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If you used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com Spotify spelled B-A-B-B B E L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may app.
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Welcome to Talking Feds. One on one deep dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives. I'm your host, Harry Littman. As the recent elections demonstrated, the country seems fed up with the Trump administration and hungry for a change. But the Democrats and more generally the left seem to be beset by divisions and lamentations. In general, the left seems somewhat stalled and unable to take direct advantage of Trump's growing unpopularity. Our guest today is aiming to address that situation and more generally, address what the left should be doing now. Jerusalem Dempsis is the founder and editor of the Argument, a new online magazine that launched late summer. She previously worked at Vox at the Atlantic magazine, where she wrote about the economy, politics and housing. In 2023, Jerusalem received the American Society of Magazine Editors Next award for journalists under 30. She is the author of an anthology of essays on the housing crisis, land development and democracy. Jerusalem Dentist thanks for joining Talking Fits.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here, Harry.
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B
So let's start. I mean, you, this is a very you pitch the distinctive mission in the substack podcast worlds of the Argument as a quote, positive, combative case for liberalism through opinion writing, reporting and multimedia projects. Let me, let me just ask you first, can you unpack that a bit for us?
- [02:23]
A
Yeah, for sure. So I think that there are moments in political history where definitions feel very fluid, right? Where what does it mean to be a conservative? What does it mean to be a liberal? Are actually questions people have trouble answering. I think right now is one of those moments. Does it mean to be a conservative? Does that mean you're pro tariff? Are you pro business? Are you pro individual liberties, or are you pro statist authoritarian takeover? I mean, I genuinely think that there's real confusion and I think similarly with liberals, like there's this question of what does liberalism stand for? Does it stand for increasing the quality of life for all people. Does it stand for focusing on these kind of like post material questions? Like there are all these different things where people feel like genuine confusion. And it's in these moments that there's an opportunity for redefinition and to push ideas forward that you think are actually better for the country and for the world. And so part of what my mission is, and I think this is like me as part of a broader, I think, movement of people who are concerned about the state of American politics and world history and world affairs generally, is that I think that like liberalism is what we should be focused on. And by liberalism I do mean this political philosophy that's developed over hundreds and hundreds of years, not just in the Western tradition, but all around the world, that looks at the individual rights of individual of every single person, that sees the equal worth of every human life. And also ask ourselves, in a very diverse world where people have very different versions of what it means to live a good life, how do you create systems of government and culture and norms in these important institutions like the media or in academia? How do you create systems that actually respect that difference without allowing someone to interfere with your freedoms? And that's like really difficult, right? Because if you're in a country where, I mean, if you believe that you're sending someone to hell, if you are gay, right? If that, if that is really what you think is happening, and then you look around your country and you're like, well, there are all these people saying that it's okay to be gay. That's actually a huge conflict. And there's this question then, right? Like, how do you create a system where like, those people can not only like, live in the same country together, but can like respect each other's individual freedoms and individual ways of, of thinking about the world? And what does that look like? And so this is something where, you know, I think a lot of people who have really strong ideological beliefs think there's like a single answer. But I think there's actually a real live debate within people who are concerned with these questions about what we should be doing. And the argument is the place where we're having that debate. We're platforming people from socialists to conservatives to have these conversations. And the thing that unites everyone who writes for us is that we do believe that we want to solve this problem. We don't think we want to purify this country and have just one kind of person living here. We don't think it's possible that you can subjugate an entire gender of people because they should be less than. You have to figure out a way to live together. And that's what we're trying to do.
