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The Realignment
593 | Austin Ahlman and Ben Winsor: Seven Hard Lessons on Economic Populism
01:43:07
The Open Market Institute's Austin Ahlman and Ben Winsor join The Realignment. Marshall, Austin, and Ben discuss their recommendations on how to effectively wield economic populism in an anti-status quo moment, when polling is and isn't useful, the complicated realities behind the terms "centrist" and "moderate," populist critiques of the abundance agenda, lessons from FDR's campaigns and presidency, and why the center isn't meeting the moment.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. I want to start off by saying thanks for the patience with the reduced show schedule the past month. It's work, travel season and W2 employeescannon responsibility holding 30 something. Marshall with a one year old just isn't as prolific as vibes driven post Covid New York City 2021 to 2022. Marshall, who was able to somehow pump out two to three episodes a week while also hosting two other podcasts and going on breaking points, was I've got a great backlog of episodes though, so I should drop another on Sunday and be back to the normal schedule next week. I'm pumped to get back in the string of things with this episode though. My guests are the Open Market Institute's Austin Allman and Ben Windsor. We spoke about a lot and went way longer than normal. We covered an interesting piece that put out on the Open Market Institute's Liberty and Power substack titled 7 Hard Lessons Democrats Must Learn in 2026. That caught my eye. The conversation also coincided with a major speech delivered by Senator Elizabeth Warren that noted her agreement with many principles of abundance, but challenged supporters to reject any trappings of billionaire astroturfing. If you're on X Twitter policy discourse spaces, you'll note that Austin is particularly known as his aggressive critic of abundance, so I was excited to talk with him in a more pro social medium. The whole thing you'll be hearing from me this year is that I hate factionalism and all of the snarky snapping between different personalities. For me, the future isn't factional, it's actually fusion between different factions that are ultimately part of the same electoral and governing coalition. Not that accomplishing anything like fusion is easy, but it definitely starts with conversations like this, friendly but open to and welcoming of disagreement. I will say that I also have a bit of bias and a soft spot for the Open Markets Institute because they hired my wife, Olivia, who at the time was uninspired by consulting and wanted to pivot into the policy space. She now works for the Owen Market Institute's offshoot, the American Echo Book Liberties Project. So there's once again a bit of bias. There's I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Ben and Austin, welcome to the realignment.
- [02:30]
B
Thanks so much.
- [02:31]
C
Thank you. It's good to be here.
- [02:33]
A
This illustrates the primary dynamic of my personality. I'm much more interested in talking with people who disagree with me than people who agree with me, so maybe the abundance propaganda will be a little stronger if we turn this into an echo chamber. But I actually think the disagreements right now and what they say about broader factional and sort of future of the country's politics finds the actually much more interesting. So I am on with two, I'd say abundance critics, to put it lightly, from the Open Markets Institute who've written a bunch of really great pieces in their excellent substack Liberty and Power. We're going to just kick off by them introducing ourselves. Austin, you are the person who abundance listeners have probably seen on X Twitter, given how much time we overspend on there. You are very consistently a very strong critic of the movement and the ideas and the institutions and people affiliated with it. How about you kick off and introduce yourself now that I've given you that brilliant opening?
- [03:31]
C
Sure, sure. Well, pleasure to be on Marshall. Thank you. I'm Austin Allman. I'm a reporter and political analyst at the Open Markets Institute. I've been there for about three years. Before that I started my career as a journalist covering primarily Democratic primary politics, Congress, the Hill and corporate power, things like that nature. I come by the way of Norfolk, Nebraska, from a small town, not really close to anything at all. And as you'll see over the course of this conversation, I, I consider myself something of some of in touch with rural America, especially middle America. And a lot of my criticisms of abundance come from a feeling that it is fundamentally out of touch with anything that that anybody that I've ever grown up with is asking for from politics.
- [04:16]
A
Just to follow up on that real quick. So I think what's interesting about abundance is there's a real need for people who are proponents of it to I think be very clear what the argument is. And I would think of abundance as a center left liberal, as something that's about the future of what American liberalism looks like, which I think. Ezra said this very well on the Ross Douthat podcast. Interesting times. There's a void in American liberalism right now, even if you're to the left of that liberalism. And abundance was a small attempt to fill that. So my perspective on the does abundance have anything to say to rural America? Issue is not really. It has nothing to say. But I think that's okay because I think what this should be understood as, as a plank, an aspect, a part of a broader liberal project and I think the failure to be very clear about that framework, rather instead the sort of overwrought book marketing version of it, causes a lot of that confusion. So I'm curious, curious what you would think about that Well, I think that.
- [05:16]
C
There are pieces of it that I'm okay with. I've been clear from the start, despite my, you know, rural boyness, I'm fine with most zoning reforms. There are some that I think are go a little too far, but up zoning, transit hubs, you know, things of that nature. Like, I'm all for it. I think of abundance as more of a factional project than a the big tent movement that you talk about. And I see it operate as a factional project. I see the money that comes behind it. I see the way in which it was launched. I see who is funding a lot of these groups, who are a lot of which are operating as primarily attack talk groups and who got out ahead, ahead of making sure that their potential enemies for the center of the party or the center of politics were on the ropes immediately. And I think that the way that I think about it is I try to separate out those two things and I do try to honor you. And I had a lot of good conversations because I think you are in it more for the ideas rather than factional power. But I have cut my teeth in politics and I understand a factional project when I see one. And that element of abundance, I think is very, very dangerous. And I will be relentless critic of it for that reason. I can get into that more. But I want to give my darling co author here, Ben, the opportunity to introduce himself, if that's all right.
- [06:24]
A
Yeah, go for it, Ben.
- [06:25]
B
Thanks so much, Austin. Thanks, Marshall. My name is Ben Windsor. I've just been with the Open Markets Institute for a few months. Also work for J Street and have been around the traps a bit in D.C. as a journalist in foreign policy for a bit and in political stuff and campaigns as well as. The accent is Australian, which is where I'm originally from, but it's been about 10 years of American politics that I've been working in. Yeah. As an Australian, when I think about abundance, I think a lot about how the government in Australia delivers a lot better than it seems to in America. I really get the frustration that Ezra Klein articulates when he talks about lots of money going into all these projects and then nothing happening on the ground. I don't think that that explains much of what's happened in American politics over the past 10 years with Donald Trump. I don't think it really explains populism. I don't think it explains his takeover of the Republican Party. I don't think that if the Democratic Party got better at building smart charges for cars and more Housing that that would change those overall trend lines. But I do think that on a policy level, that's an incredibly good and important thing to focus on. But I do take Austin's point that it does seem to have become much more than that. But if the project is good governance and efficiency, I don't think you have many enemies on the progressive side.
- [07:55]
A
Yeah. And I think that where my personal background comes into this and speaks to the fact that I'm interested in the ideas side of the project and not the factional one, is that if you look at the Biden administration's explicit strategy when you came into office in 2021 and the sort of game plan, the policy plan, especially in regards to the stuff I'm really interested in, so re Industrialization, the EV Chargers, Chargers sort of moving into this future was really about delivering for people. It was about, we're going to build these new factories, we're going to develop these new projects, we're going to really move. And this is going to be something that takes a couple years. But when you really saw the world that they saw in 2026, 2027, they thought these things were going to really show up. And I had these conversations with Biden folks in 2022 and even at the time, the political theory didn't really make that much sense to me, which is they're like, wait a second. If you're expecting these things to deliver in four or five years, well, it seems like we're probably just going to repeat what happened during the post 2009 period with the Obama administration where they were going to do all these projects and you had the big stimulus package. But as President ob time, he discovered there were no shovel ready projects. So it would just take way longer to actually achieve things. So personally, Abundance's focus on, hey, let's actually make things happen quicker, faster, more efficiently speaks to something that I just think all the time about. And then it was funny when I was talking with my sort of MAGA family in South Carolina and my wife, who also works in antitrust space, associates with the American Economic Liberties Project. She was kind of pitching this stuff and they just didn't believe it was real. They just literally did not believe that these factories were going to happen. So it just seems that there's actually a real offer that abundance could have for the Democratic center, left, liberal left, whatever policy community, which is like you're trying to build things in the world, they don't happen quick enough. We are the crew of people who are focused on making things actually happen, whatever we determine those things are. So that's just my personal why I'm here, why I'm interested. So let's get into something that I want to talk about before we get into a really great piece you wrote. The two of you wrote on lessons for a populist period in our politics. So reading both that piece and then reading a piece written about the Warren, Elizabeth Warren, senator for Massachusetts, critique of abundance, I just see how there's so much polling cited. I said this before the episode, but having spent my formative early careers on the right, I've just been shocked at how much polling comes into conversations on these issues. And that's a real not just like center left does polling, but also the left does polling, but the right just does not talk about polling. So I would just be if you talk about polling on the right, you probably work for the Republican National Committee. You are not part of like the policy community or you're not part of, like the pundit class. So could you talk about your sort of POV on how we should use polling when we are thinking about America and these different policy debates we'll throw to you first?
- [11:05]
C
AUSTIN sure. So I think the Democrats refer to polling so much because of the fundamental problem in the party, which is that there is no tentpole to the party. The party doesn't actually believe in anything at all. Yeah, standard generic Democrat believes in nothing except for their reelection. And so the only language that they listen to is power. And the only way that they understand that largely other than a win or loss, is polling about their next potential win or loss. I think that's been pretty ruthlessly exploited by the center and center left for most of the last few cycles. And then now a lot of those same characters that have really pushed this, that popularized, you know, the idea of quote unquote, popularism, are now in the abundance camp, and very unapologetically so. And I think a lot of the response for the polling thing is, is acknowledging how the game is played in the current form of the Democratic Party and making it clear that even if you look at this metric, which I will say the antitrust world, the populist world has never really paid that much attention to because we have an understanding of politics is much more dynamic, but it is sort of meeting our enemies on the playing field that they've set and making it clear that, okay, well, two years ago you thought that this was how the game was played, and now that you have your own factional project, we're just going to Throw all polling out the window and do call a policy that quote, unquote, works. And it's very aggravating to have that to. It feels like a bit of a runaround to now be to see that dynamic flip on its head and see people like Matthew Iglesias, Adam Gentleson, who's running Searchlight, literally a astroturf polling shop, getting mad about how much we use polling is really funny and I think indicative of the current way that a lot of the people in this community, and not you, I think that you have had a much more clear understanding of the idea side of this, like I've been saying before, but how they've cornered themselves. And I'll toss it to Ben, but that would be my main point there.
