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The Realignment
591 | Saikat Chakrabarti: Building a New Consensus - How to Move America from "Failure Mode" to "Mission Mode"
00:56:05
Saikat Chakrabarti, President and co-founder of New Consensus, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Saikat discuss why an anti-status-quo moment requires more from government and politics than "making the DMV work better," his framework for moving government from "failure mode" to "mission mode," the politics of immigration after ICE's crackdown in Minnesota and the killing of two American citizens, the return of ideology to Democratic Party circles, and why the center needs to start believing in big goals, and the left needs to embrace pragmatism.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. My guest today is Shrikat Chakrabarti. Shrikat came to prominence in 2018 as AOC's campaign manager and then Chief of Staff as she entered into Congress where he led the effort to draft and release the Green New Deal. Since then he's founded the New Consensus think tank and serves as its President. He's also now running for Congress in the race to replace Representative Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. To clear up front, this isn't an episode focused on his candidacy and any other election related promotion since of course, this is a think tank podcast. Charcot has actually been on my goal guest list ever since I launched the realignment back in 2019, so given our shared interests, I'd have him on the show regardless of whether he ran for office or not. So for our purposes, he's very much appearing on the show as President and co founder of New Consensus, an organization that grew out of his work at Brand New Congress and his time working on the Green New Deal. In this conversation we talk about why the political center slash moderate crowd struggles to think big and often substitutes polls and message testing for actual goals built around an affirmative story and worldview about where the country needs to go next, why the Left struggles to embrace pragmatism. What his New Consensus Left informed story of the past 60 years of American politics is. We then dig into his Mission for America framework of government having three different modes of operation, mission mode, management mode and decline mode. You won't be shocked to hear, but he thinks that we've been stuck in failure mode for most of the 30 year plus of any millennial's lifetime. We then go into how the abundance crowd can move beyond just making the DMV work better and build a more transformative project. The politics of immigration and ICE after the killings of two American citizens in Minnesota and my desire to bring a focus on left liberal ideology over generic Democratic Party divocation to center left spaces. Hope you all enjoy the conversation. Shwarkat Charkrabarti welcome to the Realignment.
- [02:02]
B
Thanks so much for having me on Marshall.
- [02:04]
A
So I have wanted to record this episode for a long time since the podcast released in 2019. Especially given the fact that I went to your website New Consensus and found just like the best reading list I've ever encountered when it came to sort of post neoliberal post 2015 consensus politics. I really suggest folks take a look at it, but it really showed that you were interested in some of the same topics that I'm interested in so I'd love to have a conversation about all of that within the context of the politics of the moment. Of course. I need to put this at the start of the episode because the Niskanen center where we're doing this podcast is through is a 501C3. This is me interviewing you as a person, not promoting candidacy or anything like that. And I think the whole 2019 thing is in reference to the fact this interview was going to happen regardless of whether or not you ran. So as I've been prepping for this interview, I've listened to a bunch of your podcasts, seen a bunch of the videos you've done, and I get the sense that other than Ezra Klein's show last year, which we'll talk about a little later, which you do with Zevvers Teach out, I'm probably one of the more center coded persons or sort of outlets you've spoken with. So as someone who hangs out in left spaces, as a center person, I rarely see it go the other direction. So what's just your broad take or sort of POV on what you see as the center and sort of like the center left or what do you just sort of see when you look at spaces like the one that I live in?
- [03:30]
B
You know, I don't like, I actually don't make these distinctions so strictly about the center versus the left versus a right, because often the the real distinction I've seen in my work and also working in Congress has been like people who are interested in ideas and ways to actually move the country forward. And then within that space, I'd say the distinction tends to be like folks who think markets alone and just private markets alone can drive that. And then folks who are interested in something else and looking at what do we actually do to make this happen. And then I'd say the distinction is like people who don't want to do it like status quo lists. And so I'm not so interested in engaging with the status quo folks. I'm interested in convincing them that they're wrong, but I just am not. I just think we're at a point where a broad swath of people realize things are broken and I'm interested in engaging with all of them. You know, and I've like a lot of the ideas that I talk about. I feel like there's folks on the right who are interested in some of these ideas. There are people in the center. I mean, you said, you mentioned the Ezra Klein podcast. I think there's a lot of stuff that, you know, I was talking about on that podcast and reading his book in abundance. There's a lot of things that he talks about from our own history, from the World War II era that I'm very interested in and that are very kind of foundational to how I see progress happening. So I don't know, I kind of try not to bucket people from the start and see how my ideas will engage regardless. So, yeah, it's funny, I hadn't actually thought about the fact that maybe I haven't been on as many center podcasts. I'd like to go on more to engage with folks like you, at least, who are interested in the ideas.
- [05:04]
A
Yeah, solicitation very much. Welcome. So I think what's interesting there in your response is I don't like to think that it's I'm bucketing or no one likes to be labeled these days, but I just notice differences in these different spaces. And by bucketing people, I can understand those differences. So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about here. So when I came from sort of covering left populist and right populist spaces and entered into center coded spaces, for example, I noticed that in center spaces, lots of talk about polls, lots of talk about limits, and lots of engagement with like, okay, the voters have said that the status quo doesn't work, but not seeing that broken status quo through the lens of like, ideology or ideas, but instead message testing. So, okay, so we need to work this message into a language that a voter who doesn't like the status quo is going to really appreciate, which is, as you know, different than basically actually saying, is this thing that we're proposing actually going to fix the status quo? So I've just found personally navigating between these different spaces by putting people in buckets. I can understand language and differences, but I think that's very well taken from.