- [05:22]
B
You know, that's a really interesting and broad way to put it. And including the sort of example that you cite of countries in which it's maybe a religious belief, I think of the Enlightenment, which is. Which seems to be what you're the sort of fountainhead of what you're talking about as exactly the antidote to the benighted religious ideas that preceded it that very much emphasize not just community, but faith and not the rationality of the individual. I just wanted to not push you on it a little bit, Jerusalem, but, man, you've given such a broad account of your kind of intellectual and philosophical lineage and contributors. Tell us just a little bit more because, you know, for many people, I'm sure when they think liberal, they think the last 20 years or, yeah, you know, liberal. What, what the. And especially the way liberals have come to be caricatured by the right and the like, you have something much broader in mind. Tell us, you know, the sort of heroes of the. Of the arguments, kind of sense of liberalism.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think this is exactly, exactly the right question to be asking, because people here, liberal right now, they assume you just mean left wing. They assume you just mean, like, oh, you're concerned about issues of structural racism and sexism and, like, you know, social issues that are categorized in that space. And like, we do care about those things as rights, but we care about it, like, in the long, long tradition of people who care about human rights that, well, precedes the current progressive era. And I think that, you know, when you think about our heroes, right, there's a classic people like, you know, John Stuart Mill, who, like, is looking at, you know, he's asking this question at a much darker moment in history. He's looking out at Europe and he's saying, wow, millions of people are killing each other. Not just over whether or not they're a Christian, whether or not they're the right type of Christian. Like, I think that this can actually be a level to where we can feel like a little bit of progress has been made as a society that, like, that is no longer normal, that, like, millions of people would be killed over the fact that they're, like, the wrong type of Christian. Like, yes, of course.
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B
I mean, not to interrupt, but the Steven Pinker book, which you probably know, makes this argument that we're actually going much more, you know, in a progressive direction than people might think when you look at it overall. But. But I'm sorry, I'm.
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A
No, no, you're.
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B
I'm eager to hear your. Your. Your hero.
- [07:54]
A
Yeah, yeah. But I think also, like, people. I think there's, like, a couple of things I want to distinguish. I think people can hear this and go, like, okay, well, this is just another, like, classical liberal project. Like, what is actually different about this? I think there's two things. Like, one is that I think much of the classical liberal project has actually been sort of like a defensive institutions or like, we are going to. We're casting ourselves as the small sea conservatives. There are all these great liberal institutions, and we want to defend them and we want to protect them against the populist right. And I think this, like, institutional frame is actually really, really wrong. Liberalism is not like a cent. Is not centrism. It's not moderation. Liberalism is actually quite a radical question. Like, the idea that you think that people who think very differently about the world can live together in community and that we're gonna figure out ways to make that happen, we're gonna promote ideas around how we can expand healthcare, how we can make sure that individual rights are respected in this kind of way is a very, very radical idea. And it's one that, like, almost no country has ever even attempted to really emulate. Like, the United States is very, very unique in trying to do this as part of its own national fabric, that we. That we have this as. As part of our mission. And. But I think the second thing that's different about us is that, you know, I think that, like, there's a lot of. There's a lot of focus on trying to sort of just lecture people about liberal democracy. You hear this all the time. And again, I agree with these folks. Like, I'm really glad that they're academics who are working on this and they're writing their books, et cetera. But as, like a. As like a person who, like, just, like, wants my political system to be responsive to my desires. The thing that you want from ideology is that it, like, gives you a way to understand how your problems can be solved and not just like, oh, wow, like, liberal democracy is great for these philosophical reasons. It's. Liberal democracy is how you get economic growth. It's how you get affordable housing in your community. It's how you can actually make sure you can get a good education and follow your dreams. It's how you get access to consumer goods. Like, Right. Like, if you have, like, a iPhone, if you have the. You know, vaccines, like all of these things are produced during liberalism's rise in the West. And I think that's something that's really important to think about, like these ideas that we should have, you know, markets where people have rule of law and expectations that, you know, large incumbents can't stop them from inventing new, new tools like that is liberalism. The idea that you'd go into a store and expect that you're going to be charged the same amount of money as other people. That's liberalism. And so to me, like, the point is not to just lecture people about political philosophy. It's to have these debates at a very granular, concrete level. Like, some of the debates we're having at the argument are around questions of universal basic income, where we're having socialists and, you know, we had a moderate Democrat who's on our staff and a socialist who's a columnist for us talking very directly about whether universal basic income is the way forward. We have debates that we're platforming soon about how to regulate technology companies and whether, you know, this kinds of. Certain kinds of Section 230 regulations would actually resolve the problems we're talking about here. And so not just talking at this 30,000 view, but really, really getting into the details of what people care about.
