Whither the Democrats? w/ Natasha Lennard
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Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Natasha Leonard. We talked about Natasha's recent writing on how the Democrats are making sense of their electoral defeat in November and how the mainstream of the party is adopting conservative social policy while flirting with far-right activists and influencers. We also talked about the enduring and ever more bizarre Democrat obsession with civility and bipartisanship

And we also touched on the Palestine Solidarity Movement and the response to the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil. Natasha Leonard is a columnist for The Intercept. She's the Associate Director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Graduate Program at the New School for Social Research in New York. She's the author of Being Numerous, Essays on Non-Fascist Life, and is currently working on a new book on how we might better conceptualise uncertainty and certainty.

So Natasha, for good reason, most political commentary on US politics has lately been focused on Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the various extraordinary actions taken by the administration, especially domestically. Some of that we'll probably get into. But as well as writing on the Trump administration, you've also written recently about the Democrats and how they're responding to the situation and how they've attempted to make sense of their electoral defeat in November.

So far, at least, it doesn't seem like anything the Democrats are doing is serving to make them more popular. According to the polls, a record low of just 21% of voters are satisfied with the job the Democrats are doing in Congress, while 40% of voters apparently approve of the Republicans.

In your article for The Intercept back in November of last year, you wrote that it's too early to tell whether the Democrats will learn from these losses or simply, as they have before, groundlessly blame the left for failures that have little to do with left wing voters. We're now, of course, more than 50 days into Donald Trump's second term. And so it seems like a reasonable moment to interrupt.

take stock of where the Democrats are at, what conclusions they've drawn from their defeat and what their strategy of opposition consists of. So how would you characterise the Democrats' position and what their strategy seems to be for how they might achieve success in the midterms and how they might win back the presidency in 2028? It is miserable to say that my worst, worst fears written in November have certainly come true as regards the Democrats, not that that

Going to be a huge surprise for anyone who's been following this kind of capitalist centrist party for much time at all. But yes, what we are seeing is a democratic establishment, which again does not account for every single Democrat. There are left-wing constituents within the party. There are a few outliers. But the democratic establishment and the party leadership has been reliably disappointing in its...

punching left once again in its willingness to preemptively obey and work alongside a Trump administration that is unambiguous about its willingness to tear all rights-based frameworks and democratic governance up from the roots. So we are seeing the Democratic Party do what it has done best for 30 years, which is fail to attend to

the struggles of working people in a multicultural working class base, which is one of the reasons it lost and another reason that we remain without a significant opposition to this fascist escalation.

In one of your articles for The Intercept, you describe the posted election analysis of the centrist Democrat think tank Third Way and how they propose that the Democrats need to, quote, move away from the dominance of small dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate. Can you talk about that a little bit and who the donors are that Third Way are proposing?

implicitly suggesting the Democrats should be chasing instead. Yeah, so for a little background for listeners who are lucky enough to not have to deal with think tank blobdom, Third Way are essentially conservatives under the rubric of Democratic Party think tank and analysis and advice.

They held a kind of convergence, an off-the-record convergence recently, that was essentially an autopsy for the 2024 election. What the Democrats did wrong, what they should do right. And as you know, they came away with these all-too-typical, we actually need to go further to the right, we need to bend rightwards, this centrist dance that continues.

to fail centrist parties throughout Western Europe, also not just in the US. And the third way says more of that, please. Let's, in fact, ignore, first of all, any sort of left-wing thinking, any sort of thinking towards improving the lot of the working class and to the point of donors and who they would be appealing to. So what is left if you don't have a small-dollar donor? Obviously, large-dollar donors, billionaires, and billionaires.

