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- [00:00]
A
You said, rightly, that the idea of freedom is, and has been for a very long time the central political value in our political discourse. And that's really important. Strategically, whoever manages to win the struggle to appropriate and use this idea more effectively is likely to win the political argument.
- [00:28]
B
Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl Podcast. I'm your host, Lee McGowan. Let's get into it. Well, today is election day in America, and if you're listening to this on November 4th and you haven't already voted, please get out there immediately and have your voice heard. There are 52,000 elections across the country today, and as the Republican Party refuses to reopen the federal government and the president abandons our Constitution, it is essential we use every opportunity we have to vote against this administration and the party that enables it and throw sand in the gears of this rising autocracy. This is a pivotal moment in our country's history. But instead of being scared and depressed, I want us to embrace hope and talk about what we could be rather than what we are. So today we'll be having a conversation with Alex Zakaris, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont who has long argued that profound inequality in power, wealth, and status has fundamentally undermined the American social contract. And in his new book, Freedom for what a Liberal Society Could Be, he explores what it would mean to extend the liberal promise of freedom to everyone on equal terms and how it could actually transform our economy and our politics. So without further ado, please welcome my guest professor, author, and big picture thinker, Alex Zakaris. Welcome, Professor Zakaris, thanks so much for having me.
- [01:46]
A
It's a pleasure.
- [01:47]
B
You just wrote this book about freedom for all at a time when the country really feels like it's moving towards freedom for very few. Right. So tell me why you felt called to write this book and what it's really about.
- [02:01]
A
I felt called to write this book because liberal ideals and institutions are in crisis right now, not just in this country, but across the world. And I think we need as many people stepping forward as we can to offer a sort of clear, principled defense of liberal institutions. And let me just step back, actually, and say a little bit about what liberalism means, because it's right in the title of the book. When we hear the term liberal in our ordinary political conversation, we often use it to mean the left, right. The more liberal you are, so the farther you fall on the left of the political spectrum. And it's important to see that that's not the meaning of the term that I'll be using today. When historians and political scientists talk about the term liberalism, they're really describing a political outlook that's united by, I would say, a shared goal on the one hand and a shared set of strategies on the other. The goal is simply freedom. Liberals try to create conditions under which people can live freely, and liberals tend to value personal freedom above all. So we think about freedom of expression and freedom of association, the freedom to love who you want to love and to work and own property and such. And then liberals tend to agree on a set of strategies, and these will be familiar because of the strategies that would be. Authoritarians hate to try to achieve those goals. And they include constitutions and individual rights overseen by independent judiciaries and checks and balances and democratic accountability, economic markets, a free media.
- [03:26]
B
Right.
- [03:26]
A
So this is like a raft of institutions that liberals tend to agree on. And one thing that's important to see about liberalism defined in that way is that it's kind of a big tent. Right. So Ronald Reagan on the right falls within the liberal tradition, and Franklin Roosevelt on the left falls within the liberal tradition. And they disagree about a whole lot of things, but they agree about those things that I just said.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah. And I mean, ultimately, when you think about people saying, you know, the one thing that Americans can all agree on is freedom, that seems to be their number one priority. Like when you put words out there, freedom actually ranks higher than America itself as a word. And yet we're watching so many freedoms right now being taken away in the name of America. And you think, well, this is completely antithetical to how the country was supposed to be functioning. And yet we're watching it happen because somehow people have made being liberal a dirty word.
- [04:20]
A
That's absolutely right. I mean, there's been, over my lifetime in this country and throughout the west, really a broad consensus in support of liberal institutions. And it's really in the last decade or so that that consensus has started to unravel. The leading threat, obviously, has been the rise of a sort of militant populist, anti liberal. Right. It's happening in Europe, it's happening in many parts of the world, and it's certainly happened to the. The Republican Party in this country. So much of the intellectual energy behind the Republican Party right now is coming from people who proudly describe themselves as anti liberal or illiberal. All right. I certainly don't need to tell your viewers that we're witnessing escalating assaults on almost all of the fundamental liberal institutions. Checks and balances, the rule of Law, Democratic accountability, First Amendment rights. So, yeah, we're in a moment of real crisis. And it's a crisis that's been precipitated by the rise and transformation of the Republican Party into, in many ways, an anti liberal party right now.
- [05:18]
B
Right. And then you wrote this book, Freedom for All, with the goal of doing what?
