Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “So… What Can the Democrats Do Now?” with Yascha Mounk

Transcript

“So… What Can the Democrats Do Now?” with Yascha Mounk · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:07
  The most important country in the world, the indispensable nation, the most powerful nation
• 0:13
  in the world, gets to choose between two leaders. One of home is an unrepentant liar who
• 0:20
  has no respect for the norms of democracy and wants to subvert the independent judiciary
• 0:26
  and all the independent institutions that make America great. And the other is a corpse.
• 0:32
  Or, you know, a close to being a corpse. That's a conundrum that many people suspected
• 0:38
  we had before Thursday night. It's one that we now, a certain we face. So this episode
• 0:44
  is about the positives of what Democrats might be able to do about it, what people who
• 0:49
  don't want Donald Trump to become president might be able to do about it at this late
• 0:53
  juncture. I wasn't going to do a debate episode. I thought, you know, debates don't move
• 0:58
  the needle really on the opinion polls. This one is very, very early. There are many, many
• 1:04
  months left to go before the election. And, you know, I'm not going to get into the horse
• 1:08
  race. I want to talk about the big things. I want to talk about the big issues. The future
• 1:11
  of democracy. I want to keep you guys focused on what really matters rather than getting
• 1:16
  into the minutiae of the political battle. However, Joe Biden has left me no choice.
• 1:25
  That was an extraordinary revelatory insight into cognitive decline. And, you know, when
• 1:34
  people say debates don't matter. And I've sort of been saying this as well, you know,
• 1:38
  Barack Obama lost the first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012. You know, Donald Trump
• 1:43
  lost the first debate against Hillary Clinton. What that normally means is that if you have
• 1:49
  a gap, if you don't do a good performance, it doesn't undermine the fundamental basis
• 1:56
  on which you're asking to have the job of the presidency. Like people forget about
• 2:01
  minus nephews. They forget about things that were accidental to that night that were
• 2:07
  kind of, I suppose, arbitrary. What they're not going to forget is something that reveals
• 2:13
  something fundamental about the candidates. Certainly not if that thing is likely to
• 2:18
  get worse over time, not better. Like when Obama lost the first debate to Mitt Romney
• 2:24
  in 2012, he lost it because he was having a bad night. If the reason why he'd lost it
• 2:29
  had been because the top of his head opened up and an alien jumped out and said, I am
• 2:33
  in control of President Obama and I will only grow bigger over the next four years. Then
• 2:39
  everyone would be like, oh, that's not just a bad debate. That's actually telling us
• 2:43
  something about the candidate's ability to do their job. And that, I fear, is what we
• 2:49
  saw in President Biden on Thursday night. The worst thing about it for me is not that
• 2:55
  he's old and doodering. The worst thing about the debate was that it showed me he's incapable
• 3:02
  of connecting with the American people on big issues. He's incapable of thinking about
• 3:07
  things and articulating them in big, expansive, sweeping ways, the way that a president needs
• 3:12
  to to be able to unite a country. Donald Trump is very bad at this as well, but he's
• 3:17
  not that bad. And I wonder if that's a function of age. It certainly seems to be. I remember
• 3:24
  that as my grandparents grew old, or once they were into their 80s and then their 90s,
• 3:30
  like little things became very big. They'd sit there in their retirement village and they
• 3:35
  spent a lot of time looking at the birds quarreling over a bird feeder outside. They'd
• 3:41
  know that they had that day to do the laundry and then go and pick up something from the
• 3:46
  bakery and those things would consume all of the rest of their attention because little
• 3:52
  things get big. They would notice a fraying stitch on a little piece of clothing that
• 3:57
  they would never have noticed when they were like busy with big shit because they were
• 4:01
  45 years old and they had lives to run. I can't tell if that's what's happening here,
• 4:07
  but Joe Biden seemed relentlessly fixated on stammering on about minor quibbles instead
• 4:13
  of articulating a vision that could bring people together. I'll give you a couple of examples
• 4:19
  of that in Justice Sec before we speak with Yasha Monk. But the other thing I want to
• 4:23
  note about the debate that I found so disheartening and I wasn't even going to watch the damn
• 4:27
  thing. I was like, you know, this is the first debate. It doesn't matter. It's not about
• 4:32
  the big issues, but as my text, as my phone started blowing up with text messages, I started
• 4:37
  streaming at least just the audio of it as I was wandering around the streets of Sydney.
• 4:42
  What I found as alarming as Joe Biden's decline was the fact that Donald Trump has obviously
• 4:50
  taken his campaign's advice and is doing a reasonably good job of not sounding batshit
• 4:56
  crazy like he lies at a million miles a minute. That's to be expected. But he didn't rant
• 5:03
  and wail and perhaps the format of the debate also assisted this because their mics were
• 5:07
  being cut off and there was no audience for him to play to, but he seemed like he was
• 5:11
  leaning into the most rational and reasonable version of himself that he could present.
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  So when you have watered down quasi rational reasonable Donald Trump up against a president
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  who is lost and rambling and focused on tiny things and even the tiny things he loses
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  the thread of and there's no reason to believe that this is arbitrary or contingent on the
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  circumstances of that debate rather than being revelatory of something deeper about his
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  cognitive condition. And when you understand that at that age of life, things can move
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  quite fast in terms of your decline. I mean, he's certainly a very different person than
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  he was four years ago. You know, the debate is the election is still many months away.
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  What's going to happen between now and then and then four years in office? What does he
• 6:01
  look like at the end of four years? Can anyone seriously say that they don't expect that
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  Kamala Harris would end up being president if they vote for Joe Biden? If so, why not
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  just give it to her now and let her run on it? I mean, she would not be my ideal candidate,
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  but I do not want Donald Trump to be running the United States for the next four years.
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  So I just want to give you some examples of the kind of thing I'm talking about when
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  I say that Biden is focused on on narrow specifics, the things that leapt out to me where
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  I saw an opportunity for Democrats to be able to articulate to Americans their vision
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  of what's wrong with Donald Trump and why a democratic future is a better one, that
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  Joe Biden completely missed the mark on. The first is abortion, which should be a slam
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  dunk for Democrats. They sit where most Americans sit, which is abortion should be safe, legal
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  and rare as Bill Clinton put it. It should not be left up to politicians to be finger wagging
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  at doctors and families as to what they should do with unwanted pregnancies. You know,
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  Joe Biden should have had a perfectly rehearsed stick about this. Instead, this is what happened
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  I support Roe V. Wade, which had three trimesters. The first time is between the woman and the
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  doctor. The second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. The third time is
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  between the doctor, I mean, between the woman and the state. The idea that the politicians,
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  that the founders want the politicians to be the ones making decisions to my woman's health
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  is ridiculous. That's the last, no politicians should be making that decision. A doctor should
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  be making those decisions. That's how it should be run. That's what you're going to do. And if
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  I'm elected, I'm going to restore Roe V. Wade. So that means he can take the life of the baby
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  in the ninth month and even after birth, because some states Democrat run take it after birth.
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  Again, the governor form, the governor of Virginia. This is what you need to say about abortion.
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  You need to say Republicans and Donald Trump talk a big game about personal freedom.
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  They talk about the liberty of the United States. They claim to be the party of small government.
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  And yet when it comes to one of the most important decisions that families can ever make,
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  which is when and how to have a child, a child that deserves their full attention and all of
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  the resources that they can put into it, a child that deserves not to be unwanted. They want
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  politicians in Washington DC to be telling you or politicians in state capitals to be telling you
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  how you can run your family. They want to be intervening in the health care system
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  and bossing around doctors about what the appropriate medical care that a woman should get is.
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  Now, I understand you could say as a Democrat, I understand that this is a fraught situation.
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  This is morally complicated. It is not an easy call to make. And there are people of good faith
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  right around this great nation of ours who have different ideas about the morality of either
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  terminating a fertilized egg. At what point of it being an embryo and a fetus, it gains
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  the rights of personhood. We all agree that in the third trimester it's getting too close.
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  And I think that abortion is always a morally complicated situation. Sometimes even a tragedy
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  that has to be made by families and doctors. But part of living in a democracy is living in a
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  society that is big enough to understand that each of us has their own perspective on things.
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  The different communities, different families, different faith traditions, including atheists
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  have different ways of approaching this issue. We are not a country in which one click gets to
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  boss around everybody else in which one religious donomination gets to tell everybody else how they
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  should live. And what the Republicans are doing, these hypocrites, this hypocrite on the stage next
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  to me, this man who has sex repeatedly with all kinds of people who cheats on his wife who pays
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  for abortions for other people now wants to point at you until you when you can do that,
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  when you can do the same thing that he does with total impunity. Since when are we the kind of
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  country that allows one small group of people to boss everybody else around to use the power of
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  the state to deploy the strong arm of the law for politicians to tell doctors and families how
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  they can run their lives. This is morally complicated. I respect you enough. I respect Americans
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  enough to allow Americans to make those decisions for themselves. That's what you say about abortion.
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  It's not that hard. You try to unite the country. You try to understand where anti-abortion people
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  are coming from. You try not to sound extreme. You don't quibble about trimesters. You don't talk
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  about how like the first and the second and the third is like that's getting down in the details.
