← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The Democrats Could Still Screw This Up
01:06:31
Can the Democrats finally seize on President Trump’s increasing unpopularity and end their slump? It seems to me as though 2026 is providing them ample opportunity. But I wanted to know what they actually stand for. Have they learned anything about immigration? Are they ready for the new politics of artificial intelligence? To find out, I asked someone I consider a true man of the left, Chris Hayes, the host of “All In With Chris Hayes” on MS NOW.
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- [00:01]
A
From new york times opinion, I'm ross douthen, and this is interesting times. The 2024 election didn't just return Donald Trump to the White House. It also left the Democrats confronting a potentially era defining defeat. But here we are in 2026. President Trump is deeply unpopular and Democrats are leading in the midterm polls. Still, I want to know, what are they actually for? Have they learned anything from their 2024 defeat? On immigration especially, do they have leaders who are capable of speaking to swing voters while also wooing a party base that's girded for an existential battle? And are they ready for the dawning age and the new politics of artificial intelligence? And who better to answer all of these questions than my guest this week, Chris Hayes, who spends every weeknight talking to some of the most liberal viewers in America as the host of all in with Chris Hayes on Ms. Now. And I just want to note, Chris and I recorded this conversation just before President Trump launched a military campaign against Iran. But I don't think the issues we discussed have changed that much, or at least not yet. Chris Hayes, welcome to interesting times.
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B
It's great to be here.
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A
It's great to have you. So you are, in my own mind, at least not just a nightly news host and a podcaster, but a true man of the left.
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B
I think that's true.
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A
Is that fair? I think that's fair. So when we first met, you were writing for in these Times.
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B
Yes.
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A
Which, for those who don't know, is a classic classical, I don't even know what it is, socialist newspaper. So those are your roots. And I wanna talk to you about the left and where it's going, what it stands for, how it relates to our exciting new technological future. But first, we're gonna do a little bit of partisan politics. Sure. And we're gonna talk about the Democrats, which is not the same as the
- [02:26]
B
left, as they will tell you.
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A
As they will tell you. Right. Maybe. So here we are, and I would say we're about 14 months beyond a point in American politics. When Trump had won and the Democrats were, I don't know, flat on their backs, as beaten.
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B
Very much so.
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A
Seen them since 2004, maybe. And now there's a certain kind of confidence on the Democratic side that they're not just gonna be living under Trump's rule forever, but they're also very unpopular. Unpopular with swing voters, unpopular with their own base, with the left. So from your position, give me a state of the Democrats. How's the party?
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B
Well, I think the first thing to just acknowledge is, know, first of all, thermostatic public opinion does a lot.
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A
Does a lot.
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B
So then you've got, you know, I think, just incredible amount of overreach by Trump of sort of misunderstanding of the. Whatever mandate there was. Like, he just has a project that's distinct from what most Americans want, which is a project to transform the constitutional order into a personalist presidential dictatorship. Like, and I think. I think that's actually not a particularly popular project.
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A
It's not. Yeah, I would say it's not what the people who had swung to Biden.
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B
Correct.
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A
And swung back to Trump were voting for. Correct. That was not like the president having absolute authority to levy tariffs anywhere he wants. That was not the core issue of the 2024 election.
- [04:02]
B
So all of that gets you a long way. I think the big question is, right, so there's a bunch of places where Democrats are still not trusted as much as Republicans. Things like immigration, crime, the economy, still just if you ask, like the partisan trust question. So there's sort of ideological factions within the party. We can talk about that. Those ideological factions, I think, are a little displaced now on a few other more important axes that are the sort of main ones of conflict. One is kind of business as usual versus radical break. And sometimes that looks like, go along to get along or fight, fight, fight.
- [04:42]
A
So this would be, for example, the debate over the government shutdown. It would be a classic example of some people in the party saying, you know, if we do this, it helps Trump and other people saying, how can you just stand here letting Trump run Rothschild if you have tools?
- [04:57]
B
Exactly. And I think, you know, I want to give credence to both sides of the argument, because I think those are fraught debates that there is a real profound question. Right. Like, at one level, it's like, should you be funding a Department of justice that is like manufacturing obviously pretextual criminal cases against political opponents? I think there's a case you shouldn't. At the same time, by that logic, you kind of just pull yourself out into a total boycott of the government. Right. Because in some senses, he's doing some things in each department that are, you know, manifestly abusive from the perspective of a lot of legislators and Democratic politicians and, and. And voters. So I think there's a real tension there that's hard. You've got the sort of momentum on the side of the fight, folks, not business as usual. And I think that's going to be an interesting animating force in the primaries this year. You know, the Democrats never really had their Tea Party levels of trust in the party establishment have been higher. The level of like just pure, pure rage at the party establishment. Like, I hate this party and anyone that at the top of it that animated a lot of the Tea Party and then Trump has not quite broken that way in the Democratic Party. So one big question is that looms over the party is like, how much do we see that play out this year, particularly along that axis? And, and related to that axis of conflict, you know, status quo, radical change or go along to get along versus fight is just new leadership versus old leadership. You know, there is a real exhaustion, a real sense that people that came of age, you know, 20 or 30 years ago and had their sort of formative political experiences then are not well tuned to the moment.
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A
Yeah, I feel like the connection to the leaders who kind of held the Democratic center together is gone. But before we get to sort of who the new leaders are, how does this affect policy? Right. Like, are there actual policy fights happening in the Democratic coalition right now that are meaningful, that we should be paying attention to?
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B
Yeah, you know, there are some. Right. So, like, the clearest right is on foreign policy, particularly vis a vis Israel. I mean, that's just an enormous clear fight. Like, should the US Government align itself in a bipartisan fashion with the Israeli government? Should it give them weapons? Should it fund them?
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A
And does that just. Would you say that broadly tracks the kind of business as usual versus fight lines like in the main primary, which for those who aren't following it closely pits the Democratic governor of Maine, Janet Mills, against Graham Plattner, who really is a kind of Democratic Tea Party.
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B
Yes.
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A
Figure, complete with a checkered, possibly Nazi adjacent tattoo. Tattoo past, whatever, you know, but there it would seem like Platner would be fully aligned with the, you know, no more sort of liberal Zionism as the dominant force.
