GlobeCon: The New Liberals Take on DSA

Summary

Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here — "GlobeCon: The New Liberals Take on DSA"

Date: August 11, 2026
Host: Garrison Davis
Podcast: It Could Happen Here (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)

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Overview:

This episode explores the rise of the "new liberals" as embodied by the Center for New Liberalism (CNL) and their annual conference "GlobeCon" (New Liberal Action Summit) in Washington, D.C. Host Garrison Davis offers a detailed, on-the-ground report from the summit — positioned as the liberal counterweight to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) activism — examining the tensions between the young digital-native technocratic liberals and the populist left. The episode dives into CNL's online roots, ideological agenda, class politics, rivalry with DSA, and its prospects for influence inside the Democratic Party.

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Key Sections & Timestamps:

1. The Setting: New Liberalism Rises (02:32–08:24)

• Garrison Davis recaps recent Democratic Party and DSA developments, describing how left populism is growing, especially among youth.
• Instead of attending DSA’s Socialist Summit, Davis visits GlobeCon—the New Liberal Action Summit—organized by the Center for New Liberalism (“CNL”), a group using the blue globe emoji as its symbol.
  • Attendee demographics: Mostly early 20s–late 30s, heavily composed of students and young professionals (econ, policy, law).
  • CNL is "a digital first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the age it is most under attack."

Quote (Garrison Davis, 08:00):
“The populist right has their own little organizations like TPUSA. The populist left has the DSA, and the Center for New Liberalism wants to be ... a counterweight.”

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2. Who Are The New Liberals? (08:24–12:36)

• Garrison interviews CNL Deputy Director Tobin Stone about CNL’s role, priorities, and desired political outcomes.
  • CNL frames itself as offering pragmatic, center-left alternatives, willing to “fight the NIMBYs and build more housing,” and to compete head-to-head with DSA in key Democratic primaries.
  • CNL supports politicians like Jake Auchincloss (Massachusetts), touting “abundance” and tech optimism, and aspiring to identify and back future candidates nationally.
  • CNL’s membership and political impact remains much smaller than DSA’s (est. 700 dues-paying members vs. DSA’s 120,000).

Quote (Tobin Stone, 08:24):
“We can be center left, moderate...but actually have a real agenda that excites people and offers an alternative to what the DSA is saying...they have to be willing to take on the fights, like fight the NIMBYs and build more housing because young people can’t afford housing anymore. So that’s what we’re trying to do.”

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3. The Glorified Meme Brigade: CNL’s Digital Origins (12:36–19:32)

• CNL’s roots trace back to the r/neoliberal subreddit (post-2016), where moderators fostered an online culture blending policy debate and neoliberal "shitposting."
  • Embracing the slur “neoliberal” as reclamation, they made market-friendly centrism “memeable,” ran Twitter tournaments (e.g., “neoliberal shill bracket”), and admired figures like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver.
  • In 2020, the Neoliberal Project was absorbed by the centrist Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), later rebranding as the Center for New Liberalism (CNL) to distance from “neoliberal” baggage.
  • GlobeCon is now in its fifth year, trying to bring digital energy into real-world organizing.

Quote (Garrison Davis, 16:37):
“When I think of cool, the first thing that comes to mind is Reddit memes about liberal free market economics.”

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4. Pragmatism vs. Populism & The 2028 Stakes (22:38–25:25)

• CNL aspires to influence the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nominee, hoping for a pragmatic “center-leaning” candidate rather than left populists.
  • Dismisses “sloppy populist” policies (“cut everyone’s taxes,” etc.).
  • Stone argues DSA in the “driver’s seat” would be “extremely harmful.”
• The host challenges CNL’s insistence that “centrism” failed only because Dems were “too out of touch,” not “too left.”

Quote (Tobin Stone, 23:12):
“One of our big goals is definitely to influence who our next president is...We also want to see that the platform that we run on in 2028 is not—We understand sometimes you have to have a little bit of populism, but it’s kind of like sloppy...We want to see a real, concrete platform that doesn’t over promise.”

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5. Class Politics: Are DSA and “New Liberals” Reaching the Working Class? (27:57–39:45)

Liberal Analysis:

• CNL theorizes DSA only appeals to college-educated “elites,” with mainstream liberals better able to attract “non-college” or working-class voters.
  • Points to data from races like Zoran Mamdani vs. Cuomo, and Abdul El-Sayed vs. Haley Stevens.
• Davis and CUNY sociologist Ben Rose Porter (32:02) dispute this, arguing that defining class politics solely by degree status obscures real material class interests.
  • DSA’s appeal comes from economically squeezed younger generations, not just education or income stratification.
  • In key elections, age is the biggest demographic divide, with young low-income voters supporting DSA and older low-income voters tending moderate.

Quote (Ben Rose Porter, 32:02):
“It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be...If you are a worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal...The liberal view cannot really comprehend how college-educated people...are also a part of the working class and respond to the economic squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy.”

