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The Realignment
599 | Henry Tonks: The Realignments Comes for the Democrats - Lessons from Liberalism's 1970s-1990s Wilderness Years
01:26:06
Henry Tonks, Postdoctoral Fellow at Kenyon College's Center for the Study of American Democracy, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Henry discuss why the post-2024 election Trump realignment failed to materialize, why opposition to the Trump presidency wins elections, but isn't a sufficient governing strategy, the fall of liberal ideology since the Reagan presidency, the lessons of the Democratic Party and American liberalism's wilderness years from the 1970s to the 1990s, and why the future of the liberal project looks more like "fusion" rather than "faction."
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- [00:01]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. After Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2024, many commentators declared that America had entered a new political era, a realignment potentially at the level of FDR and Reagan in 1932 and 1980, respectively. While Trump didn't have either president's electoral margins, the narrative power of his comeback victory was such that we could see ourselves describing 2024 as another critical turning point in American history. Today's episode is premised on the idea that this narrative is wrong. The realignment is only partially finished. Conservatism, the GOP aren't what they were before Trump, and anyone trying to turn back the clock is pursuing a fool's errand. However, the opportunity is now shifted to the left side of the aisle when it comes to reimagining what the political offerings at hand are. My guest is my friend and historian of liberalism and the 20th century democratic party, Henry Tonks. Henry believes that the US is in the middle of a messy political status quo when either party can hold power, no consensus has emerged, and both sides are searching for durable governing vision. Our conversation turns to the Democratic Party and American liberalism, where opposition to Trump appears to be the winning electoral strategy ahead of the 2026 midterms, but not a governing one. We also explore a deeper problem, the collapse of liberal ideology since the 1970s. Without a clear liberal story about the past 30 years and about what liberals believe and what country they want to build, even ambitious policy agendas will struggle to gain traction. Drawing from history, from the New Deal to the neoliberal Clintonian era turn in the 1990s, we examined the death of liberalism as a clear point of view and and set of ideas. And what would it take to rebuild it today? I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Henry Tonks, welcome to the Realignment.
- [02:01]
B
Thank you, Marshall. It's wonderful to be here as a keen listener to the show.
- [02:05]
A
Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you. I would say that over the past year there's been a couple people, Danielle Lee Thompson, of course, but also you, who've really not only shaped my thought, but I think helpfully from our different perches, been thinking in adjacent ways. So it's not as if our work is perfectly crossing over, but I think if you stack all the these scenes together, there's something coherent. So thank you for joining me in that project.
- [02:29]
B
Thank you. That's very kind of you to say. I feel very flattered.
- [02:33]
A
Yeah, so. And the key thing of understanding the reference I just made is that I'm talking to people with PhDs. So maybe podcasters who hang out with our BAS have their situation intellectually improve by talking of people who take their academics a little more seriously than I do. We're going to obviously talk about the Democratic Party and American liberalism in this episode, but I think we should really start by focusing on the realignment itself and where that whole narrative sits right now. I think an easy thing that you and I in a cord on is the idea that Trump 2.0 after the 2024 election was seen by a lot of people, myself included, as potentially offering just the realignment that was the answer. After 10 years, this was just going to end with Trump coming to power, having learned not in a Trump is going to moderate and just be different sense, but really just Learned from the first term, learned from 2021 to 2024, and just actually solidified a political approach and coalition that could last for a long time. I will say that the conventional wisdom has really shifted on that over the past year. Where do you come down to the what's happened with the realignment during Trump 2 take?
- [03:41]
B
I think this probably is somewhere where we, we would end up agreeing. Agreeing, Marshall. I mean, after the 2024 election, you saw, I think, spate of analyses from all sides of the political spectrum arguing that Trump's second election was, you know, what historians and political scientists refer to as a realignment. Obviously, listeners to your podcast will be familiar with the idea. But just to orient them, previous realignments in the last hundred years, including 1932, the emergence of the New Deal coalition, and then most historians would say 1980, the Reagan Revolution, and the idea that 2024 was sort of inaugurating the next era order of American politics. And I do come down on the side very much that this was a situational victory, that President Trump's gains with certain voters, you know, black voters, Hispanic voters, maybe even sort of young men, quote, unquote, as a group, that these gains were quite dependent on inflation, economic discontent, potentially a sort of general alienation of voters from the political missteps of the Biden administration. And I think what we've seen in the first year and a half of Trump 2.0 is that these gains were very much rooted in the context of late 2024 and not a sign that that the GOP has built a permanent new majority. And I would briefly say, I think sort of one indicator that this is the case. If you look at the off year elections last year in especially New Jersey, you see Mikey Sherrill winning back a lot of lower income, especially Hispanic voters when she is not a sort of populist type figure. She's a very mainstream Democrat, but she really recoups a lot of losses with those groups. The one caveat I would add to this idea of the realignment, which again is, I think something that you'd be sympathetic to and that a lot of your listeners would be sympathetic to, is I think as you've been exploring over the past decade, President Trump did shift the sort of elite policy consensus in certain ways or maybe capitalize on an incipient shift. So, for example, skepticism about liberalized trade with China, the need to sort of reshore certain industries, some of these policy areas, I think there is still a realignment in progress and being contested. And the fact that there hasn't been an electoral realignment doesn't change the continued contest over the policy realignment.
- [06:37]
A
Yeah, a couple things, and this is why it's funny to talk to an academic who actually studies the academic concept of realignments, because as anyone who listens to the realignment will know, my definition is really expansive and broad. So a political realignment in the way that you're Talking in the 20th century terms is about a party. It's about the long term. My version includes others use this too, but includes ideology, the composition of the party, who governs, who's in charge, how the different institutions that comprise the party and the ideology function. And that for sure is real. Conservatism is not the same conservatism that we had in 2014, 2015, before Trump came down the escalator. And the forces on the right who disagree with the way that conservatism has realigned itself, those of which operated on the basis of conservatism itself, not changing that much over the Trump period. This really was just the unique Trump thing. So this is in sort of January 6th and afterwards period, they all effectively lost out. So no matter what happens in the second Trump term or in the 2020 election, conservatism itself is just not going to go back to the sort of Reaganite framework and understanding of things, which you don't even have to be a MAGA Trump person to believe that just in the sense that a lot of the sort of reformacons who were arguing for change in conservatism before Trump just pointed out the fact that 1980s conservatism that was really the status quo was rooted in the 1980s. It wasn't just Reagan. It was there's a specific set of Challenges that made that articulation of the ideology really make sense. And in America that has the challenges that we have in the 2010s and 2020s was just not going to be hospitable to that version of politics, no matter what happened. But the other thing, I think the follow up question for you would be when is a realignment actually solidified? Because that I think if I were to think of my friends who I could speak a little more harshly to about this topic in person than I can on the podcast, but I would basically diagnose their central mistake in the White House, in the Vance office, all those different places were they acted as if the battle was won in November 2024. But I think the alignment is solidified in 2028 when a JD Vance, when a Marco Rubio, et cetera, wins. FDR could have had a terrible 1932-1936, but the new Deal was not a thing in terms of an order until after he won then. So when you just determine you've set the table and you make all the rules really matters. So I'm curious what you think about that.
