69. Is ‘Woke’ Politics Hurting the Democrats?

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0:34Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay in the Goalhanger Studio in London. I love that studio. I wish I was there with you. I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I'm down here in Tampa about to attend Yankee Spring Training, Katty Kay. And we have just agreed that both of us have massively overindulged our children in life. If there's a hooky warden somewhere in Manhasset listening to this, I did take the kids out of school to take up the Yankee Spring Training. But there you go. There's my confession as a Catholic. I'm glad you confessed that because I used to take my kids out of school the whole time and figured that nobody was really counting until one day somebody did count.

1:15And I got a very, very angry call from the principal saying, okay, your children actually do have to go to school most of the time. And taking them off on holiday is not okay. I've been there. What do you want to talk about? We got a lot to talk about actually. And I've I've written down the five reasons to be positive, which at some point I'd like to insert into the podcast. I like that. I think we need more positivity on this podcast instead of all the car crashes that are happening. I feel like you and I are like reporting on car crashes, but there's some underlying things that are going on that I think people need to focus on and feel positive as they go into the weekend.

1:48I saw your tweet on that the other day, the things that the administration is getting right and wrong. But actually, quite a lot of the wrongs, it seemed to me, cancelled out the rights, that they were right in theory and wrong in practice. So we'll get to that. We'll get to it because the wrongs are now coming home to roost for the administration. And you can even see with the prime minister of Ireland. We'll talk about it. But what do you want to talk about today? I thought it was worth talking about the Democrats. We haven't touched on what the Democrats are doing. I've had a few conversations over the course of the last week with some members and former members about the splits in the Democratic Party and how they are kind of the progressives and the centrists are locked in a battle to define the party's future and who seems to be winning out in the moment in that battle.

2:32And then after the break, we're going to do something we haven't done before on our main podcast, which is kind of give you a flavor of our question and answer session that we have for our founding members every Sunday. We're going to take a few of your questions and touch on. Are you promoting founding membership? And by the way, if you would like to become a founding member, you can sign up. Drumroll, please. At the rest is politics, US.com. How did I do? I'm taking some credit for this. I've turned you into a sales monster. It's unbelievable. I mean, you're a Brit. You're supposed to be like a little bit more reserved on the selling, but you've become more infomercial spokes.

3:08Listen, I'm going to buy you one of those plastic flowers. So when you're meeting people, you can shoot them with the water that comes out of the flower. Have you ever seen that? You seriously think that that is my style? Can you imagine? No, it's not your style, but it's a way to get people's attention in sales. You walk up to them and they get hit in the head with water and then you say, hey, could you be a founding member? Just throwing it out there. It's an idea. It's such a bad idea. We're going to move on. We're going to talk a little bit about Ukraine, the latest. Also, there's quite a lot on immigration that's bubbling around too.

3:38And we will get to your five reasons, Antonis Garamucci's five reasons to be happy, which sounds like a self-help book we all need right now. So the reason I want to talk about the Democrats is that they've been having obviously big conversations about what went wrong in the last election. And it's kind of emerging fairly clearly that there is this battle going on for the future of the party between the progressives who feel that the last election was lost because Kamala Harris was not progressive enough, didn't stick to progressive values, didn't fight hard enough, and that they need more of a resistance of the kind that we saw in what I'm going to call the State of the Union, even though it wasn't the State of the Union, of Al Green standing up and waving his cane at the president and the people holding those little paddles and they need more of that and they need to fight everything that Donald Trump is doing, point out all of the injustices that he is, they say, committing.

4:34And then the centrists in the party who think that really what the Democrats need to do is get away from the whole issue of identity politics and that is what lost them the last election and move in a direction that is much more focused on economics and the working class. They've got a couple of things that data points that I think are worth throwing out there as we start this conversation. There's a Quinnipiac poll that has just come out that showed that 21 % of Americans approve of the job that Democrats are doing in Congress. I mean, their approval ratings as a party are under the floor. If you could kind of lift up the floorboards and look into the basement, they're somewhere down there.

