The Blue Wave Cometh?

26:42cop to being from the East. I'm not from the East. I know you're not from a part of the East. All right. Fair, fair. I lived in California for a long time. I really loved it. Not a long time. I lived in California for a while and I really loved it. Gavin Newsom, there is someone who makes eyes roll everywhere. And yet he is the leading contender right now for the 2028 nomination in part because of what he's been doing. So how do you, as a Southern California, Southland native, see what's happening with him. So Newsom has put himself in a stronger position than I would have thought at all plausible a year ago.

27:22And I think there's a lesson in what he is doing for other Democrats, which is you can make decisions to try new things and see if they work. So you think of what are the four-ish big ways that Newsom has acted since the 2024 election, which remember, Newsom was a very, very, very prominent Biden surrogate in that election, very, very close to Joe Biden personally. And so not an obvious candidate for a big rethinking. But right after the election, he launches this podcast where his first guest is Charlie Kirk. And Newsom sort of ends up agreeing with Kirk on trans kids in sports, making a lot of Democrats very, very angry.

28:05He goes on to have Steve Bannon on that podcast. He goes on to have Dr. Phil on that podcast. He goes on to have a lot of figures on the right. Michael Savage on that podcast. So on the one hand, you see Newsom doing one thing, which is seemingly to choose the lane of reaching out to MAGA and trying to hear them out and learn from them. But basically, at the same time, he begins to do a few other things too, which is to first shift his own policy positioning in a way that somewhat delights me because he moves very far towards abundance and signs very, very big housing bills, much more ambitious than any of the housing bills he had signed at any other point in his governorship, and sort of accepts the critique that the way California has been working is not good enough, right?

28:55The Democrats really do need to figure out how to build again. He also steps into this role as an attention-grabbing resistance leader, having this all-caps trolling on social media of Donald Trump. But he actually found a fight that he could pick. There was an unusual fight to pick, a ballot initiative for a mid-cycle redistricting. And that he could deliver on. And that he could deliver on. And by the way, initially the polling on it was bad because people in California don't like redistricting. or partisan redistricting. We created nonpartisan redistricting under Schwarzenegger for a reason.

29:29And so what I'd say is interesting about Newsom is that you might have said before the election, well, there are two obvious pathways for Democrats. You can try to reach out to MAGA and listen, or you can retrench into resistance. And Newsom's answer to that was, yes, there are. Right. And he's going to do both. The other thing that I like about Newsom, and in many ways, he has a very tricky profile for Democrats nationally. He has done a lot of things in California that would be very unpopular if they became national ad campaigns. California actually does give, in some context, health care to illegal immigrants.

30:08California, you know, did get pretty far along the way of phasing out in the future, you know, gas, combustion, engine cars. And I mean, there's a lot that makes Newsom a very difficult contender if what you want to do is win back states for Democrats to become sort of uncompetitive. But just talking about his political positioning right now, that what is interesting to me is that Newsom does things that are high risk. And he does not seem afraid. And in particular, he does not seem afraid of making people mad on his own side in order to try new things out. And so, you know, some things he's done have made people happy on his own side, right?

30:46Like trolling Trump on social media. Democrats enjoyed that. But other things, you know— I don't enjoy the old caps, but— Well, other things like the podcasting and, you know, some of his policy movements. He just—I think one of the really damaging things for Democrats and national Democrats is they seem afraid. Timidity. Timidity. That's not true for all of them. Bernie Sanders, famously not exactly a Democrat, but nevertheless a Democratic leader, does not seem afraid. AOC largely does not seem afraid, but a lot of the others seem afraid. It radiates off of them. You can feel them checking what they're about to say to make sure nobody on their side is going to get mad at them.

31:27And not seeming afraid is actually quite powerful in politics because not being afraid allows you to try new things politically and to see how they work out. And if they don't work, you could do something else. Right. See what sticks. Yeah. But it's a politics of experimentation. Politics of throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it's real. It's a real issue. I mean, that was FDR. Right. Absolutely. And Johnson. All the high points of left, liberal, democratic governance were spaghetti that sticks. Policies, not all of them worked. But some did, right? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, right?

