Intro 

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I got talking to my guest, Noah Berlatsky, for a long time, over two hours. And when I was listening to it back, I realised it kind of neatly divided into two self-contact conversations. The first one, this episode, is about the nature and future of the Democratic Party.

 

And then the second one kind of came up more spontaneously. We were talking about how Democrats message affordability, and I was saying some stuff, and Noah challenged me on does Democratic messaging on stuff like this even matter? And what resulted was, I think, a pretty interesting theoretical conversation, so that'll be the next part. But it's largely separate from this one, so I'm just going to do one-on-one.

 

This one is on the Democrats, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And if it does seem to cut off rather abruptly at the end, there will be a part two coming soon.

 

All right, let's jump straight in.

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Episode

 

One of the most persistent tropes in American politics is that Republicans are cruel and ruthless and aggressive, and that Democrats are nice but weak, tame, not suited to the harsh realities of today's politics. Like a lot of stereotypes, there is a certain core of truth there, and I think also a certain amount of nuance that wants to be had. My guest today is Noah Berlatsky.

 

Noah, welcome to the podcast.

 

Thanks for having me.

 

Let's just start in big, broad terms—there is at least some truth there, right? that Republicans historically, at least for the last few decades, have been more aggressive than Democrats.

 

I think Democrats are more interested in compromise and often less willing to boldly state what they stand for. Jamelle Bouie had a column today in the New York Times where he was talking about this Project 2029 document and pointing out that the Project 2025 document was like very much about we want, this is what we want to do with the federal government, and this is how we want to change the U.S. and use executive power to, you know, crush our enemies.

 

And the Project 2029 document is like a list of policy proposals. And he was saying that that's inadequate, and I agree with him, but I think also it's, you know, it's sort of a telling difference between the parties where the Democrats are often sort of making laundry lists of policies but are less willing to sort of talk about sort of ruthless methods for getting there. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein often talks about how the other side always seems more ruthless.

 

And I think there's something to that. Republicans will often say that Democrats are ruthless. And Democrats often don't entirely, process or talk about divisions among Republicans. We kind of think of them as like completely complicit at all times. And I think that, in fact, they've stopped a lot of stuff. Most recently they kind of baulked at this weaponization fund, right? I mean, he kind of had to withdraw that because the entire Republican Senate caucus was like, "we are not going to vote for this".

 

So there are a lot of divisions and there are conflicts amongst Republicans. But at the same time, they're much more willing to just push for what they want, regardless of procedural barriers. And you saw this in the approach to redistricting, where Republicans, they're keeping barriers, but they often like just kind of push through. Especially the Supreme Court is just openly pretty much saying "we don't think black people should be able to vote" you know, "that's our originalism, is black people shouldn't be able to vote." As opposed to the Virginia Supreme Court, which basically like overturned the map for procedural reasons, and then the legislature, and especially the governor, gave up, right? They're just like, "well, I guess we're not going to do this". So I think that's kind of a difference there.

 

Both sides feel, I think, in American politics, like they're getting taken advantage of by the other side.

 

Both sides feel that the other side is unified and they are not. And both sides feel that the other side is willing to be ruthless when they are not. And that's probably inevitable to a degree, right? You're always going to be a bit more aware of your own divisions.

 

Right. I mean, that's partisanship. Yeah.

 

With that said, I think people can jump from that noticing a sort of mirroring quality, and that both sides are doing it, to feeling that both sides are equally making it up.

 

I mean, that's not true. There's a difference between the fascists and the people who aren't fascists, or, you know, trying to oppose the fascists. You know, I mean, like both sides are not the same.

 

And partisanship in support of multiracial democracy is not the same as partisanship in support of fascism. So, I think there's a moral distinction, but I think there is also a distinction in how they think about their coalitions and how they think about their base. Political scientist, Seth Masket, talked about this by saying, when Republicans lose elections, there isn't a lot of soul searching.

 

I mean, you occasionally have documents like after Romney lost, they were like, well, maybe we should try to like get more Hispanic votes. But, basically they just kind of were like, "well, you know, that's just the way it goes". Or, you know, more recently they've been like, "we didn't really lose". Basically they say, Democratic votes are not legitimate. Black people's votes aren't legitimate. Brown people's votes aren't legitimate. So, when they lose, they just double down on this idea that they represent real America.

 

And when they lose, that means the system's broken. Not that they should try to appeal to more people. Whereas when Democrats lose, you know, they have these endless struggle sessions.

 

We're doing it now.

 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like it just goes over and over and over. "it's the left's fault". Well, "it's the right's fault", "We need to appeal to more people in middle America". They kind of don't quite say this, but when they say we need to appeal to more 'working class' people. What they really mean is we need to appeal to more white people.