- [06:14]
B
Your perspective as you're saying that one thing it did make me think of something I have noticed and I guess, quote, unquote, more center spaces is there is a tension, especially right now, between. There's an instinct, I think, in center spaces to kind of approach problems from the. From like a small is good perspective. Like, let's try to find the like one little trick, like the one reform that'll make the DMV work better. Right. And that it's like that approach that's like, may the DMV work better and then go bigger. Whereas I think, you know, right now we have these huge, monumental problems we're facing as a country at Least that's my belief. I'd say that's the belief in a lot of more left spaces and right spaces. And I'd actually say in a lot of the center spaces I've been in, there's been this tension of trying to figure out how to like, you know, do we actually talk about our project? I mean, abundance is a good example of this where, you know, there's a big range of ideas and people within the abundance movement. And I think there's one segment that's very much focused on the how do we make the DMV work better? And another segment that's focused on like, wait, is this something bigger? Should we be pitching like a larger transformation of the country? And I don't think the movement's quite figured out which of those things is its identity.
- [07:19]
A
Yeah, and I actually love that framing because my, I would say my goal from a left liberal, from the center all the way to the left perspective is I want the left to be more pragmatic. So I think the left needs more of how do we make the DMV work better? And I think the best version of Zoron's priority is going to have a lot of stuff like that. And I want the center to also not define pragmatism as an end in of itself, because that's sort of like the bad version of it. Right. So like, the left gets overly focused on things, need to be big and transformative to meet a moment to be in an emergency, which is both. True. But then you also need the building blocks. And I want the sensor to actually say, hey, at a certain point, the DMV working better would basically not answer any single problem that any actual voter who exists outside of an ad is experiencing right now.
- [08:05]
B
Yeah. And I guess my response to that would be the practical way to make the DMV work better in politics at least, is you actually have to create a political moment in which you are getting excitement around a larger project of which making the DMV work better is part of it. I think that's part of like, why Zoron's able to make the basic functions of government work better right now. Because everyone's paying attention to him, because he pitched something bigger. I would say he actually didn't pitch something that much bigger. But that was the vibe of the campaign. And you know, at a very practical standpoint, and this is an argument I've had with folks having the abundance movement, I say, like, look, if you want to get really amazing, talented people to come work in Government, you either have to pay them a lot, like Singapore and Finland and all these countries do, or it has to be in the context of something that's exciting, like the moonshot. Right. And that, you know, if you look at examples where we've gotten government to work really well, where other countries have gotten governments to work really well, they've often been in the context of these larger missions where you're able to then attract, you know, political capital, talent, energy, and then through that process, you get a better functioning dmv.
- [09:09]
A
That's exactly it. And I think so. Here's the question that I'm actually most psyched to ask you, because I've been sort of dunking on my. On my center compatriots. I've got this over the past year or so, and this is just why I started off by asking you about, like, these different spaces, because that just has been so core to my experiences the past year. So I spent the first six years of the realignment just focused on, like, right populace and just left populace. So hosting breaking Points, going on a tour, spending time interviewing people, exceph for teachout. And then I reentered center left spaces, and I was just shocked at how differently they're run. So at welcome Fest, this big centrist gathering, I was interviewing Jake Auchenkha, the representative from Massachusetts, very smart guy, just did an event with him in D.C. and then abundance co author Derek Thompson. And for the six hours before our panel, which was focused on abundance, I just saw lots of talk about polls and how do we deal with the groups, how do we moderate, how do we win these swing districts? And that is just not my experience in left or right populous spaces where it's much bigger, it's much more aggressive, it's much more expansive, whether or not the listeners agree with those different ideas. So I just sort of asked them. I was like, just sitting through this thing. I see the polls, I see the messaging. I don't really see a story. And when I go in right and left spaces, there is always just a story. And the two of them basically, you know, Derek said that stories are for children. Jake Auchincloss said that he didn't have a story to tell, but he thinks the primary would lead us to an actual story. And I just countered with, look, the right story is that elites at a bipartisan level drove this country into a ditch since the 1990s in all these ways that have ruined your lives. And then the left story is basically one that's rooted in oligarchic Politics and capitalist overreach since the 80s, financializing all of our lives and causing all these big problems, especially with public goods. That was my sort of articulation of the left Cruise. One, but I would love to ask you a two parter then. So one, to what degree do you think the story and being able to tell one is the center of everything right now? And then two, without trying to bucket you then to your point, how would you tell a more like left facing story? Because we're in the same age cohort about the millennial experience over the past 35 to 40 years.
- [11:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the story is important and you know, I'd say more important than the story is like the reality of why we are where we are. And the story is kind of trying to tell that reality. Right. And I agree with you. I think not trying to understand the underlying dynamics of where we are means you're not going to be able to actually tell some answer for how do you get out of this? Because that's really what people want to hear. It's not just this one policy is going to save us. It's going to be what is a larger vision that's going to save us. Right. And there's I guess a story I tell and this is not exactly like the left populist story is we as a country. And if you look at most developed nations today, we actually had this different kind of governing where we had, we set national goals, we used to, we, we govern in a way to actually try to achieve those national goals. And our entire government is set up differently. And you know, at new consensus, we actually talk about these different modes in which countries govern. One we call mission mode, management mode and decline mode. The last time we were really in mission mode, I'd say was during the World War II mobilization, where if you look at how we governed then we had this mission to actually win the war. And we created real plans to do stuff, not just passing some policies and taking your hands off the steering wheel. And we had institutions to finance and execute and coordinate those plans. I'm sure you know about the Reconstruction Finance Corporation because you read all about this, but we had tons of institutions like that. And that's basically a story of all these countries in the 20th century that rapidly transformed and upgrade their economies at some point. I'm talking about post war Europe, all the rich Asian nations, the Nordic countries. And whenever you're in this mode of intentionally upgrading your economy, life starts getting better and better. But then what tends to happen is you know, eventually these countries will try to just start managing that. And in America, you know, soon after the war, I'd say we. We got into kind of a management phase where we kept trying to improve people's lives through the government, but we started to honestly decline doing that. And then at some point in the 80s, largely, you know, I'd say in response to stagflation, which was this crisis we couldn't, we couldn't tackle with that current approach, we kind of gave up on that and switched to this other mode where we just said, actually, you know, us as a government, like, the government should just act as, like a referee who's doing so, extend some rules, you know, play, you know, call in balls and strikes. But really, you know, the private economy, corporations, they should determine the future of our country. And, you know, profit alone should be like the, the determining factor for that. And that, you know, people call it neoliberalism or Reagan style economics. Washington consensus. Right. Was. Is another way to put it. And, you know, my view is that's been overall disastrous. And really over the last 35 to 40 years, you know, millennials have seen the, the adults in the room just fail over and over. And so there's been this combination of this new kind of, you know, of this decline that we've had, because I'd say we've been in decline for the last 40, 50 years where, you know, wages for working people have largely stagnated, probably the bottom 60% or so, while the cost of essentials are going up. At the same time, you've had these huge, monumental mental institutional failures. A failed war in Iraq, the Great Recession, I mean, the pandemic. Just this feeling that actually it turns out the adults in a room can't handle anything big coming our way. And that is what's given rise to this populism where people are just looking for something else that's going to rip up the system and replace it with something new. And I'd say maga's got their version of populism, which they say, you know, if we just kick all the immigrants out, you know, close up, try to be a more nationalistic country, we're not paying attention to other countries. That's going to solve it. Well, I think that will have failed, honestly, as a worldview after four years. And, you know, I'm, I'm pitching that we actually have to go back to this mission mode mindset. We're really setting the country on these larger goals to fix these problems. It's unfortunately not like One single thing. It's not just taxing the rich or just, you know, doing some permit reform. It's a whole different kind of way of approaching governing.
