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The Realignment
564 | Steve Teles: What Democrats Can Learn from the GOP's Trump-Era Upheaval
00:42:36
In today's episode of The Realignment, the Niskanen Center's Steve Teles returns for a wide-ranging discussion about the Democratic Party's evolution during the Trump-era and what lessons it can and can't take from the GOP's experience under Trump. Marshall and Steve unpack how Democratic Party factions - from abundance-focused reformers to the new "Common Sense Democrats" - mirror and diverge from the GOP's 2010s-era "Reform Conservative" movement. They explore the challenge of offering new ideas after rejection at the ballot box, the role of candidates like NYC's Zohran Mamdani, and why signaling change requires taking on your own side.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Quick announcement before we dive into today's conversation. Today marks the Realignment's last day at the foundation for American Innovation. I've been with FAI previously, Lincoln Network since January of 2020, so it's been more than five years and we've been through so many different changes and experiences, not only in our country, but also with just frankly this show. And I just want to express my deep appreciation to all of the great folks at FAI who took the Realignment in when it was a small, random podcast trying to navigate the world of D.C. towards the end of the first Trump presidency. I've been a media fellow with FAI the entire time and it's just been a really great experience. So once again, huge thanks to the folks at FAI and the folks at the Hewlett foundation who funded this podcast work starting in September. As pretty much no one will be shocked to hear, I will be going full time at Niskanin starting in September. The Realignment will continue as always, but we're going to switch up the sponsorship and all those other great dynamics. So reach out to me if you have any questions. But the Realignment as a show will continue in all of its glory. Something I always appreciate about FAI is they let me run this show completely independently so that tradition will continue on on to today's conversation that I'm speaking with my now official Niskan colleague Steve Tallies about the Democratic Party efforts to reform the party, all in the context of the evolving lessons we can take from the conservative movement and Republican Party's lessons during the Trump era, immediately from the loss of Romney onwards. Huge thank you to FAI for supporting the work of this podcast for the past five years. Steve, welcome back to the Realignment.
- [01:53]
B
Happy to be back.
- [01:55]
A
I think you've been on long enough. I could just drop the whole big guest name thing. People know your deal. You come here every few weeks and we unpack the big questions of the moment. But here's what I'd love to kind of do here. I've got a lot of big questions that I want to ask you that have been percolating the past few months of vacation time. The first one I'd love to ask you about because it syncs with your previous work where you focused on the rise and fall of never Trump Republicans. I looked at what sort of happened on the Democratic side of the aisle, everything from Zoron beating Cuomo to the debates about abundance and then the debates about new Democratic groups that are trying to reclaim the center. We're doing a reprise of what Republicans went through 2013, 2014, 2015 before Trump. That meaning there's this agreement that we need to pivot and then we need to change. You're going to see a bunch of interesting figures like Marco Rubio or like the reform conservatism movement or new groups that are sort of talking about new ideas, but then all that will be pushed aside because some outside force doesn't have to be a candidate, doesn't have to be anything that literal. Comparing it to Trump could just come about. So I'd love to unpack this with you because I'm really interested in your thoughts on it.
- [03:12]
B
We, we all have to think with analogies. That's the way our, our brains work. And you know, in the first approximation, all analogies are wrong. Right? Things are in fact are not like other things. And yet we have to somehow reason about big complex systems. It forces us to make comparisons. The, the biggest thing that I would say as a distinction between the reformacons and abundance is one, reformacons were a very particular, very specific partisan and ideological project, whereas I take abundance to be in some ways much bigger than that. Now again, there's a separate project called sort of moderate or common sense Democrats, which maybe is a closer analogy. So maybe it's worth just unpacking those two, which to me go together. But that's because I'm on a very specific point in the larger abundance spectrum. So again, when you think about the Reformations, that was a group of, you know, almost exclusively D.C. based conservatives who had intuited that dominance of Republican, especially economics and social policy by traditional conservative leaning libertarian was electoral and to some degree a policy problem for the Republican Party. And so a lot of what they were doing is, you know, hoping that someone who was sort of open for new ideas would get nominated. Somebody like Marco Rubio, a previous Marco Rubio. We always have to make sure we're clear about which Marco Rubio we're talking about. They wanted to make sure that there was a cupboard full of stuff that that person could actually run on. And so I think for one, it was mostly, again, you know, having a stack of policy for that person so that that person was not entirely dependent on ideas that were coming from Coke World and that more sort of traditional Republican economics. And so I don't think they even really pretended to be anything bigger than that. I don't think they pretended to be anything large, any kind of larger movement. It was really, you know, 40 to 50 people who developed ideas, who thought that the Republican Party was not exactly where they needed to be in order to align where the voters they needed to be and the policy the party had to have.