- [05:24]
A
Yeah, so one of the concerns that I've had about people who are stepping forward and defending Lib in this moment is that many of them are striking and have struck a kind of defensive tone. And that's entirely understandable. We're confronting, as I've just said, these grave and imminent threats. But the worry that I have about that is that it's not enough. We as liberals also need to be able to point the way towards a future that we want. We need to be able to describe in ambitious and clear and principled terms, a future that's very different than the future that we have now. A future that really speaks, among other things, to, to people's deep economic anxieties in this country, deep anxieties about growing inequality, of wealth, of power, of opportunity. And liberals aren't always doing the best job of doing that. And so part of what I'm setting out to do in this book is to show how the liberal tradition, and I should say, you know, I've said that liberalism is a big tent. The kind of liberalism I defend in the book is very much a kind of left liberalism, the style of fdr. And I'm trying to recapture and sort of articulate that vision for our moment and show that liberalism is not just important because it'll save us from oppression now, but it's also a tradition that can point us towards a significantly more egalitarian, fair and humane future for our society.
- [06:49]
B
Like you're saying, it's a big tent. There's a lot of people that are going to want that. But I think we have to be honest with ourselves that this country has never really been just and fair for everyone. You know, I think about myself when I say the Pledge of Allegiance in general. Now, I was raised in Canada, right? So we didn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. But when I got down here and you know, they started saying it at my son's school and that kind of thing. I always sort of struggled with the, with freedom and justice for all, because clearly not everyone believed that. And then as we moved into the Donald Trump years, I used to say all a whole lot louder just to kind of make a point for those who would prefer freedom for some at the expense of others. And I'm seeing that it's almost a gleeful taking of people's freedoms that I'm watching among our fellow Americans right now. I'm thinking about when those SNAP benefits were scheduled to be taken away and the amount of people on social media who were sort of celebrating that, like starving Americans was something to be celebrated because their team was doing it. And I thought, where are we and how far have we come?
- [07:50]
A
Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. There's been a struggle for the soul of liberalism raging in this country for quite some time, as between those who, who are serious about everyone having an equal claim to freedom and those who aren't. And this struggle goes all the way back to the American founding and rages through the debates on abolition and early feminism and through the civil rights movement and through the FDR era. Right. I see these as kind of recurrent moments in this struggle, on the one hand, to broaden the scope and accessibility of freedom for everyone. And on the other hand, as you say, to take pleasure in denying it to some. I certainly agree with you and I see us locked in that struggle right now.
- [08:27]
B
It's quite astounding, actually, because I always say that the people that are in charge now, the Republican Party as it stands, because I don't really think they're classic Republicans, I think we're looking at mega, but they are sort of bolstered and organized by people with a very long term plan. The people from the Federalist Society, the people from the Heritage foundation, the people who had a long term plan, be it that they wanted to overturn workers rights or civil rights or women's rights. When Roe got overturned a couple of years ago with the Dobbs decision, that was a 40 year plan come to fruition, was people who said, we don't want this and we're willing to wait and work and stack the courts till we get what we want. It's long term planning come to a head, I think, is what we're watching. And I think it's impossible not to acknowledge that there is obviously a racial hierarchy in America, that we have a massive problem with patriarchy. And now we're talking about reversing things like LGBTQ rights as well. So we've got women being pushed back in traditional roles, we're back into racial profiling, we're currently rounding up brown people in our streets, teaching black history. Gay marriage is back on the chopping block at the Supreme Court. And then to top it all off, we now have this Rise of anti intellectualism. Right. These attacks on educational institutions. You're a professor, you have to see this because it seems to me that a divided, uneducated public is certainly a lot easier to control than a cooperative, critical thinking population. What are your thoughts on that?
- [09:57]
A
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts yet. So a lot of what you said is you can tell me. No. So I mean, certainly we've seen in this administration a kind of extraordinary attack on expertise, whether it's expertise among climate researchers, public health professionals, by extension, an attack on universities, on meteorology, on. And this is sort of a classic part of the strategy that authoritarians employ. Experts are people who, who hold some power. Power to expose lies and outright fabrications, which would be. Authoritarians rely on that, which the Trump administration relies on profoundly. Right. And so, yeah, so you've seen an attempt to discredit and delegitimize experts across our society. And that plays into the sort of consolidation of power that we're seeing and plays into the attack on not just free media, but independent civil society organizations that are repositories of expertise, among other things, and universities among those, are part of any sort of healthy information ecosystem in a liberal society. And when you look at places where illiberal leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary have succeeded in taking power, you've seen a sort of concerted effort to tamp down, crush and bring these kinds of civil society organizations and the experts associated with them to heal. For sure.
- [11:18]
B
Yeah. And they all seem to be following a very similar playbook, a sort of Putin style playbook of taking the media, consolidating the rich people to your benefit, silencing dece. Because I think Orban's kind of following that. You see them doing that in Belarus. You've got Russia and China kind of collaborating, even though they're not. They don't have the exact same goals. They both have the exact same plans for themselves, which is sort of dominant power that's never ending. And then you've got people like Trump joining that group. But I think that it's this downplaying of the importance of education and intellect that creates a more pliable society, a society that doesn't ask questions or challenge authority. And then I think about a number of people who have made the argument that liberalism itself failed to address the problem of things like racial hierarchies or racism itself. And by ignoring it, they kind of entrench the problem. And then that's now coming up to bite us. Do you notice that? Do you have any Thoughts on that? Because I feel like you sort of speak to that a bit in your book.
