.

35:26

So right around the time Obama's being

35:28

inaugurated is I think that's actually a

35:30

pretty good shorthand for what happened to

35:32

Obama as well. And I don't think

35:34

it entirely explains what happened with Biden

35:36

because I don't think there was really

35:38

that neoliberal turn. But so a lot

35:40

of those underlying dynamics, I think, explain

35:42

why these progressive governments, they get into

35:44

power on one set of issues, they

35:46

end up disappointing. And the best case

35:48

scenario is you get voters turning away

35:50

and just giving up the worst cases.

35:52

So they just go to the other

35:54

side and are so pissed off that

35:56

they turn right. And I think that

35:58

if you're looking for kind of brief

36:01

fish. explanation of where politics has gone

36:03

since 2009. Weirdly, it's in Stan Greenberg

36:05

looking at his career up to that

36:07

point. Yeah, it almost seemed like to

36:09

me, I always felt like Obama was

36:11

more centrist than what his coalition projected

36:13

him to be and wanted him to be.

36:15

Like if you read any of his books,

36:18

you know, he's he very much presents himself

36:20

as centrist ideology. I would argue

36:22

that he wanted

36:24

to be Reagan more than he wanted to be Clinton, you

36:26

know, and he would he talked about Reagan

36:28

more than he talked about Clinton. You know,

36:31

he said that name more than he even

36:33

said JFK or LBJ or FDR as the

36:35

Democrats used to always say FDR JFK LBJ.

36:37

Like Obama never said that, you know, he

36:40

never he never looked back to that. It's

36:42

not all of us are tools. I think

36:44

that Obama definitely did have this centrist side.

36:47

But my favorite discovery is the story, which actually I

36:49

talked about in a previous book called Real Liners. There's

36:52

a manuscript that Barack Obama co-wrote when

36:54

he was at Harvard Law School with

36:56

his best friend. And he wanted it to be a

36:58

book at the time. They thought he thought he could

37:00

do what became my father. That would be the memoir.

37:02

And this would be the policy book. And

37:05

the figure who's all over this

37:07

manuscript, which is called transformative politics

37:10

is sort of the big inspiration. They

37:12

are the collection of really main figures

37:14

in the black civil rights movement by

37:17

Art Rustin and later black intellectuals like

37:19

William Julius Wilson. And you

37:21

see there the Obama who was a

37:23

lot more radical in his college and

37:25

post grad days than he would become later.

37:27

Like lots of it's actually kind of a parallel version to the

37:29

Sam Greenberg story and in civil

37:31

rights. But so it

37:33

all goes back to for Obama through

37:36

William Julius Wilson, who's a sociologist first

37:38

at the English Chicago, then at Harvard.

37:40

And Wilson gets us from Bayard Rustin,

37:42

who right after the signing of

37:44

the Civil Rights Act in 1964 writes one

37:46

of my favorite articles on American politics ever.

37:48

It's called from protests of politics. And Rustin,

37:51

who's a sort of genius strategist behind the

37:53

civil rights movement. We've I know you know,

37:55

I've as personal life and it's on the

37:57

March on Washington for the movie. Rustin from

37:59

the Obama. movie, Rustin, but this is Rustin

38:01

as strategist who's actually more influential in the

38:03

young Obama. And what Rustin says

38:05

in 65 is that the first phase of

38:08

the civil rights movement is basically done. With

38:10

the Voting Rights Act, with the Civil Rights

38:12

Act, we've achieved what we can through protest.

38:14

And what we need to do now is

38:16

move to the big picture economic structural reforms.

38:19

The only ways we're going to get that

38:21

is with a big coalition that can take

38:23

control of the government and force change through

38:25

at scale, which means that black Americans, if

38:28

they're going to get the equality they deserve,

38:30

they need allies. And this is Rustin's plan

38:32

for a program that basically puts forward universal

38:34

economic programs whose benefits will disproportionately flow to

38:36

African Americans and other disadvantaged groups, but will

38:39

benefit a lot of white working class people

38:41

too. The idea is just that there is

38:43

a potential working class majority to be made.

