Osita Nwanevu: Democrats Need A Better Story
52:48 Share

Savor your traditions with delicious deals and festive flavors at Raley's in Nob Hill. Create a holiday meal in half the time by pre-ordering one of our easy heat and eat feasts. Make hosting hassle-free with ready-to-eat party platters and trays from our deli. Save 30% on wine when you buy six or more 750-milliliter bottles.

Clip your digital member deal online or in the app to bring home a Grade A Raley's frozen basted turkey for 47 cents a pound. Limit one while supplies last. Full plates, full hearts. Only at Raley's in Nob Hill. Hey, everybody. I'm up off the mat after a love it therapy session and the no choice but to laugh appointment of Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense.

I got a real good chuckle out of that seriousness to come but chuckling first as a result kind of some scheduling notes uh during this period you know we're going to continue to do quick responses on YouTube when there's breaking news things that need reacting to it's going to be mostly me and Sam Stein but we'll bring we bring other people in as well so we did a couple of those last night Sam and I did so go ahead and check out the Bulwark YouTube feed if you wanted to see my uh

initial reaction to the Hegseth news.

On Wednesdays, remember, we've got the Next Level podcast with Sarah, JVL, and me. And we're going to kind of continue this process. We do more political, campaign-y, sort of in-the-weeds stuff over there with the three of us. And then on Wednesdays over here, we're going to have more bigger-picture conversations. So for folks that are new, if you're looking for just straight-into-the-veins stuff,

Heg Seth, Musk, Tulsi Gabbard coverage. Go check out the Next Level feed. Subscribe to that feed as well. That's up later in the day on Wednesdays. And right now, up next, we have a new guest to the Borg podcast, someone I've been wanting to get on. I think you're going to enjoy the conversation. So stick around for Osita Wanevu.

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, here in the American Idiocracy. I'm delighted to have today as my guest, a new guest to the Bullard Podcast, Osita Wanevu, contributing editor at The New Republic. He's a columnist at The Guardian. He's authored the forthcoming book, The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, which will be published in February. What's up, man? Hey, thanks for having me.

Thank you for doing this. We don't know each other, but I've been monitoring your takes. And my sense is if we designed the government from scratch, we'd have very different visions. But ever since summer, you've just been dropping bangers. I'm like, I either 100% agree or I disagree. And I'm like, that's an interesting point, though. That's making me think. And so I've been excited to do this. So thanks for coming on.

Yeah, it's a real pleasure. I want to do backwards looking stuff with you about state of the democratic party and the election, but our, you know, Mountain Dew overlords have given us some more timely news that we have to deal with. Last evening, Donald Trump announced that Fox and friends co-host Pete Hegseth would be his nominee for secretary of defense overseeing the American military. Doesn't appear that he's ever run anything. Uh,

I did get the joy of being able to break that news to several people at a dinner last night in New Orleans. So I'm looking for small joys, just like the reaction on people's faces when I told them that a Fox & Friends co-host was... You've got to take them when you can, man. You have to. You have to. So I did get a big laugh about that. So, I mean, there's a bunch of places we could go with it. I want to read for you a little bit from his book.

about the war on warriors that he's concerned about. But I guess I'm curious your top line views about Pete Hegseth running the military. Well, I think like most people, including most people in the Republican Party who are now going to have to have an opinion on this. I don't really know much more about Pete Hegseth, but the fact that he's a Fox News host

It does not come first to mind as far as a list of qualifications I'd want. The defense secretary is concerned. To the extent that I've heard about his positions over the last day or so, somebody who also doesn't seem like he's going to satisfy or really be part of what people who are hoping for an anti-war Trump, doesn't seem like he's going to be satisfying that aspiration he has.

over the course of his time on Fox has talked about bombing Iran. It seems very much like a conventional neoconservative. Now, I did see that there was a podcast interview he did recently where he disavowed all of this and said that neoconservatism had been a mistake and he had seen the light. I don't know if he'd been contacted to do interviews for this position before he went on that podcast, but there's nothing in his record public statements that I've seen that indicates to me that he is

going to be part of this kind of dovish, moving away from the neocon right vision for conservative politics that people have seen or wanted to see in Donald Trump.

Yeah, he had actually advocated for a preemptive strike on North Korea on the Fox morning show. He's sitting on the couch there with Steve Doocy. And I don't know, they've kind of like a rotating cast of bleach blonde women that sort of go there. And that was that was one of his points. And it's interesting because it ties to the Mattis warnings a little bit that there was in one of Mattis's book. He talked about how Trump.

was advocating for this and and mattis was so concerned about it that like he was sleeping in his clothes or something and that he was working and they were just talking to the other military officials about making sure someone was always around in case trump decided to do this and and some watchers of you know of the trump administration ike have posited that it was actually maybe future secretary of defense hegseth's suggestion on fox and friends that

that triggered Trump's interest in the preemptive strike on North Korea, of course, before the love letters. So, I mean, if that tells you anything about his instincts, it doesn't seem particularly dovish, but he could have, I guess he could have evolved. Well, it tells us that Donald Trump likes watching television, which is something we already knew. But I think that the Hegseth idea, combined with some of the other appointments we're seeing, again, doesn't really suggest to me that

any of the hope that Donald Trump would be a fundamentally different kind of foreign policy president from conventional Republican in the sense that he's less willing to pursue intervention. I don't see any real evidence of that. And I didn't see any evidence of that during the campaign. I mean, one of the most underrated proposals that I think that he put forward was this idea of sending the special forces into Mexico.

actually very little public attention for something that I think would be actually a huge, huge deal for Americans and for this country's foreign policy. So I don't know. I don't really see it. They're still talking about that.