The advice is also so, so bizarre and so strange because it paints this really misleading picture as if Kamala Harris and Biden, when he was still running before her, were running on some sort of left-wing, radical, in the least campaign. This was an extremely Republican campaign. They were appealing to Silicon Valley. They were appealing to, you know, the worst nativist fear-mongering and extremist

border regime mythologies. You had Kamala Harris walking the border in khakis and sunglasses next to border patrol agents. I mean, this was a Republican campaign. So I'm not entirely sure what the third way is.

are suggesting the Democrats could go further in acquiescence to right-wing agendas. But even if they were to, once again and again, we see that even in a real political sense, not even just a sense of what is right or acceptable or moral, just in terms of political success, it doesn't work. It just, you know, re-centres the fulcrum further to the right and

and hands agenda points to the far right and to the right. That's what we've seen in the US and we keep seeing it elsewhere too. So third way sort of thinking, this sort of triangulation to the right is a disaster for centrist parties, but they, for a number of reasons, refuse to let that go and we can talk about why that is. Just on your description of Harris's campaign as a Republican campaign, I mean, that might strike some

perhaps as hyperbole. But of course, this was a campaign involving actual Republicans, you know, Liz Cheney amongst them campaigning for Harris. So it's hardly an exaggeration in that sense. The arguments for adopting socially conservative or quote unquote anti-Semitism

anti-woke positions are always couched in terms of popularity with voters, with the argument being that the public or certain demographics at least, you know, the cliche of rural voters in flyover states, for instance, that these people are incorrigibly socially conservative and that there's no option but to pander to their views. Sometimes there's a degree of acknowledgement that culture war topics are not as important to voters as economic issues, you know, so-called pocketbook issues. For instance, I...

went through the experience preparing for this interview of reading some of Janan Ganesh's articles. And he does have a slightly more nuanced version of the argument for taking that socially conservative turn

in which he argues that even if voters don't care that much about culture war issues, Democrats adopting supposedly outlandish positions on, say, trans rights, that that allows the Republicans to paint the Democrats as being out of touch more generally and being opposed to common sense positions, including on the economy and on the hardship that ordinary people face.

What do you make of that sort of argument and the appeals to meeting the public where they supposedly are on so-called cultural issues? So this idea of public opinion being this immutable trans-historical force to which political parties, extraordinarily well-funded, you know, robustly platformed political parties and their leaders must only cater to.

To me, I mean, and this is more of a point of ethics and what politics is for, is a total abrogation of what the role of political leadership is. And a failure to understand what the work of public opinion, response, production and maintenance is.

Because public opinion isn't just some organic state of affairs that arises without influence. Public opinion is forged by information made available, news media, advertising, material conditions of how people's lives are led. So there is a way through this quagmire that is not

oh, let's hew our entire agenda to what some Washington pollsters say is the all-powerful force of public opinion. We've seen examples of this, for example, in the German elections that just occurred. Now, obviously, in many ways, they were devastating, the far right and 20...

percent of the vote. But what we saw in a more granular level was centrist parties losing a lot of voters and center left parties losing votes to the what had almost been a devastated and decimated party, D-Linker, the actual left party. D-Linker managed to double its numbers. How did they do that? They did not, like our Democrats, decide after a number of years of pain to throw trans people and immigrants under the bus.

What they did, and this is also what you've seen a number of sort of Bernie-style candidates do, they led with economic or, you know, bread and butter issues. They went door to door, asked people about cost of living crisis issues, cost of heating, rent. They took direct action around food.

rent controls and gas prices. But then if you asked any delinquent politician about immigrants' rights and trans people's rights, they would say these are people who deserve health care and rights. Simple moving on, which is honestly how most, when polled, people do feel about minority groups, marginalized groups.

unless there is a massive astroturfed campaign like the republicans have run to make these center issues so on the opposition you have a choice whether to fall into that or to pivot to change the conversation to in fact if you want focus on red and butter economic issues and economic reforms the trap for the democrats right is they actually don't want to do that do that they

They don't want to be a party that takes on Wall Street. They don't want to be a party that endorses a campaign of significant redistribution. They don't want to be a party that takes seriously that, you know, the American working class is not a white man in a hard hat in a factory.

And so therefore they take an easier option of punching left and blaming culture war issues, which the right can then feed upon. This seems to me an entirely avoidable trap, but if and only if you are willing to offer real shifts in people's material conditions in terms of the economy, in terms of redistribution, in terms of taking action,

extremely seriously inequality and the excavation of wealth by an expropriation of wealth by the super wealthy and the democrats aren't willing to do that and when some have been willing to do that they've been either cut out in congress or pushed out by party leadership in primaries and

We should also keep in mind that when it comes to this alleged guide public opinion, the Democrats are actually more take it or leave it than they might like to admit. Consider that something like Medicare for All, when described in its functional terms to most voters, is extremely popular and has been considered basically untouchable by the establishment Democratic Party.

