The Democrats Could Still Screw This Up

14:57Chris Hayes:Which is a perfect articulation of what used to be a fairly kind of consensus vision that underlied the debates happening above it. That consensus torn apart. When that fight is happening at this elemental level, I think it's very hard to come back in with like the old policy question, without actually making an affirmative case for what kind of country you want.

15:20Ross Douthat:But why can't you make the Reagan case and pair it with a moderate seeming agenda? I mean, it seems to me like when I when I look at, you know, younger right wingers associated with nationalism, what you'll see often is that, you know, if you push people, even sort of self-proclaimed Christian nationalists who believe that white America is under threat and so on, like, are still kind of civic nationalists, right? Like the actual support for a true heritage Americans are the only real Americans is really narrow. So if the Republicans seem to be moving in that direction, that seems like an opportunity for the Democrats to present themselves as an extremely normie mainstream party.

16:09Ross Douthat:but with the problem that nobody trusts them to enforce the border. Correct. Yes. Well, that's the problem.

16:15Chris Hayes:And I think, well, one place that you have to deal with this head on is changing asylum law. It is bizarre to me that this thing, which is the central technical issue at the heart of the way that we've experienced immigration in the country since really since 2014. I remember covering that. Like that was a huge moment, right? People's kids start showing up at the border.

16:35Ross Douthat:The first child migration crisis. Yes.

16:39Chris Hayes:It's kind of weird that like there has been no progress on rewriting the law on this. I mean, even just to flip it on the other side for a second, you would think a thing that a Republican unified government would do would be like, well, wait a second. Yes, we're going to close down the border using executive action. But this thing is broken and written by libs. Like, let's change asylum law.

17:04Ross Douthat:Yes. Hasn't happened. You would imagine that, but you would imagine that a Republican administration would ask Congress to do a lot of things that this administration does not. But that's a vacuum, right, for Democrats. It's a vacuum, but it's a vacuum, it seems to me, that only a relatively small group of sort of self-consciously moderate Democrats would want to claim. Like if you're on the insurgent side, the insurgent side, and then you've got an insurgent vision, plus you agree with Chris Hayes that we're having this kind of existential battle about what kind of country we are. Are you really going to want to be the Democrat who comes out and says, and by the way, we're going to reform asylum so fewer people can apply for asylum here?

17:46Ross Douthat:Isn't that an impossible sell in the Democratic Party right now?

17:49Chris Hayes:I don't think it is, honestly. I think my own way, I'm not the politician who's going to do this, right? But my own thing is— Well, we'll see, man. Your time may come. Just to be clear, I just want to say there is an absolutely, to me, compelling case for essentially open borders, like in a moral sense. Like I don't think—

18:09Ross Douthat:We're saving this clip for when you do run for president. Yes. I mean, I don't personally—I would not support it.

18:14Chris Hayes:As a politician, I wouldn't vote for it. But I also think it's not like a ludicrous idea.

18:18Ross Douthat:Yeah, you and the Cato Institute are there. Yeah, absolutely.

18:21Chris Hayes:So they're like that animating moral spirit, your right to identify as animating a huge part of the left and fundamentally causing attention with the fact that most people don't want open borders. And there are people that are morally committed to essentially that vision. And I don't think they're necessarily like ethically incorrect. Right. As a policy, I don't think it works. And most importantly, it's impossible, I think, to marshal majority support for that. So in this sense, to me, the fundamental thing I think to keep in mind is immigration policy has to be in the national interest first, orderly and humane.

19:01Right.

19:01Chris Hayes:And the key part of that, and this is why I come back around to this discussion about what kind of nation we are. The key thing that has fallen away, I think, on the Democratic side in this discussion is the first one. It is in the national interest. Like immigrants are great. Immigrants are awesome. Immigration is an incredible bounty and gift to this country. It is the reason that the differentiating thing that has made America different. I'm just going back to like the civic pluralism of like a 1980s public school education in New York City. It's amazing that we have all these people from all these different places who bring all these different kind of talents and perspectives and come here and become American and bring that to do things like win gold medals and start companies and be your doctor.

19:54Ross Douthat:And so you have to sell. You have to sell. You have to make that argument. But you have to make that argument in the style, you know, you have to make the 1980s New York City public school argument, which was perhaps slightly more liberal than the country as a whole, combined with an argument that persuades people that you're not going to do what Joe Biden did. Right. And so maybe so that let's let's all right. So let's talk about potential leaders of the Democratic Party who could make that argument or or not. Right. But like who who is the leadership class for the Democrats? going into 2026 and beyond?

20:31Chris Hayes:Well, it's very, I think out parties are always in this position where there is no national leader. But you're trying to discover one, yeah. But it's a particularly intense one here, I think, because of the rupture represented by Trump. I mean, I think a really important thing to kind of understand from the perspective of people in the broad center left is that it's a real before and after situation. Like, if you view Donald Trump's project as a fundamental assault on the constitutional order, which is to fundamentally transform the nation into something that's not democratic, it's very hard to find continuity in, like, the politics of old.

21:14Chris Hayes:Like, his abnormality and the abnormality of his conduct creates a world in which, like, it's like you've been untethered from the spaceship and you're just like floating out into space, you know?