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B
Got it. Yeah. So let's stick with this idea of your distinctive approach. And what we've been talking about so far has been in fairly highfalutin terms, necessarily. I do them myself. But you've really tried to announce a kind of new direction that you might call, I don't know, pragmatic. But you aim to persuade. And I think there's an implicit critique of current. Current liberalism, including not just academics, but mainstream political figures, as you tell me. But it feels like, from reading your stuff overall. Yeah. In your manifesto from August, how do we live with each other and what liberalism means? To me, it does feel like boring might be a word, droning might be word, but lacking real chops for persuasion. So, you know, bringing that down to earth. So maybe a specific.
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We could talk tariffs, we could talk the shutdown, but what do you kind of mean and prescribe? And maybe, maybe it's just these debates on your own platform, but about what liberalism and progressivism is currently doing wrong, such that it's ideas which I think you say repeatedly you agree with, are not gaining purchase with the American people in the way you'd like to see.
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A
Yes. No, I really, really love this question. I think that, like, at core, one of the big critiques I have about liberalism is that most liberals, when you talk to them, and when I say liberals, most people who are on the left, when you talk to them. Right. And you ask them, why do you think that there are people on the right who are voting for Donald Trump, not, like, evil people who you think are racist. Like, why do you think a regular person in Queens, New York, who is a struggling father of three kids and is working two jobs and is Hispanic, why did he vote for Donald Trump? And there's a few answers you get. One, they're stupid. Like, Republicans are stupid. And so they're just getting. They're dumb. They don't understand how the world works. The second one is that they've been lied to. So these are. They believe lies. So I guess they're dupes in the situation. And the third is that they've been manipulated by social media and they don't actually, they're not, they're not hearing from the Democrats, they're not hearing these arguments, and they don't know what's happening. All, all of these answers basically presume that there's no possible way for someone to reasonably disagree with you. Like, at core, what it means to believe that everyone who votes differently than you is either stupid or duped is genuinely to think that you are obviously right about things and there's no way that you could be wrong from another person's perspective. Now, obviously, I have, like, you can hear in my voice. I have very strong opinions about a lot of things. I feel very firmly that I'm right about a lot of things. But I also actually genuinely do believe that it's possible for another person who is trying to be good, who is reasoning well, who's, like, using their brain to come to different conclusions than I have. And I actually think that this belief is defining a lot of modern contemporary liberalism. And it's something that I genuinely feel like I had for a long time, too. So I'm not, like, just lobbing these critiques externally.
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B
Like, I think you mean the belief, the demonization of the other side.
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A
Yeah. And to believe that other people just don't actually have any reason to believe what they do.
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B
The deplorables.