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6. The Contradictions of New Liberalism: Online Contrarianism and Technocracy (39:45–51:30)

• The digital-first grounding of CNL creates an organization that is part Twitter impression metric, part in-person network.
• CNL primarily targets college graduates in big metro chapters, not the “non-college” base they claim to want.
• Their politics is profoundly shaped by “contrarian liberalism”—fetishizing unpopular, rationalist positions, edgelord takes, and memefied defiance of left populism.
  • Example: CNL members defending policies like abolishing FEMA or supporting billionaire marches.
• CNL’s New Liberal Podcast frames liberalism in crisis not because of social contradiction but a “post-modern crisis of meaning.” Their solution is technocratic management.

Quote (Garrison Davis, 39:53):
“I don't know how that kind of messaging is going to attract anyone except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the entire makeup of CNL as an organization.”

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7. Is Technocracy Politics? Class Struggle vs. Economic Management (45:08–51:30)

• Davis and Porter discuss the CNL worldview which conflates technical expertise with rightful authority to govern—erasing politics in favor of administration, prioritizing economic growth over distribution or class conflict.
• Porter critiques this obsession with technocracy as a politics “without politics,” blind to the realities of stagnation, inequality, and the actual struggles shaping people’s lives.

Quote (Ben Rose Porter, 49:13):
“The deciding what do you do with that expertise, how do you gear the economy, how do you consciously control where it’s going, how distribution happens, who is empowered in government and in the economy...This is all to discuss class, which these people basically never do.”

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8. Conclusion & Notable Moments (51:30–54:21)

• CNL’s narrow vision—framed by a meme-driven ethos, insular technocratic identity, and avoidance of redistributive or conflictual politics—is why, Davis argues, it is unlikely to supplant the DSA as the voice of young, struggling Americans.
• Notable anecdote: At the post-GlobeCon bar, a CNL committee member drunkenly argued for child outcomes benefiting from fatherly incarceration due to “the data,” provoking deep discomfort.
  • “That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project...their little knowing smirk, fully aware that what they're saying is morally detestable, while self assured in appealing to the authority of technical knowledge.” (Garrison Davis, 53:15)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On CNL’s agenda (08:24, Tobin Stone):
  “We can be central left, moderate, whatever you want to call us, but actually have a real agenda that excites people and offers an alternative to what the DSA is saying.”

• On technocracy (45:08, Ben Rose Porter):
  “You need technicians to govern, but the technocrat conflates technical ability with making all decisions—missing distributive politics and class struggle entirely.”

• On why CNL doesn’t resonate (51:30, Garrison Davis):
  “Their extremely narrow view of what is politically possible is...the main reason why this sort of young new liberal organization will never succeed in rivaling DSA. Because the whole ‘better things aren’t possible’ mentality makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause, especially young people who are struggling.”

• Bar anecdote (53:15, Garrison Davis):
  “The tendency to fall back on the pretext that a study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that there may be alternative solutions to the base problem...your politics have failed.”

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Flow & Tone

• The episode is sharply observational and wry, with Garrison Davis employing irony and directness to critique CNL and highlight generational, class, and political divides.
• Direct speaker attribution, key moments at the summit, and evidence-based arguments provide a comprehensive, critical snapshot.
• The episode’s tone is both analytical and engaging, filled with anecdotes and pointed rebuttals to “new liberal” claims, making complex ideological conflicts accessible even to those unfamiliar with internal Democratic Party politics.

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This summary distills the episode’s exploration of the CNL/DSA rivalry, the limitations of meme-ified technocratic liberalism, and the ongoing battle for the Democratic Party’s direction in an era of economic and political upheaval.