leadership, anyone really aside from Bernie Sanders and the left flank of the Democrats. At the same time, ceasefire and stopping sending arms to Israel or significantly conditioning arms to Israel is a majority popular opinion, but not one that the Democrats want or are willing to remotely...

their agenda and position too. So it's public opinion, all powerful, can't be challenged, can't be shaped, we can't take any responsibility in demystifying some myths

that have been astroturfed by the Republicans and taken up by the public, they must be held stable and listened to. Oh, but something like universal health care and one single payer option or stopping sending arms to a country prosecuting genocide, which is also very popular as a position. No, no, we couldn't possibly listen to the people on that. So you see the kind of inconsistencies and therefore in those inconsistencies, priorities of the Democratic leadership

I think it's an important point that you make about the fact that the Democrats are simply not willing to move left, even if there are electoral gains to be got through that. Because some commentary that you see on the Democrats is couched in terms of their incompetence, you know, that they're useless, they don't know what they're doing. But we've

We've seen that they can, in certain circumstances, marshal their forces, be very effective, defeat their opponents. And, you know, a case in point would be the defeat of Bernie Sanders during his attempts to get the denomination and the mud that was thrown. You know, the sort of Bernie bro stuff attempting to portray Sanders voters, regardless, in fact, of who they were, as motivated by chauvinism.

Going back to some of your writing on this topic, I don't know if you saw this, but in a recent article in the Financial Times, Jemima Kelly had an article on the Democrats in which she wrote that there are tentative signs of change.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, considered a likely candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2028, this week launched his own podcast, promising to invite guests he deeply disagrees with. Now, in a recent article for The Intercept, you took quite a different position on Newsom's new initiative, particularly regarding the debut episode of his show in which he interviewed Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA.

a Republican Party activist, a man who's propagated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and has spread various falsehoods about the COVID-19 pandemic and electoral fraud and has made many straightforwardly racist statements as well. Can you talk a bit about that conversation between Newsom and Kirk and how it's perhaps indicative of the kinds of conclusions that you described that many Democrat politicians seem to have reached about how they can improve their electoral fortunes? Yeah.

Yes, so California Governor Gavin Newsom, who turns out has actually two podcasts running now and I think a TV show. So really curious who's bothering to run California, you know, within six months of some of the most devastating wildfires the state has ever seen as the federal budget gets hacked away. So clearly Gavin should maybe get off the mic. But he is, yes. Every day there's a new reason to be ashamed of being a podcaster, I should say. Anyway, sorry.

Literally the worst industry. No, being a governor is the worst industry. But Gavin Newsom is, yes, very much setting himself up, it seems. And he's not being particularly shy about it for a 2028 run. The way in which he's doing it is in this mode of turning to the right, this classic gesture, reaching across to find middle ground. But what it does is just say, hello, this extremely far right force...

are fine, normal, and set what the middle is. And we've seen this in Gavin Newsom's

I think he's now had three episodes since the first Charlie Kirk one. The second was with Steve Bannon, the very man who helped advocate for the sort of Trumpian disposition of politics and mode of politics known as flood the zone with shit, which we're receiving in such aggressive doses right now from Trump and Musk.

And what Gavin is doing, and I'm calling him Gavin because I feel disrespectful, is sitting and nodding along with these characters and, you know, raising mealy-mouthed kind of challenges at a couple of points, but really in extremely weak ways, not calling out what are essentially fascistic, harmful, discriminatory, violent,

wealth-interested, hyper-capitalist, techno-capitalist interests of this group of people. It is just this sort of performance of getting along. At the very moment that the Republican administration, that these people have been influential in propagating ideas for, in supporting, in agitating to the right...

of ripping apart the very means by which a parliamentary force could challenge them in opposition in the first place. So this is Newsom digging his own grave.