32:09These are all things that emerged from throwing spaghetti against the wall. Well, there's that, but there's also just the way some of them did their politics in their moment. I mean, FDR moved all around. Sometimes he was worried about budget deficits. Sometimes he was, you know, everybody knows like his famous, I welcome your hatred speech. But at other times, he was much more solicitous of business interests. He made all kinds of weird compromises. My point is not that Gavin Newsom is an FDR or that he's a Lyndon Johnson. My point is that in a way that actually relatively few of his contemporaries are, he seems like a politician.

32:43And this is the flip side of what people don't like about him, to your point about eyes rolling. Newsom reads to many people as a politician, and that's always been a big weakness for him. He has a slick affect. But you're seeing right now the positive side of that, which is Newsom is acting like a politician who is looking at the landscape. and making moves to put himself in a stronger political position, even when those moves are a little bit difficult. And by the way, he was doing this before too. I remember him going on Fox News to debate Ron DeSantis with Sean Hannity moderating. What a politician is supposed to do is try to figure out the way to put together a winning coalition so they can wield political power in a way that accords with their values.

33:35And a lot of people want to wield political power in a way that accords with their values, but not that many people seem to want to do what it takes to put together a winning political coalition. And so in a way, I guess what I'm praising in Newsom right now is the flip side of the coin of the thing that some people read on him and they don't like, which is, I think Newsom is practicing politics. And man, are the other Democrats in 2028 going to give him an open lane if they're too afraid to do the same thing. Okay, this gives me an opportunity to talk about something. I don't know if it's bigger or smaller, but it's definitely harder.

34:11In the essay that we were working on over the past few weeks, part of the point of it was to talk about politics as an activity that improves lives, lives, but also politics is an activity that improves everything, right? And so I want to just read you two things and sort of have you react to them. One is a famous line of Henry Adams from The Education of Henry Adams. Politics is a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. And then I want to quote from Bernard Crick, who was a linchpin of the essay that you wrote, but this is something that we did not get in.

34:51Political activity is a type of moral activity. It does not claim to settle every problem or to make every sad heart glad, but it can help in some way in nearly everything. And where it is strong, it can prevent the vast cruelties and deceits of ideological rule. So where do you see political activity now, politics now, how we should be participating in with some look at the election, but like, what is it? What is acting in politics now? Is it participating in the system of organized hatred and cruelty, which we've certainly seen plenty of. Between the election and now, right, there was like an arrest in Chicago where they went into a preschool, what the ICE did with its masks on, right?

35:41Kids are inside at school, right? Really crazy, cruel stuff, right? And it's also a theater of cruelty as well as actually cruel, right? Because they'd love to make those videos. It's just nuts. So what is politics for now? It is those things. But I mean it, right? Politics is a wide field of human endeavor. And I do believe Donald Trump uses politics as an organizing of hatreds. I do believe Donald Trump is a master at creating us's and them's and summoning people's fury and their resentment against them. And I think one reason he is a master at that, and this is always true, is because it is authentic to him.

36:37Because that is how he is. He is able to do it for you because he is able to do it for him. and to just set this up maybe as one of the contrasts i think that barack obama did not try to engage in politics as an organizing of hatreds i think he sought to use it as a bridging of divides like going all the way back to his red and blue speech in boston in 2004 and it doesn't mean that it calmed every hatred it didn't just like it doesn't mean And what Donald Trump does, it doesn't destroy every bond between us. But you can use politics to destroy and you can use it to build. And similarly to Trump, the reason I think that was true for Obama's politics is that was authentic to who Obama is.

37:24And I think one argument I am making in that essay over the weekend on politics and that beautiful line from Bernard Crick that politics involves the genuine relationships between people who are genuinely other people, not tasks for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy. I think I switched a few words. That was pretty good. But it's pretty close. and what I think I'm saying when I argue when I talk about that and about the sort of liberalism's old virtue of liberality this emphasis on the virtues of the citizen the ethic of mutual connectedness is that one thing I would like to see and that I think that there's actual political power in one thing I would like to see the Democratic Party doing in this era when the Trump administration is organizing hatreds right and is getting consumed in some ways by Yeah, to your point earlier, right.