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  That's my grandparents looking at the birds swabbling in the bird bath or the piece of
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  frayed cotton that happens to be on my jacket. Like you got to run this whole show, Joe. You got
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  to run the whole ship. So like articulate the biggest possible version, the 30,000 foot version
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  that speaks to everybody's hearts instead of quibbling with minutia. The second clip to try to
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  show you where the Democrats should be going and how Joe Biden is leading them astray is about
• 11:12
  climate change. President Trump, will you take any action as president to slow the climate crisis?
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  So I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air and we had it. We had
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  H2O. We had the best numbers ever and we did, we were using all forms of energy, all forms,
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  everything and yet during my four years I had the best environmental numbers ever and my top
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  environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage actually.
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  I don't know where the hell he's been. The idea that Andy he said is true. I passed
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  their most extensive climate change legislation and history and history. We find ourselves,
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  and by the way, black colleges, I came up with $15 billion for HBCU's historic black universities
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  and colleges because they don't have the kind of contributors that they have to build these
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  laboratories and all that. Any black student is capable and college is doing any white student
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  can do. They just have the money but now they'll be able to get those jobs and high tech.
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  We're in a situation where the idea that he is conclaiming to have done something that had
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  the cleanest water, the cleanest water, he had done a damn thing with the environment. He
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  out of the Paris Peace Corps, climate accord, I immediately joined it because if we
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  reach 1.5 degrees Celsius at any one point where there's no way back, the only existential
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  threat to humanity is climate change and he didn't do a damn thing about it. He must undo all
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  the life done. The Paris Accord was going to cost us a trillion dollars and China nothing and
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  Russia nothing and India nothing. It was a ripoff of the United States. While that's inspiring,
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  that'll have him jump on off the couches and applauding and living rooms right across the United
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  States of America. I mean, firstly, if you want to take John Trump's bait, you can certainly say,
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  what the hell are you talking about with water and air? That has nothing to do. That's not what
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  climate change is about. Listen, the science here is settled, you need to say. You need to say,
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  I understand that there is a Republican spin machine that is making a lot of people feel like
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  because there may have been some inaccurate predictions in the past or sometimes science gets
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  things wrong. There is uncertainty in climate science. Of course, there's uncertainty in all
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  science. The one thing that we absolutely know for certain is that the emissions that we are
• 13:44
  currently pumping into the atmosphere are making hurricanes stronger. They're making droughts
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  more intense. They're making storms worse. They're making your plane sit on the tarmac more
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  frequently because there are more and more thunderstorms. They're making turbulence in the air
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  worse. At the very best case scenario, if we do nothing, if we do what what President Trump and
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  the oil lobby wants us to do, then your future and your kids' future is going to be a lot more
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  expensive and it's frankly going to be a pain in the ass. There are going to be refugee flows all
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  over the world because of disruptions to the monsoon. Our great farmers are going to find it harder
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  to get water. There are going to be fights in this country. We're going to rip ourselves apart
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  because of droughts and because of the sheer cost of rebuilding from storms like Hurricane Sandy
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  and Hurricane Katrina. We don't want to live in a world where we're constantly getting
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  battered by super storms. We don't want to live in a world where farmers have to move
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  hundreds of miles to find the correct sources of water. We don't want to live in a world where
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  we're bankrupting ourselves by constantly having to struggle with dicks and dams and levees and
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  whatever else we need to mitigate a problem that we ourselves are causing and that we have the
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  opportunity to fix. An opportunity might I add that can actually make us money instead of
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  costing us money. If we just shifted some of the revenue that we're currently putting into
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  subsidizing the oil industry, into subsidizing clean energy and clean jobs instead, we're going to
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  have to make this transition someday. We might as well make it now. Talk about the big picture. Talk
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  about how it actually affects people. Talk about the stress of living in a world which is a pain
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  in the ass to do anything in because it's constantly being battered by droughts and hurricanes
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  and super storms. Don't talk about the Paris climate accord. I mean, for Jesus, it infuriates me.
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  You know, at least what Donald Trump is saying, even though it's a load of horse shit, it has clarity
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  like crystal clear, clean drinking water. You can picture that. There's an image in your mind of
• 15:45
  like a mountain stream of like going hiking crystal clear air like you think about standing on
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  top of a mountain and looking out over a vista of clean air. And then we hear about the
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  fucking Paris climate accords. Give me a break. Okay, the last and most important clip because this
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  is the one that scares the pants off me more than any other is the issue of democracy and the
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  robustness of American institutions and America continuing to cohere as a functioning demos as a
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  functioning state with independent institutions. This again should have been a slam dunk because
• 16:22
  this is really the case that I believe the Democrats should have been making all along and should
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  be hammering home. It should be along the lines of we are a United States of America. Donald
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  Trump is divisive. He wants to undermine the institutions that make this country great. And I'll
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  show you, you know, five ways of doing it. He wants to, you know, install his own judges on federal
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  courts. He wants to go after whistleblowers and he wants to go after his own political enemies and
• 16:47
  he wants to install, you know, an attorney general who will do his bidding bidding and who won't be
• 16:52
  impartial. Look at the firing of Jim Comey. I mean, you know, you can go through, you could articulate
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  on a bumper sticker basically five ways in which Donald Trump is antithetical to the principles
• 17:04
  of American democracy. And the Democrats haven't done that, which is why I'm sort of flailing around
• 17:09
  and even coming up with it off the top of my head. But, you know, give me seven minutes and I'll
• 17:12
  draw on the back of a napkin for the Democratic Party if they need me to. Here is, and the one
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  event that sort of exemplifies this, of course, is January 6th, which is the one moment where we
• 17:21
  really saw enacted the spirit of defiance against American democracy that that Trumpism
• 17:29
  inhabits. So here's the exchange about January 6th. And Nancy Pelosi, if you just watched the news
• 17:35
  from two days ago, on tape to her daughter, who's a documentary filmmaker, they say,
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  what she's saying, oh no, it's my responsibility. I was responsible for this because I offered her
• 17:47
  10,000 soldiers or national guard and she turned them down and the mayor of in writing, by the way,
• 17:53
  the mayor in writing turned it down, the mayor of DC. They turned it down. I offered 10,000 because
• 18:00
  I could see. I had virtually nothing to do. They asked me to go make a speech. I could see what
• 18:06
  was happening. Everybody was saying they're going to be there on January 6th. They're going to be
• 18:09
  there. And I said, you know what? That's a lot of people coming. You could feel it. You could feel it
• 18:13
  too and you could feel it. And I said, they ought to have some national guard or whatever. And I
• 18:19
  offered it to her. And she now admits that she turned it down and it was the same day. She was,
• 18:25
  I don't know, she can't be very happy with her daughter because it made her into a liar. She
• 18:29
  said, I take full responsibility for January 6th. President Biden? Look, he encouraged those folks
• 18:38
  to go up to Capitol Hill. Number one, I sat in the dining room off the Oval Office. He sat there
• 18:43
  for three hours. Three hours watching, begging, being big by his vice president and a number of
• 18:49
  his colleagues in the Republican side as well to do something, to call for a stop, to end it.
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  Instead, he talked, they talked about these people being patriots and great patrons of America.
• 19:00
  In fact, he says he'll now forgive them for what they've done. You know, they've been convicted.
• 19:06
  He says he wants to commute to sentences and say that no. He went to every single court in the
• 19:12
  nation. I don't know how many cases, scores cases, including the Supreme Court. And they said,
• 19:18
  no, no, this guy, this guy is responsible for doing what is being done. He did do a damn thing.
• 19:26
  And these people should be a jail. And they should be the ones who are being held accountable.
• 19:31
  And he wants to let them all out. And now he says that he loses again, such a whiner that he is,
• 19:36
  that it could be a bloodbath. Thank you, President Biden. President Trump.
• 19:40
  Oh, the lot of all things, Holly. January 6th is not about January 6th. It's not about sitting in
• 19:48
  the dining room. It's not about commuting the sentences. It's not about who did what on that
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  date is an opportunity for people who don't want Donald Trump to become president to articulate
• 19:57
  why violence in America has no place, why the values of democracy and unity transcend any partisan
• 20:08
  political suspicion that there was something phony about the election. I mean, you have to say,
• 20:12
  this is a man Donald Trump, you know, he's talking about the documentary filmmaker who apparently
• 20:19
  was, you know, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi. So it's not about whether the National Guard was there.
• 20:24
  This is about an individual who has no understanding of the traditions of American democracy is not
• 20:30
  a scholar of American and a student of American political history. He's never read the decoration
• 20:35
  of independence. He's never read the Bible. He postures and pontificates as if he was a man of
• 20:41
  faith and he postures and pontificates as if he was a man of patriotism. His form of patriotism is
• 20:46
  the patriotism of the tyrant, the patriotism of the man who is only in it for themselves and who
• 20:52
  wraps themselves in the flag in order to get whatever they want. He is a person who will undermine
• 20:58
  the independence of the judiciary by stacking it with judges who he wants. Just look at what he's
• 21:03
  done to the federal court system and look away. He's done to the Supreme Court and any election
• 21:08
  outcome that does not benefit him. He will create rumors about Joe Biden in that speech
• 21:13
  in that answer. Just said, oh, there were all these cases that went challenge. He mentioned
• 21:19
  it in passing. He said, I don't know how many. Why don't you know how many Mr. President? Why don't
• 21:25
  you know the exact number of cases that the Trump campaign brought claiming that there was
• 21:31
  something fishy about the 2020 election that was shot down? Why don't you know that? Why isn't
• 21:36
  that the most important thing that you have to remember tonight to say, listen, there will always
• 21:42
  be suspicions about the American political system. We are a very big country. You can't get
• 21:47
  through out and 50 million people all voting without some people seeing what they think are
• 21:51
  irregularities without some people thinking that something's up without some people saying,
• 21:55
  well, I don't know any voters for the other guy. So surely there must be something fishy about
• 21:59
  this election. But our electoral process is secure. Let us not become a tinpot dictatorship where
• 22:05
  every time there's an election, the sore loser who isn't man enough to accept the result,
• 22:11
  starts creating rumors about there being something illegitimate about the election. And even then
• 22:17
  when election watchers and officials and courts step in to check it out and they say, no, this
• 22:22
  was kosher. He continues to whine like a little bitch. Well, let's not become that country.