- [05:54]
A
So, and quick bit of context that matters because the reformacon space is how I got into D.C. the key thing was reform conservatism really built on top of some work that Ross Douthat and Rahon Salaam had done in the 2000s, first with a Weekly Standard article called the Party of Sam's Club, and then with this new book in 2008 called Grand New Party, where the dilemma they were articulating from a political and policy respect was if you look at the economic policies to your point that the Republican Party was advancing under the candidacies of John McCain and then Mitt Romney, those policies did not actually line up with the party's increasing dependence on a working class, non college educated base. So a world where you are running on, let's say, the policy platform of Ronald Reagan, where the biggest problem facing American society is the existence of the late stage New Deal state, or where tax cuts needed to be the number one thing you needed to do, because in 1980 that actually meant that that was responsive to a bunch of people even in that cohort's concerns. But from their perspective and looking at the world of a post Romney loss. Oh wow, we need to develop something for that base.
- [07:07]
C
Yeah.
- [07:07]
B
So the way I think about it, my, I have a colleague, Philip Rim in the political science department at Johns Hopkins, who has written some really clever work and one way he thinks about this is to think about, you know, all voters is either good or bad actuarial risks.
- [07:25]
C
Right.
- [07:27]
B
And you know, that's, you know, do you think that you're going to need, you know, to be insured against big things like, you know, unexpected healthcare costs or loss of a job or your region declining economically or getting old?
- [07:45]
C
Right.
- [07:45]
B
And if you think about the Democratic Party of the early 80s, it's largely a party of bad actuarial risks.
- [07:54]
C
Right.
- [07:55]
B
So those are people who want to expand the insurance pool of the federal government and they want to be in it and they want to have to sort of pull the good actuarial risks in to pay, pay for those costs. And so the Republicans thought, well, we're actually the party of the good actuarial risk, which means we want to keep from getting pulled into those tools.
- [08:17]
C
Right.
- [08:17]
B
So it's very important that we keep taxes down, that we limit social insurance. And so if you look by the time you get to the mid 2000 teens, and this is something I think, in other language, Ross and Ryan recognized, is the Republican Party is getting full up a bad actuarial risk.
- [08:34]
C
Right.
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B
It's getting pulled of older people, poorer people, sicker people, all those things.
- [08:41]
C
Right.
- [08:42]
B
And yet the Republican Party is still the party of Paul Ryan, which is the party of keeping the bad actuarial risks out. And so I think one way to think about those people. Right, is they, they kind of intuited that.
- [08:56]
C
Right.
- [08:56]
B
That something about the class dynamic of the party has changed. The other thing I think in retrospect that they realized was the idea of having a party where you gave the social conservatives stuff on marriage and sexuality, but you kept them entirely out of economics, was just slowly, like, not working.
- [09:19]
C
Right.
- [09:19]
B
That division of labor where you gave the libertarians all the economics and you gave the social conservatives, mostly you get the, you gave the libertarians the bread and you gave the social conservatives the circuses, was no longer working. And so part of what they were trying to do also is think about what is a social conservative position on economic issues. And that's why a lot of what they were focusing on was things like, you know, we need to rethink our tax policy. We need to focus on child credit and helping families and all of that rather than, you know, how do we lower the tax burden on capital? And I think those two things are the things that most of the Reformacons were trying to imagine what policy would look like if those were the central obsession.
