I need to write about affordability at some point, because I think people read that in an overly literal way. I think it's become this meta concept that people are bringing a lot of different values into, both on the left and the right. And politicians hear "affordability" and they're like, 'oh, so we need to change this tax rate or something'. And I think it's just a bit overly literal-brained.

 

I think what people are saying is "we no longer trust the system anymore. We no longer find the basic moral ordering to be coherent or acceptable."

 

And there's not one answer, because people are saying that for different reasons. On the right, they're saying it because

they have this narrative of racial disorder and civilizational breakdown. On the left-left, there's increasingly feelings about this is all essentially a conspiracy by the billionaires (which is not wholly untrue). And then on the liberal side, you have more this idea of "fascism is taking everything over", which again, is not wholly untrue.

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No, that's pretty much true.

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Yeah, that's pretty much true. Let me try an idea on you:

 

If you look at what issue tops the polls, what voters say is the most important, affordability. 70% of voters, right, will say

that's [affordability] an important issue to them. That's way up. And there's also, I know this is incredibly controversial, but there's some data to suggest that people's perceptions of the economy are much worse than both they were, and that objective economic data would suggest.

 

And I think people get a bit, again, a bit overly literal about this. Here's my thesis. I suspect, if I were to say "do you feel that the basic moral order of society is just and stable?" I feel that the percentage of people in America who feel no in answer to that question has increased rapidly over the last 10 years.

 

I think it's gone from a big majority of people feel like, "yes, there's problems, this could be better,

that could be better, but the basic way our society works is just and justifiable." I think that's gone from a big majority to now something like a minority. And affordability is one of the ways people express that. It's like, it's the most obvious

symptom that something is out of order in the world.

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I think Jamel Bowie had a good video in response to Cory Booker's tax proposals.

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Right—because Booker's tax proposals are 101, what I'm saying: You're getting wrong, you're being overly

literal. Like, when people say, oh, the economy this, the economy that, like, yeah, they want more money in the pocket. But it's also a deeper sense of like "I no longer trust any of this anymore".

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Yeah, I mean, Cory Booker is like neoliberal central, right? That's a, that's a conservative framing is like, you know, well, we should tax billionaires and the only thing we can do with that money, the only really just thing

to do with that money is to cut middle-class taxes.

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But no one's excited by it. No one's gone "oh yeah, that's what I really wanted to hear!" So it's the worst of both worlds. 

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Yeah, I mean, other people have picked it up, but yeah, it's not how to cut through. It's helpful that Katie Porter ran on that in California and got crushed. I'm kind of ambivalent about her and, but that tax proposal was heinous and it's good that people will look at that election and say "well, that went over like a lead balloon".

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When people say they can't afford stuff, "I can't afford college, I can't afford childcare", you know, "I can't afford a house" all this stuff, like lowering grocery prices isn't going to fix that, Lowering taxes isn't going to fix that. We kind of need a way to sort of like re-imagine how people interact with society that provides them with a feeling like that society cares about them.

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So I think that is part of it. I do also think what happened during COVID was like, obviously inflation went up. It didn't like go up so much, it wasn't unprecedented.

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There've been inflation rates that high that haven't necessarily caused massive anti-incumbent waves. But, you know, there'd been such a long period of low inflation and then having the rates rise like that, you know, just really, and I think also, you know, COVID was traumatic.

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I mean, part of the reason that people feel like everything's wrong is COVID was so traumatic and we didn't handle it well. And people did not feel cared for in kind of a variety of ways.

 

And the feeling that things just haven't gone back to normal and will never go back to normal. I think there's a lot of rage about that, which I think is only accentuated by the fact that we kind of don't talk about it. I mean, it's this huge traumatic event that the media doesn't really want to talk about, neither party wants to talk about, it just kind of doesn't get talked about.

 

With COVID, I think part of it is just, is the inflation thing, don't get me wrong, I think part of it is just people weren't used to prices going up. And I think as dumb as it sounds, when people heard "inflation is falling", what they thought was going to happen was the prices were going to go back to normal.

 

Yes, precisely.

 

And it's, no, it's the rate of increase. But I think people were really quite shocked that prices weren't going to go back to where they were. And I think what could have been communicated better from Biden and so on, is the way we're going to fix this is that wages will rise to catch it, not that the prices are going to go back down.

 

Yeah, I mean, I don't think there was anything he really could have said that would have solved that problem.

