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A
I think there is a threshold question for many voters of are you one of those elite liberals who doesn't care about border security, who is all in favor of all these changes on gender, for example? And I think when Democrats come off as someone who's a little bit more from a faculty lounge than a union hall on some of these cultural issues, they are really going to struggle to win back working class people of all races. And now the good fight with Jasia Monk.
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In the last months and in the last days, there's been a lot of debate about how the Democratic Party can win back the working class, including a much mocked description of a fancy five star get together with all of the chic appetizers in California in which the grandees of a party try to figure out why is it that ordinary people are not in tune with us? Well, a few months ago actually I had a great guest on to discuss this question. David Leonhardt was writing for many years the morning newsletter for the New York Times, which you may know from your inbox. He is now an editorial director overseeing the process of unsigned editorials at the New York Times and he has been thinking a lot about that question. So we discuss why Democrats in the United States and other left wing parties around the world have turned themselves into what Thomas Piketty calls the Brahmin left, characterized by stronger support among the affluent and particularly the highly educated, than other segments of the population. We looked at one example on which David reported in depth that has been able to evade that fate. The Social Democratic Party in Denmark under Matte Fredriksen's leadership, who won re election for a second term recently in part by changing the party stance on some key cultural questions. And finally we discussed how all of that relates to immigration and whether we face an immigration trilemma, a choice that requires us to give up one attractive goal in order to make immigration policy work. To get to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support this podcast. Go to yashamong.substack.com. David Leonhardt, welcome to the podcast.
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A
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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B
So I read you all of the time, so I have many things that I want to talk to you about. But perhaps one of the things you've been particularly interested in in various veins for the last months and the last years is trying to understand the transformation of a Democratic party and of left wing political parties more broadly. And one of the really striking things about them is that historically many of them were born in social democratic movements and trade union movements. And they naturally were and were supposed to be the home of working class, the home of the simple guy earning a hard day's living with the hands, the party that represented those people against the bourgeoisie, against the professional managerial class, as we might put it today. But that's no longer what many of those parties do in many cases. They now actually have much more support among the affluent and among the highly educated. And that is true of the Democratic Party in the United States as well. Tell us a little bit about the trend and how that holds the key to understanding a lot of contemporary politics.
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A
It's a trend that's been going on for decades. It is not a Donald Trump phenomenon, although he accelerated really in the United States has been going on since at least the 1960s, not exactly evenly, sometimes more, sometime less. But on net it's been going on since the 1960s. And we're now at the point in which not only do college graduates lean toward the Democratic Party on net and people without a four year college degree lean toward the Republican Party, but it's also the case that people who make more than $100,000 lean toward the Democratic Party and people who make less lean toward the Republican Party. And the story, as I'm sure you know, is a little different in Europe. In Europe, we've had these trends have been more by education than by income. And so you still often on net have richer people voting for the right in Europe. But in the United States, richer people on net vote for the Democratic Party. And I think when a lot of Democrats have looked at this, they find it befuddling. They ask questions like how can all these people vote against their economic interests and why don't they understand what's good for them? And I think those are pretty common.
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B
One version of that right is this famous book, what's the Matter With Kansas? And the idea is kind of like obviously it's in the interest of these people to vote for Democrats and if they don't, then they must be doing something wrong.
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A
Yes, and they're being fooled by Fox News or they're being fooled by misinformation or they're just racist. And look, Fox News airs lies and misinformation is a real thing and racism is obviously a real thing in American politics. So I'm not dismissing any of those things. But all of them are partial explanations and I don't even think they're the main explanations. And I think that until the center left and the left grapples more honestly with this problem, they're going to have a hard time fixing it. And I would say there are a couple different things. So first of all, almost everybody really weighs not just economic issues, but social and cultural issues when they're voting. Why is it that affluent liberals vote for a party that often wants to raise their taxes? It's because they're not simply voting on which party is going to give them the biggest short term increase to their take home pay. They care about climate change, they care about reproductive rights, and working class people
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B
feel the same way. This is a really simple inversion that I've sometimes used. When students ask me this question or members of audiences and talks ask me that question, I'm like, look, I'm going to make a wild guess and think if you are a student at a fancy university, you're probably going to earn more than the average American. And if you are somebody who came to my talk at a bookstore in a nice neighborhood in an affluent American city, you probably make more than a median American. So do you feel like you should be voting with your economic interest as you see it? And with a Republican Party, I'm guessing you don't. And it's amazing that a lot of people who think about it in this kind of what's the matter with Kansas Frame have them self interrogated in that way.