21:28Ross Douthat:Okay, that's right. So you didn't give me a single name about how soft people. Well, right.

21:35Chris Hayes:No, but the reason I say that is just because what I'm saying is I think you need to understand that, like, the way Democratic Party voters are viewing this is in extreme terms. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Yes.

21:45Ross Douthat:No, I can see that. And I can see that the core reality for a lot of Democratic voters in 2026 is total frustration with anyone who told them in 2016 or 2018 or 2020. This will go away. This will go away. You just have to sort of be normal, restore normalcy and so on. Right. But the dilemma for the party is that to win national elections.

22:09Chris Hayes:They actually have to be normal and restore normalcy.

22:12Ross Douthat:But you also you have to win people who voted for Trump. Yes. Right. And this was something that Democrats didn't think they had to do after 2016 because Trump didn't win the popular vote. But guess what? After 2024, he won the popular vote. You also need to win Senate seats in seats that Trump won by more than a few points. Right. So it seems like this is, you know, not an impossible problem to solve, but a very challenging one where you have this base that wants an acknowledgement of rupture and abnormality and a swing constituency that you need to win or hold that is just living in the new reality.

22:50Chris Hayes:So let me give three examples of national figures that I think are doing interesting things to pull off that because you're right. That's the fundamental thing that you have to do. Right. Mark Kelly, Ruben Gallego, and Raphael Warnock. You can even say John Ossoff, too.

23:07Ross Douthat:Tell me what state each of those men represents, just for the sake of...

23:11Chris Hayes:Right. So let me give examples of two states that are kind of key states here, which are Arizona and Georgia, and the four Democratic senators in those states, right? They've all won statewide office. They've all won statewide office in the era of Trump. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly in Arizona, John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. I'm choosing this advisedly because, of course, Arizona and Georgia being like the key states, right, that Biden won and that Kamala Harris lost. And particularly because they're outside of the, you know, blue belt, the blue wall, right? This was a huge deal that these states flipped to Democrats in 2020.

23:48Chris Hayes:And I think all four of them have – and I'm not saying they're necessarily national leaders. But what I would say is that all four of them have their own way of dealing with precisely this issue. So, like, Ruben Gallego's voting record is fairly moderate. He, for instance, I think all four of those centers, if I'm not mistaken, voted for the Lake and Riley Act. Right. So, like, that was one of the first votes. It was a big Republican-led measure to essentially increase sanctions and for immigrants who committed crimes.

24:19Ross Douthat:Named for a woman who was killed by an illegal immigrant.

24:21Chris Hayes:Yep. They, all four of them voted for that. And I think, you know, we're looking at their internal polling and understood the states they represented. I think there were issues with that legislation substantively, but putting that aside, I think all four have found different ways to rhetorically emphasize how abnormal and wrong they think the direction of the country is, while keeping their eyes on the main issues that won them their own. Senate seats. I mean, Warnock is sort of an amazing example. Warnock is, you know, speaks in the sort of register of a preacher, which he is, broad moral language.

25:00Chris Hayes:That guy will bring it back to health care and kitchen table issues every single time. He will call what's happening aberrant and evil. And he will also go back to this sort of kitchen table vision. And Mark Kelly is another great example, right? Mark Kelly's got a fairly moderate voting record in the United States Senate. he is you know he's being maybe prosecuted military pension possibly suspended i think

25:29Ross Douthat:all of which is clearly good for his political position the best possible thing for it yeah

25:33Chris Hayes:um and so i think in all those cases you're seeing a combination of a rhetoric that speaks to like the deep sense of democratic and spiritual crisis in the center left that I think all four of those are pretty popular figures with basically a voting record and a sort of substantive policy agenda that pretty squarely sits in a kind of center of the nation's politics.

25:57Ross Douthat:I think I would say that all of them also have personal characteristics that separate them in some way from the kind of churchiness of academic progressivism, maybe. Right. Warnock speaks the language of Christianity in a way that Democratic coalition tends to be comfortable with. Gallego, I would say, is just kind of an unwoke Hispanic dude. If I can, you don't have to comment on that, but that would be my take. And Mark Kelly is like the whitest white astronaut you ever saw. Right. And some of the again, it's sort of some of these are policy positions. Some of these are identity positions, but all of them create a perception that like this is a form of democratic politics that is somewhat distinct from the kind of competition to say Latinx the most.

26:46Ross Douthat:Yes. Right.

26:47Chris Hayes:I mean, I also do think like I think that I think there's a little bit of fighting the last war on that. I think I do think there's a little bit of. The alienating rhetorical excesses of a certain part of the, let's say, nonprofit academic and online left, which sort of came together in Twitter, particularly in 2014, 15, 16, which were real. Real enough. Yeah. But it did get kind of beaten out of people a bit. Like the idea of what the language of that 2016 or 2020 primary looks like compared to now is pretty different. And I think partly that's just because people have lost elections and we, you know, Democratic Party lost the most important election of its lifetime.

27:30Chris Hayes:And you have to talk in a way that people understand and feels like a thing that they've heard before.