 

Whenever they lose, even in 2024 when every incumbent party lost because there was high inflation. There's a pretty straightforward reason why they lost. It doesn't really have anything to do with Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney. It doesn't really have anything to do with like Kamala Harris embracing the radical left. Like it's none of that stuff. Right? It's just because inflation was high, but there's this like endless hand-wringing about, often about like not appealing to the right people.

 

Whereas the Republicans say, when they lose, "the people who didn't vote for us are illegitimate". Democrats often essentially say, well, "the people who voted for us aren't legitimate".

 

I think that the reason for that is basically white supremacy, right? We like to think that at some point we like got past white supremacy, but that's not true. We're still a really white supremacist society. We're a society where people feel that whiteness is legitimate and legitimates political programmes. And that's buttressed by institutional factors, which are that basically the Republicans have a lot of structural advantages.

 

I mean, especially in the Senate, right? But also recently in the Electoral College. And, even to the House and more so now because it's easier to, basically it's easier to gerrymander the Democratic coalition out of power. And Republicans are more willing to do that because it's easier to do because Democrats are, tend to be concentrated in cities, right? And so it's, it's pretty easy to sort of like draw maps that disenfranchise cities and disenfranchise black communities or brown communities. So, so for all those reasons, there are all these structural reasons. And also, you know, that, that, that Republicans have more power and they've kind of used that power to take over the judiciary.

 

I mean, it's because of the law, you know, it's because the Senate is, gives tonnes of power to sort of rural white voters that Republicans have been in control of the Senate enough to sort of place, you know, to take control of the Supreme Court and sort of with those levers.

 

So you've got all these levers, which make it very hard for Democrats to win, even when they have a majority. And then on top of that, you have this ideological idea. You have this ideology, which everybody shares, basically. I mean that, you know, I mean, both parties, it's popular, it's sort of like compelling to lots of people in both parties. This idea that white voters are really the legitimate ones.

 

And that if you want to find out what's going on in the country, if you want to know what the real truth is, the real American spirit, you go and talk to Trump voters in diners, right? Not to Biden voters in South Chicago. So you combine those things and you've got this situation where Republicans feel like they are the legitimate party, like they represent real Americans. And the Democrats kind of feel that too.

 

They kind of also feel that Republicans represent the real Americans. And so they're constantly like trying to figure out . . . it's sort of framed as how could we expand our base? But a lot of it really means how can we get these people who are the "real Americans", you know, there's these straight cis, white guys in, you know.

 

I was going to say: yes, it's race, but I think it's also gender.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, those two things, you know, they go together

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

So it's how can we get these people in particular to vote for us? And yeah, and so that creates the situation where there's a lot of people, Democrats like Matt Iglesias and David Shore constantly sort of saying, "you're not representing real Americans". We need to reach out to the real Americans.

 

And they frame it as an electoral issue. But, as you've talked about a lot, as I've also talked about, I mean, when people put this reactionary centrism into effect, the politicians who do that are super unpopular, right? I mean, that's what Labour's done. And they've kind of like, you know, destroyed themselves.

 

And you see that with like Fetterman, you know, I mean, he has no constituency now. You know, Sinema completely ruined her career. Jared Golden has ruined his career.

 

I mean, it's like, it's like, we want to be Democrats, but we want to be white identity Democrats. And it's like, white identity people are going to vote for the party of white identity and, you know, then you alienate everybody else.

 

So... Let me switch that though to a gendered frame: There's a structural and ideological reason why the party's been more cautious. I think, and I buy both sides of it: One is just Democrats kind of need the median voter in a way Republicans don't, because their maps are better. And then the other is Republicans feel their votes are legitimate and ours aren't. So they shouldn't have to give ground. They shouldn't have to compromise. Whereas we feel like our voters often aren't legitimate. We kind of buy the same thing.

 

Let me bring in another piece though, because I think there's also a thing where the Republicans are the white party. They're also the male coded party. More men vote for them, but more than that, they are seen as male.

 

They present themselves as male. And the Democrats, I mean, you've seen this very aggressively in the Texas race where our candidate is described as low T, he's trans, he's whatever. But that's a particularly egregious form of something that's been happening for a long time now, which is we are cast as effeminate and queer, right? I think there's kind of two ways Democrats can go with that.

 

And I think a lot of the internal fights we have are sort of proxy battles for us struggling with that. Do we try and refute that charge or embrace it? You know, do we try and say 'we are the party of women and queer people and the odd sane man', or do we say, and this is what I takes to be the Fetterman spirit, no, we can be, but you're wrong to say we're effeminate, we can be machismo too.

