Chris Hayes on the New Trump Coalition, and What Democrats Do Next
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I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president. As the dust begins to settle on the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump is poised to reshape the structures of American politics in his image, this time with far fewer guardrails than the last time he held office. He will reenter the White House with Republicans in control of the Senate and quite possibly the House as well.

Democrats, meanwhile, are reckoning with what you might call a generational rebuke of their party, or at least of their party's image. So where are we heading? Is authoritarianism at the gates? And where should the Democrats and America's left go from here?

You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and I'm filling in for Tyler Foggett this week. Today I'm joined by Chris Hayes. He's an author, political commentator, and host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. He joins the show to help us make sense of the election and discuss what America may look like for not just the next four years, but potentially for decades to come.

Thank you, Chris, for doing this. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. We have endless amounts of stuff that I would like to get to. And if we could do the sort of micro postmortem a little bit. So...

We know what happened. It's kind of funny to imagine someone listening to this podcast not knowing what happened, but we do know what happened. The Chris Hayes decision desk. We're calling it. We're calling it. Harris lost. She lost all seven swing states. She lost the popular vote. Almost every sort of

micro demographic in the country almost has sort of shifted to the right. So if you had to do a little bit of a kind of meta synthesis take of takes about what led us to this moment, where are you at at this moment? Well, I think the number one thing is the environment and the environment was produced by the post-COVID experience of life. I think there's different frameworks, but if I'm trying to sort of dispassionately describe what happened, which is different than what should Democrats do differently or what did people screw up?

For the first time in as far as we have records, according to the Financial Times, every income and party lost vote share this year across and not just like OECD countries, but across all levels of developed and developing countries with democracies. That was a product of, I think, by and large, two things, the post-COVID bout of inflation exacerbated by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and supply constraints, spikes in

And then just the post-COVID frustration, reacclimation in normal life. Like, and that, you know, I keep coming back to the fact that after Winston Churchill won the war, the British public, like, kicked him out on his ass. And we're like, enough of you, buddy. And, you know, Harry Truman very famously narrowly eked by in 1948 in that election over Dewey. That's, of course, the famous...

headline he's holding where the papers predicted he would lose those 46 midterms. Now, again, you kind of think of the end of World War II and you have the image of your head of the ticker tape parade and the sailor kissing the woman on the street. And you think like, wow, people must have been psyched. Like, you guys won World War II. Like, you did it.

And people were the opposite of psych. They were like, this sucks. This I don't like this at all. It was it was the hangover. I mean, I have been listening to a lot of Tucker Carlson's podcast. So I actually think Winston Churchill was the villain of World War Two. And that's right. But but that aside, no, I mean, I think that point is well taken. So there was this environment that globally post-COVID inflation, all that stuff. This is totally in line with. And in fact, maybe the Democrats outperformed that.

I mean, you can sort of have both things be true, right? It can be true that that was the case and also that this is a moment that they can learn from and that there should be this kind of autopsy postmortem. One way to think about that is there's a lots of Democratic statewide candidates in the state's Harris loss that outran Harris and won, which is to say the environment wasn't insurmountable. Alyssa Slotkin pulled that out of Michigan, Jackie Rosen in Nevada, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin,

Ruben Gallego in Arizona. These are four statewide Democratic candidates who outran Harris and won their states in the same election. Now, part of that has to do with the fact that Biden was held more singularly responsible and the Biden-Harris administration for the conditions of the country. So it was harder. So there's the cyclical environment, right? So that's people were mad about inflation, particularly, and I think immigration was high salience. Then underneath that, there's the

the structural trend, which is Democrats losing the working class, losing people without college degrees. And if all demographics of folks without college degrees vote like white people without college degrees, the Democrats are cooked. That's just true.

Well, we should drill down on that, right? This is what people call class de-alignment or education polarization, right? This notion which has been happening for a while and was solidified or kind of reified most clearly in this election, which is – you know, Bernie Sanders came out swinging the day after the election crystallizing this where he said, you know, the takeaway lesson from this for Democrats is the working class feels abandoned by the Democratic Party and their right to feel that way.