Transcript

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welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. The past few weeks I've been covering the midterm primaries and the battle between the left and the establishment for the future of the Democratic Party, as evidenced just this month in Michigan and Wisconsin. Left Populism Continues to Be on the Rise A few weekends ago the Democratic Socialists of America held their national organizing conference, the Socialist Summit, in Chicago, Illinois. I did not attend the Socialists Summit because instead I wanted to check in on the other side of the aisle. So last month I went down to Washington D.C. to attend the New Liberal Action Summit or as it's affectionately referred to by attendees, globecon, named after the Blue globe emoji used by liberals on Twitter symbolizing globalism, free trade, free market capitalism, liberal immigration and yimbyism. The New Liberal Action Summit was a three day event with one main conference day filled with panels featuring policymakers, fireside chats with liberal politicians and and networking opportunities for young liberals who share a passion for center left policies. I went to eight of the 14 panels. One of the first panels was on energy policy, featuring two former politicians turned fossil fuel lobbyists. Next, Representative Don Beyer spoke about the need for AI regulation. A panel of policy advisors discussed why, quote unquote sloppulist tax proposals are stupid. Representative Richie Torres promoted abundance. Congressional representatives from the New Democrat Coalition had a panel about how their caucus is fighting back against dsa and I listened in to a live recording of Francis Fukuyama's podcast. Abundance was probably one of the most frequently used words at the conference. There was a big focus on building, housing, zoning reform, permit streamlining, and a lot of speakers were nervous about the growing anti tech backlash and the public support for data center moratoriums. Interestingly, most panelists and attendees were impressed by Zora Mamdani's reign thus far, but still very oppositional to stuff like wealth, taxes, the rent freeze, populism in general, DSA as an organization and their other candidates. About 300 Libs attended the summit last July. They mostly ranged between their early 20s to late 30s. These are Econ, poli sci and law students, young professionals, campaign staffers, influencers, policy wonks, and aspiring policy wonks. Just as the use of the Blue Globe emoji online was in response to socialists identifying themselves online via the Red Rose emoji, this whole conference and the org behind it is a response from young ish liberals to rising populism in the United States and especially the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party The New Liberal Action Summit is put on by an organization called the center for New Liberalism, or CNL. CNL is a nonprofit 501c4quote Digital first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the age it is most under attack. According to their website, at the summit they were giving out C and L stickers which they sell on their website for $5. One of the stickers reads, quote, we believe in economic growth through free markets, a robust social safety net, the free flow of people and goods, deregulating barriers to housing and employment, immediate criminal justice reform, a tech optimist society, a tax on carbon freedom regardless of gender, age, race, religion or sexual orientation. Pragmatism over populism. Cnliberalism.org join the center for New Liberalism claims to have about 11,000 members and 50 local chapters in cities across the U.S. though according to their website, CNL's private Slack channel has just about 700 dues paying members of the organization. In contrast, DDSA is about 120,000 dues paying members. During the summit I spoke with CNL's Deputy Director Tobin Stone and he told me that the center for New Liberalism is specifically intending to serve as a counterweight to the dsa. Stone said that the populist right has their own little organizations like tpusa. The populist left has the DSA and the center for New Liberalism wants to be both a political organizational force as well as a social body for young center left liberals who believe in quote unquote lowercase L liberalism to meet with each other, organize and advance their ideas. Stone did admit that most moderate Democrats are kind of dropping the ball right now. The Republicans are super unpopular and voters are expressing all these things around affordability. But moderate Dems have failed to seize this moment. There is a big window open for Democrats and really the only people taking it are the dsa.

[Tobin Stone]

What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, no, we can be central left, moderate, whatever you want to call us, but actually have a real agenda that excites people and offers an alternative to what the DSA is saying. Because none of these, a lot of these current moderates, like in some ways we'd rather have them than a DSA person. At the same time, like the moderates can't just be sitting there doing nothing. They have to like be willing to take on the fights, like fight the NIMBYs and build more housing because young people can't afford housing anymore. So that's what we're trying to do. Is like be a counterweight and offer a real alternative.

[Garrison Davis]

About two years ago, CNL Deputy Director Tobin Stone told the Columbia Journalism Review, quote, were Hillary Clinton Democrats basically? Now that was two years ago. But last month I asked Stone, what kind of politicians does CNL want to see taking power?

[Tobin Stone]

Say federally? Like you see people like Jake Auchincloss. I think when people hear him talk it resonates like he's incredibly smart and he knows how to talk to people about the issues that they're mad about.

[Garrison Davis]

Jake Auchangloss headlined CNL's opening reception on the first day of the summit. Akhinklaas is a congressional Rep from Massachusetts and a former Marine. After Zoran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last June, auchanglass wrote a blog post on substack reading neither democratic socialism nor crony capitalism will deliver financial freedom. I propose a 10 word agenda for financial freedom for the middle class. Treat cost disease, reduce the debt and save Social Security, unquote. Earlier this year, his re election campaign accepted over $25,000 from Palantir, including $7,000 from Palantir's CEO Alexander Karp. In January 2023, Auchincloss was the first congressman to read an entirely ChatGPT generated speech on the House floor. This speech was in support of a bill to create a joint U.S. israel AI center for the Development of AI Research. And last year Akanklass told Politico that it's quote unquote, readily apparent that TikTok's algorithm is quote, amplifying anti American, anti Israel content disproportionate to its actual frequency. Stone told me, quote, we need more people like Jake Auchincloss and not all of the electeds in this room, but like a lot of the folks here. But also what we're trying to do and eventually want to do is like have our chapters be the group that identifies some potential candidates. Stone also pointed to State Rep. Jasper Martis, who became friendly with CNL through the organization's anti tariff advocacy.

[Tobin Stone]

We want to see what we can do as an organization to help elevate voices like him who can be young, charismatic and without offering an agenda that we think would do more harm than good.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you see a point where you will not just have to kind of offer an alternative to what the DSA is offering, but, but like, but in primaries, like specifically kind of like, like, like counter them like, like directly.