Yeah, and he wasn't alone, by the way. He was able to kind of get the best of both. This is one of the reasons I wanted to have you. Sometimes I don't trust my own visibility into very progressive spaces, right? And that is what I'm seeing distorted through the internet, since it's not exactly my background. But it did seem, at least through the lens of Twitter, that he got some...

purchase with that notion, maybe not as much as in 2016, you know, with some progressives and potentially helped him at least maybe to tamp down support for Harris in certain demos. I don't know. What do you think about that? Is that fair? Which notion? The Mexico notion? Yeah, no, the notion that Trump would be dovish, you know, that he was less war hungry than Harris. Yeah.

I mean, I think that there are some people, I don't think this is like a large constituency of people, but there are certainly some people who convince themselves that there'd be no fundamental difference between Biden and Trump, certainly on the Gaza issue. That was a big topic of conversation on the left. I think that was not correct. I think that we're seeing already that that was not correct. But yeah, there was a constituency of people who

have been really cynical about American foreign policy in general, who heard the kinds of things that Trump said. And I don't even think he said them that often this time around. It was a bigger part, at least my reading is, it was a bigger part of his first campaign. But the things that Trump has said about wars and the Iraq war and how it was a mistake and how we should be America first and so on, there are people who really, really bought into that more so than they should have on the kind of

anti-establishment left. That's one of the reasons why people were interested in Tulsi Gabbard being part of a circle now. None of that has been substantiated, I think, by not only these appointments, but the actual course of the first Trump administration. And now we're seeing the entry of people who are going to be hawks on China,

on Israel, people who, you know, Mike Huckabee being named the ambassador. I mean, these are not signs that we are... Another Fox host, we should mention. Exactly, exactly. These are not signs to me that we are facing a presidency that's going to be more responsible about the use of American power at all. And I'm really kind of disappointed in people who allowed themselves to believe that. I was leafing through Hegseth's book before we got on this morning. It's pitched as a, which is why I was interested in it, it's pitched as like a

you know, kind of a rationale for him getting this appointment that, you know, he wrote a book about the ways that the department of defense needs to be restructured, et cetera. In candor, I'm only on like chapter four, but I did do some control at, I guess I wasn't really leafing through it cause it's on the internet these days, but I was control. I was searching for some keywords, uh,

as well and bouncing around the book. And a couple of things stand out. One, Dylan Mulvaney, here I remember for being on the Bud Light can, she gets mentioned more times than Donald Rumsfeld, which if you're really going to reassess kind of what is happening at the Department of Defense, you think you might want to look at what Bush had done and Obama. It doesn't seem like that.

He seems more focused on woke. And here are a couple passages I want to read you. At a basic level, do we really want only the woke, diverse recruits that the Biden administration is curating to be the ones with guns?

We want those diverse recruits pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies to be sharing a basic training bunk with the sane Americans. We want the military to be a place where potential Antifa members learn what it really means to use force for just and honorable reasons.

We can de-radicalize, I guess, the Antifa left and the people that got vaccinated. He goes on later, affirmative action promotions have skyrocketed with firsts being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans, lesbian, black females run everything, exclamation point. The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is our diversity is our strength. I mean, there's much, much more where that comes from. The word transgender is in the book like 30 times, but

And so clearly like that is his view of what needs to be reoriented in the, in the military is a de-woke-ification, a de-bath-ification for the woke would be his top priority. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's why we lost the rock. There are too many blue haired Starbucks baristas in the, uh, in the raid on the attack on Fallujah. I mean, I, you know, this is not, this is, were there a lot of black trans generals in, in Afghanistan or Iraq? Yeah.

This is going to be a very dumb administration. I will say that you do have these kinds of conversations about readiness. I remember in the Bush years where certain cultural grievances were sort of repackaged as things that we had to address for the purposes of military readiness. So obesity, for instance, became... People who didn't like obesity for its own reasons made it a national security issue.