- [15:20]
A
No, And I love that. And I think, and this is why I'm pushing the center to care about this more at a project level. Because I just ask you a could be vapid question about story and you just wrote off 60 years of American political economic history. And that's why a story that undergirds that really, when you merge it with serious like empirical reality is important here. But I guess my question for you, because I like the mission mode, manage mode, decline mode framework, I actually agree with all of that. But I think the real challenge for what you're describing is what occurs during that history too though, is the sort of rise of like skepticism of government at a language level from both the center and even parts of like the center, left to left, all the way to the right. So in many ways, like mission mode, government just does not, let me put it this way, like fdr, especially given the New Deal and sort of like the breakdown of that prior consensus, had just a lot more willingness of Americans sort of engage in those sort of projects and believe in them. And you didn't have like the welfare queen who's taking advantage of this. You didn't have like the tropes that the conservative movement developed to really delegitimize that approach. And then you didn't have to your point, that loss of faith that stemmed from like the 1970s, it seeming like the New Deal and the Great Society didn't have the answers. So chicken of the egg question for you. Do you need to restore faith in government before people would want mission mode? Or do you need mission mode to prove the government work and then that sort of builds it work? So this is very much like where, you know, you as a politician level, this would be a real question for you.
- [16:55]
B
Yeah, I think so. My view is you gotta get the country into mission mode as the way to restore faith in government. And of course you have to do small things in a way. And a big part of it is communicating that. Right. And we talked about Zoron earlier. I mean, Zoron, you know, he's promised free childcare, stabilizing, you know, freezing the rent and a bunch of larger things. But the stuff that's getting him the political capital to be able to eventually do that is like making a video about New York handling the snowstorm this last weekend. Right. So you do have to do both. And that's What FDR did a lot of, like, part of being in mission mode is this idea of you're constantly engaging with people directly. And one thing that's interesting to me actually is if you look at sort of the history of these nations that go through these big economic transformations, they do sometimes seem to dovetail with transformations in communication, like fdr. The New Deal happened during the radio era. You know, Reagan kind of happened during the explosion of tv. And we're seeing everything going on right now during the era of the explosion of social media. Right. And I think the politicians who are the best at, you know, making this stuff happen, you do figure out how to use this new form of communication and a way to directly engage with people and use as political capital to build up your ability to go further. But it is a different view of political capital. You know, like if you go to Congress today and you ask Democrats, most Democrats will talk about using political capital like they think of like, any action as a, as like draining the battery. Whereas FDR really did embrace this view of bold, persistent experimentation where he would see doing things as a way of showing fight, as a way to build people and bring people in. But that means you have to make sure your message is winning when you're talking about it. So part of that was him, yeah, doing that through fireside chats, but he did a bunch of things like he also, you know, would organize the CEOs and, and labor leaders and try to buy them in personally. He famously, he actually created the whole idea of off the record press engagements. So he would bring all the press into the White House, give them access, and have that as a way of him engaging like the mainstream press. But, but the overall idea is I do think you have to get the like because of the way politics works. Like, you have to win. You have to win with a large enough political base of what that idea is. And I think you have to put the country in a larger mission to win on that base. I'd say like Trump. That's what Trump kind of did. You know, he, he pitched a real vision of a different kind of a country. Of course, he's, I think, failing to actually, you know, deliver on the promises he made. But I don't think Trump could have won just like pitching, I don't know, making the DMV better to go back.
- [19:25]
A
Well, no, and I think you actually resolved the DMV sort of order of operations here, because any government, and this is why we keep swinging back between different populist and then centrist forces over the past 10 years, any government, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, because once again, that anti government skepticism that comes from the Reagan years is also going to affect Trump. It's also going to affect whether people trust ICE or not. It's going to affect whether or not people have faith in government actors sort of walking down their streets with assault rifles. That's a real dynamic here. So I think of the DMV dynamic as, you know, something anyone across the aisle could take, which is like, do small things that you then have the talent and the ability to broadcast to people and build credibility with and that then leads you. So, like, there's a world where, and once again, I'm not suggesting this would have been the right moral thing to do, where you consider how transformative and aggressive the Trump administration is opposed to immigration would be. Okay, let's actually get some big wins on the board when it comes to affordability and the price of goods. And, and let's not try to do Liberation Day. Dramatic, aggressive, deporting millions and millions and millions of people beyond what people thought they were going to get, just stacking all the big things at once. So I think that's a helpful framework. So I think that takes us directly to immigration. I would just love to hear, because this is a whole, I mean, you could do a whole podcast just because I think immigration has been the center of the story on a variety of different levels over the past 10 years. And even before that, this was like the story back when we were in high school and college. So what is your understanding of where American immigration policy debates are after this past weekend in Minnesota with the murder of Alex and with all those really horrible acts that are seeing in Minnesota?