- [07:56]
B
Right, Definitely. And in fact, I think one of the things, I think it's worth actually spending a little time on this ideological fight because I think it's come to kind of occupy a huge center of the fights. Like, there's a bunch of things that have been stacked atop it, if that makes sense. So the sort of outsider, insider, incumbent, fresh voice, status quo, radical break like age even have lined up around this axis. And I think in some ways the reason it's so important is because it just, I think the experience of the Gaza war represented both just a genuine and profound wedge tension on a coalition that literally contains people on both sides of what is arguably the most polarizing issue in the globe over the last thousands of years.
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A
Like people strongly and passionately on both sides.
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B
Yes, right. Both within the coalition. Right. So, so you've got that like that's always going to be a huge problem for any political coalition. But what's I think sort of happened is it's come to represent a bunch of other like corporate versus grassroots, establishment, first challenger kind of axes. So it's both a first level fight about an actual policy disagreement and then there's a bunch of ways in which that fight have come to sort of embody something broader about what kind of Democratic Party it's going to be.
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A
Right. So what about domestic policy then? If you've, if the Gaza war is like the key place where policy lines up, are there meaningful domestic policy arguments?
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B
There's a fight right now within the Democratic Party about ICE enforcement, which I think is really important and interesting one. Right. So like there's. The ICE needs to be reformed so we should, you know, take the masks off. There's ICE needs to be abolished. The country did perfectly fine for 230 years without that particular agency, which that is a kind of proxy fight for a larger fight which I think isn't actually being had right now in earnest, but will in the primaries.
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Meaning what should our immigration policy, which
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is, what is, what should our immigration policy be? And I think there's a sense that the old consensus is dead. And the old consensus was what was called by the groups, the notorious groups was comprehensive immigration reform. Right. Basically the old structure of democratic policy making on immigration went this way. Increased enforcement, increased enforcement, particularly funds. Right. There was a ton of money that was in 09, 10, 11 put into border enforcement. Know, I think people sometimes underappreciate just how much the spending on the infrastructure of essentially immigration enforcement has gone up in this country. And then in exchange, you know, path to citizenship for the however many folks that are here now, that started to come apart in a bunch of different directions. One, it starts to come apart because starting in 2014, there's just a new phenomenon that starts happening. And I think this is also underappreciated. Right. The immigration arguments that we had, particularly in the 90s and the tens, largely were about undocumented immigration or economic migrants, largely from Mexico. That was the sort of focus of it. This new thing starts happening with, right. Border presentments.
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Right.
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We start Getting it in 2014.
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A
Meaning. Meaning people who show up at the border claiming asylum.
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B
Right.
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A
And who are not sort of sneaking across together.
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B
Exactly. Right. This is a key, key difference Right. It's like they're not hiring a coyote to sneak in under night and then like. Right. Get over. They're actually coming and saying, like, there's a part of your law that applies to me. And, and then that, you know, those numbers, they sort of expand, they contract. They expand wildly in 2023, quite famously.
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2020. Right. 2021. Early Biden.
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Early Biden. But then they, they go, you know.
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Right.
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They really grow. And then they come down to 22, 23. They go really high. The reason I say all this and walk through this history is that the way that policymaking happens in Democratic coalition politics is like, there's sort of grassroots fights. There's. And then there's policy operas and then there's what's called the groups, and there's these sort of like coordinating middle spaces that these policy arguments happen in. I think there is a lack right now of consensus on what is that affirmative vision there?
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A
Right. But I see to me, and you can tell me why this is wrong, it seems to me that there's a desire actually to default back to what you just described as the old consensus from at least some Democrats. Right. That you'll have people where essentially the view is, okay, things got out of hand under Biden. But Trump's enforcement is super unpopular.
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B
Correct.
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But we don't want to go all the way back to what the Biden administration was doing, which was effectively allowing millions of people into the country on the promise of giving them a hearing at some future date. We don't want to go back to that. We concede. That was unpopular. So what's the sweet spot? Guess what we're going to say we'll do border enforcement like Trump is doing. That'll be popular, and then we'll do a path to citizenship. Boom, problem solved. Like I hear that from Democratic politicians.
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B
I think you're right. I just think it's not gonna work. Okay. I think there's a. And to me, it's a little.
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A
Why is it not gonna work?
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B
Well, I think there's a few things. I mean, one it reminds me of sometimes you see politicians to go back to that sort of defining Israel, Gaza thing. And sometimes you have a politician cornered on a question about Israel and they say Israel has a right to defend itself. And it's one of these sort of like thought terminating cliches. Right. It's just like when you have nothing else, just go with that. It's like, well, who can argue with that?
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Right?
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It's like this sort of, you know, Path to CIS border enforcement, path to citizenship has this kind of right.
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Who could be against the sweet spot?
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B
And I honestly, I think there's a reason for it. Like, I think there's structural and actual substantive policy reasons that that's a combination that works both in polling and policy. To me, the bigger thing is there's a fundamental fight over what kind of country we are happening right now that cannot be addressed with that at that level. I mean, the emergence of a genuine blood and soil strain of conservatism. This country is for us. And by us, the people that can go and visit their ancestors graves where they will bury their children, that's what this country is. It's not a country of ideas, it's not a creedal nation. All that sort of pluralist claptrap that you got taught. People come from all over and they can all be Americans. The famous Reagan speech where he says, you know, you can go to Germany and can't be a German, you can go to Italy and can't be Italian, but anyone can come here and be an American.
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A
This was his last speech, right?
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His last speech, yes. Which is a perfect articulation of what used to be a fairly kind of consensus vision that underlied the debates happening above it, that consensus torn apart. When that fight is happening at this elemental level, I think it's very hard to, to come back in with the old policy question without actually making an affirmative case for what kind of country you want.
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A
But why can't you make the Reagan case and pair it with a moderate seeming agenda? I mean, it seems to me, I think you can. It seems to me like when I look at younger right wingers associated with nationalism, what you'll see often is that if you push people even, even sort of self proclaimed Christian nationalists who believe that white America is under threat and so on, are still kind of civic nationalists. Right? Like the actual support for a true.
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B
Yes, I agree with that.
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Heritage Americans are the only real Americans is really narrow. So if the Republicans seem to be moving in that direction, that seems like an opportunity for the Democrats to present themselves as an extremely normie mainstream party. But with the problem that nobody trusts them to enforce.