38:45

If you can get especially white working class

38:47

people to think less about the white side

38:50

of their identity and more about the working

38:52

class side of their identity. And Obama picks

38:54

this up in the 90s a generation later

38:56

and he says, what we need to do

38:58

is have these big universal programs. His, I

39:01

think his exact words are use class as

39:03

a proxy for race. And that that big

39:05

picture coalition, which is basically the argument is

39:07

take the teeth out a lot of a

39:10

lot of these culture war issues. And you can get

39:12

people to think about their class more. It's a very

39:14

similar version to what Greenberg had for Clinton in 1992.

39:17

And even King's poor people's campaign

39:19

right before he was killed. Exactly. But you're

39:21

to have to be very strategic about which

39:24

issues are focusing how you build those coalitions.

39:26

So an issue that progressive like me might

39:28

think is like, obviously something that we should

39:30

defend like welfare reform, if that's toxic for

39:32

getting those are white working class, again, not

39:34

that bottom fifth of the country, but that

39:36

like 20% to 50%. It's

39:39

figuring out how to build the coalition

39:41

of that entire that spans that bottom

39:43

half with enough of those college educated

39:45

progressives to get you over the top.

39:48

And Obama, when he says there's no

39:50

red American blue America that you could

39:52

say that's a kind of dopey Eisenhower

39:54

style sentry zone that's denying that there's

39:57

real substance politics, or it's trying

39:59

to get us. there's

42:00

someone who understands them culturally. That's a secret to

42:02

Obama in 2008 and in 2012. And

42:05

it's when Clinton, partly in response to Sanders,

42:08

also in response to Trump, Hillary Clinton in

42:10

2016, when she decides to go, I think

42:12

more than anything, all in on the culture

42:14

war, which is why do you remember Alicia

42:16

Machado and how after that first Trump-Clinton debate

42:19

in 2016, for some reason we

42:23

were all talking about, I forget if

42:25

it was like Miss America, it's like

42:27

some beauty pageant contestant, who was a

42:29

Latino woman who Trump had insulted. Clinton

42:32

wanted us to be having that conversation

42:34

rather than talking about the millionaires and

42:36

billionaires. And so Democrats got in 2016

42:38

the coalition that that kind of conversation

42:40

would almost, I think, inevitably give you

42:43

help. That's great, by the way. That

42:45

was quite a breakdown. As someone who

42:47

likes hearing this stuff, that was very,

42:49

very fascinating. This

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44:42

of my criticism sometimes of the progressive

44:44

part of the party is

44:47

that when they relate to that

44:49

working class, I feel

44:51

like they relate to them in terms of wanting

44:55

to offer them a band-aid rather

44:57

than a ladder. And

44:59

I think the working class relates more

45:01

to the ladder than the band-aid. Whereas

45:05

the band-aid is always for the

45:07

lower class, that's what that was

45:09

always for. And

45:14

I think to

45:16

keep the band-aid

45:19

as the give-all for everything

45:21

just doesn't work as far as I'm concerned.

45:24

It's not aspirational. I think working classes, I

45:27

think the Democrats lose them when

45:29

they forget that it's an aspirational

45:32

class. They just, like,

45:34

free college, well, that's great, but

45:36

that's not aspirational. Honestly, it's not.

45:39

It's band-aid-y, and it's band-aid-y to

45:41

an elitist

45:44

class, too. It's like both things that

45:46

are kind of like

45:48

unforced errors, it seems like to me. College is

45:51

great for some people. It's transformative for me. I

45:53

teach it. I love it, but it doesn't have

45:55

to be for everyone. I think the Democratic Party

45:57

needs to do a much better job foregrounding, not...

50:00

It's connected to a person, not just an

50:02

idea. So what I was going with this

50:04

is like, with Trumpism now, you

50:06

have a person who can represent certain things.

50:08

Immigration is a big one, I think. And

50:12

what is the nature of a sovereign country? Like,

50:15

what does that even mean? You know, what are

50:17

we, what is our real compromise in

50:22

that equation, you know? And I think

50:24

Democrats haven't been fully honest about that.