• 22:27
  Our elections are fair. Our elections are robust. Like there will always be reasons for you to have
• 22:34
  skepticism or cynicism. I understand that. It's always difficult when elections don't go your way.
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  I understand that. I want to be a president for all Americans. And I want to uphold the independence
• 22:45
  of the justice system of the legislature and of the executive branch so that all of those great
• 22:51
  institutions that our founding fathers were so wise to put in place like crucial jigsaw pieces
• 22:56
  of a jigsaw set. Don't just get up ended by this man who wants to scatter the jigsaw pieces
• 23:02
  all over the floor and reassemble and whatever way he wants to. He does not respect the values
• 23:07
  of America. And listen, I mean, it's what Joe Biden really needs to say. I mean, what
• 23:12
  Democrat Democrats really need to get to is basically the spirit of what Barack Obama was saying
• 23:16
  before he was president when he gave his Democratic National Convention speech. I think it was
• 23:21
  2004. And his point was there is no red America and blue America. There is no black America and
• 23:29
  white America. There is only the United States of America. We are too divided today, Joe Biden needs
• 23:37
  to say. And our one of our central causes of division is a simplistic adversarial way of thinking
• 23:44
  that is embodied by this man. By this man, I understand if you love this man, I certainly
• 23:50
  understand if you hate this man. I don't want either love or hate towards our political leaders.
• 23:55
  I want our political leaders to get the job done. I want our political leaders to work for you,
• 24:00
  not for themselves. I want our political leaders to respect the institutions of this country,
• 24:05
  the justice system, the media, you know, the legislature and the executive that our founding
• 24:12
  fathers put in place. I want us all to be one America. Don't elect a divisive man who doesn't respect
• 24:20
  the pieces of the mosaic that make up this great complex nation of ours. We all have to find a
• 24:26
  way to get along. And he is the most divisive threat to the unity of these great United States.
• 24:32
  Like that has to be the core message. Then you can also talk about inflation. You can talk
• 24:37
  about the fact that Trump wants to impose essentially a 10% tax on everything, which is a tariff.
• 24:42
  I didn't even hear that come up. I don't know if it was during a part that I didn't listen to.
• 24:45
  But he should be ramming home that if you're worried about prices going up, prices are definitely
• 24:50
  going to go up. If you put a 10% tax on everything, a 10% tariff, Trump calls it, but it functionally
• 24:55
  gets passed on to the consumer as a tax. You know, there were all kind of other wows as that you could
• 24:59
  go into. Like Donald Trump saying that illegal immigration puts pressure on social security and
• 25:04
  Medicare. I mean, you know, for a start, it always frustrates me that we don't make a clear distinction
• 25:10
  between legal immigration and illegal immigration because the left is so scared of, I don't know,
• 25:15
  sounding like they're unwoke about illegal immigration. But if I were Joe Biden, I would also be
• 25:19
  saying, listen, this guy makes a big hoo-ha about the southern border. And the southern border,
• 25:27
  let's be honest, is a shambles. We have to do better. We have to do something about it. We have
• 25:31
  to fix immigration in this country. And we had a bipartisan bill to do so until Donald Trump's
• 25:35
  lackeys, Donald Trump instructed his lackeys not to vote for it because he wants this to be
• 25:40
  a wound, a sore, an open, festering sore for him to be able to run on because he wants America to
• 25:45
  get worse as long as it benefits him. But the real thing that you don't understand about Donald
• 25:51
  Trump and immigration is that he wants to dramatically reduce legal immigration. He wants to reduce
• 25:57
  the number of skilled workers who are coming into this country. He wants to make it harder for you
• 26:01
  to get a brilliant doctor from South Asia. He wants it harder for tech companies to, he wants to
• 26:08
  make it harder for tech companies to be able to get the talent that they need from abroad. He wants
• 26:12
  him an America that is old-fashioned, middle-aged, and mediocre. People who come to this country
• 26:18
  are dynamic, they're forward-looking, they generally produce more than they consume.
• 26:24
  The nasty little secret of Donald Trump's immigration policy is that he distracts you with
• 26:28
  questions about illegal immigration. But if he gets in, what he's really going to target is legal
• 26:33
  immigration. He did nothing about illegal immigration when he was in power. He didn't even manage
• 26:38
  to build the wall. That has to basically be the way that you articulate that. Then the whole
• 26:44
  social media and social security and Medicare scare thing that Donald Trump said where he said that
• 26:49
  migrants are coming in here and that's why we can't pay for social security and Medicare. Hello,
• 26:54
  migrants tend to be young. You don't have a lot of 70-year-olds coming across the border. You don't
• 26:58
  even have a lot of 70-year-olds coming in legally. They shift the balance in favor of people who
• 27:04
  are going to afford to pay for social security in Medicare. The other thing is illegal immigrants
• 27:08
  specifically, illegal immigrants, they pay into social security through their taxes because they
• 27:13
  have to pay tax, but they don't get to draw down social security or Medicare. So they're paying
• 27:18
  into the system and they're not taking out of the system. They are, by definition, a net gain.
• 27:25
  Look, I could go on and on about this. Suffice it to say that I think a lot of the analysis,
• 27:29
  which is focusing on specific gaps or talking specifically about Biden's age,
• 27:36
  are somewhat missing the point. It may be true that his age is the cause of the problem that
• 27:42
  I'm articulating, but the problem that I'm articulating is I think a larger and deeper
• 27:48
  chasm than merely his age. He may always have suffered from this to some extent and it may be
• 27:55
  exacerbated by his cognitive decline, but it's his inability to talk about big issues that face
• 28:01
  America in ways that resonate with the person who's watching. Trump has his own strange,
• 28:06
  deranged, parallel universe of conversation that lands with some 30 to 40% of people.
• 28:13
  You only need another 10 or 11% of people to think that he's preferable to the other guy
• 28:19
  to get him over the line. Trump is not going to win a majority of votes in the United States.
• 28:24
  He doesn't need to. He only needs to win a majority in those four to six swing states.
• 28:31
  If you put him up against somebody who not only can't walk properly and can't talk properly
• 28:37
  and clearly can't hold a train of thought properly, but lacks the ability to speak about things
• 28:44
  in big 30,000-foot ways that resonate with voters' lives and make them feel like he is someone
• 28:50
  who can take them on to the next chapter of the Great American story. If he could do that if
• 28:55
  he was dottering an old, but every time he spoke, he sounded like a sage. He sounded like a
• 29:01
  wise old man on a mountain top. Then you might be able to get enough voters thinking, you know what?
• 29:07
  The president doesn't need to be agile. The president can be like an ancient person who sits on a
• 29:14
  hill in the White House and people come to him and they say, what should we do about this? And
• 29:19
  because he was around at the signing of the Declaration of Independence and he and George Washington
• 29:23
  both figured it out, he's like, you know what? You should do this, but before you do it, talk to
• 29:29
  so-and-so because you're going to need the House Judiciary Committee on side. So you don't want
• 29:34
  them to feel like they've been left out in the coal. So get the head of the House Judiciary Committee
• 29:39
  to talk to the Senate subcommittee and by the way, put in a call to the ambassador to Denmark
• 29:44
  because if we do this, it's going to have an impact on the price of, you know,
• 29:49
  herring and the North Sea fishing stock could be implicated. We don't want them to get caught by
• 29:53
  surprise. Like that's what you want. You want the person who's got the big overview. It doesn't
• 29:57
  need to be able to say that quickly. He doesn't need to be able to need to be able to say that
• 30:00
  nimbly, but he needs to be able to think it and he needs to be able to articulate the fact that he
• 30:07
  can think it to the people of America and the people of the world, which leads me to the conclusion
• 30:14
  that there is no way Joe Biden can win this election, which leads me to the conclusion that he
• 30:20
  has to step down. Sadly, he can't be replaced unless he does step down. Now that I want to figure out
• 30:28
  how to do that, I was very gratified to see come across my social media feed, an article in the
• 30:34
  spectator by one of my favorite thinkers, Yasha Monk. The article was written right after the
• 30:39
  debate. It's called Democrats have led America to the brink of the abyss and subtitled the party
• 30:45
  has for too long prized polite lies over uncomfortable truths. Yasha has been on this show before
• 30:53
  to discuss his great book, The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time, which may be
• 30:59
  the best sort of post-mortem of wokeness. I hope it's a post-mortem and not an ongoing description
• 31:06
  of a biography that is in ascendance. I feel like it's probably a post-mortem. Yasha is a writer. He's
• 31:11
  an academic. He's known for his work on the crisis of democracy and the defense of philosophically
• 31:16
  liberal values. His other books are the great experiment, why diverse democracies fall apart and
• 31:22
  how they can endure. The age of responsibility, luck, choice and the welfare state and the people
• 31:28
  versus democracy, why our freedom is in danger and how to save it. I read out those titles, which I
• 31:33
  don't normally do, just so you can get a sense of how long he's been thinking about exactly this
• 31:37
  kind of stuff. He has a proposal about what the Democrats might be able to do. I haven't actually
• 31:45
  recorded this episode yet. Normally, I do the intros afterwards, but I wanted to get this off my
• 31:49
  chest before I spoke to Yasha. I hope you and I both enjoy this chat with one another. Yasha,
• 31:55
  Mark. But let's just start with the basics. Is there anything that Democrats can do? At this point,
• 32:07
  Democrats can't get rid of Joe Biden. Is that right? I still think that they can. I think that
• 32:12
  they have to. There is no obvious institutional procedural way for them to get rid of Joe Biden.
