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- [00:01]
A
I don't want to think about what 2028 looks like. If we have two political parties who are viewed as not credible by the American people, that will be an invitation to political chaos. Which means that the most important task of the Democratic Party over the next three years is to organize a debate that leads up to a coherent new offer to the center of the American elect. Good fight with Jascha Monk.
- [00:40]
B
My guests today are Elaine Kmark and Bill Galston. Elaine and Bill are both fellows at the Brookings Institution, and they both were some of the most influential voices in reinventing the Democratic Party after its string of defeats to Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. bush. This made me think that they would be the perfect people to help us think through what the Democratic Party needs to do to reform itself after its two losses to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, is it enough for Democrats to practice what Elaine and Bill many years ago called the politics of evasion, saying, as did the chair of the DNC recently, that we have the right message and we don't really need to reform ourselves? Or do Democrats really need to change what kind of message they send to the American people and how they present themselves? And is that something that they can actually succeed in doing? Given the difficulties of being in opposition? In the last part of the conversation, that is what I push Elaine and Bill on. Is it realistic to think that Democrats will actually succeed in reforming themselves by 2028? Is there going to be a charismatic candidate who is trying to take Democrats back to the center? Or aren't we more likely to end up with somebody who is pretty orthodox on political ideology like AOC? And is the similarity between 1989, when they first wrote about this topic, and today real? Or is it a matter of a hammer always seeing a nail? To listen to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support this podcast. Please go to jaschamunk.substack.com and sign up to be a paid subscriber. Elaine Kmark and Bill Ghostly welcome to the podcast.
- [03:05]
A
Great to be here.
- [03:06]
C
Great to be here.
- [03:07]
B
I want to read to you to start this conversation from something I read last night. It says the Democratic Party must choose between two basic strategies. The first is to hunker down, change nothing, and wait for some catastrophe, deep recession, failed war, or breach of a Constitution to deliver victory. This strategy has the disadvantage of placing the party entirely at the mercy of events. It puts the party in the position of tacitly hoping for bad news, a stance the electorate can smell and doesn't like, and it is a formula for purposeless, ineffective governance. The other strategy is to address the party's weaknesses directly. Thus, the next nominee must be fully credible as commander in chief of our armed forces and as prime steward of our foreign policy. They must squarely reflect the moral sentiments of average Americans and must offer a progressive economic message based on the values of upward mobility and individual effort. The authors of those lines are Elaine Kaimak and Bill Goldston. And it sounds to me like they were written a few months ago. When were they written?
- [04:10]
C
1989, 36 years ago.
- [04:14]
B
So I had always read about this famous paper, the Politics of Evasion, and I'm obviously well acquainted with both of your work, but I must admit that I hadn't read it until yesterday, and I just fell out of my chair reading the paper, noticing just how similar the situation after Democrats lost to George H.W. bush in 1988 was to how you might analyze it today. Take us back to that moment and explain to us what the problems were that you were analyzing in the politics of invasion.
- [04:43]
C
Well, we had lost several presidential elections in a row, even though the party was still quite strong at the congressional level and at the local level. So we were living in sort of a myth, right, that really nothing was wrong. It was just that Ronald Reagan was so charismatic, et cetera. When we lost to George Bush, who was anything but charismatic, we really had a sort of come to Jesus moment, as we say, and we had to look into the party and say, something's really wrong here. And of course, what was wrong is something that we've seen since, which is that the Democrats were fundamentally out of step with most of the country on values, on a set of values, and they were turned off by the national Democrats, even though at that point in time they continued to elect Democrats to the House and to the Senate. So there was this need for the party to take a hard look at itself.
- [05:48]
A
One of the things that masked the problems was the Democrats commanding position in the Congress of the United States. The Senate was somewhat variable, but the Democrats in the late 1980s had held the house for more than 30 consecutive years and would go on to hold it for another six years. We warned in the Politics of Evasion against what we called the myth of the congressional bastion, that is, that Democrats could remain strong in the Congress indefinitely even if they'd lost credibility at the national level. And so we were dismayed but not entirely shocked when Democrats did lose control of the Congress. And of course, we had lost and then gained and then lost again control of the Senate. So it was clear that the ice was breaking up and that it was no longer thick enough to stand on. But the question of what to do was by no means obvious.
- [07:02]
B
One of the things that's striking to me in that paper is that you go through a number of excuses that Democrats told themselves for why they don't have to change anything. You call them the myth of liberal fundamentalism, that if only we really went to the true liberal, the true progressive positions, then everything would be fine. Another is the myth of mobilization, that the only reason why Democrats lost is that the true, true party faithful, its base in ethnic minority groups, in people who are less likely to turn out to the polls, hadn't shown up, but if they did, then they would win big. And the third was that there was these deeper electoral strengths, like its control over Congress and its hold over demographic groups. Again, it struck me that all of that discussion in the paper, including a reference to occasional podcast guest and persuasion contributor RUY Texera, could have been written in the last months.
- [08:00]
C
Absolutely, it could have. In fact, Bill and I are getting a little bit older, as you can see, by Bill's gray hair and my attempt to cover gray hair. And we keep joking that we need somebody else to write this paper because we're not going to be able to write this paper for very long unless the Democrats really have a, you know, have a change in how they look at themselves and how they understand the nation. One of the things that was happening back then, by the way, was it was like a slow realignment. We'd never quite seen this before. What was going on in the south especially was that members of Congress were changing parties. In the 70s and in the 80s, we had a sort of regular drumbeat of people changing political parties because they didn't think they could. They really belonged in the national Democratic Party anymore. And that should have been a warning sign that something was happening. And of course, now the Southern states are almost completely Republican, almost at every level.
- [09:04]
A
This is a familiar historical story. Now, Democrats, as late as the 1960s, inherited the new Deal coalition, which was a somewhat ungainly coalition of Northern and to some extent Western liberals on the one hand, and Southern conservatives, especially conservative on racial issues. As the familiar story goes, the civil rights movement blew that up. But it didn't happen all at once. As Elaine said, there was a steady drift in the south away from the Democratic Party, in part through people transferring themselves from one party to the other, and in part through a series of defeats of Southern Democrats at the hands of Republicans. And at the same time, the liberal Republicans who were so important in politics all but disappeared. They became Democrats. And this realignment, it turned out, had a series of negative consequences for Democrats, including the fact that Democrats lost control in many states, small states, but who elect just as many senators as big states, leaving us with an increasingly steep hill to climb to get to a majority in the Senate. And that hill has only gotten steeper in recent years.
- [10:40]
B
Another parallel to some of the things that are very much in the conversation today, but that surprised me reading in a paper written at the time, was your stance on economic issues. As the quote that I cited indicates, you worried that perhaps Democrats were not talking enough about rewarding individual initiative and weren't aspirational enough, didn't talk enough about people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum really hoping to live the American dream. That didn't surprise me so much. But I always remembered the famous phrase coined, I think, by James Carville, it's the economy, stupid. About the 1990-election. And that's not what your paper sounded like. You were making the argument against those who argued that it's all about the economy, that actually cultural issues were just as important even at the time. Tell us about why cultural issues were so important even in the run up to what turned out to be Bill Clinton's election in 1992, and why at the time that was widely overlooked.
- [11:38]
A
I'll just take a first crack at it. Elaine. And I came to regard the cultural issues as. As a kind of credibility threshold. That is to say, unless people thought that you shared their sentiments and values, they wouldn't really give you a hearing for your economic message. And there is a kind of economic fundamentalism that's at work in a lot of progressive thinking. And to use familiar language, the idea is that economics is the base and that culture is the superstructure, and that economics does a lot more to shape the culture than culture does to shape the general mindset of the electorate. And the more we thought about that, the more we concluded that that was just wrong, that that might be true for progressive intellectuals, but by and large it was not true for average Americans. And that a party that didn't understand that was a party that was going to get into trouble even if it had a more credible economic message than what we had in 1988, which was nothing.
- [12:54]
C
Yeah, and it's very simple. Look, the cultural issues are emotional. They scare people, they frighten people, okay? It's something they don't like emotion will always trump intellect to understand the economic issues, sort of an intellectual process. Well, okay, what will stop inflation? Will this stop inflation? Will that stop inflation? You cannot, in fact imagine getting an economic message through an electorate that is terrified by a changing culture that they don't understand and they don't agree with. And it's just human behavior.
- [13:36]
B
Yeah. Once again it strikes me that what you call a kind of threshold of credibility I've talked about in a contemporary context as sort of permission to speak, that yes, Democrats may hope to win elections on the economy, but in order to do so, they need to at least make it clear to people that they care about their interests, that they don't judge them, that they have a basically fundamentally similar view of the world. And if you fail on that, it's not going to listen to economic policy message. So again, a sort of striking parallel, I think. So that's been enough wind up. Very, very interesting to see those parallels. But you've also written widely and extensively about the situation where Democrats find themselves in today. So draw out those similarities. A lot of people are saying Kamala Harris inherited the nomination late in the game. She had a lot of headwinds like the high inflation, which was a problem to incumbents generally. Nobody could have won under those circumstances. Therefore, as Ken Martin, the newly elected chair of the DNC said, we have a right message. There's nothing really we have to change. Therefore, as Tim Wolfs, Kamala Harris running mate, remember him, said recently, the problem is that we didn't defend Wokeness and Di enough. We need to double down on those issues and that's how we're going to win in 2028. Why are Ken Martin, why is Tim Waltz wrong in your estimation?
- [14:57]
C
Well, let's go with the three big issues, right? Inflation, immigration and the cultural issues. In this instance, they were encapsulated the war about wokeness over transgender issues, inflation. The administration was simply slow, too slow to talk about inflation. And it was a reflection of something that we haven't spoken about yet, which is new to this election, which is that in the years since we wrote the first politics of evasion, the class basis of the American parties has flipped on its head. And the Democrats are now the party of college educated and well to do people. And the Republican Party is the party of people who are not college educated and are not very well to do. The way I put it to people who understand it is, look, the college educated people will walk through the grocery stores without adding up what's going into their grocery carts. Everybody else, especially in times of inflation, will be adding up in their head or sometimes on their phone or whatever. Whatever. Exactly what's going into their grocery carts, because those things matter. We miss that completely. Immigration is both an economic issue, but it is a cultural issue. It runs deep into fear, fear of the other, fear of losing, fear of, you know, being taken over by people you don't know. And, of course, Trump played on that absolutely beautifully. And then the transgender issue, which the Trump campaign used as a sledgehammer through the. Through last five weeks of the campaign, running it every single time, they could also evoked fear of the unknown. Somehow people were convinced that something was going to happen to their children because other children had. Or other adolescents had gender dysphoria. I mean, the whole thing, right. The whole thing operated on an emotional level which the Democrats did not understand and missed and completely missed. And their policy prescriptions were neither here nor there, because each one of those things had an emotional impact on voters, and it was really a shame.
- [17:21]
A
Well, it's hard to improve on Elaine's summary, but just a couple of footnotes. First of all, while I absolutely agree that the cultural issues are deeply emotional, I think we should not forget about the emotional component of economic issues. And this is what all of the economists that Elaine and I associate with just didn't get for many Americans. And we saw this very, very clearly during the Carter inflation period. Inflation is a metaphor for things getting out of control. It's also a metaphor for unfairness, which is deeply resented because people think that they have earned what they get, and then inflation is taking it away from them. So that generates a deep sense of being wronged by forces that you don't understand. So that's point number one, that when the Biden administration, you know, restated favorable statistics over and over again, jobs, gdp, you name it, all of that was true, but it was not relevant. Right? Because as a matter of fact, it sounded evasive. And people resent being told that the problems that they think are the real problems are not really the real problems and that we've solved other problems that are the real problems. That is, that verges on adding insult to injury. The second point I would make is that it wasn't just the overall valence of the party's stance on transgender issues. It was also some of the specific policy positions that the party had taken. We found ourselves in the position of defending transgender women's participation in women's sports. That isn't what the politicians call an 8020 issue. 80% opposed to that and only 20% in favor. You have to think very, very hard before adopting an 8020 position. We also found ourselves in a situation in which we were, we were defending, in effect, what Democrats call gender affirming surgery for minors. And that really gives Americans the willies. We can have a long policy discussion as to whether that's the right or the wrong position, but Americans are willing to give a pass on adults making decisions for themselves. You know, but, you know, performing hard to reverse surgery on 11 year olds and 12 year olds is, I think, viscerally very hard for most people to swallow. So, you know, it was, you know, it was specific policies with which the party was associated, as well as a generally unpopular issue.
- [20:41]
B
Now, one obvious difference between 1989, 1990 and eventually 1992 and today is that George H.W. bush was in power and Democrats had good reason to disagree with some of his policies. And Democrats always have a tendency to say that whatever Republican is in power is somehow dangerous and irresponsible, et cetera. George H.W. bush sort of comes as close to being a moderate establishment Republican as we have in the modern political era. Donald J. Trump is a very, very different beast. He clearly believes that the refutation of Democrats ideological positions is an embrace of Republicans ideological positions, many of which are also 8020 issues on which Republicans are on the losing side. He is attacking democratic institutions in a very different way from anything you could possibly say about George H.W. bush. And of course, he is wreaking havoc, for example, on the economy with, quote, unquote, Liberation Day in a way that a conventional Republican certainly wouldn't. What difference do you think that makes? Does that make a case for those who say this is a different environment? We're not dealing with a strong Republican Party. We're dealing with a deeply ideological project that's going to go off the rails, that's going to make itself unpopular. And so all we need is the oligarchy tour of Bernie Sanders and AOC going around and lambasting Trump as strongly and as vocally as possible. Let's do that rather than getting bogged down in ideological debates where our coalition might splinter and people are gonna be unhappy.
- [22:23]
C
Let me take a first crack at that. I think that one of the things that we say in this recent paper, and we said in the paper 30 some years ago is that one way of dealing with the difference between the two parties is to sit back and wait for the other party to just screw up. Okay? And, you know, that's not a bad strategy. Right now, I mean, Trump does seem to be screwing up pretty big time. He seems to be perhaps leading us into a recession. This tariff stuff is all over the place and I think people are very nervous about it. So, you know, that is a strategy and it certainly has worked. I mean, Bush gave us the Great Recession and that was a big deal. Trump failed at breeding confidence about the pandemic and so we got a Democrat. So, yeah, I mean, we can sit around and not change much and wait for the other party to screw up. The problem with that is that there is never then any lasting progress. It's always this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Because fundamentally, when we're in office, they don't like us, okay? They don't like us. They don't like Democrats. They don't like what Biden was doing. They didn't like what. They didn't like the stuff that was coming, coming out on the cultural side from the Biden administration. They thought that his inflation, he was not sensitive to inflation. And my God, on immigration, I mean, if he had done in 2022 what he did in 2024, which was basically dramatically changing the rules of the road at the border, we would have had an entirely different election. Entirely different election. So, you know, we're at this point where, yeah, we might win, we might take back the house in 2026, we could even win the preside in 2028 if they keep screwing up like this and we're in a recession, et cetera. But that doesn't solve the problem. Right? It only gives us more of this back and forth and back and forth. We still go in with some deep, deep problems.
- [24:28]
B
That seems to me exactly right. In particular, from a perspective of democracy, as long as the Republican Party is run by somebody who is as radical and as anti institutional as Donald Trump and likely his successor is going to share many of those instincts. Democrats don't just need to win an election every now and again in order to pass some policies. They really need to build a big and lasting majority that forces Republicans back to the table, that forces Republicans to moderate so that they actually appeal to a broader set of Americans, and that forces them therefore to give up on some of that extremism. Now, lambasting Trump for being extreme when people mistrust you might be enough because he's the one who's in office and he's more extreme and he's doing lots of bad things, but it's not going to be enough to build that kind of lasting majority. So if you're actually understanding the stakes of this political moment, you need to, A, want to build this more lasting majority, and B, you need to want to maximize your chances in 2028. Anybody might win in 2028 if things go sufficiently off the rails, but to rely on that seems to me to be a mistake. Bill, you wanted to comment on this as well.
- [25:46]
A
You may think, Yasha, that we have only written this paper twice. In fact, we've written it four times. 1989. And then after the 2008 election, where we very unpopularly suggested that Barack Obama could not be the second coming of fdr, however much pundits thought he could be. But the third time we wrote this paper was in February of 2022. And in that paper, we not only argued that President Biden's immigration policy was on the road to ruin for his administration and for the party, we also said what's looming in the wings is not the second coming of George H.W. bush, it's the second coming of Donald Trump. And we said the second time will be worse than the first. And therefore, it is the principal political duty of the Biden administration to conduct itself in such a way as to minimize the chances that Donald Trump would ever darken the halls of the Oval Office again. And that's what we said then. That's what we meant. And it was the truth, damn it. Right. That was their prime duty, not pursuing various avenues that seemed. Seemed sensible to people who had spent their lives in progressive think tanks, you know, who were not scarce on the ground in the Biden, in. In the Biden administration. But here's the clinching point. The Washington Post Ipsos Reuters poll taken just a couple of weeks ago was really bad news for Donald Trump, but the news was just as bad for the Democratic Party. You know, when people were asked, well, who do you trust more to solve the nation's problems, Donald Trump or the Democrats? Despite everything that has happened in the first 105 days of the Trump administration, it was Trump 37, Democrats 30. We can fool ourselves into thinking that there's a sort of a political hydraulic at work here, so that if Trump goes down, Democrats necessarily go up. But that's not true. In fact, Trump is in the process of losing the credibility that Democrats had already lost. And I don't want to think about what 2028 looks like. If we have two political parties who are viewed as not credible by the American people, that will be an invitation to political chaos. Which means that the most important task of the Democratic party over the next three years is to organize a debate that leads up to a coherent new offer to the center of the American electorate. That is our job, and that's the way we ought to think of the task of party renewal over the next three years. And it doesn't mean anointing anybody. It means setting the stage for the most robust debate that Democrats have had in a generation about what the party requires and even more important, what the country needs at this particular point.
- [29:28]
B
So let's go a little bit deeper into what party renewal would actually look like and entail. And I want to do that in two steps. The first step is what is the actual substance? And then perhaps later we can talk about what would the process look like? How is it that parties actually do renew themselves? But let's stick to the substance question first. What is a message that Democrats can give on the economy which is true to their long standing ideals, which tries to make America a more equal place, that tries to give more opportunity to those who are locked out of it at the moment, that tries to give more decent and humane lives to those who are poor, those who are struggling, those who are worried about accessing healthcare or paying the bills at the end of the month? And what is the message on culture, which stands in the tradition of civil rights, which stands in the tradition of wanting to be an inclusive and diverse country that treats everybody with fairness and respect, irrespective of who they are, but that doesn't end up on the wrong side of issues that are 80, 20 in favor of the more conservative position that perhaps are wrong on the merits, where perhaps, for example, we end up being uncritical about certain medical procedures that a number of independent bodies in the United Kingdom and other European countries have concluded may ultimately harm those which are subjected to them? How do we formulate those coherent messages?
- [30:48]
C
Listen, let me just say I don't know the actual answer to that, but I know how to think about it, okay? On the cultural side, we have to go all the way back to Bill Clinton, who was a genius at this stuff. And when he ran as a New Democrat, he had various formulations which said to the electorate, yes, I am a Democrat and I have the Democratic Party's values, but I understand your critique and I will act on it. So the line that was as popular as you can get in a commercial in the 1992 campaign was end welfare as we know it, that said to the people who were very, very distrustful of the welfare system and thought it was giving their tax dol To a bunch of lazy people who didn't want to work, it said, we get you, we get you. We understand what you feel about this. However, we're going to fix that. And we're going to keep a welfare system. We're not going to let people starve in the streets. We're going to keep a welfare system, but it's going to be a fair welfare system. And that welfare reform, by the way, has not been undone in 30 plus years. He hit the right, the right note there. I think that we need to look for that when the issues come to, when it's the transgender issues with whatever the new cultural issues are that come up. We need to come up with that third wave formulation that Bill Clinton was so very, very good at. And I think it's possible, but I don't have it right now. I don't have the answer exactly right now, but I think that's the way we look. Remember that End welfare as we know it had the same oomph in the 92 campaign that the tagline she's for they them we're for you had in the 2024 campaign. Same oomph. They ran it. They saw how it moved voters. Whenever they were in trouble, they ran the same ad. So that's what we're looking for. I don't have it. I wish we had Frank Luntz working for us, not for the Republicans, because he's so very, he's a Republican pollster who's very, very good at the wordsmithing part art of politics. But we need something that is in that basket.
- [33:15]
A
I would add that we need a new way of thinking about the economics of upward mobility that focuses in very concrete ways on what people are now not getting and don't have access to. Let me give you an example. The classic path to upward mobility in the United States is home ownership. But we have an entire Generation now of 35 year old adults who've been renting all their lives. But now they have two kids and are looking at problems of education and good places for kids to have access to parks and other amenities. So they're looking to move out of that rental apartment into their first home. They can't buy it. They simply can't buy it. There are lots of homes on the market for people like Elaine and me. But if you're a young couple making the median family income, say $85,000 a year looking to buy a home, you probably can't because the multiple of the median home price relative to the median income has soared from about 2 to about 7 over the past 30 years. That is not just an economic statistic. That's a mobility blocker. And we have a shortage of millions of homes. That should be the first homes for people trying not only to move out of the apartment, but move up the economic ladder. What are we going to do about that? I hope that there will be a task force over the next two years of Democrats who are willing to throw away the old playbook and just ask themselves, okay, you know, we have the greatest technology in the world. We're not a crowded little country. We have vast stretches of territory. What the heck can we do to generate 3 or 4 million new homes fast that young people can buy? And I would recommend as a heuristic, going through the basic building blocks of an upwardly mobile young couple's life and asking, what can we do consistent with the way markets operate, consistent with government's well known flaws, to at least make lives easier for them, if not altogether solve these problems. Because it only takes two or three ideas like that to capture the public's imagination. They won't respond to abstract theories of macroeconomics or a new third way economics, et cetera. But if those abstractions can be given life and definition by concrete solutions to key problems, then I think we'll have something to talk about. And to the best of my knowledge, in 2024, we didn't have anything like that to talk about. And people sensed it that, you know, that they would get the status quo if they voted for Kamala Harris and they preferred taking a chance to voting for the certainty of the status quo.
- [36:59]
B
I'm somewhat torn on this issue. There's obviously a larger debate about an abundance agenda. And on the substance, I very much agree with it. It is absurd that housing prices are as high as they are not just in the most densely populated parts of Manhattan, which are always going to be particular desirable and of a particular economic opportunity. And so it's natural that they also command a certain amount of economic premium. But in places that really could very easily build the additional housing that would allow people to partake in their economic opportunities, I'm particularly struck by certain affluent small towns in New England or in parts of the Pacific Northwest that are just surrounded by fields, surrounded by woods, surrounded by places where you could very, very easily build housing, but because of long standing zoning laws and other restrictions, it is just impossible to do that. And that has a really bad impact on the quality of life of people in those communities. If you don't stand or inherit a home in those places, you cannot afford to live in the place you grew up. And if you talk to anybody who works in a coffee shop there, who works in a restaurant there, they commute for hours, for at least an hour in order to get there, because that's where they can afford to live. And it obviously also has has a bad impact on the dynamism of the American economy as a whole, because people from other poorer parts of the country can't afford to go move there. As a question of substance, I agree with you completely. As an electoral strategy, I'm much less certain because most Americans own homes and for a very significant share of Americans, that is the primary source of wealth they have. And so they might want to trade up to a nicer home. They might be worried about their children not being able to afford home homes. They're also really worried about the value of their specific home going down, since that is where a lot of the net worth is bound up. People may want to have more economic opportunity, but they're also really worried about the character of their neighborhoods in ways that are sometimes somewhat puzzling to me. But it is a very, very life concern for people. In an electoral battle between the Yimbys, the Yes in my backyard crowd that I very much see or see as my ideological compatriots and the Nimbys and not my backyard crowd. I don't want to allow this evil developer to come in and build a three story home that might allow more families that perhaps a little bit less affluent to move in our neighborhood and perhaps there'll be a little bit more traffic ideologically. I know which side I'm on in terms of showing the democrats can govern 20 years down the road. I know that it's a winning proposition to actually make sure that California is a thriving state, not just Texas. In terms of the next election, I'm much less certain about whether or not that is a winning proposition. What do you both think?
- [39:47]
A
I am not in favor of federal preemption of state and local zoning laws. I think that's the wrong way to go about this. Suppose you are trying to run forward and there's a wall stretching out in front of you. And you can either run straight into the wall or you can look for a way of running around it. And I don't think any more than you do that Democrats should be in the business of going into suburbs as they now exist and forcing people to place the value of their houses at risk. But that's not the way we have to do it right. As you yourself pointed out, you know, there are vast stretches of land in and around major cities that are not currently occupied. And we just need to think more creatively, it seems to me, as a party and as a country about the way of bringing back to young couples the kind of opportunity that they enjoyed at the end of the Second World War. Is that Mission Impossible? I don't think so. But it's the problem we have to think about.
- [40:59]
C
I think there's a bigger problem. I mean, I think this is a huge problem. I think there's a bigger one. And it's the problem that Bill and a guy named Mark Murrow who works at Brookings talked about in a paper several years ago. And it's about the forgotten places. There are places in the country where the engine of economics, dynamism just doesn't exist. They've just gone away. There's forgotten towns all over the country. There's places where there aren't any jobs. And the kids who manage to get out of very mediocre high schools but doing well, they move. They move. They leave their parents there and they move. Okay? And they move to places. I mean, right here in Arlington, Virginia. I mean, there are apartments and houses all over the place. The prices are sky high. And there's young people here. There's young people and they've come here. Why? Because I can look out my window and I can see Boeing and all sorts of other big companies, not to mention Amazon, okay, right here. So the concentration of economic activity and high and good jobs has created a, a problem that we never really had before. You know, if you read old novels from the 19th century, the towns. The guy who owned the factory lived in the town where the factory was, right? He lived on a hill. He lived in a big house. There's lots of drama written about those class differences within the towns these days. The guy who owns the factory lives in Manhattan or lives in LA or someplace else. They don't live in the towns. And so let me just say as a member of the party that cares about people who are in bad economic circumstances, I don't think there's any easy answers to this one. I really don't. Now maybe you could sort of do some tax things to encourage businesses to move there. But look, businesses don't move to places where the workforce has been decimated and they just won't. So this is a problem that I think Democrats have to think about because we're not going to win back the Ohio's of the world. And Ohio is perhaps the poster child of this problem. We're not going to win them back until we have an economic proposal that says we can give you economic growth in a way that you have not had it since the 1970s and 1980s. And that, I think is a big one.
- [43:46]
A
I think it's an interesting question. Which state is the closest to the symbol of the party's problems? And so let me just pose the following question. Is it Ohio or is it Florida? Those are two states that have moved out of the Democrats reach over the past 15 years, right? I mean, Obama won both of those states at least once, but now they are way down on the Democrats list. Why has Florida, so to speak, gone south? And the answer, at least to a first approximation, is that we lost touch with Hispanic voters in Florida, as indeed we did across the country. Now, Elaine said something 15 years ago based on her ethnic heritage, which has turned out to be prophetic, and that is that Hispanics would be the Italians of the 21st century. And that is exactly the way things are working out. They are culturally moderate, they're entrepreneurial. They are twice as likely to start small businesses as other groups. If the Democratic Party is seen as the party in touch with the private sector at all, it is seen as being in touch with big business, but not small business. And if you're talking about upward mobility, small business is the path for many, many people and include especially aspiring minorities, recent immigrants who have a tradition of strong families and therefore can create small businesses based on pooled family labor that provides all sorts of advantages. Question for the Democratic Party, what are we doing? What can we do to make it easier for these aspiring entrepreneurs to do their business and to move up to expand their well being? We will have an opportunity to try out that message because as we're finding out from the newspaper every day, the tariffs are a problem for big business. They are catastrophe for small business, many of which have already begun closing, closing their doors. I mean. So I think that there is a major political intellectual opportunity for the Democratic Party over the next two years in preparation for the Democratic, for the, for the presidential primaries to ask itself new questions that it should have been asking for the past 10 or 20 years, but hasn't, but must now if it wants to regain its relevance as a national party.
- [46:54]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the good fight. In the rest of this conversation, Elaine, Bill and I talk about what it would actually take for Democrats to reinvent themselves along the lines that they propose. Is that possible for a party that is currently in opposition to do. Insofar as it hinges on the outcome of the 2028 primaries, aren't we more likely to end up with AOC than with a centrist reformer? And to what extent is the analogy between 1989 and today really helpful? Isn't there a danger that we're overemphasizing the similarities between these two moments? To listen to this part of the the Conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please support the work we do, and obviously it means you'll get ad free access to all bonus episodes. To all bonus parts of conversations, and all these other benefits, please go to jasia mong.sapstein.com thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading 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
- [48:27]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.