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B
Well, that's the problem. And I think, well, one place that you have to deal with this head on is changing asylum law. It is bizarre to me that this thing which is the central technical issue at the heart of the way that we've experienced immigration in the country since really, since 2014, I remember covering that. Like that was a huge moment, right? People's kids start showing up at the border.
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The first child migration crisis. Yes.
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It's kind of weird that like there has been no progress on rewriting the law on this. I mean even to just to flip it on the other side for a second. You would think a thing that a Republican unified government would do would be like, well, wait a second, yes, we're going to close down the border using executive action, but this thing is broken and written by libs. Like, let's change asylum law.
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Yes, as you happen, you would imagine that, but you would imagine that a Republican administration would ask Congress to do a lot of things that this administration does not.
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B
But that's a vacuum, right?
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For Democrats, it's a vacuum, but it's a vacuum. It seems to me that only relatively small group of sort of self consciously moderate Democrats would want to claim, like if you're on the insurgent side. The insurgent side. And then you, you've got an insurgent vision. Plus you agree with Chris Hayes that we're having this kind of existential battle
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about what kind of country we are,
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what kind of country we are. Are you really gonna wanna be the Democrat who comes out and says, and by the way, we're gonna reform asylum so fewer people can apply for asylum here. Isn't that an impossible sell in the Democratic Party right now?
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B
I don't think it is, Anisha. I think my own way, I'm not the politician who's gonna do this. Right. But my own thing is, we'll see,
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man, your time may come.
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Just to be clear, I want to just want to say there is an absolutely, to me compelling case for essentially open borders, like in a moral sense, like, I don't think we're saving this
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clip for when you do run for president. Yes.
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I mean, I don't personally, I would not support it. As a politician, I wouldn't vote for it. But I also think it's not like a ludicrous idea. Yeah.
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You and the Cato Institute are there. Yeah, absolutely.
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B
So they're like that animating world spirit. Your right to identify as animating a huge part of the left and fundamentally causing attention with the fact that most people don't want open borders and there are people that are morally committed to essentially that vision. And I don't think they're necessarily like ethically incorrect. Right. As a policy, I don't think it works. And most importantly, it's impossible, I think to marshal majority support for that. So in this sense, to me, the fundamental thing I think to keep in mind Is immigration policy has to be in the national interest first, orderly and humane. Right. And the key part of that, and this is why I come back around to this discussion about what kind of nation we are. The key thing that has fallen away, I think, on the Democratic side in this discussion, is the first one. It is in the national interest. Like, immigrants are great. Immigrants are awesome. Like, immigration is an incredible bounty and gift to this country. It is the reason that the differentiating thing that has made America different. I'm just going back to, like, the civic pluralism of, like, a 1980s public school education in New York City. It's amazing that we have all these people from all these different places who bring all these different kind of talents and perspectives and come here and become American and bring that to do things like win gold medals and start companies and be your doctor.
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And so you have to sell. You have to sell.
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You have to make that argument.
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A
But you have to make that argument in the style. You have to make the 1980s New York City public school argument, which was perhaps slightly more liberal than the country as a whole, combined with an argument that persuades people that you're not gonna do what Joe Biden did. Right. And so that let's. All right, so let's talk about potential leaders of the Democratic Party who make that argument or not. Right. But, like, who is the leadership class for the Democrats going into 2026 and beyond?
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B
Well, it's very. I think out parties are always in this position where there is no national leader.
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But you're trying to discover one. Yep.
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B
But it's a particularly intense one here, I think, because of the rupture represented by Trump. I mean, I think a really important thing to kind of understand from the perspective of people in the broad center left is that it's a real before and after situation. Like, if you view Donald Trump's project as a fundamental assault on the constitutional order, which is to fundamentally transform the nation into something that's not democratic, it's very hard to find continuity in, like, the politics of old. Like, his abnormality and the abnormality of his conduct creates a world in which, like, it's like, you've been untethered from the spaceship and you're just, like, floating out into space, you know?
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A
Okay, that's right. So you didn't give me a single name about people. Well, right.
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B
No, but the reason I say that is just because what I'm saying is I think you need to understand that, like, the way Democratic Party voters are viewing this is in extreme terms I guess that's what I'm trying to say.
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A
Yes, no, I can see that. And I can see that the core reality for a lot of Democratic voters in 2026 is total frustration with anyone who told them in 2016 or 2018 or 2020, this will go away. This will go away. You just have to sort of be normal, restore normalcy and so on. Right? But the dilemma for the party is that to win national elections, they actually
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B
have to be normal and restore normalcy.
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A
But you also, you have to win people who voted for Trump. Yes, right.
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B
Correct.
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And this was something that Democr think they had to do after 2016 because Trump didn't win the popular vote. But guess what? After 2024, he won the popular vote. You also need to win Senate seats in seats that Trump won by more than a few points. Right? So it seems like this is not an impossible problem to solve, but a very challenging one where you have this base that wants an acknowledgment of rupture and abnormality and a swing constituency that you need to win or hold that is just living in the new reality.
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B
So let me give three examples of national figures that I think are doing interesting things to pull off that, because you're right. That's the fundamental thing that you have to do. Right. Mark Kelly, Ruben Gallego, and Raphael Warnock. You can even say Jon Ossoff, too.
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A
Tell me what state each of those men represents just for the sake of it.
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B
So let me give examples of two states that are kind of key states here, which are Arizona and Georgia and the four Democratic senators in those states. Right. They've all won statewide office. They've all won statewide office in the era of Trump. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly in Arizona, John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. I'm choosing this advisedly because, of course, Arizona and Georgia being like the key states, right. That Biden won and that Kamala Harris lost, and particularly because they're outside of the, you know, blue belt, the blue wall, Right. This was a huge deal that these states flipped to Democrats in 2020. And I think all four of them have, and I'm not saying they're necessarily national leaders, but what I would say is that all four of them have their own way of dealing with precisely this issue. So, like, Ruben Gallego's voting record is fairly moderate. He, for instance, I think all four of those centers, I'm not mistaken, voted for the Lake and Riley Act, Right? So, like, that was one of the first votes. It was a big Republican led measure to essentially increase sanctions and for immigrants
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A
who committed crimes named for a woman who was killed by an illegal immigrant.