- [10:09]
A
So the question then is, and you articulated this, so I want to go delve deep into it, buying the idea that we use analogies to think about things. In what ways are the Reformacons in a similar position to where the abundance crew is and then at the same time to the new, the common sense democrats? And then you could talk about where they, where they depart and where there could be lessons that can be learned from this.
- [10:37]
B
Yeah. So I, I think the. So again, I think of abundance as something much more ideologically encompassing, in fact, extremely ideologically encompassing. So I'm writing an essay now, which we'll talk about some other time, that sort of looks at these varieties of abundance. And it goes all the way from what I call sort of red plenty abundance, which is on, you know, all the way on the left, is based on, you know, extreme centralization, government ownership of, you know, but they want to get rid of a lot of procedure in order to, to build full communism.
- [11:11]
C
Right.
- [11:11]
B
That would be the simple way to Put it right. And it goes all the way to dark abundance and even beyond which is very aligned with the more right end of the Republican Party. So there's a movement like that and they all have something in common. I think you can think of that as a kind of intellectual movement with variations that's different than the political project of Common Sense Dems.
- [11:33]
C
Right.
- [11:33]
B
The project of Common Sense Dems really comes out of a set of Democrats who are in frontline areas of political consultants who recognize that the Democratic Party can't get elected without a more encompassing policy offering and political pitch. And so they're trying to figure out, well, what are the sort of policies or political strategies that we need in order to be able to run and win in that much wider range of issues. And so for them, you know, a lot of the cultural issues that are less central for abundance are much more central for them because they have more of a sense that the thing that really makes, makes Democrats not be able to compete in Ohio and to some degree in Texas and all those other places that you need in order to get a majority are more things like crime and immigration that I think abundance has something to say about but is not centrally obsessed with. And so that project is a little bit more like the reformacon project. I think there are more actual electeds involved in that then were involved in the reformacon project. There's much closer sort of working and alignment with them. And the, the intellectual. You know, in some ways it does have more to do with the DLC project that begins in the 80s. I think there's also important differences there too. But it's one where electeds and their concerns and how to run in a much wider range of places is a larger kind of obsession.
- [13:12]
A
Yeah, and the thing I'll add here, and this is the critical thing, obviously online Twitter threads, whichever blue sky retarded social platform. I'd say the new Common sense Dem project is controversial, but among actually elected officials, even serious people on the left, they would not disagree with the statement to pass and build a majority party. It's a huge problem that Dems seem to be stuck at 48 seats right now. So it's important that we build a political project to get those extra 12 seats so you could get back to those Obama era majorities. That therefore means that the number of politicians and institutions and organizations who could buy into the new common sense down this project, or at least the objective is bigger. The problem that reformacons had is that it's now uncontroversial because of Trump's victory in 2015, 2016 and then 2024 to say, oh wow, the existing GOP orthodoxy really didn't have that much to offer their base. And therefore that base was capable of being pitched to on a different level by a different sort of candidate outside that establishment that was very, very, very controversial. And a lot of politicians beyond those who were incredibly policy wonky weren't bought into that idea as much. Even though it's kind of really funny when you reread grand new party in 2008, you know, Ross and Ryan are writing about how like a politician like Sarah Palin demonstrated, there was this sort of outside the box weird way that rhymes a little bit with what Trump eventually actually ended up doing. So I just think it's important to note that the Reformation thesis didn't get mass majority buy in even from like reform minded by conservatives Post 20. Post 2012, 2013. Yeah.