- [12:20]
A
Absolutely. Let me step back for just a moment and talk about some of the economic changes that have happened in this country over the last 45 years. Years. And that have been justified by a kind of what I call a sort of rogue version of liberalism we sometimes hear described as neoliberalism. That is a version of liberalism that really places a great deal of emphasis on the free market. Above all, that emphasizes deregulation, privatization as much as possible, shrinking the scope of government, reducing the size of public investments in things like education and healthcare, attacking organized labor and so undermining the bargaining leverage of workers, all in the name of economic efficiency.
- [12:58]
B
Could I ask you a question?
- [12:58]
A
Go ahead.
- [12:59]
B
So we were talking about liberalism earlier and how that's a big tent and you have everyone from Ronald Reagan to FDR in that tent. Then if we talk about neoliberalism, what you're talking about is like limiting scopes of government, limiting things. That is more Reagan esque. Right. That is more what we think of as the conservative view of liberalism. Is that correct?
- [13:20]
A
Yes, that's absolutely right. So if you think about this. Yeah. As I said, like FDR and Reagan, as part of this liberal conversation, with Reagan's election in 1980, you saw a real sort of ascendancy in this country of what I'm now calling a neoliberal outlook, which captured not just the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party under Clinton for sure. Right. I mean, Clinton was leading the way in accelerating free trade globally and deregulating the financial industry, among other things. Right. So this has been a paradigm that's become dominant, that was dominant in our country for some four decades. And that really paved the way for the crisis that we're in right now. And I spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about that. So you asked about race, and that's part of the story. There has always been on the kind of right side of the liberal spectrum a version of liberalism that's. That's not very much interested in realizing greater equality and that's. That's mostly interested in reducing the size and scope of government, turning business loose and scuttling the kinds of major investments that we would need to, among other things, correct. Racial hierarchy in this country. All right, so you mentioned racial hierarchy. I mean, the numbers just jump off the page if you're paying any attention. Right. The average wealth of black families in this country is 1/10 the average wealth of white families in this country.
- [14:39]
B
And that's systemic. People need to understand that's absolutely systemic. That is not because black people work one tenth the amount. It's because it's everything. If you go back in time, it's that when you came home from the war and the GI Bill allowed soldiers to buy houses and go to college, that wasn't offered to black soldiers because even though they could have used the GI Bill, a lot of colleges weren't accepting them. So then they couldn't buy houses, so they couldn't build wealth. Or they built suburbs out in certain areas outside of cities, but only white families could move there. So as those houses grew in wealth and those families could grow their wealth, that was not offered to black families who were redlined into their certain districts. So it is something that we drew into our institutions. When people talk about institutionalized racism, when people talk about crt, when they were throwing that around a lot, this kind of concept of we made it more difficult for certain races. And then we blamed them for not being where we are, where they had no chance to actually get there. And then if we don't address that, then it's understandable that people would say, well, you guys are missing the boat every single time. Like, we were not where we're supposed to be because these institutions didn't meet us there. And now we're making the institutions even harder and harder for anyone to benefit from. So we're coming into the holiday season, and this is when we get dressed up, up. And you might not feel like it right now because everything is depressing, but I think people are really going to need celebrations this year. And part of celebrations is what we wear. Which is why I want to talk to you today about Honey Love. 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I am genuinely considering giving it to people as a Christmas gift. Laundry Detergent have you heard of those favorite things parties where you bring two of your favorite things and then all the people at the party get to choose things they want to try? I feel like laundry sauce would be great for that kind of party. And look, I get it, it's detergent. But I'm telling you, this laundry detergent is so awesome. It looks cute on your shelf, it does an amazing job at cleaning and it smells incredible and there are so many scents you can choose from that it really becomes personal to pick out the right laundry sauce for you. My favorite is still the Indonesian patchouli, but for fall and winter we're doing more Siberian pine and I ordered my husband whose whole family is in the Pacific Northwest, the new limited release Oregon Mint. I only buy the big boxes now. I keep them on the shelf so you can actually see them because they look really sharp. But Laundry Sauce is the full experience. I use their detergent pods but they also have scent boosters and dryer sheets and fabric conditioners all designed to infuse your laundry with high end fragrance fight stains and make the entire process less horrendous. There really is something about this high end detergent that elevates the experience. So this holiday season turn your routine into a ritual with Laundry Sauce. During their Black Friday Cyber Monday signature sales, you can save up to 40%, get $75 in free gifts and free shipping at laundry sauce.com politicsgirltrain this is the perfect time to treat yourself or gift the world's most luxurious detergent to someone you love, even if that person is you. Trust me, your laundry has never smelled so good. Laundry sauce.com politicsgirl20 now we're making the institutions even harder and harder for anyone to benefit from.