27:59Ross Douthat:I'm Debra Kamen. I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times. This one time, I was working on a particularly difficult investigation of the bad behavior in the real estate industry. I was in a meeting with my editor, and she said, Debra, why is your face so white? And I just told her the truth. I said, you know, this story is really hard. And she looked at me and said, that's what we do. I think about that all the time. At the New York Times, I have never encountered someone who said to me, that's too ambitious, or that story is too hard. It's the contrary. I am told you need to dig deeper, you need to keep going until we make sure we have every single fact, every single layer to tell the stories that would not be told because they are hard.

28:41Ross Douthat:And that's what's special about The New York Times. It allows our readers to understand not just what's happening, but why it's happening.

28:49Chris Hayes:If you're a subscriber, you probably have experienced that sense of understanding. And thank you for supporting this work. If you're not, you can subscribe at nytimes.com slash subscribe.

29:10Ross Douthat:So let me do the horrible thing that we talk about presidential politics in 2028, right? So I would say just as an observer of American politics that if I were going to pick nominees for the Democrats in 2028, all of the guys you just mentioned would be very plausible presidential or vice presidential candidates. If you're trying to maximize, just, you know, maximize your popular vote, maximize your share of swing states. The people leading the polls in the Democratic primary right now are Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, who represent somewhat different models. They are sort of Harris is a legacy candidate.

29:50Ross Douthat:Right. Polling potentially could collapse on contact with political reality. It's name recognition. That's that's possible. Right. Right. Newsom. Tell me what you think about Gavin Newsom.

30:03Chris Hayes:I think Newsom has a Hillary Clinton problem, which is that Hillary Clinton was perceived outside of the Democratic Party and Democratic coalition as like the ultimate lib, like the Libyist lib who ever lived and was never actually like that much of a lib. It was like – and also had a record that was like fairly centrist, particularly as a U.S. senator. And that's like the worst uncanny valley for a Democratic politician to be in where the base doesn't trust you because you don't have a kind of organic relationship with like the left parts of the party. And then the swing voter like just thinks like that's a lib.

30:42Chris Hayes:You want the inverse, right? Right. Like you want the person that has authentic relationships with the left parts of the party in the grassroots and also communicates broadly and is viewed as a not particularly partisan or liberal figure. Barack Obama being, you know, a good example of that. And I just think right now, and this could change, like Newsom has the opposite set of factors. Like, he has made very clear attempts to show that he's bipartisan, centrist, independent. You know, there's some stuff he's done around the billionaire tax and, you know, policy around trans folks that have been actual substantive things he's done.

31:28Chris Hayes:Moves to the center. Yeah, or to the right, as some people would say. But I haven't seen evidence that that, like, comes through. Like, I just think there's a reputational thing that's very problem. Also, partly if you're just like the governor of California is a tough place to get the next Democratic nominee from.

31:46Ross Douthat:Right. I mean, he has. I mean, they're like Kamala Harris. He has never run a important election in which he had to win large numbers of centrist to center right votes. And that showed up big time in Harris's campaign style, I think. And you could see it as his weakness. But look, here's his strength. Right. His strength is that he is able to get attention and hold attention. And you, Chris Hayes, wrote a book recently called The Siren's Call. It's a very interesting book, highly recommended, even though I disagree with, you know, important parts of it, right, about what the Internet has done to political culture.

32:25Ross Douthat:And you talk a lot about attention in that book, right? And what is the power of attention and how has Newsom succeeded in grasping it?

32:36Chris Hayes:Yeah, I mean, the thesis of the sirens call is basically that attention is the most valuable resource of our age, that the competition for it has grown so fierce that it is increasingly valuable. But it's both valuable to us and it's valuable to the companies that can extract it. That's the main thesis of the book. But it has a specific importance in politics, right? Which is, you know, attention is prior to everything you need to do else in politics. Like name recognition is the thing we use, right? Part of why Gavin Newsom is running highs. He has high name recognition. That's been true forever.

33:12Chris Hayes:But it's more true than ever because more things are competing for our attention than ever before. They're filtered through these algorithmic platforms, right, that can pull us hither and yon. And so the primary thing you have to figure out more than ever before in my lifetime to be a successful politician is how to get people's attention and cut through that. Donald Trump did it incredibly effectively, had a whole bunch of innovation in how he did it. And I think you're right to identify the fact that Newsom has a real talent for that. Like the whole shtick he did where he was like posting in Donald Trump's voice.

33:45Chris Hayes:Some people found it cringy. Some people found it hilarious. But it worked.

33:50Ross Douthat:It got attention. It got attention.

33:53Chris Hayes:So the question is, right, so how does that fit with the analysis? I mean, look, the ideal situation you want, I think if you're like designing this in a lab, is someone that both has a proven ability to speak to swing voters, the voters you need, and is also really good at attention. And the kind of nightmare scenario in a Democratic primary is someone who's like bad at the former and good at the latter, right?

34:19Ross Douthat:I don't think the Democrats nominate someone in 2028 who is sort of a kind of pure creature of base craziness or whatever. I do think, though, that there's a way in which the narrative of attention is itself potentially a kind of – it's something that people can reach for as a substitute for, again, like doing hard things like pivoting to the center, right? Where you say – I mean like if you look at the –

34:47Chris Hayes:But he is pivoting to the center.