- [15:04]
B
So you know, so we, we go back to, you know, the readers who've listened to our thing have heard the factional theory of politics probably more than they, they care to. But we do have to go back to that for a second because I think it explains some of the difference between the electeds and the online thing, which is the electeds of a pretty wide range of ideologies know that they don't want to be on the minority side of the their committee, right? They don't want to be the minority, you know, thing of the Ways and Means Committee. They want to be the chair, right. So that, you know, more than anything they care about in terms of their own ideology or whatever, they care about that. And so they do get intuitively I think this factional point, which is a faction, are people who are frenemies, right? So they're both competing for preeminence inside the party, but they're also competing with the other party for who's going to be the majority. And so politicians are more attuned to the fact that they have to do they have to go both ways, right. They, they don't particularly like some of the policy ideas of the people who are in this common sense dim space. But on the other hand, they know they can't actually be a majority without them. And, and so they have to, there's always that bound. So if you're Chris Murphy, right, your project is not exactly common sense Dem, but you know, there's no chance of getting your own project done without actually getting somebody elected in Texas and Ohio and all of those, those other places. And so I think that explains some of the variation that you're talking about because the people online have no stake really materially in that majority status in a way that most of your average generic dim have a very strong stake in that.
- [17:01]
A
Here's something I'm curious about because I'd love to talk about Zoron's New York primary win. And I bring this up in the context of if you read the factional sort of theory and you buy into the analysis that funnily enough, like even people who beef with your piece because they frame themselves in factional terms, I've seen people who really hate your piece but say as a progressive, I think X, Y or Z. That's kind of the point that you're making in terms of the factional orientation of our thinking in a way that wasn't true in let's say 1996. So from a factual, I'm curious of your theory and maybe this is a follow up piece for you to write. How do factional fights actually operationalize themselves and how do we measure success? So an example of this would be, I know from sort of talking to a lot of people, something the sort of more common sense Dem faction was excited about was Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. You know, whoever the candidate was in New Jersey, basically these more like centrist coded, like these type of candidates would really show Democrats, hey, this is the motto moving forward. The problem and I was talking to a centrist coded person about this is regardless of the merits of Spanberger or the New Jersey race because Zoron is just blotting out the sun. The texts that I'm getting from my friends back home in Oregon, these are not people who are far lefties are. I can't agree with Zoron on policy but I need to learn from his model. How do I do that? I don't think anyone is going to get any texts from how do I make the Spanberger thing work for me? So it's sort of hard to measure how models are succeeding. How can. So I just, I'd love to hear how you think about this.
- [18:44]
B
So I mean again if I think about the New York mayor's, Democratic mayor's race, it was incredibly depressing because you know, there, you know, when you think about the alternatives to Xeron, right? None of, no, none of them were really strongly making the effectively abundance case, right that we're going to make New York City government work. We're going to, you know, we're going to build, build, build. We're going to build housing we're going to get costs down. We're going to do, we're going to do all that. We're not going to do it in the way that Zoron wanted.
- [19:23]
C
Right.
- [19:23]
B
But we've got a case. We're like reformists. We want to make big changes, all of that stuff.
- [19:31]
C
Right.
- [19:31]
B
And Right. You know, the attack on Zoron would be more like, actually, he's not going to really be willing to make the changes to public employees that we need to make government work for you.
- [19:43]
C
Right.
- [19:43]
B
He's not going to actually be on top of what's going on in New York City schools to make sure that they're like, normal and like, do the things that normal people who live in Outerborough, New York want.
- [19:57]
C
Right.
- [19:57]
B
That was the kind of thing that a candidate should have been. Instead, we got the worst kind of establishment candidate in Cuomo who sort of represented, you know, he, when he got to the end, he was the one who was going up against Zoron. And so one is, I think that showed a failure of, you know, common sense, dim, moderate organization, that the pipeline had not produced a candidate like that in the way that the can that, that it did in the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races. Now, again, I, I, I, I'm sympathetic with Mikey Sherrell and Abby Spanberger too. I don't think either one of them have quite, really run on a full spectrum, abundance, common sense, dim set of positions either. And I think that's a sign partially that that whole sort of playbook of how you do that is still a little underdeveloped. So they know that they shouldn't be running like standard dimms. Um, but the, you know, it's hard to think about what's the big transformative policy idea that they're saying they're going to do if they're elected.
- [21:09]
C
Right.