• 32:20
  That's what I mean. That's a pretty big catch to be like, they have to, but they can't, but they
• 32:26
  should, but they won't, but they could, but they might. It seems to me that at least from what we know
• 32:31
  publicly so far, they haven't properly tried. I do think that Joe Biden respects Barack Obama,
• 32:39
  his old boss tremendously. Obama came out publicly supporting Biden after the debate. Joe Biden
• 32:46
  relies on the support of senior democratic leaders in the House, in the Senate, and other institutions.
• 32:52
  Those so far have been defending Joe Biden. Joe Biden relies on his vice president and on
• 32:59
  key governors around the state, like Ketchon Whitmer and Michigan and the governor of California.
• 33:05
  Either of you might and theory replace him. Both of them for good strategic reasons have been
• 33:12
  defending him, because they don't want to be seen as, you know, as those who would most benefit
• 33:17
  from his knifeing, they didn't want to be seen with a knife in their hands. They will grudgingly
• 33:21
  step up, if called, with humility in their heart on behalf of the American people, but they would
• 33:27
  never be so bold as to suggest themselves. But all the things that you're talking about, Yasha,
• 33:32
  basically, these are, these are, these are, these are customary. When you say he relies on this
• 33:36
  support, he relies in an informal way on this support. I'm just speaking through it,
• 33:40
  if someone who comes from a parliamentary democracy, like, if he was in a parliamentary democracy,
• 33:46
  he would have been out on Friday morning and some, and the party would have just nominated
• 33:51
  someone else as they did in Australia in 2015, 10 months before an election in 2013, less than
• 33:57
  three months before an election, you know, they just brought back in the last guy, Kevin Rudd,
• 34:00
  they were just like, okay, for 83 days, you're the prime minister because we're polling badly.
• 34:05
  So now you can, it's, it was, it would be as if the Democrats just went back and said, okay,
• 34:09
  Barack Obama is now the president. He's going to run for the next term, like that happens in
• 34:14
  Poland. And you know, just one of the things that I've learned in, in the last 10 years of going
• 34:18
  around the world, talking about various topics, including populism is that people always hate
• 34:22
  their local electoral system. And they always think of it as some magical other electoral system
• 34:27
  that's going to be better. And that includes people in parliamentary systems. In England, for example,
• 34:32
  every time I give a talk, somebody asks, well, wouldn't we be much better off proportional
• 34:35
  representation? But it turns out to be often overlooked with strengths of their systems. And I
• 34:40
  think one of the real strengths of a parliamentary system that they have in Australia and obviously in
• 34:43
  England is precisely that ability to change leader without having to wait for an election, for,
• 34:51
  you know, back benches and parliament and other, you know, more key figures in the past to say,
• 34:56
  this has gone so, so far off the rails, we got to swap out horses in the middle of a journey.
• 35:04
  And you're right that, you know, in principle, there's going to be a democratic national convention
• 35:09
  where Biden has to be confirmed. So, you know, some of the delegates could, you know, say we do not
• 35:16
  believe that the president is mentally fit to run, even for with delegates for him, we're going
• 35:20
  to vote for somebody else. But then I'm going to put in some rules and regulations recently that
• 35:24
  make that much harder. So I think institutionally, it's very hard. You're absolutely right. If
• 35:31
  to a Biden ends up, and the difficulty, I'd correct me if I'm wrong, I should be part of the
• 35:37
  difficulty is that we've already had the primaries, even though they were uncontested and nobody ran
• 35:42
  against him, the primaries did take place. So had his aides been more forthright about his limitations,
• 35:50
  cognitively, presumably prior to the primaries, then maybe we would have had more of an opportunity
• 35:57
  as that right, because then the delegates from it from the primaries would not be pledged to him.
• 36:01
  Yes, absolutely. So let me make two points, right. So the first is just, you have right
• 36:05
  of an institutionally, it's very, very hard for him to replace Biden. And perhaps Biden is so stubborn
• 36:09
  that even if everybody around him says, look, Joe, we love you, you trust us, you cannot run,
• 36:15
  he still would. That certainly is possible. It hasn't been tried, right? We don't know. Perhaps
• 36:19
  some of this is going on privately, right? Perhaps when Barack Obama is publicly tweeting very
• 36:24
  laudable things, laudatory things about Biden, that's because privately he's making a push. But
• 36:29
  so far as we know, so far has been reported, there hasn't been be attempt by the people who are
• 36:33
  most influential in Biden to say, Joe, you've got a step aside. And I should hope that if they try
• 36:38
  that, he would actually comply, he would actually recognize the need for that. Now, the second
• 36:44
  point is absolutely right. I'm furious with Democrats for making a series of missteps
• 36:50
  over the course of the last years that have gotten us into the sovereignty shambles.
• 36:53
  The only reason why Biden ended up being the candidate in 2020 is that all of these rising
• 36:58
  potentially moderate democratic politicians got the moment completely wrong, ran after public
• 37:05
  opinion on Twitter, you know, echoed what the most inflammatory people were saying on Twitter
• 37:09
  at the time. And therefore, forced primary voters to choose between a hard left over party
• 37:15
  and Joe Biden who was too old to know what was going on on Twitter. That's part of what
• 37:19
  set up the problem. And there's already questions about his mental state in 2020.
• 37:24
  Clearly, he wasn't a better mental condition than he is now, but there's already questions about
• 37:28
  what he was getting rather to old and perhaps a little bit seen up. You know, the second thing
• 37:33
  they did wrong was to choose Kamala Harris and they chose Kamala Harris explicitly for demographic
• 37:40
  reasons, which both narrowed the candidate field for vice presidency in a way that I think was
• 37:45
  a mistake for us, probably other black female candidates like Susan Rice would have done much better.
• 37:49
  It also weakened her further in the eyes of people because they didn't think you chose
• 37:53
  who you thought of as a best candidate. You explicitly chose somebody who feared these demographic
• 37:57
  requirements. But the third thing that I'm most furious about and that responds exactly to what
• 38:01
  you were asking, Josh, is these concerns are not clear. I wrote about this over two years ago
• 38:08
  saying it is very clear that the serious concerns about the extent of Biden's mental decline
• 38:16
  and that's going to be a disaster in the elections. We've got to change this out. I was having
• 38:19
  many conversations with pandits privately last fall who are saying we're hearing really concerning
• 38:25
  things from the inner circle about how Biden is doing. But the taboo in the media about actually
• 38:31
  telling readers what was journalist knew held up until a few months ago when people like the
• 38:38
  columnist Ezra Klein from the New York Times, when people like David Axelrod, the former Obama
• 38:44
  campaign manager and strategist finally publicly said perhaps we should consider swapping Biden out.
• 38:50
  And I respect for being some of the first to save us within a certain kind of democratic bubble.
• 38:55
  But that was too little too late. By that time the primaries had run. By that time the easy way to
• 39:00
  actually give Americans a choice in who they want to run against Trump was basically over.
• 39:07
  And so that willingness of Democrats at each of those junctures to either run after the
• 39:14
  silliest voices on Twitter or prefer comforting lies over hard truths is how we got into this
• 39:21
  down mess. And let's just pause for a moment on number two there which is the demography of the
• 39:28
  vice president because I feel that this conundrum would be somewhat less diabolical if there
• 39:34
  was a vice president who was widely liked and who people thought was up to the job of running
• 39:41
  the country. You remind us in your excellent piece in the spectator that prior to the to Biden's
• 39:47
  vice presidential pick there was not just a tacit nod towards what you might call I'd
• 39:54
  as both D.I. politics we would call it today. But he explicitly came out and said it's going
• 40:01
  to be a woman. And then was he explicit about it being a woman of color prior to picking Kamala
• 40:09
  Harris? Yes I believe so. So what happened is sort of different stages of narrowing the demographic
• 40:15
  field. And this is of course at the height of the summer of 2020 and the moment in which Democrats
• 40:27
  really believed that a set of activists voices in working slogans like abolisher police which
• 40:35
  choose credit to Biden was clearly opposed, represented the future of a democratic party,
• 40:41
  represented the future of where in particular it's supposed to base of young people and people
• 40:46
  of color stood. Now of course the fascinating story sits on a side note is that that whole
• 40:53
  view of the American public has just gone completely belly up. But only is it now obvious that
• 41:00
  you know the number of people who support an ideal like abolisher police is tiny.