38:17By its own organization of hatred, right? Desar debates about how much hatred is okay. Yeah, they wanted to do it, you know, in this way. But now Nick Fuentes says, no, no, no, we need more hatred. And it's like, well, we did say we need some hatred. So who are we to tell Nick Fuentes is too much hatred? You know, now you have Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, you know, going to war with each other, right? I don't think the organizing of hatreds is a strong politics in the long run. So it has worked for many. But it has to be beaten by its opposite. it, not by something mirroring it. And so one of the things I'm saying in that piece is that I think the Democratic Party needs people who are genuine, like it is authentic to them, that politics for them is an act of love and fellowship, including when it includes critique and disagreement and opposition.

39:07There are many people in my life who I disagree with on political issues profoundly, people in my family who I disagree with on political issues profoundly. And our conversations are still part of our connectedness. And that seems obvious to me, right? You know, I actually find it appalling the idea that you would cut off members of your family for their politics, maybe for their treatment of you. That's something different. But just for their politics, I really disagree with that. Something that I thought a lot about the election in New York City, to go back to here, is Mamdani spent so much of the election reaching out to people who were unnerved by him.

39:48He went to synagogues. He went to business leaders. Mamdani didn't say, hey, look, you don't like me? I welcome your hatred. Mamdani, he was a left pluralist. Anand Girardardas in his newsletter, The Inc., has a really great essay on Mamdani's smile as an act of rhetoric, right? He was always smiling at you. For him, the politics of friendliness were so fundamental. In a way, I thought was very, very powerful. Cuomo, for all that he was supposed to be the real politician in the race, he often seemed very powered by resentment to me. Mamdani seemed like he liked you. Cuomo didn't seem like he liked you.

40:26You can go back and listen to Cuomo's interview with Barry Weiss, which is fairly early in the campaign. And I found it very telling. Cuomo felt like he was running to get revenge on the Democratic Party that had rejected him and forced him to resign. Is it really such a surprise that the man running for revenge on the Democratic Party did not win the Democratic primary? And then it seemed like Cuomo was running just like not to be humiliated and beaten. But Cuomo was not running as a pluralist. It did not feel that way to me, right? He did not feel like he liked you. And Silva was a whole different situation.

41:03Running because he liked cats. But I really think these dynamics are important. As you say, like there is a tremendous amount of cruelty emanating and being organized from the Trump administration. I mean, you look at Stephen Miller give an interview. You look at him talk and it radiates off of him. Right. It's a person where like the function has become the form in a very strange way. He really seems like he hates people. And, you know, when Trump was up there with Erica Kirk at the Chuck Kirk Memorial, and he said, you know, I hate my opponents. You know, I'm not here. I think there's a lot of power, a lot of political power in, as weak as it sounds to people to say, a politics of love.

41:46But I remember when Cory Booker ran on a politics of love in 2020, and I did an interview with him right around the time he dropped out. And we were talking about how it was very hard to make clear what a politics of love meant. But one thing it means, love is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And pluralism is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And I think one way that you can sideline Trumpism is like, yeah, that Henry Adams quote does describe them. And when you hear it, your stomach tenses up. I don't want to be part of an organization of hatred, right? That's not what I want my work in civic life to be.

42:22If this is all about organizing our hatreds, Count me out. And so running people for whom that does not feel like what they are doing, and it does feel like what they're doing because it is not who they are, I actually think is a very big part right now of candidate recruitment for the Democratic Party.

42:55The Democratic Party has to be, right, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans, right? It has to be that. And then you can't talk about anti-cruelty without bringing in Judith Scholar, whose name I can never say, a great political philosopher. Here's what she said. It's better just to listen to her. It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first. Intuitively, they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. Yeah, anti-cruelty is the politics and affordability is the policy. Right.

43:34I don't know that love is going to be the way you reconcile those two things. Might be respect. Respect might be the word that I can use there. I mean, dignity is a boring word, but I think it's also that, right? captured in the Crick quote is the idea that other people are actually humans, right? They're actually other people. I just don't believe it is an accident. I don't believe it is a coincidence. As the Democratic Party has become the party of the institutions, the party of the educated, the party increasingly of wealthier people, that the people who have been most open to Donald Trump's burn-it-all-down approach are the people whom are being failed by this country, right?