So what did they talk about? They talked about the election. And when they talked about the election, Newsom congratulated the Trump campaign for going so viciously after Harris for alleged support of trans people. The example they brought up was when Harris was attorney general in California. She was just following a

legal case that said under the constitutional protections against torture in prison, trans prisoners are, like other prisoners, required to receive adequate health care. And that includes, by all scientific consensus,

gender-affirming health care. So yeah, when Harris was top prosecutor in California and it was affirmed as law under the Constitution that trans prisoners are, you know, required to have adequate health care, this was then used by the Trump campaign as a, you know, Harris for they, them, Trump for you. This was a highly successful campaign and

Sure. And the Democrats failed to combat it. They failed to demystify. They failed to challenge in exactly the same way that when the Trump campaign runs on fearmongering around migrant crime and America's incapacity to take in and care for millions more people, which it well can were it to have different economic policy, the Republicans fearmonger and instead of demystifying, they

and doing their job as political leaders, Democrats cater towards. So this is what we've seen Newsom do throughout his podcast episodes since he started them. He also not only nodded along with Kirk and congratulated them on their devious campaign, he said he completely agreed with Kirk about trans women in sports.

despite the fact that school districts, local authorities, state authorities, municipalities have been managing and dealing absolutely fine with transgender youth in sports for many, many years until this became an astroturfed, completely fabricated Republican issue. And now you have the governor of California who has always celebrated himself as an LGBTQ plus champion when it came to things like gay marriage.

is jumping, going out of his way to agree with a man who has made his life about rolling back civil rights protections. So, you know, it's a strategy. And, you know, it's one of those ones that even if it works,

What a grim, miserable, cruel and mean state of politics it is to win on that kind of acquiescence, as opposed to building an actual anti-fascist counterforce to take on the ways in which the Republicans are decimating rights, lives, capacities for living, modes of flourishing. So, yeah, it's grim and disappointing, but also not surprising.

Yeah, from this side of the Atlantic, I can confirm that it is grim and disappointing and miserable to watch a, you know, a putatively left party adopting the positions and talking points of the Conservative Party.

The whole sort of question of making nice with the Republicans, I mean, that brings me on to another question. I'm sure you saw this, but during Donald Trump's State of the Union address, he was interrupted by the 11-term Democratic Congressman Al Green. And as Trump was discussing his election victory in terms of the mandate he'd been given, Green pointed his cane at Trump and shouted, quote, you have no mandate to cut Medicaid.

He was then removed from the building and the following day the House moved a motion of censure against Green that was actually passed with 10 Democrats voting with the Republicans. Green was criticised by Senator Chris Coons, who described Green's actions as being counterproductive and that they, quote, went beyond decorum. No greater sin, of course, for a certain kind of Democrat politician than losing your call and losing your decorum.

He was also attacked by John Fetterman and by former Obama administration official David Axelrod, who called Green's actions despicable. It's of course been much remarked upon that the Democrats' preoccupation with civility seems ever more peculiar if Trump is, as so many Democrat politicians say he is, a fascist and a unique threat to American democracy.

How do you account for this persistent asymmetry where the Republicans are ever more comfortable casting their opponents as illegitimate actors whilst the Democrats refuse to change their approach?

I think it's slightly different for certain democratic figures, but it's a deep faith in institutions, this idea that the institutions must be upheld through the practices and norms and conventions of civility, and that through upholding those practices required or expected of those institutions, the institutions will obtain, the institutions will protect and defend.

That's a kind of basic, almost generous read of democratic centre's delusion. Because obviously, like, an institution can hold delusions.

and do extraordinary harm. Look at the state of the Supreme Court right now. It is a rights-destroying machine, and yet this rights-destroying machine, forged by Republican will and, in many cases, Democratic incompetence and blind faith in institutions serving them, will be the thing we now have to rely upon to take some of the most crucial cases around Trump's executive orders. They will end up in this Supreme Court, and, you know, that is the sort of institution...

Democrats are trying to put all their faith in and all their eggs in that kind of basket. I think there's also a less generous read is that, you know, I think a number of these people on the edge of retirement, on the edge of the end of their lives, don't give a shit and are not willing to fight and would rather play politics as usual.

Yeah, I don't think this is a political class of people who are invested in change. I mean, that shouldn't be controversial to say at all. They've pushed off change in many, many ways. And there are a lot of sites of agreement, whether they came about by virtue of ill thought, political strategizing to lean to some imagined right wing, potentially democratic voting strategy.