• 41:05
  And this should have been obvious at the time because when you poured African Americans even
• 41:09
  at the height of a protest over George Floyd for example, a majority of them had real and very
• 41:15
  understandable concerns about police violence. But they said we don't want no police. We want
• 41:21
  police for we can trust right. We want to be able to call on police when there's a serious
• 41:27
  crime that's committed in our neighborhood. The idea we want to abolish police is absurd and
• 41:31
  that was clear in opinion polls even even even that that time. So so Democrats fought look we need
• 41:39
  to do what we can to mobilize these these younger non-wide voters and the way to do that is both by
• 41:44
  moving to the left and the substantive policies just and for all of these forms of demographic
• 41:49
  representation. And so they ended up choosing something like Kamala Harris to be on the ticket
• 41:54
  and the idea that that was really going to mobilize these respect voters, these young people of
• 41:59
  color, even for Kamala Harris, they're very poorly in the primaries and important for primaries
• 42:04
  including among these groups. So they weren't actually looking at reality when they were making
• 42:09
  their choice. And so yes, Biden started to say it's definitely going to be a woman. And when the
• 42:13
  moment he said that, you know, any white woman would have come to be a disappointment to be you
• 42:19
  know, more like the politics minded constituents in the party because that suddenly would have
• 42:23
  been sort of a standard choice. And so the moment he said it's definitely going to be a woman
• 42:27
  when the pressure was huge, but it had to be a black woman. And basically by the time that
• 42:32
  the campaign was vetting candidates, it was very, very clear that it was going to be a black woman.
• 42:37
  And I don't don't don't don't don't remember how explicitly the campaign at that stage said
• 42:41
  that's only considering black women, but it's very clear. I remember it being obvious before the
• 42:46
  pick. I mean, I remember knowing before the pick that it was going to be same with the Supreme Court
• 42:51
  nomination, you know, it was made it was made abundantly clear of of Justice Jackson. So
• 42:58
  to be fair to the Kamala Harris of pre 2020, I do have a feeling that if she had run on her
• 43:04
  tough on crime, the law and order, I've been a prosecutor. I'm a smart savvy legal mind with a
• 43:11
  cany instinct for politics. And I don't broke any shit from criminals. If that had persisted,
• 43:18
  similarly, if Elizabeth Warren had kept on banging on about economic justice instead of getting
• 43:22
  sidetracked by social justice, and you know, even Pete Buttigieg, if you know, there's this
• 43:28
  cavalcade of people when you cast your mind back to the 2020 primaries who had they not allowed
• 43:34
  themselves to get swept up in what now seems to be the hysteria of that COVID induced,
• 43:40
  riot induced, you know, George Floyd induced moment, it's possible that there would have been,
• 43:45
  it's possible, in other words, that Kamala Harris would be, you know, a more viable presidential
• 43:51
  candidate than she is now. It's not that she's necessarily too woke. It's that she doesn't seem
• 43:55
  to have a spine and I don't think people know what she is. She just seems to go wherever the wind
• 44:00
  takes her. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. So look, the first book that Kamala Harris published
• 44:06
  was called, I'm blank on the exact name, but it's something like, you know, the call thesis was
• 44:13
  that she's a tough smart prosecutor who, you know, brought certain reforms to the California
• 44:19
  justice system, but who really was willing to go after the bad guys and was proud of it.
• 44:24
  And the title of that book reflected that. And I thought there was many things to like about the
• 44:30
  pitch she was making in parts of the Trump years. At one point, you know, she went to a very left
• 44:38
  wing political event and, you know, pointed to an American flag. And this isn't the aftermath
• 44:46
  of, you know, some far-right protests in the country and so on. And Kamala Harris said,
• 44:51
  this is our flag. Don't let them take that away from us, right? Don't let the far-right monopolize
• 44:56
  the flag. We should be patriotic Americans. And in those modes, I thought that she actually had
• 45:03
  pretty appealing pitch. And she did have some, this little hard to remember now, some really
• 45:08
  strong performances in the judiciary committee where people were watching her and saying, well,
• 45:12
  she's quite impressive. The problem, as you're saying, is that she vents one wildly to the left
• 45:20
  during the primaries and during the summer of 2020, because her advisors and herself clearly
• 45:27
  misread the mood or feel accurate, thinking that the most extreme voices on Twitter somehow
• 45:33
  represented where the average democratic primary voter actually sat. And as a result, she succeeded
• 45:40
  in really quite a remarkable feat, which is to make every constituency in the Democratic party
• 45:47
  distrust her. You know, I tend to be more moderate. My friends have in the party are on the center
• 45:54
  left. They do not trust her one moment. They feel that if the wind blows a little bit in the other
• 46:00
  side on Twitter or in the New York Times editorial board, she'll just go along with that. And one of
• 46:05
  the examples of this is that you're putting in charge of a Southern border. And because of her
• 46:09
  fears of activists, she refused to actually go and visit the Southern border that she was
• 46:14
  supposedly in charge of for a very, very long period of time. But I know, you know, people on the
• 46:20
  far left of the party, the robust progressives within the Democratic party don't trust her either.
• 46:25
  Because basically, look, she's effing some of the stuff that we've been saying. But, you know,
• 46:30
  for many years before that, she was this prosecutor in California talking about how tough she is.
• 46:36
  And, you know, she'll sell us down the river any moment that she decides. So we don't trust her
• 46:43
  either. That's really quite a remarkable feat. Not to your wider point, I think the best example of
• 46:48
  that is actually Bernie Sanders. I'm not a big fan of Bernie Sanders. But in 2016, he had a very,
• 46:53
  very effective pitch because he was really talking about economic inequality, about problems
• 47:00
  with the American economic system, you know, focusing his attacks on class lines. And that clearly
• 47:08
  resonated with a significant portion of the Democratic base. Now, his analysis between 2016 and 2020
• 47:15
  was that he did not do enough to mobilize basically, sort of, young workers' activists.
• 47:23
  And he mistook those people as standing for broader communities. And so he hired all of those
• 47:29
  identitarian figures as his spokesperson, as his key policy advisors between 2016 and 2020.
• 47:36
  And that's one of the reasons why his appeal significantly narrowed during those years.
• 47:41
  I think if Bernie had run the campaign, he ran in 2016 in 2020, plus, you know, a bunch of
• 47:47
  attacks on Donald Trump, he may very well have won that primary election.
• 47:54
  So let's fast forward to now then. And as you put it in your piece in the spectator, you say the
• 47:59
  Democrats now have to pick between three terrible options of running a man who's seen aisle,
• 48:05
  running a woman who's deeply unpopular, or splitting the party in an unsamely display of
• 48:11
  infighting and backroom daily. Let's assume that we don't want A or B. How does C work?
• 48:19
  Well, the most likely scenario that people have talked about is that, you know,
• 48:23
  Joe Biden announces that he will continue to be president until January 20th, 2025, that he will
• 48:30
  no longer be available as for Democratic parties normally. This releases all of the delegates to
• 48:37
  a Democratic national conventions that have already been selected and that do have some somewhat
• 48:42
  unclear, but but some real legal obligation to vote for Joe Biden as long as he is the candidate.
• 48:48
  To vote for whom ever they please. There's no legal reason why they have to nominate the sitting
• 48:55
  vice president when the person they are pledged to support drops out of the race. And so then there
• 49:01
  would be a summit attempt at the Democratic National Convention to coalesce around Biden's
• 49:08
  successor. Now, Kamala Harris is going to have a strong claim to be the successor because she was
• 49:14
  on the ticket as Joe Biden's running mate and she was seen as the heir apparent for that reason.
• 49:22
  At the same time, I think was a compelling argument against Kamala Harris, which is first of all
• 49:26
  that according to polls, she is as unpopular as Joe Biden is for a long time. She was
• 49:31
  more unpopular than Joe Biden. Secondly, that when her electoral appeal was put to the test
• 49:38
  in primaries in 2020, she did not perform very well. And so I don't think it's obvious that there
• 49:45
  is a clear clamor, but even from within the Democratic Party base to select Kamala Harris.
• 49:52
  Now, and I think, I mean, I guess you could just say, I mean, if people think that's unfair,
• 49:58
  you could just make the point that, look, if the president were to resign today,
• 50:04
  then it would be absolutely legitimate to accept Kamala, to expect that Kamala Harris would be
• 50:09
  the president until January 20th, 2025. But if he simply announces his intention not to run,
• 50:17
  yeah, if he simply announces his intention not to run, then the inevitability of the vice president
• 50:23
  is only as strong as the inevitability of the vice president in any scenario after their
• 50:30
  term in office. In other words, you know, it's not a, it's not a failure complete that the
• 50:34
  vice president is necessarily going to be the party's nominee. They aren't always. Dick Cheney
• 50:39
  didn't succeed, you know, didn't even try to succeed George W Bush. So yeah, I think then,
• 50:47
  but then you end up with a convention that's only four weeks before the election in which you've
• 50:52
  got the whole party arguing with itself and trying to bring down whoever the candidates are.