34:50Ross Douthat:Well, he's pivoting to the center, but from, I would say, from a position, and this is to your point, as governor of California, right? Right. That's the problem. It's where he's starting from. Yes, right. It's tough. It makes the pivot tough.

35:03Chris Hayes:But he is trying to do it. Right. I mean, clearly, it's not like he's not, like, the thing that I think you're going to see a lot of politicians try to pull off, and it would be interesting to see how the base responds, is, like, maximal kind of, like, attentional trolling resistance. you know, rhetorical performance and substantive pivot to the center. That's what you're going to see a lot of people trying to pull off.

35:26Ross Douthat:But you do have a lot of situations right now that I see, again, as a conservative looking at liberals, right? Like if you look at the Democratic Senate primary in Texas. In Texas, yeah. Right. And James Tellurico has a kind of religious pivot to the center, but fundamentally, I don't see that in his positions. He's sort of just doing a Christian gloss on very conventional progressive messaging. I just wonder if you see that, you know, again, as the author of a kind of attention thesis as a situation where Democrats are like, yeah, we're winning. We're winning the attention war. And therefore, we don't have to worry about swing voters.

36:00Chris Hayes:I think we have to interrogate some of the premises here, right? Because underlying this, listen to this academic liberalism, Chris, interrogate the go on.

36:11Ross Douthat:Yeah. Interrogate the premises for.

36:12Chris Hayes:Well, here's I mean, But here's the question, right? All this depends on, like, how much we're dealing with median voter theory here. Like, there's a median voter. That voter is in the middle of a traditional ideological access. They're cross-pressured on issues. And they move towards the people who substantively align with their policy views the most. I think there's a lot to that. I think that clearly was very true on immigration in 2024. Like, really clear story to tell there about that. But I also think that Donald Trump and his success just like confounds that in a million different ways.

36:45Chris Hayes:And people will be like, well, he moderated on Social Security, Medicare. And it's like, yes, OK.

36:50Ross Douthat:That mattered. I think that mattered a lot. Yes.

36:52Chris Hayes:Yes. Yes. Yes. It mattered. Was it that was that why Donald Trump became the president of the United States twice? I'm a little skeptical about that. So the reason I say that is the question presumes that like the way to go back is that you need to like move to the center on this sort of like traditionally ordered access. Right. Right. Which is like the left right access and on individual issues. And I'm just like a little skeptical that that's true. Right. Like you need to be perceived as a moderate. 100%. That is true. You need to be perceived as relatively independent, as not a kind of like traditional partisan to win swing voters.

37:36Chris Hayes:Is the way that you get that perception like what your substantive policy is on asylum law? Maybe, maybe not. Like it's just not clear to me that those two things add so neatly to each other.

37:50Ross Douthat:All right. This seems like a good moment to pull away from electoral politics a little bit and talk about the left just as a force unto itself. Right. A force that, you know, sort of wants to pull politics in its direction, doesn't necessarily want to worry about exactly what the median voter thinks, but wants to be a kind of gravitational force in American politics, independent of, you know, what you need to do to win election after election. I've asked you where things stand for the Democrats where do things stand for the left like what does the left want besides Donald Trump out of office and defeated and so on what is the positive left wing vision in American life right now.

38:32Chris Hayes:The question of the left is a little complicated because we're talking about the sort of people to the left of liberals the kinds of folks online who would like use liberals and insult.

38:39Ross Douthat:Let's start with people who would define themselves as left as opposed to liberal, mainstream Democrat, whatever else. People who have a self-conscious identity.

38:50Chris Hayes:I mean, I think the positive vision would be like a society of shared flourishing and equality and solidarity.

38:59Ross Douthat:All right. Well, then let me frame the question differently. Before we got to the possibility of some kind of artificial intelligence revolution, and we're going to talk about that possibility in a minute, but let's bracket AI for a second. It seemed to me like the left all across the Western world had run into a kind of big cul-de-sac obstacle, whatever else, in the last 10 or 15 years. Basically, you have a bunch of countries that are rich, have big welfare states. They're all pretty expensive. These societies are getting old at a really rapid clip. And it seems to me that that basic dynamic just sort of traps the left in a kind of desperate attempt to shore up a status quo.

39:46Ross Douthat:that's under threat and doesn't... Defensive battles. Defensive battles and doesn't leave room for, you know, a utopian revolutionary vision, which is sort of essential to the left, as I understand it.

39:57Chris Hayes:Yeah, I think that's a fair critique. I mean, I think that's...

39:58Ross Douthat:But it's not a critique. It's the, to me, it's like the challenge and what is, are there sort of solutions?

40:05Chris Hayes:I think that is truly the case of the center-left parties of the, say, Socialist International in Europe, right? I mean, which are completely hollowed out, but moribund and electorally in a lot of trouble. The Western Hemisphere is a very different story for a bunch of different reasons. But we can stick to America. But in the U.S., yeah. I mean, look, you know, one attempt to do that was the Green New Deal vision, right? Was, look, let's talk about a sort of techno-utopian world. We, you know, we could have a world, and this is actually a world that still exists possibly in the future, although it seems like so remote, of essentially like zero marginal cost energy that's carbon free that would allow us to do all sorts of things, right?

40:51Chris Hayes:And a society in which like we don't have this enormous concentration of both wealth and energy wealth that's much more distributed and much more equal. The biggest issue right now on the left, I think, is they have the wind at their backs on the central political economy question, which is, does American capitalism work for the ordinary person? And I think the polling reliably shows people say the answer to that question is no. Profoundly no.

41:24Ross Douthat:Younger people especially.

41:25Chris Hayes:Younger people especially. And I think the level of wealth concentration we've seen, the explosion in spending by the wealthiest folks on our political campaigns, whether it's efficacious or not, and the kind of like tech folks all there at the inauguration. Like all of this creates a world that should be ripe for a left critique. And in some ways has been. I mean, there's a reason that the mayor of New York is a democratic socialist, which would have been, you know, a very remote possibility 15 years earlier. The question is, what kind of society do you want, right?

42:02Ross Douthat:But isn't the question, how do you pay for the society you want? Because it seems to me that, yeah, that vision is, in principle, very popular. Bernie Sanders has been a very popular figure making that kind of case. The right, the populist right, has traded on elements of that vision, tried to appropriate it and so on. But when it comes to, you know, are we going to do a massive new public works program? Right. It seems like the left, it hit one wall with inflation under Biden. It spent a lot of money and got inflation, which is incredibly unpopular. And the other wall is that, yes, you can tax the billionaires and that's popular.

42:40Ross Douthat:But to fund a totally revised welfare state, you need to tax a lot more people than that. And that is deeply unpopular, too. And does anything change those facts for the left?

42:52Chris Hayes:Well, I would say there's a different set of questions that are, to me, a little more important. I think one of the traps in center-left policy in the last, say, 30 years is that we have this sort of pre-tax and transfer inequality and then tax and transfers to change it. And we just keep getting more and more inequality in the, you know, what the market does. And then the recipe is more and more redistribution. And like, it's more than rhetorical. Ask rich people in New York whether the leftist project of taxing wealthy people in New York has been rhetorical. It has very much not.

43:29Ross Douthat:I mean, I won't I won't ask you how you how you're aware of that.

43:33Chris Hayes:It is the most redistributive tax regime in the entire country. You know, there's a new line put in above$25 million. They're trying to get the billionaire tax in California. Like, that's real stuff and real money. The problem is you can't have a political economy that just keeps producing, like, this larger and larger forms of inequality that then have larger and larger amounts of redistribution. to produce an equitable society. Like, so the question then becomes, well, what is the vision for an equitable market economy or labor market or labor force or society that is genuinely middle class?

44:13Ross Douthat:But even for that, you have to, as far as I can, like, I just don't think you get that more equitable society by passing like some, you know, pro-labor regulations or something. Like, you know, you mentioned the Green New Deal. Like, any story you want to tell about changing just the way people are employed and paid in America itself would require massive public work spending, massive new industrial policy. And that money has to come from somewhere. And the left certainly doesn't want to cut Social Security or Medicare or anything like that. Right. So it is. Isn't it still sort of stuck saying we're going to add another line above 25 million, like to get the money to create the predistribution?

44:56Chris Hayes:Well, I just think that it's thinking in too narrow terms to think about this, like, specific tax and transfer question. I mean, the other thing I'll say is, like, there really is a lot of money at the top. Like, you can't fund a welfare state with it, but, like, you can start with a wealth tax. Like, that actually is, like, a very developed, clear idea. It's very popular. It would be fought tooth and nail. But there really is a lot at the top. But, yes, you're correct that you have to build. I mean, what's the most durable form of, you know, social transfer, right? Social security and Medicare.

45:32Chris Hayes:Really social security the most. And, you know, social security is actually relatively regressive as a tax and is broadly shared. And so to get back around to the point I think you're making is that, like, you do at a certain point have to take the tax revolt head on.

45:46Ross Douthat:Yes, you do. Right. You have to convince some middle-top or middle-class people that they should pay more taxes.

45:52Chris Hayes:But the thing I would say about that is if that's what your ultimate project is, right, which is, I mean, this would be what, say, Bernie Sanders, Medicare for All would require. And he was clear about that. There will be more in taxes. And yes, for you. Right. He didn't try to, like, wave away the math on that. He was crystal clear about it. That said, that is only a plausible political vision. Right. A shared vision. If you're also really going after the billionaires. I mean, a country in which like those people who are billionaires are paying us lower effective tax rate and like, yes, is this a campaign cliche?

46:28Chris Hayes:Yes. Is it true? 100 percent. It's also true. Is not a world in which like you can plausibly ask people to have this sort of shared vision.

47:07Ross Douthat:Let's talk about how artificial intelligence might shake up the landscape. Because I think it enters into all of these debates in powerful ways. But start, again, since we're talking about the left, There is a narrative to which I have contributed that says basically the left right now, meaning academics, intellectuals, activists, and so on, less so politicians maybe, is just not taking AI seriously enough. That there's a bunch of people on the left who just keep wanting to say, you know, it's just not as big a deal. It's getting hyped. You know, it's the AI companies talking their book. Yep. Not and what is actually being delivered is not a game changer.

47:50Ross Douthat:To the extent that that's what the left is saying, I think it's wrong. I don't know how big a deal AI is, but I think it's a pretty big deal. But how do you see the left-wing conversation on artificial intelligence?

48:01Chris Hayes:Well, I think there is a fair amount of that. I think there's a little bit of wishful thinking of like, this is the metaverse. Right.

48:09Ross Douthat:It's the crypto, the metaverse. We had a run of things from Silicon Valley that were not world changing.

48:16Chris Hayes:Right. In defense of people saying that, like, there is very recent evidence of an enormous bubble in which, like, one of the most powerful rich companies in America literally changed his name to Meta. And it was ridiculous. Right.

48:33Ross Douthat:The holodeck didn't appear.

48:35Chris Hayes:It's like, you know, sometimes everyone does jump in the hype pool and everyone is wrong. As a baseline, that's an important thing. And the reason I say that is because that is a very key part of the way that I think a lot of people think about this. Like, this has happened before.

48:49Ross Douthat:But you would concede, I don't think you agree with this, but you would concede that more people are all in in much bigger ways for AI than I think ever were for, you know, tooling around in virtual reality. Well, I think the distinction. Mark Zuckerberg was in for it. I think the distinguishing thing is that it's just obviously a more impressive and useful technology.

49:07Chris Hayes:Like you can explain to a person very quickly what it does or what it could do that's useful in a way that you couldn't with the metaverse, right? So that's the key thing. I mean, so I would say, yes, there's a certain amount of it's all a scam. I do think it's probably worth distinguishing between the technology and the business model, which are distinct, right? Like I was thinking about this the other day. there was a company called Cosmo.com in 1999 to like 2001. I remember them well. And Urban Fetch. And their idea was you would be able to order anything you wanted, whether it was soda, a VHS, groceries within an hour, two hours, whatever.

49:48Chris Hayes:And it was like the typical classic late 90s dot com boom. And it, you know, went out of business very quickly. But they clearly were on to something. They were just a little too early. Right. So like, I think it's important to keep this distinction in your head between is the technology useful and going to be transformative? And is the current business model or business hype around it like correctly valued in the market? And the reason I say is because those get conflated sometimes in this discussion in ways that I think are not helpful. And particularly, I think people on the left were like, it's all BS or it's all going to go away.

50:24Chris Hayes:It's like, yeah, there might be a huge crash. But very clearly, this is a transformative technology. So then the question becomes, like, how people on the left think about that transformative technology. And I would say, overwhelmingly, it's extremely negative. Let me defend why it's negative. One is, it really is the case that they just took everyone's intellectual property without compensation and trained up models that could then, like, replace the people that generated them. That's like an actual thing that happened. That's pretty messed up. It's kind of a crazy transfer of value when you think about it.

51:01Chris Hayes:Like artists that made stuff, people that wrote things.

51:05Ross Douthat:Newspaper columnists.

51:07Chris Hayes:Newspaper columnists.

51:07Ross Douthat:I mean, I'm in the anthropic settlement.

51:10Chris Hayes:Yes.

51:11Ross Douthat:I have also received literature from the anthropic settlement. So like, yeah, A.

51:16Chris Hayes:B, the people that are controlling it are a tiny sliver of people. And like one of the sort of fundamental insights to the left, right, is like real intense forms of concentrated power of, you know, billionaire capitalists making huge decisions for everyone is pretty bad. And right now you've got like, what, five or six people that are making decisions about how trillions of dollars of capital is allocated and what all of our futures are going to look like? Like, no thanks, man. Like, I don't I don't like that at all.

51:49Ross Douthat:Well, fortunately, the people making those decisions are completely normal in every way, hold no eccentric views about the nature of the human future. No, I think that story makes sense. But then what is what is an actual left wing AI politics look like? Because right now, interesting question. Right now you have Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has called for a moratorium on building data centers. To me, this seems like something that is likely to be fairly popular in a lot of places and ultimately basically useless that it's basically sort of nimbyism, not in my backyard. And what will happen is the data centers will get built in other states or they'll get built in the Middle East or they'll get built in Africa.

52:33Ross Douthat:And at most, you're slowing down AI maybe a tiny bit. You're not doing anything about China and you need some other plan.

52:43Chris Hayes:So let me, can I argue against that for a second? Yes. Just because I think the question is like, okay, well, where do you start, right? So I think there's a real parallel to the arguments around globalization, trade, and neoliberalism that happened in the late 1990s. Because people said the exact same thing there. It's like, well, what are you going to do? You're like, this is just the way the world is moving. And if we don't make this trade deal, then other countries will make that trade deal. And things are going to get automated. And what, you want to like cling to factories for the rest of your life?

53:12Chris Hayes:And this is just like the way the world is moving. And yeah, you kids can go riot in Seattle with your dumb WTO protest and like try to save the owls. But like. In the end, that's all going to be ineffectual. And then what really happened was like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance came along to be like, hey, man, probably not a great thing to like absolutely sledgehammer the entirety of our industrial base and just take millions of people and turn their towns into like absolutely hollowed out husks and leave everyone just like begging for enough opioids to kill the pain of what had been taken. And I want to go back and be like, wait a second.

53:51Chris Hayes:Those people were right. They were identifying something correctly. when they said back when we had this debate the first time that there were going to be enormous consequences to this model of economic development, to a bunch of policy decisions that were actually made, remember, that led to that destruction.

54:08Ross Douthat:Right, but the downsides of data centers, as I understand it, is, yes, there are some questions about electricity generation and sort of green concerns. Pretty big ones. Well, I don't think we're going to resolve that. I'm not convinced that they're that big, But like my concern with data centers is the thing that they are enabling and how it transforms. Well, that's what I'm talking about. Right. Okay. But my point, the reason I say that is, you know, because I'm saying the full thing, right?

54:37Chris Hayes:I'm saying if you're saying my project is to put a crowbar in the wheels of the machinery of the creation of a new vision for how the world will be ordered. And the way I'm doing is I'm stopping this data center, right? Right. Like what else do you want people to do?

54:52Ross Douthat:I mean, I think you do need to figure out the right place to put your crowbar, right? So if this is, to use a different historical analogy, right, if this is akin to the Industrial Revolution, in the end, the people who, you know, smashed looms and so on didn't really have a plausible agenda. Right. And the people who instituted child labor laws and tried and did. Right. Yeah. So that would be a left friendly example. I'm not sure that works. Like, look, there is a part of me certainly that looks at certain doom laden projections for the future of AI. And it's like, yeah, you know, you stop it wherever you can.

55:31Ross Douthat:And if you've got to use, you know, NIMBYism that I might oppose in other circumstances to do it, so be it. Right. I just don't see the path from a data center that doesn't get built in Oregon to we prevent AI from doing something bad.

55:47Chris Hayes:Yes. I mean, let me let me just say that, like, the reason that I sort of defend that project is just because, like, as a means into the politics of it. Ultimately, I mean, Lawrence Lestick said this to me, the Harvard law professor, and he's been thinking about AI and democracy, where he's like, he said this thing that stuck with him. He's like, imagine if we had the nuclear arms race, but it was just private companies.

56:08Ross Douthat:like well and well and but but also the people building building the nukes were talking to the nukes and the nukes the nukes were the nukes were saying don't you want to press the button a lot of things right no no it's very it's it's a very i agree and we're having again we're having this this conversation i should note in the shadow of an ongoing dispute between the pentagon and and anthropic about the uses of anthropics technology. But wait, in that debate, you're on the side of anthropic, right? You don't want, like, if I said to you, Chris, should the Department of Defense take over? Right?

56:44Ross Douthat:That's what they're threatening.

56:45Chris Hayes:They're threatening the Defense Production Act. Right.

56:47Ross Douthat:But you don't want the AI race managed by Pete Hegseth. No. Okay. So what is the solution to Lessig's conundrum?

56:57Chris Hayes:I mean, there has to be, at the broadest level, I don't, I mean, let me just be clear.

57:01Ross Douthat:I don't know. Maybe a board of peace. Yes, exactly. To manage. Yeah. No, I mean, like, I don't know. But some kind of civilian governmental control.

57:11Chris Hayes:Civilian governmental regulation. Right. I mean, right now, as far as I can understand, there's zero regulation. I mean, I don't think there's nothing. Again, I am not at all enough, like not even begin to be at the threshold of being enough of an expert or AI wonk to tell you, like, what should the governmental regime be? Right.

57:33Ross Douthat:But sticking to the level of politics, though, right, it seems like there's a line that. Democrats, liberals and not only Democrats and liberals, but some form of populist AI backlash, which, by the way, everyone who works in AI expects. Right. If you talk to people who are. Dario said it. He said it on my podcast, but like you, everyone who is in that small sliver of people who you mentioned assumes that 2028, 2030, if we get that far, right, that our politics will be consumed by people who have your some version of your reaction. But that could go in a lot of different ways.

58:13Chris Hayes:Or definitely politically, different political valences of that same reaction. Right.

58:16Ross Douthat:It could be the Steve Bannon anti-A. But just on the left, like, do you think that sort of the idea that you need to regulate AI for safety actually breaks through as a political issue? Or do you think it only breaks through if it's like about job loss?

58:31Chris Hayes:You know, part of what's difficult to disentangle is there's such an obvious concerted effort to paint a maximalist picture of the possibility of the power of the technology by people that are right now in rounds of investment raising, right? For companies that are absolutely bleeding capital, they're nowhere near profitable. So there's a skepticism of like, is it really going to be the doomsday machine and it's going to be hell and all this stuff? I'm pretty worried about that, actually. Like, I think just descriptively, I feel like that doesn't have that much purchase. I think the thing that does have purchase are two things.

59:09Chris Hayes:One is this notion, and I've talked about this a bit, is just like to the extent they have a business proposition, which they do, is to replace white-collar workers in machines, basically. Like, we automated all these other jobs. We're going to automate these jobs. And, you know, to go back to the metaphor I was using before about the sort of big trade debates, it's like, yeah, what do American politics look like if you turn Marin County into Youngstown and, you know, park slope into Gary, Indiana? Probably not great. What does the American economy look like? Like, so I think there's a real sense of like the sledgehammer is coming for the part of the economic capitalist American project where like people have homes and they take vacations and send their kids to good schools.