- [19:31]
A
And as a result of those structural injustices that powerfully shaped our public policy throughout the 20th century, Black youth are way more likely to grow up in neighborhoods blighted by poverty, in food deserts, in polluted places. Right. Schools are still highly segregated by race. I mean, we really lost that struggle after the civil rights movement. And schools with high concentrations of minority students tend to have significantly lower levels of per capita funding, lower teacher salaries, larger class sizes. Right. I mean, we can just keep going down the list. I mean, you know, we could talk about the criminal justice system. We haven't even started there, right. That, that black people in this country are far more likely to be pulled over by police, more likely to be arrested, more likely to wrongfully convicted, more likely to suffer police brutality. So. Yes, and to come back to this conversation about liberalism, right? There are those who would say, well, wait a minute, we want a colorblind society. Isn't liberalism about colorblindness protecting everyone's rights equally and not giving preferential treatment? I mean, we've heard this from the Roberts court right now, but seen against the background of these cumulative systemic injustices which have produced these deep patterns of heritable inequality, it's unconscionable to now say, well, wait minute, you can't make any investments that might correct these imbalances. You can't provide preferential access to loans for minority owned businesses, for example, which have suffered discrimination at the hands of federal government for decades. It looks really dishonest. And again, it's a sort of abdication of the fundamental liberal aspiration to realize freedom for all.
- [21:07]
B
Yeah. And I think that's why I think a major idea in your book, and correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be that we've broken the social contract in this country, that we've allowed our economy to be exploited. We've turned our corporations into these kind of tyrannical overlords. We've given them so much money and power to then bankroll our politicians who then more or less support an authoritarian style of government because it works for them and really only for them. Would you mind expanding on that a bit? This idea of our broken social contract?
- [21:38]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So we've talked already a little bit about the rise of this kind of Reaganism beginning in the 1980s. Neoliberalism, depending on what you'd like to call it.
- [21:48]
B
Market first capitalism.
- [21:49]
A
Market first capitalism. The effects over the last four decades have been really stark. Right. Inequality is as high as it's ever been in American history. As high now as it was during the infamous Gilded Age. The age of robber barons, right? Which nobody looks back on as a good time in our history.
- [22:05]
B
Boy, I wish we could have that. It's only the Gilded Age TV show that we watch. And we're watching the rich people in that.
- [22:12]
A
Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I mean, wage growth has stagnated. Yes, wage growth has stagnated for working class Americans during this period, even as it's skyrocketed for the wealthiest. I mean, costs have risen sharply so that, you know, I mean, housing and healthcare and education is less and less affordable, not just for poor families, but middle class families. We have a number of credible studies now showing that rates of economic mobility in the United States. I mean, this is something we always used to pride ourselves in, right? That Americans tolerate a measure of inequality, but we expect wider, widespread economic opportunity and mobility. Well, that's no longer true. It turns out now that if you're born poor in Denmark, you're much more likely to make it into the top quintile of income earners than you are in the United States. But in a way, what's most telling to me out of all of this is the research about economic insecurity. People's incomes are more volatile now, their jobs less secure from one year to the next. If you look at things like mortgage foreclosure rates and evictions and personal bankruptcies, I mean, these are way up for middle class families as well as for poor families over the last several decades. So this is just not what our society was supposed to be. Americans have, as I say, tolerated a measure of inequality, but they've always expected at the same time that with hard work and saving, you could get ahead. You could buy a house, you could send your kids to college, you could afford to live where you worked, you could get health care. Right. You could enjoy a measure of economic security. That sort of understanding, which I describe as the sort of implicit social contract which is really frayed and eroded for so many millions of people. And, you know, the political right has been quite effective in our moment in harnessing the accumulated alienation of working class folks over the last several decades. And the Democratic Party has not been as effective in speaking to and harnessing that anxiety. So I really worry that, that, that it's not just that this metastasizing inequality has created really difficult conditions for a lot of people, difficult economic conditions for a huge number of American families, but it's also fed a growing disillusionment with our political institutions. I mean, we've seen cratering approval ratings for American government across all the branches right now, partly because people just don't see it as capable of addressing this deeply failed felt crisis. And again, then, this makes people, as you were saying, vulnerable to demagogic appeals by people who are, you know, coming in and promising to blow things up and start over. In a sense, yeah.