- [09:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, that is, that is sort of the key. That is the key question about when the realignment is solidified. I think that. So for listeners who aren't familiar with this idea, one answer to this question is sort of proposed by the historian Gary Gerstel, who's a historian of the 20th century United States, and he sort of is a prominent person who argues that the neoliberal order sort of inaugurated by Ronald Reagan, he orders it, he argues it over. And he would argue that a realignment is solidified when the other party is forced to adopt the realigning party's arguments due to consistent electoral defeats. So, for example, Gary Gerstel, the historian, would argue that in a way, the New Deal order is only really, really solidly in place in 1952 when Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, is elected president. But he's elected president advocating for a so called middle way between sort of old conservatism and the New Deal, and arguing that key planks of the New Deal, such as, you know, Social Security and a kind of accord or truce between management and labor is accepted. He argues those things are features of the American political economy that are there to stay and Republicans have to accept them. And so the sort of logical counterpart to that several decades later would be that the neoliberal realignment identified with Ronald Reagan is really solidified by Bill Clinton in 1992 because Democrats lose three presidential elections in a row. Bill Clinton comes into office, this argument goes, and acts as a kind of Democratic version of Dwight D. Eisenhower saying we have to adapt and accommodate ourselves to the sort of Reagan led neoliberal realignment. So in a way, what would need to happen for a Trump 2.0 realignment to be permanent would, would be first a J.D. vance or a Marco Rubio wins the 2028 presidential election, and then theoretically in 2032 or 2036, a Democrat is elected who adopts or accommodates or sands the rough edges off of key sort of MAGA policies, whether it's immigration or trade or whatever else. I think what's so interesting about the moment we find ourselves in now is that after 2016, it seemed like Democrats accepted aspects of the policy realignment, for example, getting so called, getting, quote, tough on China. It seemed they accepted aspects of the policy realignment while being very, very opposed in a partisan way to Trump and the MAGA movement and calling out, I would argue, correctly calling out the kind of authoritarian aspects of the MAGA movement. That's a very different response from the Democrats to what you see from, say, Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, who really accommodates himself to the New Deal in a way that establishes a kind of elite consensus in even a bipartisan style in American politics. And we don't see any of that kind of, we don't see any of that relationship between the two parties develop in the era we're in now. What we've seen is key Democrats in the Biden administration, for example, adopt elements of the policy realignment while remaining very, very opposed to Donald Trump's Republican Party at the partisan level. I think that complicates the analysis that we can have a realignment now that is comparable to the realignment of the mid 20th century. And as I suspect we'll get onto later, one of the reasons this realignment is so much messier and more strange, frankly, than the previous realignment of the mid 20th century is that I think the roots of the policy realignment in the Trump era can actually be found in the 1980s. Because I would argue that the Reagan neoliberal realignment is actually itself incomplete and that it's always very contested, including within the Democratic Party. It's more contested within the Democratic Party than left wing critics of Bill Clinton would claim. And therefore, in a way, I would say what we're seeing now is the result of four decades in which American politics was only partially realigned and four decades in which a large number of American voters were not happy with the neoliberal realignment in a way that I think a majority of American voters had accepted or been happy with the New Deal realignment of the mid 20th century.
- [14:50]
A
Yeah, a couple things to note here. So one and part of the voters are dissatisfied with the unfinished neoliberal realignment is just explained by the fact that unlike during the early Reagan era, where you go from Reagan 1980 to Reagan 84 to Bush 88, where there are a bunch of landslides in between, between and then of course, the FDR is elected four times, then Truman wins a surprise election, period, you have just seen neither party able to actually consistently hold power at an executive level. And I would say it's not that today's realignment period is messy, it's just that it's. Well, it is messy, but it's messy specifically because it'd be much easier for Democrats to actually say, okay, wow, the American people have made things very, very clear on X, Y or Z issue in the same way that Eisenhower did the same thing with an expanded role of government, with internationalism like NATO and then of course with Social Security, because that was after decades of Democratic power. So because you just went from Trump winning in 2016 to Trump losing in 2020, and then the Biden presidency itself having all these sort of false starts, but also confusing takeaways that are still very contested, and then Trump coming back again, but then having the SW off between Biden and Kamala Harris, there is just no equivalent forcing function. So I just think you're not going to see the world where Democrats truly accommodate themselves to this Trump era would really be a world where J.D. vance or Marco Rubio specifically win in 28. And frankly, it'd be easier for the accommodation to happen if the Republican candidate is a Marco Rubio versus a J.D. vance, because I think that Marco Rubio is just palatable from a norms just does this person inflame me perspective that J.D. vance just isn't right like J.D. vance, if you look at the sort of like, you know, no kings base of a large part of the Democratic Party now, a JD Vance presidency will just be inflaming in a way that a reveal presidency, even if some of the similar policies were still taken, just wouldn't be. And it would be impossible for virtually any Democrat. It'd be hard for me to imagine at this stage that we're talking, you know, five, six years out for. For someone to make a similar level of accommodation.
- [17:11]
B
I agree. I must say, I'm based in Ohio at the moment. And I can't say that I've met too many people who are much enamored of J.D. vance. You might say I'm teaching at a liberal college. But I have met people who are impressed by President Trump, and very few of them seem to have too much fondness for the vice president. I think I broadly agree. But I think one area of slight sort of disagreement, but that is instructive, is as you pointed out, Marshall, yes, in the 80s you get this gigantic landslide under Ronald Reagan, his reelection, when he wins 49 states out of 50, unimaginable today. And to a certain extent, that cows Democrats politically in a way that the very close election results of the past few cycles haven't. The one caveat I'd make is what you see between the 1980s and continuing today is if you look below the presidential level, you actually see that parties find it hard to hold on to Congress for very long periods of time. Between 1933 and 1995, the Democrats control the House of Representatives for all but four years, and they control the Senate for all but 10 years. And you don't have anything like that level of sort of stable national majority in the four and a half decades since 1980. I mean, even those dates I gave you suggest the Democrats hold Congress after the Reagan realignment begins. And since then, you've really had a lot of see sawing during midterms, and you've had this idea of thermostatic public opinion which the popularists I know are quite keen on, but more of that later, I suppose. And I think the fact that there is so much see sawing in midterm elections and then also these very narrow presidential results, again indicates to me that there's a lot of contestation over the depth of, of realignment. And I just think we saw the figures around President Trump. I think they overplayed their hand after 2024. I think they thought there was a sort of a permanent realignment. And I think that events since have shown that they had a much more qualified, contextually based victory.
- [19:43]
A
Yeah. And I think this is where we can get into the Democratic Party. So this is something you and I have chatted about separately, but we're now in this moment where if we're looking at the gubernatorial and the special elections of 2025 and then just sort of the polling on the midterms, just not being Trump is enough for Democrats to succeed. So the question I'll ask you then is what are the limits of just not being Trump? And then what are the potential costs, especially from a 2020 and beyond perspective, come from just not being Trump serving as enough to win back, let's say, the House or to do well in gubernatorial or special elections?