5:11Compare that to 40 % who approve of what the Republicans are doing. So we may be focusing a lot on Donald Trump and the problems that the Trump administration is having just at the moment. But still, the Republican Party has double the approval ratings of the Democrats. And they do realize that they've got to come up with some kind of coherent strategy for connecting to the working class of America. But this civil war that is brewing beneath the surface, I think is very indicative of the fight that they're going through at the moment. And I think one thing that in my conversations has become pretty clear to me is that this fight will only really be resolved when the party gets a leader.

5:56And that the direction the Democratic Party takes is not really going to be defined by whether it's going to be more progressive policies or more centrist policies, but by the candidate. And I think that's so interesting, particularly speaking to you from London, where of course, it's a parliamentary system. And in a parliamentary system, it's the party, not the leader that predominates. In America, I think in this election, it's going to be the person. Whoever emerges as the most charismatic, most successful democratic candidate who's able to get their message across, that is going to be really determinative of whether they go into the next election as a more progressive party or as a more centrist party.

6:34I'm sure you've been hearing some of these discussions too that are taking place, right? I mean, this is all the Democrats are consumed with at the moment. So it's a weird battle. I would love to have you react to this. So there's old white men, which of course I would be included in old white men. So it's not like I'm being denigrated to anybody. Yes, I do need the confidence boost. I do appreciate you saying that, but let's face it. Okay. James Carville, Bill Maher, and Stephen Smith have the answer. And again, this is my opinion, but that could be because I'm a jaded older guy, but I think they had the answer.

7:12What is the answer? Get off of the DEI, get off of the woke stuff, move the party back to the core themes of blue collar aspiration, helping blue collar families with their living standards, their economic security, a platform of healthcare security. Caddy, just think about it. How insecure most Americans are with their healthcare, whatever the problems are with NHS or other universal healthcare standards around the world, at least somebody waking up if they've lost their job or there's something going wrong in the family, they can get to a hospital, they can get to a doctor and not have to worry about it bankrupting them.

7:55And so, there are five or six pillars of the Democratic Party that have been completely lost now. And you brought up something very interesting, which I do agree with. They need a galvanizing leader. And unfortunately for the Republicans, the galvanizing leader was Donald J. Trump. 2012, I brought this up, I think, last summer, I sat in a room with Republicans. They were We're smisted by Barack Obama for the second time. And we put out this statement. We're going to be more favorable to immigrants. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. We put this whole statement out. And in came Donald Trump with an anti-immigration message and an anti-statement.

8:37It's almost like the last gasp of white supremacy running for office in the site. And he galvanized the party, ultimately decapitated it. So you've got to be very careful. I think you're right. There's going to be one leader, one charismatic person, man or woman is going to come in and marshal the party. But you have to be very careful who it is because the Democrats are the best thing. I just want to repeat this. The Democrats are the best thing going for the Republicans. They're disorganized. They're going after each other. They are unbelievably arrogant. You talk to these Democrats, they are unbelievably arrogant.

9:17They wouldn't let people that are against Donald Trump into their reindeer games. You know, it's like poor Rudolph, which is sort of the moderate person who wants all of this nonsense to end. They've got that person shoved to the outside. It's very, very dangerous. And now they've got Rahm Emanuel. He's saying that he's not running for president, but he's on the air every day. He is. He's on the air every day running for president. God bless him. I like Rahm. I have no problem with Rahm. But I would say to Rahm, think outside the box. You are a centrist Democrat. You are a tougher Democrat. I respect you.

9:57A lot of moderates respect you. Go meet AOC. Go figure out what you need to do to tie up that wing of your party. It's going to be very important because if you have a fractured coalition, one thing about the Republicans right now, they're not fractured, No, they're definitely not fractured. I mean, it's interesting that in that kind of battle of who's managing to kind of get their voice across. One thing I heard from a Democratic strategist, who's actually a pretty centrist one, was saying that if you look at the coordination of messaging, the person who is the clearest voice on the Democratic side is not a centrist as Bernie Sanders.