And American readiness was going to be fundamentally undermined by the fact that people were drinking soda. Back in the Vietnam War days, you know, people were talking about, you know, we have a military full of long hairs and that's why we got our asses kicked. I mean, you know, this kind of thing happens all the time. I do think it's become more a part of...

conservative rhetoric in the last 10 years or so. This idea of being inundated by DEI objectives and Department of Defense and tolerance in Department of Defense, undermining our security, ignoring the fact that, look, I mean, wars are fought on different grounds these days. We have people sit at computers and push buttons and, you know, immolate neighborhoods on that basis. I mean, I just think that there's like a very kind of...

action movie based understanding of what a military needs and what a military is about that seems to be shaping the way a lot of conservatives think. I don't really think that alienating potential members of our military probably serves our interests either. So I don't know. I just...

As somebody who is not fond of large amounts of military spending and thinks that we need to shrink our military, I think that one of the silver linings of the Hexeth secretaryship, if it happens, probably furthers that end. And I don't know. We'll have to see what happens. In what way? Just because he's going to fire the woke generals or because you think it will decrease trust in the military? I think it's going to decrease trust and sort of confidence in the military. I mean, look, I think...

My understanding is that you need to have a steady stream of people who are interested in propitiating the American military in order for it to function as a volunteer army. If it becomes a matter of, yeah, the only people we really want are the people who fit this kind of stereotypical idea of what a soldier should be and who agree with all conservative culture perspectives and live conservative lifestyles, that's self-undermining, you know?

And honestly, I think that if we come back into power as Democrats in the next 10, 15 years or so, I can only assume that having seen Hegseth run the show and any kind of dysfunction and misgovernment is going to happen there, it's probably going to, again, further the end of asking real questions about how much we spend on the military, whether we should rework certain things, et cetera. But that's all speculative. I don't know. Maybe it'll work. Maybe he'll strengthen the military. We'll all be

army full of John Rambos and we'll you know beat the Chinese in Taiwan with the you know the Chinese will cow in the face of Hegseth I don't know if you've seen the pictures of him like I mean he's he can throw an axe and

You know, he likes to wear those bro sunglasses and the tank tops and he's got a we the people tattoo. I mean, I just think that the Chinese are just going to be quaking in their boots. So, yeah, I mean, I guess I should say for full context, because I think it's going to relate a little bit to the rest of the conversation about, you know, about whether the Democrats were misguided in certain ways and how they kind of advance their political objectives.

I'm sure that there's some really annoying DEI pamphlets that some people have to read in the military. And so I'm happy to think that if Jim Mattis had gone into an administration and was like, you know, we should dial back a little bit here and focus a little bit more on that. I'm not in the military. I'm open to this. I think that the clownishness of choosing for Secretary of Defense, somebody that wrote a book that's like,

The biggest problem facing our military right now is that we have too many aspiring black trans generals. I think, I guess it speaks for itself, but I felt like it was worth mentioning.

The holiday season and election season is tough on skin. Colder weather, stuffy indoor heating, nonstop festivities can lead to a dull, dehydrated complexion. That's where today's sponsor, OneSkin, comes in. Their scientifically proven products are designed to support your skin at the cellular level so it looks and feels healthier and holiday ready. OneSkin.com.

Founded by an all-woman team of scientists, OneSkin focuses on skin longevity, not just surface-level improvements. It's all thanks to their proprietary OS1 peptide, the first of its kind to switch off the cells that cause skin to become more vulnerable. For a limited time, try OneSkin for 15% off using code BULWARK when you check out at oneskin.co. This holiday season, invest in your skin's long-term health because healthy skin is a gift.

And I got to tell you, man, you know, when you're on TV from 2 till 6 in the morning with that fake garish lighting, you're going to be like,

And Donald Trump celebrating. All you want to do when you get home is just moisturize a little bit. Just want to wash that face and then moisturize and feel fresh and do my best to take my mother's advice, which is when there's bad stuff happening around you to look your best. Right, God? And you present your best you. And maybe by that force of will, by the force of fresh skin and a cute outfit, you

You can turn the vibes around. If you're interested in that, go to OneSkin. OneSkin is the world's first skin longevity company. OneSkin addresses skin health at the molecular level, targeting the root causes of aging so skin behaves, feels, and appears younger. It's time to get started with your new face, eye, and body routine at a discounted rate today.

Get 15% off with the code BULWARK at oneskin.co. That's 15% off oneskin.co with code BULWARK. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. We only have one body, one skin, and only you can choose to make it better. Age healthy with one skin. Going backwards. You fired off this heater.

On election night, this is 1.05 a.m. on election night, maybe 2.05. I'm on Central Time, so I don't know. It might have been a little later. I don't know if you were sober or what your mental state was watching Donald Trump regain power in the country, but you wrote this. Many Americans of all races do not believe our norms and institutions work, and a message about protecting them from a force promising to upend them will not be effective.

I think that's interesting. I just want to use that as a starting place for what you think were the fundamental reasons for why we got here.

Yeah, so I think the Democrats over the last, well, really over the course of Biden's term and really in the last election too, have advanced a very, very clear and consistent message about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is somebody who is going to come into power as a would-be authoritarian. He poses a threat to our norms of governance. He poses a threat to the values embedded in the Constitution.

He's going to purge his political opponents from government. He's going to persecute his political enemies. All of these Republicans who worked for him either don't work for him anymore or, you know, they...