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B
Yep, yep. They all four of them voted for that. And I think, you know, we're looking at their internal polling and understood the states they represented. I think there were issues with that legislation substantively. But putting that aside, I think all four have found different ways to rhetorically emphasize how abnormal and wrong they think the direction of the country is while keeping their eyes on the main issues that won them their Senate seats. I mean, Warnock is sort of an amazing example. Warnock is, you know, speaks in the sort of register of a preacher, which he is broad moral language. That guy will bring it back to health care and kitchen table issues every single time. He will call what's happening aberrant and evil. And he will also go back to this sort of kitchen table vision. And Mark Kelly is another great example. Right. Mark Kelly's got a fairly moderate voting record in the United States Senate. He is, you know, he's being maybe prosecuted, military pension possibly suspended, I think
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A
all of which is clearly good for his political position.
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B
The best possible thing for it. Yeah. And so I think in all those cases, you're seeing a combination of a rhetoric that speaks to the deep sense of Democratic and spiritual crisis in the center left that I think all four of those are pretty popular figures with basically a voting record and a sort of substantive policy agenda that pretty squarely sits in a kind of center of the nation's politics.
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A
I think I would say that all of them also have personal characteristics that separate them in some way from the kind of churchiness of academic progressivism, maybe. Right. Warnock speaks the language of Christianity in a way that Democratic coalition tends to be comfortable with. Gallego, I would say, is just kind of an unwoke Hispanic dude, if I can. You don't have to comment on that, but that would be my take. And Mark Kelly is like the whitest white astronaut you ever saw. Right. And some of the. Again, it sort of. Some of these are policy positions, some of these are identity positions, but all of them create a perception that this is a form of democratic politics that is somewhat distinct from the kind of competition to, say, Latinx the most.
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B
Yes, right. I mean, I also do think, like, I think there's a little bit of fighting the last war on that. I do think there's a little bit of the alienating rhetorical excesses of a certain part of the, let's say, nonprofit academic and online left, which sort of came together In Twitter, particularly in 2014. 15, 16, which were real.
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A
Real enough. Yeah.
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B
But it did get kind of beaten out of people a bit. Like the idea of what the language of that 2016 or 2020 primary looks like compared to now is pretty different. And I think partly that's just because people lost elections and we, you know, Democratic Party lost the most important election of its lifetime. And. And you have to talk in a way that people understand and feels like a thing that they've heard before.
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A
So let me do the horrible thing that talk about presidential politics in 2028. Right. So I would say, just as an observer of American politics, that if I were going to pick nominees for the Democrats in 2028, all of the guys you just mentioned would be very plausible presidential or vice presidential candidates if you're trying to maximize, just, you know, maximize your popular vote, maximize your share of swing states. The people leading the polls in the Democratic primary right now are Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, who represent somewhat different models. They are sort of. Harris is a legacy candidate who polling potentially could collapse upon contact with political reality. It's name recognition that's possible.
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B
Right.
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A
Newsom, tell me what you think about Gavin Newsom.
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B
I think Newsom has the Hillary Clinton problem, which is that Hillary Clinton was perceived outside of the Democratic Party and Democratic coalition as like, the ultimate lib, like the Libby Lib who ever lived and was never actually like, that much of a lib, and also had a record that was, like, fairly centrist, particularly as a U.S. senator. And that's like the worst uncanny valley for a Democratic politician to be in where the base doesn't trust you because you don't have a kind of organic relationship with, like, the left parts of the party. And then the swing voter, like, just thinks, like, that's a lib. You want the inverse. Right. Right. Like, you.
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You.
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B
You want the person that has authentic and relationships with the left parts of the party and the grassroots and also communicates broadly and is viewed as a not particularly partisan or liberal figure. Barack Obama being, you know, a good example of that. And I just think right now. And this could change. Like, Newsom has the opposite set of factors. Like, he has made very clear attempts to show that he's bipartisan, centrist, independent. You know, there's some stuff he done around the billionaire tax and, you know, policy around trans folks that. That have been actual substantive things he's
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A
done, but moves to the center.
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B
Yeah. Or to the right, as some people would say. But I haven't seen evidence that that like, comes through. Like, I just think there's a reputational thing that's very problem also partly if you're just like, the governor of California is a tough, a tough place to get the next Democratic nominee from, right?
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A
I mean, he has, I mean, they're like Kamala Harris. He has never run a important election in which he had to win large numbers of centrist to center right votes. And that showed up big time in Harris's campaign style, I think. And you could see it as his weakness. But look, here's his strength, right? His strength is that he is able to get attention and hold attention. And you. Chris Hayes wrote a book recently called the Sirens Call. It's a very interesting book, highly recommended. Even though I disagree with important parts of it, right. About what the Internet has done to political culture. And you talk a lot about attention in that book, right. And what is the power of attention and how has Newsom succeeded in grasping it?
- [31:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, the thesis of the Sirens Call is basically that attention is the most valuable resource of our age, that the competition for it has grown so fierce that it is increasingly valuable, but it's both valuable to us and it's valuable to the companies that can extract it. That's the main thesis of the book. But it has a specific importance in politics, right, which is, you know, attention is prior to everything you need to do else in politics. Like name recognition is the thing we use, right. Part of why Gavin Newsman is running highs. He has high name recognition. That's been true forever, but it's more true than ever because more things are competing for our attention than ever before. They're filtered through these algorithmic platforms, right. That can pull us hither and yon. And so the primary thing you have to figure out more than ever before in my lifetime to be a successful politician is how to get people's attention and cut through that. Donald Trump did it incredibly effectively, had a whole bunch of innovation in how he did it. And I think you're right to identify the fact that Newsom has a real talent for that. Like the whole shtick he did where he was like posting in Donald Trump's voice, some people found it cringy, some people found it hilarious, but worked.
- [32:19]
A
It got attention.
- [32:20]
B
It got attention. So the question is, right, so how does that fit with the analysis? I mean, look, the ideal situation you want, I think if you're like designing this in a lab, is someone that both has a proven ability to speak to swing voters that the voters you need, and is also really Good at attention. And the kind of nightmare scenario in a Democratic primary is someone who's like bad at the former and good at the latter. Right.
- [32:49]
A
I don't think the Democrats nominate someone in 2028 who is sort of a kind of pure creature of base craziness or whatever. I do think, though, that there's a way in which the narrative of attention is itself potentially a kind of. It's something that people can reach for as a substitute for, again, like doing hard things like pivoting to the center. Right. Where you say, you know, I mean, like if you look at the center,
- [33:17]
B
but he is pivoting to the center.