• 51:01
  It's not necessarily a good look and it gives Donald Trump all the ammunition he needs to make
• 51:07
  it seem like you're a basket case. Are you sure that that's better than running Corpse Pardon?
• 51:14
  Well, look, a few points. One is, the convention is about two and a half months before the
• 51:17
  election. I forget when exactly this, but it's customarily in August and I'm assuming. Oh, sorry,
• 51:22
  it's August. Yes, you're right. Yeah, I'm in August and the election is in the beginning of November,
• 51:25
  of course. I do worry about the fact that if the party doesn't manage to coalesce around a
• 51:31
  replacement candidate, that's going to look very messy. There's particular concerns that if
• 51:37
  it don't choose Kamala Harris, that somehow going to alienate all of these, you know, black voters
• 51:43
  that are supposed to be key to a democratic party success. I mean, I have two things to say in
• 51:47
  response to that. One of which is that it's actually among young voters and non-white voters,
• 51:53
  including black voters that the campaign is currently struggling. You know, Biden retains about
• 51:58
  as much as the vote of older white Americans as he did four years ago. It is those voters who are
• 52:03
  saying, we don't like this administration. We don't trust these people in politics. They're way too
• 52:06
  far to the left of us, especially in social and cultural issues. Also, it wouldn't be, I mean, it's
• 52:11
  not just not the case that black voters are supportive of woke candidates. The people who Kamala Harris,
• 52:17
  who you would lose if you knife Kamala Harris in the back, would be largely what university educated
• 52:22
  social justice activists who think that they're allies of black people, but the actual black
• 52:27
  democratic base is pretty conservative socially. Yes, absolutely. So it's clear that the
• 52:32
  the black electorate is actually the most conservative group within the democratic party for
• 52:39
  interesting, and once you think about it, obviously it's darker reasons, which is that black
• 52:44
  voters, because of a civil rights movement, and because frankly, the Republican party did have
• 52:49
  a strategy of trying to appeal to white voters with significant racial resentment in the 1970s,
• 52:55
  into some of the 1980s, never felt welcome in the Republican party. So if you think about it,
• 53:00
  it's not like all black people are somehow progressive or liberal. They have a distribution of
• 53:05
  views about questions like the importance of marriage or of a stable family or all the other
• 53:12
  kinds of cultural questions that split any other demographic group. They're also more religious
• 53:18
  than the average Democrats. They have more traditional family values type social outlets. That's an
• 53:22
  additional reason, but even if you forget about that, even if you say they have roughly the same
• 53:26
  distribution of preferences about cultural issues, you know, a conservative white person would
• 53:31
  simply vote for a Republican party for a long time, a conservative black person would not
• 53:35
  have voted for a Republican party for perfectly sensible reasons within that political context.
• 53:39
  Those reasons are going away, in part because the Republican party has actually been quite
• 53:44
  good at recruiting some visible black political figures, and frankly distancing itself,
• 53:49
  even under Donald Trump, from the kind of anti-black appeals that was a more significant party,
• 53:56
  part of a party's rhetoric in the past. And so, increasingly conservative and even moderate
• 54:03
  black voters, including of course, more conservative Latinos and others are saying,
• 54:08
  we don't have to vote for Democrats just because we're not white. We actually feel comfortable
• 54:11
  voting for the Republican party. And so, you know, the Democratic party says our bases,
• 54:15
  these young non-white people, we have to mobilize and get to the polls, that's true. That's
• 54:20
  that is an important part of the Democratic base, but you don't mobilize them by moving left,
• 54:25
  you're actually mobilizing, mobilizing them and win them over by moving to the center. They're
• 54:29
  not saying, you're not sufficiently woke for us, they're saying, you're way off to one side,
• 54:34
  you know, talking stuff that we really don't agree with about, for example, trans women's
• 54:39
  sports and so on, you got to actually show to us that you're sensible for us to come back into
• 54:43
  a fold of a party that perhaps my parents always voted for, my grandparents would always vote for.
• 54:49
  I mean, this is not a representative person, but I spoke to one person who's a very prominent
• 54:53
  hip-hop producer, you know, who pulled out some of the seminal records in the 80s and 90s.
• 54:59
  And, you know, African American guy who said, in his family, the only person who still
• 55:04
  lively votes for Democrats is his octogenarian mother because in that generation,
• 55:10
  it's just obviously worked for Democrats and anything else is absurd. And then he said, you know,
• 55:15
  of his siblings, he has two sisters who are married to Whiteguest and they also vote Democrat,
• 55:19
  but everybody else is now voting Republican. Again, I don't think that's a representative,
• 55:24
  but it tells you something about where... Well, there's also, I mean, we haven't even mentioned
• 55:29
  the Latino vote, but like, you know, I think it was Ronald Reagan. I don't know if this is
• 55:33
  apocryphal, but apparently Ronald Reagan said that Hispanics are Republicans, they just don't know
• 55:38
  it yet. You know, he had the point of view that they're hardworking, they're industrious,
• 55:43
  they believe in family values, like they're natural Republicans. And his prophecy is somewhat
• 55:49
  coming true in the sense that Latino men are now, you know, going on mass towards Donald Trump
• 55:57
  versus instead of the Democrats. And so that should be a big worry for the Democrats. So as we
• 56:02
  think about a possible successor to Biden, you have to take into account the point of view of
• 56:08
  a young Hispanic male, if you want to keep the coalition together, as well as Black Democrats.
• 56:13
  Okay, so let's go to this, you know, so we're at the Democratic Convention. We've got Kamala
• 56:20
  as a candidate, like, who else do we have and how do the factions cleave and how do they sort it out?
• 56:28
  So we brought factions from a Democratic party still put, you know, a loud progressive wing
• 56:35
  around people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren against a more moderate mainstream wing
• 56:42
  of a party, you know, around people like to Biden himself, obviously, there was a big part of
• 56:47
  his appeal in 2020. And then you have a whole lot of people who are somewhere in between that,
• 56:53
  you know, people like Cory Booker, for example, who certainly not a member of the squad, he's certainly
• 57:00
  not a Democratic socialist, he's certainly not a paid up member of a progressive wing of a party,
• 57:05
  and in fact, progressive, particularly, disliking this trust him, I think, in part because they think
• 57:09
  that a Black Senator must somehow be on their side. But he's also not a sort of explicit third-way
• 57:15
  moderate, you know, I would put him somewhere in between them. That's probably what the center of
• 57:19
  gravity in the party, at least among the elected and the kinds of people who are going to be delegates
• 57:26
  at the convention force. But one side of this, some of the people that would convention a very
• 57:30
  influential, very powerful people, you know, a lot of them would be thrust into a lot of responsibility,
• 57:35
  and you know, there's just the people who are the local party activists, you know, the people who
• 57:40
  drive around bringing everybody to a pause and primary day, the people who, you know,
• 57:46
  get in the yard signs to the house and distribute them among other sort of local party hopefuls.
• 57:51
  So there are people who, you know, have real public spirit in a certain sense, who volunteer a
• 57:57
  lot of the time to a very fanceless task of organizing for boring party primaries for minor
• 58:03
  electorals, and the big reward is once every four years we get to go to this convention,
• 58:07
  but we don't really have any power normally. Right. Now, suddenly, we might be in a world where they
• 58:12
  hold a lot of power, and I don't think people understand quite enough about where exactly
• 58:17
  faithful ideology within that spectrum. And do you remember, remember, back during the Hillary
• 58:24
  Bernie primary, there was a lot of complaining from Bernie Bros about super delegates and how
• 58:30
  there are like people who get smuggled into the convention by the powers that be, who have twice
• 58:36
  the voting power of regular delegates and things like that. Does it, do you, do you understand
• 58:40
  any of that and does any of that make a difference now? What makes much less of a difference for
• 58:43
  two reasons. One is that in 2016, we had a relatively close one primary election. So even for
• 58:50
  Hillary Clinton, clearly won by the end, and not just among super delegates, but also among the
• 58:55
  elected delegates, there was a significant contingent of Bernie delegates who went into the convention
• 59:00
  in 2016. And in part, because frankly, a responsible rhetoric from Bernie Sanders calling the
• 59:06
  whole thing rigged, some of them were not willing to give up on their candidate. And so they really
• 59:11
  wanted to disrupt the convention and exert a political price in order to do that. This time around,
• 59:18
  there's really no other candidate, other than Joe Biden. There's Dean Phillips going around and
• 59:23
  he was made an interesting pitch, but I don't know that he won a handful of delegates. I don't know
• 59:28
  exactly the number of delegates. No, but what I mean is if you opened it up because Biden steps
• 59:32
  down and removes himself from the race, don't you run into the same question of the status of
• 59:37
  delegates at the convention? Well, the two things to say, one is that as a result, you have a
• 59:42
  well-known majority of Biden delegates. So the question really is where would they swing? Because
• 59:46
  it's Biden campaign, but one of the delegates, right? The second is that there have been institutional
• 59:50
  reforms to reduce the role of super delegates since 2016, and I'm now no longer aware of the details
• 59:56
  of whether they've abolished them completely or just much reduced the role that they would play a
• 1:00:00
  much, much smaller role than 2016. Here's one thing I still want to say about the convention.