- [21:10]
B
Um, they're mostly, it's mostly vibes. It's mostly that, you know, I'm normal and I was in the military or I was in intelligence in the case of Spanberger. And so I think that's one where my hope is in, you know, in 26 and 28, each of those subsequent elections, there'll be a better clear playbook about what moderate dims do that's actually big and reformy as opposed to just being sort of, you know, you know, vibe distancing and dumping on the groups, which I think is fine, but not nearly enough to really go up against somebody like Manami, who ran a really idealistic race and a really positive race. Now again, I think there's lots of weird creepy stuff underneath the surface, but he didn't choose to run on any of that. And because you know, the basic way he ran was so positive compared to Cuomo. Like what could you possibly say to get excited about a Cuomo mayorship? Nobody, I don't think anybody in their campaign could say what was the exciting thing that would excite you about what New York would look like after four years of Cuomo.
- [22:29]
A
So the question for you, and this is where I felt really vindicated by this and this actually goes to your point about how different actors in different factions behave differently. So and once again I need to do a quick freenote. Obviously it's easy for Zoron to go on Derek Thompson's podcast and to talk to the odd lots guys and talk about, you know, abundance in a lowercase sense and this, this or that. But what was so funny to me was just that if you looked at how vehemently anti abundance, a lot of people who would say they're on Zoron's team were especially online and within quote unquote the groups relative to him going into abundance forums and like clearly like name checking that he read the book. It validated something I'd thought for a while and this is why I always was much more and obviously to your point, there's a danger if we make abundance too broad. It just ends up not meaning anything. But I always suspected that certain people on the left would be friendlier to abundance than a lot of the pre publication thinking would be. Because since I spent a lot of time with the left, abundance actually offers a useful framework even if you are a lefty, because I'm putting myself in sort of Zoron shoes. The problem for Zoron is he sees what happened to Brandon Johnson in Chicago, that 6% approval rating, inability to deliver lots of big promises that then fell into all sorts of like kludgy, not particularly obvious, different traps, a basic abundance framework of getting over obstacles, identifying the bottlenecks where you're trying to actually get to making an import on state capacity and then also rooting your priorities and I think people's actual sort of lived and real experiences. It just isn't surprising that that playbook like appealed to him. So I'd be curious what your sort of thinking is moving forward when it comes to how and I just did a debate on abundance on the left on earlier this week when we're recording so love to just hear what you think about this rubric.
- [24:37]
B
Yeah, so I, I think it's at all weird that parts of the left would get attracted to abundance. So I don't, I don't find it contradictory or weird. And I don't think when he was going on Derek's pod, he was being, you know, he was just sucking up, right? He may, maybe he was also sucking up.
- [24:58]
C
Right.
- [24:59]
B
But if you want to do the kind of things he clearly wants to do, you can't do them with the existing way that New York City government is organized now. I think the really. So at the 30,000ft thing, I don't think it's at all weird that he would have recognized that and he would have seen that if he really wants to deliver on tens of thousands of new homes and public transit and everything else, that something about the machine is not going to deliver. That when he like pulls the lever, he's going to pull the lever and like nothing's going to, nothing's going to come out. That said, the real question is not whether you say the thing right when you actually govern, first of all, are you going to be able to put all the people in positions in New York City government who are really going to ride herd on that bureaucracy and are going to be willing to cut through things like public employee contracts and rules and all those other things? And so one thing I want worry about for him, just for his own project, which is not my project, but you know, for him being able to do the thing he says he's going to do is, you know, there really isn't actually a fully developed Red Plenty faction out there. There are people who get it. And I think again, if you look in the, the all the way, the other coast, right, the place where you really are going to see more mainstream abundance versus Red Plenty is in the congressional race between Scott Wiener and Chakrabadi, right, where that's going to be really interesting because they're both some version of abundance, but they've got very different versions of it and very different versions of how they. And they have different constituencies for it. I do worry that Mamdani is not going to, you know, he just doesn't have the, the army to go and do that. So as a general he can go and tell everybody to go in this particular direction. But like what are his colonels and captains going to do and are they really going to be out there in agencies doing the hand to hand combat to do this? Maybe, right. Maybe that he is so incredibly charismatic that all the people who had been sort of dumping on this before will be like, well, our glorious leader tells us to do it, so we'll, we'll go and do it. But I wonder whether, and I can also wonder when he has to make all those hundreds of small decisions that that really aggregate up to building abundance in his particular way, whether he's willing and going to be willing to do that.
