566 | Osita Nwanevu: The Case for a New American Founding: Rethinking Democracy After 2024

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Realignment – Ep. 566 | Osita Nwanevu: The Case for a New American Founding: Rethinking Democracy After 2024

Podcast: The Realignment
Host: Marshall Kosloff
Guest: Osita Nwanevu (Guardian, The New Republic)
Date: August 12, 2025

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Overview

In this timely and expansive discussion, host Marshall Kosloff sits down with journalist and author Osita Nwanevu to explore his provocative new book, Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. The conversation centers on America’s faltering faith in democracy following the upheavals of 2024, the limits of political messaging, the need for a broader, structural reimagining of governance, and parallels with historical political “foundings.” Nwanevu argues for a vision of democracy rich in agency and meaning, challenging both left and center to move beyond technocratic fixes toward ambitious rethinking. The episode covers shifting voter behavior, the crisis of political imagination, movement-building, and the prospects for cross-ideological renewal.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Thinness of “Democracy” as Political Messaging

• Critique of Post-2016 Political Messaging:
  Nwanevu highlights the exhaustion with how “defending democracy” became an abstract, uninspiring rallying cry, especially for Democrats. Despite warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism, voters prioritized material interests and, in 2024, backed Trump for economic reasons (02:07–04:10).
  • Quote:
    “If it’s just an abstraction, this thing that your civics teacher told you was important, you know, in grade school, the Democrats are yelling you about, and it’s that or, you know, paying your rent, paying your groceries—people choose the latter.” – Osita Nwanevu (03:04)
• Democracy as a Fair-Weather Principle:
  Democrats and liberals, in Nwanevu’s view, are at risk of treating democracy as conditional—dangerous because it undermines lasting commitments and invites suspicion of opportunism.
  • Quote:
    “If it’s this kind of thin tissue over which we put over our ambitions…and when we are disappointed or we lose, it kind of goes out the window, that’s not good.” (06:16)

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2. Rethinking Who Participates in Democracy

• Surprising Voter Trends in 2024:
  According to new polling, lower-information and marginal voters (traditionally expected to favor Democrats) swung toward Trump, undermining the “just turn out the vote” strategies. This shift forced introspection about whether liberals truly support broad participation if it doesn’t guarantee left-leaning outcomes (07:10–10:49).
• The Flaws of Civic Tests and Elitism:
  Both host and guest deride calls for voter literacy or civics tests, calling for trust in the political agency of all citizens, regardless of formal knowledge.
  • Quote:
    “You can be a voter that does not know a lot of specific information…Everyone has access to thoughts and beliefs about the kind of society they’d like to live in…” – Osita Nwanevu (12:37–13:53)

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3. “New Founding” as a Structuring Vision

• Historical Paradigm:
  Nwanevu frames his project in continuity with America’s previous “foundings”—the original Constitution, post-Civil War Reconstruction—and argues that the dysfunctions of the current era require a similarly foundational response (15:42).
• Democracy as a Cohesive Left Vision:
  The left lacks a clear, movement-defining framework like conservatism in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Nwanevu suggests democracy, conceived as expanding human agency and collective self-rule, could fill this void, uniting disparate progressive causes under a single banner (15:42–20:00).
  • Quote:
    “I think democracy is the thing. I think that believing in democratic agency, expanding democratic agency, and building democratic agency for the American people is…kind of the project.” (18:13)
• Comparison to the Right’s Messaging:
  Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is cited as an accessible, galvanizing slogan; the left has failed to produce an equivalent (20:00–23:36).

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4. Why the Left Lacks a “MAGA”

• Fragmentation and Historical Drift:
  Nwanevu attributes the left’s big-tent incoherence in part to the fracturing of New Deal economic populism into diverse identity and justice causes, and to a lack of philosophical, as opposed to purely historical, analysis (23:36–27:10).
  • Quote:
    “We have a lot of historians…not very many philosophers, who are telling us, here’s what we actually believe as a matter of principle…We’re very, very good…at asking ourselves, well, is this or is this not what the founders wanted? Very, very bad…in asking ourselves, what kind of America do we want as a matter of principle?” (26:13)

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5. Abundance, Skepticism of Power, and Fusionist Strategies

• Discussing “Abundance” and Its Limits:
  Both speakers parse the idea of “abundance” and how it can only be one plank in a larger political vision. Nwanevu notes the need for leftists to embrace skepticism of elite power and oligarchy, while not getting bogged down in technocratic or niche policy debates (27:10–31:10).
  • Quote:
    “You need to rope whatever abundance is into a kind of larger theme, larger narrative about where the country ought to go.” (30:03)
• Movement over Party:
  Suggests Democrats must build something akin to the conservative movement—one that sees the party as a vessel for a larger, society-transforming project (29:40–34:25).

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6. U.S. Crises Without Lasting Change—Why?

• Repeated Crises, Missed Refoundings:
  Kosloff and Nwanevu question why, after shocks like the Great Recession and Covid-19, America fails to seize “refounding” moments. Nwanevu suggests such moments require not just shocks but pre-existing, coherent movements and ideas ready to be adopted (34:25–38:57).
  • Quote:
    “Things do not naturally change and change in your direction because an old system is dying or because there’s a shock…If there aren’t things kind of lying around as political visions…you’re not going to go anywhere.” (37:01)

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7. The “Great Man” Theory, Leadership, and Talent Deficit

• Historical Talent and Today’s Leadership:
  Citing the “talent deficit” in contemporary politics, both acknowledge that periods of political refounding typically coincide with capable, visionary leaders—from the Founders to Lincoln and Reagan (38:57–45:31).
  • Quote:
    “It was Gore Vidal who said…the Constitution was written by…55 of the smartest men in the country and we haven’t heard from them since…” (40:43)
• Movement vs. Person:
  The left, in particular, has over-invested in presidential saviors (e.g., Sanders) rather than building mass, programmatic support that can outlast individual campaigns (44:13).

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8. Populism, Polls, and the Perils of Complacency

• Polls vs. Political Reality:
  Economic populism may poll well, but voters’ actual preferences are shaped by credibility, aesthetics, and belief in a movement's ability to govern. The left has not yet demonstrated governing or persuasive prowess at the scale necessary; mere popularity of policy is insufficient (45:31–51:27).
  • Quote:
    “People might agree with these ideas…cannot imagine the left actually governing, cannot imagine us actually winning, cannot actually imagine us implementing the things that we’re talking about.” (47:51)

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9. The Case for Refounding: Structural Reforms and Who Gains?