- [12:55]
B
I'll, I'll try to be the good cop to a fad cop. I, I think more generally in the party, not necessarily in this dispute, people really care about polling because they really want to win. Because Trump is so appalling and repels Democrats and good people, I think at just such a fundamental level and what he's doing to the country is so terrible and painful that they really, really want to win. And they see polling as they'll, you know, you'll grab anything you can from polling that says whether it's good or bad or what you should do or how to beat him. Right. I think that we, we talk to pollsters in the piece. We don't actually quote much polling. I think there's good polling and bad polling. Like an incredibly bad use of polling, I think is a debate that's on X right now about a poll that said to voters, did you. People who didn't vote for Harris or decided not to vote for Harris, who would have otherwise could have voted for her? Do you think she's too liberal or too moderate? What was the reason? Was she too liberal or too moderate? And most people said too liberal, but what does that mean? Right. Too liberal to someone who is an idiosyncratic swing voter. And most swing voters are idiosyncratic. Put yourself in headspace of someone who votes for Trump one year and Obama and Bernie and Harris, like they're swinging between these, these, these personalities with wildly different political platforms. They're idiosyncratic. They're not on a left. Right. Spectrum. Right. So asking them if it's too liberal or too moderate is, is, is really asking yourself to be like, misled. Right. So someone who says that she's too liberal could be talking about trans issues or could be talking about immigration, but that same person could support a massive wealth tax on the super wealthy or want massive public investment or a takeover of health care or caps on drug prices or like price controls in supermarkets. Right. Like these are high testing policies among swing voters. So I think our goal in talking to pollsters, rather than referring constantly to polling, was to be talking to the people who are having conversations in focus groups day in, day out with swing voters in middle America, in the states that they need to win. People who, who are the voice of those folks on campaigns and say, look, these are the people you need to win, and this is what they want. And those conversations are far more illuminating with the people who are doing that and who are working in campaigns and doing that than looking at the numbers themselves or looking just like at a data analytics or speaking to like a data analytics person, because they're actually having those conversations and they see how those conversations flow in and out. They see how people can be persuaded or not persuaded, and they kind of understand that worldview. So I think that's. That's why I was really interested in doing both. This, this, this piece, which started off as a lot smaller. Right. It started off just as speaking to a bunch of experts on how to do a good affordability message after affordability kind of became the buzzword and it became a much broader project about, you know, what is the best way to pursue an economic agenda in 2026 and beyond.
- [16:07]
A
Yeah, for sure. So just to respond to you, too. So 1. Ben, my interpretation of too liberal is really what people are saying is too California, which I think has implications for the 2028 race. So that would be just. I. So I actually think that's a useful poll. Yeah, I think it actually means to California because California is a amorphous. But, you know, if you sort of know it's a no way you see it vibe and a dynamic that's important, so. But totally stipulated in your broader point there. And then Austin, to you, I think.
- [16:40]
B
The popular people using that exact poll to say that that's why we can't embrace populist economic policies and that is. That's like really dangerous. I think that is such a misunderstanding of what that poll says.
- [16:51]
A
Yeah, no, and I think the thing that I want to appreciate and double tap on that, which is, I think. And if we talk about liberal, and I think this is where the California thing comes in. So a. I think that basically also includes government incompetence and bad vibes and effectiveness and fecklessness, which I think is a best articulated version of abundance like gets at at a language and sort of framework perspective. But yeah, I also think that the too liberal thing basically has nothing to say about the economic policy debates that are up for grabs right now, especially on the sort of like abundance line. And then yeah, I think it primarily has to do with socio cultural issues which like that's an argument to be had. But I don't think that has anything to do with those people's views on antitrust. And this is also where it gets confusing. This takes me to Austin's point where, to your point, Austin, the popularism thing and to introduce for people who are not sort of looking at the inside baseball fights, popularism was this idea associated with a guy named David Shore, a Democratic pollster in the early 2000s, which said Democrats should run unpopular things like do the polls look at the popular things and run on the things. And Austin, your comment about how the central problem on the center left to center to liberal side of not having any policies, not having an idea other than just winning, explains why popularism initially actually helped people who have that void problem think about the world. So like think about it. If you're, if you're in 2022 and you're coming out of the Democratic primary of 2019, 2020, where I think the left could stipulate this, a bunch of people in the center left faction adopted ideas they did not believe in for a variety of reasons because they were just trying to sort of follow the vibes. They didn't really know what to say, didn't have a core. Popularism says, hey, before you raise your hand and you say that you want to decriminalize the border or before you get in a fight with the left over like the best form of Medicare for all or single payer healthcare, actually see, is that like a popular idea? Now that's not the way that I would advocate doing politics, but I understand the purpose it was serving at the time. However, the dynamic that you're describing, Austin, where you then get this contradiction between saying run unpopular things, do popular things, but then three years later abundance comes out and shocker bottlenecks doesn't pull well, especially when put next to an aggressive economic policy like antitrust or a lot of the initially popular grocery and other crackdowns that Kamala Harris was talking about in September of 2024, it's obviously not going to pall well against that. So then you have a situation where as you said, you've said, hey, do the popular thing. But all this new thing that A bunch of people who are associated with this popular idea are advancing, but it's also not popular. That just confuses. So I think what I would just sort of stipulate for the future is that you should do the right thing as a sort of center point. So I would, I would talk to center left politicians and say like, hey, like the project for the next year is what do you believe? Like what do you think about the world? And then you should use polling as a gut check. So for example, here's a good use of polling before we get to the next one. The Trump administration should look at the polling that very clearly says even immigration skeptical people do not like ice and they should have people who work for ICE take the masks off. That's an example of how even if there's going to be no unconvincing of the Trump administration to do an immigration crackdown, but at a minimum you can look at polling and say, hey, we need to adjust our approach because, wow, we're seeing this in the real world. But that's a lot different than just sort of saying what we are going to do as a political party and movement is wake up every day, look at the polls, let's do whatever. And the last thing, what I particularly don't like about this at a sort of political level is the polling argument sort of illustrates kind of explicitly the idea that our people aren't strong and don't know what they think and then therefore need to be told what to do. But I'm waiting for sort of someone to sort of just like make that like very direct attack like within the faction, basically, like, and the way I would sort of put this is I never supported defund the police, I didn't support decriminalizing the border. And I also like am pretty in sync with like my Texas community on a bunch of those sociocultural issues. But that's because of who I am. It's not because I looked at a poll to sort of come to that conclusion. And we should want to have politicians who are more like me rather than someone who, like, is so unrooted that they could make these really big swings. So let's get into the actual piece. Austin, you could sort of kick us off with this section and Ben, you could come in. So the first of the seven arguments you all make is one, Real life voters don't want DC Centrism. Austin, kick us off of what that means and interprets to you.
- [21:52]
C
So I think people are shocked to hear me say this. A lot of the times but these days I refer to myself almost explicitly as a centrist. And it's because I do feel when I talk to swing voters, of which there are many in my family, that we get along on most of the major issues and we make it a point to, you know, I come from a background, right, at one point was more liberal, affiliated with the Democratic Party. Almost everybody I've ever met, it's been more affiliated with Republican Party. We agree on like 95% of stuff. And the things that we really both seem to care about that gets both of us worked up is not, frankly the cultural stuff. It's not all this other stuff. It is anti elitism and anger at the status quo and anger particularly at elites. And I think that that is something that every pollster and every data analyst and every focus group, you analysts that we talked to was, was very clear about that there is this massive gap between the center in D.C. and the center in this country. And that if there's any one thing that is responsible for the building anger in our politics, it is probably that, right when the quintessential D.C. centrist is somebody like Kirsten Sinema or Josh got in the House, right, that has no bearing whatsoever. That type, that type of small bore tweaking around the edges, will hack for whatever interest comes to me that day while, you know, doing the things that are aesthetically moderate in order to keep like, you know, break even approval in their district and get reelected. That style of centrism, that form of centrism is really, really toxic. And I think that there is just this, this culture in D.C. of not being able to talk about that, especially within the DC media, you type circles, because that's all our conception of centrism too. That's how we approach centrism. That's how we describe centrism. And we put this first at the top because that is big thing that people need to understand is that until we start talking about the center of the country and the way that they actually talk about themselves and view themselves, we are never really going to solve any of our, of the issues of our politics.
- [23:56]
A
Quick follow up. So as you know, and this is such a difficult dynamic for let's say, and the word I want to use is like the moderate sort of faction in terms of understanding the politics of this abundance moment. Kirsten Sinema, even when she was in the Senate, had no interest in public policy. So she is someone who would not be associated with the abundance faction or sort of abundance argument. So for good or for real, she's just not that person. Josh Gottheimer is like never mentioned in like these abundance. If you look at sort of the politicians who sort of have spoken at abundance events, it's never those types of people. I would sort of say like the ideal moderate centrist sort of abundance politician would be someone like Representative Jake Auchincloss who's been on this show. What's your interpretation of Auchincloss?
- [24:45]
C
Well, so important to remember that we did not necessarily write this piece as a refutation of abundance. It was written in its own right as sort of just an understanding of the populist moment that we're in and how to capture it and how to actually be responsive. So I just want to make that clear. Although there is applicability too broadly to the abundance conversation, Aqua Class I, I would say is, is similar to this typical DC's interest. I think that sometimes he, he'll, he'll talk about, you know, frustration with the status quo. I don't think that he's doing the things that we will get to later in the, in the bullet point list of naming enemies. I don't think that he's willing to take on any cows that he personally likes that the median voter does not. And then I also think that some of his, some of his anger and some of his, the enemies that he has taken on and has been rather performative. You know, we had a conversation, I think, about big tech stuff where he was at the welcome event and it was like, well, the left or whatever is, they're the ones selling out to big tech, which is insane. And I think, I think his, I think his reasoning for that was that the left has some hesitation around phone bans and most people, that most of his factional enemies would much rather just structurally regulate big Tech and, and, and take care of the fact that these platforms are addictive and destructive to our, our mental health and our discourse. Rather than just like do small bore stuff like have kids hand in their phones for eight hours a day and then hope that the rest of their lives they don't get their brains melted. So Akin Kloss, he's not somebody that I particularly like. I don't think that he comes really all that close to the real center of this country. He maybe comes close to the center in Massachusetts. I, I'll give him that. I, I don't know for sure that that's the case. I would have to, I'd have to do some more time talking to the people of Massachusetts to understand there. But if we're talking about real swing voters. I still don't think he's really anywhere close to the way that they think about politics and especially to the mode of politics that they would see as representative of their, their values and their, and their frustrations.