- [24:51]
B
I mean, the concept of America being a place where anyone from anywhere can make it if they just work hard enough hasn't been true for a long time for most people. And Trump tapped into that by saying, it's not your fault, fault. It's not your fault, you can't make it. And then he uses a lot of blame. It's these people. It's these people. It's these people. When the irony, of course, being that the Democrats can't sell it properly, but they're the ones trying to make things more fair. They're the ones right now with the government closed, trying to fight. So you can't keep raising our healthcare premiums, you know, when we're, you know, there's 73 countries in the world that have universal healthcare, and then there's one that doesn't, and that's us. You know what I mean? Like, if you look at the inauguration of Trump's second Trump term and the people that stood behind him on that stage, I look at it and I'm like, it's like they're trying to create a new feudal system, right? Like, these are our aristocrats, you know, these tech bros. And they are out there making billions of dollars, propping each other's companies up. Like, if you look at the stock market, there's about seven companies holding each other up right now. They're all tech companies. And what happens to regular people in that world? What happens if you're building ballrooms and having Great Gatsby parties when people can't feed themselves and people can't, you know, we've been there before. Like you said, it was called the Gilded Age and it went into the. We ended up in the Depression, right? Regular people, if we carry on the way we are, are going to become essentially serfs to these tax oligarchs where we are surveilled by people constantly. We own nothing. It's sort of like the feudalism of the past where there's an aristocracy and then there's the rest of us and we pay tithes to them. We own nothing and we sort of serve at their pleasure. And I think that that's what people don't want, but they don't understand how to stop it from coming. And I think one of the great things in your book is you talk about building this countervailing power in America, a power that's able to stand up and hold these people accountable for, say, destroying our civil rights to their own benefit, or allowing them to poison public discourse by buying all of our media or completely perpetrating our climate crisis. Right, because it serves their financial ends at the expense of our health and safety. So tell me about countervailing power, because what do you mean when you say that? And then how do we create that? Because we definitely need that. Well, it's getting colder, which means it's the perfect time to head to Quint and refresh your wardrobe with pieces that let you look polished, stay warm and save big without compromising on quality. Quint has all the fallacy essentials. 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Tell me about countervailing power, because what do you mean when you say that? And then how do we create that? Because we definitely need that.
- [31:26]
A
First, let me just start by echoing some of the things you said. I mean, we hear a lot about unequal income and wealth in this country, but in many ways unequal power is a more fundamental problem. It lies upstream of unequal income and wealth. And you know, your audience knows this well enough, right? The richest Americans are just in control in this country. They bankroll our parties and our politicians. They pour billions into our elections. I mean in the 20s, 2024 election cycle, 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion of election related expenditures, right? Their lobbyists are teaming around the centers of power. They own our giant media companies and so control the tenor of our public debates all too often. And so, yeah, as a result, ordinary people feel like they've lost access to the levers of power. And so I do think you're right that countervailing power is an important point of emphasis in my book. We need to be laser focused on rebuilding the sort organized citizen power. That is the only way really of pushing back against the accumulated power of oligarchs in this country. And so this has several different dimensions. I think rebuilding the power of organized labor is the first and most important of these. Organized labor has really atrophied in this country. And this is one of the ways, I mean, you mentioned healthcare, but this is another one of the ways in which the US is really an outlier among affluent countries. It used to be in this 1960s that a third of American workers were unionized. It's now around 10%, 6% of private sector workers. And that's just, you know, that that's way lower than it is in many other societies. And it's both, it, it prevents workers from bargaining collectively and earning fair wages. Unionized workers earn better wages, they have better benefits, they have better vacation policies, they have better satisfaction at work. But it also has really undermined the political power of working people. I mean, unions were one of the key vectors through which ordinary people could voice heard, have a seat at the table politically. If you go to places like northern Europe, in the Nordic countries, 60 plus percent of people are unionized and 80% of people are covered by collective bargaining. So that's one of the real differences. But it's also drawing on the power of organized labor. We have to think about other ways of mobilizing constituencies that are hurting right now. So I think about the debt collective, for example, which is an Organization that's done really interesting work in organizing people who are in debt people, among other things, who have educational or medical debt. Right. And they've, they've staged debt strikes for example, which has, have, have drawn attention to some of the flagrant abuses in for profit higher ed, for example, you're seeing in Los Angeles, among other places. Renters unions find ways of building collective power again and, and channeling the voices of ordinary people into the political process and building solidarity and strength. I think the conversation has to also include political parties and what's happened to the Democratic Party over the last half century? It's professionalized. There are many fewer working class voices in it. It's gotten in many ways hollowed out. Political parties used to be vibrant membership organizations that provided constituent services at the local level. You know, you'd go to your local party organization and it would be a vibrant group of people who were there, there present and forming long term relationships in your community. And, and not coincidentally it would, it's a way, it was a way for, for ordinary people to have a voice. You know, they would nominate people who would go to party conventions and eventually and pick candidates for office, et cetera. And much of that has been sapped away as the Democratic Party in particular has become more and more reliant on big money donors. And so yeah, so we need, we need a support of concerted effort to revitalize and build the forms of organization and the kinds of bottom up institutions that can draw ordinary people into the political process and empower them to push back.