And then Nancy Pelosi comes back and says, that's not at all the case. Biden did this amazing stewardship of the economy. What are you talking about? And then, you know, Chris Murphy, senator from Connecticut, kind of tries to synthesize those two points of view. So what what is the class deal alignment story from where you sit? I mean, have the Democrats lost the working class? And if so, what does that mean?

Democrats are losing the working class increasingly. That's an empirical fact. It's accelerated in the Trump era. I think, again, I hate to be annoying about this, but that's something happening all across the Western democracies. I mean, one of the wildest things is that when Jeremy Corbyn ran as a full throated economic populist opponent of neoliberalism, like he still lost the places that are basically like the kind of like post-industrial heartland in the UK.

And did better in like the university towns. So it's like, even when you 100% try to do like, we hate neoliberalism. We hate the new global order. We hate finance capital. You're getting screwed. We're going to stand for you.

That didn't work that great when they ran their version of the experiment. And even though Slotkin and Gallego won, John Tester and Sherrod Brown lost, right? Totally. Although Brown, you know, if everyone could have outperformed a national environment like Sherrod Brown, the Democrats would have had an amazing night. I mean, he outran the top of the ticket by seven and a half points, I want to say. So, like—

But that phenomenon of running on anti-neoliberal populism, and we should talk about neoliberalism specifically because it's a word that people get annoyed at because it's a wonky, you know, technical word. But just to do like a 101 definition of the terms we're using, like when we say neoliberalism and whether it succeeded or failed, like what specifically should we be looking for? You know, let's quickly say skepticism towards government intervention is

a belief in the supremacy of markets as a sort of default choice. The government should, as someone once said, steer, not row a specific view about the value of finance, capital and free flow of capital and trade across borders, a specific view about the

deregulation and getting the government out of the job of, for instance, price caps in managing inflation, a supremacy of the central bank and the Federal Reserve in the project of keeping price stability, an obsession with price stability as the most important feature of economic management over and above

What democratic public's might like or want first on that point if you can run as a kind of you know Jeremy Corbyn is as much of a Bernie style populist as you get in these OECD countries What and still you're winning university towns and losing the heartland? What is that? Why what does that tell us that well? I don't know I have a bunch of takes on this some contrarian some not so yes center-left parties have been losing the working class I think

This sense of nationalism and borders and immigration is key to it. I think immigration is the kind of crowbar that the right has been using. It certainly worked in Europe. It's clearly working here. I don't know how to solve for that, to be honest.

Because one argument you make is like, look, Democrats just need to move to the right on immigration. And I have moral objections to that and substantive objections. But even if you were talking in clear-eyed terms about it politically, I'm not sure what the lesson is there. But clearly, that's part of the story. Part of the story is that a big part of the story in the American context with Trump is

is that they have given up the big argument on political economy entirely, and that has been hugely beneficial for them. And here's what I mean by that. Conservatives used to argue for a worldview that was about the relationship between markets and government.

This was the big Ronald Reagan argument, freedom to choose, Milton Friedman, you know, the sort of neoliberal revolution of the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan as two figures. But all the way through Ryan, like my entire adult life, like Republicans made arguments about the relationship with the market and the state and about freedom in those terms that they've completely abandoned under Trump or Trump has abandoned. Trump has zero, zero arguments.

ideological or rhetorical commitment to that. And I think basically what happened was the financial crisis completely destroyed faith in those sets of arguments. Romney held onto them. Trump abandoned them. It's a much more effective party rhetorically when they abandoned them. It's turned into a populist rhetoric in which everything is zero sum. There's a one pizza pie, there's eight slices, and every question in politics is who's getting your slice.