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A
Yeah, I once wrote a column called what's the Matter with Scarsdale? Which was basically laying out this argument. Scarsdale, as most of your listeners know, is a very wealthy suburb of New York City. But I could have done Aspen or Martha's Vineyard or Beverly Hills, all those places now skew Democratic. And so I think the first form of denialism on the left is this idea that why would people vote against their economic interests? They shouldn't do that. And this has real consequences for the Democratic Party because you often see what the Democratic Party does is ignore social issues when campaigning and just try to talk about economic issues as if they can stop somehow get people to ignore everything except taxes and healthcare and Social Security. Then they're going to win everyone over to their side. I think that is a doom strategy. I think you have to engage on other issues that people care about for good reasons. So then the second thing is to say, well yes, but on those social issues and cultural issues, the working class people who are voting for center right or right wing parties, they're ignorant, they're bigoted, they just don't understand the way the world works. They're on the wrong side of history. And you know, I already said this once and I'll probably say it a third time at some point during our conversation. Racism is a huge and real problem in the United States. I'm not suggesting otherwise, but it isn't the only reason that somebody might decide that they don't have a home in a center left party. And I thought that was the case back in 2016 when a lot of liberals and academics and yes, journalists came forward and said the only reason Donald Trump was racism. I thought that was wrong. I thought it was wrong in part because many of the people who had helped elect Trump had voted for Barack Obama four and eight years earlier. I thought there were other reasons to think it was wrong, but now we really know it was wrong. Because what has happened since 2016, we've seen a really meaningful shift of Latino voters, of Asian American voters, and even a noticeable, if still modest shift of African American voters away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party. And so to somehow argue that all those people are just racists, it just really defies belief. And so to me, the shift of working class people away from center left parties is a more nuanced, and I think it's often a more understandable story, and I think it's important to grapple with that without simply saying, as Democrats too often do, either they're voting against their own interests or they're just ignorant and bigoted.
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B
Yeah, I think it's interesting to see how that explanation wasn't particularly convincing in 2016, but you can see why it was tempting because the demographic pattern and who voted for Trump and who voted for Hillary Clinton at the time was so clear and so obvious that he could sort of say, oh, it must be a bad thing, but it turns out that the kind of socially moderate or conservative white working class that had voted for Barack Obama and then switched over to Trump was actually a lead indicator for other working class voters and in particular Latino working class voters. And when you look at the 2024 outcomes, it's quite clear that Latinos who are socially very progressive continued unsurprisingly to vote for Kamala Harris. But it was particularly Latinos who are moderate or conservative on those cultural, social issues who went over to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. What ultimately drives this? Right. I mean, one of the kind of debates that you keep having between social scientists, but also in journalism, the public sphere more broadly, is, is the shift happening because the Democratic Party and other left wing parties in Europe aren't standing up for working class sufficiently on economic grounds? When you look at somebody like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, he's sort of been making this argument since the election. We just need to take a more what he calls economically populist line in order to offer voters something bigger on the economy and that's gonna get them back in. Or is it really the cultural message that is so alienating to a lot of working class voters that they're not even going to listen to what Democrats and other left wing parties have to say on the economy until they feel that the exponents of those parties come into line with them on those cultural questions.
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A
To me, the best way to answer that question is to look at the center left candidates in the United States and parties in other places that have actually won tough races. And how have they gone about this? And there is, I don't want to say it's absolutely universal, but there is a very clear pattern. And the answer to your question is both. So the candidates that win these tough races. So I'm thinking of Alyssa Slotkin, the new senator from Michigan. I'm thinking of Ruben Gallego, the senator from Arizona. I'm thinking of Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Raphael Warnock in an earlier election in Georgia, a whole bunch of Houses members, Marcy Kaptor in Ohio, Jared golden in Maine. They're often winning Trump districts. They do sound quite populist. I mean, a whole bunch of Democratic House candidates who won this year came out in favor of tariffs, for example. They often talk about big companies being out to get you. They often talk about how China competes unfairly. So they aren't running some sort of neoliberal, centrist campaign. They really sound quite populist, but they also sound very moderate, even to the point of conservative on a whole bunch of cultural issues. To A1, they were really hawkish about immigration and were critical of the Biden administration. Sometimes, depending what states they're in, they portray themselves as hunters. They connect themselves to kind of rural life in different ways. And so I think there's this real desire among a whole lot of progressive Democrats to imagine that if only we get populist enough on economics, we could ignore all those cultural issues. I think directionally they are often right on populism. And I'm not saying, look, I think there's also a kind of more centrist, market friendly version of economics that could work for the Democrats. I'm not saying that's destined to fail, but, but this notion that you can just go really populist on economics and ignore the cultural stuff, it's really hard to find a single example of a Democrat who's won a tough race by doing that. I think there is a threshold question for many voters of are you one of those elite liberals who doesn't care about border security, who is all in favor of all these changes on gender, for example? And I think when Democrats come off as someone who's a little bit more from a faculty lounge than a union hall on some of these cultural issues, they are really going to struggle to win back working class people of all races.
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plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com let's dive a little bit more deeply into the economic piece before returning to the cultural piece and the question of immigration which I think is particularly important and interesting in this regard. So on the economy, the way that I tend to think about it, and I'd be interested to see whether it resonates with you, whether you have way of framing it, is that we need to distinguish between a kind of anti crony capitalist line and an anti capitalist line. It's interesting to me that the examples you were giving where to say, well perhaps tariffs are a good idea. I'm not quite sure personally whether I agree with that or not. But that's not an anti capitalist line. Right? It's to say some of these big companies, they're really unfair, they're out to get you. We're going to protect you against those companies. It's not to say I'm a socialist and I have worries about the free market in general. To me the distinction between where the popular economic policies lie, where I think the Democrats can partially move to the left and where there's real danger in moving to the left for Democrats or other left leaning parties is whether you sound like you are in favor of markets, of competition, of economic growth, of progress. I think all of that are very, very popular issues. And if you start to sound like you don't appreciate the entrepreneurialism of small business owners, you don't have an ambition to make people more affluent, you have any kind of sympathies for the degrowth movement. Or you go, in most countries, at least perhaps outside certain parts of Latin America or Europe, into socialist rhetoric that is extremely off putting to people because they think that that doesn't connect to their real concerns, which often is quite aspirational economically. They want to be more affluent than they are. They don't want promises about a higher minimum wage. They want promises about how they can actually be thriving and be affluent and make a real success of themselves. Right. I think all of that is compatible with saying our economic system is rigged and Wall street isn't on your side. And too often the regulators are too easy on these big companies. And why is it that Apple makes huge profit, but they don't pay barely any taxes? And so I think you can be quite sharp in rhetoric on those kind of issues while still making it clear that you share, certainly in the American context, very broadly felt support for entrepreneurialism, for free market, for economic growth. Do you think that that distinction makes sense or do you see some of those candidates going a little bit further than I'm suggesting?