Liz Cheney-loving figure, or whether it is a genuine conservatism within the Democrats, which is very much a party of conservation. The result is the same. You have a party very much committed to refusing to move the political needle, the economic needle,

terrain the economic status quo in a way that shifts the conditions of possibility for the sort of right-wing revanchism that we've seen. Refusing to make people's lives consistently better and refusing to reorient the political economy of this country.

And when that in turn creates a mass of deeply resentful people who can be weaponized by a very well-organized Republican Party without any scruples at all, you don't need Democrats appealing to

institutions and a rule of law that doesn't seem to hold much sway in the eyes of those in actual power. You know, we've seen this just now. Chuck Schumer in the Senate and 10 other Democrats voted to allow Trump's continuing resolution budget to go through, as opposed to letting there be a government shutdown. Chuck Schumer's logic is, oh, you know, what they really want is a government shutdown. That's chaos.

What we must do is keep going and let their budget pass to avoid chaos. So we choose their chaos budget that we know for sure hands extraordinary power of the purse to Trump and Musk. And this is the sort of Democrats we have. We have Democratic leadership going against many even surprising figures in the Democratic Party, not just the AOCs and the Sanders, but even people like Rosa Delario in the House.

saying we should not let them have this budget, we should not pass this and then you have Chuck Schumer Fetterman, Senator Gillibrand ten Democrat Senators to allow this vote to go through and for this

budget legislation to pass. And it brings me no joy to say it, but there just quite simply is not a large liberal to left united front against Trump's agenda. I mean, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see a massive sea change in Democrats away from this moderation above all. Continue as we were, continue to genuflect to the right. It's desperate that that changes, but I don't see it on the horizon.

Perhaps this is naive, but I suppose one reason I guess why there might have been some reason to suppose there would be a shift away from this obsession with civility is that Donald Trump is obviously such a personally vindictive character and we see an ever greater radicalisation of the Republican right to the point where, you know, elite Democrat figures may have reason to not fear for their personal safety necessarily, but perhaps fear for some of their financial assets. Clearly,

Trump is open to a bit of, you know, a bit of lawfare and so on. And I guess the other thought that occurs is it can be quite easy to think that the Republicans casting the Democrats as illegitimate actors is a phenomenon just of the Trump era. But of course, I mean, this goes right back to at least to Newt Gingrich and the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. And then, of course, we had the birtherism thing during Obama's presidency. So it's not as if the Democrats haven't had a long time to change course and rethink this.

I'm not sure I really have a question there, but yeah. No, but I see what you're saying. And we've seen an articulation of what the Democrats think they're doing in the best possible of ways in these moments. And that's, you know, when Michelle Obama said, when they go low, we go high, which I think is obviously a terrible way to take on a serious political opposition that is putting millions of livelihoods and thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of lives and lives around the world and an entire climate at extreme risk that

That is, it's very generous to say that they truly believe that this sort of moral high ground is the way to win. And I think I don't think we should be that generous. I think more of the problem is that there are too many actual sites of agreement. There are too many actual continuities between democratic policy and republican policy over the last 30 years.

Obviously, I think Trump is making moves around governance, control, executive power that are absolutely extraordinary. But, you know, this is an exacerbation of focus on a border regime that was the rule of law under Clinton, Bush.

Obama, Biden, and, you know, Trump 1 and again, Trump 2. This is a deep continuity. Violent Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism and state tools of repression, most extraordinary oppression from rendition, extraordinary rendition, deportation, jailing, expulsion, harassment, surveillance, all built up since the war on terror and given license.

by Biden in his opposition to any sort of Palestinian solidarity movement, opening the door for Trump's violent actions now, for the sort of deportation regime we're seeing now. There's a way in which the Democrats' claim to civility is all a smokescreen in terms of policy. Even the claps from Biden's Build Back Better, which was a more robust investment infrastructure plan

And its inability to pass a very conservative, even Democratic-led House and Congress, when you had figures like Senator Manchin and Sinema voting no on public welfare and investments. You know, you've got a Democratic Party that's been very willing to pass very brutal, cruel, and support very brutal, cruel and anti-social laws. So civility has always been like a limited and very unpleasant, I think, smokescreen.