- [26:38]
A
How about you, Ben?
- [26:40]
B
When we were talking to the pollsters, this, this was the thing that like, seemed to underpin a lot of what they were saying it. And there's this anecdote from Anat Shankara Soria, who was holding very regular focus groups with, with folks throughout the, the election, still, still does lots and lots of focus groups. And she said in late 2024, just after Trump had won, when the healthcare CEO had been shot in New York, she would open up focus groups with a really blue sky question, no prompts, no anything, and just say, what do we need to do to get the country back on track? And the most frequently volunteered answer that she got for months was, well, manjourney was a good start. So these are not people who are like, love the system and want kind of civility politics and respectability politics and are just floating somewhere between the parties, swinging back and forth that you would think of as moderate or centrist. They are completely outside the kind of left right spectrum. They're angry at the system. They've probably been left behind after the financial crash. They're probably working class and they're angry at the system. Them and they're looking and they don't believe that either of the sides are really fighting for them or speaking to them. And when you think about the kind of candidates at a presidential level that the Democrats have put forward, you can understand why that is, right? Is Hillary Clinton speaking to that angry person? Is Kamala Harris speaking to that angry person, to a degree, is Joe Biden speaking to that angry person. So I think really just understanding these folks who think that the economy is rigged against them, that they're being screwed over by everyone, that they're like cynical, they're struggling to get by. And the other thing is that they're more concerned about economic policy than they are about culture wars and other stuff. So in the absence of a big economic plan, they will center on whether they're relatable to you on a cultural sense as a candidate. But the thing that they most care about are pocketbook issues. That's the reason that they're swinging back and forth between these wildly different candidates and platforms.
- [28:51]
A
I think it's interesting. So what's funny is out of all of these arguments, I think whether in private or in Public. The one thing that all these different factions will actually agree on is this point. And I think a lot of awkwardness around the abundance conversation and the broader sort of like moderate faction in the sort of Democratic Party is actually based on this premise. So when I Hear the words DC Centrism, I'm taken back to the 2000 and tens and think of how DC Centrism operated at the time. So that's when you had the type of, let's say center left Democrat would say, we need to talk about the national debt. We need a Michael Bloomberg Democratic Party where we are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Think of the sort of Democratic Party that the sort of Thomas Friedman of the 2010s would really advocate for. And I think it should be noted the sort of like centrist coded class of DC has moved past that. I think frankly, no labels flopping as hard as it did. And then no labels actually in many ways, like threatening a Democratic presidency in 2024, really forced people to understand how destructive this was to the actual political objective, which is actually winning. So I think it should, so it should be. And I want you to come in Austin after I finish this. But basically, you know, the interesting thing is what should be noted is, you know, it's totally abandoned by the DC centrist class in terms of that reconciles with this argument. I have not heard anyone mention on the center to center left the words national debt in a long time. That, and that was sort of like the apex sort of. You know, you're in a centrist code space in New York or D.C. and you just think that the words national debt are going to be the organizing function of the country's politics. That's just totally absent. So, and then the last thing too, then on this, and this is part of the reframe, is a lot of the people who are within the centrist moderate camp actually call themselves moderates. They don't call themselves centrists. That's part of the rebranding thing. Because I think they actually are aware of the dynamic you2 are both describing where centrism is actually not a good frame for understanding the politics. And instead what they're advancing is moderation. So what they would say is they are people who recognize that you have these swing state, swing district, Trump district people like Representative Marie Gutenscamp Perez, I'm in Oregon right now, so her district is just north of me, who are able to win these Trump districts because they hold positions on sociocultural issues. And then sort of like a mixed grab bag of economic issues, especially in MGP's case. And that's their sort of understanding of moderation. So my follow up question to you two would be how do you understand the moderation case of there are going to be people who need to win at the margins, they are going to need to take positions that are not going to align with what let's say like urban coded left perspectives on social issues.
- [31:48]
B
I think one way to take it.
- [31:50]
C
Is.
- [31:52]
B
I forget which of the pollsters spoke spoke to us about this book. They spoke about performative moderation. Like you pick a few issues to distance yourself from the party on. And I think you've seen and some of them are substantive, some of them are not. I think you saw in 2018, for example, the blue wave election. You had a lot of candidates. I worked for one of them at the time, Mikey Sherrill, who said that they would refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi as leader of the of the party when if they were elected to the House. And that was like a strong signal to swing voters or moderate Republicans that this person was not the fall in line Democrat, but they were moderate in some way. Now whether the other policies were also moderate in any way I think depends on the candidate. In some cases, probably. In some cases definitely not. And so if you look at the Way to Win report as well, they suggest moderating on immigration and on public safety as a way to distance yourself from the unpopular elements of the party. So that's one version of moderation. I think there's probably a lot more validity in that than just moderating everything that you stand for. Right. Because I think there are probably a lot of folks like Marie Glucan Perez who may be described as immoderate, but she's probably got a bunch of policies that would not be described as moderate and votes that wouldn't be described as moderate, especially on economic issues. And that lines up with where the voters are because those swing voters the party needs to get some of their most extreme views are on the economy. That's what pollster after pollster told us from these conversations that they were having with them.
- [33:39]
C
Emphasize Ben's point, which is that I think it's been rhetorically useful that the term moderate has been used instead of the center. And I'll be honest, that's part of the, part of my, my own little project to, to rebrand myself and not even rebrand because I think it's honest as, as center because I think that in a lot of ways that the, it's more correct to call, call it moderate. You are, you are taking a position and you are whittling it down one way or the other based off of, you know, either responsiveness to the electorate, which is good, or just, you know, the polling numbers that you got that day. But yes, extreme views on the economy are the norm among swing voters. And these are people that really are looking for something big there. And I think that moderate. This is going to be just restating Ben's point just in my own, in my own way, I think about it. But that moderate is for most people a stand in for the word different or different in a way that is not unappealing. Right. That is really all that it means. I don't think it says much at all about the direction of your policy.
- [34:40]
B
Right.
- [34:40]
C
So like in 2016, Bernie Sanders was regularly seen as more moderate than Hillary Clinton. Among 10 primary voters and the general electorate. There was this poll after poll saying this, and it was really bizarre because anybody who listened to him would be like, I don't know that that's true. And he actually, over the course of that campaign, even moved his issue position on immigration, guns, et cetera, and still was seen as more moderate. And I think moderate is often a stand in for heterodox and independent. And understanding that people see independence as the key locus of what it means to be moderate really helps you understand the way that people are processing things and why there's a level of dynamism to politics and to which positions that you take that is not captured. If you just think about moderate in the way that D.C. people think about the term moderate.
- [35:25]
B
Just to extend, on Austin's point, Congress is incredibly unpopular. The Democratic Party is incredibly unpopular. So if you can find a way to distance yourself from that at a policy level, then that obviously makes sense. And I'm not saying anything new here. Like, Barack Obama did this. That's how he won in 2008 in the primaries. And also taking a hold of this kind of anti elitism and working class fire and populist economics is how he won in 2012. So it's not like we're setting anything new or groundbreaking here, I don't think. I think maybe part of this is just rediscovering politics.
- [36:04]
A
Yeah. And then we spent a lot on this section, but I think it's an important one. So just two things. So one, I think everything you describe is correct. And there's also a real structural as of popular. As with popularism, the polling theory, there's an actual like structural flaw here that like frustrates me coming from new right spaces in the 2010s, which is the problem with one of the funny beefs that moderate coded abundance people have that probably isn't very publicly discernible is that they are very well aware of the fact that Zoran's ability to come on stage during the campaign with AOC and Lina Khan and Elizabeth Warren and this broadcast of characters was a real strong point for their movement. It's clear that there's a team. It's clear there's a bunch of people. And I think the problem for the centrist moderate camp is that because everyone has the objective of independence, I think MGP in Washington would actually really identify a few articulation Ben of like, it's not that she's a moderate. Like, it's funny. If you watch her episode of Ezra Klein, there's this like weird segment where she talks about she hates trash pickup. And you could just tell that Ezra, she's like describing trash pickup as this. Like, she uses this like quasi. Look at you soft urbanites if you're trash pickup. And I live in the suburbs and I'm sort of just like, whoa. I think I don't. I had no conception of that as like an issue that people polarize themselves. That's an example. She's very independent. But by overemphasizing independence, it a doesn't actually build a cohesive team. It doesn't build a cohesive set of ideas. And to your point, Austin, about there not being anything within the center left liberal faction of the party that means something and offers the country of the future, it literally prevents that cohesion process where on the right, like or hate maga, MAGA produced a consensus that people broadly agree with in the party. And in 2024, a majority of the country agreed with. So I think what my lesson for the center moving forward is, if you understand independence and moderation and centrism in the way that you describe it, Ben, as this like, effort to say you are not this like unpopular, uncool Democratic Party, you are not the status quo. I think that needs to run out of gas after 2026, because what the project needs to pivot that into is what is something that we would all want to be on the same team around, which then suggests the project is a fusionist project. And that's why I have lefties on the show to talk about these issues because, like, I'm not interested. And this is sort of where I come from, the right. Like, the right is Always focused on like how do we fuse this all together? The right will have fights, but then the quick next pivot is like, okay, but how does this fuse? The lack of that instinct on the Democrat side of things is very, very frustrating to me.