- [21:09]
B
I mean, I think there's massive popular backlash to what's going on in Minnesota and the cruelty of this administration. I actually think we are at a point in immigration where anything could be the future. And I think it's actually a place where Democrats need to provide an affirmative vision of how immigration works in this country. But yeah, I don't like Republicans and Democrats are, are horrified because, and it's not just about immigration. People just don't like the idea of state violence. Like you're talking about government skepticism. I think this is the, the extreme version of, of that. You know, this is the exact thing that people are afraid of is the government sending in their folks to your state or your city and murdering your neighbors. The interesting thing to me about immigration is Trump's made this an issue since 2016. But if you actually look at the polling back in 2016, there wasn't a strong anti immigrant sentiment in the country at all. People were largely pro immigrant. Even now, people are largely pro immigrant. The sentiment around undocumented immigrants had changed since Trump came into power. But largely people in this country are in favor of immigration. And I think what we have to do, my view of, I guess, politics in general is whenever the country's in a mode of feeling like the pie is shrinking, that's what creates the fodder for someone like Trump to come in and pitch a politics of exclusion, of trying to kick out immigrants of this kind of cruelty. And there's going to have been a backlash. So I think any discussion of going back to, like a pro immigration, expansive mindset has to be tied with an expansive economic program where we're seeing, you know, the faith are everybody's fates in the country as being tied with an expansive immigration program where other people are coming in to join us in that. I mean, frankly, that's how we were in the 60s and 70s. Right. That's, that's how my dad got here. Like back when, back in the 60s, my dad's, we actually used to have these immigration offices all over the world that were begging people to come. Like, we're recruiting people actively. And my dad grew up super poor in India. He was a refugee. But a friend of his took him to one of these immigration offices in Calcutta where the staffer literally pitched him on the American dream and got him to apply for a visa. And that's how he got here. He came here with like, literally $8 in his pocket. I used to say he came over with $20 in his pocket. And he fact checked me on that when I went back home.
- [23:32]
A
But, but this is the, you know, thinker to candidate transition. The fact checks.
- [23:41]
B
But, but yeah, I mean, that's, but that's, that was possible because we had just had decades of wages growing up, living standards going up. You would just put a man on the moon. You know, we had just built the interstate highway system. We were such an optimistic country that we felt that our fate was tied with having more and more people come to this country and help us build this together.
- [24:00]
A
Yeah. And I think the one issue, and this is where, you know, understanding, you know, if your career goes where you want it to go, understand these partners are going to be key. And this is why a lot of people are driven towards structural reform of American politics. The country in 2016 may have broadly supported immigration, but 2014, Eric Cantor is primaried in a very low turnout spot primary by Dave Brat. He was going to be the speaker of the House. Eric Cantor. He was on the path. He wasn't even campaigning in his district the day of his loss over him supporting immigration reform in some sense. So just the reality is immigration politics are so hard because unlike a lot of issues, you could say 60% of American believe X, Y or Z and normally that's enough to get big things done. But there is just a very activated part of the Republican Party's base who are turning out in these primaries who really disagree there. And they are the people who break down the Gang of Eight post 2012 immigration reform prospectus in 2013. They are who do the primary. They are who initially support Trump. So that is just going to be the sort of, at least for now, insurmountable thing. So I want to focus on the affirmative vision part of your take because I think the way that I'm understanding the current dynamic is Americans hate chaos at the border. And I do not think that that's, I mean that's something that's going to rise and fall in salience, but just as a default. I think going into 2028, I would just think like, look, my number one goal, let's say I'm running for office, would be there will not be chaos at the border. This thing is going to work. And then two, they really have no tolerance for violent criminals, like dangerous people who are violating immigration law and want them out of the country. They a gap between violent criminals and just a person who's been in this country for 30 years and is a member of their community and the Trump administration jumping, they like shut the border down. Okay, people like that then, you know, hypothetically, they're going after criminals and druggings, people like that. But then when they surmounted it into what's happening in Minnesota, that's where the backlash happens. And it seems like that awkward dynamic is where a white Democrat needs to sort of, or even just anyone who's sort of center right to like left has to navigate. How do you understand sort of like the state of affairs in that sense?
- [26:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, so to back up on the primaries, so you know, the general anti immigrant sentiment, anti immigrant sentiment that you're talking about, you know, with Dave Bratt beating Eric Cantor, you know, I really do think that's, that's been a failure of, of telling the story of why people's lives are stagnating economically. And, and I think the story of like your lives are getting worse because immigrants are coming in is an easier story to tell. And that's the one that the right's been pushing for a long time. And that's what's anime, the right wing populace base. I think it's a false story. You know, I actually don't think that's the answer. And so we have to actually try to win that story. I'm not going to say we're going to win all the, you know, Dave Bratz of the world, but we actually at least have to try pitching a different version. But, but yeah, I agree with you.
- [26:54]
A
Let's, let's pause there because I actually have a question about this. So what I'm basically was going to ask you a little later down the script was like what are the limits of economic populism? Because I think a frustration I have when I have this conversation with people to my left is that they basically, you're not quite advancing a false consciousness argument saying that like, oh, all these like you know, right wing voters think they believe this, but actually they're being lied to and body blah. Because I think there are just like a bunch of voters who just are viscerally appalled by the idea of like open borders or by the idea of people being here and follow the rules. That's just something they believe. And I think that because we do live in a rich, wealthy society, like they are well taken care of enough. Yes. Their wages have stagnated. Yes. Their health care isn't working, it wants to be, but they are comfortable enough under the status quo that they can start making values based decisions. And I just, I'm always skeptical of the left sort of overestimating the degree to which economic language and a lot of these people are people in my family is going to appeal to them. So I just like push you on that. Love to hear your response.