[Tobin Stone]

That is like part of what we want to do. We have always been and will continue to be willing to get directly into those primaries. Whether it's supporting someone we already know and work with, likes to be up here today. If someone tries to primary Jake Alton class, our Boston chapter is absolutely going to be out knocking doors to support him. Especially if it's a DSA candidate. But then also again long term, we would love to be able to be the group that can identify the candidates who can run against the dsa. We want to do the work to find those young charismatic candidates and get them to run against the DSA candidate and offer real alternatives. We really just want to see like organization like five years be even bigger. We want to not just be like doing this conference here in D.C. but then go over like all over the country and say like we can go in Denver and host a whole conference in Denver with all of our members of a chapter and talk about the work we need to do to elevate the pragmatic justice in Colorado or New York or wherever. Like that's a long term goal.

[Garrison Davis]

The center for New Liberalism's annual impact report for the election year of 2024 claimed that the organization made $5,500 in quote, successful campaign contributions and gained 186 new members. That's 186 new members during the year of a highly impactful presidential election. DDSA gained over 7,000 members in just the two months after the 2024 election. And since then DSA membership has more than doubled from 50,000 to 120,000 members just 10 years ago. DSA had only 5,000 members before Bernie Sanders first presidential campaign which breathed new life into the organization. But in order to fully understand cnl, you have to understand their deeply online origin because they essentially Internet trolled themselves into something resembling a real political organization. Center for New Liberalism can be traced back to R Neoliberal on Reddit, where after the 2016 election a new team of moderators tried to grow the subreddit as a place to discuss liberal policymaking and free market economics. In response to online conversations about politics being dominated by populism, whether from MAGA or the rejuvenated socialist left. Following Bernie's 2016 campaign, these moderators turned the subreddit into an online community of policy wonks discussing economics as well as neoliberal shitposting in an attempt to compete in the arena of Internet politics and make center left liberalism cool and memeable. And I don't know about you, but when I think of cool, the first thing that comes to mind is Reddit memes about liberal free market economics. In 2018, two moderators from the subreddit, Colin Mortimer and Jeremiah Johnson started to consolidate this loose online community into a real organization called the Neoliberal Project. They started a neoliberal Twitter account and launched the Neoliberal podcast. All of this neoliberal branding was sort of a troll at the time. And still now the word neoliberal was mostly used as a pejorative in current political parlance. So the Neoliberal Project's use of the term was almost this form of slur reclamation. Tongue in cheek, semi ironic but largely sincere embrace of neoliberal economic policies. To quote a 2022 article in the Washington Post, quote, Carl Nielsen, a 24 year old aerospace engineer who leads the D.C. chapter, told me his brother turned him onto this neoliberal community a few years ago and he was immediately smitten. I was like, dude, this is it. This is where we belong. The memes were fantastic. They were doing a neoliberal shill bracket, which is a Twitter tournament where you vote to determine who's the chief neoliberal shill. That was really easy to get excited about, so I jumped right in. The neoliberal shill bracket on Twitter is like a March Madness style bracket for Twitter users to rank which politicians, columnists, lobbyists or influencers are the biggest neoliberal shill of the year. This basically amounts to stanning figures like Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, Nate Silver and the streamer Destiny. The Washington Post described the organization as being on, quote, a quest to bring market friendly moderation into the age of Internet meme Politics, unquote. In 2020, the neoliberal project was absorbed into a centrist think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. In the announcement, Will Marshall, the president of ppi, said that the young liberals, quote, fill a vacuum in our politics for a pragmatically liberal alternative to right wing populism and democratic socialism. Colin Mortimer, the Neoliberal Project's executive director, is quoted in the announcement saying, over the last several years we have built the Neoliberal Project into an online community of politically engaged young individuals who are pushing back against the ideological extremes that put our country in peril. Now we are proud to join one of the most storied think tanks in the country as we develop and advocate for a radically pragmatic agenda for change our country so urgently needs. Unquote A quick note on the Progressive Policy Institute PPI was founded in the late 80s by the Democratic Leadership Council when the word progressive referred to center left pragmatism as opposed to the modern connotation of the term as used by left wing progressives today. In the 90s, PPI functioned as the idea factory of the Clinton administration and was a big part of the shift in the Democratic Party away from New Deal Great Society redistributive liberalism towards the neoliberal politics of maximizing economic growth that defined the Clinton era. Soon after joining ppi, the neoliberal project rebranded into the center for New Liberalism, displaying some awareness of the massive unpopularity of neoliberalism and that it might actually be pretty hard to grow a political project under such a banner. CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson, who also hosts the New Liberal Podcast, told the Columbia Journalism Review that neoliberal is a great word to use, quote, when what you want to do is get in fights on the Internet, but it turned out to be less great for recruiting congresspeople to their cause. Two years after joining ppi, the center for New Liberalism started doing their annual New Liberal Action Summit. 2026 was the fifth year of Globe Con. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote in 2024 that the center for New Liberalism is, quote, Biden's fighters in the meme trenches, doing what they can to make his brand of politics trendy again. Unquote.

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[Tobin Stone]

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The past few years, the center for New Liberalism has tried to legitimize itself beyond its Reddit, shitposting and humble Twitter troll beginnings. Earlier this year, CNL brought on Greg Schultz as a senior advisor. Schultz was the campaign manager For Joe Biden's 2020 presidential primary campaign and general election strategist. One of the aspirations for the New Liberals is helping to secure a center leaning candidate for president in 2028.