- [38:45]
C
I've always got something I want to say. No, Yes, I very much agree. And I think that, you know, we have our ideas and some of our stuff glances at policy. We are talking about modes of politics here. But I agree with you that the need to get to a point where you can fuse around an actual agenda, a tent pole agenda, is urgent. And it's one of the things that I harp on all the time. But I think that we can get into that discussion a little bit more as we get to later points because we talk about the ways in which you should go about craf. Crafting the parts of an actual party wide agenda or a coalition wide agenda. Because I agree. Yeah.
- [39:20]
A
So for the next one, number two, pick fights that get people's attention. Whoever wants to pick it up first can go for it.
- [39:28]
B
I'll jump on that one. So a lot of the debate in the, in the party is like, what should we focus on? What should we talk about? What should we focus on? And it kind of ignores the fact that you don't always get a choice. And also it doesn't really matter what Democrats say because they're not the only ones saying it. The Republicans also get a say. The media also gets to say in what's being talked about. And one of the, one of the things in our Shankara Sorio said that she just, she says, she says again and again, but no one seems to be listening is a message that nobody hears, cannot convince them of anything. If you're not being heard, then it doesn't matter what you're saying. She's really critical from working inside the Democratic Party of this over reliance on what's called dial testing, which is when you sit someone in a room, you pay them a bunch of messages and you get their response. Right. But that's not how politics actually works. Politics works by the attention that things are getting. That's how social media works. It's not, you don't get to just sit someone in a room and talk at them. Right. That's a really old traditional, outdated, if it ever was real version of politics. So picking fights to get attention is like really the master of that is Trump. Right. Like if you look at his build the wall policy. Right. It's, it's, it's small. Sorry. It's A, It's a, It's a simple, simple phrase. It's a big thing, and it pissed a lot of people off. And Democrats start talking about it and getting angry about it, and it becomes a fight, becomes a big national fight, and that's all anyone is talking about. And suddenly everyone in the country knows that he's anti immigration, and they know that Democrats are polarizing themselves into being pro immigration. So. And they know that that's the issue of the election. Right? Because everyone's talking about it. So he's picked a massive fight and got all this attention and put himself on the side of it. Now, is it the best policy? No. Is it necessarily a super popular policy? Maybe not. But he's mastered what we kind of term strategic friction in the piece, that you want to actually pick a fight about something because it's a way of getting the attention onto the issue that you want to be talking about. And that's like the beginning and end of what a campaign is, is getting people to talk about your winning issues and getting them to know that you're on the winning side of them and getting them to have that issue front and center of their mind when they're casting their ballot. So being really picking fights and like, having these, these, these frictions, either with unpopular parts of your own party or unpopular parts of society generally is a good way of showing that you're fighting, that you're interesting and getting attention on the issues that you want to get attention on. And I think that the critique that a lot of the pollsters had of the Democratic Party is that they, and maybe this is a critique of populism as well, is that if you're always just picking the most broadly popular thing and just saying what 80% or 90% of people agree with, then you're not going to have much attention on those things, even if you are saying the right things, because no one's disagreeing with you, no one's thinking about it, and it's not what's defining the election or the choice.
- [42:55]
C
I'll follow that up by saying I think the wall, the build the wall thing is the example that we use in the piece for a reason, which I think is that the reason for that is no matter how you respond to that, you are taking the bait. If you respond to that through a very tortured, performative moderation, you are taking debate because you are still allowing that to be the centerpiece of the campaign. If you respond to that by going full board the other direction and you become very extreme on pro immigration stuff. You were also taking the bait. And no matter what you do to respond, you are taking the bait because you are allowing that to define the issue. Right. It's not an issue of moderation. It was never an issue of moderation with Build the Wall. Right? Build the Wall was a, was a net unpopular policy in most of the polls. There was no amount of moderation on immigration that was going to get Democrats in a place where they were going to overcome the dynamic shift that happened when Trump took a position like that step, right. You are never going to, he has staked his, his claim as the anti immigrant guy. And all that you can do by continuing to try to optimize your position is feed into the primacy that that issue has in the election. And that is one of our big critiques of, of some of our, you know, ideological opponents in this space who, who just refuse to see through those terms and just think that if we, if we optimize our position just enough and are seen as just moderate enough, then it'll be fine. Because what's going to happen is they're going to choose a totally different, different issue or move the goalposts and you are going to be set scrambling again. I would, I would, I would turn to say that on the flip side, Democrats have a lot of opportunities to do this and they're scared to do it.
- [44:24]
B
Right.
- [44:25]
C
You see this on healthcare. Whether it needs to be full blown Medicare for all, I don't know. But universal public insurance, you know, public option that you really mean that is like automatic. You need to have it and you need to message it at a level that it would piss off insurance companies and really make them mad. Like if the Wall Street Journal is not pissed about your healthcare plan, if frankly, some folks in the abundance faction are not doing long tweet threads about how horrible it is and how it wouldn't work, you are not going to generate the type of attention that you need to break through and ad. You might still be trusted more on health care. And by the nature of, you know, dynamics in the real world, you might get lucky enough that healthcare is the centerpiece of the campaign. Or you might have Republicans do something like, you know, that they'll be the most recent bill. But to truly take advantage of it and to make it the central issue of the campaign, you have to take an actual stance that draws fire and you have to be willing to defend it. And access to affordable healthcare coverage or whatever pabulum that you hear is never going to do that. It might be enough in a midterm to win a few House seats and take back the chamber for a short term. But you're never going to build any real political momentum with that type of politics.
- [45:36]
B
There's a. There's another, another thing that every single pollster brought up to us that kind of illustrates this point as well, was when Harris, out of the gate, brought out her economic plan and included an ad that she ran on price gouging. Grocery store price gouging. And she's going to crack down on that and also crack down on, I think, landlords and rental properties jacking up rents. And that was her top testing ad. The attack on price gouging was something that all the pollsters had seen and had been begging Biden to do. And then Harris did it, and it worked incredibly well. But as soon as that ad came out, you had the New York Post with communism on the front page with, like a hammer and sickle. You had all these op EDS in the very serious outlets saying, well, you know, it's broader global trends that are causing spikes in inflation and cracking down on price gouging will take a while to follow through to the broader economy. And will it work? And it's only like. And there was a lot of, like, angst and pushback on this policy. There are a lot of never Trumpers that didn't like it, a lot of major donors that didn't like it. And the, the Harris campaign, whether it was because of donor pressure or because they feared that she'd be like, put as, you know, positioned as some kind of San Francisco elitist, they backed off the policy. Right. And all the pollsters that we spoke to saw her numbers tank from that. Like, this was a popular policy and that friction was good because it drew even more attention to it. Right. Like, as a. Having worked in campaigns like earned media, which is media that you're not paying for, is like, priceless. And she was getting a lot of it. And it was focused on this policy. And it may have been condemning her, but the fact that, that they had elites and Wall street condemning her was actually a proof point of positivity for folks who were swing voters, who they needed. So not shying away from those fights and actually going for them, I think that's the lesson that the pollsters really drew here.
- [47:37]
A
My real thing here, and I'm going to concede that at a personality level, centrist moderates are not comfortable. And here's the thing, and this is why I think the whole, like, it's all the Oligarchy, it's all big money, et cetera, is actually missing sort of what's going on internally with a lot of folks. Like, if you just talk at a personality level with people in the sort of centrist, moderate camp, they just don't like fights in that sense. It reads as uncouth. It reads is not what politics is about. So I think it's like really important to note that gap and then push them to understand this in your terms. But then my thing for the left though, and I think this is my frustration once again coming from the right, an idea that Trump has just really convinced me on is the importance of central casting. And there are people to the my left and to my center who think that the whole central casting idea is like very vapid and doesn't really mean anything. But I think it's actually key to understand. It's sort of like the logical culmination of like, everything is the attention economy and everything is podcasts and everything is short from video messenger and talent, like really, really matter. So, you know, in your piece, and this has been talked about a lot, you know, Lena Khan obviously like really cracked down monopolies, like, you know, did all these things, different things on healthcare. But my problem and then, and then what the left then cites is the fact that like the Democratic centrist crowd did not highlight that. The Biden administration did not highlight that. And that was like a failure. But my actual take here is like, sorry, like Lina Khan is the most Yola coded person ever. I actually don't think she was actually the person to like wage those actual fights. I was talking of someone who worked on the Biden, on the Biden and then Harris campaign in 2024, and they were talking about the most impressive person that they saw in the field in a swing state was Mark Cuban. So from my perspective that you want to take a fight on health care and drug pricing, but the person who should be representing you in that fight should be a Mark Cuban person who has, you know, his, you know, low cost drugs thing, who has all this like, popular attention and is just like very, very well known and doesn't code as like an urban New York coated, suit wearing, DC type. So I just think that there was just no world where Lena Khan as a specific messenger was going to achieve the things that the left claimed she would. And then what I would instead suggest everyone conceptualize is not the debate of like, do we fight? But who is like the public face of this fight, who achieves that? And you know, because I Spend most of my intellectual time thinking about the World War II era and the Arsenal democracy era. An idea I'm really obsessed with were like the dollar a year men. So these were sort of people from the private sector who were given like $1 a year to like work on government and obviously insert statement about conflicts of interest and all those different things. But I think what that model just tells us is like, oh, wait a second, we could enlist people at no cost into the public facing part of our government. And you know, this also happens with you when you look at like selling the chips program or selling the RE industrialization program. I've interviewed most of these people. They are all lawyers who went to Ivy League schools and do not look shoveled anything ever. So what I would want all factions of the party to think about moving forward is like, who is the person who could actually sell your thing? And how do you actually. And not just sell. Right, because that's me using said first language. Who's the person who could actually pick and win the fights in the right way, but this way, like I would want Mark Cuban on CNBC getting in a fight about drug pricing and saying, no, I've done this. I'm a business person. You know, I don't hate capitalism, but this system screwed up. That's who I want to see do it. Not Lina Khan. Lina Khan's job is to do the intellectual work and she does some of the fighting for sure. But like I just think the fight, that's the gap in the fight language.
- [51:17]
C
I see.
- [51:17]
A
Because I think the left really overestimates Lina Khan's effectiveness in terms of what they're claiming she could have done for the administration.
- [51:24]
C
Yes, I'm gonna jump and I have a few thoughts there. One, I'm going to continue to quibble with the use of the left as a stand in for all of the people that like Lina Khan or advancing her policies. I do think that it's important to understand that she had a lot of even just cross partisan appeal. Right. Like J.D. vance during the campaign was out there saying how much he liked Lina Khan. Donald Trump, big gestures, that direction. A lot of swinging sea folks. Ruben Gallego had Lena Khan out and Shaq Rose and Helena Khan out as a surrogate in Nevada. I don't know that I personally think that she's the best messenger. I, I have mixed feelings. I think that there's. Right, there's something to be said about the Yale law coded element of her presentation. I think that the substance resonates and I Think a lot of really smart people who win tough races saw that and believe that. And I think that she was an accidental messenger. The FTC chair should never be as famous as Lena Khan was. I think that that was indicative of the fact that the work that she was doing had meat to it and had, you know, fired to it. That was not being harnessed by the administration. And it was sort of natural that it grew in a different direction and just found other channels because there was so much energy behind some of that stuff. So that, that's the one thing that I would, I would say there.
- [52:35]
B
And.
- [52:35]
C
I'll kick it over to Ben, but those are the two things that I really wanted to quibble with in the framing. Off the bat, I'd agree with that.
- [52:41]
B
I think, I think thinking about credible messengers is really important. I don't think necessarily you should think about that when you're thinking about staffing the administration in the, in the same way. But yeah, broadly I think that folks should be more comfortable speaking to working class voters. I think I would kind of reframe what you're saying around authenticity, right? Like if you can speak authentically, it doesn't really matter. I don't think what you look like or what background you're from because people will be able to tell and people have pretty good bullshit detectors. And if you, if you, if you look the part but can't speak authentically, same's true.
- [53:20]
A
Right.
- [53:20]
B
People, people aren't going to buy it. I do also think that like on, on a question of like selling policy, something that we spoke to about all of these pulses and they all kind of agreed on is that you've got to have a good policy to sell, right? And what people want on the affordability stuff is not a subsidy to a company that in a few years will make a factory and maybe they'll get hired at. It's not all of this kind of abstract thing about how it's going to help the overall GDP figures or you know, it's going to help unemployment rates, it's what's going to put money in my pocket now and what's going to take the prices down of the costs that I have every month. So if the policy is capping drug prices or if the policy is putting $500 in your pocket or lowering your taxes or the price gouging policy, like that stuff really speaks to people. So it really doesn't matter who the messenger is. If the, if the message is we're going to subsidize a company to Build a factory maybe near you in a few years. Like that's not, it's not going to work as well, I'm reminded. And maybe you, you'll appreciate this from the abundance perspective in 20. In 2007, during the financial crisis, Australia responded with a series of really direct, what we called shovel ready projects. The government built like a new project in every single public school in the country. So like a new gymnasium, a new library, whatever. Everyone got $1,000 in their bank account. It was kind of a model that you guys copied from us in the, in the coronavirus pandemic. And the government also subsidy subsidized home insulation. So putting in insulation into the walls and ceiling so that everyone would have lower power bills and they basically paid for it. I think those things, those like three policies, like that's direct, you can see it, you can feel it. It happens quickly, right? To all of the abundance arguments. Like it's happening before the next election and people are experiencing it. I think thinking about politics in those kind of terms is maybe a way of like triangulating that what the pollsters are saying, what the abundance folks are saying and what was actually effective for voters as well.
- [55:39]
A
So next section, real quick editorial POV on top for me. So three name enemies and show how you'll beat them. So, so this is actually really, really interesting because when I've had left folks to discuss abundance, one of their main critiques has been abundance's unwillingness to name enemies, right? So in terms of like name the corporate actors who are building monopolies and concentrating power and then causing things to not happen. And you know, at the time, so this is very early on, after the book's release I was just like much more uncomfortable because once again something I've been trying to reconcile my personality is just the sort of like, like I just want to be positive some and I just want to work together. It's just like deeply, deeply, deeply uncomfortable for me. And I found the need to sort of like push myself whenever I have that instinct. But that said, what I've discovered and come to realize is actually the center left centric out is actually very willing to name enemies. The problem is the enemies that are named are enemies to the left, which coming from the right has been very problematic to me unironically because once again on the right, whenever I hang out with my right wing Trump friends, they're always sort of, for once they get to play anthropologist with like center left, left spaces because they never sort of spend time there. And something that they're all fascinated by is just like the left punching. Because one of the number one rules on the right, which has been taken too far with the Nick Fuentes stuff and the Tucker Carlson stuff, is that you never punch to your right. Why would you punch to your right? Trump punched to his center. So Trump attacked Paul Ryan, Trump attack attack the D.C. establishment. You know what Trump did not do? He did not attack social conservatives to his right on gay marriage and abortion. He did not punch people to his right on other big like socio cultural questions. He always punched towards the center. So the sort of instinct to sort of punch to your left, AKA punching to your base during a Trump presidency is very strange to me. And I understand why it happens because and this is the other sort of norms difference between the right and the left, left, the right. It's, and to be clear, it's not that the right won't get in fights with the right, but typically when the system is functioning properly, when those fights are necessary, they're kind of like inside baseball. So the, the, the one other thing I'll add to your sort of framing, and this is part of the centrist understanding of the project, is like really the argument about the groups. So the argument about the groups is this argument that what happened to the Democratic Party in the late 2010s and early 2020s when center off people took positions that were to their left extreme on socio cultural issues was because a variety of nonprofits, NGOs, non governmental organizations would send staffers in with pollings, with polling that wasn't accurate and with all these like signing statements and said, if you do not agree with this polling, if you do not sign this statement, you are a racist, you're a classist, you're a homophobe. And then Kamala Harris ends up with that ACLU statement saying that she would fund transgender surgeries in prison, which she didn't actually believe at the time, I suspect, and then couldn't defend it or explain her evolution on the question in 2024. Here's the thing, the groups thing is real. There are groups that push people. I think my solution to that though, coming from the right, is that's a private conversation with the center left, which basically says, hey, if a crazy group comes in, or if a group that you perceive as crazy comes in, you do not need to do what they say. And that's a private conversation that doesn't need to be an entirely public big left punching sort of phenomenon during a Trump presidency. But that's sort of my Modific. But yeah, you two take this one wherever you want.
- [59:17]
C
So I think it's funny because that to me that gets. Gets at something that I've been quibbling with the whole time, which is the situation situating of Ben and I, or even necessarily our cohort as the left. And I think that that happens because we don't do the left punching as much. It's not because we are not necessarily center or attuned with the center, but we get coded and cast as such because that's just not our M.O. like, that's not our mode of politics. We don't see it as really that useful school. We spend our time punching the corporatists in the center and on the right. And so that in a way puts at a disadvantage because it's really easy to just like then cast it as leftism, et cetera, et cetera, all the time. The groups thing I think is more. I find it to be kind of a bullshit complaint. And here's why. I think that issue group politics is just how politics works, especially within parties. And I think that the complaining about the groups pushing this and that, that is deflection from the actual problem, which is that you don't have something originally that you believe in. And you have no ability to navigate and meet. Meet issue groups halfway without just. Just taking whatever document they give you and running with it because you're just filling in something in absence, right? You are not negotiating your position in good faith with them. You are just taking an issue paper, plugging it into your website and chugging along. And so I think that the diagnosis of the problem as the groups themselves instead of the party, and it's an inability to do basic issue group politics anymore because of how lost it is and because of how empty it is at its core, really distorts the conversation. And we end up in this spiral talking about the aclu and the ACLU did this and that. And it's not the ACLU's fault. It is Kamala Harris's fault. And. But it's not her fault necessarily. It's not even that big of a deal that she took the position on the questionnaire. It's that she had nothing in her second in her presidential campaign and that could fight for attention or push that to the margins, which is where it should have been. Because an ACLU questionnaire, no matter what you said on an ACLU questionnaire five years ago, you should have something that you're saying today that is drawing more attention than that. And you do that by naming an enemy and picking a real fight with them and saying how you're going to beat them.
- [61:27]
A
Quick follow up because I don't want to forget the thought. Thank you for highlighting that. Because what I don't like about the group's argument is it actually is undemocratic in the sense of like hey, like in a democracy there are people who have perspectives on things. They're going to be a minority and I don't mean that like racially, just like there are going to be like groups of like concentrated people who advocate for things. And that's just what democracy looks like. Right? There's a reason why like sort of petitioning is like a literal constitutional right. So what you are projecting when you talk about groups too much is the idea that you are uncomfortable with people like advancing their perspectives into your part. Also you can't navigate democracy. But then secondly, and this is where a lot of the work that I'm sort of focusing on is like trying to change the culture of center left to left spaces. Another way of describing the group's dynamic is that there's deep discomfort with disagreement within the Democratic Party's coalition. It's really funny. Even when I've been at centrist center left gatherings when there have been up for grabs issues or someone makes a provocative statement, there'll be like lots of whispering but no one will say anything and no one will object and someone will say, well if we argue then we're just going to get in a fight and that's going to bad in of itself. So just like once again, not only can you say no to people, but you can also say because what I would if I were a heterodox centrist like you know, in D.C. right now, I would just like punch to my center and say this group's argument is I'll meet with anybody I want to talk to people. Talking to people is awesome. Like that's what democracy looks like. And you know what? Like, because you know where I stand, you know my deal and I will give you a good faith hearing but like I'm not afraid. Like oh no, scary. A bunch of college educated like, like you know, POC coded groups are talking to me like I, I, I'm just not afraid of that. And like that's what you know. So yeah, come in. Ben.