- [14:13]
A
Yeah. And. But I think that, like, when I think about the Obama era, like, I really came up as Obama was like, like I was 13 years old when he was elected the first time. So this is when I, this is really when I really came up in politics is under Obama. And there's this level of inevitability that we all felt like, okay, We've elected the first black president. He's amazing. We as a country are unified, and we're all headed to liberalism. Gay marriage is happening. Then we're moving on. Now we're. We're expanding rights. Everyone will inevitably agree with us. We have, like, cultural dominance in Hollywood and in social media. The millennial generation is very liberal, and it's the largest generation we've had since the baby boomers. This was a level of inevitability that I think is actually incompatible with believing that you should allow other people to, like, have different views than you. And I think that what ends up happening within liberalism that people rightly see is that if you're someone who agrees with liberals on 90% of stuff, you agree that we should have universal health care. You agree that you don't want companies blocking new entrants. You want competition. You don't want there to be, like, monopolies and oligopolies. Like, if you believe a lot of these things, you believe in equal rights for people of all races. But you have some questions because you're a religious person. I mean, there are people in my family who are like this, who are religious, and they have questions about trans people, and they don't really get it, and they don't think it makes sense to them. But, like, that means that you are not in the tent and that you're an idiot or you've been lied to. And to me, the. The actual answer is, as someone who cares a lot about the trans community and wanting their rights to be respected, like, how do you approach that? With a question of persuasion. Hey, why do you have these problems? Like, where does this come from? How am I trying to convince you differently, but also not just to, like, force it down your throat, but to actually hear what you're saying, what your worries are? And there's a level to which I really don't think that, as liberals, we embodied that for a long time. I don't think I embodied that for a long time. And I think that, you know, what we're trying to do with the argument is really display a level of engagement with views that you may not agree with. I'm an immigrant. Like, I came here as an asylum seeker when I was three years old. My family is Eritrean. We came here from Ethiopia. And I really, sincerely have been working in the last year to think through how is it that you actually create adorable pro immigration majority, and that requires listening to the concerns people actually have around. Are people coming here, being vetted to make sure there Aren't criminals coming here? Can you actually respond to that? Like, instead of just calling someone a xenophobe for saying that, can you explain how that we vet people to make sure criminals don't come into this country? I think most people can't. And so I think that like, there's this question here of just like, then what are we all doing if we're not willing to engage with reasonable concerns like, hey, are we letting criminals in? The answer should just be no, we don't let criminals and we let gray people in all the time. Immigrants commit crimes much less than native born Americans do. Here are the processes we can increase to make sure that we don't actually create these problems that you're seeing in your community. And so I think that that kind of approach, I don't think it solves all of politics. I don't think it's, you know, there's obviously misinformation, there's obviously different things going on. There are people who have different values than me who just don't like immigration and aren't going to like it. But you're never going to get to a world where your ideas are actually implemented in a majoritarian, democratic way if you have no interest in perspect, persuading people.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I do think the kind of orthodoxies that you've described, Jerusalem and the, you know, you're out of the tent if you don't hold tall. These views are classically illiberal. And, and the, and the left has had quite a problem with illiberalism as well. You know, in, in recent years. That's probably a topic for, for discussion within the argument, letting people understand more generally your distinctive mission. I'm kind of interested in what the magazine, to me, as I, as I prepared, doesn't seem to cover as much, which is the Trump administration that it's clear you find appalling. But, you know, that's not a name that you see. There's something I would say enervating or frustrating say in my job and my focus that it's Trump outrage after Trump outrage. Your vantage point seems somewhat different. And looking in another direction, you might call it a forward direction. But what is the argument's stance on how to address.
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A president who seems like, you know, the leading point of what it does not stand for, who's making a lot of, has a lot of influence in the country?