- [27:41]
A
So for the last section, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, because I know this something you think about a lot. There's been over the past month a whole set of new institutions and ideas about where Democrats could go moving forward. Everything from the States forum. I'm going to have the head of that on the podcast in upcoming weeks. You've got the Project 2029 group that's thinking about new ideas. You've got Searchlight from Adam Jefferson, Majority Democrats. All these places have been covered in the New York Times. Folks should go look those up if they want to learn more about all of them. And obviously each and every one of these groups has slightly different theories of the cases and theories of power. They have different sets of leaders leading them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if there's one thing they all share, it is a helpful focus on quote, unquote, like new ideas, new faces, getting something that's compelling for groups of voters who find Democrats incredibly uncompelling right now. And the reason why I brought up reform conservatism at the start of the episode is this is where when we look at all these different groups, which once again are across the spectrum of progressive to centrist, I just am triggered into reminding myself in 2015, where Marco Rubio is running under a new Leader for a New American Century. He had all these wonky but interesting ideas about how college would only go for three years instead of four years. We were going to attack the college accreditation cartel. So I guess what I'm really asking you is how much are voters actually really looking for new ideas? You do what I mean versus Marco Ruby had all sorts of new ideas but didn't really matter versus personality, the broader story you're telling because I just think there's a danger with the whole new idea. Jake Auchincloss is enough of a friend of the show that I could slightly critique him. His statement to the New York Times about majority Dems is like, people are looking for new ideas. And there's like the idea of new ideas which just sounds kind of vapid and there's like actually new ideas. So I'd love to hear what you're how do you unpack all this?
- [29:57]
B
So again, that was, that was a lot of questions. I'm going to try and unwind.
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A
Can you react to the past? Just can you react to the, to the launch in all these different groups? And how can they make their objective of presenting new ideas mean something tangible and vibrant, viable to people?
- [30:12]
B
I actually, I want to go back to begin. So I think there is one big difference is it's not obvious that there was a whole bunch of like local people running, you know, in California or Arizona or whatever who were the base of this thing, Right. Whereas I think there's a lot of people who are coming up now who are trying to decide how they want to position themselves in politics who know that something about the legacy Democratic package is just not good enough. Know that.
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C
Right?
- [30:46]
B
They've seen it. They seen that the very best that thing, that generic dim thing can do is maybe get them like a, you know, 150 vote margin, right. But they don't want to run that close right there. You know, now they don't necessarily know what that thing is, but they know that if they just make a career as a generic Democrat, that, that's not going to, that's not going to work. Right. So Jake, you know, clearly gets that.
- [31:16]
C
Right?
- [31:17]
B
And Jake's been throwing out, I keep reading all these emails he sends, you know, he sends out, right. And you know, half of the ideas are great and half of them are not quite baked yet and whatever, right. But I think he's clearly gotten the idea that there's a market for that. And so if your theory is voters are like closely reading these policies and saying, oh, these policies are closer to like the median or where I am. So this guy is good, right. Some of the ideas that are going to be good are the ones that send the voters the signal that like, oh my God, they went there, right. That's the thing I, again, that I have the bigger critique of, you know, again, you know, we're in this weird cycle where Virginia and New Jersey are having governor's races and everybody's going to use that as like a symbol or something, but I don't think either of them have yet and maybe they don't even need to in their states, right. Said the thing where voters have to go and say, oh, I have to completely re evaluate what I thought Democrats were. Because that person said the thing, right? Again, like, again, if you think about Trump, you know, Trump said that he supported Social Security and Medicare, right.
- [32:31]
A
And hated the Iraq war and hey.