- [27:55]
B
Yeah, no, and I think people, people are really animated by unfairness. Right. So people do. So I'm not saying like it's entirely an economic thing. Yeah. I think if people see if like the main thing people are seeing is like violent criminals, which is the thing that the right wing constantly does. Right. They try to find the violent immigrant criminal who's like murdered. Right. And that's the picture going to keep pushing at you. That's going to animate you. Now the question to me to some extent is like in these arguments it's always a question of like what is the thing that comes top of mind? And I would say, you know, the problem of violent immigrant criminals is not actually a very big problem in the country, but it looms large in people's minds. Isn't the same way that like, the right managed to make, you know, trans women in sports as seeming like a much bigger problem than it actually is to a lot of folks in this country? Right. They're just that, that's the way they frame this stuff is they take issues and try to make them bigger and that's then they become election winning issues. But so, you know, again, I'm not saying like the goal necessarily is like convince people that you've been lied to and that your economic problems are something else, though I think that is part of it. I think it's also, it's just pointing out the big problems being the big problems and trying to win on the merits of that. Like, the much larger problem is we have stagnated as a country. And shouldn't you vote on that instead? The much larger problem is that, you know, big money has stolen our, our elections and has a huge corrupting influence on our politics. Shouldn't you be focused on that? But when it comes to immigration politics, specifically, you know, to your previous question, you know, yeah, I believe, like, we do need to have a secure border. I believe that, you know, Democrats need to be clear about criminals, you know, immigrant, immigrant criminals, which, you know, isn't again, a huge problem. But I think like the situation we're in right now where we have this agency with ICE that's completely out of control, this is not the way to tackle that problem. Right. Like, we've basically created an immigration enforcement agency that's a loyal paramilitary group for Trump. And I don't think this agency is reformable at this point. You know, the way they've recruited the folks into the agency, the directions are being given. They're basically being told to create maximum chaos and aggression in our cities. So we have to get to a different kind of immigration enforcement. My belief is we have to actually abolish this agency, abolish ICE and you know, start from scratch and actually build a more humane immigration enforcement system. And that's, you know, frankly, I think a lot of people are starting to end up too, just by seeing the actions of what ICE is doing. But another piece of the border problem is, you know, we do have to talk like this is why people talk about comprehensive immigration reform. But getting to this country legally has become very difficult. You know, that's one of the reasons we have so many people trying to show up at the border. It's very difficult to get a visa to this country to get a, you know, permanent residency. It's. We're basically using, you know, paperwork and bureaucracy as a means of trying to keep people out legally. And so we're ending up with a lot of folks, you know, claiming asylum at the border.
- [30:50]
A
No, And I think I was explaining this to someone because they hear the abolish ICE conversation and they get very scared and understand why from their perspective, they get scared. But the thing I told them is that. And they kept bringing up like it's 2018, it's 2018, it's, you know, you all coming into office by AOC. It's sort of the group showing up and like pushing us to the left. And what I pushed them on is what. And this is why me. I'm sure this is true to you when it comes. Because San Francisco is like very much in the bubble when it comes to tech in a certain sense. But it's not in the bubble when it comes to like D.C. inside baseball politics. So you at least are sort of outside of that bubble in that sense. And I'm in Austin and because of my breaking points time, I still get recognized occasionally in public and like, especially at the gym where like people sort of have a chance to come up and talk. And these are very like right wing coded like Rogan, like Austin suburban bros, right? So the center of sort of the. When the center describes like who Democrats lost in 2024, it's these guys. I am not kidding you. Ice comes up in the first 30 seconds every single time. And that in terms of me not being in the DC version. So this is what I told the reformer. I was like, if you are understanding the ICE debate within a 2018 context and not a 2026 context, that's going to lead to a severe misunderstanding of the political moment. And to the point of where we started the conversation around which is the political possibilities of what could actually happen in a moment like this. Because a ICE deconstruction, repair and replace, abolishment use. Senator Diego's conversation of burn it all down is very different. If it's rooted in hey, ICE isn't just sort of violating left wing Overton window shaping my POVs. You could be the most centrist center left person ever and just say, oh wow, this thing should not exist. And I actually don't trust that a body cam reform or a quote retraining opportunity is going to correct for this. So therefore something new has to come about. So I think that's like one of those weird. I think this is just like, this is the most fascinating and not just because of the moral weight, but I actually think this is like a centerpiece of like all these debates wherever this whole weird coalition of people go next is.
- [32:57]
B
Yeah. And you know, to your point earlier about the left need to be more practical, I, I do think we need to create a plan for how, what to do about it.
- [33:06]
A
Right.
- [33:06]
B
Like, how do we, like, if Democrats take power, what is our plan to abolish ICE and then replace it? And that's something I'm very interested in working on. But the thing that like, I think is really interesting right now in this debate is I've talked to folks who worked in CBP and DHS in past, you know, Democratic administrations and they're on the side of like, yeah, we got to abolish this administration and create something new because they see how everything's been twisted. Like it seems impossible to like unwind what this administration has done with ICE and with dhs. So it's easier at this point to abolish it, start from scratch and hire up a new immigration enforcement thing with a completely different culture. Because that's the thing is the culture is going to be impossible to change at this point.
- [33:51]
A
Yeah. And I think the thing that's interesting here too is that if you actually, and this is what's frustrating to me so you obviously work in tech. So something that I've been fascinated by. There's been this huge debate within sort of reform circles on the center left about how do Dems win tech back. We lost tech in 2024. And what frustrates me is the people who work on this question professionally. They, you know, my wife worked in venture capital. Like I worked for a startup. So like I'm actually like in that space. So I'm not like a gov relations lobbyist who lived in D.C. and like interacts with tech through that. And so I actually like know people in tech. And what's been so interesting is when you talk to sort of the DC centric reform people, they're like, the Democrats need to find the policy on crypto to win tech bet and Democrats need to find the position on AI that basically moves things towards the center and to the right and basically gives the industry what wants. But seeing even on X. Right. So like late stage Elon Musk, right wing X. I've never seen the sort of like tech center more activated against the right and frankly more able to be open to saying like, whoa, we're going to vote against whatever this thing is, buy this ice thing that's been the really, really wild thing I've been waiting for sort of Liberation Day kind of got that conversation started a bit. But like I'm sure you see this but like people are openly dunking against the Trump collaborating tech power structure in a way that it was not common up until this weekend. And it's just a funny sort of exposure of how the centrists have a difficult position here because the ground they want to fight on is like the economic ground. And hey, lefties, we have to get rid of all pushing them on economic issues because then they'll never come back to us. But then we're seeing it's actually a socio cultural issue do. And it's actually like a kind of like left coded thing that's activating them. So that's like the core of the dilemma that like my circle is kind of running into and trying to work around.
- [35:40]
B
Yeah, I mean I think with, with the murder in Minneapolis it just became such a clear red line and then you got someone like Tim Cook going and you know, doing a movie viewing at the White House the, you know, two days later. It's very hard for tech workers to stomach this. But honestly I'll say like even before this because I talked to a lot of tech workers here and I do think there was a real divide in Silicon Valley largely amongst between tech workers and more I'd say some of the VC class and CEO class where some of the VCs and CEO class, I'd say some of them have gone total far right. They're just totally in with the David Sachs and Elon Musk's of the world. Some of them are curious about that. But I think they're going to get polarized away. I'm thinking of people like Vinod Khosla who went after Elon Musk, Twitter. But tech workers, they, the interesting thing is like they're actually more open to the much more radical stuff than even I'd say like laypeople. Like it's like the workers at Anthropic that I talk to who are more open to. Yeah. I think government should take get equity stakes in AI companies so that we can control where this technology is going to go. Like they're the ones pitching that because they know how big of a problem this could be. So I think there's this real mistake sometimes in trying to triangulate, I guess between like what industry wants. But industry is not some cohesive thing. Like there's divisions within that there's. Yes, of course the things that CEOs want, but the workers are not all with the CEOs at all.
- [37:08]
A
Yeah, so I guess you're kind of answering a question I had for you, which is sort of like, how should. Because obviously you were early, you know, team or founding team at Stripe. How. And I guess you basically have this answer where, like I was going to say, what do you think Democrats should do when they think about tech? And you just delineating between tech workers, who, to be clear, still overwhelmingly vote center left to left in their politics and the actual. And this is where there's just a reality of power laws when it comes to who has the biggest voice. And the people who host a big podcast are the VCs who write the checks. And maybe just the easy answer where all sides of the debate about the future of the party could come down to is that there's a vast swath of people at a numbers perspective who are aligned at these various different parts of our project. And that's a really starting point of the conversation because I think something that Ezra and Derek did try to do with the Abundance book is like, Ezra said this, he tried to repair the Democratic Party's relationship with the tech industry. But I'm hearing from you that the easy way to think of this is just by delineating between are we talking about VCs who want to be cool going to White House parties and who are going to donate money for the Trump Ballroom, or are we talking about like the like literal hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who actually work at the companies? That's a very addressable market, is what I'm hearing from your pov.
- [38:27]
B
Absolutely. And I'd say the other piece of that is like, a lot of those workers, I think are if they like, hate Elon Musk even more than the average person because they really don't like being represented by people who are just so shamelessly going along with this, you know, far right government. And like, you kind of actually bears out on the polling too. Like, Elon Musk is one of the most hated people in San Francisco. I think he, last we checked him in a poll a few months ago and he was at the same level as Donald Trump. Right. So I think it's like this weird bubble where people think there's like a tech right movement that's much larger than it is just because the voices are so big. You know, the loud voices are so big. But. But, you know, by and large, people who work in tech want to be working on things that are helping society, not hurting it. You know, they want to. Actually they're pretty progressive in their values, and they are more and more starting to see this disconnect between themselves and the CEOs and the VCs because of, like, these distinct red lines. Like, you know, Murder in Minneapolis happens. Who speaks out against and who doesn't. That's, to me, feels like a real breaking point for a lot of folks who, you know, try to be apolitical. Even they're coming out, coming out and talking about it. Yeah.
- [39:41]
A
And this is where I do have to do one question about abundance, which raises from my point about Ezra and Derek thinking about tech. So we are a year into the abundance conversation and sort of like the vibe that I've picked up from folks just sort of asking around is that abundance is sort of run adrift or run aground. There was this moment, there was this energy, but there's a question of where it goes next. You obviously did that big episode with Ezra and Zephyr very early on, sort of towards the height of the hype of the moment. What's your sort of diagnosis of where abundance is and how does it intersect with your project and your interests?
- [40:19]
B
Yeah, I think when the book came out, I actually did like reading the book. And especially sort of the vision of the post abundance world that Ezra put out, or I don't know which of them wrote it, but one of them put out at the beginning of the book. And a lot of the references we talked about, the references to how we actually did big things during the World War II era, how we mass produced penicillin. I thought that was really exciting. And I was really into the fact that some of these ideas are becoming so mainstream through Ezra's work. But I feel like the abundance movement has really become sort of splintered. And there's like a piece of the movement that to me feels like is just kind of doing the typical, I'd say, center left neoliberalism project of like, trying to figure out how we, like, deregulate private markets, let the private markets rip, and that will somehow get us to a world of abundance. And I'd say that hasn't worked. That's, in fact the problem. You know, that's the thing we're trying to get out of right now. And there are all these problems that private markets just can't solve and haven't solved. And, you know, my take on it, and this is kind of the point I try to make on the Ezra client podcast, was if you actually look at the Histories of countries that have created lots of abundance, including our own. It's never been through just the perfect regulatory, you know, system. It hasn't just been some permit reforms like it's been through this product of getting the country on a mission and having a leadership. And this is a thing where I think the center sometimes really discounts how much leadership matters. And I'm not saying it's the only thing that matters, but it's a key part. If you want to create abundance, you have to actually be able to communicate what you're doing and create political capital. You have to be able to create comprehensive plans. You need institutional reform institutions that can finance and coordinate those plans. And there's so many examples of countries that have had honestly terrible permitting environments and tons of paperwork, including world, you know, America during the World War II mobilization, we required so much paperwork from companies to do that mobilization. Companies hated it. Right. I mean, China in the 80s, like there was so much paperwork and so many hoops that companies had to jump through to get there. But because there's this larger thing going on where there was this like overwhelming momentum towards building and producing and creating wealth, companies were willing to go along with it. And we actually achieved abundance like that. And so I don't, I guess like that part of abundance I don't see as being the thing that's like winning in the abundance movement. And that's been disappointing to me. I don't want to see, you know, I don't. I feel like if abundance does just turn into, you know, neoliberalism 2.0, it will not actually live up to the vision that was even set out in the book.
- [42:52]
A
Yeah. And I think what comes to mind, given the way you discuss things at the start of the episode, it's like state capacity, for example, I think one of the most useful parts of abundance. But state capacity for what to do what? Right. The reason why I tend to have good conversations with the left about abundance is I will say no, no, put aside Ezra, put aside Derek for a second. There are legitimate questions to be asked about the modern American state's ability to achieve, let's say the Green New Deal. And then someone's like, oh, actually that's a totally fair point. Or okay, so you want Medicare for all. You want single payer health care there. Especially when we look at how catastrophic the failure of healthcare.gov was for Obamacare's like initial white popularity and reception. If you are going to do this thing, if state capacity is not a construct or a framework that you use to think about the moment you're going to run into some big issues, then they're like, oh, hey, I get it. But this is why at the start of the episode. And I totally get why. From your experience as a candidate, bucketing people isn't actually helpful. But from my perspective, as someone who's sort of like organizing and trying to get different people to work together, I actually need to bucket it, because the way that I pitch abundance to someone on the left is very different than someone that I pitch it to on the center. So to your point too, right? Like, I kind of joke, if I were pitching abundance on the left, I would sort of, with a different version of the intro, talk about how FDR's memorial on the National Mall has the word abundance in it. Abundance is actually a story about the failure of post 1970s liberalism to deliver for people and to achieve its objectives. That is not the pitch that the centrist crew wants to hear. That's not the pitch the sort of never Trump center, right, who's attracted to abundance wants to hear either. And that's okay, right? I have this joke where I'm like, one of the famous abundance critiques that Ezra makes is everything bagel liberalism, where it's like, liberalism tries to do too many things at once and we can't have the chip fab and the childcare center and the labor union requirements. And yes, people on the left will critique whether that's literally accurate, but I think as a governing framework, it's actually a really useful one. My problem of abundance is that we have everything bagel abundance. So we're like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to get the right wingers by talking about AI and human flourishing and that stuff. And then we're going to get the center by talking about how this is the counter to Zoran Mamdani. And then we're going to get the left by Marshall talking about the New Deal and all those things. You can't do all these things at once. You have to pick and be specific. And I think just by conceiving of people having different ideologies and frameworks and language, it's much easier for me to come to this conclusion rather than just sort of saying we're a bipartisan movement for all people and that's what our deal is, which then leads to people sort of feeling around the ground.
- [45:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think. I don't know if you heard Bernie answer the question on abundance on some podcasts, and I think he put this really well, which was, yeah, you know, good governance is good. And he had his whole example about how hard it was to open a health clinic in Vermont. And he was like, yeah, that sucked. But the question is, like, what do you do you doing? Like what is your ideology? What is the thing you're actually trying to achieve through government? And you know, I, I do want to go back to one point you made about how the left doesn't always focus on pragmatism. Because I, I agree to that about, on that shock. And that's honestly like a big reason why we started New consensus back in 2017. And over the last five years we've been trying to write this very comprehensive, detailed plan that's like, like if we actually got power back and we wanted to build a clean economy that, you know, decarbonize all the, all the industries, what do you have to do? You know, specifically like what are the permit reforms you got to do? But also what are the institutions you have to build? Because one thing like my view of that, that lack of pragmatism is not actually just the left. I actually think it's the entirety of, of the Democratic Party like the left at large, you know, because whenever I've tried to pitch Democrats on doing any sort of long term planning, the response I get from donors and from sort of establishment figures is like, we have to worry about the next election. Whereas on the right you do see long term planning. You know, I mean we talk, you talked a bit about the backlash to you know, the New Deal framework and the Great Society. That was part of a long term plan as well that a lot of right wingers and business people started, you know, right after the New Deal in the war ended. And there's a great book about it called Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips. Fine about like long term right wing project, but, but you know, one, one little anecdote about the Green New Deal. You know the thing when we launched the Green New Deal and aoc, she famously did a sit in a Nancy Pelosi's office with Sunrise Movement and that kind of launched the whole thing. The thing we were asking for was a committee to make a 10 year transition plan. And we didn't quite get that committee, but we did force Pelosi to make a select committee on climate which spent two years creating a bunch of policy. And then gu. What? Because we did that when the IRA happened, it wasn't a complete shit show like we had a bunch of policy to, to lift off of. Right. So that's this has been a big project of mine for years to try to get any Democrats to think, you know, more than two years into the future towards some long term plans. But what are you going to do if you actually get power? Because that's going to be key. It's not going to be enough just to win in 2028. We then have to actually do this stuff and it's going to be, you know, Trump the Project 2025. But that was the easy version of it. It's very easy to just like write, you know, a long document of all the programs you're going to cut. We have to actually have our document for what are we going to build, how are we going to do it? And that, you know, I, so I agree and that, that has, that's why I've been so animated to like work on that for the last, you know, five or six years of now.
- [48:19]
A
Well, here's the thing and this is why I'm regaining my confidence here because when someone just says you're bucketing people, I feel dunked on. Not that you were being trait there. The reason why I emphasize ideology in these conversations so much and you I actually have the answer to why the right does long term planning and Democrats don't. And it's think about the meaning of the terms we're just describing. So I've read these same histories you've read and I spent my early career time in the conservative movement in D.C. the key word is conservative movement. And the right. The funniest thing that I've noticed moving between the right and then back to sort of the center and Democratic Party spaces is that on the right, if you refer to yourself as like a Republican, that's like your core of being. It's kind of declasse, it's kind of lame, kind of sound like a party hack. Because think about it like the conservative movement, we talk to people on the right and what you'll find is they'll say I'm a conservative comma and therefore a Republican ideology. And there being a movement, AKA there being a project that you are building, that by definition is not about whether you win the midterms or this special election, but is this actual centuries long thing, like if you talk about like the funders, and this is why it's so funny, because we could so dunk on the nature of the project of repealing the New Deal order in terms of what these conservative funders did. But on the other hand, I actually love the story and find it weirdly optimistic. Because he's for people. They did not wake up thinking we need to win this special election and we need to message us. They were thinking, I wake up every single morning hating fdr. I hate the New Deal. I hate at a philosophical level what the New Deal says about our country, what it means for the future. And I'm going to spend tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars with my buddies putting a different movement and different set of ideas at the core. Because it's not these short term elections, it's actually ideas that are at the center of everything. The lack of thinking that you see on the sort of like left side of the aisle is just because people. One of the most amazing and awful things that Reaganism did is it killed liberalism as an ideology, destroyed the Democratic Party's ability to think ideologically as a thing that you would do. And instead sort of like my understanding of what happened during the 1990s. It wasn't just that Clinton was triangulating, it wasn't just that he conceded too much to the right. It's like third rate politics represented a world where like Democrats no longer define themselves ideologically, but define themselves by do they win elections, yes or no. The right has retained since this post war period the idea that they are an actual thing. And what I want to do with all of my work, and I'm talking with a lot of funders about this, I want there to be a code of people who just think I am a left liberal. My project, which maybe the Democratic Party is a vehicle for, but oftentimes is not going to involve the Democratic Party, is making that a thing, making that a post 2024 realignment thing. And that's why I think there's so much work to be done. So I just love to hear. This is sort of the core of my. So if you're thinking with new consensus, bringing ideology back to these spaces is my project. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. All my politician friends think this is useful. They have literally said to me, I was back in Oregon, they're like, bro, we don't sit in the State House and talk about liberalism in the State House. So you're just naive. You've been in D.C. too much. So what's your reaction?
- [51:32]
B
Well, actually, I don't know. I mean, because I pay attention a lot to the right wing spaces. I've listened to like right wing talk radio for years and, and you know, Steve Bannon and folks. And the interesting thing to me is like these philosophical debates actually happened there Way more than on a Democratic side. Right. Like, if you ever listen to a right wing intellectual pundit go on, like, mainstream, you know, Democratic spaces, they use so many buzzwords and all the, like, all these inside battles are going on constantly because they're really interested in this larger philosophical question of, like, who are we? What defines us? You know, what defines a country? And. Yeah. And even this idea, like, I've sort of said how I believe we should have goals as a country of who we are and what we're trying to achieve. Right. A lot of right wingers also believe that they have goals that are.
- [52:19]
A
Yeah.
- [52:19]
B
And that. And the thing is, you know, and I would argue that the current Democratic mindset of, like, not having goals, and I said center Democratic mindset. Right. Of not having goals, that is itself a choice. You know, you're making a decision to make the goal, whatever the private market. Yeah. And so I, I do love what you're trying to do and, and specifically, you know, you trying to figure out how to talk to all these spaces and. Because I do think there's a realignment happening. And, you know, we talked a little bit before we started the podcast, but, you know, when we started the Justice Democrats project before that, we actually started a project called Brand New Congress where the initial goal was to run in both Republican and Democratic primaries. This is before Trump got elected. And this project died with Trump because once he won, Republican primaries just became like a litmus test on how loyal are you to Trump. But the reason we're going to do that is a lot of these ideas we're pushing about how do you actually develop a country intentionally, how do we bring back our means of making a living, how do you industrialize the Midwest? They were not things that were being discussed in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. So we were saying, can we actually just pitch this to the people overall? And yeah, you know, maybe if we're in Arkansas, the kind of person you recruit and the way you talk about it will be different, it'll be coded different. And then if you're in California, you talk about different. Right. But overall, like, the general idea of how do you get the country into a mission, how do you actually build up our industries, how do you actually create our means of making a living that isn't. You know, I think there is a, an alignment realignment going on around those ideas. I mean, even now, like, when I talk, when I listen to Steve Bannon, like, a lot of the stuff he's talking about is left wing populism. Mixed in with, you know, extreme racism and anti immigration sentiment. Like he wants to kick out all non white people. But when it comes to just like we should focus on workers, we should actually build up our means of making a living. But I would say the, the thing that the right wing, because their tension is between this sort of nationalism and libertarianism, they can't actually even begin to approach the solutions you need to fix the larger problem because they can't bring themselves to believe in government doing stuff at a large scale level. And I think that's something that has been a real challenge in that space. So I'd be excited for you to go and convince the folks of how do you actually do this?
- [54:37]
A
Well, yeah, And I think the way to sum up what you just said too, is that given the right and given people like Banner, the right's really good at asking good questions about like, why the status quo isn't working. Right, because the right, once again, because the right is ideological in a way that like the center just isn't. They can see things and use language like it was funny. Steve Bannon did an episode on the Ross Doutha podcast and like a chief of staff in the Oregon State legislature, where I grew up, just texting me, saying, like, why isn't there like a Democratic version of Steve Bannon? And I basically didn't have a good answer. And the point is just that until you get a Democratic Party that's comfortable with ideology and doesn't see that as academic. And I think it's so key, as I close out here, that you talked about listening to right wing talk radio and seeing that these ideas are not up market or down market, it's just sort of what you do. I think it's really important. So that's why I think the work that you've done, just actually putting out these plans, thinking about ideas is really key. And you know, obviously like no endorsements on this podcast, but I think what I can endorse is just sort of, I think, during stable parts of history, so let's say the 1990s. I don't think you need to, you know, read the new consensus library to like offer who people are looking for. That's the whole point of stability. But I think just sort of seeing this opportunity is really great. So I really want to encourage that effort that you underwent and what other people who are thinking about or running or working for you for an office to take that model. So this has been so great, man. Thank you for joining me on the show.
- [56:00]
B
Yeah, thanks. For having me. I really enjoyed this conversation.