- [33:20]
A
Well, he's pivoting to the center, but from. I would say from a position. And this is to your point as governor of California.
- [33:26]
B
Right, right.
- [33:27]
A
Where.
- [33:27]
B
That's the problem.
- [33:28]
A
It's where he's starting from.
- [33:30]
B
Yes, right.
- [33:30]
A
Is tough.
- [33:31]
B
It makes the pivot. But he's trying to do it. I mean, clearly it's not like he's not like the thing that I think you're gonna see a lot of politicians try to pull off and it'll be interesting to see how the base responds is like maximal, kind of like attentional trolling resistance, you know, rhetorical performance and substantive pivot to the center. Right. That's what you're gonna see a lot of people try to pull.
- [33:56]
A
But you do have a lot of situations right now that I see again, as a conservative looking at liberals. Right. Like if you look at the Democratic Senate primary in Texas.
- [34:05]
B
In Texas, yeah. Right.
- [34:06]
A
And James Tellarico has a kind of religious pivot to the center, but fundamentally I don't see that in his positions. He's sort of just doing a Christian gloss on very conventional progressive messaging. I just wonder if you see that, you know, again, as the author of a kind of attention thesis, as a situation where Democrats are like, yeah, we're winning the attention war and therefore we don't have to worry about swing voters.
- [34:30]
B
I think we have to interrogate some of the premises here. Right. Because underlying this.
- [34:35]
A
Listen to this academic liberalism. Chris, interrogate the. Go on. Yeah, Interrogate the premises for premises.
- [34:42]
B
Well, here's. I mean, here's the question, right. All this depends on, like, how much we're dealing with median voter theory here. Like, there's a median voter. That voter is in the middle of a traditional ideological axis. They're cross pressured on issues and they move towards the people who substantively align with their policy views the most. I think there's a lot to that. I Think that clearly was very true on immigration in 2024. Like, really clear story to tell there about that. I also think that Donald Trump and his success just like, confounds that in a million different ways. And people will be like, well, he moderated on Social Security, Medicare, and it's like, yes, okay, that mattered.
- [35:20]
A
I think that mattered a lot.
- [35:21]
B
Yes, yes, yes, yes, it mattered. Was it that. Was that why Donald Trump became the President of the United States twice? I'm a little skeptical about that. So the reason I say that is the question presumes that, like, the way to go back is that you need to move to the center on this sort of traditionally ordered access. Right, right. Which is like the left. Right. Access and on individual issues. And I'm just like a little skeptical that that's true. Right. Like, you need to be perceived as a moderate. 100%. That is true. You need to be perceived as relatively independent, as not a kind of like traditional partisan to win swing voters. Is the way that you get that perception, like what your substantive policy is on asylum law? Maybe, maybe not. Like, it's just not clear to me that those two things add so neatly to each other.
- [36:20]
A
All right, this seems like a good moment to pull away from electoral politics a little bit and talk about the left just as a force unto itself. Right. A force that sort of wants to pull politics in its direction, doesn't necessarily want to worry about exactly what the median voter thinks, but wants to be a kind of gravitational force in American politics, independent of what you need to do to win election after election. I've asked you where things stand for the Democrats. Where do things stand for the left? Like, what does the left want besides Donald Trump out of office and defeated and so on? What is the positive left wing vision in American life right now?
- [37:02]
B
The question of the left is a little complicated because we're talking about the sort of people to the left of liberals, the kinds of folks online who would like, use liberals and insult.
- [37:09]
A
Let's start with people who would define themselves as left as opposed to liberal, mainstream, Democrat, whatever else, people who have a self conscious identity.
- [37:21]
B
I mean, I think the positive vision would be like a society of shared flourishing and equality and solidarity.
- [37:30]
A
All right, well, then let me frame the question differently. Before we got to the possibility of some kind of artificial intelligence revolution, and we're going to talk about that possibility in a minute, but let's bracket AI for a second. It seemed to me like the left all across the Western world had run into a kind of big cul De sac. Obstacle, whatever else in the last 10 or 15 years. Basically you have a bunch of countries that are rich, have big welfare states, they're all pretty expensive. These societies are getting old at a really rapid clip. And it seems to me that that basic dynamic just sort of traps the left in a kind of desperate attempt to shore up a status quo that's under threat and defensive battle. Defensive battles and doesn't leave room for, you know, a utopian revolutionary vision, which is sort of essential to the left as I understand it.
- [38:26]
B
So yeah, I think that's a fair critique.
- [38:27]
A
I mean, I think that's not a critique. It's the, to me it's like the challenge. And what is, are there sort of, well, solutions?
- [38:35]
B
I think that is truly the case of the center left parties of this, of the, say, the Socialist International in Europe. Right. I mean, which completely hollowed out, moribund and electorally in a lot of trouble. The Western hemisphere is a very different story for a bunch of different reasons.
- [38:55]
A
But we can stick to America.
- [38:57]
B
But in the U.S. yeah, I mean, look, you know, one attempt to do that was the Green New Deal vision, right? Was, look, let's talk about a sort of techno utopian world. We, you know, we could have a world, and this is actually a world that still exists possibly in the future, although it seems like so remote, of essentially like zero marginal cost, energy that's carbon free, that would allow us to do all sorts of things. Right. And a society in which like we don't have this enormous concentration of both wealth and energy, wealth that's much more distributed and much more equal. The biggest issue right now on the left, I think, is they have the wind at their backs on the central political economy question, which is does American capitalism work for the ordinary person? And I think the polling reliably shows people say the answer to that question is no, profoundly no.
- [39:53]
A
Younger people especially.
- [39:55]
B
Younger people especially. And I think the level of wealth concentration, we've seen the explosion in spending by the wealthiest folks on earth, political campaigns, whether it's efficacious or not, and the kind of like tech folks all there at the inauguration, like all of this creates a world that should be ripe for a left critique and in some ways has been. I mean, there's a reason that the mayor of New York is a democratic socialist, which would have been, you know, a very remote possibility 15 years earlier. The question is, what do you, what kind of society do you want? Right.