10:38and that since the election, he's had a well-organized tour around the country. He has been speaking around the country to packed out crowds. He's been on television a lot. And the more progressive wing of the party, whatever you think of their kind of antics up on Capitol Hill during that State of the Union address, is very well funded. And this is, I had a conversation with Matt Bennett, who's in the Third Way movement, which as its name suggests, is a more centrist movement. And he was pointing to the fact that the progressive wing of the party is very well funded by these outside groups. So you've got all of these foundations like the Hewlett Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the leadership of those foundations may not necessarily in itself be particularly progressive, but a lot of the people that work there are very progressive.

11:26They're kind of on the front lines in the fight against poverty and inequality around the country. And they have a lot more money and a lot more resources to put into campaigning than the center of the Democratic Party. And you look at the Progressive Caucus on Capitol Hill in the Democratic Party, it's big. It's a big, well-funded operation. And at the moment, it is their voice in the form of Bernie Sanders, not actually so much AOC, who has not been going around the country talking that much, some of the other squad members. it's Bernie. Now, I don't think Bernie is the answer for the Democrats for the next election, but it's just interesting to hear how that progressive voice - But some of his ideas are, tell the viewers and listeners what some of the ideas are.

12:10Again, I'm a right of center centrist. I'm a centrist socially, but a little bit right of center politically when it comes to the business community. Bernie Sanders is not, but there elements of what he's saying that has lots of support. I mean, we saw that in 2016, right? When he ran for president against Hillary Clinton. It's Trump's message as well, Katty. It's Trump's message as well. So tell people, tell people what it is. Bernie has worked his whole life on redistributive economic policy, on billionaires making too much money, billionaires should pay more taxes, big corporations are hurting American workers.

12:48He actually is in favor of protectionist economic policies to help build up. I mean, again, you're right. Look, does this sound like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance? Yes, it does for a reason. I mean, he's not actually not been on the identity politics. One of the reasons that Bernie Sanders had trouble back in 2016 was with Hispanic and black groups. He didn't have, it was pretty white, his base of support. I mean, he comes from Vermont, maybe that's partly why, but he was an old white guy that got a lot of young supporters, but struggled with some of the more minority groups in America. He's not particularly woke.

13:26I mean, he isn't on that kind of cultural left of the party. He's very much on the economic left of the party. And he's still even, how old is Bernie now? He's got to be in his early 80s, 83. He's 83. And he is still playing, it's like the Rolling Stones, right? He's never going to go away. He's like Mick Jagger. He is playing to packed out houses around the country at the moment. And I think it's this, when I've heard Bernie speak since the election, there is a simplicity and a coherence in his message that Democrats, but more importantly, working class Americans find very appealing. That we need to do more to redistribute income in the country.

14:06There is too much income inequality. The rich have got richer and the poor have not got richer. Big corporations are not doing their part to help American workers. And we need on-shoring to build up American manufacturing. It's a pretty simple message. And I had this conversation just in the last couple of days with Tim Ryan, who was a former congressman in Ohio, who's very much more a centrist, who ran against J.D. Vance in the Senate election, ran for the presidency, didn't get very far in 2020 as one of the candidates. But I've always found to be a very impressive candidate. And I wanted to kind of ask him about this.

14:41And he did see that it's the clarity of message. I mean, he talked about this as of needing somebody who makes a very clear connection between the Democratic Party and working class Americans. I imagine for centrist Democrats, the fact that it's Bernie who's out there getting so much attention is alarming, because I don't think they think that Bernie, as they thought in 2020, they didn't think Bernie could get elected, that come a general election, he just doesn't have enough of a centrist support. But he's certainly the guy that's out there at the moment. The other thing that Tim Ryan said that I thought was interesting that I wanted to ask you about is that he agrees with more of the centrist that you have to connect to kitchen table issues, that you've got to be talking about that.

15:22But he also recognizes that we are in a moment of cultural extremism where it's not enough to be talking about kitchen table issues. You have to also have a cultural connection that is kind of bigger than the part. I mean, the thing about Trump is that it's not just the Republican Party, it's a wave, it's a movement. And Democrats need to be part of that cultural movement. And the thing that Tim Ryan was saying is that they need to come across as strong. You know, Trump is there at sporting events. He's out at NASCAR races, NFL games. He projects strength and people like that. And he says Democrats need to find their own way to project that kind of strength.