 

I think there's things that could have made a difference at the margin, but with the COVID sort of like almost like spiritual gap I almost call it in my head like semi-demystification, in that we had a long period of very stable politics, very stable economic rules. The world works a certain way, and it's assumed that that must be just and justified in the way things have to be.

 

And for like a year, we just did some completely different shit. It turns out, we all can work from home (or very many of us can). It turns out like we can suddenly jerry-rig this massive welfare state into existence and then out of existence again.

 

Suddenly the basic parameters of how our lives worked, that have always been stable up to now, were totally just ripped up and then totally reimposed, and the world just went on. And I say semi-demystification, because in Marxism, to demystify is to get rid of the obfuscatory level, the ideological lies, and see the real reality behind that. But I wonder if for many people, there was no moment of seeing a real reality behind that.

 

There was nothing that was revealed other than that it was demystified, other than that the way things have always been assumed to work can just be changed. We can do it a totally different way.

 

I think it was probably more just a huge sense of chaos, which is throughout, you know, I mean, that's kind of Trump's thing.

 

I think a lot of people experience that as really scary. I think people experience, I mean, when I talk about COVID dislocations, I mean, like there was a ton of stuff that, for instance, schools, like schools still haven't really recovered. Health care hasn't really recovered in terms of like getting hiring back and sort of like having all the same kind of protocols. I mean, I look around Chicago, like local businesses were killed. You know, I mean, like new businesses came up, but like a lot of the stuff that people was used to is gone.

 

There was a huge amount of churn, which I think felt destabilizing.

 

Yes.  I mean, like the economy recovered in a lot of ways, but like a lot of sectors for a lot of people, a lot of things like didn't go back to where they were before. And people got aid and then the aid went away. Trump's whole thing is to constantly tell people to be terrified and then to also create this huge amount of chaos, right? I mean, with like people getting fired. People can't trust their media outlets because like they keep like destroying them, right? I mean, like if you listen, if you like, you know, if you're interested in CBS News, The Washington Post, you know, or like even like Google, you know, like everything just like turns to shit, it feels like.

 

And so you have both Trump sort of like telling people that everything's going to shit and everything going to shit. I mean, I think that he's like, you know, just extremely destabilizing. And of course when ICE goes into these cities and communities. There's just this huge amount of like chaos and horribleness for, you know, I mean, affecting different people differently. But I think a lot of people, even Trump supporters, who are like, "yeah, I like what Trump's doing", Trump's still like constantly telling you that everything's horrible, right?

 

Right. Again, my—and I have no data at all to back this up—but my gut is the number of people think the basic moral order of society just and justifiable has collapsed. 

 

The number of people who say no has gone up a lot. Part of that is Trump is telling you this racial disorder narrative again and again, again, and causing chaos, as you say. Liberals are saying again and again, again, we're being taken over by fascists.

 

Like you're just hearing again and again and again "the world isn't working". And I think people have taken that up. It does feel that like specifically COVID was unsettling for people and in a way that didn't recover because Biden was running for re-election, you know, well into like an economic recovery.

 

But I think there was still clearly a strong sense of unease with the economy at that point, which I think was a bit deeper than price increases. Yes, prices had gone up and people were mad about that, but I think there was a deeper sense of unease that the whole thing just felt uncertain and unjustifiable in a way that it hadn't before.

 

Yes.

 

And I think, you know, I mean, this is part of why I think the sense of Trump's chaos and the sense of, you know, that there's this sort of like huge amount of rage and dissatisfaction. I mean, this is obviously bad. I mean, part of the reason there's rage and dissatisfaction is because a lot of people are suffering.

 

I mean, it's kind of, I mean, in the U.S. also, like, you know, I mean, the biggest, it doesn't get talked about a lot, but I mean, probably the worst thing Trump did was USAID cuts. I mean, that's supposed to kill like 14 million people. It's, you know, probably the biggest genocide any president has committed.

 

It's kind of just kind of impossible to like put your head around. But I mean, in the U.S. too, you know, I mean, there's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of misery. But that also, you know, I mean, that potentially opens the way for some real change.

 

And, you know, I mean, I've been heartened by some of the things Jeffries has said. You know, Jeffries is kind of a centrist.

 

They are getting there

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But I mean, he keeps saying over and over, we're going to gerrymander, you know, we're going to gerrymander the House for 2028. We're going to get rid of this, we're going to do something about the Supreme Court. I mean, he sounded very aggressive, enough so that like people like Abigail Spanberger  have been like, "geez, I don't know if that's what we want to do." You know, I mean, and he's in a position of real power and authority in terms of like, you know, what needs to be done to get the House majority.