- [35:34]
B
Yeah, well, I couldn't agree with you anymore on that. I mean, I think much of what we have to do to rebuild this country is about rebooting politics, but rebooting the political parties in general. Because, because clearly, as I was saying before, the Republican Party is no longer the Republican Party. They're not the party of small government or fiscal responsibility. They certainly aren't the party of life. They're just spending hand over fist money. They're blowing up people indiscriminately in the, in the oceans. Right. Like it's just everything they claim to have stand for. It's, it doesn't exist. But the Democratic Party proper doesn't feel like it's doing much better based on where they're at right now. So I feel like there's a lot of us out here who don't really care about red versus blue anymore. Like I care about a free America versus a captured America. And I feel that's where we are right now. So I think it's really important that we, we sort of reimagine what these parties look like and we don't feel like we're so entrenched. I think partially this comes back to Citizens United decision and it comes back to what you were talking about, about how unequal money has made unequal power. And it's really the power that's the bigger problem. Because these super rich people, once Citizen United came down, were able to buy elections, were able to buy politicians, lobbying groups were able to do that. You see people behaving in a way that you think, why are they doing that? That's completely antithetical to what their job is. And you realize it's because they're getting money from X, Y and Z company, X, Y and Z. Blobby group, X, Y and Z billionaire who has a different agenda than they say 800,000 people they're supposed to be representing. And I think that that's what we need to get away from. And I think most people would say that's what we need to get away from. Because at the end of the day it seems to me, and tell me if I'm wrong, looking around the country, I think we can see that the checks and balances have been dismantled. You know, like I have talked to people who say, I don't understand how this is even happening. Is the President supposed to have this much power? And I say, no, the President is not supposed to have this much power. Right. He's only able to get away with everything he's doing because our Republican Congress has completely abdicated their responsibility to hold him to account on anything. Right now the guy government is still closed and our far right Supreme Court, which is the top judicial branch in the land, is just allowing him to get away with it because it was stacked with people whose job was to allow him to get away with it. But our Constitution itself doesn't give the President this much power. And you have argued that Trump is a symptom rather than the problem that he, he's not the only problem we have in this country. That there are major threats to liberal ideas and liberalism in general. General coming from both the left and the right, which is how we get to the political party thing. What do you think we should be doing?
- [38:14]
A
Let me just come back to something you started with. And that is, I mean, I draw some hope from the fact that every time you ask people and you look at the polling data about things like money and politics, about things like economic inequality, about the minimum wage, I mean the armed federal minimum wage is at an obscenely low $7.20, 25 cents an hour. Right. That's about, no one can live on for a full time job. Right. It is just morally grotesque. And, and, and it's, and people don't want it. Right. They don't want housing costs to be this high. They don't want billionaires running their government. Right. They want big money out of politics and this. So, so there is, there are opportunities to be seized here. Right. Americans don't like the levels of CEO pay. Right. If they're asked what they'd like CEOs to earn as a, as a, as a kind of rough ratio of ordinary workers, it comes in way low. It' like 300 to 1, which is what we're seeing now. It's closer to like seven to one. Right. And one of the things that political scientists have found consistently is that the policy preferences of ordinary voters in both parties fall to the left of party elite. So there are opportunities to be seized if we can just again tap into this, this alienation and begin offering some bolder solutions. So I would definitely like to see candidates run for office embracing what I would call a kind of left populist agenda to, I mean, yeah, they should run, they should begin running on a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics. They should begin running on an $18 federal minimum wage and universal pre K, universal health care.
- [39:50]
B
Baby, I don't know how that's not the most obvious at this point when we're watching what's happening.
- [39:55]
A
Child care, I mean, these are things that are popular in this country and we have to be, you know, we have to succeed again. So it's really important again that we come together and oppose this administration's egregious assaults on liberal institutions. But it's also really important that we begin reaching for some of these broadly popular economic priorities that can begin bringing people back who are alienated. People without college degrees in this country who are alienated by the sort of elite tenor of our political discourse. Understandably alienated. Right. To begin drawing them back into a kind of saner and still liberal politics.