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A
Yeah, no, it's, it's a, I think it's one of the central problems right now is that for all of Us who believe that Trump is the principal threat to not just liberalism, but to American democracy and potentially world peace and world stability. How do you combat that? And there's this question when I was thinking about starting this, and, you know, I wrestled with this in the first opening essay of. Of. What is it? Once we've accepted that, yes, the post liberal right, these people who are on the right who want to define America just to mean white people who are here for the last six generations, these people who want to get rid of all immigration, the people who want to, you know, strip away rights for women to have access to health care, all these different things, like, what is it that we're supposed to do about that? And I asked myself this question, like, does the world really need another magazine that is just reminding them day in, day out that, like, Trump is taking away their rights? That stuff is covered. There are people doing great work who are doing this already on substack, on the New York Times opinion page, et cetera. That is great and important work. And we always keep that as a lodestone. Like, we are always thinking about, like, okay, what is it that he's doing? That is the most important thing we'd be focusing on. But at the same time, the project that I'm trying to develop is, given that I know that Trump is extreme threat to everything I care about, how do I create an alternative that people are actually interested in being a part of? Because I don't think that a lot of people who voted for. I don't think that most people voted for Trump are just irredeemably like, racist, sexist homophobes who are just never going to vote for a party that includes people like me. I don't think that's true. I think that they had real serious concerns about inflation. They had concerns about the cost of living, they had some concerns about immigration, and that they needed a party that was willing to actually address those and not make them feel insane for not being a part of the existing liberal orthodoxies. And so how do I help create that alternative? It's not like the. I mean, this is the work of, like, many different kinds of institutions. This is the work of politicians. There will be political figures who will define this well, way more than I ever will. But when you look at history, small magazines can have a real outsized impact on the ideological development of the side that they're talking to. You think about, like, the New Republic. You think of the New Republican. Yeah. Or you think about the National Review under William F. Buckley. These People do not have, like, formal power within the party structures or even, like, in cultural institutions. They just started a magazine and started making arguments to their own side and to the other side and say, like, this is how I think politics should work. These are the things that I think are important. These are the ideas that I think should be salient. And it doesn't mean you're necessarily destined to win, but it does. I think there's no way to win without it. You know what I mean? It's like a necessary but insufficient condition for liberalism to do well is for people to model what they think liberalism actually looks like. So instead of spending a lot of my time talking about how Trump is bad, which I think either people agree with me or they don't at this point. They've heard all the arguments. They know what those things are. They know that it's happening and they care or they don't. I'm going to explain what I think the world should look like and what we should do, and I'm going to invite people to disagree with me and argue with me in the pages of our magazine and on our podcast. And that's really my view for what we're trying to do here.
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B
It's a very interesting point, and in particular, the outsized influence of certain culturally significant magazines. It's kind of very American, it seems to me. You know, the intellectual history in the Europe, in European countries are these tomes that we still study. In, you know, colonial America, there were broadsheets and everybody read them and they had different views and they were pretty. They could be pretty raucous and combative and the like, and that, you know, Village Square. And here's the latest broadsheet. That's kind of the American tradition. And I do take your point. You know, we try hard here to just educate and follow what's going on and try to explain the stakes. In fact, next time we talk Jerusalem, I wanted maybe to ask you about what's going on at doj, which is always front and center for me. We're near out of time. And I wanted to ask about another point that emerges for me, I think, as I looked at your.
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FDA argument. And that is, it seems maybe, you know, a validly, purposely, through a kind of an optimistic and less doer overall podcast and magazine and substack. Is that fair? Is that a conscious kind of choice in the wake of, you know, a lot of, as I said up front, kind of lamentation among progressives, or is it just sort of work out that way? Because that's your sensibility.
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A
Well, I think you can tell that my sensibility is a bit like this. But I do think it's both. It's intentional, too, and not in a sort of toxic positivity sort of way, but just in a. Oh, there's a.
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B
New phrase, new meme. Toxic positivity.
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A
I did not come up with that, but I. But I did. I did adhere it and I thought it was good. But I think that there's like, you know, there's people. People who just are, you know, I'm sure you have this in your life too, where someone will strike you as just like, all right, you're really putting on this level of like, optimism about the future, but it doesn't feel grounded in anything. Yeah. And all of our writers, all of our contributors, you know, are very.
- [24:02]
B
Tell us a few of them. You've got. You've got quite the slate for especially a relative startup. Right. I don't know how you did it, but tell us. Tell us some of your guys.