 

And it's also, I mean, it's also kind of, you know, I mean, I don't think it's exactly accidental that he's Black. I mean, like, he's not a Black progressive, really. I mean, he's not a Black leftist.

 

He's kind of, you know, he's a centrist politician who often bashes the left. But, Julia Azari points out that impeachment efforts have often been led by black politicians as a response to backlash Presidents. And I think  it's also the case that Black politicians look at like black political power being devastated and that maybe gives Jeffries a different perspective from Abigail Spanberger, who's, you know, kind of like, "do we really want to gerrymander? Because maybe it'll make my poll numbers go down" you know?

 

I think there's like two questions:

 

One, we're going to need to do a shitload of aggressive structural stuff. Just for one, any path back to anything that looks like local democracy runs through court reform—and serious court reform—,right? And there's other things that you can mention there. We have to get the entire Democratic Party behind all of that. And they're not. They're like 50, 60% there at the moment. Now that's better than 20, which is where they were a few years ago. But it has to be all of them, because of the institutions we have, we're not going to be coming in with massive majorities. It has to be all of us.

 

That's one battle. And that's going to be tough enough. That's partly just about primaries and yelling at Democrats.

 

The other thing is the American electorate is just in a very counter-cyclical mood, and has been for decades, but is especially so now. I joke sometimes the swing voter believes that the president has a button on their desk that lowers the price of eggs, and they are not pushing it to spite them personally.

 

And two years with a trifecta in 2028 is not going to be enough. We have to make the case to everyone in our coalition that this big structural program is necessary. But we also have to make the case to stick with us, even if it isn't immediately delivering economic benefits.

 

And it's that second one I struggle with.

 

Yeah, I mean, it's a worry. You know, G. L. A. Morris has written a lot about this. And, you know, he sort of identified the problem, and then he had some solutions. And I was like, those solutions don't sound like they're going to work. You know, I mean, his solution was we've got to go big, like the New Deal.

 

And I was like, I don't know, man. The problem is there's very little you can do that's going to completely change the landscape in a year.

 

See, I don't buy this at all.

 

I'm not saying we don't do good things, do good things. But an electorate that flipped out over the Affordable Care Act, an electorate that turned straight back to fascism over 4% or 5% inflation, is not an electorate that's going to smoothly process a New Deal.

 

Right.

 

So I think, you know, like that the, you know, radical procedural changes like an electoral strategy. You've got to be like, look, we've been playing at a disadvantage for, you know, 50 years. We're going to like, you know, we're going to put 10 people on the Supreme Court. We're going to enfranchise D.C. We're going to enfranchise every other territory that wants it. You know, yes, Puerto Rico if they want it. But also like, you know, everyone, every other one, everybody.

 

I think we just have to keep the narrative on what we want to talk about. Because I don't think keeping the narrative matters. Because the problem is the people who are counter cyclical, right? I think they have to be talked into not being to some degree.

 

You can't talk to them. They're not listening. Like that's the whole point.

 

Like these voters who are like, who are like, "yeah, fuck it, vote the bums out", right? And those people are not paying attention to politics. Like they barely know who the president is. The idea that you can like somehow nuance messaging and reach people who are, I mean, I think about it like the way I like, it's like, it's like me with sports.

 

Then we need to pull enough, we need to pull enough people into our own coalition that it can be more durable.

 

It's just not really feasible. Because I mean, like, you know, like it's the way, it's the way that I interact with sports: I have no idea what's going on. I don't know who the players are. Like, you know, I get bombarded with messages about when, oh, the Super Bowl is coming. The Super Bowl is coming. The Super Bowl is coming. And I still don't know the Super Bowl is coming because I don't care.

 

And most people, like there's a lot of people who interact with politics that way. And like, you know, obsessing over messaging nuances is just like, it just doesn't matter because like they don't hear anything at all. They don't hear anything.

 

Like the only thing they know is that the price of eggs went up. That's all they know. I think to push back on that, though, do we not have to be more radical in not merely trying to come up with a strategy that works with the electorate that we have, but to change the way chunks of the electorate respond to politics, to change what it is people vote on.

 

I mean, have you read Democracy for Realists?

 

Not sure I have.

 

H.N. and Bertels, I think is their name. It's kind of a it's a classic political science book at this point.

 

And various people have various arguments with it. But its main point, it's a great book and it's really kind of thought provoking. Its main point is that we've got this idea that democracy works through informed voters, that, you know, that like informed voters listen to the arguments of both sides.