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A
No, I think that's precisely right. I think particularly in the American context, I do think it's important for candidates to signal some version of pro capitalism, even if they don't use the word. I don't know whether the word itself would be effective or not, but voters don't want to vote for a socialist in the United States. And Bernie Sanders recognized that. He tried to distance himself from that word when he was running for president. And you see that in some of these specific campaigns. I've already mentioned Jared Golden, a House member from Maine who really has had one of the most impressive performances over the last few elections. He keeps winning this Trump district up in Maine. And so he both sounds a very populist note, but he also talks about maybe I shouldn't even say but, and he also talks about government being too big. So this isn't like we're going to nationalize things. We're going to put everything in the hands of the government and companies are evil. It's just what you said, which is the implicit message is I'm a capitalist, but the version of capitalism we have now is rigged. It's rigged for big businesses. It might be rigged toward big government. China's helped rig it, and I'm going to help unrig it so it can be fair to you and to small businesses and help you make a good living.
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B
That is actually the kind of economic populism in which Barack Obama ran a little bit in 2008. I know people have understandably mixed up feelings about his response to the financial crisis and to Wall street and so on, but it was always this promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to get ahead. And the problem in our system right now is that it doesn't always allow for that. And that sort of, I think, combines very cleverly this appeal to work ethic, this appeal to merit, not in the sense of who gets into Harvard, but in the sense of we want to reward people who work hard and provide for communities and, and do all of that. But we also recognize that there's a big role for the state in making sure that you then don't get screwed over. And at the moment, you are getting screwed over in all kinds of ways. To switch to the cultural piece of this, why is it that so many voters feel that the Democratic Party doesn't connect women on cultural issues? And why is that feeling particularly strong in working class communities, both white working class communities and, you know, Latino, Asian American, to some extent African American working class communities?
- [19:27]
A
I mean, the Democratic Party has gotten well to the left of public opinion on several social issues and, and hasn't really been willing to grapple with that. So. So we can kind of tick off the different issues. Right. I mean, there was really a period of time, I would say roughly from 2015 to 2021, as the Democratic Party tried to figure out its post Obama future, in which it really was quite negative about policing in all kinds of ways. Right. In Oregon, a Democratic state, you had the decriminalization of even hard drugs. You, of course, had all of the discussion around the defund the police notion. And I understand that was a fringe part of the Democratic Party, but it got a lot of attention. And the notion that we should pull back on policing was not a fringe idea. It was an idea that many Democrats embraced, the idea of decriminalizing border crossings. And so there was just a lot of the Democratic parties that sent this message that we're in favor of less policing. We're not that worried about crime. Voters were never there, including Latino and black voters, they were never there. So that's one example. I mean, gender is another example. I think what the Trump administration is doing about trans people is deeply, deeply alarming. This notion of being disrespectful, of denying the notion that there are trans people, of saying, we're not going to allow you to use the pronoun that you think fits you and that fits your identity. I find it deeply, deeply alarming. And actually, so do many Americans. If you look at polling on basic civil rights for trans people, there's strong support of it.
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I haven't seen any polling specifically, for example, on the question that I think has been most shocking in terms of what the Trump administration has done with respect, which is to say that they're going to boot trans people out of the military. I think on principle, that's something that Democrats should oppose. I think that's also a winnable case. I imagine that most Americans also are going to say, you happen to be a trans person, you just want to serve your country. You're in a role in the military, doing good work. You're going to be kicked out of that job just because you happen to be trans. I would like to think, and I suspect that a majority of Americans disagree with that.
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A
Yeah, I would like to think that, too. And I think that if you look in North Carolina, when Republicans tried to go really far on bathroom issues, there was some blowback against Republicans. And so I think these basic civil rights ideas are winnable. I don't know that every single one is as winnable as I would hope it would be, but I think they are, and I think polling is consistent with that, and I think a lot of it is. Then, obviously, we get into some more complicated issues, like should people who have gone through male puberty be able to play girls and women's sports? Public opinion is incredibly against that. You know, 75, 25, 80, 20, 65, 35. Kind of depends on what poll you look at, but every single one shows a huge majority. There is a very. To me, there are. I get the arguments on both sides. The argument on letting trans girls play girl sports is they should be able to play sports that aligns with their gender. The argument against it is that people who go through male puberty are taller and they're faster and they're stronger, and they have advantages that no amount of taking, stopping, or taking various drugs can change. And these are huge advantages. And the idea that not only the Democratic Party has lined up so strongly on this subject, but has said that anyone who expresses another view, a view that something like 75% of Americans hold, is beyond the pale, that's a really problematic place for the party to be. So whether it's crime, whether it's gender, whether it's immigration, which I know we're going to get into some detail on, so I'll just skip over it now, whether it's some of the stuff that went on during COVID where Democratic run Parts of the United States closed their schools for much longer. In retrospect, that clearly seems to have been a bad decision. Republican run areas were much more comfortable in the moment opening their schools. And this was another case where a lot of liberals really tried to chill debate. They said if you want to reopen schools, you're not only wrong, but you don't care about old people. They threw around words like eugenicist. They tried to get people disinvited from, from conferences. They really tried to disallow public debate about things like COVID lockdowns and Covid's origin. And a lot of people reacted really badly to that. And so I think the Democrats need to have some more self reflection on a relatively long list of issues of just how much they, on some issues got far on the wrong side of public opinion. On others, public opinion might have been closer. But they treated people with whom they disagreed as not just wrong, but evil. And that's really alienating to people. And so I think that's a big part of what's going on here.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think this kind of over moralization of every debate and a lot of these debates are very big important moral stakes. But this idea that if you have a view that is one inch to my right, you might not just be wrong, but you must be an evil person, you must have bad motives, that is so strong on the left. And I just want to give an illustration of it and make a point. So the illustration of it is that I was one of the first people who argued for cancellations of big mass events, sporting events and so on. We weren't yet talking about government in post lockdowns or anything like that at the time. I wrote an article called Cancel Everything in the Atlantic I believe March 5th or 6th of 2020. I also later on was one of the first people, one of relatively early people I should say, to state, all right, look, the whole point of getting vaccines was that once everybody has access to a vaccine, we can then return to some semblance of normal life. And while it's sad and tragic that some people aren't availing themselves of those available vaccines, that is not a reason to keep the country shut down. And so I wrote an article called Open Everything and I went my mistake on MSNBC to discuss this. And the other panelists was somebody I'd had friendly exchanges with in the past. And I believe he literally called me a murderer. He literally said that in this complicated debate about the trade offs between the benefits of some amount of Social distancing and the costs, which in retrospect, I think I may have gotten wrong at the very beginning. Perhaps I got it wrong at various points. I think it's a really hard thing to think about in retrospect. And I had, I think, a degree of moral certainty myself that now I'm really unsure I deserve to have. But just because we had a different view about where the trade off lay at that particular moment, I was a murderer. I was somebody who was just gleefully wanting for people to die. Just an extreme way of overreacting to that kind of difference. And that, I think speaks to a debate we've had since the election in 2024 in which a lot of progressives and sort of people in the philanthropic space and in media have been saying the problem is that the right has all of these great media voices. They have Joe Rogan and all of that kind of right wing media ecosystem. And Kamala Harris lost because she doesn't have that. And so we're going to recreate that. We're going to invest a bunch of money into finding the left wing Joe Rogan. But of course, this is a complete misunderstanding of a space, because Joe Rogan is not a particularly political guy. Certainly wasn't when he started out. He was not particularly on the right when he started out, but he realized that every time he says something that upsets the right, they might argue with him, but they don't expel him. And every time he said something that upset the left, he was kind of pushed towards the right. And at this point, I think he has become part of a very clearly right wing media ecosystem. But that's a sort of emergent property of how the system creates incentives for people and treats people who have disagreements. And the reason why there's no left wing Joe Rogan is not that there's no left wing funders willing to pour money into a progressive show that is a complete chimera. It's that it's very hard to build that kind of organic mass audience when you always have to watch yourself really carefully in how you speak. Because otherwise your friends and your colleagues and the people who are gonna have dinner with next Friday are gonna beat up on you. And that, I think, is really sort of at the heart of what's going on here. Feel free to respond to that. And then I also would love for you to speak a little bit more to the immigration question in the United States. How is it that somebody like Ruben Gallego, for example, dealt with that issue in a Senate race In Arizona.
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A
Let me just say something briefly about what you just said, because Covid was really the first time that I experienced this kind of blowback from the left. My experience had a lot of similarities to yours, which is I originally wrote about the importance of closing things down, and I wore masks and I did all these things. And then as the vaccine started to come out and I saw that a whole bunch of the other things we were doing weren't actually making a difference. Right. I mean, my favorite example of this is we had mask mandates on planes, and then we took our masks off to eat the stroopwafels that the flight attendants circulated as if somehow Covid wasn't going to spread while we were eating our in flight snacks. And there were all kinds of versions of that, restaurants, the restaurant version of
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that, which is that you had to have a mask on while you walked in, and then you sat down for two hours without a mask.
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A
I mean, I went to a play at one point in a very liberal community where we all sat watching the play with our masks on. And then in intermission, we went out to the lobby and we took our masks off to have drinks, which is just. It's insane. I mean, it really is virtue signaling, right? We were, by wearing our masks in the audience, we were signaling our virtue and then taking them off. I think anyone who's had an experience that you and I had of just really being called terrible things, which is fine, it's part of what you sign up for when you're a journalist. But there are a lot of people who have had that in their daily lives, right? So a friend of mine, who, by the way, is female, basically says, I'm never again going to talk about my nuanced opinion on abortion in a public setting because of the amount of disdain that I experience. I think a lot of people who broadly view themselves either of the center or frankly of the left, have had this experience of being told that they're wrong, that they're hateful, that they're doing something bad, maybe even that they're killing people. In the case of COVID it is profoundly alienating to feel like, wait a second, I am not allowed to think that through these things. I'm not allowed to express my doubts, I'm not allowed to talk about my nuanced views. And there is really a judgmental nature of the modern academic elite left that even people who are sympathetic with it on many, many things find deeply alienating. And I think that that is something that is important to get past which is a good transition to immigration. So if you look at what the Democratic Party did on immigration and, and I've gone and I've read every platform that the parties had in the 21st century on immigration every four years. And it's a really useful exercise because in the early part of the 20th century and very much in the Obama era, you hear this mixed, moderate message, which is celebration of the United States as a nation of immigrants, a desire to defend particularly people who came to this country even without legal permission, but who've lived here and lived stable lives. The idea to create a better, fairer immigration system. But also the platform basically says we're going to have a secure border, we're going to deport criminals. Barack Obama in his 2008 convention speech said illegal workers undermine wages. He said that in his speech he used the phrase illegal workers. And then you see, first in 2016 and then in 2020, the party basically gets uncomfortable with any form of immigration law enforcement at all. And all it calls for is admitting more and more people, both through legal channels. But even although it doesn't totally acknowledge it, it calls for admitting more people through illegal channels by talking about avoiding deportations and making it easier for people to claim asylum and all these things. And you then end up with the Biden administration that basically puts these policies in, into effect. And we have, over a four year period, the most rapid immigration in our country's history, either in raw numbers, by a wide margin or even in percentage terms. There is no four year period in the late 1800s or early 1900s that matches the Biden era immigration. And that is a major, major reason that Biden ends up being so unpopular and that Harris can't beat Donald Trump. And it really was an example to me, a signature example of the Democratic Party moving away not only from the views of working class people, but the interests of working class people. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
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B
and by the way, one of the interesting things here is that there's a kind of slightly cynical approach to politics at the moment, which is that governing doesn't matter. And there's some strains of research and political science that say that when there's an economic downturn, you're going to be blamed for it, even if it really doesn't come as a result of your government's policies. And to some extent, that's true. I mean, if you happen to have economic boom times, perhaps as a result your administration's policies, but perhaps for reasons that really have nothing to do with it, you're very likely to be reelected. If you're in the middle of a deep recession, you're just going to struggle to win an election, even if it isn't obvious that it's your fault that you find yourself in the middle of that recession. But I think that that point is often overplayed. And on some of the key vulnerabilities of the Biden administration, including inflation, which was a global phenomenon, but which was in various ways accelerated by the Orwellian named Inflation Reduction act and other things that Biden administration passed. And on immigration, where it really is a set of very specific measures that the Biden administration took that led to the surge of immigration, I think there was actually a response to actual policies. It doesn't necessarily mean that the next administration is not going to be worse in all kinds of ways and other things. And I personally wasn't particularly happy with the outcome of the 2024 result. But I think it actually is a good check to that cynicism to see that there is a quite clear cause and effect here. Right. There was a change in how the Democratic Party fought about a lot of those issues that drove a lot of Biden policies, particularly ones that might have been less visible at first, that weren't debated on the front page of the New York Times every day, but that actually drove what was happening at the border. And it was that surge at the border that helped to turn public opinion in a way that, that then made it very hard for Kamala Harris to win the election. Now you're saying that that was a drag on how Democrats did in the fall of 2024. What's the evidence for the fact that that actually mattered to voters? And how is it that some politicians, like Gallego himself, Latino in Arizona, were able to distance themselves to some extent from the Democratic Party brand on this issue, at least enough for them to win in states that Donald Trump carried for the presidency?
- [35:13]
A
I think the evidence that immigration was important is that polls consistently showed that voters were very unhappy with Biden's immigration policy. When you saw long running general questions, like a question Gallup asks, do you think the country should be admitting more or fewer immigrants? During Biden's presidency, there was this enormous surge in anti immigration sentiment. Really tragic given how important immigration is to our country. And then you just I've watched a lot of town halls on video in places like Denver and Chicago and New York. And you see people coming forward and saying, our communities are bearing a really big burden from this surge of migration. There's more homelessness, our schools are taxed, there's just more chaos. And then you just look at the counties along the border, including the single most Latino county in the United States. And those counties in Texas swung very hard to Trump. And when you look at the Democrats who managed to win tough races, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, I've mentioned a couple of others, Slotkin in Michigan, all of them included in their ads this notion that they were worried about the border. Sometimes they talked about fentanyl coming over the border and how they worked with, with police. And so basically the kind of the real world evidence of the people who were closest to this, the politicians who needed to run. Republicans ran very strong against Biden and Harris's administration immigration policy. And Democrats who won managed to do so in part by sometimes outwardly criticizing the Biden policy. And I am sure some of your listeners are saying, wait a second. Kamala Harris also said she was gonna be really tough on immigration if she won, and it didn't help her. I think that if you're going to actually do what she tried to do, you can't do it as sort of cutely as she tried to do it. She never acknowledged she was changing her position. She never explained why she changed her mind. She never talked about what the Biden administration had gotten wrong. She just tried to skip over that whole thing and sort of say, now I'm a border hawk. She never said that she herself had been wrong to be in favor of, of decriminalizing the border in 2019. And so when voters look at that, it just really felt like a kind of election year deathbed conversion. And she never gave voters the respect of saying to them, I know I used to say something else, but now I'm changing my mind. And let me tell you why I've done it. I just don't think it was very credible to a lot of people.
- [37:42]
B
So we mentioned earlier that some of the same debates are playing out in Europe. First of all, I would love for you to tell me a little bit more about something you hinted at earlier, which is that there's a rise of what Thomas Piketty called the Brahmin left. It's not just an American phenomenon. It seems to be happening in Europe as well. You seem to also be having, in particular, the most traditional electorate of left wing parties move over to Far right populists. So I believe in the last German election the SOFA Democrats in Germany were possibly fifth according to some of the exit polls among the working class, with many other parties more favored and particularly alternative for Germany. And you see the same thing in France with a national front, in Italy with right wing populist parties, that they actually do particularly well among the working class. But you were saying that there's some difference there where perhaps because it's a multi party system in many European countries, you still get more affluent people more likely to vote for certain kind of center right parties perhaps. I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about what is similar and what is different to the situation we've described so far in Europe in general.
- [38:53]
A
Yeah. So I was describing some results there by a paper by three co authors, one of whom is Thomas Piketty. And this is the paper in which they use the phrase Brahman left, which I find to be a very useful phrase. It's referring both to the idea of Brahmans being the highest cased in India, and it's also the idea of Boston Brahmans in the United States as being these elites. So the notion is that the left has become more elite, it's become more intellectual, it's become more affluent since really the 1950s and 60s in both Europe and the United States. And what Piketty and his co authors do is they look at this both by education and by income. And in the United States we've had it flipped both by education and income. It obviously matters where you draw the line. If you go very high enough, I think billionaires still tilt Republican. But if you're thinking about say draw the line at 100,000, then in the United States you have richer people voting Democrat for the majority of them. You also have college graduates voting Democratic. In Europe you, you have had this inversion by education, you've had less of it. And in many countries it's still the case that most affluent people vote right of center. So how could those both be true? You sort of think about it. You think about kind of intellectuals, maybe teachers, they are voting left, but people who have less education. In the United States we often talk about someone who owns a car dealership who might not have a college degree but makes a lot of money. They're still voting right. But the trends in both the US and Europe are the same. Which is the left is becoming more Brahmin, the right is becoming more working class.
- [40:34]
B
Great. So you basically see especially the same kind of erosion of appeal to the working class and presumably from my knowledge of Europe, I would say has some of the same underlying reasons, both that those parties have become less adept at making a certain kind of economic appeal to working class voters, that they, for example, have been some of the parties that are responsible for weakening social protections in certain respects and so on. But they don't have, seem to have an aspirational vision for how working class voters can actually move ahead, but also very clearly cultural issues on which many of those parties have moved clearly to the left as well. And that is in part a result of the fact that, that they've changed their personnel. That in the German Social Democratic Party, it used to be that you had a lot of senior leaders who were workers from local towns, who'd made their way up through trade unions, who didn't go to university and then were representing the party at the highest levels. And nowadays virtually every person in any leadership position in any of those parties in Europe has studied literature or politics or something like that at a university in one of the biggest towns, has probably worked nearly all of their lives in politics. Few of them have even worked in the private economy, whether in manufacturing or in a different kind of role. And that creates some of that cultural distance as well, I think. But the issue that is, I think perhaps even comparatively more important in Europe than it is in the United States is immigration. And you just had a very interesting long article in New York Times Magazine about one outlier here, which is Denmark, one of the few countries in Europe in which the far right populists have actually been stagnating or declining rather than increasing in their share of the vote. And one of the few countries in Western Europe in which the Social Democrats have held on recently in the midst of an anti incumbent wave. And as you point out, this is a government led by Frederick Nixon, a prime minister who comes from a Social Democratic party, which has been in power for a lot of the last hundred years in Denmark that in some ways is straightforwardly progressive, expanding the social safety net in some important ways, even pursuing some environmental goals and other things. But that really has distinguished itself from other left wing parties in Europe and the United States by its stance on immigration. Tell us a little bit about what you found when you spent time speaking, speaking to Mette in Copenhagen, reporting on these changes.
- [43:11]
A
Denmark really does stand out. So you look across Europe and the United States and one of the things you notice in this Covid and post Covid era is that incumbent parties in the rich world have really struggled. They've had a hard time winning re election. That's been true for center right and center left parties. But I think in a lot of ways the left has had more problems than the right. The far right is ascendant. The far left is not ascendant. Some of the cases where the left has won, like Britain, the left didn't win because it got a huge landslide or mandate. I mean, the Labour Party barely increased its vote share in this most recent election. It won a landslide victory because so many of the, the people who voted Tory in the past went to other parties, including the far right. And so labor managed to win without actually increasing their vote share very much. So for the most part, it's just very hard to find a single country where you say, wow, the center left has had a really good run over the last several years. Denmark stands out. The Social Democrats won power in 2019. Mette Fredriksen became the Prime Minister and then won re election in 2022. She's still the Prime Minister there. And as you just talked about, she's compiled a really progressive record. They have expanded abortion access. They've passed a really aggressive climate bill. They've cracked down on private equity in ways that would bother the laissez faire crowd and that would cause populists to cheer. They've changed the pension rules to be more favorable to lower income workers. But the big difference and the thing that when I went there and I talked to the senior figures in the government there, including the Prime Minister, the thing they say is the most important is we changed our party's policy on immigration. And we decided not simply as a matter of politics, although they don't admit it, I think politics played a role, but they say not simply as a matter of politics. We developed this diagnosis that very high levels of immigration are bad for working class people. It's working class communities where a large number of immigrants tend to move and tax things like social services and schools and, and compete for jobs. And one of the things that the Prime Minister said to me is she said, look, we are a welfare society. And if you are going to be a welfare society, you can't just let in everybody who wants to come into your country. You will undermine support for the kind of taxes that, that you need to pay for welfare programs. And so Denmark has really gotten tougher on immigration. They haven't totally reversed it. Immigration is still increasing, but Denmark has about 12.5% of its population foreign born. The two countries that Denmark borders, if you count the bridge with Sweden and Denmark, they're both at about 20%. And so it's been a really meaningful difference. And sorry, Sweden and Germany. Yes. Thank you, Yasha. One of the things that really stood out to me is when I read the articles that other journalists, often from Britain or other countries, had written about Denmark, they were withering and disdainful. They had much of the same tone that you and I have been talking about about the Brahmin left, like, how could these terrible Social Democrats in Denmark abandon the principles of progressivism and crack down on immigration? And they basically said they're no different from the far right. Even though I gave you the long list of ways in which actually the Social Democrats are very progressive. What's interesting, however, is as immigration has continued to roil politics in other parts of Europe, as the far right is much stronger in Sweden and Germany and Italy and you name it, than it is in Denmark, where it's really been marginalized, we've seen this shift and there are now more center left people in other countries who are looking at Denmark and saying, wait a second, maybe they have this right and we had it wrong.
- [47:15]
B
Yeah. And I think it's helpful to take the wider lens here. Right. I mean, one of those wider lenses is that there has been just a fundamental transformation in what some of us European societies look like. And that is true in Germany, the neighbor to Denmark's south. But I think it's even more extreme in Sweden to Denmark's north. Sweden used to be a place that was always admired for not just its strong welfare state, but its economic success, its very low crime rates, its strong social cohesion. And a lot of those things are now on the rocks. And in particular, Sweden is now, I believe, the country in the European Union, certainly in Western Europe, with the biggest homicide rate. You have daily and on average, I really mean daily bombings in Sweden in which members of rival criminal clans are trying to kill and assassinate each other with these small bombs placed in apartments and other kinds of, of things, you have no go areas in which, for example, ambulances won't go without police protection in many other suburbs of cities like Stockholm and Malmo, which is quite close to Denmark, and so on. So I think even countries that have always prided themselves in their social liberalism in the openness to the world, like Sweden, like the Netherlands, have seen a radical shift in public opinion as a result. And so perhaps the second wider lens thing here is to contrast opinion about these issues in Europe today with 10 years ago. We're now coming up to the 10 year anniversary of that famous line that you quote in your article by Angela Merkel, Deir Schaffendass. We're going to make do. We'll figure it out. When a lot of immigrants and refugees came to Germany and other European countries in 2015, 2016, and there was this huge wave of popular enthusiasm for it, there's hundreds and thousands of people going to the train stations of German cities with signs saying refugees welcome, really sort of animating the civil society organizations that were helping to house the refugees and to provide German causes and all kinds of things. My own mother was volunteering for a little while in a refugee center close to where she lives in Berlin. It was really a mass movement. But I think the public opinion on this has just shifted radically across Europe. And as you're saying, it is notable that a lot of European political parties on the left are continuing to look at this Danish Social Democrats with deep skepticism and saying sort of bad words about them. But in practice, virtually every European government today is vowing that we are not going to let 2015, 2016 happen again. I heard once, I know it's true, that the mayor of Woodstock, New York, won 40 years of elections after the 60s vowing, no more Woodstock. This may be apocryphal, but I think in a weird way that that moment of openness in 2015 has really turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for pro immigration voices in Europe. And at the moment, every new European government seems to be vowing, no more Woodstock, no more Wirschaffen dust, no more return to 2015.
- [50:44]
A
Yeah, I think there are two important things to say about that. One is if you believe in the promise of immigration, because it can help people transform their lives, because it can make the societies they're coming to more dynamic, both economically and culturally, I think it's very important to understand that the best, most sustainable way to be pro immigration is to be pro moderate levels of immigration. And that if immigration becomes too fast and too rapid and too large, you're just going to lead to kind of destabilization that causes support for immigration to plummet. We've seen that in the United States during the Biden administration, and we've seen it in Europe over the last decade as well. I mean, to have a society go from 6 or 7% foreign born to 20% in just a couple decades, that's just a pace of change that is deeply uncomfortable for most people. And it doesn't make them bigoted people. In order to think about it that way, I went to Japan last summer for the first time and as people who've been to Japan know, there are a whole bunch of different cultural mores in Japan than in the United States. And one of the ones that's hard for an American, and I'm American, is you're not supposed to eat in public. So you don't walk down the street eating a bag of pretzels or an ice cream cone. And when you think about it, I completely get that. Right. You'd be dropping crumbs on the ground. It doesn't look very attractive. So just imagine that there was a Japanese town of 60,000 people that suddenly had 10 or 20,000Americans move in and everyone walk around eating in public. And Japanese people didn't like that, and they wanted to change rules to have fewer Americans or have Americans not do that or change their immigration policies. Would it be racist of those Japanese people to have that view? I don't think it would be. I think it would be a completely understandable version of, hey, we had certain ways that we did things here and we expect newcomers to respect it. And you've had that in Europe. And then the second thing is that there are a lot of similarities between immigration, politics and policy in Europe and the United States. But there are also some important differences. The United States is much better at integrating and assimilating people, or people who come to the United States are better at integrating themselves and assimilating themselves. There's economic research on this that shows that immigrants to the United States in recent decades have continued to climb the ladder at very similar rates to the immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Europe is just not as good at integrating people for whatever mix of reasons. And so Donald Trump lies when he says that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native born Americans. But in Europe, it's true. Immigrants commit crimes at much higher rates than native born people. And that's part of what we're seeing in Sweden that you talked about. It's part of what we've seen in Germany. I mean, in the last year, there have been four fatal attacks in which someone who is denied asylum but nonetheless remained in Germany then committed a fatal attack, whether it was terrorism or whether it was just a more random crime. Think about the anger and the sense of lawlessness that that breeds. And I think there is nothing driving people toward the far right the way immigration is. And if the center left, and for that matter the center right, wants to win these voters back, they have to engage seriously on immigration. And I think Germany's going to be a big test of that can. Can this new center right, center left government meaningfully crack down on immigration? Or will they continue to say to voters, hey, if you want less immigration, if you're worried about crime, then your only option is the far right. I think it would be incredibly damaging given how extreme the German far right is, if they basically said, if you want less immigration, if you want crime to be dealt with, then your only option is the far right.
- [54:24]
B
So a few thoughts on this. The first is that I completely agree about Germany. I think David Frum had unfortunately, the right line about this a number of years ago. Unfortunate because I think it's just an inescapable political reality that if moderates don't enforce borders, extremists will. And the new German government is helmed by Friedrich Merz, who put a lot of rhetorical emphasis in the election campaign about how tough he's going to be on the border. But it is a grand coalition with the Social Democrats who very unlike their Social Democratic comrades to the north. And they have in negotiations for this grand coalition so far put a very tough line about what they're unwilling to accept. And basically all of the demands that Merz was making in the election campaign, they have said are red lines for them. Now we'll see exactly how that works out. But I do worry that the resulting grand coalition likely is not going to, to do what Metz promised in the campaign and that the result of that is an alternative for Germany, which as you say, is one of the most extreme right wing populist parties in Europe. Much more extreme these days than Marine Le Pen's Garbmond national, for example. That might be at 30% of the vote rather than 20% of the vote in the next elections for Bundestag. And then Germany is going to come close to being ungovernable. I think the broader sense here is that there is just a rebellion against the sense of lack of alternatives. Right? I mean, the title of that party is Alternative for Germany because Merkel, in various respects there is no alternative. And I think one of the things that you see is a lot of countries in Europe saying because of human rights law, because of the European Court of Human Rights, because of our various legal constraints, because of the difficulties of deporting people, there's just nothing we can do. The rule of law won't allow us to do anything about any of this. And I think if you make people choose between the sense that they have no effective control of a border and the rule of law, they're going to choose sacrificing the rule of law. And I don't think that the right conception of a rule of law requires countries being unable to actually control the borders.
- [56:37]
A
I would just add to that. I think a lot of people on the left view themselves as defenders of democracy today. And in many ways that is correct. Donald Trump is doing a lot of alarming things to roll back some basic democratic standards and even rules in the United States. But if the left is going to stand up for democracy, it has to take public opinion seriously, even when the left finds it a little bit uncomfortable. And to say that you refuse to heed what is clearly public opinion about enforcing a nation's borders, which is a position that many people on the left take, is a fundamentally anti democratic position. You are saying, I don't care what the citizens of my country want, I don't care what the voters want, I don't care what they keep voting for. I'm going to exactly ignore that. In a way, what they're doing is they're claiming to defend the rule of law at the same time that they are rejecting the basic ideas of democracy. And I agree with you. When voters are told, hey, you have to choose between what you actually want and some treaty that we signed decades ago or some law that comes from Brussels, they're going to choose what they actually want. And I think it's hard to fault them for that. The people I fault are the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, I mean, particularly the center left, that aren't willing to give voters enough respect to say that we are going to do what you want. And not only that, but that aren't willing to be clear eyed enough about how much of a threat the far right poses. If you actually think the far right poses a threat, you have to try to take take away their most successful issue. And that's not just a theoretical idea. That's part of why I went to Denmark. They've actually done it in Denmark.
- [58:38]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, David Leonhardt and I talk about imagination. Is there actually anything more about the current immigration regime in the United States or in Europe? Is there a trilemma which requires us to give up one key value? If we want to have a coherent and sustainable immigration policy? How can we have a humane immigration policy that doesn't fuel the rise of. If you want access to that part of the conversation, please set up a private feed of this podcast. Stop missing out on those last interesting bits of the conversations I have with my guests. Go to jasamunk.substack.com and become the paying subscriber. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [59:58]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.