50:26

You know, they've been, I

50:28

think they're on the right side of that, but they haven't, because

50:31

of politics, they haven't, they've been squirrely about it.

50:33

Let's just say that, you know? Because

50:36

I think we're more aligned than not, you know, both

50:38

parties in terms of what that, what

50:40

it really means and what we should do about

50:42

it. And, you know, the Republicans are full of

50:44

shit have been their own way, but they're lucky

50:46

because they're just on that side that has the

50:48

person. So does Trumpism exist without Trump? Like, Trump

50:50

is a lame duck right now. What's

50:53

gonna be the face of this? Or is that,

50:55

is that something that you feel has substance here

50:58

to keep going? Or is it, can

51:00

J.D. Vance, does he take it to another level? Do

51:02

you have a prognostication about this at all? Yeah, maybe

51:04

not Vance so much, although at least given the way

51:06

that he flops in the initial debut, although I think

51:09

he was a lot more effective in the VP debate

51:11

than I would have hoped going into this. I thought

51:13

he was very good in the debate, yeah. Yeah, yeah,

51:15

and that was sort of the, we sort of softened

51:17

edge his tone down. But still, I wonder if he

51:20

doesn't, he's never gonna have that sort of celebrity appeal

51:23

that Trump has or that sort of instant

51:25

rapport. He's not gonna be the guy in

51:27

McDonald's. He just cannot pull that part off.

51:29

Right, he tried that part, right. Yeah, yeah,

51:31

no, he had a donut disaster. You can

51:33

tell the story of those two. Donut disaster.

51:35

Vance is a person who now that he's

51:37

had, now that he's in power, he can

51:39

pull, he can pull the

51:41

levers behind the scene. He can give, like

51:44

Republicans will love him on Tucker and all

51:46

the rest, but he doesn't have that particular

51:48

it thing that Trump has. Or

51:50

again, like, you know, Biden, Hillary Clinton, they're

51:52

fine as politicians. So is Kamala Harris, but

51:55

they're no Barack Obama. The thing

51:57

is, I do think that there is a particular

51:59

magic that when you get a... candidate who has

52:01

that charisma appeal of an Obama or a Trump.

52:03

And they also that they need issues to write

52:05

for Obama. I don't think he beats Clinton in

52:08

2008 without Iraq without being able to say that

52:10

I was on the right side of this issue.

52:12

And that comes to stand in for him moving

52:14

beyond it. And for Trump, I think it's easy

52:16

to forget now that it's even though Obama didn't

52:18

have a vote back then. So it was kind

52:20

of a bullshit answer. Like he wasn't forced to

52:23

vote on that in the Senate the way that

52:25

Hillary was. So it was really a bullshit thing.

52:28

As my ringtone could have been tested in 2007

52:30

when it was Barack Obama saying what I do

52:32

oppose is a dumb war. He had that sound

52:34

bite that he could point to again and again.

52:36

I was going to write a book like this.

52:38

And with Trump, it's not that he came out

52:40

of the gate on top of everything in 2015.

52:44

There's a lot of skepticism about him at

52:46

first. But what happens? It's when he seizes

52:48

onto that immigration politics issue so that he

52:50

is as guys, his charismatic candidate. But for

52:52

a lot of conservatives who might be inclined

52:54

to think of him as just sort of

52:56

a New York style Democrat who's in this

52:58

for ratings and not because he cares about

53:00

anything of substance, the fact that he was

53:02

meeting people where they were on these cultural

53:04

issues where even going back to the Tea

53:06

Party, there are these great studies that by

53:09

excluding this one by the sociologist, Theda Scott,

53:11

DePaul and Victoria Williamson that said when we

53:13

talk to Tea Party years, yet they mentioned

53:15

the deficit. They talk about how they want

53:17

to have responsibility in Washington and all the

53:19

rest. But what really gets them charged up

53:21

is immigration. And that's something that the Koch

53:23

brothers don't want to talk about. But there

53:25

is this sort of intense anxiety, intense frustration

53:27

about what's going on at the border. And

53:29

Trump was the one who came along and

53:31

spoke to that later. And the thing is,

53:34

like, do we have Trumpism without Trump? We

53:36

already do just now in the United States.