 

And then they, you know, they decide whose policies they prefer. And then they that's how they choose. And the argument it makes. And this is I mean, this is kind of, you know, really influential in political science is based on a lot of political science studies. And their argument is that that's just not true. That's never been true.

 

Most people don't pay attention to politics and they're never going to. And you can argue that they really shouldn't. You know, politics that they shouldn't have to or that, you know, that demanding that they do is just like it just kind of doesn't really make sense.

 

Politics is, you know, complicated, depressing. People have their own lives to lead. They mostly just they mostly just vote bipartisanship, which works fine.

 

So here's what I think is wrong about that narrative:

 

I think most political scientists, consultants, people who run campaigns, most commentators think about politics as primarily about policy. And the values are kind of secondary to that. That you start with a policy platform and then words like freedom or justice are kind of like rhetoric to support it.

 

Electorates are the opposite. Electorates have very strong values commitments and (with some exceptions) generally don't know much about policy and see policy as secondary to values. I don't think it's the case that electorates aren't political. They're just not political in the same way that the . . .

 

I mean, there's kind of different groups. Most people who pay attention to politics are just very partisan.

 

Yes. Right.

 

But even swing voter you talked about, even that voter has a narrative in their heads: "vote the bums out". They have a narrative in which there is an overclass who don't listen to them, who don't know anything and need to be routinely punished.

 You also regularly hear from swing voters about "we need to balance the system out". The president's a Democrat, so I'm going to vote Republican.

 

OK, that's a story. I think when I talk about changing behaviors, changing people's politics, what I don't envisage is that people are going to know the details of this or that policy. What I mean is these stories that people have in their heads. I think we have to try. I don't think it's viable long-run for us not compete on the terrain of the stories that people have.

 

It can be a very simple story. The narrative is the country's being taken over by fascist freaks. Like, that's the story.

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But what I'm saying is. I don't think there's any way to really message to people who aren't paying attention. And I think a lot of people aren't paying attention.

 

And the people who are the anti-establishment people. I mean, G.L.A. Morris talks about this. I mean, they're not partisans.

 They're not really tightly connected to the political system. But I mean, one story you could tell, and I think this is a true story, is that the reason Republicans are able to compete is that they have all these structural advantages. Republicans have adopted a platform that is pretty unpopular. It's very unpopular. They're very unpopular. The things they want to do are very unpopular.

 

And they tend to lose because of that, you know. But they've managed to stay in the game because they have these structural advantages. And I think that instead of focusing on messaging nuances, we could maybe really focus on saying, look, we need to make the playing field even.

 

We need to make it so that the Senate is not, you know . . .

 

Agreed. But no one's gone harder on that than me. Very few people have been as big an advocate, for as long, about the need to do something about the fucking Senate or the court as I have. Of course, I agree with all of that. My worry in the moment that we're in is like we're going to leave ourselves in a position where we have two years.

 

And I'm not saying I have a complete answer to this either. But yes, structural reforms absolutely has to be the number one priority above doing a new deal or anything like that. We're going to leave ourselves in a position where we have two years to do all of that.

 

I think what we should also think about is that doing structural reforms is the way to put pressure on Republicans to change. I mean, if they're competing, if they're, you know, if more Republicans have to compete in competitive districts, if Republicans can't rely on a Senate advantage. I mean, you know, Republicans haven't had to change because in part because they think they can win anyway.

 

They can win no matter what they say. So, you know, if you kind of change the playing field, the incentives get changed, which I think is important.

 

Agreed on all of that. And we started the conversation with structural advantages and ideological ones as the enabling factors of the right's radicalization. Right?

 

But are we really saying that we just give up completely on the values, the stories, the framings with which the electorate engage in politics?

 

I think people make the jump way too fast from "the electorate don't know all the details of policy" to "there is political thought behavior that is amenable to change". I think that  . . .

 

So I think messaging is more about talking to elites. I mean, I think in general, messaging is more about talking to people who are already engaged, talking to elites, figuring out what you want to do once you have power.

 

And I think that's really important. Like, it's really important to make the case for multiracial democracy, which people are really unwilling to make. I mean, people are much more willing to say, oh, we're fighting the billionaires. You know, they're much more willing to say that than they are to say, look, you know, we're kind of fighting men. You know, we're kind of fighting white people like, you know, we're fighting white patriarchy. People don't want to say that.

 

And I think that it's important to, like, make that clear that we need to be antifascist, that antifascism is an ethic that, you know, and that we really need to fight for that. You know, we really need to fight for, like, black voting power. We really need to fight for, you know, for a society where everybody really does have, you know, a chance and where, you know, where the default is not like, you know, exploiting and oppressing people.

 

So all of that's really important in making that case. But I think that it helps to make that case to realize that you are talking to people who are engaged and that there is no perfect electoral message that's going to make everybody your friend.

 

But that's not what I'm saying.

 

like, yeah, we can get lost in this idea that there's some exact right way to phrase things that like activate everyone. Of course not. Let me put it to you this way:

 

Say you're not an especially politically engaged person. You're in a workplace setting. And your manager says "don't hire any women for that role. Women just aren't good at it." They give you a sort of explicitly discriminatory instruction. And let's just say, just to make the example colorful, concludes with some nasty remarks about women's bodies.

 

So you get classic shithead, sexist workplace boss, right? What do you do in that moment?

 

Now, regardless of what you do, what I think is interesting is you will generally have a reaction and then you'll justify it backwards. So you'll start with "that's wrong" and then you'll put words to that. You'll say, "wait, isn't that discrimination?" Or "isn't that being mean or unfair?" You'll have your reaction and then you'll invoke and you'll frame political values around it.

 

Or conversely, you might just go deference to authority "Well, he's the boss. That's what he says" right? But most people will have a reaction. Most people will not be neutral—like completely not know what to do. They will have some mental framework that kicks in to tell them how they should handle that situation. And that framework is political, right?

 

You start invoking political concepts like discrimination and justice. Now, that is not natural. Most people today would have a response that what the boss is doing there is unfair or unjust or discriminatory. Most people throughout history would consider what the boss is doing perfectly legitimate. That has come from somewhere, right? That's not just arising naturally in people. That's been implanted in them.

 

So when I say we should compete for people's political thought behaviour, what I don't mean is "oh, if the Democrats said affluence instead of abundance". Like, agreed. No one fucking cares about that. Nevertheless, we are in a society-wide competition for how people think... it actually does matter. If people hear discrimination in the workplace, how do they think? What are the concepts and categories that we'll use?

 

I think a lot of these things matter a lot in ways that don't necessarily connect up to a lot of elections. I mean...

 

But they're not unrelated to elections either.

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They're not completely unrelated, but I mean, you can't... kind of can't, you know, confront that in a way that's going to, you know... swing your electorate for the next election. Like, if the issue...

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I would bet that how people answer that question I gave in the workplace would very strongly correlate with voting behavior.

 

It might. Yeah. I mean, it might...

 

People who would stand up to a boss who was being sexist, they vote dem. Pretty sure. At least like 60/40.

 

They might not vote at all.

 

Maybe. But that's not a neutral variable with respect to elections.

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No. But I mean, so for instance, if you like... I mean, I think, you know, union power, workplace power, that's really important. You know, investing in unions, unions is something Democrats have struggled to do. And they can do things on the policy level that would, like, have a big effect. Like, repealing right to work is something that they should do. And that would really help a lot with building union power. And unions are a way to give people options for dealing with sexism and workplace discrimination, at least sometimes.

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And building that kind of power again, that's messaging, which can be directed at people who are paying attention. And then they can kind of like put in place, you know, policies or institutions, which then can interact with people who are not necessarily paying attention. And that's all, that's all really important. I mean, political messaging really matters. The difficulty, I think, is that political messaging has been presented sort of entirely in this electoral context. And I think it's mostly, like, not super useful for, like, you know, the election that's coming in two years, to think about, like, you know, what can we do with messaging to affect that?

 

I don't think that's super helpful. But whereas, you know, talk about, like, you know, what can we do with messaging to affect that? We're talking about "Republicans do this. Republicans do that" I mean, they're doing this now. Republicans are like, "how can we change the system so that our voters are the only voters?" How can we pick our own voters? Right? That's been much more effective for them than messaging. Donald Trump's got, like, 17, 17 house seats. There's no way you could ever get that many with messaging. There's no messaging you could do that would get you 17 house seats.

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We started this conversation by agreeing there is a structural and there is an ideological component to the Republican advantage.

 

The structural component is they don't need as many votes, and we need to reverse that. We're both completely agreed there.

 

The ideological component is (and I agree it's not something that's happened in a single election cycle) is that they have, through history, through culture, through their continued insistence, that they are the masculine side, and they're using language to convey that. They have an ideological advantage there.

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