- [63:08]
B
I think, yeah, I, Austin, I think you captured that really well. Just two other thoughts on the group stuff. Like groups are going to advocate, they're advocacy groups. Like what do you expect them to do? Like they, they have an agenda, they're going to push for it. That's like you said, that's democracy. They should do that. Not every group in the country needs to be an arm of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party can stand for itself. Right. So I think, you know, recognizing that it's not the group's problem that they're advocating for something effectively. Yeah, I think that's an important part of it. The other thing that really bugs me about it is, I mean, people think of it and when they talk about it, it's always these groups that are like a bunch of underfunded people who are taking grassroots donations, who are like really good people in Washington trying to do their best for an issue that they care about. And we're punching that them. And we are not in this conversation talking about well funded, billionaire backed astroturf groups that also do the same thing, that kill popular economic policies that would help millions of people and it would be really, really popular. We're not talking about groups like AIPAC, which is a group and does push politicians in D.C. to take very unpopular positions and may have been one of the reasons that Harris lost a significant number of young voters and significant number of people of color in Michigan. Right. Like this is not, it's not solely like these lefty groups that are doing this. It's a whole bunch of other groups to turn it back also to naming enemies. I think one of the kind of stouses that I think happened between Derek Thompson and the Biden world people was about this. It was about naming enemies. Right. Like the, the abundance books critique seemed to lie primarily on the administration for not being able to deliver things like rural broadband. And this is something Elizabeth Warren mentioned as well. You know, she brought through what I would have thought would have been a very good popular kind of abundance policy of like tax, that the IRS would have a. Its own tax system that you wouldn't need to do TurboTax or anything else. You could do it online with a few clicks, be automated. They already know most of your details because they're the government. You just have to click through and your tax is done. Right. Turbo taxes and their lobbyists are the ones that killed that. Rural broadband was killed by a bunch of corporate interests that didn't want to compete with public financing and public investment. So I think the problem with abundance, maybe in naming enemies, is that folks in the movement will not name the corporate enemies of abundance quite so freely as they will name the left political enemies of abundance. And I think that Austin's critique There is. Look at who's funding them. And that'll tell you why they're not criticizing them. But to the broader political point about naming villains, what the pollsters were really telling us was that people, like, know who are screwing them over and making them their lives miserable. And if you don't name them, you don't name the big corporations, and if you don't name the utility monopolies that are jacking up their rates then. And you are holding fundraisers with them, then they'll assume you're not on their side. And picking fights with these villains. And naming them is a really easy way to make yourself seem more credible, to, like, have a bit of drama and get attention and a way of showing people that you're on their side. I think it was. It just shows that you exist in the same world as them, that you're willing to name the names that they know are already responsible. And then one of the other parts of that politically as well, is if you're not naming the names of the villains, if you're not saying who's responsible for you not having enough money and not being able to and having to work two jobs and being in a really stressful financial situation, then the other side is right.
- [67:06]
C
Right.
- [67:06]
B
And they're saying, well, it's because we're, you know, paying for transgender surgeries for people in prison and because all these immigrants are coming and taking your jobs. Right. They will. They will figure out an enemy and they will fill in the blank. So it's really important for Democrats to name enemies to explain why we got into the situation that we got it in, and then to commit themselves to fighting those enemies. And I think too often corporate interests and donors, and this is what the Pulse has told us as well, kind of stop candidates at that point point from naming the name the enemies very clearly.
- [67:36]
A
So I'm going to skip number four because I'm just going to stipulate this is just accurate. And funnily enough, I spent a lot of time in sort of the democracy space. So number four is defending democracy means fixing the economy, basically. You cannot think of democracy, quote unquote, as its own sort of unique political sort of case you make. And when elections based on, you have to understand it as being intertwined with people's views on the economy. The democracy space did not understand this before 2024. A lot of their awkwardness in this mom, is their effort to recognize the way YouTube, the, the. The sort of framework YouTube provided. And then what do they then do with that because the actual issue is you could get. And the reason why democracy became the overarching thing was that was a unironic form of bipartisanship where you could really get like center right, never Trumpers to center left, corporate Democrats, two left coded people who agree on that point. But so it was unifying. But because it doesn't work, then the economy thing comes in. That's where everyone disagrees. So that's awkward work to be done that I think we could just stipulate and move on to five. Don't take the bait on culture war attacks.
- [68:47]
B
I can, I'll just, I'll throw that Austin in a second. But I think one of the things that I asked Celinda Lake, who is, she's a veteran Democratic policy, she did did a bunch of swing state Senate races. She was Biden's lead pollster in 2020. What's the most shocking thing, that surprising thing that you could tell people and that you just want everyone to understand. And she said the culture war attacks just like the limit of their mileage, that they are actually not as strong as you think they are, are that people care far more about economics. And if you have a strong economic platform and if you have something really strong economically that you're focused on, then a lot of this other stuff really kind of slips away and people don't think about it or care about it as much and it kind of makes sense. Like think about Bernie Sanders, for example. Most people, I don't think know if you were to say what are his views on immigration or on LGBT issues, You know, people may be have a vague sense just because he's part of the Democratic Party of what he would think about those things. But they know him for taking on the billionaires. Right? That is his thing. And so if you have an economically populous platform that people agree with, then a lot of this debate and conversation at the Democratic Party gets itself wrapped around the axel on what position to take on on culture issues. Like it doesn't actually matter as much if you've got that strong tempo first. And there's a lot of testing that these posters have done that show that if you're attacked on a culture war issue, you can just quickly explain what your position is in the most like moderate and poll friendly terms that you can and just authentically and then pivot back to your economic policy. And that is the best way, way to defang and defeat those kind of attacks. I think the lesson out of the ad that Trump invested a lot of money in at the end of the campaign, Kamala Harris is for they, them. Trump is focused on you. That says more about the fact that in the absence of Harris having a strong campaign thing that she was fighting for, in the absence of people feeling like they knew what she was fighting for, they will assume that she's more interested in those other things because that's what they've heard from her and that's what they're hearing from all the attack ads. But if there is that other thing, if you do have something very strong that you're running on, then that is going to eclipse all of these kind of other culture war attacks. That's the best way of inoculating yourself to them.
- [71:36]
C
I will briefly add, because I know we should move on and not to rely on polling again, but what's funny about the, the trans stuff in 2024 is that through the end of the campaign, if you ask people straight up, who do you trust more on trans issues, it was still Democrats and it was still Kamala Harris. So even if those particular attacks landed, it was not enough to shift anybody that was voting on those things, whatever margin of people, if everybody was voting on those things, if everybody was voting on top of trans rights, Harris would have won. She would have won by a lot. It was, it was a like a 10 point gap, like, and this was a Fox News blow, I believe. I, I don't have it in front of me, but I swear to God it's true. I'll send it to you after the podcast. The point is, is who is activated by a message and why and how you get a different message in front of them. And this, we've stressed this in a number of different ways over the course of this conversation, but I think that is the operative thing. The only time in which I've ever really had a lot of active conflict with left. Okay, not the only time I've had active conflict with left. Left is the economic anxiety thing. I, I just genuinely believe it and I think it's very obviously true. And now, now you can say it without getting, you know, called too unwoke, that it. Most of these cultural issues, and especially the fact that they're so thermostatic and change so much. Right. In 2016, Trump was loudly proclaiming how much he supported trans people using the bathroom of choice. It is in fact, downstream of their feelings about society and the economy. And you couldn't say that after, after 2016 because it was largely the white working class that first departed the coalition and you were being racially insensitive, blah, blah, blah. But now it's voters of color, it's working class voters of color who are abandoning Democrats. And it is because of their economic anxieties, the same reason it was before them. Now, maybe that economic anxiety and the fact that they only feel that the Democratic Party is talking about this one thing feeds into resentment and has calcified some views on social issues that, or that you and I might see as negative. But that's still not the operative thing, and I just refuse to believe that it is, especially when something like abolish ICE a year into Trump's presidency can be polling at a plurality level. What that tells me is that people, one, respond to current events and their views are dynamic. But then, two, they probably didn't have that fixed or steadfast a belief on the issue in the first place. It was probably downstream of other sentiments also.
- [73:51]
B
Like, yeah, one thing that really annoys me about this politics of like, you know, what was the term that the basket of deplorables, right? Just that you can't, if you, you can't write off voters, like, what does that get you? What does it get you to write off the voters that you need as like, irredeemably racist and deplorable and sexist and whatever else? Like, people are on an individual level capable of change. And as a, as a political party, you have to believe that people are capable of change. And sometimes that change comes from the bottom up and sometimes it comes from the top down in leadership. But you have to win and you have to speak to people and you have to persuade people. And this politics of just like writing people off and not bothering to try to convince them or listen to them or understand where you can find points of agreement. I just, it's, it's, it, it doesn't get us anywhere. And it, it certainly only helps the other side.
- [74:49]
A
So two quick things here. So, one, I agree with the don't take the bait thing, but I do think, though, you can defang kosher war attacks via compatibility with the electorate, especially, like, at a district level. So an example here would just be the fact that no one is going to look at, you know, mgp, the congresswoman we mentioned earlier, and think that she's like a radical on social issues. So, like, you're going to try to make those attacks. And because she just matches her district and she just has the aesthetic and sort of the performance and the actual who she is as a person, that really matters there. So I just worry that the left in Overselling the. Not overselling. I just, when I hear the like. This is all about economic populism. That's the strong point of the sphere. I think that argument ignores the baseline foundation of the actual candidate needing to match the electorate. So, for example, you could not pop Zoran Mandani in Nebraska, where you're from. Austin or Texas, where I'm from, even if you gave him the best, most perfect. No, no, no, no, no.
- [76:01]
C
I actually agree with. I want to take a different turn of the screw, which is to say that you were talking about. You can't plot like Zaron Montani in Nebraska. Heard your point. Do you know who didn't moderate on any LGBTQ issues during his campaign? Was Dan Osborne. Do you know what, what his response was? He found a way to very symbolically acknowledge people's concerns. He never talked down to them. And then he said, look, at the end of the day, I'm a libertarian on social issues, so even if I personally disagree with some of these things. And this was how he would answer a lot of the really hot impressions. He's like, it's just none of the government's business. And then he would say, why I'm running is X. And so I, I agree, Asani, but that's because he presents his politics differently. He is leaning into some of those cultural things, but when it comes down to, to the root of it, a lot of their actual issue positions, if you got them in a closed, in a closed door space, may be the same. But Dan Osborne understands that you, you meet people where they are rhetorically, that you emphasize the need for government to not solve some problems, and then you talk about the problems that you want to run for to use the government to solve. And I think that there, it's not, I wouldn't say that it's gesture torporal. Right. He made a lot of gestures on immigration that were substantive but also largely, but still mostly symbolic.
- [77:22]
B
Right.