- [32:33]
B
The right way that that is that there was a set of voters who. That forced them to say, okay, now I had a completely clear idea in who my, who my head of what, what the parties were. And now I have to reevaluate. And so my worry about some of these things is if you're really going to do it, you got to really do it. You got to do it enough that sends a shock to people, that causes them to go and have to reevaluate everything, right? Everything about what they, you know, what they think Democrats are, right? Because again, a lot of the Democratic brand right now is really bad. People really just don't like Democrats sometimes they're more scared of Republicans, but they really don't like Democrats. And I think a lot of what these groups are trying to do is first of all just tap into that instinct that voters don't like Democrats elected to are coming up, don't like the generic Democratic package. Now again, that's where the ideas thing come in, right? Is that the best that people like us can do is just supply a library of things that hopefully are at, are sufficiently at scale to shock people out of their ex. Their sort of status quo belief. And that's where I think personalities come in, right? Somebody's going to take all those and take all that stuff that's in prose and turn it into poetry and personality. And that's not something that's like in my lane, right? That's not something that's in your lane, right. There's a very particular kind of skill that politicians have who are really good at this is they can say here's all these like raw materials that a bunch of think tank people and people doing stuff in states have put together. And like somebody ran for Arizona and they got elected. And then I'm going to take all that and synthesize it into something that you know, can actually be a party agenda. And so, you know, that's where I think there's all that energy. But it is going to need a person or a few people to go and turn that into both personality and poetry.
- [34:45]
A
I guess. Something I will, I will, I will just say I was. I have a weird, I have a weird background. So I actually, I actually do feel like that is my lane. But I'm in a slightly different personal era. I. What's my last thing? So I have been talking to a lot of people about this new ideas thing and the best idea that I've heard. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. And the reason why I call this the best idea is because it says something. It both critiques the establishment while also making clear there's some sort of sacrifice or some sort of admittance of failure. And it's also the type of thing that I sort of use this rubric of could you go on Joe Rogan and talk about this for 30 minutes? And the idea was the next Democrat should promise that they are going to appoint a non college. And this is not my idea. I got this from someone who's anonymous right now. The next Democrats should commit that they're going to appoint multiple people to cabinet level or high visibility level positions who did not go to college in the first place. I love that idea. What do you think about it?
- [35:59]
B
Honestly, I worry it's a gimmick.
- [36:01]
C
Right.
- [36:02]
B
I actually think you need to do something more, you know, because that in and of itself doesn't change anything about how Democrats govern.
- [36:09]
C
Right.
- [36:09]
B
They're what?
- [36:10]
A
Actually, no, I'll push you on that. If I were to, if I were, I say this as a, you know, humble state school grad. The first thing you pick up within two minutes of spending in Democratic Party circles is that this is a cabal of Ivy League front row kid winners.
- [36:26]
B
Yeah, I have no, I have no problem with that. That's true.
- [36:28]
C
Right.
- [36:29]
B
I mean that's absolutely true that Dems have a problem with the degree to which they are associated with elite higher ed. That is both in terms of where they went and who people think they serve. So it's certainly that, that case I would actually say more that, you know, they should commit to, you know, things like Supreme Court nominees.
- [36:52]
C
Right.
- [36:53]
B
Democrats always just appoint Harvard, Yale, say I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm going to put somebody who went to, you know, Notre Dame or Ohio State or whatever law school on the Supreme Court. No more Sanford, Harvard, Yale appointees. But I guess I think, you know, that's still.
- [37:11]
A
This is why I brought up the Joe Rogan thing. Joe Rogan would not be interested and wouldn't care about that. I think the reason why I like this rubric of you start with a critique that people just under. So for example, most people just not thought hard about Supreme Court nominations and the composure of clerks and like where they go to in that sort of pipeline. People have thought about though, the idea with the Democratic Party is like this elite inside baseball club of people. So if I were talking to Joe Rogan, you could just say to yourself, hey, here's this thing about the Democratic Party I don't like and Here's a way that that's a huge problem because it means that whole parts of our society don't feel like they have a voice or have any ability to understand what's going on here. So here is the very vis. Obvious way that I would do things differently. And then the question I would then ask, sort of like a manosphere podcaster, is like, who's someone you could think of who Democrats don't put in power but could do an amazing job in a role like that? I think it's, I think it's a useful prompt in a way the Supreme Court one isn't because it's. Everyone in their own way would have their own weird thought on it.