• 1:00:04
  It would be a mess, right? I mean, at this point we're in view omnischambles. I've explained
• 1:00:09
  how it is that Democrats goddess in view omnischambles, but it's obviously an omnischambles. So we're in
• 1:00:14
  the world of picking the least that option. I still think a convention that's a mess that chooses
• 1:00:19
  the candidate that's not proven because they haven't had the time to run at the national level and
• 1:00:25
  make the pitch to voters and grow is a real problem. You know, Ronda Santos, the governor of Florida
• 1:00:30
  looked like a formidable Republican candidate for some good reasons. He had, from a conservative
• 1:00:34
  point of view, real policy achievements in Florida. Once he was at that national stage, it became
• 1:00:39
  obvious that there was all height, but he simply wasn't up for it. That could happen to some of
• 1:00:43
  the people who are thinking of as possible replacements of Biden, like Gavin Newsom, the governor of
• 1:00:49
  California, or Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. We simply don't know. We're not tested
• 1:00:53
  at that level. Second thing, Barack Obama, you know, obviously a generational talent as a political
• 1:00:59
  candidate, right? Extremely effective campaign in 2008. In the early months of 2007, when he had
• 1:01:06
  already announced his campaign and he was with outsider shooting star Senator who wasn't really
• 1:01:11
  expected to win. A lot of journalists who saw him speak said he's not quite there. You know, he's
• 1:01:17
  not that charismatic, actually. He doesn't know that well how to make his pitch, but he spent
• 1:01:24
  months, you know, speaking to rims of 50 random people all across Iowa honing those skills.
• 1:01:30
  And by the time he hit the big time and the baits, Taylor Clinton, you know, in the key primary
• 1:01:36
  debates in fall of 2007 and so on, he had grown tremendously as a candidate and he was incredibly
• 1:01:44
  effective. We've deprived people like Gretchen Whitmer or like Gavin Newsom or, you know, Joshua
• 1:01:51
  Pierrot, all the other kinds of people who might have run of the opportunity to grow in that kind
• 1:01:55
  of way. And that's a problem as well. Now, you know, we've deprived them because we didn't run
• 1:02:01
  against Joe Biden and hold a proper democratic primary. Because Biden, because journalists
• 1:02:06
  didn't tell the public about what they knew on Biden's mental stage. And so we didn't end up
• 1:02:11
  putting pressure on him to not run. And so we didn't end up with a real primary season. And to
• 1:02:16
  be fair, they were too cowardly to run against Biden, it could have done so. But that would have been
• 1:02:19
  very hard, you know, underverse circumstances. I want to say two things. One is there's also
• 1:02:27
  upside here, right? I think a fresh political phase when a lot of Americans are deeply fatigued,
• 1:02:33
  obviously, with Joe Biden, but also with Donald Trump is a real strength. I think there would be
• 1:02:38
  some excitement if by the end of August, we suddenly have a candidate who's plausible, who's 30
• 1:02:43
  as younger than either of those candidates, who seems to represent a generational change. That
• 1:02:49
  person doesn't have to do all of that much to suddenly feel like a real breath of fresh air.
• 1:02:53
  And then, of course, there's advantages to only having two and a half months of your position
• 1:02:58
  being able to define you, right? I mean, a lot of American politics is negative ads,
• 1:03:02
  is attack ads, is people trying to make people scared of you, you know, only giving Republican
• 1:03:09
  party two and a half months to do all of that is a genuine advantage in an election. And as you're
• 1:03:14
  saying, there's other systems where you have candidates who come in three or four months before
• 1:03:21
  the election, who obviously not completely unknown figures, but who rise to a new level of prominence,
• 1:03:26
  and they're often fair quite well, because we're just saying, hey, you know what, perhaps the
• 1:03:30
  fresh voice is what we... Now, the other thing I want to say is, I think this is still a little
• 1:03:34
  bit in Democrats' hands. You know, we have elections in France and the United Kingdom
• 1:03:42
  around now that were called in June, that we didn't know what were happening on June 1st.
• 1:03:49
  And these countries were able to organize genuine national elections.
• 1:03:55
  In their times, I don't see why we're democratic party. The moment that you abide, hopefully,
• 1:04:01
  intensis, announces intention not to run again, can't call... Let's call it a one-day,
• 1:04:07
  consultative popularity poll in 50 states, right? So you have one day in which you are asking
• 1:04:16
  any American who's interested to show up to the polls, doesn't have to be an official vote,
• 1:04:21
  doesn't have to be, and have any legal validity, right? And say, hey, you're going to have a bunch
• 1:04:26
  of candidates tell us who you like, and that I think would provide a lot of a democratic legitimacy
• 1:04:31
  to then coalesce around one of those candidates over Democratic National Convention.
• 1:04:37
  Yeah, I think this is an interesting proposal that you make in your piece as well. So some kind of a
• 1:04:42
  one-day consultative vote in all 50 states are kind of a testing ground for the national appeal
• 1:04:48
  of various candidates. Who decides who gets on that ballot? Well, the Democratic National
• 1:04:55
  Committee, but first of all, I don't see the point of keeping people off ballots. I mean,
• 1:05:00
  you don't want 7,000 weeders who nobody has ever heard of, but I think you can have very minimal
• 1:05:07
  requirements. One, the standard one is that there's got to be a couple of polls in which you
• 1:05:12
  poll at least 1%. But if there's 17 names on that ballot, I don't really care, that's perfectly fine.
• 1:05:19
  So have minimum standards so that you don't have literal lunatics put the name on the ballot,
• 1:05:25
  and you know, you have 24 names to choose from, and it's such a mess that you can't find people
• 1:05:29
  at all. Say something like you've got to have what I said in a few national polls so that it's just
• 1:05:34
  candid, it's where in any way kind of plausible. They end up with 10, 15 names who cares. Let's
• 1:05:39
  see which of them actually appeal. I mean, it is funny that the American political system
• 1:05:45
  works so slowly and the reactions to it are so fast. It's like it is, you know, it's abiding by
• 1:05:51
  the logic of this social media algorithmic 24 hour news cycle hysteria, where a single tweet
• 1:05:57
  can dominate news coverage for three hours and then disappear. And yet when you think about the
• 1:06:03
  prospect of putting a national vote to all democratic voters, like the idea of America being able
• 1:06:10
  to do that in four weeks, even though as you say, other very big countries, you know, it's not like,
• 1:06:15
  I think Americans sometimes think, oh, we've got so many people, how could we possibly do that?
• 1:06:19
  But like the European Union just voted, like everyone in Europe, which is larger,
• 1:06:23
  more populist than the United States, just went to the polls. You know, India votes, it's a billion
• 1:06:27
  people, like this does happen. And so there's no reason why you can't scale up the infrastructure
• 1:06:33
  in the United States to just go, yeah, okay, let's just have essentially a plebiscite, you know,
• 1:06:39
  don't even call it a primary or a vote. So it's some kind of an opinion poll, a nationwide
• 1:06:43
  opinion poll. It could even be a mail-in ballot if you wanted it to be in which you've got a 10-day
• 1:06:49
  window to return your ballot if you're a registered Democrat and indicate who you want to be the
• 1:06:56
  party nominee. Now, the question would be, I guess, is that binding or when your world would
• 1:07:01
  this be an indicative vote that would ultimately get decided at the convention by the delegates?
• 1:07:08
  I think it would have to be an indicative vote because by the rules of a party, you know,
• 1:07:13
  it is the Democratic National Convention that chooses the candidate and there's a, you know,
• 1:07:18
  system for determining who's a delegate to that convention and that system has a this point run.
• 1:07:24
  You know, and of course it would open certain risks, you know, what if you have one candidate who
• 1:07:28
  gets 39% of vote and one candidate who gets 38% of a vote and when perhaps the delegates don't feel
• 1:07:34
  bound to that outcome and so they might end up preferring the kind of 38% of a vote that might
• 1:07:39
  alienate those who've heard the other candidate, you know, look, at this point when we have no more
• 1:07:43
  risk-free options, right? The risk-free option would have been to actually have a genuine primary
• 1:07:47
  last, last four. That would have been the best way out of this damn mess. But I think that this
• 1:07:53
  still is the best way forward to actually imbue the eventual Democratic nominee with some
• 1:08:01
  genuine Democratic legitimacy and with making people excited about this person, right? You
• 1:08:07
  would have a frantic period. I mean, it's also the case, of course, you know, people don't have to
• 1:08:11
  be that excited in the sense that I think, you know, I heard a pollster saying that this is the first
• 1:08:15
  election in American history where a generic candidate beats either of the actual candidates. In
• 1:08:23
  other words, if you ask people, you know, would you rather a generic Democrat over Donald Trump than
• 1:08:29
  the generic Democrat wins? Would you rather a generic Republican over Joe Biden, the generic
• 1:08:35
  Republican wins? You know, so if you can just get a lump of cheese on a stick and call it the
• 1:08:42
  Democratic candidate, then as long as it isn't carrying a huge amount of baggage, it should be
• 1:08:47
  able to beat Donald Trump. You know, it doesn't have to be a morning in America once in a generation,
• 1:08:54
  Barack Obama, town. You know, and this is not a hypothetical. What you're describing is an
• 1:09:02
  actual scenario because a lump of cheese on a stick is running for Prime Minister of United Kingdom
• 1:09:05
  at the moment and about to win the biggest parliamentary majority in the history of a labor party.