53:38

It's people like Boris Johnson in the UK

53:40

and a lot of other figures. These are

53:42

right wing populists from around the world. The

53:44

exact mix varies from country to country. Some

53:47

are more comfortable with a big

53:49

government welfare state entitlements. Boris Johnson

53:51

in 2019, he says we're

53:53

going to get breaks done and the NHS

53:55

is going to be better than it ever

53:57

was. It's a British National Health Care Service.

53:59

You have other more libertarian. figures out there

54:01

and see something like this argument playing out

54:03

in Trumpy circles where it seems like Elon

54:05

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are more on that

54:08

kind of neo Reaganite. We'll talk tough on

54:10

immigration but we also really want a small

54:12

government side of the story. J.D. Vance a

54:14

more consistent economic populace. So that fight's going

54:16

on. But there is a big

54:18

picture formula for right wing populace a playbook

54:20

that's being used around much of the world.

54:22

So even as this hopefully I feel like

54:24

a best case scenario for the U.S. is

54:26

that we can get a Trumpism without Trump

54:28

is just sort of the right wing populist

54:30

stuff without the election denialism which is what

54:32

you can get in the U.K. It's not

54:35

as if Boris Johnson was like desperately trying

54:37

to hold on power trying to stage a

54:39

coup on the way out the door. Right.

54:41

But I think that the underlying political problem

54:43

and again this is a point that's a

54:45

lot clearer in 2024 after Trump wins a

54:47

popular vote than it was in 2016

54:49

when you could say this was just a fluke. It

54:52

seems like the underlying right wing populist dilemma is going

54:54

to be here for a while. There's also

54:56

this like this

54:58

amateurism movement which is interesting. I mean

55:00

Trump really is an amateur. You

55:02

know some of the

55:05

leading voices in the party are amateurs.

55:07

You know he's not a politician

55:09

Vivek you know people like that.

55:12

Even Vance he's a newcomer.

55:14

You know I'm hoping

55:17

that that's something that Democrats resist.

55:19

You know like. But Obama

55:21

was that in 2002 and I

55:23

remember loving it at the time. He'd been

55:25

in Senate for like two seconds by the

55:27

time he's running the country. But he had

55:29

been in state legislature. You know he had

55:31

been grooming himself in that area. He didn't

55:33

come from the corporate world. You know it

55:35

wasn't that. You know he really

55:37

had been he just hadn't been wildly

55:39

successful in that in government. That's what

55:42

he was grooming himself in. If

55:44

you know for being honest about that. Yeah he

55:46

wasn't quite the same. He wasn't Ross Perot. You

55:48

know he wasn't. Yeah. But I think the balance

55:50

that Democrats need to strike is that they need

55:52

to be the party not of government but of

55:54

using the government effectively. I think they get in

55:56

a trap when you can just say oh we

55:59

have to respect the. government. It's the thing

56:01

that brings us together. How can you love

56:03

your country and not love your government? That's

56:05

a very sort of like finger wavy. Don't

56:07

you understand that us bureaucrats of Washington have

56:09

your best interests at heart? Who actually likes

56:11

that? It's hard for me to think

56:14

that many people outside like the Beltway where I'm

56:16

currently living do, but I think

56:18

that if they can say, listen,

56:20

we understand, we feel those frustrations

56:23

that you do to the same way that Bernie

56:25

Sanders was speaking to those concerns in 2016, but

56:27

that we can actually have solutions for problems that

56:29

the Republicans are just going to throw a tantrum

56:32

about or trip them, trip over their shoes as

56:34

they try to deal with like that's something

56:37

it's a difficult balance to strike, but I

56:39

think it's one that is definitely a lot

56:41

better off than just defending institutions because they're

56:43

under attack and whatever institutions being attacked needs

56:46

to be defended. That's sort of the worst

56:48

version of resistance politics, but thinking of government

56:50

as something that we can use, not either

56:52

just to blindly oppose or blindly defend. Which

56:54

party do you think is best positioned right

56:57

now for the next, I won't say 20,

56:59

that's too long, but the next five, 10

57:01

years, is the

57:03

Democratic Party better positioned as an outsider party?

57:06

Because sometimes Republicans got more done being an

57:08

outsider party, you know, or is

57:12

the Republican Party, which has its own fractures,

57:15

do you think they're better positioned right now

57:17

for the next five, 10 years? I

57:19

think the point is that it's a jump

57:22

ball and that what's great about the moment

57:24

is that both sides have an opportunity, they

57:26

have an opportunity, they can seize or they

57:28

can fuck it up. That both neither of

57:30

them is acting like a party that really

57:32

wants to be a majority party, but they're

57:34

both still in the game, probably because the

57:36

other side just keeps screwing up so badly.

57:38

Yeah, it's more fun to knock down those

57:40

that are in charge of something, you know,

57:42

even when Republicans are in charge, they act

57:44

like an out of power party in some

57:46

ways. And the thing is that

57:48

even though these elections over the last like

57:51

12 longer years, even though they've been so close,

57:53

the coalition's have changed so much, it shows that

57:55

there are lots of swing voters out there, there

57:57

are people who are willing to shift from election

57:59

to election. And that sort of

58:01

that's how Trump goes from being, gosh, what

58:03

did he get? Like 46% something

58:05

like that in 2020, up

58:08

to now like on the doorway of like

58:10

50%. And that's

58:12

because there are a lot of people who

58:14

are willing to change their mind, which means

58:16

that if you can not just get those

58:18

people to change their minds, the top line

58:20

number stays almost the same, but really move

58:22

to build that majority coalition, which I think

58:24

is still out there, that either party can

58:26

do it. And that weirdly, well, right.

58:29

So this is the wonky historian argument that I

58:31

have for why this isn't a realignment election. And

58:33

sometimes people talk about some realignments, which set the

58:35

terms of debate for a next generation, they usher

58:38

in a new majority, those really big important elections.

58:40

And a lot of times they talk about 1932,

58:43

which is when FDR wins office for the first time. But

58:45

the thing about 1932 is that who voted for FDR in

58:50

that election? Pretty much everybody, because they

58:52

were pissed off at Herbert Hoover, right? He's

58:54

the outsider and he's running as change. No

58:56

one likes Herbert Hoover. The only group that

58:58

really sticks with him are black people because

59:00

Republicans are still the party of Abraham Lincoln.

59:03

Flash forward to 1936 and it's a different story

59:05

because four years later, you've had the new deal,

59:07

FDR has made it clear that this is gonna

59:09

be a fight over class politics. And what happens

59:11

to a lot of those affluent, well-educated

59:14

voters who will, some of them

59:16

will be Democrats later, but they moved back to

59:19

Republicans in 1936. They thought

59:21

FDR had betrayed his class, I think was

59:23

what they're saying. Exactly, he wasn't governing for

59:25

the country, he was governing for workers. He

59:27

was being had this class war, not looking

59:29

out for everyone. But working class voters, poor

59:31

people, they show up in even greater numbers

59:33

for FDR, including black voters for the first

59:36

time for a Democrat in American history, which

59:38

is how you get FDR carrying both Harlem

59:40

and South Carolina at the same time. They're

59:42

getting like literally something like 99% of

59:45

the vote in South Carolina, astronomical. And that's

59:47

when you have that class divided coalition emerging,

59:49

not out of reaction against Herbert Hoover, but

59:51

because of what Democrats had built. Now, I

59:53

think that what we saw in this

59:56

election, yeah, there's a lot of class shifting

59:58

under the surface. There are Democrats. Democrats

1:00:00

picking up ground or at least doing better

1:00:02

with affluent voters, losing those working class voters

1:00:05

who they think of as core to their

1:00:07

identity. But this is still mostly a rejection

1:00:09

of Biden election. What could be a realignment

1:00:11

election is if Trump, the Republicans, use this

1:00:13

opportunity to actually deliver for those voters and

1:00:16

persuade the people who are skeptics now that

1:00:18

they can actually build not a kind of

1:00:21

pseudo new deal, but kind of I think

1:00:23

of it as sort of like capitalism with

1:00:25

Trumpian characteristics, where it's a system

1:00:27

where blue collar workers can do well and so

1:00:29

can Elon Musk and that's fine and that you'll

1:00:31

see your paycheck rising. It won't be, as you

1:00:33

were saying earlier, because of government handout, but because

1:00:36

you have a job that pays well and allows

1:00:38

you to afford all those basic elements of a

1:00:40

middle class American life. If they can at least

1:00:42

do better on that front, then I think they'll

1:00:44

have laid the groundwork for a more durable shift.

1:00:47

But if fingers crossed as if they fuck it

1:00:49

up as I hope they will, then that gives

1:00:51

Democrats an opportunity to have their own opposition

1:00:54

into building something different. Well,

1:00:56

we'll see. The one

1:00:58

thing you left out of the home new deal conversation

1:01:00

is there was a little thing called the Great Depression,

1:01:04

which was a big reason why people

1:01:06

rejected Hoover as well. People

1:01:08

couldn't put food on the table, which is,

1:01:10

as we say, that's the thing

1:01:13

in front of us right now. It has more

1:01:15

to do with those issues and everything too. So

1:01:18

who knows? And you wonder if

1:01:21

there is a different type of Great Depression

1:01:23

that is in front of us that isn't

1:01:25

economic and is it cultural? Is

1:01:27

there a cultural Great Depression going

1:01:29

on that the Democrats aren't recognizing? Is

1:01:32

there something else happening here that

1:01:34

five years from now we'll

1:01:37

say, of course, but right

1:01:39

now, it's like, is

1:01:41

there a possibility of that? I don't know. Maybe you can't

1:01:43

answer that. Who knows? I think some

1:01:45

of the cultural stuff is important, but

1:01:47

with the Democrats get a little luxury

1:01:49

about as opposed to just letting, you

1:01:52

know, why you have to even have an opinion on a

1:01:54

lot of these things, you know, just a big tent. You

1:01:56

know, it's like, I have my views, you have your views,

1:01:59

but we also have these other things. that we agree about

1:02:01

that really matter to us too. Yeah, that'd

1:02:03

be interesting. It'd be interesting to see what happens, but,

1:02:06

you know, as they say, you know, like

1:02:08

in golf, always expect them to make the putt, not

1:02:11

to miss it. You're hoping they miss

1:02:13

the putt. I'm saying, what if they make this

1:02:15

putt? What's gonna happen, you know,

1:02:17

in the next couple of years? Because it feels

1:02:19

like the economy might rebound

1:02:21

here, you know, and we might see, it'll

1:02:24

be interesting to see how the parties

1:02:26

align if there's a successful Trump presidency.

1:02:28

That would be interesting to me. It

1:02:31

feels a little easier to predict if there isn't

1:02:33

one, you know, but if there

1:02:35

is, what do you do now? You know, like,

1:02:37

and who are the parties? And it's so interesting,

1:02:41

Tim, to see, because a lot of people

1:02:43

talked about these ex-Democrats who are in Trump

1:02:45

now, and like the Latinos and blacks and

1:02:47

all that. But remember, there are a lot

1:02:49

of Republicans who left, you

1:02:51

know, that party too. And what about those

1:02:53

people? Are they making any

1:02:56

difference in the Democratic Party? I know you talked

1:02:59

a little bit about, you know, was that kind

1:03:01

of a mistake to appeal to them in some

1:03:03

of the election stuff? Is there

1:03:05

anything cultural in that that's significant, I guess

1:03:07

is a better question. So the sort of

1:03:09

old lefty impulse to me is gonna be

1:03:11

skeptical about all the sort of affluent, suburbanized

1:03:13

showing up. He's like, can you really be

1:03:15

the party of workers when you're so dependent

1:03:17

on Scarsdale and run down the rest

1:03:19

of sort of, yeah, affluent, blue America, not

1:03:22

newly blue suburbia. But it's also fair

1:03:24

to say that that wasn't Joe Biden's

1:03:26

problem, right? He wins with the most

1:03:28

gentrified coalition in democratic history, and then

1:03:31

tries to push through a new, new

1:03:33

deal. I think that when I

1:03:35

try and understand like, what went wrong with

1:03:37

Biden, I feel like partly it just has

1:03:39

to be bad timing, right? You take over

1:03:41

during the pandemic and you're responsible for this

1:03:43

bumpy transition. But another part of the story

1:03:45

is you kind of get this like version

1:03:47

of populism as designed by an Elizabeth Warren

1:03:50

staffer, which means that they were really, really

1:03:52

attuned to the potential long-term problem posed by

1:03:54

something like climate change, but just had no

1:03:56

idea what to do at the border. And

1:03:58

it turns out that, and they all... also

1:04:00

had this again, that perennial incumbent temptation to

1:04:02

say that things are better than they are.

1:04:04

So you have that combination of big structural

1:04:06

reforms that aren't delivering in the here and

1:04:08

now, saying you're on the side of workers

1:04:10

when real median wages are declining and

1:04:14

not having a response to what a lot

1:04:16

of people, including a lot of Democrats were

1:04:18

coming to see as this immigration crisis. That

1:04:20

all set the stage for Trump to take

1:04:23

over or at least to do so much

1:04:25

better this time around. And what

1:04:27

I see, I think you see what the suburbanites is sometimes

1:04:30

that more than anything, at least so far, it's

1:04:32

just been encouraging a kind of complacency that, all

1:04:34

right, well, things are going well for me. So

1:04:36

yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, the recovery, it's going

1:04:38

fine. Like, I don't feel like my quality of

1:04:41

life is being sacrificed in any way by these

1:04:43

issues are people are getting pissed off about. And

1:04:45

I really want you to talk about something like

1:04:47

the crisis democracy, which doesn't resonate with a lot

1:04:49

of working class voters in the same way who

1:04:51

if you're tuned out of politics and you see

1:04:53

someone calling Trump a fascist, this

1:04:55

is a really hard pill for Democrats to

1:04:57

swallow. But a lot of normies when they

1:04:59

hear Democrats say that Trump is a fascist,

1:05:01

they react the same way that Democrats do

1:05:03

when you call when a conservative calls Joe

1:05:05

Biden or Barack Obama socialist, they think, oh,

1:05:07

this is just name calling. These are people,

1:05:09

you know, they're throwing mud at each other.

1:05:11

This is just nonsense. It's a really good

1:05:13

way to get people to tune out. So

1:05:15

even though there's someone like me, who's like,

1:05:17

I'm horrified by January 6, too. But that

1:05:19

just doesn't mean that people are it's going

1:05:21

to be a voting issue for people when

1:05:23

they are concerned about making ends meet or

1:05:25

the border or whatever else. So it's less,

1:05:27

I think, so far as an active obstacle

1:05:29

than just not allowing them to persist in

1:05:31

denial about what this other part of their

1:05:33

at least potential coalition is looking for or

1:05:35

working class people with more immediate concerns. Yeah,

1:05:38

we just hope if the as a fellow Democrat and

1:05:40

hoping that the party can do better, I hope

1:05:43

when they focus on climate

1:05:45

change, it's not just the environment

1:05:47

climate that they're focusing on. There's

1:05:50

a political climate change. So

1:05:53

we'll see any any other thoughts or

1:05:55

predictions or prognostications about this, Tim? I

1:05:57

appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this

1:05:59

man. Yeah, this is disclaimer. I'm a

1:06:02

historian. I don't write about the future.