They've said publicly that they think he's a fascist and so on and so on and so on. So Donald Trump is going to come in. He's going to be a dictator. That's what he's about. That message has been hammered home consistently for years now. Both Biden, before he dropped out, and Kamala Harris, when she came in, made that

central to their campaigns. And I think that substantively, I mean, Americans were watching the last Trump administration. They saw the effort to try to overturn the 2020 election. They saw January 6th. So every American who voted, I think, is going into the voting booth this year with that image of Donald Trump at the front of their mind, mission accomplished and getting that into everyone's heads. And he won.

So I think to sort of be realistic and think critically about why he won, I think that we have to sort of think critically about...

why that message didn't succeed, why even if Americans, many Americans may even have believed it, they went ahead and decided to choose Donald Trump anyway. I think that there is an economic story you can tell here. That's one thing that people have been focused on. Inflation, other economic concerns ended up being the priorities for most Americans who went to the polls. I think that polls bear that out. But I think even that requires an explanation. So what you're saying then, if that's what happened, is

People can say to themselves, well, yeah, you know, Donald Trump is an authoritarian. He does all of these bad things. He tried to steal the election and so on. But, you know, I really think that groceries have gotten too expensive. And so I'm going to vote for him anyway. That, I think, should tell us something about the way people think about democracy and the amount of faith people have.

in a system worth sustaining. And then I think, too, that there is a portion of the electorate who said, okay, you know, I think Donald Trump's an authority, and I think that he wants to do all these bad things. But, you know, I think that he could do those things for me. I think that we need somebody who's going to go in there, bust it up in Washington, all these kinds of rich, corrupt people who've dominated the show for years and years and years. He's going to go in there, and he's going to really tear things up. And I think that that's

Good. Even if I don't think that's going to be effective, I think it's going to be entertaining and I'd like to see it. I think these are two constituencies of voters that seem to have mattered a lot. And I've been thinking a lot, especially about the second half, people who I think have already been cynical. And we've seen this in polls for years now, not only in the United States, but around the Western world. People are losing faith.

In the extent to which democracy works, the extent to which they have a democracy, the extent to which democracy reflects the values and the priorities of ordinary people, the extent to which it works, there's been a real, I think, erosion in faith in all of these things. The idea of both parties and Washington are clowns, the clowns in Congress. That's been a part of American political life for a long time.

It seems like we've gotten to a point where there's a real amount of nihilism about it, amongst a certain proportion of the elect. I'm not saying this is all voters or even a huge proportion of voters, but certainly voters who have taken an interest in Donald Trump are thinking differently about democracy and his threat to it and what he means than voters.

Democrats do and that then Democrats hoped they would. Yeah. So I think that what is downstream from this is like, if you accept that, if you accept that, right, that there is a plurality or a huge percentage of Americans that just don't believe that the institutions are working for them. And so they're, they want to blow it up. Then obviously the Democrats need to figure out how to speak to them. But first,

I mean, are we babying these people? Is that legit? I mean, look, I know there are many people whose lives aren't perfect. Many people have very challenging economic circumstances. That's true throughout all of history. I just struggle with why 2024 is the year where people decided that they needed a clown dictator.

versus times where there was much more economic and cultural strife, where there were many greater security threats than we have now. Why? Well, the thing is, it's not just 2024. It's 2024 and 2016. And so I think we have to derive some kind of explanation here. I don't think that American life in 2024 is worse than American life in 1924 for anybody.

I think that there have been times where American... Or 74. Or 74, you know. I think that relative, in relative historical terms, we're doing pretty well on all fronts. And I say that as a leftist, somebody who really thinks that we need to definitely radically change some things in the economy. But that, I think, is not how...

maybe the bulk of the American people feel. I mean, the numbers on the extent to which Americans believe that the country's on the right track, the extent to which they think that they're satisfied with the direction of the country, that has been going down, I think, since 2004. I was looking at Gallup's numbers on this. But I guess this is the question, the vibe session. This is like, is it going down because their real experience is getting worse every year since 2004, or just because their information is worse? Yeah.

Well, I mean, this is the other thing. This is something that I think has kind of frustrated me in democratic conversation. I also don't think that Americans are more misinformed or dumber than they were in 1924, either. I think that there have always been people who believe crazy things and who have wild sources of information.

and sources of information that pit them against other Americans. I don't think these are novel features of American life. And frankly, back in, what do you want to say, the 20s or the 70s, I think we also had more political violence, political division. So I don't think that suffices as an explanation. I think that the closest thing, the thing that seems most...

plausible to me is that in the last 25 years of American life, we've seen a lot of high-level institutional failures, and we've seen a lot of government dysfunction and gridlock, right? So the roll call from 2000 or so is,

9-11, it's the war on terror in Iraq, it's Katrina, it's the financial crisis, and more recently we have the COVID-19 pandemic. I think these are very, very big negative things people have been trying to process in the last quarter century, since the turn of this century. I don't think it's made up that we have a lot of gridlock in Washington, D.C., where it seems like the two parties are not able to resolve what should be basic issues

problems or sort of do their basic job. That's something a political scientist will tell you we've gotten worse at the last couple of decades. So I mean, I think that there are reasons why the idea of American institutional failure looms large for us today that aren't bullshit. I don't think that means that material conditions are worse than they've ever been by any stretch of the imagination. But I do think that people who are thinking back on

their own political lives, their own political experiences, or what American politics has been like, you know, for quite some time now, two, two and a half decades. I think that there are reasons for people to believe that politicians don't know what they're doing, that they've been lied to, that we can't really solve certain basic problems. I think that there are grounds for believing that. Okay, so this is where my small C, conservatism, comes in, because I'm like...

Okay, yeah. I mean, even if there's some legit complaints about the system, I feel like there's not a lot of focus on what the...

The downside risks of alternate systems are like a new system isn't necessarily a better one. But that said, let's just accept the premise, right? Like there's something about the institutional failures and the cultures and the culture and our phones and the democratization of it. Like that some combination of all these factors has led us to a place where like we might not wish it to be the case, but there is...

a significant number of Americans that want to blow things up, that want to, you know, kind of tear down institutions. And so the Democrats in that environment are, cannot be the defenders of institutions party if they want to be successful. So then the question is, okay, so then what? And like a lot of, and as you mentioned earlier, you said you're a leftist. I'm curious what you think would be a productive way

anti-establishment posture for the Democrats to take going forward? Sure. So, I mean, you know, everybody's going to be hawking their takes now and for the next year. So, you know, I think that there's a lot of debates to be had here. And I don't think that I have the answer.

But I do think that Democrats offered people a very, very thin understanding of what democracy is and means, that as we talked about, was not compelling to voters. But I also think has been kind of productive in trying to understand what to do with this loss. I've seen a shocking number of people, both in kind of like conventional liberal left and leftist, actually,

who have sworn off the American people on the basis of this election, who are just saying, "Well, you know, people are too stupid. People are too misinformed. They deserve what they get." I've seen people say, "Well, you know, if you're a Latino who voted for Trump, what we're going to do is we're going to try to get your relatives deported so you see how bad of a thing that you just did was." You know, people are losing the plot in ways that I think demonstrate how shallow their conception of democracy was.

In a democracy, and I think the American political system is a democracy. Nevertheless, Donald Trump legitimately won most of the people in this election. And if we're going to have a democracy, if we tell ourselves we believe democracy, we have to take that seriously. We have to take that and understand that victory as legitimate. And we can't be in a mode where when people...

vote in ways that we don't like, that means that we give up on the system. That means that we denigrate people as kind of hopelessly stupid. That's not what it's about. You have to have a real faith in our capacity to do better and a real faith in your capacity to make better arguments that will win people over. That's kind of the whole thing. And so for me, I think that ground zero here in thinking more productively about politics has to be returning to a sense of

Why democracy, that word that we've been using so freely over the last couple of years, is so important in the first place? Is it important? We should be open to arguments from conservatives. Well, what do we do about the fact that a lot of people are misinformed or who make rash decisions? How do we work through that? What responses can we articulate to that? I think that we need to go to first principles and really thinking through why this concept is so important and thinking through what it can do for us. That is...

the pitch for my book. And my own process for going through this for the last couple of years, I've been working on it and asked myself those questions, has led me to an understanding of what democracy is about that feels fuller. And I think it would feel more compelling to the American people if it was delivered as a political message. A democracy cannot just be about doing these things that your civics teacher told you were important. It was important in high school. You know, you go out, you vote, and you...

Get the little sticker and you do this every two to four years and that's a democratic process. And I think it's the most important about democracy, protecting the right to vote and so on. I think those things are important. Democracy more fundamentally, though, is about granting people agency over the conditions that shape their lives. So not being subject to arbitrary authority, not being subject to arbitrary hierarchies, but really having the power to

to create the lives that we want and the time that we have on this planet to ourselves. Democracy, I think, has to be part of the picture of how we self-actualize and define our own futures. That, I think, is the fundamental kernel.

And when you take that value seriously, you say we care about democracy as difficult as it is and as rough as it is to work through because we fundamentally believe that this is a system that allows us to be the people that we want to be and have control over conditions and control over our time. You understand very quickly that that is a system of values that

applies not just to the political realm, but also to the economy. I think we should take it seriously that Americans spend about a third of their lives at work in institutions where, even though they're derived from their livelihoods, from their workplaces, even though

The decisions being made at the hub of a corporation often affect them more directly and intimately than the decisions being made in Washington DC or in their state house. We should take seriously the fact that all of that is true without any real kind of voice or agency on the part of workers, especially now that the labor movement in this country has been decimated over the last 40 or so years. If democracy becomes the way that we think through economic issues,

and economic power for working people becomes something that people are materially tethered to. It's not just an abstraction, but democracy so conceived can be thought of as the way that you earned your last raise, or the way that you addressed some working condition that was bothering you at work. It becomes something you practice more often, whether it's at a union or other some kind of economic structure. You learn how to engage with people who are different than you, voice your disagreements, make arguments, collaborate on different projects.

All of these become ways that you practice democratic habits outside of just participating in elections that I think would redound to the benefit of our political democracy. And democracy, so conceived, is also a vehicle for addressing income inequality to the extent to which

political system is dysfunctional because of the role of money in politics, that also becomes a way of addressing that problem. So I think that there's a lot of potential in thinking through democracy, not just as a set of political values, as a set of values that should cover our political institutions, but as a way we should think about a lot of the economic problems that we do face. Again, I don't think that

The American economy is in the worst place than it was 100 years ago or 50 years ago. I think that Americans' standards of living have improved, and there are great things we can talk about there. But I think that the

The absence of labor power is something that contributed to income inequality. I think it's something that makes Americans' working lives a little worse than they could be. So in the spirit of wanting to improve things, I think that we should try this way. Here's my problem with that. I mean, that all seems fine. I don't – look, I'm neutral on this. I'm really –

I have my own priors about what I think a good economic policy would be. But frankly, if some economic policy that if the Democrats could appeal more to the working class voters that they lost by advancing economic policies, I don't like in order to stop the authoritarian threat from the right, from the cultural right. Like, I would be fine with that. I just am not sure that like we have evidence that that.

the problem, like actually, and that the gap for Democrats in reaching working people is economic and not cultural. And so I guess that's really where this stuff falls down for me sometimes with the left, because I mean, Biden ran for

like a pretty populist economic like a pretty left populist economic administration income inequality is down you know there was big investments in red states you know in plants there's no i mean we don't have all the data yet but there's no real evidence that like in communities where there's there's you know new investment coming in people were happier with the democratic administration frankly if you do springfield as an example the opposite happens like there's a backlash against

new investment because that meant black people were coming into town. You know, so I don't know. Like maybe there's just a way that it was the Democrats didn't message it right or maybe they weren't radical enough. I don't know. So anyway, how do you respond to that? Well, first of all, I don't think that there is any one the problem. I think that there are many different problems facing Democrats right now. I do think that some of this stuff is

is cultural. There are people who are not going to be in the Democratic fold because the Democratic Party now adopts positions on whether it's LGBT issues or immigration that they culturally are not going to cotton with. I think that's a real portion of the electorate. I also think that there are people who are not Democrats because, or moving away from the Democratic Party because they don't see

what the Democratic Party has done to improve their lives in the last 20 or 30 years. And yeah, they're on a better baseline than workers would have been on 30, 40, 50 years ago, but people expect to see improvements from engagement in politics. And I think there are some people who don't necessarily see them. I think that there are a lot of different competing impulses and ideas that are shaping what's going on now. I just think that this is a thing to try.

And I don't think that the idea that selling people on an economic vision might solve some of the culture problems. I think there might be something to that. I don't think you win back everybody.

on those grounds. It's a field of play. As far as how to characterize and think about the Biden administration is concerned, I have been very positive about the domestic record of this administration for, I think, the reasons that you describe, even on things like labor unions. I think that this has been a very pro-labor NLRB that Biden has presided over. There's a very important decision, the

that could have really dramatically impacted labor organizing in this country. I think one of the challenges, though, in making that economic vision stick beyond just inflation was that these were things that were done very technocratically. Nobody was taken to the streets in this election to make sure that Lena Kahn would return to the FTC. These are conversations that people in Washington, D.C. had about how great...

the FTC's new posture was or how great this turn away from neoliberalism was. It was this intellectual conversation. You could make arguments about how great things are going to be, but all the changes also were kind of long-tailed. I mean, Trump seems like he's going to preside over some of these ridden cuttings for these plans that Biden kind of greenlit or sort of made happen. It was like an economic progressivism, right?

That happened, I think, behind the scenes and that was not really paired, I think, in the mind of the American voter with a kind of new normative way of thinking about the economy or a sort of sense that Biden was going to take on the people that they wanted to blame for their economic distortions. Or Biden was presenting a picture of people that he blamed for economic distortions. It was a vision without a story.

And I think the Democrats have needed a story for a long time. And there's a reason why, beyond Donald Trump, voters trust Republicans more on the economy, just in general. If you believe in

opportunity and competition and going out there and on the basis of your own work and and merit making it for yourself maybe even becoming rich someday yeah you do eight years on the couch at fox and friends weekend and like your merit you can be put in charge of the biggest you know uh organization in the world exactly but no but more seriously like

On a level beyond economic policy, I think the Republican Party and conservative movement have been very good at giving people or telling people a story about how they should feel about the economy and how the economy should work that Democrats, I don't think, have ever really responded to in a sufficiently compelling way. There's this stuff about the equality of opportunity and we feel sorry for these people who aren't doing so well and so we're going to take money from here and give it there. I feel like there's something...

I don't want to get, I'm supposed to be leftist, I'm supposed to be materialist, I'm supposed to be about the hard, whatever. But I do think that there's something elemental about the American experience and the American spirit that the democratic economic message has never really tapped into. And Republicans have kind of won on the basis of. You can't build a politics in America without

exclusively around feeling sorry for people who haven't made it. You need to tell people, my economic policies are going to help you live the life that you want to live. They're going to give you power, you agency, you the ability to construct your own reality and construct your own vision of what you want to achieve. And it's not just about opportunity in this way. I think we should be talking about

direct empowerment and giving people more agency than they are used to having in ways that are not just about creating a kind of social welfare policy that's going to redistribute wealth. The word pre-distribution has gained a lot of attention and is sort of increasing in use, I think, in progressive circles. So this idea that beyond just rejiggering the economy so that we're taking money from here and the billionaires and putting it here, like,

There has to be a sense that we, at the outset, are giving people what they deserve from work. That, I think, may be a more fruitful thing to try. Is there anybody you think does that well? Gives that message well? Or we're starting from scratch? I think we're starting from scratch. I think that the left has not figured out how to talk about this in ways they're sufficiently capable of. I'm not one of the people who says...

Well, if it wasn't for the dastardly Democratic National Committee, Bernie Sanders would be president of the United States right now. I think that there are people that that message resonated with and his way of talking about the economy resonated with. But if it were enough, that would have succeeded. I think we need to go back to the drawing board as leftist, progressive, whatever you want to call us, and thinking through how we talk about the economy. Because I think the Republicans have a story. They have a compelling story. They have a story that resonates with a lot of Americans. And...

We haven't developed an alternative one. And I think that's part of the issue. That's not just the Biden administration failed over the course of this term to tell that story. Democratic Party, I think, has failed to tell a good story for many years now. And we've seen an erosion in support for them amongst working class people who used to be dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. And I think that's something that deserves addressing economically.

That's a much more challenging solution and much more thought provoking than what I've seen from some leftists who have settled on a very easy answer for why the Democrats lost this election, which is that it's Liz Cheney's fault. Obviously, that cuts to the bone here. It's like it's Liz Cheney's fault. Kamala had three events with Liz Cheney on one day.

And obviously she cared too much about that. And like, you know, Liz Cheney wanted to show up and help and a lot of the leftists wanted to complain, but we're not going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about how it was this major strategic error to have Liz Cheney. So I wonder if we can, we can hash that out. Do you think that is, do you think that's right? Do you think it's Liz Cheney just caring too much as the reason why Kamala Harris lost or how do you, how do you adjudicate that?

I really don't think Liz Cheney is the reason why Kamala lost. I don't think that's a sufficient explanation. I do think that we need to think about the broader, longer trends here. Democrats have been doing poorly with working class people for quite some time now, increasingly poorly from election to election to election.

And I think that there are deep questions we need to be asking about why that is, beyond the kind of, you know, should Kamala have done this or that micro-analysis over the last several months. There needs to be a kind of macro-analysis of why...

You know, each successive election, with few exceptions, you know, Democrats have done worse and worse and worse with the white working class than in the previous presidential election. Now, I don't think that that's because, you know, people were talking about defund the police in 2004, 2008, 2012, right? That client precedes the cultural conversations of the last decade.

couple of years and has to be explained in terms beyond that, even if you believe. And again, I can see it. It doesn't precede the cultural changes, though. It doesn't precede gay rights and doesn't precede, you know, increased visibility of people of color and cultural spaces and leadership. Right. So it doesn't precede that. So it doesn't. It doesn't precede like the George Floyd stuff that people like to pin it on. But I think.

Since, you can say, the 1960s, the Democratic Party has been increasingly associated with cultural positions that put them out of step with certain segments of the electorate that, again, used to be dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. And that's a long-tailed kind of change. And so the question we have to ask ourselves is this. Was it a mistake to pursue civil rights on that basis? Was it a mistake to pursue LGBT rights on that basis? Was it a mistake to improve women's rights on that basis?

Are these things that we should be thinking critically about pulling back on? That's one response. Or if we like those things, how do you work through that problem? Can I just offer maybe it was right to pursue it all the way up through 1998 when the Democrats were winning and then stop and then stop at 1998. We achieved the ideal amount of social progress in 1998, 1999, white before Y2K, 2000.

and American culture was exactly where it should be. I just think that this is a very deep question. And I don't think that people are

addressing it with a sufficient amount of seriousness. How Democrats adopted, you know, in the last couple of years, positions that are outside the culture mainstream that have been particularly harmful in these recent elections, I think that you can say, yes, that's probably the case. On the other hand, I think that people like Barack Obama, people like John Kerry, people like Bill Clinton, were actually very disciplined about how they thought through and worked through cultural issues. And you still saw over the course of their

administration, the course of their time in American politics, these kinds of structural trends kind of continue. I reminded people yesterday, 1994,

the first midterm under Clinton, Republicans take Congress for the first time in 40 years because they tell the American people that Bill Clinton moved too far left on cultural issues, and they keep Congress for the better part of the next 12 years. Do we think that Bill Clinton was some kind of flaming-haired radical who was afraid to take on the left wing of his party? No. I think Bill Clinton did what he could. I think these things are complicated.

I think that we need to go back to the drawing board and thinking through politics and not just tell ourselves that we did everything right in the 2000s, we did everything right in the 90s, we just have to go back and everything's going to be fixed. I think that the electoral record suggests otherwise. And we're at a point where we need to think more creatively about new ideas and new visions for the country that we can be selling and offering to people to break away from what they're familiar with.

We had a heated agreement over the summer about Joe Biden. And we're not going to just rehash that. But there was one element of it that I think is relevant to your upcoming book. It's kind of relevant to this whole discussion. That was, since the time you wrote a column about this, I was talking about this. It's like if you really believed democracy was a threat, you wouldn't be taking this risk on somebody that was clearly diminishing.

like that was not capable of doing some of the basic elements of the campaign. It's been this interesting question, like how much do people really believe that threat? Like how much of it is lip service? And you wrote recently, I've been struck by the extent to which people engage with politics seem to take it for granted that the American project might end within the next few months. I can't quite tell how serious people are about this, but it's plain people are scared of

On the other hand, why would you expect America to buy that Trump is a dictator in the making when you don't act like you believe that's the case? So it's this tension that you're talking about how people seem to say that they are very concerned about the imminent end of the American project, like their actions don't match it. And so anyway, I just was wanting you to kind of ruminate on that topic a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, this is something I've wrestled with, frankly, since Trump's first term. I mean, in 2016, again, like you had similar kinds of messaging. Well, this is somebody who demonstrates authoritarian impulse. This is somebody who said terrible things about Latinos, terrible things about Muslims, who in fact is promising to do a Muslim ban and kick them out of the country and so on and so on and so on. Democrats said this all the time. And as soon as Trump, you know, went...

It's as though people are starting, "Oh, maybe we can negotiate on this. Maybe we'll go to the inauguration." You either believe that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler or you don't. I think the Democrats don't. I don't think they ever really have. I think there are things that Democrats are sincerely concerned about and rightfully concerned about. But clearly, this is somebody who exists within their own minds.

the realm of politics where you can still work with this person or sort of like accept this person or sort of, you know, deal with this person in normal political ways. And I think the Americans see that. I think that Americans perceive that in this election. You know, we're going to see in the next couple of months, you know, how

good Trump is going to make on some of his more extreme promises. I'm particularly concerned about the deportation campaign he has promised, not just to start deporting Americans more aggressively, but Stephen Miller talks openly. We'll construct some staging grounds along the border where people are going to be held until we figure out what to do with them, and we're going to deputize local law enforcement and go into cities and start pulling people out of them. We're going to see if that happens. If that happens, I think that

What we've done in these months immediately after the election is going to be of interest to historians. What were you doing before all this happened? And what were you suggesting we should be doing? I don't know. I do remember in 2016, basically as soon as the results came in, I started getting invitations to protests and marches and teach-ins and all of this kind of stuff.

There was a lot of energy in the early administration, the hashtag resistance, this whole kind of burgeoning, you know, we've got to do something about this guy. Things are very, very different now. I think we can have like a critical conversation about how much of the stuff that we saw early in the Trump administration ended up being productive and helpful. But there was a kind of response that seemed, at least amongst the American public, that

and Democrats and liberals commensurate with the things that they had been saying about Donald Trump in the election.

Now, I don't think we have that, even though I think substantively what Donald Trump is promising in his term this time is actually worse than what he promised in 2016 in many respects. And I think that's something we have to think critically about. So apart from this electoral question, how do we talk about transgender issues? How do we talk about immigration? How do we talk about this culture? I think there's also a very immediate conversation we had about

Given what Donald Trump has promised to do as a matter of policy, what are our obligations to these populations, to these constituencies in the near term? How do we address the things that he's saying he's going to do? That's what I'd like to see more of. The electoral question is the electoral question, but if we...

And I think we did have reason to be concerned about Trump coming in again. If we believe that, we should be not just trying to rehash the election, but sort of thinking actively about what we can look forward to in this next term on all fronts, whether it's the social and cultural front, whether it's the military front with peak headsets. I'm very concerned about the hawkishness of this new administration. I will say, jokes aside, I don't know. I think that...

There's a lot of defeatism and nihilism in liberal politics, democratic politics, and even on the left right now that...

I don't know. I don't think that that's the right response. I understand the temptation towards it, but the reason to cry against it. Okay. I was about to close, but it seemed like you had one more thought when I cut you off. Was there something else you were trying to say? I have many thoughts, but we'd be here all day. All right. Well, then we'll have to do it another time. Thanks so much. That's Osito Wenebu, his new book, The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

It's out next year. You can pre-order it. Thanks so much for coming on the Bulwark Podcast. Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. Peace.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.