- [40:32]
A
But isn't the question, how do you pay for the society you want? Because it Seems to me that, yeah, that vision is in principle very popular. Bernie Sanders has been a very popular figure making that kind of case. The right, the populist right, has traded on elements of that vision and tried to appropriate it and so on. But when it comes to, you know, are we going to do a massive new public works program, right, it seems like the left, it hit one wall with inflation under Biden. It spent a lot of money and got inflation, which is incredibly unpopular. And the other wall is that yes, you can tax the billionaires and that's popular, but to fund a totally revised welfare state, you need to tax a lot more people than that. And that is deeply unpopular too. And does anything change those facts for the left?
- [41:21]
B
Well, I would say there's a different set of questions that are to me, a little more important. I think one of the traps in center left policy in the last, say 30 years is that we have this sort of pre tax and transfer inequality and then tax and transfers to change it. And we just keep getting more and more inequality in the, you know, what the market does. And then the recipe is more and more redistribution. And like, it's more than rhetorical. Ask rich people in New York whether the leftist project of taxing wealthy people in New York has been rhetorical. It has very much not. I mean, I won't, I won't ask
- [42:00]
A
you how you, how you're aware of that, Chris.
- [42:03]
B
It, it is the most redistributive tax regime in the entire country. You know, there's a new line put in. Above $25 million, they're trying to get the billionaire tax in California. Like they're right. That's real stuff.
- [42:16]
A
That's real stuff.
- [42:18]
B
The problem is you can't have a political economy that just keeps producing like this larger and larger forms of inequality that then have larger and larger amounts of redistribution to produce an equitable society. So the question then becomes, well, what is the vision for an equitable market economy or labor market or labor force or society that is genuinely middle class?
- [42:43]
A
But even for that, you have to, as far as I can, like, I just don't think you get that more equitable society by passing some pro labor regulations or something. You mentioned the Green New Deal. Any story you want to tell about changing just the way people are employed and paid in America itself would require massive public work spending, massive new industrial policy. And that money has to come from somewhere. And the left certainly doesn't want to cut Social Security or Medicare or anything like that. So it is, isn't it? Still sort of stuck saying we're going to add another line above 25 million, like to get the money to create the pre. Distribution.
- [43:26]
B
Well, I just think that the, the. It's thinking in too narrow terms to think about this like specific tax and transfer question. I mean the other thing I'll say is like there really is a lot of money at the top. Like you can't fund a welfare state with it, but like you can start with a wealth tax like that. That actually is like a very developed, clear idea. It's very popular. It would be fought tooth and nail. But yeah, there really is a lot at the top.
- [43:51]
A
Okay.
- [43:51]
B
But yes, you're correct that you have to build. I mean, what's the most durable form of, you know, Social transfer. Right. Social Security and Medicare. Really? Social Security the most. And you know, Social Security is actually relatively regressive as a tax and is broadly shared. And so to get back around to the point I think you're making is that like you do at a certain point have to take the tax revolt head on. Yes. You do, Right.
- [44:18]
A
You have to convince some people, middle class people, that they should pay more taxes.
- [44:22]
B
Yeah, but the thing I would say about that is if that's what your ultimate project is. Right, which is, I mean this would be what say Bernie Sanders Medicare for all would require. And he was clear about that. There will be more in taxes and. Yes. For you. Right. He didn't try to like wave away the math on that. He was crystal clear about it. That said, that is only a plausible political vision. Right. A shared vision. If you're also really going after the billionaires, I mean. Right. A country in which like those people who are billionaires are paying us lower effective tax rate and like. Yes. Is this a campaign cliche? Yes. Is it true? 100%. It's also true. Is not a world in which like you can plausibly ask people to have this sort of shared vision.
- [45:37]
A
Let's talk about how artificial intelligence might shake up the landscape because I think it enters into all of these. Yes, very much in powerful ways. But start again. Since we're talking about the left, there is a narrative to which I have contributed that says basically the left right now, meaning academics, intellectuals, activists and so on, less so politicians maybe is just not taking AI seriously enough that there's a bunch of people on the left who just keep wanting to say it's just not as big a deal. It's getting hyped. It's the AI companies talking their book. And what is actually being Delivered is not a game changer. To the extent that that's what the left is saying, I think it's wrong. I don't know how big a deal AI is, but I think it's a pretty big deal. But how do you see the left wing conversation on artific?
- [46:31]
B
Well, I think there is a fair amount of that. I think there's a little bit of wishful thinking of, like, this is the metaverse.
- [46:38]
A
Right. It's the Right. It's crypto, the metaverse. We had a run of things from Silicon Valley that were not world changing.
- [46:45]
B
Right. In defense of people saying that, like, there is very recent evidence of a enormous bubble in which, like, one of the most powerful rich companies in America literally changed its name to meta. And it was ridiculous. Right.
- [47:03]
A
The holodeck didn't appear.
- [47:04]
B
It's like, you know, sometimes everyone does jump in the hype pool and everyone is wrong as a baseline. That's an important thing that I. And the reason I say that is because that is a very key part of the way that I think a lot of people think about this. Like.
- [47:18]
A
Right. But you would concede. I don't think you agree with this, but you would concede that more people are all in. In much bigger ways for AI than I think ever were for, you know, tooling around in virtual reality.
- [47:29]
B
Well, I think it.
- [47:30]
A
Mark Zuckerberg was in for it.
- [47:31]
B
I think the distinguishing thing is that it's just obviously a more impressive and useful technology. Yeah. Like, you can explain to a person very quickly what it does or what it could do that's useful in a way that you couldn't with the metaverse. Right. So that's the key thing. I mean, so I would say, yes, there's a certain amount of it's all a scam. I do think it's probably worth distinguishing between the technology and the business model, which are distinct. Right. Like, I was thinking about this the other day. There was a company called Cosmo.com in 1999 to like 2001, I remember them well, and Urban fetch. And their idea was you would be able to order anything you wanted, whether it was soda, a VHS, groceries within an hour, two hours, whatever. And it was like the typical classic late 90s.com boom. And. And it, you know, went out of business very quickly, but they clearly were onto something. They were just a little too early. Right. So, like, I think it's important to keep this distinction in your head between is the technology useful and going to be transformative and is the current business model or business hype around it, like correctly valued in the market. And the reason I say is because those get conflated sometimes in this discussion in ways that I think are not helpful. And particularly I think people on the left who are like, it's all BS or it's all going to go away. It's like, yeah, there might be a huge crash, but very clearly this is a transformative technology. So then the question becomes like, how people on the left think about that transformative technology. And I would say overwhelmingly, it's extremely negative. Let me defend why it's negative. One is it really is the case that they just took everyone's intellectual property without compensation and trained up models that could then like replace the people that generated that. That's like an actual thing that happened. That's pretty messed up. It's kind of a crazy transfer of value when you think about it. Like artists that made stuff, people that wrote things. Now newspaper columns, newspaper columnists. I mean, cable, cable tv. I'm in the Anthropic Settlement.
- [49:40]
A
You know, like, I have also received literature from the Anthropic Settlement.
- [49:44]
B
Yeah, so like, yeah, A, B, the people that are controlling it are a tiny sliver of people. And like one of the sort of fundamental insights to the left, right, is like real intense forms of concentrated power of, you know, billionaire capitalists making huge decisions for everyone is pretty bad. And right now you've got like, what, five or six people that are making decisions about how trillions of dollars of capital is allocated and what all of our futures are gonna look like. Like, no, thanks, man. I don't like that at all.
- [50:20]
A
Well, fortunately, the people making those decisions are completely normal in every way. Hold no eccentric views about the nature of the human future. No, I think that story makes sense. But then what is an actual left wing AI politics look like? Because right now.
- [50:38]
B
Such an interesting question. Right now you have Bernie Sanders.
- [50:41]
A
Bernie Sanders has called for a moratorium on building data centers. To me, this seems like something that is likely to be fairly popular in a lot of places and ultimately basically useless. That it's basically sort of NIMBYism. Not in my backyard. And what will happen is the data centers will get built in other states or they'll get built in the Middle east or they'll get built in Africa. And at most, you're slowing down AI maybe a tiny bit. You're not doing anything about China and you need some other plan.
- [51:13]
B
So let me. Can I argue against that for a second? Just because I think the question is like, okay, well, where do you start? Right, So I think there's a real parallel to the arguments around globalization, trade and neoliberalism that happened in the late 1990s, because people said the exact same thing there. It was like, well, what are you going to do? You're like, this is just the way the world is moving, and if we don't make this trade deal, then other countries will make that trade deal and things are going to get automated. And what, you want to, like, cling to factories for the rest of your life? And this is just like the way the world is moving. And yeah, you kids can go riot in Seattle with your dumb WTO protest and, like, try to save the owls, but, like, in the end, that's all going to be ineffectual. And then what really happened was like, Donald Trump and J.D. vance came along to be like, hey, man, probably not a great thing to like, absolutely sledgehammer the entirety of our industrial base and just take millions of people and turn their towns into like, absolutely hollowed out husks and leave everyone just, like, begging for enough opioids to kill the pain of what had been taken. And I want to go back and be like, wait a second. Those people were right. They were identifying something correctly when they said back when we had this debate the first time, that there were gonna be enormous consequences to this model of economic development, to a bunch of policy decisions that were actually made, remember, that led to that destruction.
- [52:38]
A
Right. But the downsides of data centers, as I understand it, is, yes, there are some questions about electricity generation and sort of green concerns.
- [52:48]
B
Pretty big.
- [52:49]
A
Well, I don't think we're gonna resolve that. I'm not convinced that they're that big. But, like, my concern with data centers is the thing that they are enabling and how it transforms. Right, okay, but, but my point, the
- [53:04]
B
reason I say that is. No, because I'm. I'm saying the full thing, right? I'm saying if you're saying my project is to put a crowbar in the wheels of the machinery of the creation of a new vision for how the world will be ordered. And the way I'm doing is I'm stopping this data center.
- [53:18]
A
Right, right.
- [53:19]
B
Like, what else do you want people to do?
- [53:22]
A
I mean, I think you do need to figure out the right place to put your crowbar. Right. So if this is, to use a different historical analogy, right, if this is akin to the Industrial Revolution, in the end, the people who, you know, smashed looms and so on didn't really have a plausible agenda and the people who instituted child labor laws and did. Right. So that would be a left friendly example. I'm not sure that works. Like, look, there is a part of me certainly that looks at certain doom laden projections for the future of AI and it's like, yeah, you stop it wherever you can. And if you've got to use NIMBYism that I might oppose in other circumstances to do it, so be it. I just don't see the path from that. A data center doesn't get built in Oregon totally to, well, we prevent AI from, you know, doing something bad.
- [54:16]
B
Yes. I mean, let me, Let me just say that, like, the reason that I sort of defend that project is just because, like, as a means into the politics of it ultimately. I mean, Lawrence Lessig said this to me, the Harvard law professor, and he's been thinking about AI and democracy, where he's like. He said this thing that stuck with him. He's like, imagine if we had the nuclear arms race, but it was just private companies, like, well, and. Well, and.
- [54:41]
A
But also the people building the nukes were talking to the nukes and the nukes. The nukes were. Excuse me, the nukes were saying.
- [54:49]
B
Don't you want to press the button?
- [54:50]
A
A lot of things. Right? No, no, it's very, It's a very. I agree. And we're having, again, we're having this conversation, I should note, in the shadow of an ongoing dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic about the uses of Anthropic's technology. But wait, in that debate, you're on the side of Anaconda. You don't want, like, if I said to you, chris, should the Department of Defense take over? Right.
- [55:14]
B
No, that's what they're threatening. They're threatening the Defense Production Act. Right.
- [55:17]
A
But you don't want the AI race managed by Pete Hegseth.
- [55:22]
B
No.
- [55:22]
A
Okay, so what is the solution to Lessig's conundrum?
- [55:26]
B
I mean, there has to be at the broadest level. I don't. I mean, let me just be clear. I don't know, maybe a board.
- [55:33]
A
Maybe a board of peace advantage.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah, No, I mean, like, I don't know know.
- [55:38]
A
But some kind of civilian governmental control.
- [55:41]
B
Civilian governmental regulate, like, right. I mean, right now, as far as I can understand, there's zero regulation. I mean, I don't think there's nothing. Again, I am not at all enough, like, not even begin to be at the threshold of being enough of an expert or AI wonk to tell you, like, what should the governmental regime be?
- [56:02]
A
Right. But Sticking to the level of politics, though, right? It seems like there's a line that Democrats, liberals, and not only Democrats and liberals, but some form of populist AI backlash, which, by the way, everyone who works in AI expects. Right. If you talk to people who are.
- [56:21]
B
Dario said it in.