• Key Proposals (51:27):
  • End the Senate filibuster
  • Expand the House of Representatives
  • Enact a national popular vote
  • Impose term limits for Supreme Court justices
• A Broader Appeal:
  Nwanevu argues these reforms, while often aligned with left interests, should also appeal to centrists alarmed by institutional failures and even to a right confident it can compete in a genuinely democratic system (52:09–53:38).
• Risks for Everyone:
  Both acknowledge that any more democratic system will bring victories and losses for all sides: “Everybody has something to lose here. But I think we all as a country gain…” (55:36)

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10. Closing Reflections: Sacrifice, Maturity, and the Road Ahead

• Realism Over Nostalgia:
  Both Kosloff and Nwanevu urge centrists (and all others) not to expect restoration of lost status quos without change or sacrifice.
  • Quote:
    “If I see a centrist or a traditional never Trump conservative who is…not willing to say I’m going to have to accept this uncomfortable truth about where our country’s going, I take them far less seriously.” – Marshall Kosloff (54:10)
• Democracy Demands Maturity:
  Committing to a more open and responsive democracy means accepting the risk of loss, but that’s the work—and the reward—of real politics.
  • Quote:
    “To be committed to democracy or more democratic system is to be committed to the possibility—that probability, really—that you’re going to lose a lot…” – Osita Nwanevu (55:38–56:06)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “People voted on the basis of what they felt the material interests were...it reveals the kind of thinness of the Democratic message.” – Osita Nwanevu (03:00)
• “You can be a voter that does not know a lot of specific information…politics is about what kind of society we want to live in…” – Osita Nwanevu (12:37)
• “I think democracy is the thing...and building democratic agency...is kind of the project.” – Osita Nwanevu (18:13)
• “We have a lot of historians…not very many philosophers, who are telling us, here’s what we actually believe as a matter of principle…” – Osita Nwanevu (26:13)
• “You need to rope whatever abundance is into a kind of larger theme, larger narrative…” – Osita Nwanevu (30:03)
• “Things do not naturally change...because an old system is dying...If there aren’t things kind of lying around as political visions…you’re not going to go anywhere.” – Osita Nwanevu (37:01)
• “Committing to a more democratic system is to be committed to the probability that you’re going to lose a lot…” – Osita Nwanevu (55:38)

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Suggested Listening Guide / Timestamps

• Introduction and thesis on democracy’s “thinness” — 00:00–07:10
• Debate on civic tests, voter knowledge, and broad inclusion — 07:10–13:54
• Historical foundations, structural change, and movement-building — 13:54–20:00
• Vision deficit on the left vs. “MAGA” on the right — 20:00–27:10
• Fusionist projects: abundance, skepticism of power, and movement logic — 27:10–34:25
• Why crises don’t yield fundamental change — 34:25–38:57
• Leadership, movement-building, and the “talent deficit” — 38:57–45:31
• Populism, the gap between polls and votes, and overcoming complacency — 45:31–51:27
• Structural reforms and appeals to all sides — 51:27–55:36
• Sacrifice, maturity, and the real work of politics — 55:36–59:38

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Tone:
Engaged, thoughtful, direct; the conversation is grounded, occasionally humorous, and deeply reflective about the realities and future of American democracy.

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For listeners who haven’t tuned in:
This episode is an urgent call to think bigger about American democracy and to reimagine not just policies, but the very structures and visions that shape the nation. Osita Nwanevu makes a compelling case for a wholly new American founding, arguing for movement-building, structural reform, and a more inspiring, unifying left vision—one that marries realism with real ambition.

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Transcript

[A]

Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. So for today's episode, I'm speaking with the Guardian and the New Republic's Osida Wenevu about his new book, the Right of the Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. I was very excited to speak to Osita, even though we disagree on a lot of political topics, because he's proposing that in the wake of 2024 we shouldn't just think about America in terms of new policies, some new messaging, some new polls and focus groups. We need to think bigger and we need to think bigger in the sense of a new founding for the country. What this means is that ever since the 1860s, there's really been this idea that after the Civil War, America had a second founding with Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Assita, looking at the wreckage of 2024 after the Biden years and a second Trump presidency sees the need to reimagine America at a structural level, at a democratic and and economic level. So even if you don't agree with every single one of his proposals, when it comes to increasing the size of the House of Representatives, abolishing the filibuster, expanding the size of the House of Representatives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you could at least admire the fact that he's thinking big. And I think everyone, whether you are on the left, right and center, needs to think similarly. So hope you all enjoy the conversation. Osira Wanaveu, welcome to the realignment.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

I'm really excited to speak with you. So I'm sure you and I have all sorts of disagreements about post2024American politics, especially as relates to the Democratic Party. But one thing you and I do agree on, and I found increasingly true among people in our age cohort, is a general exhaustion with the sort of post2016 Biden era thesis that making the case for democracy, centering democracy as the pitch for the sort of anti Trump movement and sort of this era of politics just feels really stale. I'd love to hear from you. Why you think having just written a book about democracy that just tends to be true right now?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think that the 2024 election was a good test case here. I think Democrats ran pretty loudly and strongly on democracy. I think you would have been under a rock to have missed him message. Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, that he was an abutting authoritarian, that we're going to lose our democracy, our democratic rights if he was Voted in. Voters heard that message and decided to back Trump. He won the popular vote and the Electoral College. And I think the preponderance of evidence that I've seen is that they backed him for economic reasons. Yeah, I don't necessarily like all the things that Donald Trump says and does. I don't like January 6th or the 2020 election. Mythology and lies that he spread. Sure. But I think that he's going to get us a better deal in our groceries or improve my housing situation. The people voted on the basis of what they felt the material interests were, their hope that Donald Trump would be able to improve their situation. And so I think that they reveal the kind of thinness of the Democratic message. If it's just an abstraction, this thing that your civics teacher told you was important, you know, in grade school, the Democrats are yelling you about, and it's that or, you know, paying your rent, paying your groceries. People choose the latter thing. And that's a point of vulnerability for democracy as a system. It's obviously, as a matter of narrow partisan politics, a point of vulnerability for the Democratic Party. And I think that makes it an especially interesting time to be writing a book about what democracy even means. And I think I took on this project partially out of the hope that if we offered a fuller conception of democracy, more ambitious conception of what it means and where we can go as a country, that would rebuild confidence that it's not just an abstraction, something that can actually deliver for us materially. And it would also be a kind of way to fill this vacuum that I think exists in the Democratic Party now, where there's not really a vision for American society. They're selling to people, not really even the vision for the next 10 years to try to sell to people, maybe there's something in a more robust conception of democracy that can fill that gap. It's at least what I'm trying to.

[A]

Bet here, at least on my part. What I've always found most concerning about the language around democracy is that too often it's just a surface layer. And I'm not trying to sound like a leftist here, but it really is just a surface layer. Lack of analysis from people who sort of promote it, basically saying to yourselves, well, you know, Democracy produced the 2008 financial crisis. Democracy produced the Iraq war, though a little complicated by the Supreme Court and the Electoral College in that case. But basically, if you don't think seriously about the dynamic between take voting for granted, take institutions and norms for granted, there's actually a lot of really Bad effects that have emerged from sort of that instinct or just sort of that reality. And it just wouldn't be shocking that there'd be a huge swath of voters and young people in all the polls we see every other week saying, like, oh, I think democracy isn't the best system anymore, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'd just love to hear how you react to that.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's an important point. I mean, I have been distressed, I think even more so than I thought I would be, by how people reacted to November in particular. I mean, all these people who were, I think, rightfully up in arms about attacks on the right to vote, for instance, or gerrymandering these kinds of things on democratic grounds, say, because Trump won the popular vote this time. Well, maybe democracy is not actually all that. Well, it's cracked up to me. Maybe we shouldn't be investing so much faith in the system. Maybe American people are just stupid or evil. There was a lot of this going around, I think, amongst liberals and even people on the left in the immediate aftermath of the election, which I was troubled by. For me, this is not a kind of fair weather commitment. I think democracy is at the center of my own politics, even more so now that I finished this book than when I started. It's at the center for very practical reasons. I think it is a good method of governance compared to the alternatives. And I spent a good portion of the beginning of the book laying that case. But also in a more spiritual sense almost. I do think that we're fundamentally entitled to some agency over the conditions that shape our lives. And democracy gets us there. And it's not by any means a perfect system. It's not a system which people are going to make the right decisions all the time, or agree with me, a woke leftist, all the time. It's still a system that I think we should be committed to as a kind of background principle. So, yeah, I think if it's this kind of thin tissue over which we put over our ambitions in the immediate political sense, and when we are disappointed or we lose, it kind of goes out the window, that's not good. That's actually a way to build a sense for people who might be sympathetic to authoritarianism, but whimsical monarchs, you're actually not very real and not very adorable. You don't really believe all the things you're saying about it, all you're saying that you can do and all the reasons why you say it's right. So why shouldn't we invest in a figure like Donald Trump or some other authoritarian. If people perceive that we're shaky about these things, that we're kind of opportunistic about them, I think that that lessens and reduces our ability to defend democracy well.

[A]

So one last thing before we get into the idea of refounding, which I'm super interested and fascinated by. One of my favorite sections in the first part of the book is really dealing with Democratic theory. And a lot of the discourse is something that came to mind. This is also a realignment theme is that you were bringing up how certain people at the Daily Wire, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, there's been this like long standing conservative trope about how we need to have civic tests, we need to have literacy tests which are really based upon like Reaganite 1980 sort of images of like, oh, the reason why we have all these Democrat welfare programs. These are all these people who are just like voting. Like this operation would get spiked pretty racist pretty quickly. The premise just being that like voter restrictions or restrictions on the franchise would lead to less sort of left leaning outcomes. But something that really shifted with the 2024 election and also I think led to some of the liberal despair about democracy you're referencing is it was actually lower information voters who actually supported Trump. It was actually people. And there, there's a really fascinating poll that showed that if a lot of people hadn't turned out, a lot of the people who didn't turn out to vote, if they had voted, they would have for Trump. So that would really like those things together, really realign the way we conceive of turnout. Like, you know this, there are hundreds of millions of dollars of democratic left liberal infrastructure that's been built over the past 20 years premised on the idea that if we get more voters out there, if we increase turnout, we win. That whole shift, I think, is going to place a lot of, I think Democrats or even liberals or leftists who aren't thinking deeply in the way that you're talking about this, in a position of being weirdly anti Democratic in a way that will also make Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh start dialing back their rhetoric about needing civic tests asap.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I've been fascinated by the civics tests thing from conservatives in a moment of educational polarization especially. It is out of a real deep and sincere concern for their benighted movement that I think it would be wrong to have the vote go to people who only had college degrees. Post casualty degrees be very good for Me, but I'm just as a political figure, then I don't think we should enter that world for conservative sake. But I think you're right. I think, again, there are people who shift on this set of questions on the basis of what they feel is politically advantageous. There are stories being run by the Washington Post about how the knowledge that many low information voters or kind of marginal voters were actually swinging to Trump had lessened or dampened the enthusiasm among some Democrats, first expanding the vote in the ways that they've been talking about under Biden and under the first Trump administration. That can't be the case. Again, if you have a fundamental momentum model, which I think we shouldn't, you shouldn't be flipping on that basis. You should instead take up the burden and the responsibility of saying, look, let's have an electorate that's broad, let's have it easier for people to vote in this at present, and let's actually do the work of persuading people to agree with our ideas. That's just what politics ought to be about for me. I know that sounds maybe too idealistic or whatever, but, you know, I think there's a practical reality and reason why you should have that perspective. And it goes to, again, if we are transparently duplicitous in the ways that we talk about democracy, the extent to which we emphasize democracy, people see that people are not stupid. And if our commitments to it are shaky, the gap between what we believe and what the authoritarians believe is thin enough that people will go over to the other side with terrible consequences, I think, for us all.

[A]

My last question on this front. One of the polls that you cite in the book is the specific statistic that only, what, 56% of voters could name all three branches of government. I don't know what it is about me. I don't particularly care. It does not. Put it this way. I think that's a problem. And I think to your point in the book, we should increase civic education and we should have robust public infrastructure for supporting media. This is why I'm unironically quaking in my limp boots about the defunding of NPR and PBS and these sort of like, public functions in an era of AI slop. But if we're just speaking literally, I just can't imagine thinking that one's inability to name more of the three branches impacts your ability to sort of make judgments about your life or the environment. Some of you just kind of like, talk, because I just thought I'm pretty empathetic. But that just seems very alien to me. I just don't particularly care.

[B]

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that we should get that number up. We should be improving in public's knowledge in all kinds of ways that we haven't really tried yet. We are right now attacking public media. Other countries invest in it deeply in a way that I think research has shown tends to be good for political information, tends to be good for political knowledge, to have a robust, nonpartisan, non commercial information sector. So I think we should be trying to improve how educated, informed voters are for sure. But I think the point I'm making in that section of the book is the point that you just made to a large extent. Look, you might not know exactly what portion of our budget goes to Medicare, for instance, but you certainly have ideas about whether people should be supported by government, whether it's right for us to have a certain number of people uninsured, what kind of society we'd be if we didn't provide for people who are struggling. You certainly have principles that animate your politics. I think those principles are accessible to all of us, whether or not, you know, statistics. And I think that's valuable content that is to understand the stuff of politics and that matters. And so, yeah, you know, the, the other reason why I think the civics test stuff fails is that you can be a voter that does not know a lot of specific information, frankly, even though those who work in politics, cover politics, don't know everything. There's a huge amount that we're all learning every day and huge amounts of, you know, blind spots that we're all trying to navigate. Um, yeah, everybody has access to thoughts and beliefs about the kind of society they'd like to live in and the kinds of values they think that society ought to uphold and be defined by. And, and those matter as political contributions too. And those are not things you can disqualify people for on the basis of whether they ace some test you devise. Those are just things that we have by living. And yeah, I think that's, that's one of the overall points I'm trying to make in that chapter in the beginning that is aimed at addressing critics of democracy that I think have substantive things to say. And I thought that was an important part of the book to have in there as well.

[A]

So let's get to the meat. So the book is the Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. Once again, there are plenty of things you and I disagree with at a political level, but I find the idea of new foundings to be really, really fascinating because I think the idea of needing to deceive of the fact that there could be structural problems with our system just having that mental model, regardless of where you take that mental model. Right. There are all sorts of different directions one could take a new founding. But I think it pushes back against a really disturbing urge I've noticed in Washington. I saw this in the Republican Party of 2013. I see this in the Democratic Party of 2025. This sort of like, okay, so we were dealt this disastrous result at the ballot box. Romney 12, Harris 24. The answer is to run some focus groups. We're going to do some messaging testing. We're going to sort of promote some new faces that say these same messages in kind of slightly different tones, or we're going to go on podcasts and stream and be a little bit different that don't actually reckon with the problem. I think during previous eras, if we look at the, you know, 1850s, the issue was not that, you know, the slavery and civil rights compromise didn't have quite the right messaging. It was that, like, actually the literal way that we constructed our democratic republic did not work. And needing to focus in that framework is so helpful. So I want people who find themselves started thinking, okay, I know we need to do something different. That's sort of the illustrative tip of this show. But your framing and the framing of Eric Froner allow me to sort of explain his thoughts that you're sort of building upon. Like, where does this idea of America having multiple foundings come from? And why is it a useful one separate from the specific new founding that you'd like to put forth?

[B]

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I'm trying to do two things in this book overall with that one. I think the problems that I've identified in the book with our political institutions are severe enough. And Warren change is large enough that if we enacted them, if we did them, we really would be fundamentally reconstituting the basic structures of governance in this country in a fundamental way. And I think it makes sense to call that a new founding just as a level of honesty. That is the scale of the project that I'm trying to argue for. The other thing we're trying to do is, again, in this place where I think that a lot of people, especially on our side of politics, are bereft of a unifying vision, unifying idea of where we're going, and a unifying message to the American public, something on the scale of national renewal or New Founding seems to fill that gap in really, really well. I've always been inspired, not substantively, but just as a matter of as a political project by the conservative movement. This is as recently as the 1940s, 1950s. Small minority faction in American politics, I think it's fair to say, has premises about government and about society that most Americans don't share. Post New Deal manages to succeed through internal political organizing within the Republican Party to get a nominee on the ticket in 1964. In Barry Goldwater gets absolutely destroyed. But they really are animated by an understanding of what they would like American society to be. And they understand their task as building constituency for that vision. And that helps them sort of organize their thoughts about what they prioritize politically as a matter of policy. But also that vision is intelligible enough and digestible enough that they can explain what it means to be conservative to ordinary people, and they can get it very, very quickly. Progressives, the left have none of this. I think that we have a lot of policies we'd like to implement. There are constituencies in American society we'd like to help out. I think it's very, very hard to describe to an ordinary person succinctly what it means to be a progressive in the kind of society we want to build. You start listing off this laundry list of Medicare fraud, renewed deal and abortion rights and this and that, and nobody really understands how it fits together. And so what I've tried to do in this book initially, and I think I'm going to try to do more and more in my writing in the future, is to say I think democracy is the thing. I think that believing in democratic agency, expanding democratic agency, and building democratic agency for the American people is kind of the project. And there are different facets of that project that reaches the different parts of the progressive agenda. But it is kind of the vision we are trying to create. A democratic society, I'd argue for the first time. And that to me sounds a lot more galvanizing than we're saving, protecting, dusting off this thing that was perfect and that you were told about in school, to be a part of a constructive project of generating a new society and pulling country in a new direction and feeling that we, not just George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or James Mad, but we can be founders and creators in building that country. That sounds exciting to me. It sounds novel to me. And I think it's a register of politics that we on the left have not really pulled people into very well. And I don't know, I think it's worth a shot. And I don't know that there's a lot of other competition. I mean, maybe the vision that you've had, people come on to talk about abundance, maybe it is zoning instead. I kind of think you need something larger and more capacious than that. And I think that's one of the reasons why Donald Trump succeeds are people parsing the ins and outs of his agenda. Every time he's on the ballot, they hear the message make America great again. It's this overarching theme, overarching vibe, overarching feeling about what he's about and what he's doing that pulls people in. Without that, I think that you're missing a huge part of what actually animates ordinary people in politics. I think you're missing a large part of what makes movements succeed. So to the extent that I can pull people out of the technocratic mode, I think the Democratic Party has been in and get them to re embrace political vision, I think that'll be a good thing. That Blinker accomplishes hopefully.

[A]

So many things I want to respond to. So 1. I too share your fascination with the conservative movement. And I also think to your point about there being a galvanizing story with, with figures and a genuine canon and this trend you're sort of progressing, that's a lot of the reason why I was really attracted to the right in the 2010s. I didn't see anything existing as much. And I want to keep noting this because I think I've discovered more and more as I just sort of embrace my center left politics that my center left friends don't share this instinct as much. It's so notable that when you were talking about your admiration for conservatives in the 1940s and 50s, you didn't say Republicans because these are not the same thing. Conservatism is a specific ideology that there are conservatives who are Republicans, but there are Republicans who are not conservatives. And this also gets around one of the Democratic realities of our current era, which is the people are not attracted to the two parties in many ways. You're seeing increasing number of independents. Obviously you cite the research that like, even though when you look at these independents, they tend to actually tend to vote right or left, either way, any sort of we're rebuilding the Dem. I put it this way. The thing I want my centrist friends to stop saying is we're rebuilding the Democratic Party. We're pitching the Democratic Party because at a generational level that A is one of the least Sexy, like, messages I'm being told. I love your part of, like, what project are you is like a, you know, excited 20 or 30 something looking to sign up for. People are just not the right people, I think are not attracted to that. And I think what Bernieism and the DSA and frankly like MAGA populism did at their best in the 2010s is they said, hey, are you a person who thinks something's jacked up about our society right now? Here's this project you can join and contribute to and not necessarily have to wait in line for things that isn't just saying go knock on the door at the Republican national committee in downtown D.C. or go knock on the door at the DNC. So I think so much of what I'm trying to do with this podcast as I'm talking with people like you who are decently far to my left, is I'm just like really sympatical of anyone who kind of recognizes a lot of this flaw lies in left liberalism in of itself and progressivism in itself, and that we should be just talking more in those terms rather than just me sort of turning this into the Democratic Party Rehabilitation Hour, because that just so doesn't meet the moment. And then secondly, I also want to ask you this question that I really wonder the key thing you said something about MAGA, which is like really, really important. What I really like at an intellectual level, love about MAGA is MAGA is a political philosophy that if you just say it, it means a lot to someone. It says something about the past, it's something about the present, it says something about the future. You could say MAGA and you could be your most high brow Heritage foundation fellow. You could come up with like 25 policies that I could actually guide once again, like the sort of, you know, Project 2025 side of things. But then I could also talk to my MAG family members in South Carolina and they're going to hear MAGA and they're going to like hear like discernible, straightforward things like that. To your point, left liberalism, whether it's like centrist or progressive, kind of lacks that. What kind of. Why is that true? Because that's not true. I think during like the first half of the 20th century, is this really just that, like, New Deal liberalism was so eviscerated with like, Reaganism that everything just sort of because, because I think I want to be precise about this is more than just like the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton, like, went centrist and took things the 1990s I think there was also something deeper that happened at a philosophical level. Love your thoughts on this.

[B]

Yeah, you know, I. I've wondered about this myself for a long time, and I. I don't have an answer. I. I mean, I think that people have this thesis that, you know, with the 60s and the emergence of these, you know, social justice project, whether it's women's rights or LGBT rights, or civil. Civil rights, what had been a kind of economically driven movement with like a clear economic message, finds itself fractured in these kinds of ways that make it difficult to reconstitute. Okay, what are we actually about as a unifying project? And we haven't really come up with what that thing is, but I think we could. Again, I think democracy can be understood as a way of tying different things together. So if it's not just an ideology about going to the polls every two or four months, or two to four years rather, but instead, democracy is a system of ideals about human agency and whether or not we have control over our lives. That's the reason why you deserve the right to vote. It's the reason why you deserve a union at work. It's the reason I'd argue why women deserves the right to choose. It's the reason why we shouldn't let people have themselves go bankrupt or die because they can't afford health insurance. Like, that idea of agency seems to bring a lot of different things together. And that idea, combined with the sense that, no, we shouldn't have a society where people are either victims of circumstance and can't really do anything about their situation, or they're snared by hierarchies of people who are. Which are more powerful than. There's something about democracy that I think spreads out into these different areas. But before now. And the reason why this gap has to be filled or this kind of tissue has to. This thread has to be, you know, tied together is because something happens, I think, in the middle of the last century where, you know, the economic populism that I think it defined democratic politics and progressive politics fractures into something that's less easy to define. I think another part of this thesis too, is that especially in the last, I'd say 10 years, 15 years, especially since the rise of Donald Trump, you have a very historically based rhetoric about what we're doing as a project. So we have a lot of historians who analyze Donald Trump through the threat of the Confederacy or something, or American history, broadly speaking, and how we got to this moment and historical movements we could draw from and so on. There's not a whole lot of place for political philosophy in all of that. We have a lot of historians, not very many philosophers, who are telling us, here's what we actually believe is a matter of principle in the kind of society that we want, and facilitating debates at that level. And so I guess one of the things I'm also trying to do with this book is to change that level and introduce thinkers who I think we can draw from his resources. There's a little bit of history in this book, but it's certainly not a book that is a work of history. It's instead, if anything, illustrating that history to give us the right to have more principle, more philosophical conversations about where we want to go. We're very, very good, both as a movement, as progressives, and as a country as a whole, at asking ourselves, well, is this or is this not what the founders wanted? Very, very bad by comparison, in asking ourselves, what kind of America do we want as a matter of principle? And I think that has to change.

[A]

And one thing I want to respond to, because I want to be very clear about this, I do not think abundance with a capital A is the sort of unifying, obvious path forward. Because I spend time on the right, I just really sort of take the rights approach. This, the project that I'm interested in engaging in is what I love about the sort of American conservative project of the late 20th century is it's fusionism. It's taking these different things that wouldn't naturally fit together, but in many ways can be complimentary or at least not jut into each other and present them as a unified project. So if I sort of think of my economically like populist or sort of like anti status quo friends to my left, I think that a Democratic Party or a liberal project has to be very, very deeply skeptical of power in a way that centrists or pragmatists by sort of birth and personality like me, just are usually not comfortable with. So I think a huge plank of whatever that project has to be is, no, just because X person got high SAT scores and then went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and then crushed it at law school, that doesn't mean this person actually is fit to govern the country. I think that's actually a very important thing. Just because this person was in charge of this Wall street firm or this corporation doesn't mean they should take power over the federal government. I think that's a very important instinct that I think the left plank of this brings. But what I do think the abundance plank brings to the table is once again, I think this in its best, it's focus on, well, government should actually. It's actually funny. Bernie Sanders just gave a very sort of helpful take about abundance that I think was very fusionist, where he said, look, he was asked by Dana Bashfortly what he thinks about abundance. He's sort of like, look, I've worked in government for the past 40 years. Government can be too slow, there can be too much paperwork. We need to actually make sure things are built. That said, I do think oligarchy is like the number one issue facing this country, and any movement has to confront that at the forefront. I think that articulation of the quote unquote project is perfectly, perfectly, perfectly permissible. I think fighting back against Doge, rebuilding the American state after whatever the hell happens after this Trump administration, that project is perfectly compatible with zoning reform. But I do think there's a danger that if any one faction sort of says that, like, their way is the way forward, they're going to sort of miss some part of it, but also not put forward a project that's like, compelling or interesting to people.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I. Look, I, I think it's absolutely true that there are ways in which government impedes growth, impedes development of new technologies, makes it difficult for us to build housing, really gets. I think this is a point that Ezra Client has made that I think has not been discussed enough, gets in its own way, even when it comes to government programs. Like, okay, if you're on the left, you want Medicare for all. Well, you want a government that can administer that program. Program of that scale and size well and efficiently, you know, so I think that there, there, there are things there that are the. Basically, we should be having policies we should be looking into reforming. But I also think the question of how to build more affordable housing in San Francisco or in Brooklyn is just kind of the driest, most dusty empirical question. I think people should just do what works. I'm not dogmatic about this in any respect. Anyway. I think that there are people on the left who I think are a little bit too dogmatic and dogmatic on housing in particular in ways that are not dogmatic on healthcare, but we can get into that. It's a whole. But I just, I just, you know, to your point, your overall point, that to me, is not really politics at the level I'm trying to discuss in this book. And I don't think it's politics at the level of most voters engage in politics I think that you need to rope whatever abundance is into a kind of larger theme, larger narrative about where the country all to go. If that narrative is as I interpret this. You can tell this me if I'm being unfair here. Well, there are parts of the country that are magnets for growth and magnets for innovation and magnets for investment and which would be making it easier for people to go and live in those places. I don't know that that's really the thing. I think that we live in a society where people shouldn't have to, because of technology, move to New York or move to San Francisco in order to have a better life or to have economic opportunity. In fact, we live in a world where if you want to stay in your hometown and work in a coding job, it is technically possible for you to do that. There's a whole, I think, weirdness to I think the register abundance is being framed within. I also don't think it's the case that people don't think liberal cities can govern because they're looking at median rents at the dinner table before they go to the polls and saying, actually the people in New York do a really bad job building. I think that people believe all kinds of things about why New York is the way it is that are not really rooted in hard analyses of the policies that are in place there. But I say this not to just dunk on abundance, but because I think that the gap that people are trying to fill, and I think many people are trying to fill earnestly, can only really be filled with a vision on the scale of discussing the kind of America that we want to exist. That's not to say that I think Democrats can only win in 2028 if they are talking ambitiously about refounding the country. I think that there are a lot of ways to win an election, a lot of ways to skin the cat. But the don't get party's been in trouble for a long time. You can win election here, win election there, and still have be on this downward trajectory. I think Democratic Party has lost key constituencies over the last several decades. We're seeing the Republican Party make inroads even with minority voters. Democrats have taken for granted. This is a party in trouble. You can come up with a winning campaign, winning slogan, winning candidate in the next couple of years and still be on this downward slope. And I think picking the party up is a job for movement politics, A job of people who see their job not even to rebuild a Democratic Party per se, but who see the Democratic party as an instrument for a wider societal project in the way the conservatives saw the Republican Party as an instrument for their project. Absent that, I think that things look very, very hairy and very dicey moving forward. And it happens to be the case that this particular project that I'm arguing for is also a project of structural reforms that will probably help Democrats. So there's this kind of unity of immediate political self interest and also kind of ideological vision here that I don't know, I hope people find compelling if you're as concerned as I think Democrats ought to be about their, their medium to long term future.

[A]

So here's a question I've been fascinated by that I've yet to get a satisfactory answer on because the people I've asked it have had an incentive, given the nature of their books, to say that this is not quite the dilemma. So you and I are around the same age and we're both very politically and policy active. So we sort of seen these spaces. I'm fascinated by the fact that if I were to sort of go through Amazon, I could find and I will get into why your book is different every single time there's been a crisis. So whether the crisis is 2008, whether the crisis is the election of Trump in 2016, whether it's Covid in 2020, you get some book that doesn't quite argue that at a deep philosophical level as your does in the refounding language. Yours is more substantive and that's very important. But there is just this question of why do we keep going through crises, these moments of potential transformative change. Like for example, we get this refounding in the 1860s because America went through the Civil War. You could not have gotten the refounding in the way that it went about into Reconstruction and afterwards in the 1850s. There is something about the crisis of the Civil War years that created the space for the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. So one would think that the chance for a refounding, especially because what you do in this book is you talk about the intersection. It's not just democracy, it's also the economy. It's also the workplace man 2008. That's a chance for both those things put together. 2020. Oh wow. Like Covid, the intersection of January 6th and Covid, the democracy and the economy side. Why do we just keep going through these crisis moments? And you don't see new Founding moments, new Republic moments in the sense of Arthur Schlesinger saying there was a republic before the New Deal, there was a republic after the New Deal. Tell me about that. What's your theory?

[B]

Oh, I wish I had a theory. I mean, I do remember in 2020, all of this talk about how the pandemic has reordered American life. And I think it did in important ways. But the specific way that people thought was, well, obviously we're going to have a fundamentally different attitude towards public health now. Fundamentally different public health infrastructure. And they were right. We made it worse. People hide and this is like, oh, obviously like a million people die. We're going to do things the fundamentally different way. We're going to have medical care for all. I think there's a lot of hubris in kind of understanding the world in that way. Things do not naturally change and change in your direction because an old system is dying or because there's a shock to the order of things. If there aren't things kind of lying around as political visions, as new directions that are kind of fleshed out and ready for people to pick up at these moments, you're not going to go anywhere. And I think the only thing I'd guess is post 2008 and really post 2022, the predominant language, at least on our side of things, was let's go back to normal, let's reconstitute things. Let's, let's not prosecute bankers. Let's protect, you know, after 2000, after 2020, let's protect our existing democratic institutions. We're looking at small R Republican institutions from Donald Trump. Let's get back to politics as we remembered. Let's, you know, have a presidency where you're not forced to watch the news all the time. That was the mode people were in. That's why Biden was the nominee in 2020. And so I think that things were set up in such a way by people in a position to change direction, to not take full advantage of the situation. But I also think that the American people, to the extent that they want to change and still want change, it's kind of inchoate. The only visions are really on the table, are being offered by the right right now or visions that sort of operate from the scale that we've been discussing this whole time. So, yeah, I don't know. I kind of feel like if, you know, opportunities present themselves and you often need a kind of shock to fundamentally change things, but it's not inevitable. It's certainly not inevitable if you don't have either the ideological resources or the willpower amongst people who are in a position to do something. It's not inevitable if you don't have those things together in a way that's going to work towards change.

[A]

Listening to your answer, a question that comes to mind is obviously for a variety of reasons beyond just the words itself, the phrase great man theory of history has gone out of fashion both at an empirical level and just using those sort of terms. But just thinking of the moments I described to you, these really transformative moments. Lincoln, FDR, Reagan in 1980. Let me put it this way. America doesn't take its Reaganite, neoliberal conservative turn if George H.W. bush is the president in 1980 or if Gerald Ford wins again in 1976. There is something to these sort of moments. So I guess I would just be. And once again, what I love about the book is, especially in the first hundred pages, you're really dealing with the first founding of the country. You're citing the specific debates and the statements that the founding generation are making. And obviously it's cliched to say like our politicians back then were so smart and so amazing and everyone's dumb today. But like, sorry, like you've got the direct quotes in the book, like they are cooking at a level. Let's put aside slavery. Like, but just like, you know what I mean? Like, there's just a, there's a. I like when you, you know, you cite the specific example, you know, 55, you know, 55 show up at the convention. And I sort of like if I had to name the 55 men and now today women who I would appoint to fill that similar role, purely from the perspective of let's get like the minds and the talents of our generation, I think we would sort of struggle. I think there's like a talent deficit here. So I totally agree with you that there's this need to build this vision, but I think there's this also non vapid need to recognize that there is a talent question. So I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on that.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think it was Gore Vidal who said that I'm going to mess it up. But the Constitution was written by, you know, 55 of the smartest men in the country and we haven't heard from them since consistently close enough.

[A]

If that's not the exact quote, I.

[B]

Mean, it's just, I mean it is true. I mean I, I obviously have major, major differences with, with the founding generation. I oppose slavery without reservation. I think women should be equal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These were not dumb people. Extremely intelligent even given the Mistakes that they made, I think. And yeah, it's hard to conceive of specific people in politics today who are operating at anything like that level. You don't even have to go back far as the founding, I'd say the early 20th century. This is the quality of the oratory, the kinds of things people are saying to the public and expecting a public that is less literate than ours to pick up and understand. Listen to Roosevelt meeting his fireside chats, the way that he speaks. Politics has been dumbed down a substantial amount, I think, in the last several decades. And I don't know what it would take to change that. I think it is hurting us in important ways. I don't know if there's a specific figure that I'd point to as our potential savior in this respect. One of the other points I make too is that outside the immediate political sphere, I do think that we have the resources and a lot of intelligent people working through questions of governance to do better than the founders did in crafting someday some new political order. Political science was not really a thing. 1787. They were just kind of getting it started. It's been a thing for some time now. We've seen all kinds of governments pop up all around the world we can learn from. We have more than two centuries of experience with this one. So the knowledge is there, it's just not in Washington. And I'm not really sure how to square that and what to do about it. But I'm despairing about it, I think as much as you are. One other thing I'll say about political leadership, I've thought for a while since 2016, that as much as I've come to like Bernie Sanders and people like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but the left has invested so much in the idea of a revolutionary presidential campaign that if we choose the right person, let's say in 2028, they'll get in there and things will just kind of start working. They'll make the arguments, they'll get people who aren't interested in the left kind of by virtue of their charisma or whatever. On our side, there's been a tremendous amount of faith in this on the left, and I think it's come at the expense of understanding. No, I think that most people do not actually agree with us in this country. I think there's. You'll find support for taxing the rich and Medicare for all and so on, that these are popular ideas. But people are not going to the polls as self conscious Coherent leftist with a sense that there is a political program they should be supporting candidates you should be supporting on that basis on a consistent, in a consistent way. Conservatives do have that. Again, to make the comparison conservatives have, people will say to you, I'm a conservative, I believe X, Y and Z. I'm going to look at every single candidate on the ballot to see whether they align with these positions or not and can to vote on that basis. And I hope that we have conservative majorities in Congress. I think we have a conservative core. Progressives or leftists more specifically, have not built a constituency like this in the American public, as sympathetic as people might be to some of our policy proposals. And Bernie Sanders is the neutral person. And so there's a lot of movement building work that still needs to be done underneath the big presidential campaigns that get all the attention and investment. That's kind of been the way that I thought about our challenge as a movement. I will say though too that I've come to appreciate more and more that it took conservatives building a movement like that. But as you say, it also took Reagan like you still needed a guy. Like there's this, this interaction between movement politics and the leadership and charisma of specific people. And so I don't know, maybe, maybe it makes sense to put up somebody who's definitely going to lose the primary next time around just to have that happen. But yeah, I think that there needs to be a kind of balance that I don't think we've struck on the left between, on the one hand, propping up these individual figures we like a lot, and on the other hand asking ourselves, okay, how do we actually pull in more ordinary people to our side without assuming that there is a restive left majority waiting to be activated by the right presidential campaign?

[A]

I'll ask you about this specific example. It's explained through my pseudo family, my very MAGA family in the South. They are dispersed in my family, more activated. So and so, given breaking points, I spent a lot of time despite being a centrist in left spaces. And the biggest argument I typically get into, especially with Kyle Kalinsky, was over him, citing polls that indicate that 70% of people support Medicare for all. This is sort of like Peak Bernie 2020. And the fact that Bernie didn't win was reflective of a conspiracy and how corrupt the system was, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for me, this has just been very, very easy to square. When I talk to my family members who, if you polled them, especially given some of the proposals that you list here, right? So like a wealth tax, unions, worker power, especially the economic planks that you're discussing here. And this is always the burning opportunity. Like, none of these people, like, went to college. I suspect they'd be sympathetic to them, and in polls, they would register as part of, like, whatever majorities you could form in favor of that. However, when I talk to them, when they ask me about politics, you know what they're Most animated about? RFK Jr. Tearing down the FDA. They are not animated by the destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Even though if we were to, like, pull out some of the individual functions that the CFPB did, they would probably say they were supportive of them. That seems to me, and this goes a little deeper than just the stereotypical, well, yeah, they're socially conservative, therefore they're choosing that over economics. That's why I picked the RFK Jr example as being the really indicative one, because it's sort of. It's weird, right? Like, that's a realignment issue. I think the left really has to square themselves to this reality that the polls are not capturing something when it comes to how the polity is thinking about things. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

[B]

No, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think, you know, again, poll after poll after poll, taken in isolation, on an individual level, you ask people about certain aspects of left, economic platform or agenda. Large amounts, even. Even, you know, extraordinary amounts of support, depending on what you happen to be talking about. But I think there's a credibility gap that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. People might agree with these ideas. They might even like Bernie Sanders, but cannot imagine the left actually governing, cannot imagine us actually winning, cannot actually imagine us implementing the things that we're talking about. There's this sort of absence of faith that we can deliver all the things that we promise and all the things that we talk up. And that's important hurdle to clear. I think some of this is, frankly, aesthetic. Zoran Mamdani is a very different political figure than Bernie Sanders in these ways. Zormandani is somebody who I think has made an effort to look more like a conventional politician, sound more like a conventional politician. And I think that's helped him tremendously, and I think it's helped him win over some skeptics would be alarmed by Bernie's whole deal and his hair or whatever. That stuff, as silly as it is, I do think kind of matters. But in a broader sense, I think that there's a need to demonstrate a capacity to govern. And I think there's a need to frame the things that we care about in ways that align with the existing value set that Americans have. If you are talking about democracy and you are not talking about Das Kapital, maybe that's something to try. Maybe. Maybe you get people to the same place, but within reference to things that they already tell you that they care about, the ways that they've already been used to hearing politics frame. You say that if you care about the system of values. Well, actually, here are some things that you haven't thought about before, and you're not trying to sort of force people into a kind of novel aesthetic or rhetoric because it's one that you happen to like the most as a leftist. Yeah, I think about this question a lot. I do think that in 2020, it's clear as day that you had the field consolidate during the primary, Democratic primary, basically to block Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee. I think that absolutely happened. I think it would have been much harder for that effort to succeed if 60 or 70% of Democratic voters wanted Bernie Sanders to be the nominee. And that was not the case. Bernie pursued a strategy that got him a kind of solid minority bloc, but there was not enough to have him prevail. And I think we need to change that. I think we cannot just appeal to the machinations of the dnc, or whoever it is happens to be as real as those machinations might be as an excuse for not winning and not succeeding. I think we have to be more creative about the way we present ourselves, the way that we make our arguments, the kinds of arguments that we're making, and the extent I'm inspired by anyone. I think Mamdani has shown that this can be done, at least in New York City. Does that campaign work in places where I grew up in Northern Virginia? No, I don't think it. You need something else there, but that's what it means. You need a multifaceted movement. People are speaking in different registers to different concessions of people. But there's this unifying system of ideals at the heart of it. So you have different kinds of conservatives. You have conservatives that can speak well to evangelical communities. You have conservatives that can speak from the Chamber of Commerce. And it's all part of the same project. There's this fusion, as you said, that they labored to build and that got them a broad enough coalition to become as powerful as they have become in American politics with this idea. Write in the book the help of some structural features, but they did the movement work that I think we need to be doing on the left.

[A]

So last two big questions. So some of your specific proposals are end of the Senate filibuster, expanding the House Representatives, national popular vote, term limits on the Supreme Court. What I'm really curious about is these structural changes, put it hypothetically, but as we should learn from 2024 realignment politics of pushing things in a different direction than we would sort of think. But hypothetically, a lot of people on the right are going to respond to this by not being interested in the founding project because it's seen as a left founding project. I would be curious, what is there there for the right or the center when it comes to the refounding as you're articulating it?

[B]

Well, I think there's a tremendous amount for the center. If you are troubled by Donald Trump, you should take seriously the ways in which the safeguards we've been told were going to help us avoid authoritarianism have failed and actually abetted Donald Trump coming into power and staying in power. If you're a centrist, there's a lot in here that should worry you, trouble you. In fact, I think most of the people who've studied some of these issues, the legal academy, historians, I don't think most of those people are on the left or leftists. I think they're kind of good government types who will yell about Citizens United and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of. There's a lot here for the center, the right. I think I'm a little the right. I think I'd be more of a loss to say what they have to gain here beyond the reassurance that a world that is or a country that's more democratic and a country with a more functional democratic political system is not one where we leftists are going to win all the time. Obviously, Donald Trump again won the popular vote in this particular election. He won the popular vote partially because the right was able to make inroads in places like New York City amongst minority groups. Again, the Democrats had been doing well with conservatives can win in a more democratic country. It's just a matter of making the effort and making the argument. And I look forward to having those debates and those fights and hopefully winning them. And New Refunded America one a quick.

[A]

Thing on that too. But this is what the right and the center have to come to a realization on and this is where I'm going to push them is that it's true. You're right, the right was capable of winning in a higher turnout mass election in 2024. But that right was not the same right as the right in 2013. And my biggest concerns about people, people are always sort of surprised about like my despite me being like centrist in disposition, me being more centrist, skeptical and more left friendly than most people in my cohort. It's just because I have not heard enough centrists reckoning with the fact the whole like to keep things the same. Like the more things have to change to keep things the same. There's very little, there's almost this theory and this is actually why like I just get worried about some of the centrism because it's very much sort of like we can take things back and win while basically not conceding anything or sacrificing something. And it's hard to see a post 2024America and not have that one be where establishment coded. People like you and I, in certain ways we're wearing blazers that says something are going to have to sacrifice something. If I see a centrist or a traditional never Trump conservative who is arguing against Trump or is arguing for a return to power, but aren't willing to say I'm going to have to accept this uncomfortable truth about where our country's going, I take them far less seriously. And I think too much of the anti Zoram Mandani stuff has fallen into that category of if I were an elected Democrat right now, I would not whine about Zoran. I would actually spend my time screaming about the insanity of nominating Andrew Cuomo for office and how that requires all of us after going through Biden, to really burn down our own houses before we whine about other things. So that's just like my big frustration when it comes to these things.

[B]

No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. And I think it's important to reiterate as we kind of started at the beginning by saying to be committed to democracy or more democratic system is to be committed to the possibility that the probability really that you're going to lose a lot. And I think that there are things that should make people on all sides of the political spectrum anxious about moving into that world. On the left again, I'm a leftist in every respect. I have very, very woke social beliefs that most Americans disagree with. When it comes to things like transgender rights and other parts of progressive agenda in the last decade especially, I have to accept the likelihood that in a more democratic society I'm going to lose on those questions. Sometimes and also take up the burden of convincing people to agree with me over time. And that means I'm going to lose some elections. That means I'm going to lose some fights and debates. But you pursue that, work in the faith that eventually you can get people to come into coalition if you agree with you. That's going to be true for things that the center wants, can be true for things that the right wants. And so everybody has something to lose here. But I think we all as a country gain from being able to resolve our political questions in a democratic manner and with a responsive government, the government that has been so paralyzed by the inequities I talk about here, and paralyzed in very basic ways from solving problems that we'd all like to solve somehow rather than kind of leaving Bethesda. So I don't know, I think everybody has something that's going to pinch them about more democratic America. But I think that's what it means to have a kind of mature political project and mature political vision. It's not all sunshine and roses. So, yeah, to your point about we want on the center or on the right to win without changing in any meaningful way. We want to sort of remake 2008, we want to remake 1990, whatever, and it's just a matter of coming out with the right pitch. I think that's a loser politically. And also this thing, it's kind of irresponsible and immature in a deeper, more fundamental way. Things change, politics changes, what people want changes. And even if you'd like to take us back to some prior time, you know, there's something naive about believing you'll get there just by dusting off the political approaches of the old. You have to make new arguments for why the old, why the old order existed, which is what Donald Trump. I think this to a certain extent, you know, there has been conservatism and then the specific articulation of it that Donald Trump has offered in the last decade or so, it sounded novel to people's ears, even though I think he's pursuing, as a matter of substance, a lot of the same agenda. But now, like make America great again, that's a matter of rhetoric, political style. It sounds, it feels, it is different. If you want to return to a centrist America or if you want to return to a kind of more establishment feeling conservatism, well, hell, do the work of trying to build a constituency for that amongst the public in a way that respects them and respects, reflects the way that their attitudes have changed. Like how do you think creatively about building things back up in your way? I don't know. I think that's I don't envy them for having to try, but that's kind of the work of politics. You can't just toss out the same old same old and expect it to work the same way that it did 20 years ago.

[A]

That is an excellent place to end. Osita, thank you for joining me. The book is Right of the People, Democracy in the Case for a New American Founding.

[B]

Thank you very much for having me.