[Tobin Stone]

One of our big goals is definitely to influence who our next president is like, and maybe that there ends up being a more compromised candidate. Or I don't think be conference is the wrong word, but like you're seeing right now like a lot of people are gravitating towards Osof if he does end up running like people like, but we would rather not see like a further left Canada. And we also want to see that the platform that we run on in 2028 is not. We understand that sometimes you have to have a little bit of populism, but it's kind of like sloppy. You see, right now we're just like, oh, cut everyone's taxes. Like, we want to see like a real concrete platform that doesn't over promote promise, can be enacted and can maybe repair people's hope in government. Again, Senator Bennett talked about it earlier or alluded to it, but like people don't feel like government works anymore. So we want to make sure that the agenda in 2028 is one about making government work again. Obviously we have to workshop that message and figure out what, what's going to appeal to the American people. The most part of it's like, obviously we're fighting the dsa. We are aware they're going to exist in America. They are part of the climate. We don't want to take them away. But we also think it will be extremely harmful. If they're in the driver's seat, they should absolutely have input. But if they're in the driver's seat, the presidential election, we're going to lose again. And we want to make sure that we win because obviously if we lose again to Donald Trump or whoever his heir is, it's not going to be great for America or the rest of international or international institutions.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, I think some of those DSA people would look at centrist candidates going up against Trump in like 1624 or like, you know, more center leaning.

[Tobin Stone]

I would be very hesitant to call either of those centrists or even center left. Like, if you look at the exit polling data from 2020, 24, everyone thought Kamala is much further like from the center than Trump, which is pressure, good at marketing. But like, yeah, I mean, and it's not center. Like, you ask anyone in this room who's worked for. We all work for a center left moderate organization. We all saw comm was not center left. There's a reason we lost and it's because Democrats third voters thought we were too far to left or not even too far to left. Too out of touch. I think that's a good way to frame it. Like too out of touch.

[Garrison Davis]

I think it's really important to understand that too far left and too out of touch are vastly different things. And secondly, what is considered quote unquote left is not at all clear. Does left refer to left wing economics, wealth redistribution, or like the sort of performative liberal wokeism that was completely captured by corporations and the elite before being quickly dropped as Trump took back power? Because the recent batch of left wing populists are running on economic policies to make life more affordable, their focus on uplifting workers and the poor would materially improve the lives of large swaths of marginalized populations. Way more than corporations posting black squares, academic language policing, White House pride events and Nancy Pelosi wearing a West African kente cloth stole and as a scarf. A New York Times poll from May of 2026 found that the majority of Democrats and Democrat leaning independents do not want the party to move to the center on health care or economic issues and should embrace economic populism. According to the Times poll, 63% of likely Dems said our political and economic system needs major changes and 20% said it needs to be torn down completely. 88% said the economic system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans. 74% of Dems oppose sending aid to Israel. Most respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, 91% had not heard of abundance, only 5% said the economic conditions were good or excellent, and 49% said they were favorable to socialism versus 22% unfavorable. Only 20% of respondents said the Democratic Party was too far to the left, and respondents were evenly split on whether the party in general should move to the center. But most said that the party should move to the left on things like healthcare. A frequent topic of discussion at the New Liberal Action Summit was how the Democratic Party can win back quote unquote working class voters and spoiler. They think it's by moving to the center.

[Tobin Stone]

Something you've been talking about at VPI

[Garrison Davis]

a long time is winning back the

[Tobin Stone]

support of non college voters, working class voters. We have a new report coming out

[Nancy Glass]

soon that showcases how Santa Left units are doing much better in that regard than their progressive counterparts.

[Garrison Davis]

We do a lot of polling of nonconforming voters, working class voters if you will.

[Tobin Stone]

Most of our data says that people that vote for Zara tend to be heavily college educated, whereas people without degrees voted for fomo which the best lens for working class students is not. I think it's just has college degree does not have a college degree.

[Garrison Davis]

The new liberals believe that DSA is out of step with the working class and by working class they mean voters without a college degree. Moderates will often point to high profile races like Zoran or Abdul Al Said where the more center leaning candidate often quote unquote wins the non college or low income demographic. Now these wins are often in the single digits. In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo quote unquote 1 the under 50k a year income bracket by 8 points. Cuomo also won the highest income bracket, $250,000 and over by 11 points while Mamdani dominated the middle income brackets. Almost this exact same trend appeared in the Abdul Al Said versus Haley Stevens primary in Michigan. Left wing populist candidates are doing so well with college educated voters in part because they're just driving such high turnout, especially among Millennials and Gen Z. But center left liberals will often use the support of DSA from possibly downwardly mobile college graduates to point towards socialism as this kind of disgruntled elitist phenomenon that's not actually connected with the quote unquote real working class, which again to them means a voter without a college degree. And while income level or education can be an indicator of class, just defining working class as meaning a voter without a college degree doesn't really make sense. Nor does it tell you anything about the class interests of voters because it doesn't actually point to anything regarding their place in the capitalist production process. Just whether or not you have a degree doesn't even point to what your income is, which is itself kind of a flawed way of understanding what working class means, which in a Marxist sense refers to whether you live off selling your labor for a wage, that is Being a worker, or if you own private property like a business and make your money off of controlling other people's labor. But all that matters to these liberals is voters proximity to higher education. Based on looking at election data where DSA type candidates do very well with college educated voters and maybe don't do as well with what is categorized as a non college educated or maybe sometimes a low income voter, even if the difference is only a few percentage points. The liberal analysis of class simply being whether or not a voter has a college degree offers no insight into why a middle class of educated workers are moving in droves towards social democracy or some form of democratic socialism and are voting for policies that benefit people largely more poor than them, instead of just supporting the center left Democrat who would advance elite interests. To this point I talked with Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York about why class analysis is important.