• 1:09:10
  You know, Kirstama, I'm obviously being a little bit unfair to him and overstating the point,
• 1:09:16
  but Kirstama is not a generational talent that Barack Obama was. He's not a deeply charismatic
• 1:09:22
  candidate. He's not offering hope and change. He is simply saying,
• 1:09:27
  you know, we are going to be a sensible, moderate political party. We've taken on the left
• 1:09:33
  within the labor party, people like Jeremy Corbyn, who are deeply politically irresponsible,
• 1:09:38
  who excited a few activists that were deeply unpopular with the general public.
• 1:09:44
  You know, I have removed that wing of the party from any hold over its decisions.
• 1:09:51
  I'm going to be a sensible steward of a country's economy. I'm not going to be fighting weird
• 1:09:55
  culture wars. And look at the other guys. They're falling apart and you don't want them anywhere
• 1:10:00
  near believers of power. So go for a lump of cheese. You know, if Democrats are ready to make it
• 1:10:07
  to some extent it's true in Australia as well in the sense that our current Prime Minister put an end
• 1:10:11
  to more than a decade of conservative leadership by having essentially no policies and just saying,
• 1:10:17
  I'm not them. You know, so this is the, you know, I'm not Trump kind of model.
• 1:10:24
  It also a new person gets to distance themselves from whatever voters don't like about the
• 1:10:28
  Biden administration. I mean, this is one other reason why Australia and the UK have had such a
• 1:10:34
  revolving door of Prime Ministers over the past 10 or 15 years. Australia recently changed its
• 1:10:39
  rules within the parties to prevent it from happening quite so quickly. But, you know, I mentioned
• 1:10:44
  in 2015 and, you know, Malcolm Turnbull was able to come in as Prime Minister just 10 months
• 1:10:49
  before an election and every criticism that anyone would make of the existing government that
• 1:10:54
  had been in power for some time, he was able to say, well, it wasn't me. Well, my government,
• 1:10:59
  you know, that was the other guy, even though it's the same party, the same parliamentarians,
• 1:11:02
  the same policies. And they would have two big advances for the Democrats at first is that,
• 1:11:07
  you know, the Biden campaign is in a weird kind of standoff with the electorate where the Biden
• 1:11:12
  campaign is saying, we've done amazingly on the economy and there's some strengths to the
• 1:11:17
  economy that are genuine. But voters are saying, but inflation has been really high and perhaps it's
• 1:11:22
  fallen during the last year, but what I'm having to pay in the supermarket is the way more expensive
• 1:11:26
  than it was five years ago. We don't feel like the economy is doing so great and we're not going
• 1:11:31
  to vote for somebody who tells us that we miss perceived the world. So, you know, a new
• 1:11:37
  presidential candidate could say, hey, we've done something's right and something's wrong.
• 1:11:41
  Here's our plan for the economy. It's going to get a lot better. The second problem, of course,
• 1:11:46
  is that the Democratic Party, and this is going to be the crux of what any candidate has to do
• 1:11:49
  in the fall, is just way out of where American public opinion is on a number of key issues.
• 1:11:55
  The first is immigration. Americans, I think by and large, deeply value, but diversity in
• 1:12:02
  the societies, they know that immigration can make a huge contribution to the country,
• 1:12:08
  but they want control over the southern border. They don't want to feel that there is an open
• 1:12:13
  border which anybody with enough means or enough willpower and enough willingness often to risk
• 1:12:19
  their own lives in tragic ways is able to cross and they simply don't feel that Democrats are
• 1:12:25
  serious about getting a hold of this problem. As I mentioned earlier, the Trump administration put
• 1:12:30
  Kamala Harris in charge of his thing and she refused to go and visit the border in an obvious
• 1:12:35
  attempt to preserve her popularity among the left wing of the party. The second key thing is
• 1:12:42
  just cultural issues of which trans is one big example for it goes much deeper than that.
• 1:12:50
  Here, Stama in United Kingdom has made it clear that he will respect single biological sex
• 1:12:57
  spaces in women's shelters. For example, he has really changed where the Democratic
• 1:13:02
  party stands on this. He is supporting the outcome of a helicopter review that is putting real
• 1:13:07
  limits on the kind of gender changing surgeries that you can access as as miners saying that there's
• 1:13:18
  real limits on the state of knowledge about what the long term impact of these kind of surgeries
• 1:13:24
  is and on the ability of 1314 year olds to consent to life changing alterations of the body that
• 1:13:32
  often random and fertile and so on. Joe Biden and the Democratic party have not made the same kind
• 1:13:39
  of changes. Americans rightly perceive that this party is not willing to ensure that
• 1:13:48
  high level sports competitions are reserved for biological women that they are not willing to
• 1:13:55
  look at where the evidence has led a lot of European public health systems on some of the complications
• 1:14:01
  of transgender care for teenagers and twin ages and that makes them feel that the party as a whole
• 1:14:10
  is just way out of the mainstream and the way that the administration, as well as much
• 1:14:16
  more progressive voices, if the party talk about the world only doubles down on that. What James
• 1:14:23
  Carval has read. That's without even touching race where my Black friends in America, the majority
• 1:14:30
  of them find it just exhausting the way that Biden and his accolades talk about race. When he
• 1:14:37
  gave that speech to Westmoreland College or whatever it was, that mostly majority Black
• 1:14:42
  more half college and he's telling them that more house college yet, sorry, that they have to be
• 1:14:46
  10 times better than a white person to get ahead and they're carrying the burden of intergenerational
• 1:14:52
  trauma on their shoulders and so on. And the conflation of illegal immigration with legal
• 1:14:57
  immigration, the kind of half-baked compromise that he did at the border with 2,500 refugees
• 1:15:03
  or asylum seekers per day in this sense that anytime any criticism of illegal immigration is
• 1:15:09
  conflated within a criticism of legal immigration, you don't have to be like an anti-woke conservative
• 1:15:16
  crusader to just find the whole thing a little bit inside the bubble and unhinged from where the
• 1:15:23
  center of gravity of America is. It's just not how people talk and it's not where they are politically
• 1:15:28
  and look, the Democratic Party should be progressive on many of these issues in part because we need
• 1:15:35
  a sensible division of labor between Democrats and Republicans in the United States and in part
• 1:15:41
  because part of its natural voting block are people who obviously have deep concerns about some
• 1:15:46
  of these issues. The way the Democratic Party is talking is very, very white so we know from
• 1:15:53
  a report that progressive activists are hugely over proportionally rich, affluent, and white.
• 1:16:00
  And so the tone in which the Democrats talk about issues whether it is sensitive questions
• 1:16:06
  around the treatment of trans people or whether it is how to empower Black America is not in the
• 1:16:14
  register that that base which is in play actually talks about them. It talks about them the register
• 1:16:22
  of a white lefty post-grad at Smith College and that's a real, real problem. So this is something
• 1:16:29
  that a new candidate would have to solve. Even if they don't, even if they just talk generic Democrat
• 1:16:34
  Boulder Dash, they're going to have a much better chance than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris,
• 1:16:38
  but if they want to maximize their chances and possibly win the kind of majority they would actually
• 1:16:43
  put an end to some of the most worrying forms of Trump is the kind of majority of Kistama is about
• 1:16:47
  to have in the United Kingdom. They got a distance with party from those deeply unpopular positions
• 1:16:53
  and it's possible to do that without selling out groups that are vulnerable including trans people
• 1:16:59
  without giving up on the basics that we need to have equal rights for people irrespective of
• 1:17:05
  the kind of group into which they are born. There's a way of standing up for those good old fashioned
• 1:17:11
  liberal aspirational values without engaging in a kind of woke speech bubbles that a lot of
• 1:17:21
  senior Democrats have gotten used to. And I mean, I think that's a medium to long-term goal of the
• 1:17:27
  Democratic Party. That needs to be a medium to long-term goal of the Democratic Party and of all
• 1:17:31
  central left parties regardless of what happens now, but I feel like at the moment we're in a
• 1:17:36
  state of triage where it's just a terrifying, we face a terrifying emergency for American
• 1:17:43
  democracy. You're always one of my favorite analysts on like the big picture of like how we got
• 1:17:48
  here. So just step back for a moment and look at the very long term like what the hell has happened.
• 1:17:56
  Like how is it possible that in the most powerful country in the world we find ourselves in this
• 1:18:02
  diabolical like Sophie's choice between a man who has absolute contempt for democracy and
• 1:18:12
  knows nothing about the independence of the judiciary, the separation of powers, international
• 1:18:18
  relations, the geopolitical world order, and a man who is patently incapable of following
• 1:18:27
  a train of his own thought for more than 15 seconds. What the hell is going on?
• 1:18:33
  Well, so one one one set of things that's going on is what we've talked about, which is a common
• 1:18:37
  practice. To hear the rest of this conversation go to uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash
• 1:18:43
  listen and you will get your own personal premium podcast feed with at least three extra episodes
• 1:18:50
  of the podcast every month and heaps of extra stuff, including the remainder right now of the
• 1:18:55
  fabulous conversation you've just been hearing. If it was worth listening to this much of, don't
• 1:19:00
  rob yourself of the rest. Well, like your phone right now and search for uncomfortable conversations
• 1:19:05
  of what's upside down.