1:00:00And it's like if the project of AI is to just now take out that layer, I think, A, you will create insane amounts of political backlash.

1:00:11Chris Hayes:But I also think American politics will go even more insane than they are now.

1:00:16Ross Douthat:I think you essentially gave an answer to this question earlier when you talked about sort of the problem with redistribution, right? But it seems like the left under those circumstances could take a form of saying, look, we need UBI, universal basic income. Job guarantee of some kind. Well, that's we'll see. These are different things, right? Very different. There's a version that says you basically want to look at all the money that the people in the AI world are going to be making and you want to tax it. Just directly subsidize Americans out of that largesse. or you need a politics that basically protects work.

1:00:54Ross Douthat:And it sounds to me like you are on the job side, not the UBI side.

1:01:00Chris Hayes:I guess I haven't thought it through enough to feel like I have a very fixed view on either. I think there also can be complementary in certain ways. I think to me the animating principle here, which I think is the animating principle for a lot of left liberal resistance to this, It's just like an increasing appreciation of the specialness of being human and the dignity of being human and humans doing human things like making stuff and sharing it with each other. And a world that feels increasingly designed to strip away, extract, exploit and reduce that fundamental humanness. And that to me is kind of like the beating heart beneath whatever the policy is, which I think, I don't know, it's not like a job gives life meaning, but like we need space for people to be able to create a stable world for themselves, raise their families, be with their friends, pursue their goals and projects.

1:02:05and be engaged in the world and their communities.

1:02:11Ross Douthat:Yeah. So this is a good place to end because this is where I wanted to ask you about this. I think the left has been radically underestimating the capacities of AI and in a way that has left left-wing politics somewhat unprepared for where we're going. At the same time, I appreciate the extent to which the left critique of AI has been framed in those terms as a kind of defense of humanism and, dare I say, human exceptionalism in the face of machine alternatives, because that's not the only possible direction for the left to go in. There has been a kind of various kinds of sort of anti-humanist tendencies on the left for as long as I've been alive, right?

1:02:57Ross Douthat:There's a kind of secular materialism that sort of is incredibly reductive about the human mind and dismisses free will. There's a kind of academic deconstructionism that reduces like all human art to power relations. And then, you know, there is a kind of environmentalist left that is skeptical, let's say, about the human contribution to the biome. So I'm really happy to have the left in there defending human exceptionalism. Are you confident that that will stick? Like, as opposed to a world where the left decides that, you know, we need to defend the parasocial relationships that people have with their AI that are just as important as, you know, male-female marriage of the old school, right?

1:03:46Ross Douthat:Like, I think that's a direction the left could take. Do you?

1:03:52Chris Hayes:that feels very remote from what's happening now. I know, I agree. I think it depends. I think it depends a lot on the trajectory of the technology and also the deployment of it. Yeah, because I think that, yes, I guess the sort of thread you're pulling on intellectually is like this sort of, yeah, species exceptionalism, right? Like, is there something particularly uniquely great about being a human and distinct about it? And if you're a materialist or you're an animal rights activist, you know, you're skeptical of those claims. I guess I would just say, again, like as a sort of sociological fact, what I found sort of bracing at this moment and which I feel deeply personally, just speak for myself for a second.

1:04:33Chris Hayes:And it's really put me in touch with humanism in like a deep way of like what it means to be human, what's amazing about being a human, what's distinct about being a human, what the tradition of the liberal arts and why it's like important to read and study and actually, you know, write for yourself and not hire a robot to go to the gym to work out for you, which is like what we're doing in colleges in mass. Right. And I think I think that right now that's the dominant reaction, which I think is I think is good. And I think, you know, I've been thinking about this, just to say this about because I think it connects in some ways to one of the things that we saw in Minnesota, which is this notion of like, I think coming out of COVID and the experience of that, this sort of sense of like the power and importance of just human connection, like face to face and community connection and neighbors.

1:05:33Chris Hayes:You know, neighbor is the term that all the folks in Minnesota were using and that like there does feel like there is above and beyond this AI discussion, a kind of resurgent humanism and an appreciation of human connection in a lot of what's happening right now in this political moment on the sort of broad center left. Yeah.

1:05:54Ross Douthat:Yeah. And well, too, we can end with politics, but just do you think is it an AI election? Like, is that is that your expectation?

1:06:04Chris Hayes:I just I feel so much radical uncertainty about the future. Yeah, I know. I know. You have to end.

1:06:09Ross Douthat:You have to end by giving me a prophecy. Imagine that you are that you're clawed or chat GPT and I'm typing in and, you know, I'm asking you, you know, here's what I think.

1:06:18Chris Hayes:I think in the sense that I think it will be. I think the odds of it being the center of whatever the economic story is in that year are high enough that that's likely to be the dominant thing.

1:06:33Ross Douthat:Okay, I'll accept that. Chris Hayes, thank you so much for joining me. I enjoyed it.

1:07:02Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Sophia Landman, Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck. Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusik, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz. And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

1:07:51Thank you.