[Nancy Glass]

It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be regarding, you know, the politics when it comes to how should the economy, how should our society be oriented? If you are a worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal. If you are an owner, your interests are going to be geared. Oppositely, they're going to be geared towards capital, towards ownership of private property and the making of profit being protected against the interests of labor. And so this is the conception of class that I think paints a much more lucid picture of the world than one that just sort of treats, you know, the, the, the poorer you are, the more working class you are. It's absolutely true that the base of the working class is always the poor, relatively speaking. I mean, the bottom strata of the working class is its source of power. And it's the better paid workers who while, you know, they are in a theoretical sense in the working class, they often are the ones who are comfortable with capitalist production because they're being compensated fairly well. But again, it's a kind of analysis that can't comprehend the liberal view, cannot really comprehend how college educated people who may be securing somewhat decent middle class jobs, they can understand how they are also a part of the working class and respond to the economic squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy, when capital is so unquestioned by its liberal administrators that it squeezes the whole of the working class.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, and there's these certain moments with technological advance, like you're seeing with AI that lead to the de skilling of certain workers. The past 20 years, adults have been telling kids to just learn coding. Yeah, work in tech. This is like the last growth area of the economy. Learn coding. And now those skills are not as useful as they used to be because an AI can do it. And there's this like, proletarianization of tech workers happening, that just this like liberal model. The working class then can't really understand why wise people are going to be turned against liberalism.

[Nancy Glass]

Capital produces its own gravediggers. Marx writes in the manifesto, right, that you know, the, the socialist project sees that there is a fundamental antagonism in the capitalist mode of production. Not only in that capital appropriates, exploits workers. The capitalist class survives parasitically by squeezing the worker. That's fundamental to the capitalist system. Not only that, but it also is continually growing the working class. It's constantly pushing people out of their positions of property, but also out of positions of skilled labor into having to move down into proletarianized positions where you are not going to be paid as much. And by constantly doing this, it's building A class that goes against it. It's the socialist project which recognizes those antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode of production. And it is the liberal project that is utterly blind to them that just to the liberals, no, capitalism is good. It increases gdp, right? It leads to economic growth. These antagonisms do not exist to the extent that you can show them to them. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge them or else to understand how they are fundamental to the capitalist system. And so they have no answer to this. You can see how these people who are themselves sort of like intellectual, you know, sycophants to the liberal institutions they perceive like, well, if you're smart and you have the right policies and you believe the right things, you'll get taken care of. It's a very different experience from, I think, a lot of college grads who have tried very hard to do the right things and who do not have a place in the economy or a very limited place with very limited power and very limited resources.

[Garrison Davis]

While Andrew Cuomo slightly outperformed Mamdani among the lowest income voters in the 2025 Democratic primary, come the general election in November, that ceased to be the case. In the general. Mamdani won low income districts by 11 points. To quote the New York Times quote, Mamdani largely expanded on the base he built during the primary in neighborhoods across the city. He swept communities of every income level save for New York's wealthiest enclaves where his top opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo, performed best, unquote. In the November general, Mamdani also won districts where less than 20% of the residents have a college degree by 13 points. Though a CNN exit poll of less than 5,000 voters showed that Cuomo did just 5% better than Mamdani with voters without a college degree. I think it is also worth reiterating that 1 out of 10 people who voted for Zoron in 2025 also voted for Trump in 2024. That's something that liberals never talk about and something else they never talk about is just how much these non college low income statistics graph onto age more than anything else. Both Mamdani and Abdul Al said overwhelmingly won with voters aged 18 to 45. Young people who are low income who maybe have not graduated college or are in college or maybe just graduated college but are still low income. Those young people are backing DSA candidates. Those young people are not going to Andrew Cuomo in the general election or the primary election. The sort of low income voters that are going towards either these incumbents or more traditional Moderate candidates are generally older voters. And if we want to have a real discussion on how the DSA can appeal to older voters, maybe voters who are not as politically engaged as younger voters, then yeah, that is a real discussion to be had. But just breaking that down as DSA does not attract low income voters is just completely not true. Many low income people without a college degree are old retirees who tend to vote more conservative even if they're registered Democrats. Another factor is the effectiveness of ad spending. Abdul Al said was outspent 11 to 1 and that is going to have an effect on the election results. Blanketing the airwaves with misleading attack ads can be hugely impactful in rural areas and districts with low information or less engaged voters. This same general trend happened in the June 2026 Democratic primary in New York City. That election was not divided by income or race. The largest indicator that skewed whether someone was backing the incumbent or the DSA was age. By and large, younger voters, whether they were middle class or lower working class, backed the DSA candidates like Claire Valdez, while older voters backed the incumbents, the moderates and the establishment politicians that these voters were maybe more familiar with that maybe has been representing their district for anywhere between five to 30 years. But what makes this whole college educated working class debate so absurd to me is that most of the city based center for New Liberalism chapters don't even seem interested in trying to appeal to the voters that they think DSA is overlooking.