You know, I'd rather they be deeply uncivil and actually fought for a greater good. But that would be, this is not a shift in the Democratic Party, as you say, this is a continuity. And it's really just a matter of style. In substance, there's been nothing more kind of civil in the broader sense of the word of like towards civilians, towards a civic society. You could hardly say that's a badge of democratic politics. You mentioned the deportations and the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

So there's been a lot of discussion about the relatively muted response to Trump's victory and that we haven't seen the mass public protests that occurred in 2016. But we have seen an upsurge of protests and an apparent revitalization of the Palestine Solidarity Movement in response to the extraordinary case of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and a green card holder currently held without charge at an immigration and customs enforcement center.

As well as provoking outrage and opposition from the movement, we've also seen a more sort of narrow legalistic critique from people like Chuck Schumer, who you've mentioned, who has made clear his opposition to Khalil's views on Gaza, while at the same time opposing his detention on legal and free speech grounds.

Do you think that Marco Rubio and the administration have perhaps made a misstep in going after Khalil and others in the movement? And do you think that Schumer's intervention may be characteristic of how the Democrats act going forward, you know, sort of distancing themselves from the left, while also trying to profit from public discontent around issues like this?

Whether they've made a misstep or not, I would say in terms of the kind of move fast and break things and presume that you don't have a robust enough institutional opposition to stop you fast enough, I would say it's probably not on the part of Trump and Musk and Rubio.

I'd say it's probably not a misstep in that they are genuinely invested in testing the waters of what sort of top-down authoritarian control they can have over the exclusion, the detention, abduction, exclusion of people for political speech around views they oppose. And it is absolutely no accident that, like in so many cases, it's around Palestine where the rubber hits the road. It is Palestinians who have been targeted first.

Will we see a robust democratic opposition?

To this, I think given the First Amendment stakes in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who would be a pretty much unprecedented case since the Red Scare in the 50s and the 60s, especially with the particular statute Marco Rubio has said he is planning to use to have Khalil removed, it would be extraordinary for even the most conservative Democrats to sit by and watch that sort of extraordinary violation happen.

of the First Amendment and because Khalil is, as the government has literally said, not been convicted of crime and it would be relating only to activities of speech on campus that would lead to his deportation. Do I think a good way of mounting your angered opposition, like we've seen from Democrats like Schumer, is to put a social media post where the first half of it is a decrial of Khalil's views, support,

for Palestinian freedom and an end to the genocide of his people as abhorrent. I think it's not a great way to start your advocacy for someone who has been kidnapped by the government you supposedly represent and held away from his eight-month pregnant wife whilst he is a legal resident. But the gamble that the Republicans can make with this sort of thing is that even if they

find opposition. There are many, many things that the Trump government has done that Democratic leaders like Schumer have stated opposition to. Schumer stated opposition to this continuing budget and still voted to let it pass. So the test will not be how far the Republicans are willing to go. They're willing to go all out and not stop. It is, will there be any

significant and meaningful response from democratic leadership. I think none that we can count on in any serious way are for this particular case, and it is terrifying to say this, as it will be a precedent-setting case. Much of what happens will depend on court decisions. This is a legal decision, but it is on all of us, obviously, to be out in the streets and learn to protect each other and whatever institutions we're working within, whether you're in a university or a workplace, to...

ensure that everyone knows their rights, knows that they don't need to open the door to ICE without a judicial warrant, that they don't need to readily hand over immigration information in any way, shape or form. And that, you know, I do think people should be realising that if you are observing democratic leadership now,

It is a sorry tale of genuflection, acquiescence and priorities as relate to upholding deeply conservative centrism that is not interested in shifting material conditions in the United States. So we really do have to be taking care of each other and ourselves on a community level and a different kind of organizational level.

You know, I've never been particularly involved in party politics in my organising and, you know, I was never even a Bernie door knocker. That was not... You know, I would have much preferred Bernie to win, but it's never really been my focus. But if that is the sort of thing people are involved in, yes, there are candidates like Zoran Mandani, who is a man running for mayor in New York City on a fantastic left-wing campaign, very worth getting behind. But on the whole, if you're worried about

the immediate threats of Trump's actions, Musk's actions, that's going to be a kind of defensive position reliant on community organising rather than hoping that anyone in the leadership of the opposition will put up a significant fight. You've been listening to Politics Theory Other. If you've been enjoying PTO and finding it useful, please do consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to bring in new listeners.

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