16:05Has he built a multi-ethnic coalition, Donald Trump? Yeah, that was the shocker for Democrats, right? That's part of the soul searching that's going on in the Democratic Party at the moment is how did Trump do so well, particularly with black men and Hispanic men, male voters? I mean, it's more of a kind of male issue, I think, perhaps even than a cross-cultural issue. So one of my Italian-American friends, old school guy who listens to our podcast, primarily for you, Caddy Kay, primarily for you. Such a flatterer. He said to me, this is really hard for the Democrats to understand, but Trump has a multi-ethnic coalition.

16:47Trump is talking about issues that matter to Democrats, believe it or not. He's just distasteful to them because of his attitudes, his mannerism, some undercurrent of the white supremacists being with them is a big turnoff to a lot of the Democrats, things like that. But these themes are Sanders themes. themes these themes are you know and and i'm gonna say something about steve bannon because you know i obviously can't stand steve bannon but i listen to steve bannon and so steve there you go you should be flattered by that i listen to him because i know how smart he is and i know how dangerous he is to the society so i do follow him around because i want to hear the arguments so that these arguments can be checked they can be verbally hand checked he's on gavin newsom's podcast.

17:34I listened to the whole thing yesterday and he did say something to Gavin that's true. There's a lot of oligarchic power on the left and the right, not good for the country. Some of the ideas, the Sanders ideas, the ban and Trump ideas interlock with each other. And they're actually Teddy Roosevelt ideas. So let me read you the four pillars of Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican catechist, the father of progressivism. The coinage of the word progressive in the United States came from Teddy Roosevelt and monopoly power, right? When you bust monopolies, you lower prices, you increase more innovation. Number two, protect the poor.

18:22Make sure that there are things in place where there's landing grounds for the poor. There's safety nets that people can fall into, God forbid, if there's trouble. But there's also building codes and standards to make sure that the housing that they're in is safe. This would also include an umbrella of healthcare. And then the third thing, which is, I think, a very big pillar of all this, making sure that the percentage of economic rent, that means the output in society, at least 50 % of it is going to labor. It's off that mark right now. And that's why people are unhappy. More economic rent is going to capital than labor.

19:04If you go back to the 1990s, Clinton had it in equipoise and the population was generally happy. So this platform, I don't understand why they can't put a coalition together to put that platform together. If you're pro-American and you're pro-democracy and you're for democratic values and maintaining the constitution that's worked for this country for two and a half centuries. If you're that person, why can't you break an impasse with AOC? Why can't you settle on some ideas? Why can't you all universally decide that, hey, you know, the DEI woke stuff really has not worked. Okay. How about inclusion as opposed to woke?

19:51How about aware? How about if we're just aware of each other and aware of each other and sensitized to each other's values as opposed to jamming the word woke down people's mouths and throats? The counter argument to that, Anthony, obviously, is that woke has become a dirty word. But for black Americans, and I'm sure you've spoken to many of them in the last couple There is a real fear that the DEI stuff is actually the anti-DEI movement is basically tacit racism. It's a new racist. It's tacit racism. Exactly. 100%. So people are being accused of DEI hires when actually it's just a black person who got hired or a woman who got hired.

20:34And that it's an easy, lazy way of condemning the whole of the Democratic Party's agenda and saying that's what the Democrats are all about, when actually there has been an effort in the Democratic Party in the past and in the Republican Party. Let's talk about compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush to do what you just said Teddy Roosevelt did and help the poor. And many of those poor people historically have been black Americans, Hispanic Americans, women who didn't have jobs as much. and there's been an effort to try and bring those people up and to level the playing field against some of the discrepancies that those people felt.

21:16And I think phrased like that, many Americans are actually in favor of that. It's just that you condemn the whole thing as woke and it becomes something that is a dirty word in American politics. You're right. It's well said. Listen, Paul Ryan once said to me, Anthony, we had a war on poverty. Lyndon Johnson started the war on poverty. We spent$100 trillion. Right. Poverty won. Poverty won. Yeah. Okay. So why did poverty win, Katty? Well, because of, I mean, income inequality grew massively in the country is part of the reason. Working class wages stopped growing from the last, I'm actually, they have started growing.

21:54They've picked up in the last few years, but there were decades where working class voters' wages stopped growing. Unions, labor got undermined. That was actually during Clinton's time, right? Lost some power. And I think all of that contributed. Listen, one thing, and I wanted to get your reaction to this, and then we're going to take a break. One of the things that Tim Ryan said to me that I thought was interesting is that Democrats are at their best, not when they mollycoddle people and treat them softly. In a way, he said that was sort of slightly dismissive, but they're at their best as a party when they challenge people, when they embody the spirit of Kennedy or FDR.

22:35They don't just tell people what they want to hear, but they challenge people to help in the effort to rebuild the American economy. How do we out-compete China with electric vehicles? How do we become a very competitive country? How do we get skilled up to do better, to be the best that they can? I mean, his argument is, look, we shouldn't be saying to everybody, you should go to college and Americans will pay for it. America in the working class will pay for it. You should go to the union, get a skill. We need nurses. We need people to work in the FAA. And I think it was just, I mean, he has a bit your argument.

23:10We should cooperate with Bobby Kennedy on food and health and getting Americans healthier. We should be encouraging Americans to eat better, exercise more. And that Kennedy's kind of 100 % right on that. Might not like some of the other things he says, but cooperate with people where you can and don't be the party of comfort, be the party of challenge. And I thought that was a really interesting way of phrasing what Democrats could do for America. Don't be afraid in a way of challenging the country because that is when you can get the best out of Americans and when you can actually be a party of leadership.

23:48We don't know yet the person. I mean, I keep asking every Democrat I speak to, Who is the person that you see rising to the top? And everyone says, well, in 92, we didn't know it was going to be Bill Clinton. 2008, Barack Obama came pretty quickly. I don't know in this world of social media where everybody knows everything and the information stream is so omnipresent that it's possible for somebody to be in the shadows still. But of the people who are out there at the moment, I don't see that charismatic driving figure who could overcome these kind of differences within the Democratic Party and challenge people in a way that they felt excited about voting for Democrats.

24:28I don't see that figure yet. I think Alyssa Slotkin did a very good job, but she was kind of her speech barely got any attention because of what Al Green did that night on the floor of the House. and I don't know that she has that charisma. I also don't know, I asked Tim Ryan this, do you think Democrats are going to nominate a woman? And he kind of said, well, it may be a while before we do that. You know, you've mentioned Rahm and we all know the names out there, but it'll be interesting to see. I mean, maybe it's still just too early to see that name and they will emerge in the next year or two and maybe they don't want to emerge quite yet because the longer you're out there, the more you get attacked.

25:04So it'll be interesting to see who the person is and whether they can find that figure who can define the party and excite the country to get behind the democratic message. There's a book that was written in 2016 that Democrats should go back to. And the title of the book is American Amnesia, How the War on Government. This is a big issue, Cady. How the War on Government Let Us Forget How We Became So Prosperous. We forget what made America prosper. there was an integration between what the government was doing and what the private sector was doing. And business leaders were mindful of lower income living standards.

25:42You know, even racists like Henry Ford were like, hey, I got to pay these workers enough money to afford the product that they are producing. But in this book written by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson, which I read recently, I actually read it a long time ago. I went back and looked at it. there are elements of what we need, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, we do need the government. And one thing Elon Musk is showing us is that, yeah, there is some fad in the government. I'm not saying that there isn't, but the government is integrated into the body politic and into the welfare of the people.

26:18If you're going to mess with that, it's going to cause problems, Katty K. And I think we need to remember that. And I think the Democrats have got to get off of some of the pronoun usage off of some of the screeching and the scolding and the canceling and back to that fundamental formula that people like Franklin Roosevelt and people like LBJ understood. The irony, of course, is the one person who has really benefited from American government help, Elon Musk himself, right, in building Tesla. How much did he benefit from government assistance? You're not having a car dealership set up on the south portico of the White House.