Yeah. That's how Trump sees the world. Yeah. Well, and I should say, I mean, I was sort of joking about, you know, Tucker a moment ago. But, you know, I did in the run up to the election do this piece where I went on the road and watched. Thank you. I and I'm curious about I mean, this is just a lens to talk to continue talking about what you're talking about in a sort of end of neoliberalism context. Right. On this, you know, Tucker Roadshow episode.

The audience would cheer, like stand up and cheer for anti-neoliberal talking points that could have come out of Jeremy Corbyn or David Harvey until you then get to the end of the paragraph. And it's like, oh, by the way, the real problem is the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Right. But until you get to that moment, I mean, I had these moments sitting in that audience where I was kind of like.

Wait, he's just been doing 15 minutes about how Bain Capital is destroying the world and the VCs are leeching value out of it. And, you know, and you have a plastic, you know, a garage full of plastic crap that you bought on Amazon and that's not making you happy. I was kind of like, where's the lie? And then we get to the real villain where it's like, oh, no, not only are global bankers the scapegoat, but they're bringing in the immigrants. And that's the real problem. So I guess one way of asking that question is like, A, can the bankers

The right, which is, you know, not run by Tucker Carlson, but maybe is kind of slightly run by J.D. Vance and the circle around him to the extent that Donald Trump doesn't have a lot of interest in ideology. People like J.D. Vance do. And they have very clearly staked out this anti neoliberal. The Democrats are the party of the Cheney's. We're the party that's opposed to that. Like that is clearly their position at this point. Mm hmm.

To what extent can they keep up the momentum on that while also sort of pleasing the donors and the Club for Growth and all that stuff? Yeah. Well, here's the big question is what – does it matter what the government does and does policy matter? So we come back around to this question. I also was – understood what Bernie Sanders was saying in that statement, but it also kind of pissed me off. And the reason it pissed me off was that it didn't acknowledge of how many ideological fights he had won in policy terms. Right.

Bernie. Yeah. In the Biden administration. Now, I want to be careful because there's two adjacent points that get confused. I don't think anyone should like feel better than they have than they felt about the economy. There's all sorts of reasons people felt bad. The first real bout of inflation in 30 years, the fact that people's personal disposable income skyrocketed during the three rounds of COVID pandemic.

supplemental help to under Trump won the ARP under Biden. And then their personal disposable income like went down a roller coaster. People are just like, well, I was flush and now I'm strapped. That doesn't feel good. So like I'm not telling anyone how to feel. But from the perspective of macroeconomics and macroeconomic management,

The Biden folks had a theory of the case and they implemented it. The theory of the case was the neoliberal order had alienated the white working class in the industrial Midwest. They had to be won back. They would be won back with policy that was focused on them. And they went about implementing policy focused on directing government investment towards manufacturing, good union paying jobs across the industrial Midwest and in the growing South. Georgia is now the kind of battery green tech capital of the country.

And this set of post neoliberal industrial policies would win those folks back. And I think it was a plausible theory and implemented way better or at least more aggressively than I ever thought they would. And it totally failed. So that and just at a really basic level, too, I mean, to sort of even step back from what you're saying.

If you look, you know, at like the big sort of like ideological realignments in American history in the, you know, in the last century and you have the New Deal order under Democrats, like big government Democrat. And then you have the Reagan revolution, which ushers in neoliberalism, which is like if you get a one word association with Republicans, it's government bad, small government bad.

Yep. So now we apparently have this burgeoning realignment, maybe, where suddenly the Republicans are the party of pulling back from the small government free market orthodoxy thing. So I want to talk more about exactly what that realignment means or what it might look like after a break. ♪

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Visit store.newyorker.com and enjoy 15% off with the code NEWYORKERPOD at checkout. That's store.newyorker.com. So we're kind of talking in big abstract terms here, but, you know, if we are in a moment of realignment, like...

What would that mean? What would we expect to see? And what should the Democrats do to respond to it? Well, so if if the Biden theory of the case was we need to address the root causes through policy. Right. And it didn't work. The policy was quite a break with what had happened before. Like really, truly a break. The messaging was very because he was the incumbent and because Harris that inherited the mantle of the incumbent. There's only so much she could distance herself from.