- [20:26]
B
Yeah, it's a fascinating question. I would say that on a sort of, sort of bird's eye view level, I think simply positioning oneself as being not Trump, as basing your appeal on primarily on opposition to or dissatisfaction with the current president. Firstly, I think you could say that that strategy is time limited in the sense that when Donald Trump is not on the ballot, you have to sort of reconstruct a whole other message. You have to hope that whatever Republican runs after him has the same sort of salience and negativity that Donald Trump has. And as you've suggested, a Marco Rubio might not be as superficially polarizing to a lot of voters as the current president is. So that's the first thing. It makes it difficult to win a sort of a follow up election. But I also think that the key thing to me with simply being not Trump is it means you're vacating responsibility for actually coming up with your own long term distinct sort of proactive political and policy agenda. So I would say what we're seeing in the Democratic Party at the moment is a lot of debate about what the party should be in broad terms. You know, we have a left populist faction that I think, you know, a lot of your listeners will be familiar with. We then have this sort of emerging abundance movement or abundance agenda, which again of course a lot of your listeners will be familiar with. And you hosted a great debate a few episodes ago about the sort of the left populist versus abundance side of the agenda, with you taking more the side of the abundance piece in that debate, I suppose. And you know, then there are lots of other voices arguing for cultural moderation or arguing for meeting the Republicans on certain policy areas, maybe meeting them where they are on certain sort of things to do with immigration, or meeting them where they are on certain things to do with AI development or something like that. So I think the existence of this debate within the Democratic Party to me should shows that Democratic elites realize that they need to actually come up with an agenda for A winning multiple elections in a row and B, governing once they're in power. And then C, actually by having a long term political strategy and a long term governing agenda, actually building up a sort of durable base of popular support for the Democrats on their own terms. And I suppose to sort of explain a bit more what I mean by that is, I think if you take for example the Biden administration, I would argue that the Democrats victory in 2020 was primarily a product of backlash to free frustration with large elements of Trump 1.0. The Biden administration then comes into office and it has this quite expansive, even innovative domestic economic agenda, so called Bidenomics, that's sort of tied to this foreign policy agenda of being tougher on China. But there hasn't been the work put in to sort of actually build popular, buy in for that agenda, identify the Democrats electorally and politically with that policy agenda. And therefore, I think over the subsequent four years you see a lack of public interest in or even understanding of what the Biden agenda was, if that makes sense. You don't have a sort of popular consent for this ambitious long term Democratic agenda. And instead there's been this perception that Joe Biden was elected to heal the soul of the nation, to restore sort of normality in a way to politics. And when those things either don't happen or aren't his priority, you then see sort of he becomes extremely unpopular quite quickly. And I think that goes to show 2020 was the example where Democrats thought they could win with a very sort of tactical short term message, we'll go back to normal, we won't be Trump. But then once in office, they thought they could sort of almost smuggle in this really interesting ambitious agenda. And you just can't have that sort of disconnect between the tactics and the strategy. And if you have that disconnect, I think you're relying on basically playing off your opponent every other election cycle.
- [25:48]
A
Well, and here's the thing, it's not even as if you could say broadly the Democrats snuck in the ambitious Bidenomics agenda because what we're really talking about, and this is what's been fascinating about hanging around these spaces for the past year and a half, what really happened is that a select number of people were selected for transition teams and there was a lot of inside baseball playing between different think tanks and different sort of power structures and different Senate offices like that of Senator Elizabeth Warren. And then those people came in. So the kind of question I've asked people, and they've basically told me that my intuition is correct, is that if you'd sat down the Biden Cabinet in, let's say, February of 2021 and said, okay, like what's our theory of the case? The vast majority of them would not have been able to articulate that. Now there were people who were on the national Economic Council or the National Security Council or people who work with Jake Sullivan, who was National Security Advisor, who could have given that version of it. Right. So the Jake Sullivan people would say this is all about a foreign policy for the middle class. And people who work in the chip's office could have talked about how this is really just like building and doing those different things. But there's just no thing versus by contrast with the Trump side of things. I'd actually say even for some of the officials who flamed out over the past year and a half, you could actually probably get them to basically say this thing, that thing and this thing, A, B, C are the Trump agenda. And that's what we're doing, that's what we're selling. And they take A, B and C way too far in a bunch of different directions. But I think the ability just to have a publicly articulable and understandable, not just to like your next door neighbor, which is what the Bidenomics agenda had, but also just. The problem is that I think even most DC creature types couldn't have articulated what Bidenomics actually was. And that is something that I think is thoroughly unique and that is the type of problem which is a structural one, that I think is the result of a broken Democratic Party. So I want to get to where I sort of see the crises facing Democrats, but also I think liberals left liberals ideologically because I think something that I'm trying to contribute intellectually here without the PhD credentials is my story of what went wrong during the Clinton era is that we stopped conceiving of liberalism. And when I say liberalism, I say American liberalism in the fdr, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ sense as an actual ideology that meant something, that had visions, that had ideas. As you had to reconcile the success of Reaganism and the market turn our country took and the broader west took during the neoliberal period during Reagan and Thatcher, as they triangulated, as they pursued the third way, you saw ideology fall apart and instead everything basically became centered on the Democratic Party. I've told people this anecdote, but you should try this out at home. If you talk to people on the right, even at a colloquial like on the day average Joe level, there's an understanding that conservatism as an ideology is different than the Republican Party. These are two different things. Conservatism is a worldview. It's a framework, It's a set of ideas and policies. The Republican Party is the vehicle for implementing those different policies. So if you just approach all the different challenges that the right has had after 2016, you're going to come up with different answers in different formulations. If you're centering yourself as a Republican versus as you're centering yourself as a conservative, there's just so many different ways that could spew out in different directions. And we could do a whole other episode on that. But I think the fact that we just don't think of being a liberal or being a left liberal or being a progressive is truly meaning something. And even when you say being a progressive or like a DSA person meaning something, it's kind of specific. Policies like Medicare for all or a Green New Deal or a jobs guarantee. But policies that you could just say in a one liner or write a bill around are not the sum total of an ideology. And they're probably not enough to actually govern successfully, especially because you couldn't pass a bunch of those policies. There was no world where President Bernie was going to pass Medicare for All, just given the makeup of the Senate and the margins you had. So if they had not been able to pass Medicare for All, what would the Biden agenda. Sorry, what would the Bernie agenda have been? How would they have handled the invasion of Ukraine? How would they have handled October 7th? How would they have handled Taiwan and China? What would be their theory for growth? How would they think about AI? The lack of, of those issues are true even on the left end of the spectrum where they're much more comfortable speaking in ideological terms. So I'd love for you to talk about the implications of this party is different than ideology point. And then one last thing here, just piling it on, on here. But I have thoughts on it because I'm taking from books that you've recommended in your actual writing you've published and illustrated that there are a bunch of interesting books that cover the 1980s debates within the Democratic Party. And something that's fascinating is that back then there's this book called the Neoliberals. It's the Neo Dash Liberals. They were centrist, moderate types. A lot of these people probably would have found themselves as a part of the abundance crew today, but they referred to themselves as liberals and then also Democrats. So even back then it was true. But being a centrist wasn't just this sort of like, well, I'm a centrist, but being a centrist doesn't mean anything. So threw a lot at you. But I'd be curious what you think about all that.
- [31:10]
B
Marshall, I must say you've sort of opened Pandora's Box by the book you refer to the neo hyphen liberal, the neoliberals by a journalist called Randall Rothenberg. In a way, it's sort of my bete noir because the problem is that the term neoliberal was used in the 1980s not to mean. It just meant in a way a sort of reform minded liberal. And then the people who used it didn't seem to be aware that it was also separately being used by people like Milton Friedman. And it's caused any number of headaches for historians ever since. But it's been good fodder for sort of a take merchants at outlets like Jacobin, I guess, to be able to substantiate their use of neoliberal as an insult.
- [31:57]
A
I think the thing to just sort of contextualize that my end. Correct, correct me if this is an unfair articulation of the deal, but because these people. Gary Hart, a different, you know, version of sort of. Sorry, who was, I'll edit this out. Who was the labor secretary?
- [32:17]
B
Robert Reich. Right.
- [32:18]
A
We're talking about figures like Gary Hart, a different, less lefty branded version of Robert Reich who went on to be Clinton's labor secretary. When they used the term neo hyphen liberal, they were saying, we are an updated post New Deal order collapses version of the American liberal tradition that builds upon fdr. And critically, a lot of people who call themselves liberals today or who we now see as neoliberals in the more traditional academic sense, were not people who saw themselves as building upon the promise and tradition of FDR's New Deal liberalism. So just that distinction in terms of that origin story is really key to articulating where the confusion is coming from.
- [33:04]
B
Yes. Yeah. And I can get even in even more detail into that in a second and explain, I think a little bit about what you could call lessons, so to speak, from the 1980s. But to step back before I talk a little bit about the Democratic party in the 1980s, lessons from the 1980s, how that feeds into today, I think I would really co sign what you said about the lack of intellectual coherence behind the idea of liberalism in the 21st century. And I think that I understand that if one is a political practitioner, you know, I know that you speak, you interview a lot of politicians, you speak to a lot of politicians. Some of them may hear a kind of call from an academic sort with a PhD for intellectual vision. They might think that's very sort of airy fairy. It doesn't really apply to getting politics done in the so called real world, etc. And I understand, I understand that response on one level. But I would say that if you look at significant figures who dominate American politics, set the terms of debate and actually are able to effectuate medium to long term policy change, if you looked at the Democrats of the mid 20th century and post war years, if you looked at a lot of people in the Reagan administration, it wasn't that these people were ideologues. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, famously proceeded with the New Deal in a spirit of so called bold experimentation. When he was asked what his ideology was, he said, I'm a Christian and a Democrat and that's all. Actually, he was the person who appropriate or re appropriated the term liberal to sort of refer to muscular government intervention in the economy and moved it away from the sort of classical liberal libertarian use of the term. But he thought of himself as a practitioner and a politician, not as a sort of ideologue or thinker. But if you'd said to these transformative political figures, and I think crucially, if you said to the people around them, what is your vision of political economy? What are your desired political outcomes and your policy goals, they would have had coherent answers to that question. And as you pointed out, Marshall, very astutely, there were people who would have had answers to that question, for example, in the Biden administration. But you would have had different, very different flavors of answer depending on where in the Biden administration you went to ask. And I think the idea of constructing a sort of coherent intellectual project might seem very abstract to people on the center left, broadly construed today to a lot of pundits who advocate for sort of district by district moderation or advocate kind of tactical scrounging 1 or 2 percentage points of swing voters in order to win, in order to win elections. It might sound very vague and impractical to them, but you actually need to do that work to establish a basis for then building a long term political project. And just as one indication of this, I would say that is something that the old conservative movement that Donald Trump in a way displaced in 2016, but the old conservative movement did that and it did that exceptionally well, funding think tank programs, funding fellowships for young conservatives. I think you've sort of spoken eloquently about this before. There's a great podcast called Know youw Enemy where one of the hosts is a former conservative. He talks about this very eloquently as well. The conservative movement understood that you need to have a long term view of project and movement building based on a sort of vision and intellectual framework and that that is a necessary basis for long term political success. Now, in terms of lessons or can
- [37:54]
A
I respond to something real quick? Yeah, yeah, I want to a. I so appreciate you giving the here's why ideology and ideas are not just airy fairy response because you know, there's no video here of this episode. But you know, people would see me smile on the camera when you said that because I've literally heard that feedback to this riff of mine from my politician friends. And I think the way that I would explain the actual central issue here is when I ask them, you know, okay, what story would you tell about the country? Not just Jake Auchincross and Derek Thompson, who I, you know, I bring them up a lot who say they don't have the story. These other politicians agree. They also agree that they don't really have answers to the big questions that exist right now. What actually do we think about? I was, it's funny, I was with a Texas Democrat at a dinner and someone asked him, why do you believe what you believe about immigration? And he, the, the, the candidate responded, you know, I've never been asked that question before. I guess I don't know. This consistent inability to do what I think should be basic foundational political things all stem from the lack of focus on ideology. And that's what I just think the central failure is just like really just letting ideology. And this is also related to my increasing beef with the meritocracy and technocracy and even sort of the wonk blogging punditry. I think there's been this real 2010s Obama era idea that ideas are actually just here's this paper that shows this specific idea we're going to do to do X, Y or Z thing and not understand that how you actually get to that idea is actually rooted in. Well, a voter is going to encounter this idea in terms of their perspective on things. So I'll give you another good example here. So a good example would be if you are speaking to a millennial Texan, there's going to be a bunch of things that's happened to them in their lives. They were born in the 90s, everything was chill. But oh, 9, 11, Bush presidency, 2008, financial crisis. Maybe they were in college at the time and they were interested in Occupy Wall street, but that didn't go anywhere. And then you get Trump, the rise of isis, Covid. Like there's all these things that are happening at a story level that I think any policy or any idea quote Unquote, has to intersect with, like, no one is just sort of interacting with a policy idea. Tabula raza Reading Matt Y blog and just not thinking ideologically just makes it impossible to, I think, really make that mean anything versus, like, this is, you know, the other part of the sort of missing part of the picture. So I just really wanted to highlight that and just that that's my iteration of like. If you are a politician who thinks that we're doing airy fairy conversation, ask yourself, do you have answers to the deeper questions? We're kind of questions where we aren't even that deep, you know, to the question of, like, what's going on in this country in the past 30 years and how should people react to that and how should that shape how I frame myself politically? How do. How should that shape how I tell my stories? How does the way that I theorize politics works, quote, unquote, the result of maybe me being in this, like, weirdly privileged position? Like, if you find yourself being a person who thinks that politics is about, like, wonky papers and blogs and substacks, it probably means you spent a little too much time in D.C. versus actually interacting with everyday people. So I wanted to add that before you get to the lessons of the 80s.
- [41:11]
B
No, no. And just to add one one final thing, Marshall, I think. I think there's an interesting subtle maybe distinction, not disagreement between how you and I are talking about, about this piece, which is, you know, I think you're. You're sort of framing it in terms of ideas and, and ideology. And I often don't use. I often don't use the word ideology, excuse me, in my work, and this is a bit of a deep cut, but, but like any historian educated in Britain, I sort of fear and don't understand ideas because we're vulgar materialists in Britain. But what I would say is, to me, I don't foreground the sort of term ideology, but I do believe that the policy white papers that you refer to, the wonkishness, to me, it has to grow out of a vision of political economy. Now, often in things I write and in issues I think about, I do often sort of think about political economy more than social or cultural issues. Political economy is what a historian says they study when they can't do math, when they haven't done econ 101, basically. So I often frame it that way, but I think there's a subtle distinction there. But I think the key point you and I agree on is there needs to be a vision and A long term, a long term aim of what you want society to look like, how you want society to be organized. And I am personally, maybe we can sort of circle back some of this at the end, but I'm personally very sympathetic, very keen on a lot of parts of the emerging abundance agenda. And I often sort of use and think about the word growth, the concept of growth. But I think you can't just have sort of line go up, you know, I know a phrase that you're also keen on. You have to have a sense of what growth, where and for whom. And I think this is where. If you look at some figures around the sort of more moderate or self identified moderate end of the Democratic debate at the moment, I'm thinking, for example, the political scientist Gary Winslet, who I've spoken to, he's a fascinating, he's a fascinating guy. I like him a lot. But I think if you ask them what does growth mean to you? Often you get the sense that they'd have a noun, a verb, an AI, but there's not really a sense of, well, we actually need growth in more places for more people so that you can satisfy more Americans, give more Americans a sort of a chance of prosperity. But also then ultimately, if you have more dispersed growth, you have more people voting for the party that oversaw that growth. And that's exactly what happened in the sort of several decades between the 1930s and the 1970s for the Democratic Party. And that I suppose leads me to sort of the.
- [44:27]
A
Well, and then I'm going to interrupt you again because I want to you get to the core of my beef with Abundance the book, which is, as people know, abundance. The book kicks off with a vision of 2050, which is very urbanist, it's very San Francisco, it's very West Coast, east coast upper middle class, you know, drones are delivering your GLP1s. There's all of this abundance, things are green. And what the book should have done, especially in terms of convincing a skeptical, not even just left audience, but like skeptics on sort of the broad liberal base of Ezra's listenership perspective is it would, it would root abundance within. Once again, this is why I love stories within the story of American liberalism over the 20th century. So the abundance story I would tell at the beginning would be I'm near the Hill country in Texas and there's this huge section of the Path to Power, the first of Robert Caro's four Going on, hopefully five volume biography of Lyndon Johnson that talks about how the New Deal's Public private partnerships that brought electrification to the Hill country, took people from the 18th century to the 20th century. Electrification fundamentally transformed things. The same thing is true of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Like, it just was not true in terms of 20th century history, that growth was just another way of saying we're going to do tax cuts on the rich. That's where a lot of, like, the liberal skepticism of the word growth is going to come from. And to your point about Gary, I like Gary a lot. Gary's been on the podcast. But because they are not rooted in American liberal history, and I think because they are too wonky and econ focused, I just don't think they have the political sort of antennae or just sort of awareness of the fact that you have to talk about growth within an ideological context and basically say for 30 years. And they don't like the word neoliberal because they think it's sort of unfair to their political view. Because they are kind of neoliberal is sort of the spoiler. It is actually true that they. They are neoliberals. I think that's actually a problem. But what you would say politically, let's say at a conference, is one of the big mistakes of the neoliberal era is that we allowed the idea of growth to be captured by people who only define growth as upper income tax cuts or not deregulation to make government work better, which is the articulation of abundance. But deregulation as a means of serving, financialization, of helping the wealthy, of empowering corporations, of attacking labor unions, that was not the way that the heyday of American liberalism, The Democratic Party, 30s to 1960s, conceived of its growth like they saw growth. That is something. There was no tax cut that was going to electrify the whole country. It actually took like an active, directed government effort to do that. And that's how you got that growth. The Tennessee Valley Authority would not have occurred if not for growth. You know, growing up back in Oregon, so many things that people really like about the state, whether it's sort of, you know, even the, you know, lodge, you know, on Mount Hood that was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Growth is actually something that government can deliver, but you need to place that contextualization of that articulation within that. And then you would say to yourself, abundance basically is reckoning. And they do tell this story, but they don't add in the 30 years of history I told, they basically say, and then Ralph Nader came around and he made everyone care about, you know, restraining government. And then we Sort of lost our way. No, no. Like there's a whole other set of things you need to build into that.
- [47:55]
B
Yeah, completely. And I think you make a good point as well about the sort of the urban or the urbanite bias or image maybe of. Of some of the discourse around abundance. And I also think that actually leads us quite nicely into the sort of the Democratic Party history. And I would say that the history you've been alluding to, and I'll lay out some more now, is relevant for two reasons. It isn't just me talking about something I happen to have read about. It's relevant for two reasons. The first one is that the history of the Democratic Party between really actually the mid-1970s, sort of since the mid-1970s, how the Democratic Party has changed in that time, I think explains why we are in the political situation we are in today probably as much, arguably, maybe even more than understanding the right, understanding the conservative movement. And so, in other words, understanding this history is crucial for understanding the situation we're in now. And I think the other reason that this history I'm about to lay out is important is that there are some lessons or sort of cautionary experiences in the 1980s and 1990s that I think help think through how Democrats should be sort of rebuilding today or rebuilding for the long term instead of simply tactically sort of being not. Not Trump. So I think fundamentally what you see from the mid-1970s until, you know, 2016 or 2020, is you see the sort of Democratic Party center of gravity shift from the union hall to Whole Foods. You have in the late. In the sort of, in the mid-1970s, you have a new generation of Democratic initially political leaders, but they are representing voters as well, which I'll explain in a second. You have a new generation of Democratic leaders coming of political age. So Bill Clinton is the most famous and most successful, I suppose other people, Jerry Brown, who was governor of California again in the 2010s, so he's still very much around. Gary Hart, who you mentioned earlier, Senator from Colorado, and then sort of policy thinkers like Robert Reich, who's Bill Clinton's labor secretary. He's now known as this sort of Diet Thomas Piketty figure, but he's got a very different story. In the 70s and 80s, you have this new generation of Democratic leaders. They are born and reared within the sort of affluent order that the New Deal Democratic Party had created. So whether they are born in the middle class like Jerry Brown or like Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, or if they are sort of plucked from the ragged edges of the lower middle class like Bill Clinton himself. Either way, they have this generational experience of massively expanded higher education, a sort of growing, but at this point quite incipient knowledge economy. And they have this experience of broad based economic growth that really expands the American middle class. Yes, there are sort of aspects, profound aspects of racial exclusion to this system. But it is nonetheless, to use a quote, that, to use a metaphor that actually JFK popularized, it is to a certain extent a rising tide lifting all boats situation, at least in the mind of these politicians. These Democratic leaders come of age in this system and when they start to actually run for office or take up positions in government in the mid-1970s, they find that this system is breaking apart because of industrial competition from the US's Cold War allies, particularly Japan and to a lesser extent West Germany. You have the Democratic Party discredited essentially by the Vietnam War. And you have rising inflation that sort of famously becomes unbelievably high by the middle years of the 1970s. And this new generation of Democratic leaders, I sort of collectively call them new liberals because the term neoliberal is so sort of overused and difficult. I call them new liberals. They look at this, these challenging sort of structural economic issues and they conclude the Democratic Party needs a new agenda to meet these challenges. And what their background is, shapes what some of their sort of proposed solutions are. These are not people who have any political, sociological or sentimental attachments to the labor movement, for example. These are people who are defined personally and as a generation by the experience of higher education. Bill Clinton's sort of courtier, Sidney Blumenthal, refers to Clinton as the leading meritocrat of America's first mass generation of college educated meritocrats. These are politicians who are unsympathetic or disinterested in large sort of sections of the Democratic Party's existing coalition. I mean, in some ways the sort of quote unquote white working class voters who you see today is so important in this sort of imaginary of the Trump coalition. So they have this sense of being untethered from the political, the liberalism that they inherited that they grew up with. But what's interesting about them is that a lot of historians would tell you that therefore they seek to simply leave behind the liberalism of the preceding generation. And therefore that's where you get an argument, such as Gary Gerstel's argument, that they become the sort of the Reagan light, the sort of accommodating themselves to the Reaganite consensus, or another historian, Lily Geismer, very important historian of modern liberalism. She would argue that they have their own vision. It isn't simply reactive to Reagan, but that that vision is about not big government intervention in the economy, and that that vision is about embracing financialization and globalization. What's very interesting about them is, in my opinion, what I try to show in my research is that even though in demographic and political terms, they were a new sort of Democrat, in terms of their policy proposals in the 1980s, right up through the mid-1990s, they actually were trying to create a sort of technological upgrade of the big government liberal state, not leave it behind, sort of a representative quote. Just quickly, I think that sums up this sort of strange paradox is Colorado Senator Gary Hart runs for president in 1984, and one of his chief aides writes a memo planning the campaign, and he says, gary is a leader of post New Deal Democrats. And then he puts in parentheses after that, whatever that means. And so the point is, they think we can't talk about the New Deal. We have to look for new voters. They look for voters like themselves. They caught highly educated, suburbanite, metropolitan voters. Your listeners will probably think that sounds a lot like the Democratic base of today. That's because they create the Democratic base of today. But the plans, they have in the 1980s, a quite expansive, ambitious national industrial policy that is aimed at revitalizing traditional industries like automaking and steel, but also more importantly aimed at building up, like proactively using the government to build up new higher technology industries, but not higher technology. You know, the way we think about tech today, sort of apps, digital gimmicks, building up semiconductor chip manufacturing, manufacture of consumer electronics, advanced manufacture of, you know, high tech factory equipment, of other sort of technological products. They're interested in high technology, yes, but they're interested in high tech production. And they're interested in essentially creating a system of broad based, regionally dispersed growth that has high employment levels in the productive economy. That is their sort of goal in the 1980s. And I think what that shows is these new liberals who are later sort of much maligned by the left, had one key or sort of one central analysis of American liberalism that I think was very important. They saw American liberalism as fundamentally identified with a sustainable, broad based growth model. And they saw having a broad based growth model anchored in productive industries as being the basis for long term democratic political power, political viability. I say they were more afraid of Japan than they were of Ronald Reagan, because if you read the memos and the internal correspondence, it's clear to me that they saw President Reagan's victory as a symptom of a structural crisis of the economy and as a result of liberalism running out of steam, they didn't see Reagan himself as the existential threat to the Democratic Party.
- [59:02]
A
Couple things in response and then we'll close, of course, with Fusion. My favorite new thing. 1 and this is why it's so helpful that you are carving out your academic niche and these debates with the Democratic Party and liberalism in the 1980s, because so many of the popular accounts of the Democratic Party's turn during the neoliberal era are focused on the 1990s and Bill Clinton. And what's so cool is that when you read the books that you recommend, especially the books you recommended, the way you tell the history in your American affairs piece that I'll link in the show notes, Bill Clinton doesn't come up. And if you notice the type of people we're talking about these maybe I'm missing a governor, but they're mostly senators and members of the House of Representatives, which I think is interesting because it suggests that these are and if there are members of the House of Representatives mentioned, they're like the ambitious types who are going to want to go become a senator and then run for president someday. They are thinking of industrial policy on a national scale, especially within the foreign policy context that you gave with Japan. So that's just a noted thing. And if you understand what was happening in the south during the 1980s, it makes sense that Bill Clinton was not a person who was delving deeply into industrial policy. Because what's happening during this period, even before nafta, you're seeing jobs shift from the Rust Belt to the South. So I don't think if you're Bill Clinton sitting in the Arkansas of the 1980s, you're particularly wondering what is government going to have to do to bring industry and factories and plants to our state? Because that was happening. Because the economic sort of I'm just coming up with this theory on the fly, but I just noticed that Bill Quinton is absent from the 1980s version of the story, but then centers in the 1990s one but then here's a question for you. Have you read H.W. brands's Strange Death of American Liberalism?
- [60:53]
B
I haven't, actually, no. I'm familiar with HW Brands, some of his other work, but I haven't.
- [60:57]
A
It's not to besmirch a fellow Texan and Austinite here, but he's pivoted to doing sort of of fun popular history Books. But during the more sort of academically publishing focused part of his career, he wrote a book in 2000 which I think is such a fascinating book that actually explains everything. It's only 200 pages. Very rarely does a 200 page book explain everything but the strange death of American liberalism. And it's also interesting he wrote this book in 2000, before the 2000 election. So I just sort of saw that. I was like, okay, well I'm curious what the theory is. His theory is, and this is where the left would sort of object, but he just thinks that it is just true that America is a fundamentally center right country in a way that has made big government energetic government style approaches not particularly salient or sustainable or even implementable in the first place. Like America really is different from, from Europe. His point is that American liberalism, in the way that I use American liberalism, the 1930s to the 60s, is purely the product of both the rise of fascism and communism during the New Deal period, World War II and then the Cold War. And that if we look at sort of the motivating factors behind a lot of these big projects and this idea that the American government, government needed to invest and be aggressive, so much of that was only sustained because of Cold War style competition. And that liberalism itself then dies during the 1990s because it loses the foreign competitor dynamic that drives it. And to your point, you're Talking about the 1980s and Japan and that's driving the focus on industrial policy when not only Japan's economic miracles slows to a crawl and they go into two decades plus of slowed growth and decline in their own sense, but also just the Cold War ends. You just don't see someone waking up and saying, okay, we need the government to do these big things to build this future. And then what makes it so interesting is at the end of the book he says we will only see a return of expansive forward facing government investment centric liberalism when there is some type of foreign adversary that merits such a threat or a specter that it surmounts America's inherent libertarian ish skepticism, classical liberalism. So then what happens 20 years after his book? You get biodynamics, which is rooted in China. So once again, like we could sort of object to the sort of 200 page characterization of the history. But what I think makes the book so, so worth reading, and this is always an argument I had with my Hudson colleagues, and this is before I formally pivoted to the center left, but a big argument I had with them in 2021 was hey, actually the Biden people are going to embrace China competition. People just didn't believe me. They're like, no, they're not going to do it. They're going to say that competition of China is racist and competition of China is war and Democrats are afraid of war and don't believe in America power. I didn't quite have this articulation, but at the end of the day, and I think there are really serious reasons to compete with China. But if you just understand the role that these sort of bidenomic style approaches over the past hundred years have been rooted in, wow, the federal government really needs to do X, Y and Z thing because there's a threat. It just totally makes sense that China would act activate rather than deactivate that sense. So before we do a closing section on Fusion, would love to hear your thoughts on this. I also want you to do a book review of his book. That's why I also ask for you, I would love you to read his book and then bring your academic lens rather than my popular one to it.
- [64:44]
B
Well, I think, I mean, I think Marshall, by raising that point, you've, you've, sort of, you've, you've completed, you've sort of joined the dots with why I laid out my sort of slightly revisionist take on the 1980s. But then you've connected it to why there are lessons for today. So keen listeners of what I just said may find it interesting and would presumably then say, but wait a second, the Democrats didn't create a new national industrial policy in the 1990s when they actually got into power. And I would argue a critical reason for that is a version of what you just said, which is that as late as 1991, you have Bill Clinton's competitor for the Democratic nomination in the 92 presidential election, Paul Tsongas, former senator from Massachusetts. He's on the campaign trail. He's told that the USSR has been dissolved, you know, in the Russian Federation and the other states emerge from it. And he says the Cold War is over, Japan won. I think the absence of the Cold War and remember the Cold War ending really accelerates or really opens up even more space for globalization to take place geographically. I mean, new markets open. The end of the Cold War, then Japan's economic stagnation in the sort of early to mid-1990s. These two things have a profound sort of delegitimizing effect on industrial policy ideas. And there are other factors behind the Clinton administration retreats from, from industrial policy ideas which I hasten to add it did bring into office in 1993. You'll hear a lot of centrist pundits today talk about this thing, the Democratic Leadership Council, the dlc, as being central to Clinton's victory. He's the chair of this group. It's a very, very effective party organization as sort of doing the kind of work of party politics. But it is not an ideas factory. It is not providing the policy items that Clinton actually comes into power with. He comes into power with some industrial policy ideas. And then he does have this sort of growing Wall street wing of the Democratic Party that's interested in fiscal discipline. The space for industrial policy to be implemented is radically constrained by the end of the Cold War, by Japan's economic stagnation, and then by internal debates within the administration over deficit reduction versus public investment. And the deficit reduction side wins. The person most representative of it is the Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, also Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who's been in the news recently for other reasons. And I think when you have I'll sort of close this section with this. When you have the Democrats ultimately choosing deficit reduction not out of some grand ideological game of neoliberalism or something, but it's a contingent choice to prioritize deficit reduction over public investment, industrial policy style, public investment, you then have the party settle into what I describe as this mix of political transformation and policy stasis. The party has politically and demographically changed a lot. It now has this sort of base of college educated metropolitan meritocrats and at this point the vast majority of sort of lower income voters. Obviously there's now this debate about our Democrats losing some of those voters. But it has this transformed electorate. The sort of industrial. The base during the industrial economy has been replaced by this new base. It's really being powered as well by these sort of metropolitan meritocratic types. That's a political transformation. But it then has policy stasis because the Democrats aren't committed to some ideological vision of neoliberalism. But in the absence of industrial policy and in the absence of the Cold War and the rivalry with Japan, they sort of don't have. They've lost the sort of vision that I would argue they maintained throughout the 1980s. And so essentially what they do is they retreat into managing the new neoliberal economic order more prudently and more kindly than the Republicans. And you have this political economy of it's called compensate the losers. It's referred to by some economists, which is we'll let growth happen where it's going to happen and then we'll redistribute the proceeds of that growth to the so called left behind parts of the US and that is in a way that's why the US welfare state, as someone like Matthew Iglesias would point out, redistributes more than the more generous welfare state, the apparently more generous welfare states in Europe. The reason is there's far more inequality because there's very narrowly concentrated unequal economic growth and economic opportunity. And so the Democrats when they're in power have to do way more to redistribute than. But after the mid-90s, they stopped thinking as much about how to actually pre distribute and actually build a more sort of durable, broad based economy that will sustain them in power for longer, which is what they had between the 1930s and the 1970s.
- [70:47]
A
And the closing thought on that is. And part of the thing towards redistribution was, and this is the way that the unfinished history of the 1960 liberal project just makes sense. A lot of the conception of what we're doing, universal health care now and we're increasing the minimum wage now and we're shoring up Social Security now, is just this idea that we are completing the unfinished projects from the New Deal era. Think of the way that Obama discovered, discussed Obamacare, which was like ever since Harry Truman, we tried to just make this happen. It's taken 60 years. I think the problem with American liberalism in the Democratic Party is that and beyond just the sort of redistribution pre distribution thing was just this idea that they saw the project as like completing the New Deal to its logical conclusion rather than doing what I think was so important from the new liberals or the neo hyphen liberals were trying to do, which is that there actually needs to be a whole other thing. This isn't just basically saying let's build the America that we would have built at a social legislation level if Reagan and Nixon hadn't happened, if Kennedy weren't shot or either Kennedys weren't shot. Right. If LBJ hadn't gotten into Vietnam. I think at a baby boomer level that was just so personal to their understanding of their political story that it really shaped things. So for the final section, I'm going to hawk my own wares. You've done a great job of hawking your wares. The warehouse I am hawking is the idea that the solution to a lot of the problems within party politics and it also just like this lack of ideology is just fusion because there is no such thing as American liberalism. Now I actually have to Make a quick side note, we're seeing this sort of rebirth of like liberalism. So in the same of it, you said that the FDR liberals took the term liberal from the sort of classical liberal, center right kind of European conservative set. Now you're trying to see this sort of rehash of that from the other direction. So now you have the Institute for Humane Studies and a lot of these different people try to say like, hey, liberalism, like, this is a thing. I really just want to use the realignment as like the single headquarters of like pushing back against that. Because it's going to be a total dead end. Because I've had these debates in a. Scanning the. You know what number one thing they would never agree with, they would never agree with industrial policy. People just, just like blanch for it. I think that there is just a reality that if you are someone who considers yourself classical liberal, you just have to understand that there are certain periods of American history where you are just not going to be in the driver's seat. And this is just one of those things. So I just want to emphasize what I'm talking about in liberalism. I'm talking about like left liberal American liberalism, not classical liberalism that you see more from Koch folks. But my point being, because there is no longer any such such thing as American liberalism today. And there are kind of little projects like abundance. You know, I always talk about this Ezra quote that no one ever mentions, but on Ross Douthat's podcast, he straight up just said abundance was only successful because it was the only initial attempt at filling this giant void that exists within American liberalism today. Once again, that is the opening quote that should have started off the book because that is actually the opportunity right now, because it doesn't exist. We can build a new thing the same way that, you know, what was so exciting about the New Right in the post 2013 period was everyone's like, wow, Reaganite conservatism doesn't work anymore. The Republican Party seems totally doomed. So let's build this whole new thing. People love projects. People want to join something, right? That's exciting, it's different, it's new. And it's not just sort of the thing that you get from too many centrist organizations especially, which is very much like, hey, how can we make you like the Democratic Party again? Which is just like lame. And not. Some of it's going to attract people you want to attract. Just this idea that like, hey, there is this void in American liberalism, per Ezra, so let's build something new that we Fill that void with. But my whole point of fusionism, taking from my time on the right, is that that void cannot just be filled on a factional level. So there is not going to be an American liberalism that's sustainable, that is just sort of like third way and welcome pack and centrists and abundance people that I'm very near and dear with. That just doesn't work. They don't have the votes, you know, but this is my real opposition to this, you know, future is faction idea, which is that if no one faction of like the Left Liberal coalition or the Democratic Party has 50 plus 1% of the total vote share, then you by definition cannot dictate terms. Everything is going to be in a negotiation. And this takes us back to how fusionism actually does exist right now, just in its worst possible version. Remember the story we told at the start of the episode of after Biden wins the nomination, you get these transition teams and you get the Warren people and the Bernie people and then the sunrise movement gets to get and join the conversation. And the sunrise movement says, hey, you need to do the Climate Conservation Corps. And then they do the Climate Conservation Corps because that was part of the negotiating. So we get fusionism between these factions, but it literally happens between a set of a thousand elites who live either in San Francisco or Los Angeles or the Acelo Corridor. It's not public, it's not something that brings in politicians. It's totally inside baseball. So what I think the opportunity is, hey, let's see how much agreement there is. What's the core to this project at ideological level or at an ideas level to make this more compatible to the British side of your British American identity? And then just say where do we actually, actually disagree? And then how do we adjudicate that? And you know what, if we can't come to a compromise on US Israel, Gaza, politics, then guess what, that's going to be fought out in primaries, as happens on the right too. Like the whole point of fusion is not that everyone. This is something that people have asked about. The point of fusion is not the idea that everyone agrees on everything. It just basically says, let's identify a core that's based on mutual interests where there is compatibility. And then we adjudicate rules and sort of like approaches where we disagree on things. And a part of the answer is sometimes things are going to be figured out in primaries and that's going to determine who wins there.
- [76:36]
B
Yeah.
- [76:37]
A
Your broad closing thoughts on this idea?
- [76:40]
B
Well, and it's sort of, it's prioritization isn't it as well? I think that's sort of key to the fusion idea is it's identifying what key priorities are and sort of organizing on the basis of unity around those. I would say. I mean, I think my closing thoughts are certainly in sort of an intellectual terms. I definitely come down more entirely on the idea of fusion rather than faction. And sometimes it's sort of said faction between parties, for example, with abundance. I definitely come down far more on the side of fusion on the center left and fusion to sort of create some, to create, to recreate, to renew American liberalism. Now I would say, you know, to quote Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, I'm not a field agent, I just read books. So I'm not sure what, what sort of practical solutions I can offer. But I would say in a way, the way I think of fusion in this case is to use the historical analogy of the New Deal. It would be think of the New Deal as rural electrification, not Social Security. And what I mean by that in the present day is, and again, this is why I sort of come back to this idea of we should think more about growth and we should get the left to be comfortable with thinking about growth. I would say I think there is space for people on the center left to unify around a vision of broad based growth. And the debate to be had is if that's the vision, what are we prepared to do to get to it? And that's why I think if you outline a more dynamic, more sort of spatial, more geographically dispersed growing economy, which I do think is something that figures on the sort of moderate, so to speak, side of the Democratic Party, they do agree with. You know, you see a lot of research from places like Brookings, Liscan and Third Way about place based growth getting more growth centers in the U.S. i think if we can agree on that outcome, then the question becomes, well, in order to get to that outcome, maybe the left will have to think about prioritizing that over redistribution. And maybe the center left, center, whatever you want to call it, maybe the center will have to think, well, that might involve government interventions in the economy that we have this knee jerk lack of comfort with. Because the truth is, I think if you would, to use the abundance jargon, if you'd unplugged more of the procedural bottlenecks, there's every indication that bidenomics could in the long term have borne fruit. I mean, the first year of Trump 2.0, there's been what, 108,000 manufacturing job losses A lot of those were jobs that were created during the Biden administration. And I think fundamentally, I think the basis of fusion has to be what is the desired outcome. And then the debate and the compromise comes in. What tactical approaches are you prepared to accept to get to that outcome? And that may sound very simplistic, but I think if you look at the debate happening in the Democratic Party today, I think if you look at it, you'll actually find people almost are refusing to admit what their desired outcomes will be. And they're instead concentrating on these sort of tactical disagreements. And I'll close with one very quick example. You're seeing a lot of these primaries. It's fascinating electorally, all these different factions, Democratic Party duking it out in different primaries. And you had Elizabeth Warren come out and endorse this candidate, Mallory McMorrow in the Michigan Senate race. And there's one candidate in the Michigan Senate race, Haley Stevens, who's sort of seen as more establishment. So anyone who thinks of themselves as more left wing or more progressive would logically think Haley Stevens wouldn't win. And I was listening to a very, very prominent left wing alternative media show where they said we really need to have more fusion on the progressive side. So that's even below what you're talking about, Marshall. It's fusion of the smaller factions. But then the host said, but we can't have endorsing people like McMurray. They have to endorse the more progressive candidate in the Michigan Senate race. And I thought, well, if your goal is defeating this one Democratic candidate, you're now saying it's not good enough to defeat that Democratic candidate because of some minor tactical disagreement. So my point in raising that is just, I think so much of the debate on the center left over focuses on disagreements about tactical approaches or sort of specific policy approaches. And then not the debate isn't prepared to get into what a shared outcome could be.
- [82:04]
A
Well, and this is where it's really funny. I get a not shocking amount of objection diffusion from the center. But look at the McMarrow and she was a guest on the podcast. I really enjoyed speaking with her. She supports a public option yet remember during Obamacare, the public option was a total no go zone for the center. A lot of centrists are, but Pete Buttigieg saying, know Medicare for all who want it, that's a public option. And so the overton windows clearly shifted. So, and this goes to your point about like a overfocus on like the tactics and not the bigger picture. So in a Weird way you're people are asking, but how could fusion even work? It's sort of like, hey, the left's whole demand in 2009 was a public option. And now the center rising millennial part of the party now agrees with that point. So I think your sort of rubric for like focusing on like the broader picture of the economy and these like different dynamics and it's. And this is my actual closing statement I'm thinking about the episode that came out with you beforehand was about, you know, Palantir and reindustrialization from a right wing perspective. And my conclusion is just that the reason why right wing reindustrialization and defense mobilization just can't work is that they are trying to pull from the iconography of FDR in the 1940s. They're trying to say FDR went to 50,000 planes and we did all these things and the Cold War, we were so serious and we need to do that again. But we also added Social Security and we also built the highway system and we also invested in science and technology and higher ed and K12 education after Sputnik was. Sputnik was launched. We did Medicare and Medicaid, we did the War on Poverty. I think what was so helpful for about the center left version of re industrialization and mobilization during the 40s, 50s and 60s, this is once again why I love American liberalism from that period was they understood that you on the one hand have to be serious about defense and those topics that you also have to deliver for people. So I think if we're going to say to ourselves, okay, we're going to try to build this like core center vision. And you're kind of. So the disagreement that I'll close on, which is cheating as a host, but I just got to go there is is. I don't think you can. I think it's a. I think it's a bridge too far for abundant centrists to say we just have to cut. We have to convince the left that we have to forego a redistribution for a bit. It's like, nope, like we're going to have to deliver some form of expanded healthcare coverage. Just like as a baseline, we just like, sorry, that's like, that's tape. That's just like entry level admission. And once again the fact that the public option. And then also by the way, the left candidate kind of moderated into saying actually a public option would be fine. So like that's the way I would sort of think of that. So I'll actually let you have the last word if you want, but yeah, Ben will close out.
- [84:53]
B
No, I mean, thank you. Thank you so much, Marshall. I think, I think much, much, you know, grist for the conversational mill in the future. But I'll just close by saying I think, I think it is important that more people in all factions of the center left, in all factions of sort of the Democratic side of the aisle, so to speak. I think it's important that more people think in terms of this idea of fusion, and I think it's important that there's a lot more discussion about how you build this sort of how you construct a coherent theory of political economy from which policies can be developed, rather than focusing on these fundamentally tactical, not strategic questions.
- [85:47]
A
Excellent place to end. Henry will do this soon. This episode was the Marshall thinks out loud with a smart friend of his. So at some point I really want to do like a very like by the books. We're going to take you through your American affairs essay, but I appreciate you letting me think tank out here. So thanks for coming on the show.
- [86:03]
B
Thank you so much.