1:06:04

I'm a professor. And I know you

1:06:06

want to be better. I'm

1:06:11

not writing about tomorrow. I'm writing about yesterday. But

1:06:13

again, the point that I always just keep in

1:06:15

mind is, well, there's a big history lesson. There's

1:06:17

just also be as

1:06:19

a proto Obama groupie in 2004, 2005, when the

1:06:22

smart people are writing

1:06:25

about the newly emerging Republican majority,

1:06:27

how Karl Rove has figured out how

1:06:30

to win elections forever, and

1:06:32

how everything can go off the rails

1:06:34

quickly. It's not a guarantee. You want to

1:06:36

assume the other guy is going to make it work. But

1:06:39

even going back to Obama in 2012, how we

1:06:41

thought that there was this Obama coalition that was

1:06:44

on the rise and that Republicans would have to

1:06:46

change and spun out of the way. The

1:06:48

next election has never fought in the same terms as the last one.

1:06:51

And the story of American politics is just things

1:06:53

going in directions that nobody could have seen. I

1:06:55

still think that there are big picture trends that

1:06:57

we have to keep into take into account the

1:06:59

sort of tendency since the 1960s for the left

1:07:01

to go hard on cultural issues that are a

1:07:06

lot more controversial for their old working class base and

1:07:08

to fumble when it comes to economics, that there are

1:07:11

a lot of voters out there who have the sort

1:07:13

of populist economic views, more moderate on culture. And if

1:07:15

you want to get a majority, you need them in

1:07:17

your camp. That's a big picture structural thing that we

1:07:19

need to keep in mind, but that there are so

1:07:22

many different opportunities Democrats will have over the next four

1:07:24

years. So I just hope that they don't fuck it

1:07:26

up this time. Yeah. Most

1:07:28

people out there are just trying to make a living,

1:07:30

feed their family. Don't forget those people. Honestly,

1:07:33

yeah, this is a source for hope

1:07:35

is that I have so many progressive

1:07:37

friends for them. 2024

1:07:39

was just this terrible moment because they felt as

1:07:42

if the country was turning against them that they

1:07:44

were being personally rejected by a majority for the

1:07:46

first time in their adult lives. And

1:07:49

the, what I want to say is like, they just don't care

1:07:51

that much about you. They, this there's like a 10% or

1:07:54

something like hardcore right wing mega base that maybe

1:07:56

is really furious at you, but most people, the

1:07:58

good and the bad news. is they do not

1:08:00

care about politics. They just don't follow it. It

1:08:03

doesn't appear in their lives. They are thinking about

1:08:05

their grocery bills. They are not thinking about you.

1:08:07

And that means that if you can go from

1:08:09

being an Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump

1:08:11

voter, you haven't been lost forever. You are you

1:08:14

are on the same team not that long ago

1:08:16

and you can be on the same team again.

1:08:18

I agree. Well said. Tim, thanks

1:08:20

so much for being here. So interesting. I'm

1:08:23

packing all this stuff. I love how you can

1:08:25

deconstruct these things so fast. It went

1:08:28

so much clarity and

1:08:30

precision. You take a scalpel to these

1:08:32

things very nicely. Thanks so much for

1:08:34

being here today. Thanks so

1:08:36

much for having me. It was great. Yeah, I

1:08:38

love it. So guys, look,

1:08:41

like I said, if you're one of

1:08:43

these people like me who just

1:08:45

love rabbit-holing, you know, some

1:08:47

of these things, especially now. Now's the time.

1:08:50

If you're if you're a Democrat, take a

1:08:52

deep breath, you guys. There's a lot going

1:08:54

on right now. You don't have to do

1:08:56

anything just yet. Take a deep breath. Read

1:08:58

left to drift. What happened to liberal politics

1:09:00

as a start? Just read it as a

1:09:02

start. Just let it soak in. You know,

1:09:04

there's a lot of lessons in there. Some

1:09:06

good stuff. And Tim, I look

1:09:08

forward to seeing more of your op-ed pieces too.

1:09:10

I really enjoy reading them. Thanks so much. Tim

1:09:13

Schenk, everybody. Thanks, Tim. Thank

1:09:27

you.