- [40:36]
B
Yeah. So what you were talking about at the beginning was liberalism, which you said, you know, is a huge tent and fits both the Republican proper and the Democrat proper. Then we had neoliberalism, which was kind of market capitalism. First guy with the most money wins. That kind of a vibe that we've had for say, the past 40 years. And we are seeing blowing up the country right now. Then what you're talking about a little bit feels like radical liberalism, which is like a return to what liberal values were supposed to mean about freedom and truth. And what I always say, like, read what you want to read, love who you want to love, marry who you want to marry, get divorced if you want to. The government has no purpose and no place in any of those personal decisions. It's a personal freedom. Manifest that then your government should represent the people. Do you believe that that kind of liberalism, that kind of radical liberalism can really pull us back from where we are now?
- [41:30]
A
I believe that very deeply. I'm glad you asked. Yeah. So radical liberalism is a term that I use in the book to describe the particular version of liberalism that I would want us to lean into right now. And I should say it's not, as I've said already, it's not something I've invented. It's been part of our political conversation. And it's not even particularly radical.
- [41:48]
B
It's like what most people want.
- [41:51]
A
I believe that is true. But let me just point to what is radical liberalism. For me, it's three things. So first, radical liberalism takes the idea of human equality seriously. We've touched on this already. It looks to extend the promises of freedom to everybody in our society on equal terms. And it places special emphasis on expanding freedom and opportunity for those who have least of it. Because of this emphasis, it's really pretty well equipped to provide a searing indictment of our current economic status quo. Second, and this is something we haven't talked about much yet, you said, rightly, that the idea of freedom is and has been for a very long time the central political value in our political discourse. And that's really important strategically. Whoever manages to win the struggle to appropriate and use this idea more effectively is likely to win the political argument. So there are deep disagreements between the right and the left as to what we mean when we use the term freedom. And radical liberalism embraces what I would call a robust idea of freedom that says freedom, the kind that's really worth having, really means the power to make choices. So building a free society means building a society in which people actually possess the power to shape their own lives in the ways that matter most to them and understood in that way. It's just very clear that having access to affordable child care and not having to fork over half of your income towards rent. Right. And having health care, these are. These are things that expand your set of options, expand your set of opportunities, and empower you to actually shape the course of your life instead of living Constantly paycheck to paycheck.
- [43:30]
B
Right.
- [43:30]
A
With a diminished set of options. So it invites us to ask, look, what resources, what opportunities do people need to actually have the power to make choices in their lives? And then finally, radical liberalism is committed to finding ways to mobilize ordinary people and build grassroots citizen power. And this relates to something we've talked about already. I mean, we're a semi oligarchy already in this, in this society, wealthy people have their hooks so deep into the policy making process, the media ownership. Right. And we have to find ways of building counter power wherever we can. So radical liberalism sees that project of building citizen counter power as integral to the project of extending the promise of freedom to everybody.
- [44:16]
B
Yeah, I'm actually, I have to say, I'm a tiny bit. Even though I get super depressed, I'm a tiny bit hopeful these days because I know that what this current government has been doing over the past nine months, they have been attempting to push us into riots, into violence, into hating each other. And I find it really interesting that we keep returning to communities. I think they really thought we would be violent at the no Kings rally. I think they really thought we would be violent when they sent ice into our streets. I really think they thought we would be violent if they stopped SNAP benefits. I think that was a choice. I think they wanted starving people because starving people do crazy things. And then they would have a justification for this military overreach that they want to take. And yet I find that people, American people, are rising to the occasion over and over again. They're filling up food banks, they're buying people groceries at the store. They are helping each other out in ways that I don't think this government was prepared for because they're such a cynical group that they didn't expect us to behave the way we're behaving, Especially when the media does their bidding. The media pitches their ideas, the media gives them all this grace. And I think you and I both agree that media companies and social media personalities have a real lack of accountability when it comes to truth. And it allows people to live in these bubbles where they don't actually know what's going on. And I think I feel like suddenly people are sort of waking up to the health care crisis that has the government closed and to the food crisis that the Republicans clearly wanted us to experience, that the courts stopped. The courts. You know, one part of our three checks of power actually got the money released to feed the people on SNAP when our government wouldn't have done it. And I think that that is actually community coming together in a way that you're talking about in this third way, finding ways to mobilize regular citizens to work together. I think that's always going to be, be what we have to do if we're going to fight this clear kleptocracy that we are dealing with right now with this oligarchy in power. And you just have to look at what I was saying. That great Gatsby party the other day on the eve of SNAP benefits, you know, expiring and 42 million Americans not having enough food. They literally had a Gatsby party. And I thought, boy, somebody really missed the mark on that one. Like they just, just did not see the irony of what they were doing. But I think the people did.
- [46:39]
A
I mean, it's the Gatsby parties that's, as you said, the sort of gold plated ballroom that's gonna go up on the wreckage of what used to be the East Wing. Right. It's Trump talking about retiling the various.
- [46:50]
B
The bathroom over and over.