- [24:11]
A
I'm very persuasive, Harry. That's why. So we are. Our staff. We have Kelsey Piper, who's fantastic. She was formerly at Vox. She's been doing fantastic writing about technology and education, and it's been really smart stuff that's already been affecting the political conversation. We have Laksha Jain, who founded the firm Split Ticket, which is a political data firm. And we do original polling with Laksha all the time. And then our columnists include Derek Thompson, who was formerly my colleague at the Atlantic and wrote the recent. Co. Wrote the recent book with Ezra Klein, Abundance. We've Matt Iglesias, who writes the great substack. Slow, boring, totally. Dr. Rachel Bedard, who's a fantastic writer at the New Yorker, who writes about the Maha movement for us and the future of personal health in this country. And we have so many more people who are right across the political spectrum who are writing for us. I'm commissioning people right now who are on the right to talk about the post liberal right. And we're really excited about this. But to your question about optimism, though, I genuinely think that when you look at the history of the world, it is really remarkable what human beings are able to do when they try. The fact that you can have millions and millions and millions of people living in this country who are not only thriving, who are. Have access to a level of economic welfare that was unimaginable, not just to, like, people a thousand years ago, but to their own grandparents. Like, when I think about my grandfather I mean, it's kind of an extreme case. My grandfather is in rural Eritrea. Could he have even understood the life that I'm living, the material abundance that I have access to that I can be in this, you know, air conditioned, climate controlled room, working my laptop job, making money, getting to say what I believe? I mean, there's part of why, you know, we couldn't be in Eritrea is because of religious persecution. And there's a level here where it's just, it's really, really important to remain grounded in what we can do and not to fall prey to the idea that there's an inevitability here, to the loss of our rights, there's inevitability here, to the loss of economic freedom, that there's inevitability here to the rise of fascism. These are the products of choices that we're making and decisions that we're all making. And I think we can make better decisions.
- [26:18]
B
Seems like more pinker to me. And, you know, not to mention I'm the same, you know, with, with my grandparents. It's a common American story. And, you know, not to mention, like the availability of, say, indoor plumbing. Okay, last question to you. Tell us about that hat.
- [26:35]
A
Oh, yes, this is our new argument hats. We're gonna be selling them soon. I wear them just so we can advertise them. But this is our logo. It's a, you know, it's an abstract inside of our, of our, of our, of our product and our brand. But like, the great thing about it is that it's really supposed to be evocative of our optimism. It's a starburst. It's supposed to really bring to fore the art of the 20th century. That was really progress focused, science focused. Imagine kind of like the World's fair in the 1920s, this time when America really felt even, even in the middle of like serious, serious deprivation, that there was hope for the future and that we could create a better world together. And you can buy them@theargumentmag.com I'm sure you can.
- [27:16]
B
Jerusalem Dempsey, thanks for being with us. Best of luck with your new important enterprise and see you next time on Talking Fit.
- [27:25]
A
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to come back.
- [27:30]
B
Thank you for tuning in to One on One, a weekly conversation series from Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube, where we are posting full episodes and daily updates on top legal stories. Check us out on substack harrylittman.substack.com where we're posting two or three bulletins a week breaking down the various threats to constitutional norms and the rule of law, and Talking Feds has joined forces with the contrarian I'm a founding contributor to this new media venture, committed to reviving the diversity of opinion that feels increasingly rare in today's news landscape, where legacy media seems to be tacking toward Trump for business reasons rather than editorial ones. Rest assured, we're still the same scrappy independent podcast you've come to know and trust just now linked up with an ambitious and vital project designed for this pivotal moment in our nation's legal and trust political discourse. Find out more@contrarian.substack.com thanks for tuning in. And don't worry, as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking. Talking Feds is produced by Luke Cregan and Katie Upshaw, associate producer Becca Haveian, sound Engineering by Matt McArdle, Rosie, Don Griffin, David Lieberman, Hamsa Mahadranathan, Emma Maynard and Hallie Necker are our contributing writers. Production assistants by Morgan Chisholm and Akshaysh Turbailu. Our editorial interns are Bridget Ryan and Troy Neville. Our music, as ever, is by the amazing Philip Glass. Talking Feds is a production of Delito llc. I'm Harry Lytton. Talk to you later.