44:12people who are poor, people who don't have college educations, people who live in areas of the country that don't have as much economic opportunity, and also people who are not acculturated into saying all the right things and having all the right opinions by going to college. And they have become, they have felt culturally alienated from the Democratic Party, and also they have not been well-served by the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has felt rejected by them and feels endangered by them in some ways right now. And I really think you have to see an absolutely central part of this moment in politics as not leaning into that divide and trying to eke out the percentage point or two that will allow you to just win the election in 2028, but beginning to erode that divide.

44:57You're not going to get rid of all of it. Not everybody in MAGA is a plausible political recruit for liberalism, but you have to act like many You have to act like more of them are. You need to re-knit people's connection to liberal democracy for the people who felt failed by it. For the people who don't think that a renewed liberalism is necessary for a renewed Democratic Party, I always go back to, like, quote machine today, but like to the very famous Heine thing where he says, you know, thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder, right? I think that's true, obviously. And you can hear, for anybody listening, in that you can hear how much Aaron's depth of political philosophy influences my work these days.

45:49It's too bad for you. But I want to read, I had never actually connected with, so this Judith Sklar essay, Sklar essay that you're mentioning, I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we're having in an interesting way and gets at, I think, something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult act but worthwhile. Like, virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn't be virtues. And so she writes that courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats both physical and moral.

46:33This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence. and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white.

47:12Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom. And I do find something very inspiring in that. I hoped you would. Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening, a muscle you are strengthening. There's something Obama has been saying as he's been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting.

47:58He said it too in his interview with Mark Maron, if you want to go listen to that, where he says, for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn't grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it, not really. There have been at other times in our history, you know, you go to Jim Crow, you go to the Red Scare, you go to World War II. I mean, but he said, you know, it has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism. And all of a sudden it does. And right now we're seeing who is willing to have that asked of them, right?

48:37Who's willing to believe some of these things when it's hard? And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They, particularly compared to the first era of Trumpism, they've bent the knee. They go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. they are very much willing to pay to play and not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people's freedoms, pay out in terms of other people's safety, pay out in the kind of society that if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that, right?

49:10They've not wanted to stand in the way, right? You know, universities that have been more worried about the federal funding in the near term and are not willing to use their endowments in ways that they probably could. Law firms like Paul Weiss, right? We really, probably at the beginning of this Trump era, watched a tremendous amount of cowardice taking hold in civil society. And it's true, like, when you are dealing with an illiberalism operating at the highest levels of political power, it takes some amount of courage, not as much courage as it would take to do the same thing in other countries right now, like Russia, but some amount of courage to tape the masked ICE agents, to stand with the immigrants, to, you know, make yourself a target for Stephen Miller and his blue scare, right?

49:52All of it. And yet that's, I think, what's asked. But that's not the only thing that is asked. You actually have to have the Crick idea, the Sklar idea, right? The obvious example from American life is the Whitman idea of like, what is the world, right? The world is something I am open to. I'm going to walk around in it. I'm going to take it in. I'm going to see it. I'm going to be large, contain multitudes, all that stuff, right? Which is critical to a conception of liberalism that—by the way, a conception of liberalism enriched by the radicalism to its left, which I think is important to mention, right?

50:30The liberal democracies that defeated fascism were very much enriched by the left that brought policies that—or gave suggestions that became policies that made those worlds better. The liberal democracy that defeated communism, same thing. the left radicals pushed, right, for a world that people then wanted to defend. And it was a capacious, large, big tent, as everyone always says, but like genuinely big tent. And that liberalism is a much more powerful liberalism than, you know, the liberalism of orthodoxy, right? I mean, it's just going to be by definition more powerful. How to get there, as you say, is very hard.