- [46:53]
A
I mean, yeah, there's a kind of tone deafness to this administration. Yeah, but this relates to something you said earlier. I mean, I was reading a piece the other day about how many billions of dollars Trump's cabinet is worth. Right. I think it's 7.5 billion, excluding Trump himself. So, I mean, the people who are running this government, our Secretary of Commerce is worth over 3 billion. Our Secretary of Education is worth over 3 billion. Scott Besant, 600 million. I mean, what is it that you expect exactly when these are the people who you surround yourself with a politics that's so fundamentally out of touch with the needs of ordinary people. I mean, it's the SNAP benefits. It's the. In Vermont here, November 1st was the. When people started experiencing sticker shock around the Affordable Care act subsidies. Right. And so many are seeing their premiums double. Projections here in Vermont are that 45,000 people are going to lose their health care as a result of the big ugly bill. Right. That Trump and his minions passed this last summer. I mean, it's all of this stuff. If there is a silver lining in any of this, it's that people seem increasingly outraged and appalled by this stuff and that you see a kind of building resistance both in the no Kings movement in the courts. I mean, the democracy district courts are dealing Trump setback after setback right now. And the SNAP benefits being one of them. I mean, we'll see what happens with that. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, we're seeing some real powerful and peaceful resistance. And I totally agree with you. I think Trump is absolutely itching to invoke the Insurrection act, and that a lot of what he's doing here is deliberate provocation intended to elicit a kind of violent response. And frankly, I think it's only a matter of time before something goes wrong, really wrong. Right. I mean, you can't send National Guard troops in. I mean, we've, we've all seen the video. I mean, it's, it's, it's appalling stuff without eventually people starting to get hurt in a, in, in a serious way. And then what's going to happen. Yeah. Is that the, the administration's going to be tempted to initiate a wider crackdown. We're holding our breath.
- [48:53]
B
Yeah. I think everyone in America's holding their breath every day. Because I think ultimately what we want is what your book tells us, which is freedom for all. And what we're watching is the opposite. So it is really essential that we do the things that could bring us back from the brink, and then we build something far better. I do think that there's hope in candidates like Imam Donnie, in leadership like Gavin Newsom pushing back and Pritzker pushing back. And, you know, the new leaders that I hope we get today in states like Virginia and New Jersey, people that are going to have the wherewithal and the guts to fight back, because we can't forget that we live in a federal that our states have vast amounts of power to organize, to plan, to fight back. Even with the snap benefits that we're talking about. The states were right there. Gavin Newsom brought the National Garden to food banks. You know, Maura Healy in Massachusetts, like, doubled her budget. They were out there trying to help the people. And we can only hope that the people start to notice who's on their team. And it doesn't necessarily mean the old Democratic Guard. It means the new leaders that are doing it in a new way. Like you're saying, in a radical, liberal in way that brings us back to freedom and the way the country was founded, rather than what we have become by sort of bastardizing those ideas from the foundation. So thank you so much for joining us today and for writing this book. Honestly, I hope everybody will go and read it. I know you have to go off and teach, but please tell people how they can follow your work and how they can buy your book.
- [50:21]
A
Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure to have this conversation. And, yeah, I mean, the book is available through Yale University Press and through whatever online bookseller you like to shop at. I really hope that folks will find something of value there. And again, really appreciate your time today.
- [50:36]
B
Oh, thank you for coming, truly. So that was Alex Zakaris reminding us that there are a lot of challenges ahead, but there's also real opportunity to be seized. We need to rebrand what being liberal means and who liberals work for. Liberalism is supposed to be about tolerance and nuance ideas and respecting those with different opinions and above all, supporting individual rights and personal freedom. Professor Zakaris points out that unequal power is actually a bigger problem than unequal wealth. So we have to be focused on rebuilding citizen power through things like organized labor, independent media, community run services. If our institutions are broken, we can't just complain. We have to build something better. I want to thank Alex for joining us us today, and you for caring enough about democracy to be here. Now go check out Freedom for All what a liberal society could be and inspire yourself to imagine a better world than this. Until next week, PG out before you go, if you're already a premium member of this podcast, thank you. And if you're not, I want to ask you to support my work. We are living through a propaganda nightmare right now. We are literally being fed lies by liars. So if you see worth in what we're doing, please consider becoming a member of Politics Girl Premium by going to politicsgirl.com and signing up. You will get this podcast ad free along with my rants sent directly to your inbox. So even if my work is silenced on social media, you will still get access to the truth. There's a link to sign up in the bio of this episode, but also@politicsgirl.com and as always, please like and share and follow this podcast so we can grow our audience. Because the more people who have access to real information, the better chance we have to build a community ready and willing to fight back. As always, thank you for your time and support. The Politics Girl Podcast is written and performed by me, Lee McGowan and produced and edited by Happy Warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.