- [77:22]
C
You know, opposed mass deportations, but was willing to build the wall. All right. Because that is more of a symbol for how people feel about something. But all of this to say that it's, it's just a lot more complicated than doing a poll of your district and matching and matching. The cultural politics being genuine comes first. And people believed it because he meant it like he really just didn't care about those issues. These are these the things that he was running on. And that's not to say that you weren't even acknowledging that that is that mother politics is valid. But I just want to Say that the way that I heard that was like, you can't pop Zoram down. Like, of course you couldn't. But Zoran Hamdani wouldn't run the same way. And not running the same way would not necessarily just be about changing issue positions. It's also how you message them and.
- [78:03]
A
Emphasize them well and for sure. And I think so a very well taken. And I wasn't using the Zoram on Dani thing in like a bad faith way. My point was just simply that like the way to reconcile this dynamic. That's why I said defang. And the way you defang is you say once again, Dan. And this is why I won't even describe Dan Osborne's position as an immigration. It's quote moderation. Because I suspect he just believes that like a borders are he. He's not a sort of like Harvard social justice, like grad school coded person who thinks that borders are this like 20th century nationalist disaster. And he doesn't think that like that's just not who he is. So. So like that. That's what really, what I'm like really saying here, which is that like my challenge then for the left that would make this argument like very interesting is like because I think this is the cleanest hit that up until now the center gets, which is that.
- [78:53]
C
At their.
- [78:54]
A
Best the moderates define the project is like we're winning the swing districts. And Dan Osborne's useful example of how this could work from a more left coded perspective just sort of prove that you can identify the candidates who match those districts, match those states, can use economic populism as the pointy end of the sphere, but then also have their own take on it in a way that's sort of different. So that's more what I just kind of meant there. Okay, so last two aggressively agree. Yeah, yeah. I think I'm not left bunching. Ben. I'm sorry.
- [79:27]
B
What triggered me about it is this video by third way that's out right now which starts with exactly the same thing. And like kind of makes the case that, well, Mamdani, if you replicated like his positions across the country, we would definitely lose. And it's like who is arguing that? Like who on any side of the party is saying we should run Mamdani as a presidential candidate? It in this we can't the good.
- [79:50]
A
News on that front.
- [79:53]
B
Yeah, it's just, it seems like such a reductive, silly argument that they're using. I wasn't saying that you were using it, but that's why I was triggered.
- [80:00]
A
No, no, no, that's totally fair. And I think that's why what I hope people get from this episode is like an actual understanding of people's actual positions. Because like, if you actually understand what people are saying, you could actually get to the core basic like argument there. So number six, this one's obvious. So we could do a quick, quick get out ahead of the AI backlash. My quick 20 second comment is I was at the, I did an abundance event with inclusive Abundance with Jake Akin Kloss and so he, he and I were interviewed by Derek Kaufman, IA's president. And this person came up to me afterwards, said like, what is abundance gonna have to say about AI? We really need to bring like AI and its vision of human flourishing into the picture. I said, dude, we want nothing to do with that. That is its own, its own thing. And obviously I think liberalism has to have an answer in AI. But just sort of my version of just sort of like that's its own thing. I think the only thing abundance from IPOB has to say about AI is that, wow, the cost of electricity is out of control no matter what. And we clearly need more sources of energy, especially clean ones. If you're center left, liberal left, and it's crazy that the Trump administration is shutting down clean power projects for bullshit culture war reasons. And Abundance really wants to make those clean power projects happen. That's why we're not anti environmental, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that is all what I think abundance just say on AI. It's its own problem that should be handled from a ideological, broader Democratic party, liberal left, progressive perspective. That's my thing. What are your two contributions on AI?
- [81:31]
C
I genuinely believe you that that's your view of how abundance should interact with AI. I think that it is nowhere close to how the status quo is. I think that the reason that you have so many people from Silicon Valley that are funding these groups, I we could talk about inclusive abundance is funders list even is because they view this as an easy vehicle for the regulatory structures that they need to very quickly do the AI build out without any democratic discipline or oversight. And I think that you see that with how they're going about, you know, the construction of data centers. I think you see it just in general like they have hijacked the language to use to just generally put forward deregulation as just like key to growth growth. I think that they see it as just, they see it as an incredibly useful vehicle. Now this conspiratorial Side of me wants to say that, like that's by design. I think it's a mix. I think some of it is by design, I think some of it is by accident, by good, meaning people who want government to work just ending up with odd bedfellows. But in general, I think that that is one, that that is my primary critique and my, my primary issue with, with abundance as a campaign is that it is funded by folks who clearly are using this as a vehicle to, to have the regulatory structure that they would like for artificial intelligence build out. And funnily enough, it just turns out that you just can't seem to get most people in, in the, in the abundance world to say anything bad about Google, just can't seem to get them to say anything bad about Facebook. Google has had what, two or three cases in the last year where they've been found of illegally monopolizing like key parts of the Internet infrastructure, like the advertising market, like the online advertising market is so essential to the entire economy. And you cannot find takes from any of the leading people in this space about what that means for innovation in the digital economy. You just can't find it. And it's because they are not willing to talk about it. And so the AI stuff is central to this and is one of the key points of the abundance tension and the tension with the mode of politics that we're arguing for, for. Because if you are not able to talk and meet people where they are, with their hesitations and their fears about the biggest transfer to information in our economy, in our lifetimes, then you have nothing to offer to the coalition right now. I feel you just have nothing worth saying. And that's really just where I stand on it. Ben, I'll kick it over to you.
- [83:51]
B
Yeah. I find if you go to the website for the Abundance Institute and you look at their, you know, submissions to Things, it's all about, you know, stopping any kind of impediment to the data center rollout or any kind of impediment to nuclear power. So I think Warren's speech about abundance is like an opportunity for folks who do care about government efficiency, who do think more about government delivering things, who people who want to see a more effective American government delivering for people and making real world impacts. This is an opportunity to divorce yourself from those elements of the movement. And I think it would probably help with building a lot of bridges within the coalition on doing that and frankly getting everyone's priorities pushed forward. I think something that's interesting both on AI and on that actually, David Plouff has a piece last week in the New York Times about how Democrats can win. And there's a whole section on AI and talking about the dangers that it has to kids and speaking to people's anxieties. I think that there, there, there's obviously that kind of optimism, techno optimism about how it could transform the world for the better. But do we really think that the guys who have control over AI right now are going to do that? I mean, their entire track record with technology would prove that they have made people's lives miserable and worse through social media and through everything else. And it has just concentrated the benefits of this technology up backwards. So I think that there's a real case to be made that the Democrats are the only party that can ensure that the benefits of AI are felt by everyone, that it means more money for folks, that it means more leisure time for folks, that the efficiencies are spread across the economy. And that's a case I think the Democrats should be making. And that's something that all of the pollsters as well said. Look, this is something people are thinking about and talking about, and they're not being spoken to about it by the party. It has, it hasn't fully been polarized as an issue yet. So I think there's tremendous opportunity to get out ahead of this and to get out positively on it. And the other thing that the other point Pluff made in the piece is that progressives and abundance folks can kind of realize that they're maybe working towards the same goal, because if the government can show that it's delivering things and delivering things very quickly, then people will be happier to pay their taxes or happier to trust more things in the government to deliver things. So I think that that is marrying those two elements together of like a government that delivers, and that's why we should expand it. I think that's probably a path forward for conversations within the coalition.
- [86:49]
A
So one last quick comment before we get to the last section. And this is where, excuse me, I can offer some tough love for the abundance movement, building on your two comments. So one, you know, one of the vital pieces in the sort of abundance canon is Ezra Klein's everything bagel liberal critique, which from a technical policy perspective, I know people on the left sort of like punch some holes in it. Everything bagel liberalism is like the reason why we didn't build chip fabs is because we added a child care center requirement, we added these environmental, we added all these requirements on together. We tried to do so many things at once and it just turns out you can't have an everything bagel. You actually have to concentrate on the central thing. Maybe there could be one or two things, but have in the back of your mind the fact that our coalition just of adds all these things. We want to satisfy every single group at once. I think there's truth to that. But ironically then, and I just realized this as you spoke, Austin, here's the central problem. We have everything bagel abundance. And that's why this is screwed up here in the sense that. Do you know why AI is such a part of abundance conversations? Because if you actually talk to the abundance people and they really do believe this, that this is not just like Reid Hoffman talking. I think the whole Reid Hoffman thing is not like it's problematic for sure, but I think it's in my sort of understanding of what's happened in the past year. And as people know, I've been very inside these things. It's not the determinative factor. The determinative factor here is that people are obsessed with abundance as a bipartisan thing. People like if you actually talk to abundance people, they really just think that the way you advance policy is by building this big bipartisan coalition. And as you said, Ben, the abundance institutes is really about AI. And here's the thing, it's not just because they're paid to do. I know these people, these are techno libertarians who unironically just are accelerationists who believe AI is the key to everything. This is a real thing, money's a thing, but they believe this. So the way that abundance brings them into the coalition because they're right coded is by saying abundance is going to talk about AI. That is quite literally the thing that's happened. All of the AI programming at the abundance conference last year, which I emceed, was the way that the right leaning abundance groups would come in because they weren't there to talk about housing. They talked about state capacity a bit to be sure. But AI is the way you get the right, right wing part of the coalition in. And the actual truth is that's everything Bagel like you, you, you do not advance policy by bringing every single person in, including issues that are going to alienate your sort of ideology and your idea from people in the actual coalition. Right? Because like think of China policy. I said this at my abundance event last week. The reason why, and you will probably disagree on China in a bunch of different ways, but that's for another episode. But here's what happened The China Hawks won the argument on the MAGA right in the 2015, 2016 primary. Then they governed. And then you saw center left Democrats like Jake Sullivan and Rush Doshi say, hey, we may disagree with Trump's like specifics, but actually there's something to this idea that we need to compete, not just engage with China. And then we had a bipartisan consensus until Trump, you know, did his tick tock thing, which we could talk about, you know, the reasons why that actually happened. But the point was as like you start in one side, you win arguments, then you expand outwards. That's how abundance should think of itself, like abundance. And this goes to Elizabeth Warren speech, abundance should understand itself as having a center left to left like area of like battle where there's a conversation happening. And if the arguments are correct, then you'll see people on the right say, hey, so we tried doing that. We're going to deport like a, we're going to deport 10 million people. And then magically everything's going to get cheaper. Once that does not work because it will not work. They're going to look for solutions. And maybe that zoning, maybe that's economic populism, maybe that's bringing more of their Lena Khan side to the four after they jettisoned her this year. I think that's just like the way that I would understand this and that's I think an important way. So last one and the strongest one. Welcome the hatred of elites.
- [90:50]
B
Yeah, I think, I think the thing that got us on this and what the quote is actually from FDR in his re election campaign. He was, was arrayed against, you know, what he described as monopolists and warmongers and robber barons and all these economic elites. And he said, never before in history of the world has such a coalition been against someone and has hated them so much. And you know what? I welcome their hatred. And he got reelected with a massive sweep three days after that speech and was able to then enact massive policies that completely transformed America and are durable to this day. So I think the, and, and, but can you like imagine a Democratic candidate getting on stage right now, apart from Bernie Sanders, and saying that it's, it's, it's this idea again of viewing politics as a battle, as taking on other powerful forces in a country and fighting for the betterment of most people? I think, I think sometimes with the amount of policy wonks in the party, with the amount of very thoughtful people, we can get stuck into discussions about macroeconomics and what's Best for the system. And all these kind of abstract ideas of what is best for America. And what people sometimes want, especially in a populist moment, is someone who will just, just take off on the system, transform the system and fight for them and be a fighter for their interests and to make their lives better. I think that like returning to that and kind of welcoming the, the, the, the hatred and the, the backlash from the folks that are going to be pushing back against you because they have vested interests in keeping the system and the status quo the way it is is, is really what we're, we're trying to say here. Austin, do you have more on that?
- [93:20]
C
I do, I do. I think this is, this connects really well to the conversation that we just had about AI Right. You have what are in my view quite obviously the most powerful corporations in the history of the world. Not just their lobbying power or the financial resources they have available to them, but they have control over the, the primary swaths of our information system as well. And they, and we do know that they use that. And so when you have that kind of power and force and then you have a coalition that's battling over itself over whether we should even talk about that, you're so far from any mode of politics that's ever going to get us out of this doom loop that we are in. Right? You are, you are just. We had the analogy, I think in one, our last piece, the Warren piece of. You're not even rearranging the chairs on that Titanic, you're shopping for fabric them, right? If you're not even at a place where you can even talk about this. And so one thing that I try to make clear when I have these conversations is that democracy is messy. And especially democr. Especially enacting democracy through economic policy is messy. You are not always going to land on the most efficient policies. You are not always going to land on a policy that gives every interest group what they want. You are not going to land on a policy that always raises gdp, global growth per year. That is democracy. If that is what people want. It's that. That's just how. How things work. You have to be responsive to the actual will of the people. And one of these things that we have in this abundance debate is this mini debate over who is the inheritor of the New Deal legacy. And to me it is preposterous to, to point to what worked in the New Deal and then, and then work backwards and being like, well, we are advocating for those things that worked because the New Deal was A it was an axe, it was not a scalpel. It was an A max. There were all kinds of failed policies in the New Deal. There were all kinds of things that were struck down, programs that were left behind because they just didn't work. But the point of it was that all of those policies were responsive to acute needs of people that were gettable voters who also were hurting. Right. And that was the method of FDR's presidency. He just threw all the shit that he could at the wall and saw what would stick because he understood that people were angry and they were looking for that kind of urgency and they were willing to forgive mistakes if they saw that that kind of urgency was underlying the politics and that they were willing to take on the interests that they felt were taking advantage of them. And I think that that is the key mode that we are trying to embody in the politics that we're advocating for today is to be willing to take risks, to be willing to try things that might seem like they wouldn't work, that some IO economist, the FTC will write an equation being like, oh, I don't know, that seems risky. I don't care if that is what people want want, if that is what this country, that is what people in this country say that they actually want. And we need to try it so that we can see if we can break out of this loop because things are getting very bad very quickly and I don't see a lot of other alternatives. And moderating on immigration and moderating on crime, sure. But it's not going to do anything to break the, the rigid boundaries that are on our current politics.
- [96:16]
A
Oh, sorry, Ben.
- [96:17]
B
I'll just say. Yeah, yeah. One of the, one of the things that, that some of the pollsters told us is that, you know, understanding the policy and big policies, big breakthrough policies, it's not that voters are like stupid and don't understand drawbacks around, like freezing the rent or freezing utility rates. Like people understand that there are drawbacks, but it sends a signal that you're on the right side and that you understand the scale of the problem, that you're going to do something big. And when you're in power, you try that. And you can try all of the other wonky things as well that, you know, know the, the policy class is telling you we're going to be more effective. You have to win power first. Right. And just to say that you're going to make the price gouging policy, or whatever it is the centerpiece of your campaign does not mean that that's the only thing you're going to implement or push for or do. But it does mean that that's what you're going to talk about and that's the winning strategy and that's what's going to signal what you're fighting for. And then you can bring in all of these other affordability policies as well. And I, yeah, so I think it's about, about not being afraid to be big, not being afraid to like, take, take on the status quo and like welcoming the hatreds of the elites. There is one person in politics doing that very consistently and it's Donald Trump. And it seems to be working for him. Like, that is, for all of his faults, that is not the one that is going to bring him down. People really do see him as fighting for them because he's sending a signal that I'm willing to take on and piss a bunch of people off. And so that kind of more combative politics is, I think, what all these pollsters were kind of begging the party to understand. And it doesn't need to be exactly the same as Donald Trump and it doesn't need to be as bombastic as Bernie Sanders, and it doesn't need to be something that's like out of touch or inauthentic for a candidate. But being able to think about politics in that way and being able to have that courage and signal to voters that you understand the enormity of the problems that they're facing, I think is, is what, what folks are saying.
- [98:14]
A
So great statements. My closing, and this is actually one which I've really evolved my thinking around and I've realized this is one of those, like, language issues. So like, I think the FDR example is really important because I think when I first heard it was Elizabeth Wilkins of the Roselle Institute who like pushed me on this one and I got really uncomfortable. And I think it's because it seemed like we were just like arbitrarily saying, like, if you don't wake up, like wanting like elites to hate you, and once again I'm speaking from a center left perspective, then like, you don't know what time it is. And that's just like not like my vibe or my deal. But, you know, as I learn more about the New Deal and this is, I just watched the America, the Ken Burns is like the Roosevelt series. Like, if you were an economic elite in 1936 and you hated theater and you hated Franklin Roosevelt and they hated him, you at a fundamental level did not understand the country. You didn't understand that the world of like the 19th century and like laissez fae capitalism was not coming back, that Herbert Hoover's sort of American individualism was not appealing and would never meet the sort of twin threats of fascism and communism. So if you have the reaction to the New Deal that they had, then yeah, I would welcome that. That would be the way that I sort of understand it. Right? Because like what you were trying to do is you were like, FDR was trying to save the country country, he was trying to save democracy. He was trying to actually improve people's lives. And if doing the things that he did caused hatred from that set of elites, his answer was not to say, okay, nobody needs to dial it back then, well, we think this is the right thing to do, but, oh, we'll get some people mad at us. If you are doing the right thing and elites hate you over that thing, then just keep going. That's my centrist reinterpretation that makes it not about like, like FDR didn't hate capital. Because I think the problem with people here in the center is sort of like, so you're saying that like we have to like hate capital, we don't have to hate capitalism. Like, I'm a capitalist. I believe markets work. I just, because I'm center left liberal. I think that like the New Deal gave us this vision of like government and the private sector and them doing these things together. And then lastly to note, FDR then appointed a bunch of these economic elites, his dollar a year men in World War II, right? Like, who are the people who are running the factories? He had a great joke on this. People said, why did you appoint so many, many Republicans to be dollar a year man? And he said, they're the only people who could afford to only work on $1 a year because they're all the rich people. So even in his thing, he like sort of did a funny little like right punch as he was sort of accommodating the right too. So like, that's been the real transition for me. And I think this is why making it about specific issues makes this easier. I'm sorry, if you are center left, if you run on the Abundance Institute's recommendations for policy, it's going to be a total disaster. If you are center. Right, right. And you run in the Abundance Institutes policy, it's going to be a total disaster. The right was shocked by how much their populist base hated the state regulatory ban of AI stuff. That's just the deal. So if you are on the right, if you're on the left or you're on the center, if you are going to navigate AI politics precisely and actually find this messy middle we're searching for, you are going to get hatred from economic elites, especially in the tech industry. And you need to accept that as a cost of doing business. And that's how I sort of reconcile myself, myself with this point. So we've. This has been an incredibly long episode and I'm like, so thankful that we could. I, I really mean it because I think that like, people have sort of asked me, like, how do you do fusionism? Like, how do you sort of like talk to people, like to your left and like sort of been a cohesive project. And I think that like, you just do this like at scale and like consistently. So that's why I wanted to just go longer because, like, that's actually like the point. And I think we establish plenty of boundaries where we actually agree there are some places out of it, but I think like, this is just what I want to do more. So like, any closing thoughts from you two would be a pretty appreciated. But I really enjoyed doing this.
- [102:01]
C
You know, I don't know the big closing thoughts. I think we really were comprehensive and covered it pretty thoroughly. But thank you so much for having us on. It really was a pleasure. Martian.
- [102:10]
B
Yeah, we really appreciate it as well, I think. Yeah. To your point, you know, if, if folks in D.C. thought like the rest of the country and like the swing voters that the party needs, then we wouldn't be in a situation that we're in. So it's like by definition these voters want something different and speak to something different that we want. And a lot of the time I feel like we, as everyone does, tries to project your personal views and politics, but I think just being humble and accepting, hey, the folks that we're trying to win or the way to win, what we're doing isn't working. We need to rethink that and that's going to make some of us uncomfortable. All and it's going to be different to what we necessarily all want. But let's work through this together and figure it out and get the best policy and get the best politics out of it. I think that's the project that we all have to be engaged in right now and really appreciate it.
- [103:02]
A
Thank you for joining me on the realignment.