She's a sitting vice president. It was very kind of it was pro, I would say, not particularly populist and sort of pro system messaging. And I think one of the most important axes of the rhetoric and the vibes is pro system, anti system. And the anti system, half the country was a little bigger than the pro system. The Democrats tried to do this at the policy level and sort of failed, I think, at the messaging vibes, rhetoric and all that stuff. Trump does the opposite. Like, I don't I think they're going to just do a big corporate tax cut.

They're going to just hand over everything to the oil and gas regime. I think Elon Musk might try to do an enormous round of austerity. They're going to might try to go to the Department of Education, which has been a hobby horse since Reagan. There's nothing so far. I don't I think there's going to be no realignment in policy. And this and here's where you get to the real kind of black pill nihilist take. I'm not sure policy matters at all. Genuinely, I don't know anything.

There are such profound, inherent contradictions in the Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, Steve Bannon, anti-neoliberal realignment stuff. And what I think they're going to do, which is hand the country over to the oligarchs and the industries to regulate themselves and do all the stuff that you would think.

A non-realigned pre, you know, pre-Trump presidency would do. Now, there are a few places where there clearly are departures. Like, for instance, they are going to try to do mass deportation. I don't know at what scale, what level of cruelty and violence. That's scary and terrible. But I do think it's in some ways kind of a departure.

And then the big testing question to me, which is where we get to this real realignment thing, is what they do on the tariffs. Because that really is... Now, to be clear, for all our talk of free trade, we do a lot more tariffing than people realize. And George Bush stuck tariffs on steel to get reelected. So this has always been kind of honored in the breach. And I don't want to overstate the extent... This is a great point that Dean Baker makes all the time, that we do a lot of trade policy, right?

That said, like, is he going to do the 20 percent tariff on all imported goods? I will give him this. That would really mark a break. Well, so right. So from the previous neoliberal order. So points there. One other sort of realigning thing that we might be looking out for is the question of

Are we on the doorstep of authoritarianism? Are we on the doorstep of fascism? You talk about this a lot. I've written about this. Like there was a discourse in the first Trump administration of should we believe everything the autocrat says when he says he wants to do things like mass deportations? And then as these things are, it was a bit of a mixed bag, right? It wasn't tanks rolling in and everybody suddenly is all the dissidents are in jail. But nor I think was it right.

Not at all trying to do that, right? It was a kind of mix. And what I've written is that it's a kind of proto-authoritarian populist, you know, attempt of the kind that you might see in Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey with structural differences based on the American system. So where do you think we are with that now? And what should we be looking out for when it starts? Well, I mean, I would add one more thing. I thought January 6th

pretty definitively resolve the debate or I thought it should have. Like, I think there was a much more contested debate before he led a violent insurgency to try to overthrow the constitutional order and invalidate the votes of the majority to put into by force a person who majority voted against. Like,

That to me was pretty definitive on this question. But you can see how the debate continues after that, right? Because it wasn't successful and it was kind of buffoonish. So, right. I mean, I don't know where we are. I'm trying to be clear-eyed and not catastrophize. I think there's real erosion. I think that sometimes we think things will be more spectacularly dramatic than they are. And I think the biggest things I worry about here are both him pushing the line and

And institutions of civil society, particularly power centers, you know, large corporations, Bezos, things like that, acquiescing, accommodating,

And courts giving sign off to things that they that should they should be the last bulwark against. Yeah, just to sort of yes. And that I mean, to my mind, to your point about things being spectacular or, you know, let's say successful. Right. You know, January 6th did not succeed in overturning the election. Right.

Sometimes it's buffoonish. Sometimes it's incompetent. You know, Trump is distractible. He's not that interested in details. Right. So all these things. I think another thing that happens on this sort of authoritarianism question, right, is that because of the way we're taught history and the way, you know, which sort of dystopian shows get made on, you know, prestige TV and all these things, we basically have like.

either the plot against America or, you know, Handmaid's Tale in our mind when we talk about this stuff. And those are not the only options when you talk about authoritarian futures. And I think a lot would be different on this question if we had a wider palette to choose from, right? If we could look at January 6th and see, you know, French semi-fascist attempts in 1934 as another possible analog. If we could see, you know,

You know, again, Orban's Hungary, Modi's India, right? These are not places where the entire state falls and we're engaged in a mass war and there are mass camps. But it's not liberal democracy. Exactly. So –

Will you in terms of how you cover this night by night or the way you write about it, you know, do you have certain like benchmarks or things? Because I don't think there will be a moment when we say there goes democracy. It's over. Right. It'll be sort of these, you know, people use the frog boiling analogy. So like how will you cover it with regard to that?

I don't know if I theorize this. I mean, I would add one more example, which is the Jim Crow South. I mean, I think, you know, someone pointed that the 1876 election, which was still an election in which there was a compromise struck to make Hayes the president in exchange for withdrawing troops from the South. That, you know, another place to look for like what an authoritarian government that still has voting like is the Jim Crow South, which were relentlessly one party states that repressed dissent.

I think people don't actually appreciate how much they were one party states and how like you couldn't be a white Republican. Like that they were repressive regimes for white folks as well. They were obviously apartheid regimes in which black people were relentlessly oppressed and didn't have rule of law. But they also were they were genuinely not liberal democracies. Like there was not really open free exchange of ideas. So that's another place where we actually have in our own history, you know, versions of this.

I think it's a little hard because there's a tension between planning and like future tripping. And I'm trying not to future trip too much. Maybe that's selfish because I don't like thinking through all these things. And maybe I would be better served thinking through them. But I know when someone's

When people in power are doing the wrong thing. So, you know, we'll call that out and we'll we'll we'll be loud about it. Other than that, I don't know. I guess I'm too close to it to benchmark. Yeah. You know, like, well, I mean, look, the first big thing that we all got to get our heads around is is what is this mass deportation thing going to look like? Yeah. And again, there's an enormous spectrum. I mean, Barack Obama.

deported more people in his first few years than any year that Trump did. So there are versions of this that are, while to me, bad policy are also in the range of like a quote unquote normal change to enforcement priorities. Like that's one end of the spectrum. And the other is like,

thousands of National Guard troops deployed, going around, you know, dragging people out of workplaces and homes. And I don't,

I don't know what it's going to look like. Yeah. I mean, that benchmark of is this something that another administration would have done or is this totally new and abnormal in that sense? I mean, that's that's a reasonable benchmark. I know you've been thinking about the attention economy, about how social media, new media, the way that our attention is commoditized has sort of reshaped everything, including politics and

And, you know, you've just written a whole excellent book about this, The Siren's Call, available for pre-order now, that's all about this. As somebody who's been writing about the attention economy and then sort of covering it night by night, is there any part of –

The result here that you find at all surprising, you know, people talk about the swing and the young man vote. People talk about the long form podcast thing. There's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. You know, why didn't she go on Rogan? Where's the Rogan of the left? Like, is there any part of that that rings true to you? Or do you think it's all sort of foregone at this point? A lot of all of it rings true. I mean, I think that the I think the information environment is the worst I've ever seen it. I also think there's.

a kind of very vibrant bottom-up, like sort of right-leaning to like avowedly right-wing anti-establishment kind of counterculture that's grown up, that's real and not really engineered, although obviously helped along by a lot of investment from very rich people. I think there's a lot of male alienation that is...

Again, independent of how people think who's responsible for it, what its permutations are is like a real felt thing. Here's the short version that my book, The Sirens Call, which you very nicely actually read the whole manuscript and helped me with tremendously. The short version is current forms of attention capitalism select for negativity. And that creates an environment of constant negativity that

And there's just no way for the country to have a national mood of optimism or satisfaction under those conditions. I kind of think that's true. I mean, the other thing to think about is there is no distinction. This is such an important point between real life and online life. People used to say this thing. Twitter's not real life. It's all real life. It is constitutive of real life. There is no difference. It's all real life. People move differently.

seamlessly and constantly. Think about how often people look at their phone. Every time they look at their phone, they're warping from one dimension to another. Those two dimensions have fused. There's no like...

You can't tell yourself some story about like, well, in the real world. No, there is no real world. I mean, especially I just, you know, I was just on a plane and saw somebody sitting in a seat with no screen just staring into space. And it was like the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I was like, OK, there's no more difference between screen life and real life. I mean, so a couple of things on this first.

Let's take a specific example of how we can think about how this is shaping politics. Right. So let's say AOC would want to run for president one day. The old playbook might be she has to run for governor of New York or she has to run for senator.

The new playbook might be she keeps doing what she's doing, but she continues to use Instagram Live all the time to show what it's like in the back rooms of Congress. She keeps, you know, cooking dinner with people and building a fan base. She kind of does what she's already doing, which is politics influencer hybrid.

And a lot of times people look down at that and think it's juvenile or whatever, but it has worked out really well for her so far. And I think that might actually be her path to the presidency potentially. Is that am I crazy that? Yes. See this there? I think we're I think the policy argument is a little bit of a dead end. And and and the way here, here's how I'm thinking of it.

I think all of the postmortem analysis is important because you have to see things clearly. But what I think is really poorly thought out and overdetermined is that that cluster of data means that then you do if X, then Y. So let me give like two examples of this. So morning after Election Day 2004, what is the message that the country sending the Democratic Party?

It's basically saying that, like, we here in real America, red America, want a strong leader to deal with the threats to protect us. And you have gotten too out of touch because you're in these urban liberal academic enclaves of campus anti-war protest. And, like, you like it's not you got to come back to us. And what happens?

A law professor community organizer from Hyde Park, Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama, who very famously was at an anti-war protest, romps to victory four years later. What happens after 2012? Well, Republicans have to get right on immigration to bring the growing diverse American demographic into a majority and pass comprehensive immigration reform. What happens?

a racist game show host runs Mexico, sending rapists and vowing to ban a billion Muslims. What happens in 2020 in which they've lost four consecutive national popular votes? Is there searching? Is there like, no, they're like run it back. And even worse this time. And so point being like,

I just don't think whatever little engineered tinkering that comes out of this, like the thing today I said, as I was, the thought I had was like, you know what? Maybe after this election, the Democrats will have a trans nominee and she's going to win 40 states. Like, who knows? Like the point here is Steve Jobs said this very profound thing. I think about all the time. I say to my staff, it's not the customer's job to know what he wants.

The customer doesn't know what he wants until he sees it. You're asking in the set of choices people have, what do they want? The work of politics is to give them a new choice. A 45-year-old guy named Barack Obama, like, that's a new choice. A racist game show host who says he's going to build a wall, that's a new choice. Like,

So that's what, you know, I don't know what that is because I'm not. And I think you're on the right path and thinking about like AOC and how good she is at the attention economy. And maybe it's but I just think there's something out there that isn't the set of choices that isn't like now for the party as a whole. That's a different thing. But I think for the question of presidential politics and large national elections, I

Like some things will brew outside of the set of stuff that we're looking at right now. Yep. Can't keep making iPods forever. OK, we're going to take one more break right back in a moment with Chris Hayes. I'm David Remnick, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. I think you're right that we don't know what the future will bring. You can't, you know, you mentioned the 2012 pandemic.

Republican autopsy where they decided the future of the party is let's be pluralistic and move to the middle I guess the question is right we were talking about you know the Bernie take and the Chris Murphy sort of synthesis take what do you think Democrats will take from this or do you think it doesn't really matter they'll issue some report and then history will happen and everyone will forget about it I think that's likely to be the case but I think it also just matters a lot on events you know the old

You know, the UK prime minister asked what's the hardest part of statecraft? And he said, events, my dear boy, events like a lot of this is going to be shaped around what happens. And in reaction to in large case, because when the other party has control of government, you're reacting to it. And do you think just to jump in on that? Do you think that makes it easier for them to get the tone of we were talking before about, you know,

A lot of fighting for the forgotten, fighting for the working class, like the magic trick that the MAGA Republicans have been able to pull off is the tone of I will fight for you with the policy of I will give tax breaks to plutocrats. Do you think that being in opposition, especially if it's a trifecta, will allow the Democrats to recapture some of that? It's much easier to be anti-system when you're out of power. You know, this was the very difficult assignment that this election posed to Democrats was

running an incumbent party in a change election. And people were two-thirds, two-to-one, wrong track, right track. Now, I don't know. Maybe, again, maybe it flips around. Maybe two-thirds of the country is like, I love this. I love Trump. I love the Trump economy. Things are great. We don't want change. Again, I'm super humble about what happens in the future. I would be worried about

you know, Elon Musk and the judiciary sort of working concert to produce the kind of conditions in the institutions and in civil society that make dissent harder and kind of work towards hegemonic, Orban style, you know, big majorities like that would be a really that's one of the real and terrifying possibilities. Yes, it's much easier to capture anti-system energy when you're the out party.

And they will be handed a bunch of stuff. Like, I think they're going to really try to get rid of the Department of Education. Like, here's an example. The Department of Education does a lot of things. One of the things it does is basically administer...

Kids IEPs. IEP is an individualized education plan that is required by federal law for kids with special needs. And those special needs can be a huge range of needs. Folks who have auditory impairment, visual impairment, other physical challenges, ADHD, emotional diagnosis. There's a whole bunch of things.

And the Department of Education plays a key role at the federal national level in regulating this. I don't think there's a majority of the country that wants to get rid of that. I don't think there's even a majority of the country that voted for Trump wanting him to having any idea. Yes. Get rid of abortions or get rid of. I mean, yes. So then. But that that is just to say that's an answer to your question about what it looks like, because it's it's going to be in response to what they try to do. Yeah.

And then there's two questions. One is if the Trump administration takes away your right to have your kid be educated the way you want or your right to an abortion or takes away your – raises prices through tariffs or whatever, but you don't know that that's happening, does the tree make a sound when it falls in the forest? That's one thing. Another thing is –

Can the opposition party tell you that that's happening without being the party of scoldy technocratic elites? Right. Because if if the big thing that the Democrats are trying to get away from is being the party of expert professors who are scolding you for not knowing the facts, how do you close the loop for people without continuing that problem? Well, no, I don't think you have. I think that's that's a raw form of politics than like wonkiness. Yeah.

Like, they're going to take away your kid's IEP and inclusion classroom is, I don't think that's like, that's not, you know, that's not wonky hectoring.

That's like you have a thing they're going to try to take. We want to help you fight to keep it. And I think that's where you get out of that. I agree this branding problem of like a party of Tracy Flicks, of former gifted students, of lifelong A students, of people with all sorts of degrees, a lot of people who are like rule follower by nature that are pro-system and high trust. And that's a real branding problem and a real thing that

And I don't, again, I think there's a way out of that that none of us, like the Dem consultant would be like, we need you to be cursing in every other sentence. We've just done the research and we've done the data. And if you throw an F-bomb in every other sentence, we find a 9% increase in the receptivity of working class. Like, and I don't think it's going to work that way. Like, it's going to work some other way. It's going to, someone's, people are going to innovate and experiment and

Now, there's one structural problem here to get out of that. Here's a problem, because you're right. There's like a little vice grip. The Democratic primary voting electorate really over represents the kinds of people that are those kinds of people who I think select for other people like that. But I also think people are really persuadable that people want something else. And so I think there's there's, you know, but that's the

The structural impediment is that there's just a big block of votes in a Democratic primary who and again, who am I kidding? I am one of those people. I mean, I'm, you know, I mean, I don't want to talk about like these other people like, yes, that's me. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I trust me. I'm I'm intimately acquainted with the problem. I sometimes I'm like.

I'm annoyed at myself. Like how? Right. Yes. Yeah. I can't stand myself. Right. Right. So how annoying must I be? I mean, part of the thing. So, you know, in this sort of synthesis of takes and this will get to your point, if you are the party of experts and elites and college educated people, you're

It's hard for people who are not that to see themselves in your party. And one thing that people say about Trump a lot, which I think has some truth to it, is it's not that people are voting for him because they like him. It's that they think he likes them. And that could be as simple as he loves handing out McDonald's fries through the drive-thru window. I mean, it could be any number of things. But so I guess that sort of points to what you're saying is the way to make people feel included or see themselves in your coalition is

That could just be a matter of trying things and innovating that we haven't seen yet. I guess the question is, you know,

Do you in an intention economy world where people can always point to the most annoying thing that's associated with your coalition? How do you get out of that? Well, this this is I think this is a hard problem to solve for. Dave Weigel made this point, the great reporter for Semaphore, who was like somehow nothing that Trump directly says reflects on Trump or the Republican Party. But every viral hectoring.

tweet by some random, literally random person is like all of the Democratic Party. Yeah. Some kid at Oberlin College or whatever. Yeah. Or like some professional being like, you know, I don't, well, I don't want the working class in my party, whatever. Some dumb thing that some random person said. The class resentments are real and not based on nothing is part of the problem. So there it feeds into those. And it's

It's a very tough bind because the way American life works and part of the source, I think, of the class resentment is just that everyone who has power in the culture is basically coming through the same choke point in the funnel. Like, I mean, you know what is an example of people that don't are like our comedians who bypass the entire process of elite credentialing often, I think, don't like often drop out of formal schooling pretty early to start doing stand up.

And I think it become like an interesting place where this outsider anti-system thinking happens on all these podcasts. Yeah. And a way to measure sort of how deeply the Democrats may be in trouble is precisely through the comedian focus groups. Right. I mean, all this all for all the people who have said, why didn't Kamala Harris go on Joe Rogan or why doesn't the left have a Joe Rogan? You know, the rejoinder that I've seen to that is Trump.

There was a Joe Rogan of the left. His name was Joe Rogan, and he felt alienated, you know, for reasons that you can dispute or think are wrong. But, you know, Elon Musk was associated with the Democratic Coalition. Joe Rogan was also, and they were lost somehow. So I think to sort of end on a moment of, you know, future looking, not future tripping, but future looking hope, you know, the innovation that's required is to, I guess, push

I don't know, keep interesting people in the coalition. I don't mean Elon Musk and Brogan specifically, but like... Here's my three-word takeaway. Yeah. Be more weird. Do different things. Try different things. Talk to different people. And I don't... That's different than like throw trans people under the bus, which I think is a terrible lesson to learn both morally and politically because I actually don't think it is the lesson. But it's, I think like engage more...

With heterodoxy and vibe-wise and rhetoric-wise and places that you're Occupy-wise, seek out the strange and weird and bust out of the straight jacket, you know, he says on the New Yorker podcast. We don't have straight jackets here. We have tweed jackets. It's very different. But that's my... That's the only thing I do feel kind of certain about, you know, is that...

There's there are going to have to be new spaces, new conversations, new people to have outside of the strictures of what we have. Thank you. I appreciate your time. And yes, this is about as weird as we get on The New Yorker podcast. So we're trying to walk the walk here.

Chris Hayes is an author, political commentator, and host of All In with Chris Hayes. Look out for his new book, The Siren's Call, coming out this January. This has been The Political Scene. I'm Andrew Morantz, filling in for Tyler Foggett. This episode was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Jonna Palmer, with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. In

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