51:15you have to tolerate things you don't like. I don't like to do that. I mean, no doubt. Me neither. I'll say something that has just been interesting for me on this, and my team knows this, and actually you probably know it, but, you know, it's something I always try to do on the show, that I always try to make sure the show, basically within every month, has people I really disagree with on it, right? I try to make that part of our programming. And those conversations cause me a lot more stress beforehand. They require a different form of preparation. I feel much more like I have to be championing ideas and make sure that I don't falter and I can't just be in the exploratory mode I prefer to be in.

51:58But I also leave them more enriched. I think about them more after usually. And this is very interesting research that looks at workplaces. And what it basically finds is diversity of different kinds actually makes people less happy, but it makes them more effective. Because it is hard to be in spaces of disagreement and spaces of difference. But you really do learn from it. You are enriched by it. And what you were just saying, you know, is true on the left. and but also we as i sort of say in the piece over the weekend the good thing the democratic party has done since say 2004 is open up its left side uh i remember back then people often talked about how few would even claim the moniker liberal say nothing of democratic socialist or socialist.

52:52The fact that we are not afraid of that now is to me positive, right? That's an opening of the tent. But we sort of moved as opposed to widened. And as I say in the piece, we want to be not left, not right, but bigger, right? Left and right. But also just more multidimensional. I've been having these conversations with the political scientist Henry Farrell, who I think is really brilliant. And just something he has been talking about in terms of representation is just recognizing that people in the sociological sense of the term are very thick and complicated. And what you're trying to do is find ways to take them in that thick complexity.

53:37And what the internet does, what much of modern society does, what polling does too, by the way, is it thins them. Now, something like polling is better than nothing because it will help you. Maybe. It is. All right. Because the thing that you and I both see happen is that in its absence. Right, right. People just make shit up. People make shit up, but they also convince themselves that what is around them is how everybody feels. Right. And polling when done well is a way of disciplining at least some of your intuitions. But it does collapse people down to their answers to questions they actually may not have overly strong feelings on.

54:18And so the question of how do you have the complexity of people contained inside your relationships to them? I mean, you have to be in relationship to them. And that in the modern era, in the digital era, in the digitized era, I think one of the worst signs of the Democratic Party right now is that Jared Golden, who I mentioned in that essay, who is a Democratic representative from Maine winning Trump plus 10 district, which he's won four times. and he's facing a progressive challenger from the left and maybe is facing the former main governor, a Republican who's very Trumpy, LePage on the right, decided not to run again, just announced his retirement.

54:56And I don't know what is in Congressman Golden's heart. You know, he says that the cost of his family has just gotten too high. It's very, very hard to be in an endlessly competitive district, particularly then when you're facing, you know, challenges in the primary and challenges in the general and you have young kids. but he was somebody who was good at representing people and good at having relationships then inside the democratic party and kept that sort of thickness uh and a little bit more alive than otherwise would have been and so it isn't just that losing his seat if democrats lose it will be a loss but it's that losing the relationships he has and then the relationships other democrats have with him will be a loss.

55:42And one way you can think of some of this politics is you want more real relationships that work across difference, not because you're trying to have those people agree with you or have you agree with them, that that might happen over time in one direction or another or both, but because you're trying to contain more of their multitudes inside of you. Right. And that's not just to be clear, that's not compromise with the devil, right? We're talking about people communicating with each other inside the tent of the Democratic Party, right, where there are a bunch of givens. And it's not going to fit on a bumper sticker, but my givens are that the Democratic Party should be a machine to make people's economic lives better and that liberalism should be an anti-cruelty machine, right?

56:31And that it has been and it should be again. And the two things together, by the way, also have practical effect of potentially really swinging a lot of Latino voters that the Democrats desperately need. I don't want to be that practical about it, actually. I want to be more philosophical about it. But those two things together are a very good recipe for not just success in left-wing urban areas, not just success in moderate states that trend democratic, but also in reclaiming some of the areas that you're talking about where there are these plus 10 for Trump states where not that long ago in our lifetime, there were Democratic senators.

57:15senators, there were states that Obama won that are out of reach, right? I know that this show is meant to be you interviewing me post-election, but I think I'm going to let you have the last word on that because that was quite lovely. Aaron Redica, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra.

57:43This episode of The Oso Clown Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Marie Cassione. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Jack McCordick, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Koble. Original music by Carol Saburo and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser.