Democrats Need to Ditch ‘Loser Politics,’ with Matthew Yglesias

26:20I see some beautiful locations. But what I post, like, to my Instagram feed is, like, just the really good moments. You know, Like, nobody is up there posting, like, and here's the time I sat around and I was bored. Or, like, here's the place I went, and then the food was just okay. You know, because, like, that's not good content. Right? So you look around, and it seems like everybody else is having a great time all the time, that they're going to all these glamorous places. Then you have these different entrepreneurs, like you were talking about, you know, feeding your insecurities and telling you 80 million ways that you could be better.

27:00You're constantly seeing these images, right? I mean, if you're in school, you know, there's like one person who's like going to have the richest family in your class. And, you know, you might feel jealous or envious or like you're not living up. But on the internet, you get to compare yourself to a universe of, again, millions of people. So there's always somebody who's more successful than you, who's better looking than you, who has a more delightful family, or at least their pictures seem more delightful. And it can be really sort of crazy making. And I think that that's, again, an issue. I don't know if people totally understand how fake things that they see on the internet can be.

27:43And we know this going all the way back, that reality television isn't real. I mean, in the 90s, we had a big discourse about magazines, you know, and trying to inform people that, like, you're looking at airbrushed photos of models and these things is not what real people really look like. But the levels of artificiality that go into these things have escalated with our technology. And I'm not sure that people's, like, understanding of what the world is actually like has improved at the same pace.

28:14Coleman Hughes:I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present, with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives.

28:51Coleman Hughes:And when he brings in guests like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retzig-Gor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare, and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today.

29:38Coleman Hughes:Maybe Elizabeth Warren to some extent. So the contrast between the establishment, which fears most of all the far left, the DSA, AOC, et cetera, and what you kind of represent, which is a faction of the center left, or maybe moderate left, however you want to call it, which is not the same as the establishment and doesn't believe that merely fighting the far left and supporting the establishment, wants to lodge a critique against the establishment from a standpoint of the center-left. So this is like a triangle situation of some kind. Can you paint that picture for me and tell me why that's the right way to view the Democratic Party right now?

30:23Sure. I mean, you know, I go back to 2020 and the primary campaign that played out there, right? And at that time, you know, you had Bernie Sanders and he was running. And then you had a bunch of people who were sort of more moderate than Bernie. You know, you had Elizabeth Warren in there. You had Pete Buttigieg in there. You had Kamala Harris. And then you had Joe Biden, right, who was seen at that time as like distinctly more moderate than those other people. He was like this old guy with old-fashioned values. I remember a big story that leftists blew up because he told a meeting of donors.

31:04He said, you know, oh, if I'm president, your taxes are going to go up some, but nothing is fundamentally going to change about your lifestyle. You're still going to be rich people, et cetera. And he got all this criticism for that. He's like, no, we want bold transformational change. He won the primary. And when that happened, I think a lot of people, more moderate Democrats, were like, this is great. We're back in business. Despite everything that's been going on the past few years, like people still want common sense, et cetera. And then Biden, you know, surprised a lot of people by governing in a strikingly progressive way.

31:44You know, he empowered a lot of people from the Elizabeth Warren network in his sort of economic and regulatory policies. He walked away from the Obama administration's legacy on education reform, things like charter schools and performance pay for teachers. He, you know, in his first week in office, he puts out this executive order saying that he's going to center racial justice in like all aspects of everything the federal government does. And that became the sort of new baseline for the Democratic Party and the Democratic establishment, which is that the establishment itself became meaningfully more left-wing than it had been in the Obama years, to say nothing of the Bill Clinton years.

32:28And you'll sometimes see these things, you know, an old clip will go viral of how Obama or Clinton talked about illegal immigration in the first couple decades of the 21st century. And they sound really different, not from left-wing Democrats, but from today's mainstream Democrats. And so, you know, an idea that I want to gain more visibility to is like this critique that, you know, that the mainstream of the Democratic Party went too far left on a number of different issues and ought to sort of plow its way back to the Clinton-Obama center, which is different from, obviously, there's this well-known now, widely heard critique coming from Bernie, coming from Mamdani, coming from others.

33:16But if you look at the primaries that happened recently in New York, they got a lot of coverage. The people who lost those races, those were Medicare for All co-sponsors. Two of the three were Congressional Progressive Caucus members.

33:30Coleman Hughes:This was like a fight inside the left, which was, you know, I mean, I don't know what it was about. It was about Israel and about some other things. But it wasn't really about moderates, like at all, on any level. whereas we have not seen as much attention to Congressman Tom Swasey and Adam Gray who've launched this promise to America, which is like the kind of center-left initiative that I'm talking about, that I'm interested in, which is a moderate challenge to where sort of the Biden-Harris Democrats have been. So the DSA sweep, as it's been called, and you just referenced, you know, the extraordinary success of DSA or DSA endorsed or de facto DSA endorsed primary candidates about a month ago.

34:22Coleman Hughes:So what does it mean? I mean, there's a big attempt to understand what this means for the future of the Democratic Party. Is it that socialism is much more popular now among young people? Is that the right takeaway? Or is there some other lesson that was obscured in the analysis there? You know, I mean, I think clearly public opinion on Israel has shifted quite dramatically over the years, and particularly among Democrats. And so there's a bunch of people, because as I say, these were quite progressive people, mostly, who lost these challenges to the DSA. And then I think that those members of Congress, because they thought of themselves as really solid progressives—I mean, outside of New York, there was this one in Denver.

35:15And, you know, there's a number of moderate House Democrats in the Colorado delegation. And none of those people actually drew primary challenges, and certainly none of them lost. The person who lost was the most progressive Democrat in the Colorado delegation, but she just had the most left-wing district. and she just like really didn't know how to campaign against somebody who was hitting her from the further left because it's not, you know, it's not in Diana DeGeddy's background or ethos to know how to sort of mount that. Some of this, yes, I mean, as you do see that at least among younger people, the idea, like the word socialism doesn't scare them off the way that it does among people over 40.

36:00You know, what does that mean to people? I don't know. I thought it was interesting. there was this Echelon Insights poll where they asked people about free markets. And that polled quite well, whereas capitalism among young Democrats polled terribly. So who knows what these things mean. There's a lot of anger at the establishment. Democrats, I'm sure this won't be news to you, but Democrats really don't like Donald Trump. And they are very frustrated that the leaders of the party have lost to Trump two times out of three. and to some extent, like, I think that's rational. The job of party leaders is to win elections rather than lose them.

36:39You also have this kind of irrational view that, like, people want Democrats to, quote-unquote, stop Trump. But, like, he won the election. Republicans have majorities in Congress. He's entitled, I don't want to say he's, like, entitled to do whatever he wants because this is a constitutional republic, but, you know, things change when you lose an election. That's, like, totally fair. There's going to be another election in November. It looks like Republicans are going to lose their majority. And that's how the system works. And like being mad at Democrats for not being able to do things that are impossible doesn't make a ton of sense.

37:13But also, you know, there has been a long-term sort of growth of radical left political institutions in the United States. And the specifics of what the people in those institutions argue for seems to me to shift around quite a lot. You know, like we had Medicare for All as the obsession. Then we had Defund the Police as the obsession. We are now in an Israel moment. We had a Green New Deal moment in there somewhere before. And I don't know where that's going. You know, it's not clear to me even what the priority for those people is. Because at any given moment, they will tell you this thing that I'm talking about right now is of, like, such transcendent importance that no compromise is possible.

38:05But they keep changing, like, what it is they say the dominant issue of the moment is from, like, allegedly we're all going to burn to death in 10 years to, like, now we have to stop genocide. But, like, the same people who were behind Graham Plattner were behind John Fetterman, who they despise. And, you know, to an extent, like, Fetterman has changed. But he said in the 2022 campaign quite explicitly that he was going to lean in on the U.S.-Israel relationship, that he didn't consider himself a progressive on that topic. And at the time, it was like, progressives just didn't care that much about it.

38:52They thought, you know, like, this is an obscure foreign policy issue. And now it's like their number one dominant thing. And I don't know where it's going to go.

39:00Coleman Hughes:Right. And do you know where it's going to go? No, I don't. But it's been interesting to see Mayor Mamdani play both sides of this because when he was running, he, I think, very wisely and in a way that was appealing to me as, you know, I consider myself a pretty pro-Israel person. But as a New Yorker, I am pro the mayor shouldn't give a shit about Israel or Palestine. The mayor should care about New York City and campaign and govern as such. Right. Right. And Mamdani took that line really effectively during the campaign in a way that was appealing, despite all my other disagreements with him.

39:33Coleman Hughes:And now he's giving weighty press conferences about how he's looked into arresting Netanyahu. And though he can't do it, he clearly wishes he could. And he's just like focused way more on this remote conflict thousands of miles away than I think a mayor of New York City should. So we sort of played both sides of that, like, why should I care? But also, I really, really care. I'm curious, it's like what you make of, and so you listed this sort of succession of sacred concerns on the progressive left, Medicare for all, defund the police, climate change, now Israel. It seems like Israel is different than all the rest of them in that, like, at minimum, the stakes of those earlier positions were domestic.

40:25Coleman Hughes:Like, whether the police are funded makes a difference in my life as a New Yorker. Our approach towards fossil fuels, like, in principle makes a difference towards my life as an American. Ending$4 billion a year to Israel, it will change more for Israel than it would for any American, obviously. Why do you think that has become the new sacred issue? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? I mean, some of it is, there's just this kind of shell game around what is the policy demand at all, right? Because you have like, Abdul El-Sayed was telling Axios this morning, you know, I'm the true America first candidate in this race, by which he means he wants to cut aid to Israel, which is fair enough.

41:18That's a position I have advocated for actually for a long time. But then it's not true that the amount of money that's involved in this is going to be transformative to the American budget. And it's also not true that it's going to be transformative to the conflict in the Middle East, which he's well aware of because he actually cares a good deal about this. And on his website, he calls for a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, plus the resumption of American financial assistance to, you know, the UN agency operating in the Gaza Strip and so on and so forth. You know, because what he wants, I mean, I don't know ultimately what he wants, but like he wants the United States to weigh in heavily and try to deliver whatever he thinks, you know, liberation of Palestine and the end of Israel, the end of the sort of Zionist project would be.

42:14And that's quite different from, eh, I want to like cut a modest foreign aid spending program, right? And you see this over and over again, that the moral stakes of the conflict is grounded in human suffering that's occurring many, many thousands of miles away. And then you ask, well, like, why are we so invested in this particular thing when we know there are lots of instances of people suffering thousands of miles away that, you know, we can all sort of, if you ask someone, like, you know, what do you think about what's happening in Niger? They'll say, you know, it's bad, right? Lots of bad things happen in the world.

42:57I wish I could help. It doesn't get that much coverage. It doesn't get that much attention.

43:02Coleman Hughes:But the argument they usually make is that we're not funded. Right. So they'll say, well, no, the difference is, well, you know, we're much more intimately involved in the Middle East, which is true. But then if you say, well, so we should be less involved, that's not actually what the activists on the pro-Palestinian side want. It's what I want. I would like the United States to be less intimately involved in a conflict that we ultimately can't control and can't solve, and that involves a lot of people on both sides who, you know, are just fairly extreme in their views. But they want us to flip, you know, and to become really sort of aggressive advocates for anti-Zionism, to treat the Israeli state as the moral and political equivalent of apartheid South Africa, etc., etc., which is just going to get us deeper, kind of ensnared into that sort of mess.

43:59And, you know, I don't know why. I mean, I can't offer a full diagnosis of why this is so important to people. Obviously, you know, we're several generations into this, and all throughout the sort of Islamic world, there has forever been this kind of disproportionate interest in Israel relative to other questions afflicting that part of the universe. and one thing that has happened is as we have had more immigration from Muslim countries into the United States and into the West, there's been a sort of importation of that set of political concerns, just as in the past, right? I mean, I remember when I was a kid, you know, my friend's dad was like, he cared so much about Northern Ireland, you know, and he was like giving money to the IRA.

44:53I needed all these takes. And I was like, why do I care?

44:57Coleman Hughes:I mean, he cared because he was Irish, you know? And it's part of Irish emigre politics, or was at the time, to have these really strong feelings about Northern Ireland. And I don't want to be too reductive, but clearly that's part of what's going on here, is that it's part of Muslim identity globally to be like really invested in anti-Israel right um okay so given that we have this war for control of the democratic party between your faction the moderate center-left faction the establishment and the dsa um you you wrote this um what it what you call the common sense democrat manifesto which is like, to me, exactly the kind of Democrat I'd love to elect.

45:49Coleman Hughes:But it also occurs to me that almost everything, almost everything on that list, if I were to sit across from a Joe Biden or an Elizabeth Warren and say, here's what I think you should, here's my critique of you, right? I think you should endorse the idea that biological sex is real, that climate change, it's not the apocalypse, It's a reality that we're going to have to manage, I think, as you put it. We shouldn't tolerate antisocial behavior in public spaces. Let's stop with the language policing. Serving students is more important than pleasing teachers' unions. I would be afraid as a center-left Democrat that I'm just sounding like a center-right Republican, right?

46:37Coleman Hughes:What is there to distinguish me from just the right-wing critiques of the Democratic Party? Sure. I think the difference is, Republicans, you listen to Donald Trump, you listen to Chris Wright talk about climate change, and they're not saying climate change is a problem that we have to understand and we have to navigate pragmatically. They're saying it's completely fake and we need to prop up the American coal industry. You know, on some of these things, you know, it's different. I mean, I think that, like, on the question of biological sex, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm just agreeing with conservatives.

47:17I would like to see people treated with respect and kindness in a way that I don't think we always see coming from the right, which has an edge of cruelty in how they kind of treat these kinds of issues. But, you know, on these cultural issues, like, I just would say, like, I think Democrats have long and should continue to champion abortion rights, for example. And, you know, freedom and equality for gay and lesbian couples, which the sort of, you know, Christian element that is very heavily dominant in the Republican Party doesn't do. But yes, I mean, the danger, right, the ratchet of polarization that we're dealing with as a society is that as people in the Democratic camp find Donald Trump so repulsive, they become allergic to anything that sounds like something that a Republican might say.

48:11But, you know, part of how you govern a society in a sane way, part of how you practice politics in a two-party democracy, is you say, like, yeah, like, we're going to counter the worst things that Trump does and the worst ideas that he stands for. Not everything that's on the laundry list, right? That, like, he's allowed to critique our worst ideas. and when you're functioning, you sort of ping-pong towards sanity across the parties and what we've been doing instead is the opposite, right? It's kind of like, you know, like with each bounce of the ball, it goes higher in the air, you know, which is bad and I would like to see an effort to try to, you know, bring that process to a halt.

48:56Coleman Hughes:You very helpfully summed up your desire for the Democratic Party as, quote, quote, ditching loser politics that squanders winnable elections over dumb shit. I think that is very well put. I mean, Trump in 2024 was eminently beatable as a candidate. He was not extremely popular. He didn't win that election. I think Democrats lost it. There's one example. But is there anyone you see in the Democratic Party right now that can accomplish that? I mean, I think there's a lot of people who might accomplish it, and there's no guarantee that any of them will or would or could. It's not hard to look at a map and see people like John Ossoff, like Ruben Gallego, like Raphael Warnock, like Gretchen Whitmer, like Josh Shapiro, you know, who are winning elections in the critical swing states who are often quite popular there.

49:54They have some instincts in the right direction. A lot of my favorite politicians these days are the sort of moderate Latinos in South Texas. You know, Vicente Gonzalez, who's an incumbent down there, but Bobby Pulido, who's running, Jenny Garcia, who's running the San Antonio suburbs. I like them a lot. Mary Paltola, who, you know, I think is going to win a Senate race in Alaska, you know, is really good. Nobody's even covering the North Carolina Senate race at this point because Roy Cooper is, like, so clearly going to win. So part of what's happened is that, like, our attention has gotten very focused.

50:34I'll put it this way. Both the left and the right think it's productive to focus a lot of attention on Mamdani and Bernie and Abdul El-Sayed. And it's kind of an ends-against-the-middle attentional conspiracy. And people aren't writing articles about, like, how is an independent-minded Democrat winning people over in Alaska? and, you know, that's too bad for the country. The main point of my article there was just like, we don't know what is going to happen. You know, like I want to see moderate Democrats mount a good effort in 2028. Like get somebody in there, hold your heads high, say what we think, acknowledge that like no individual person's odds of winning the presidency are very high.

51:26You know, you look at a Donald Trump or a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton in his day, Ronald Reagan in his day. All of those guys were seen as underdogs when they got in their races. And it's not like, well, the underdog always wins. It's like most underdogs lose. But most presidents who win were underdogs. The kind of George W. Bush or Joe Biden scenario in which it's almost like the baton is handed down to you, is actually a little bit rare. You know, it's normally people with some boldness, people with some vision, people who are willing to be distinctive, people who want to zag a little bit, end up winning because they hit on something that speaks to the way people feel.

52:10An example I used in my piece that I do not have any polling on, this is pure vibes, But like, what's the deal with Democrats getting rid of plastic straws? Like, I never meet anyone who's for that. Like, I spend all my time talking to Democrats, even like ones who are way more left-wing than me, and get annoyed at me for complaining about the plastic straws, or the paper straws. They like can't explain to me, like, where is this coming from? It's just this kind of borg of like interest groups and policy demands and things like that. And in a presidential campaign, you have the chance to cut through that and just be like, guys, you know, what people like about Democrats is we want to give people health care.

52:52We want to protect women's rights to choose. We want to, like, engage respectfully with the many different kinds of minority groups that exist in the country. And, like, we just, like, we don't need, like, 80 % of the rest of it. We could just not do that. And, you know, I think it might work.

53:14Coleman Hughes:Yeah. You've talked about the pundit's fallacy, though, which is the mistake of believing that what you want as an individual is what the electorate wants. Do you think that for you those things are aligned, or do you make a distinction between, I'm Matt Iglesias, these are my politics, on the one hand, and I've looked at the electorate, and what could win is this. Yeah, I mean, I do try to. You know, I mean, I think I am more pro-immigration than voters are. And that's just kind of a reality. That's something that I have a pretty progressive view on. You know, but like, that's fine. You know, you got to give people what they want on these kind of things.

53:54I'm also, I grew up in New York City. I live in Washington, D.C. I'm like a big city person. I'm really interested in various things that, like, relate to cities and urban governance. I write about that a fair amount because it aligns with things that I care about. I also acknowledge this just isn't most people's lifestyle. The vast majority of Americans just live in the suburbs. They live in the Sun Belt. The country's, in fact, becoming increasingly suburban over time. And, like, that's fine. You know, like, practical politicians need to deal with the electorate as it exists out there. I'm sure I engage in a certain amount of wishful thinking.

54:30I try not to. I try to be mindful of it. But it's hard, I think, for any of us to be totally free of that kind of thing. But I do think that a lot of people have gotten really overboard with it. You know, that most of the people who talk about politics, I think, don't actually realize how disengaged from politics most people are. You know, that like just the whole discourse jabbering community is an eccentric minority. If you look at like who voted in those primaries that we were talking about before, it's a tiny fraction of the electorate. Like most people just sat those races out, right? Which is not to say there's a silent majority of people who agree with me about everything, but there is a silent majority of people who didn't agree or didn't care about either of the options that were really being put on the table in those kind of races, that people were not speaking to them.

55:28And so there are some opportunities out there to do something different.

55:32Coleman Hughes:You mentioned that we're becoming a more suburban society, i.e., you know, presumably people are moving out of cities into suburbs. One of the major trends over the past 20 years, at least, you'll probably know the details better than I do, is that blue states have mostly been seeing outflows of people and red states have been seeing inflows of people. And the canonical cases are California losing population every year, Texas gaining population every year, New York State as a whole, I believe, losing population almost every year, Florida gaining population every year. But what, I mean, is it too simple to see this as a referendum on the overall politics of left versus right and whether they're delivering for the typical American?

56:23Coleman Hughes:Or is it more complicated than that? I think this is important information and that people need to think about it and study it and that progressives in particular need to internalize some of these facts. But I do think that that's a little bit too simple. That, you know, Louisiana and West Virginia have also been losing people fairly consistently during this period. and that, you know, because of economic problems in those states. And that while Texas and Florida have gained a lot of people, Indiana has been losing people, right? And, you know, if you just look at a map, right, like Indiana's right up there adjacent to Illinois and just suffers from some of the same structural weaknesses that are impacting Illinois and doesn't have, like, the weather benefits that these warmer states of the American South have.

57:15But the thing that is really important to pay attention to is both quantities and prices, right? So California is a very expensive place to live. And so the good news that that, you know, gives Democrats, gives liberals, whatever, is it's not true that nobody wants to live in California. If nobody wanted to live in California, it would be cheap. And like, we could all like go move to Santa Monica tomorrow and, you know, live on the beach and have great lives. But it's, in fact, incredibly expensive. Now, the problem is, is that if you're a progressive and you care about, you know, delivering high living standards for working people, California is not doing that, right?

57:58California is taking these incredible assets in terms of the technology industry, Hollywood, great weather, beautiful mountains, and it's turning it into a kind of a luxury good. And then it is creating a sort of public sector that lives off the high taxes. But it's not creating upward economic opportunity for working class people. who are instead just moving to places where it is easier to build housing. You know, because fundamentally, like, being able to afford a place to live is like the building block on which everything else exists. And, you know, if you are a plumber or a barber or you want to open a restaurant, etc., etc., Going to a place like Texas or North Carolina where housing is relatively abundant and where it's relatively easy to build new housing just completely dominates California or New York.

59:02And that's a real tragedy. And that's the biggest economic policy problem, I think, impacting the country.

59:11Coleman Hughes:So you were just referencing working class people. you had an interesting post about what the hell the word working class means anymore. And you pointed out that Graham Plattner was billed as working class, even though the details of his actual family's socioeconomic status really make him not the typical image that we tend to conjure or that we used to conjure. And obviously working class, as a concept, it has Marxist roots, but it's taken on its own meaning. what is the actual usefulness of that phrase anymore in politics? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. You know, I mean, a distinction that I do think makes some kind of sense, right, is trying to understand the difference between people who work with their hands and people like you and me who, you know, work at our desks with computers.

1:00:03Because I do think that that, you know, not just politically, but in terms of people's relationship to retirement, relationship to time off, you know, to all different kinds of things is actually quite different. You know, I heard, somebody put it to me like, the difference between people who shower in the morning before they go to the office and people who shower when they get home because they're covered in sweat and grime after what it is they've done. And I think that, like, blue-collar, white-collar distinction, You know, it's not perfect. There's middle grounds for everything. But that does kind of, like, resonate with people and is a real—

1:00:43Coleman Hughes:As in those groups of people tend to have different interests in ways that would make—it would make sense for them to organize along those interests. Yeah, or at least to think about, you know, how does—like, what does work mean for your life? You know, what is the significance of all these different kinds of things? And what do you care about? And, you know, that also relates to how people relate to higher education and different kinds of things. I mean, it's not a perfect correlation. I met a guy two weeks ago who's a, you know, an exterminator. And, like, he went to college and he studied theology there and has a great interest in books and things like that.

1:01:22But I think that's probably not that typical of people who are in that line of work versus people, you know, in the— You know, both of us are posed for the podcast with our bookshelves behind us to, you know, show off. You know, we've read things. We know about the world. We care about big ideas. So, you know, these kind of things matter. But I, you know, I don't think we live in the kind of economy that Marx thought we would live in, where most people are in this, like, impoverished working class that has had its earnings driven down to a subsistence level. I mean, that's not, that's just like not how the world works.

1:02:05Most people have jobs, they work for a living, but most people also own at least a little stock. Most people own homes. Most people have some kind of specialized skills, you know, that give them status and give them earnings power in society. And so, you know, most people, like, I don't know, like, they want more out of life. They have aspirations, but they also don't want to, like, turn the system upside down. Even most people who call themselves socialists, it seems to me, don't really want to, like, nationalize industry or whatever it is people thought they wanted in the 20s or 30s. So I think it's a somewhat confused conversation that we're having.

1:02:48Coleman Hughes:So speaking of things that Marx got wrong, you've written extensively on housing. In fact, you wrote a book many years ago, I think, called The Rent is Too Damn High, right? I did, yes. Yeah. You wrote recently about the fact that many people believe the problem with expensive housing is too much capitalism. But you write, quote, you could completely eliminate the capitalistic aspects of this housing system, and all the problems would recur. Explain what you mean by that. Yeah, so I mean, you know, you can define these words in different ways, right? But housing in America is definitely capitalistic, right?

1:03:32You have for-profit companies building homes. You have people seeking investment. You know, we have banks making mortgage loans, right? It's all capitalism. But it's very much not a free market. You know, it's one of the most, it's probably the single most regulated sector in America. You have higher odds of getting permission from the government, you know, to build a new kind of airplane than to put an apartment building up in a suburban neighborhood. And it's that lack of freedom that has created all of this scarcity. And that speaks to, like, how does the planning system work? You know, you could say, okay, we're going to have, like, no more private investors in anything.

1:04:18It's all going to be, like, government-run social housing, whatever, whatever. And you would just still have this question, like, well, a lot of people want to live in San Francisco. And, you know, there's an AI boom happening there. People are getting more money. Demand is soaring. So what are we going to do? Are we going to build new apartment buildings in the places where there's demand? Or are the people who live there going to say, no, that's not allowed? And we have that recur in—there's so many parts of the country now where—forget apartment buildings. You can't even build, like, a starter home on a small lot.

1:04:54People have said, you know, a house has to be, like, on so many square feet of land. And that just makes it really hard for young couples who want to buy a home and start a family. Some places have been adopting laws to try to change that. There was just a federal law trying to make progress on this. Maine, again, I'm in Maine right now. They passed a big law last year to make it easier to build small homes. I hope that that will work. But it's like, when young people are frustrated with the status quo, they'll say, well, I'm frustrated with capitalism, because capitalism is the system that they're living under.

1:05:34Coleman Hughes:You know, I think that sort of makes sense. But it's not socialism that's going to solve this problem. It's going to be more freedom and, in a sense, stronger property rights. Yeah, but that's counterintuitive because that sounds like yet more capitalism to them, right? Right. I mean, it may or it may not, you know, and it was, here's one where, I mean, I will give Mayor Mondani credit. I mean, he has put forward initiatives in New York City, ballot measures that he supported, new things that his administration is doing to make it easier to build more housing. And he said, you know, in a good New York Times interview, they asked him for something he'd changed his mind on over the course of his then young career.

1:06:18And he said he's learned the value of market rate housing to a thriving city. And that's great. The new DSA mayor of Seattle has said similar things. I hope she follows through on that because, you know, this is really the most important economic issue. I don't know if it's even the most important issue writ large, but certainly in terms of brass tacks, practical aspects of people's living standards, nothing matters more than making it easier to build housing. Yeah.

1:06:48Coleman Hughes:I mean, in New York this past year, the average rent raise was something like 7 % to 8%, which is just, you know, it affects me. I mean, I lived in New York for 12 years, and I'm a two-issue voter. My two issues are the cost of rent and the presence and efficacy of the police, because those are the two issues that are going to affect me the most, right? Well, and the thing that is so fundamental about housing, right, is that if you don't get housing right, then anything else you do becomes a little bit perverse. I mean, there was a story that's always stuck with me, but that ran over a decade ago in the Washington Post.

1:07:34And they were talking to people in a kind of a gentrifying neighborhood about this initiative the city had to like plant more trees on the sidewalks. And they quoted this woman who was like, I don't want them coming in with these nice new trees because it's just going to raise my rents. Right. And, you know, if people have the feeling that lower crime or better schools or a nice new playground for kids or like planting of some trees is just going to cause them to be forced out of their neighborhood because rents are going to skyrocket? Like, that's really toxic, right? You know, because like you said, there's like two issues.

1:08:14It's the cost of housing, and then it's the quality of life. And you don't want to make housing affordable by driving down the quality of life. But you don't want it to be that when the quality of life improves, that people who've been living there for a long time can't afford to stay, right? And that's why you need an elastic housing supply so that you can do the other stuff. and have a positive sum environment where crime is lower, so more people are moving in, so more businesses are opening, so there's better job opportunities, right? And then you have this good flywheel.

1:08:47Coleman Hughes:The great comedian Ron Bennington had a very funny joke about this, that back in the 80s, people of his generation wanted low rents, but they were willing to go out and stab people to get them. But the young folk, they want low rents, but they're not willing to go out and You know, I was born in 1981. I was raised in New York City. And, you know, I grew up in Gretchen Village, which was, you know, by no means the cheapest part of New York at that time. But it was middle class people could afford to live there back then. And a lot of that was, yeah, like the crime was way higher back then. And so the city has become a much better place to live since I was a kid.

1:09:29But because housing hasn't been built, it's meant that instead of everyone benefiting from these improvements, there's been, you know, people with rent-controlled units have done well, but other people, you know, have a lot of problems. Yeah.

1:09:44Coleman Hughes:Okay, final one of your recent blog posts I want to ask you about. And this is, you can file this again under the category of ways in which that, ways in which you might struggle to distinguish yourself from a center-right Republican, at least as judged by the ears of like a far-left Democrat. at. What is public school for? You argue that public school, part of the mandate of public school should be to inculcate basic civic patriotism and loyalty to America, which I agree with. It's probably not something I would have agreed with as a younger person. But as I've reflected more and more on what the purpose of school is and what the purpose of a history education actually is, right?

1:10:34Coleman Hughes:It's not like you can actually get by in life without knowing anything about history. Like you can do just fine. And given that all of history education is one giant act of curation, that curation is the main problem, right? It's like once we agree what all the lies are, even if we can agree, we've still got, you know, whatever it is, 200, 250 school days and very limited time and maybe, you know, expenses for like three field trips. And we've got to figure out what to teach these kids, knowing that they're not going to learn 99 % of what they might learn, of what is out there to learn. And so how we curate that, like what should be the master value in terms of how we curate what to teach kids and what songs to have them sing and so forth.

1:11:30Coleman Hughes:So how did you arrive? I mean, is that a view you've always had as a Democrat that teaching straight up like patriotism and loyalty is a good thing? Or is that a more recently arrived at viewpoint? I mean, some of this is just, you know, the luxury of being a cranky middle-aged person as I enter my 40s and thinking about how we used to do things. back in the day. But I do think that there's been this experiment that progressives have run with sort of really mainstreaming kind of like critical theory takes on America with the view that this is going to like advance really good progressive causes or something, you know, or like create justice in the world.

1:12:24And I think as we've seen it, as I've seen it, as I've watched it play out, it's like we just, we can see that that's not true. You know, I think it's a fair critique to say that a lot of the older patriotic histories of America were written, you know, in a way that was exclusionary of the experiences of African Americans, of women, of other kinds of things like that. And we should try to, you know, be mindful of the diversity of the country and think about, like, what we're saying and why and, you know, how we characterize, like, the Confederate States of America and other kinds of things like that.

1:13:09But that fundamentally, if you look around the world, it's just not true that, like, having ethnic conflict is what is unique and special about America. Every place you look where you see diversity, you see some elements of conflict, and you see elements of injustice around those conflict. That's a real part of the universe. But I think we should understand that as the baseline, right? Like, that's the human condition. That's not the American story. And so then we ask ourselves, like, well, what is the American story? Like, what does America have that's distinctive, that we can contribute to these things.

1:13:47And it is these universalistic ideas, right? And it is things that transcend identity and ethnicity and conflict. And it is the, you know, working together to overcome aspects of the universal human tradition. And I think that's a story ultimately that, you know, it's not the only true story you can tell about America, but it is true. It's a good story. And it's a story that I think meets what conservatives want, which is to hear something like affirming about themselves and about America and its role in the world. And it's something that also accomplishes, I think, what progressives want, you know, which is to validate the idea that like change is good, that society should be dynamic, that we should be inclusive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:14:39And one of the things I talk about in my piece is, you know, all the most accomplished figures of the civil rights movement in that era, obviously, were not like blind to America's flaws or whatever somebody might say, but they emphasized America's virtues. You know, that was the lever that they used to accomplish change was to talk about the Declaration of Independence, to talk about Abraham Lincoln, to talk about, you know, America as a sweet land of liberty. And that was how you inspire people to be the best versions of themselves, that having everybody dwell on race and divisiveness is not productive in the way that I think progressives want it to be.

1:15:29I always remember what I learned from William Julius Wilson when I was in college, you know, great African-American thinker, intellectual, you know, one of his points was, you know, the more you tell white people to, like, ponder race and, like, dwell and marinate in it, like, ultimately that backfires on Black Americans versus trying to just, like, advance ideas that will lift most people up and create a kind of a unifying vision of America. I think, like, that's what Barack Obama did in his best-regarded speeches. And that, you know, that's the tradition, the mainstream tradition of American liberalism, and it's one that it is not that hard to imagine going back to,

1:16:23Coleman Hughes:but is quite different from what's sort of become in vogue among left-wing intellectuals. Yeah, I mean, the example you gave, which I thought was very powerful, was of Marian Anderson singing America, Land of Liberty, My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty, which I grew up singing as well. And if I can just read from your blog post, it's really good. You say, now, Anderson was singing the song somewhat ironically. This is in the late 30s or early 40s, right? Her point was that to a considerable extent, America was in fact not a land of liberty for Black people, right? Yet the performance worked because people all across the country were taught to sing it non-ironically.

1:17:12Coleman Hughes:Some people probably noticed the mismatch between the stated ideal and the reality. Lots of people probably didn't and just took it at face value. Yet, it's precisely because people grew up sincerely believing that America was a sweet land of liberty that gave the performance its punch. So that's a very deep point. So, I mean, it's like, imagine if white kids in school in the 1930s had been taught to sing a song that's like, my country tis of thee, founded on slavery and genocide, deeply implicated in white supremacy, for thee I sing, then when she's up there singing whatever and being like, I deserve equal rights, people are going to be like, no, you don't.

1:17:59Like, this is a racist country with white supremacy as a foundational value, right? It's the fact that people were taught that America is good, that meant that if America did something that's not good, you could say like, hey guys, we're supposed to be the good guys here. And if you tell people that the country is villainous, you're just encouraging everyone to live down to the worst versions of themselves or the worst versions of the country. And this comes up any time hypocrisy is raised. about anyone, about any country, about anything, right? There's always the question, well, okay, are we challenging you to live up to the aspiration?

1:18:44Or are we saying you should lower your standards, right? And just kind of like wallow in it. And I don't think it's anyone's intention to like turn America into a country where everyone just wallows all the time. But I do think that that's the impact of this like insistence that we be hypercritical and tear down our idols constantly. That when you raise people up with a maybe slightly naive view of themselves and their parents and their family and their community and their country, it then means that, like, if they don't live up to that self-image, you can press them on it. You know? And that the idea that, like, the education system is going to turn everyone into, like, radicals in this way.

1:19:32Like, I think it doesn't really make sense, right? That it feeds a kind of divisiveness, and it feeds a kind of angst and unhappiness, but it doesn't do the work that she was trying to do, that Martin Luther King was trying to do a generation later. You know, and there's a reason why, I mean, this thing I say in the speech, right? Like, she gives that performance at the Lincoln Memorial. And it was very famous at the time, famous for years later. And then King gives the I Have a Dream speech in that very same location. And, you know, his speech is referencing her performance. Her performance is referencing Abraham Lincoln, right?

1:20:12It's all people participating in this, like, grand tradition of Americana that is meant to mean something to people and to call them to rise above their most narrow and picayune self-interest. And patriotism is the lever that, like, societies use to get people to think bigger than themselves. And I don't think that narrow, like, ethnic identity politics or critical theory serves that function well. It's sort of fun for advanced students to remind them that reality is more complicated than, you know, George Washington would never tell a lie or something. But it's like, it's good actually to start with the kind of naive patriotic story.

1:21:04Coleman Hughes:okay Matt Iglesias thanks so much for coming on my show the substack is slow boring I recommend that anyone interested in politics make this part of your essential reading thank you so much for coming on the show Matt thank you