- [38:11]
B
I mean, I, I guess I think the bigger thing is the Dems need to actually say that they've got big reformist ambitions for higher ed.
- [38:20]
C
Right.
- [38:21]
B
And that higher ed, the people who run it aren't going to like a lot of it, but they're going to have to lump it and that we've got a big, you know, agenda for changing the federal government and that lots of public employees aren't going to like it, but they're going to have to lump it because we want. Again, I've talked about this before. You know, what makes us different is that we think of a government from the point of view of the consumer of government, not the point of the producer of government. And by government, I mean all of also the non governmental parts that do government. Like again, lots of higher ed is government, but a lot of it is private. And I think the way to actually send the signal in the more credible way is it has to be costly. This is the thing I would say is what makes a signal really valuable, right? To really make people have to notice is you could say, oh, I'll appoint somebody who didn't go to college. What's the price to you of doing that?
- [39:17]
C
Right?
- [39:17]
A
I mean, the price. There's, there's, there's no. So probably the perfect example. There was no price to Donald Trump saying he was going to support Social Security and would oppose the Iraq war. The point was that those specific issues and the critiques of the established people in power he was running against, implicit and explicit in there were ones that resonated with voters. So basically saying the Democratic Party is alienating to people because it's the winners of the past 40 to 50 years all like sort of patting each other on the head saying, I hate that and I'm going to aggressively break that with all the fiber of my being I just don't think you personally have to make a sacrifice as demonstrated by Trump.
- [40:01]
B
I think with the Trump thing, though, if you think about like, I'm not going to cut Social Security or Medicare, right. People knew, whoa, like all of the business, Coke, you know, all the usual suspects are going to scream. And they did scream. And I think the point is their screams were valuable because people saw that actually he was getting in a big fight with major Republican interests.
- [40:25]
C
Right.
- [40:26]
B
Or neocon foreign policy people all, you know, viciously attacked Trump.
- [40:32]
C
Right.
- [40:33]
B
A little more neocons, I'm a little more justifiable. But you know that their, their screams were advertising.
- [40:41]
C
Right.
- [40:41]
B
The screams of the Coke world were advertising. And I guess I think the same thing is true for Democrats, Right. When you show that you're willing to do something that has a personal cost for you.
- [40:53]
C
Right.
- [40:53]
B
That you're making enemies, that's when people think that's credible.
- [40:58]
C
Right.
- [40:58]
B
I know they're not faking it.
- [41:00]
C
Right.
- [41:00]
B
They're not just saying something that like, you know, is like, you know, ad tested or whatever.
- [41:06]
C
Right.
- [41:06]
B
They were willing to do something that had cost for themselves. And therefore I believe what they're saying about who they are fundamentally. And again, that's, I think the question is, what's the issue that does that for Democrats? And you know, again, nobody should trust my judgment on that because again, I think that's what professional politicians are good at doing.
- [41:30]
C
Right.
- [41:30]
B
They're good at finding that thing.
- [41:34]
C
Right.
- [41:34]
B
And again, I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of wrong with like the sister soldier kind of language for that. And that's like not the only way to do it. And certainly at this point in history, that's not the way you should be distinguishing yourself because frankly, most of the, most of the moderate Democrats are African Americans at this point. But, you know, public employees are the biggest constituency of the Democratic Party. And so saying that I'm on the side of you, the consumer of government, whether it's schools or police or, you know, the environment, any of those areas. Right. I'm on your side, not on their side. They work for us and we're going to make them work for you, I think that kind of thing sends that credible signal because people know that it's going to lead to static and it's good static.
- [42:29]
A
That is a perfect place to end. Steve, thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [42:34]
B
Thanks for having me on.