- [56:23]
A
He said it on my podcast. But like you, everyone who is in that small sliver of people who you mentioned assumes that 20, 28, 2030, if we get that far right, that our politics will be consumed by people who have some version of your reaction. But that could go in a lot
- [56:42]
B
of different ways or different political valences of that same reaction.
- [56:46]
A
Right. It could be the Steve Bannon, but just on the left. Do you think that sort of the idea that you need to regulate AI for safety actually breaks through as a political issue? Or do you think it only breaks through if it's, like, about job loss?
- [57:01]
B
Part of what's difficult to disentangle is there's such an obvious concerted effort to paint a maximalist picture of the possibility of the power of the technology by people that are right now in rounds of investment raising for companies that are absolutely bleeding capital that are nowhere near profitable. So there's a skepticism of is it really going to be the Doomsday machine? And it's going to, you know, be hell and all this stuff. I'm pretty worried about that, actually. Like, I think just descriptively, I feel like that doesn't have that much purchase. I think the thing that does have purchase are two things. One is this notion, and I've talked about this a bit, is just like, to the extent they have a business proposition, which they do, is to replace white collar workers and machines, basically, like, we automated all these other jobs, we're going to automate these jobs. And, you know, to go back to the metaphor I was using before about the sort of big trade debates, it's like, yeah, what do American politics look like if you turn Marin county into Youngstown and, you know, Park Slope in New Gary, Indiana? Probably not great. What does the American economy look like? Like, so I think there's a real sense of, like, the sledgehammer is coming for the part of the economic capitalist American project where people have homes and they take vacations and they send their kids to good schools. And it's like, if the project of AI is to just now take out that layer, I think a, you will create insane amounts of political backlash. But I also think American politics will go even more insane than they are now.
- [58:47]
A
I think you essentially gave an answer to this question earlier, when you talked about sort of the problem with redistribution. Right. But it seems like the left under those circumstances could take a form of saying, look, we need ubi, universal basic
- [59:03]
B
income, job guarantee of some kind.
- [59:06]
A
Well, that's. Well, see, these are different things, right? Very different. There's a version that says you basically want to look at all the money that the people in the AI world are going to be making and you want to tax it, just directly subsidize Americans out of that largess. Or you need a politics that basically protects work. And it sounds to me like you are on the job side, not the UBI side.
- [59:30]
B
I guess I haven't thought it through enough to feel like I have a very fixed view on either. I think there also can be complementary in certain ways. I think to me, the animating principle here, which I think is the animating principle for a lot of left liberal resistance to this, is just like
- [59:48]
A
an
- [59:48]
B
increasing appreciation of the specialness of being human and the dignity of being human and humans doing human things like making stuff and sharing it with each other. And a world that feels increasingly designed to strip away, extract exploitation and reduce that fundamental humanness. And that to me is kind of like the beating heart beneath whatever the policy is, which I think, I don't know. It's not like a job gives life meaning, but like we need space for people to be able to create a stable world for themselves, raise their families, be with their friends, pursue their goals and projects, and be engaged in the world and their communities.
- [60:41]
A
Yeah, so this is a good place to end because this is where I wanted to ask you about this. I think the left has been radically underestimating the capacities of AI and in a way that has left left wing politics somewhat unprepared for where we're going. At the same time, I appreciate the extent to which the left critique of AI has been framed in those terms as a kind of defense of humanism and dare I say, human exceptionalism in the face of machine alternatives. Because that's not the only possible direction for the left to go in. There has been a kind of various kinds of sort of anti humanist tendencies on the left for as long as I've been alive. Right. There's a kind of secular materialism that sort of is incredibly reductive about the human mind and dismisses free will. There's a kind of academic deconstructionism that reduces like all human art to power relations. And then there is a kind of environmentalist left that is skeptical, let's say about the human contribution to the biome. So I'm really happy to have the left in there defending human exceptionalism. Are you confident that that will stick as opposed to a world where the left decides that we need to defend the parasocial relationships that people have with their AI that are just as important as male female marriage of the old school? Right. I think that's a direction the left could take. Do you?
- [62:22]
B
That feels very remote from what's happening now.
- [62:25]
A
I agree.
- [62:26]
B
I think it depends a lot on the trajectory of the technology and also the deployment of it. Yeah. Because I think that, Yes, I guess the sort of thread you're pulling on intellectually is like this sort of. Yeah. Species exceptionalism. Right. Like, is there something particularly uniquely great about being a human and distinct about it? And if you're a materialist or you're a animal rights activist and, you know, you're skeptical of those claims, I guess I would just say again, like, as a sort of sociological fact, what I found sort of bracing at this moment, and which I feel deeply, personally, just speak for myself for a second, it's really put me in touch with humanism in, like, a deep way of, like, what it means to be human, what's amazing about being a human, what's distinct about being a human, what the tradition of the liberal arts and why it's, like, important to read and study and actually, you know, write Right. For yourself and not hire a robot to go to the gym to work out for you, which is like what we're doing in colleges in Mass. Right. And I think. I think that right now that's the dominant reaction, which I think is. I think is good. And I think, you know, I've been thinking about this just to say this about. Because I think it connects in some ways to one of the things that we saw in Minnesota, which is this notion of, like, I think coming out of COVID and the experience of that, this sort of sense of, like, the. The power and importance of just human connection, like face to face and community connection. Neighbors, you know, neighbor is the term that all the folks in Minnesota were using and that, like, there does feel like there is above and beyond this AI discussion, a kind of resurgent humanism and an appreciation of human connection in a lot of what's happening right now in this political moment on the sort of broad center left.
- [64:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. And well, too, we can end with politics. But just. Do you think, is it an AI election? Like, is that your expectation?
- [64:33]
B
I just. I feel so much radical uncertainty about the future trajectory.
- [64:37]
A
I know you have to end by giving me a prophecy. Imagine that, that you're Claude or Chatgpt and I'm typing in and, you know, I'm asking you, you know, here's what I think.
- [64:48]
B
I, I think in the sense that I think it will be, I think the odds of it being the center of whatever the economic story is in that year are high enough that that's likely to be the dominant thing.
- [65:02]
A
Okay, I'll accept that. Chris Hayes, thank you so much for joining me.
- [65:06]
B
I enjoyed it. SAM Interesting Times is produced by Sofia
- [65:35]
A
Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain and Emily Holzeneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Sophia Landman. Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos and Emma Kelbeck. Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusek, Marina King, Jan Kobel and Mike Pierettes. And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.