[Tobin Stone]

Like if the DSA can only appeal to the people with a college degree, that's 70, 60, 70% of voters we are missing and we need to do better.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you think that new liberals should be going after like a totally different voting block than what DSA is just trying to go after?

[Tobin Stone]

I don't know if that's our role. Like most of our chapters do operate in cities where it is more college educated things. So our role we view as like trying to convince the college educated people that we have the better ideas and the more optimistic vision. Whereas then it's other groups. Like if we have a chapter in swing district, obviously that's going to like our chapter in San Francisco is going to be focused on not that.

[Nancy Glass]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tobin Stone]

So like I think there are groups on the C left that should be doing that. I don't know if it's our goal.

[Garrison Davis]

So CNL has already foreclosed themselves to really only going after college educated voters despite insisting that their ideas are what actually can appeal to the working class. In evaluating the political potential of the center for New Liberalism. One must keep in mind how their online shit posting origins still influences their ideological outlook. If you recall, CNL describes itself as a quote unquote digital first grassroots organization, and on their website they claim, quote, our work reaches upwards of 60 million people a month. That number seems to be almost entirely based on the impressions from their account on X the Everything app. These are Twitter views. So as much as CNL likes to put on their little in person networking events, per their own metrics, the organization is essentially a glorified Twitter account. And I could just go through years of bad or offensive tweets and many people at the summit were very concerned about old tweets made by DSA candidate Darieliza Avila Xavier. But rather than focusing on posting, I would prefer to engage with the actual substance of their politics and how CNL is trying and failing to place itself in opposition to the dsa, in part because of how much it's focused on on online edgelord Contrarian Liberalism for whatever reason, be it their upbringing, class, position or type of education, these liberals have not hopped on the populist train but still feel left out from the rest of their age peers who are all having fun with dsa. And so they have decided to define themselves in opposition to populism. It's a reactionary liberalism in response to the growing influence of democratic socialism in the Democratic Party. So in effect their new liberal politics largely manifests itself as a form of contrarianism against popular left wing policies, while also continuously reiterating to themselves that left wing ideas aren't actually popular with the working class. It's a politics entirely downstream from trolling online in an attempt to make center left liberals cool again. I went to a bar after the summit with a few of the attendees and a law student was passionately trying to argue why we should abolish FEMA as a federal agency and just have states pay for their own disaster response so that unquote, my tax dollars won't have to go towards idiots in Florida. And like both myself and a writer from the journal Liberal Currents had to explain from like First Principles why it's good to care for poor people and care about a general public good. That's what I mean by contrarian liberalism. The Bay Area chapter of the New Liberals where involved with that pro billionaire march in San Francisco earlier this year in protest of California's proposed wealth tax and stunts like this march for Billionaires is another perfect example of CNL's overly online irony poisoned politics, which still display A deeper sincerity. Before I interviewed Professor Porter, I had him listen to a recent episode of the New Liberal podcast hosted by the co founder of cnl, Jeremiah Johnson. The episode argued that liberalism is in crisis, but because there is no more great struggle in America, basically the economy is doing too good. And that's triggered a sort of post modern crisis of meaning, resulting in voters sabotaging our own political system just to feel something. And confusingly, CNL's co founder proposes a centrist, neoliberal technocracy as a way out of this crisis.

[Nancy Glass]

The guy on the podcast is talking about technocrats and how one of the central liberal programs of, like, a revived liberalism has to be like, kind of, you know, technocratic politics and a renewed, like, faith in technocratic politics. And I thought technocratic politics was very interesting because, you know, the point that, like, you need technocrats to do good policy, to do good governance is a bit of an odd one because absolutely you need technicians to do good policy, like, you know, complex social institutions at the scale of like, you know, a city or a state or a federal government in today's world, you need people who know how to run systems and who are trained. You need intellectuals, you need technicians in a general sense, right? You need specialized people. What's interesting is that the whole thing elides, like, the crat part, like technocrat, the idea that, well, those with technical capacities also rule this way, in which it just completely conflates the idea of technical expertise and decision making at the highest level, right? That it doesn't even think that those are two separate realms. It literally is the people who can technically do the job are also the people who should make all of decisions about what kinds of jobs we do, how the whole system functions, right? Which essentially rests on this, like, notion that there is only one game, right? That, you know, in the podcast, you hear it a lot is essentially, you know, the unspoken aim. And for them it doesn't need to be spoken because as they conceive the world, it is the only real game to be played is economic growth, right? Is just growing the GDP machine. Capital growth, capital accumulation. They do not entertain the question of what kind of a society do we want to build. Their main drive is GDP growth. And so everything else is just sort of, how do you technically do that best, right? How do you improve productivity? How do you grow the economy best? They have no concept of, like, that there's any kind of like, political battle at the heart of that. It's a view of politics without politics.

[Garrison Davis]

Many of the attendees at The New Liberal Action Summit were aspiring technocrats, often self described as such. I think the main tendency among these overly online center left liberals is to confuse technical knowledge for politics for the ability to govern. They display this deep failure to question authority, not just in like an authoritarian sense, but the authority of what is true or useful knowledge. To the contrarian liberal technocrat, something like rent control is not just bad, but it's actually evil because it disrupts the market, it unnaturally alters supply and demand. And here's all these studies proving this right. In this technocratic mode, there's no consideration that policies may have trade offs, that yes, rent control might negatively affect the class of landlords and for profit developers, it might alter supply, but it might be still worth doing as a measure to provide relief to tenants, perhaps in addition to other efforts to make it cheaper to build housing to increase supply. But that sort of appraisal of trade offs requires governing beyond a pure commitment to serving the market, to just acting on what studies say is true. The liberal technocrat thinks that politics is just the application of technical knowledge, which of course is a massive limitation on what you understand politics as being and what is politically possible. History did not end in the 90s. What is politically possible changes over time. And politics is about responding to different opportunities in history.

[Nancy Glass]

They're missing the part of history which is class struggle, right? It's the case that we're in a capitalist world and that requires economic competitiveness. You need to maintain competitive production on the world stage and internally as well. Totally true. But that does not follow that. You know, you just pursue that blindly. There are very hugely significant decisions about how economic growth proceeds. The biggest one that is just completely left out by these people is the notion that in growing the economy, the wealth produced by that growth, how that's distributed, distributive politics. These people, they don't seem to conceive of it. The podcast you sent me, I think he literally, he says something like, you know, the biggest liberal struggle is that there is no struggle. Like, it literally just conceives the world as like, there aren't really any problems, things are fine there. Big citation needed on that one. He's just sort of like, yeah, things are, things are fine. If you look at it, things are fine. Which is just, I mean, it's just an insane thing to say. Wages haven't risen in like four, 40, 50 years. You know, inequality has exploded, life has stagnated for so many people, especially the poorest people, which are most workers. So the idea that There is actually a realm of politics that revolves around class struggle, around, you know, how wealth is distributed and how we gear our economic growth. To them that's a, that's a separate category. And so their entire politics is a politics of technocracy. And in that, you know, I'll give it to them, I think that they probably are pretty good at the technical expertise of governance stuff. I mean, one would expect liberalism has been in power in the United States for most of its history. So yeah, I would expect that they would be good at technical expertise. Their critique is not that they don't know what they're doing, it's that they, they have totally jettisoned politics. The deciding what do you do with that expertise, how do you gear the economy, how do you consciously control where it's going, how distribution happens, who is empowered in government and in, in the economy. Right. This is all to discuss class, right? Which these people basically never do.

[Garrison Davis]

This limited view of what politics is then determines what the neoliberal technocrat thinks is worth focusing on and what they view as being impossible. Like how they view Medicare for All as this impossible goal. Whether that's because they think voters will never support switching away from private healthcare or that a single payer healthcare system might even hurt the economy and therefore we should oppose it. Their extremely narrow view of what is politically possible is the main reason why this sort of young new liberal organization will never stop succeed in rivaling dsa. Because the whole better things aren't possible mentality makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause, especially young people who are struggling. No, we can't pass Medicare for all because XY reason a rent freeze is actually evil because XY reason. I don't know how that kind of messaging is going to attract anyone except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the entire makeup of CNL as an organization. After the summit, an elected member of CNL's Leadership Steering Committee got drunk at the bar and argued that child outcomes are better when certain types of fathers are incarcerated. Because some study proved that the type of father who gets charged with the crime would be a bad influence on his kids. I am Adolf Hitler, command of the Third Reich. That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project. This person was so delighted in their own contrarian commitment to cold, emotionless, uncomfortable truths that may run counter to what's socially accepted. Their little knowing smirk, fully aware that what they're saying is morally detestable, while self assured in appealing to the authority of technical knowledge. Right. This tendency to fall back on the pretext that a study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that there may be alternative solutions to the base problem. Here, when your main political solution to social problems is just incarceration, then you have lost. Your politics have failed. That's GlobeCon 2026. Next episode, I'll be doing a deeper dive into neoliberal technocracy as a counter to rising popul.

[Nancy Glass]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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