 

And I guess maybe on that side, I can see the point in running some like very male coded candidates.

 

But I think it goes further than that. And I think when a lot of people attack the Democratic Party, what they're trying to say is, 'I don't want to be cast in with the female coded side'. Do you see that tension on our side too, about what do we do?

 

Yeah, I mean, first I want to say, I mean, like, it's kind of the same discussion.

 

Because I mean, one of the things that racism, I mean, racism is very much about gender. A lot of tropes of racism are about who is performing gender, who is considered to be performing gender properly, and who isn't. And, basically only white men or women are seen are, you know, supposedly performing gender properly.

 

And then, you know, black people and brown people are, you know, men are seen as hypersexual and seen as performing masculinity incorrectly. And, you know, women are seen as like that, performing femininity incorrectly. So it's kind of all the same. You know, like, being manly is also being white. I mean, it's kind of the same thing. In terms of like, how you respond to it.

 

There's a lot of  hand-wringing and discourse about how Democrats haven't reached out to young men, about how we need to find a Joe Rogan of the left, about, you know, basically how, if only, if only Democrats would perform masculinity correctly, we would, we would win all these men, you know, the patriots. And I think the narrative can be, and I see it both from the centrists and from left critics of the Democratic Party, that there's so many votes that are obviously being left on the table, if only we wouldn't be such sissies, essentially.

 

Right. I think that that's just, you know, it's, it's, it's patriarchy.

 

Like, it's just, you know, it's just like, patriarchy for the left.

 

And, you know, I also just think it's bullshit. Like, I think, you know, you can be as typically masculine you want as yourself, or you can talk in a different language, but that we are, we are part of a side that is systematically portrayed in feminine terms.

 

Like, that's where it's coming from, not your, you know, and you need, you know, I mean, like, that's the coalition, you know, it's, it's majority women. There's a lot of LGBT people. And, you know, and there, you know, it's a lot of black women, you know, are kind of like, really core to the party.

 

And, you know, just, I mean, all women, black women, all women, queer, queer, queer people. And yeah, I mean, and, you know, the people who are, I mean, it's also Jews, right? Who are, you know, I mean, Jewish people are, you know, consistently feminised. Asian people are consistently feminised.

 

It's just, this is the coalition. You've got a lot of people. It's a multiracial democracy.

 

It's all these people who are, you know, under this kind of strict patriarchy are, you know, supposed to be on the bottom. So kind of just kind of like centering men and sort of saying, well, we need more masculinity. I mean, it's a lot of ways, it's kind of like a betrayal of the coalition.

 

And it's not going to work because everybody can see, you know, everybody knows who your voters are. You know, everybody can see that you are electing. You know, I mean, Democrats are just about at parity in terms of like electing women, right? I mean, in terms of like- It's like, it's like 55-45, but then the Republicans are like 85-15 or something.

 

Right, right. It's very close. You know, we have a lot of, and that's good.

 

You know, that's a good thing. That's what you want in multiracial democracy. You should, you should have lots of people represented and it should be open to everyone to lead.

 

And I don't have the statistics off the top of my head for race, but it's getting closer to proportional. Whereas Republicans, definitely not.

 

Yeah, and they've been getting worse, you know, I mean, and so, you know, so people think they can finesse that, you know, they're saying, well, we could just, you know, we need to only nominate white men, right? From now on that, you know, Harris lost and Clinton lost because they were white men, because they were white men. But, but that's, I mean, that's, you know, but you can see with Talerico, who's this, you know, I mean, he's this white Christian cishet guy. And he's, you know, and they're claiming he's, you know, they're, they're relentlessly feminising him.

 

But like, even kind of worse than they did with Harris in a lot of ways, you know, it's just like, kind of gets ramped up as they, you know, get freaked out about it. Or as, you know, as they, as they, you know, sink deeper into their own derp or whatever. So I just think that, you know, I think, I think at some point, you have to embrace the coalition you have.

 

And you've got to say, look, you know, we, I mean, there's a good argument that patriarchy is bad for everyone. You know, I mean, people point to like male suicide rates. And the big reason that men kill themselves more than women is because they have more guns.

 

And they're more likely to use guns. I mean, you know, so it's like, it's the symbol of patriarchy, which is like at the root of this, of this kind of problem, which is cited as a reason to sort of like, do more patriarchy. Right. And, you know, I mean, I mean, like this male loneliness epidemic, you could say, look, I mean, it's kind of hard to say how much, I mean, people are having less sex.

 

So specifically on the male loneliness thing, I've spent a bit of time on this. There are some indicators that might suggest loneliness is going up. But you wouldn't at a first pass necessarily centre that on young men. Young people are having sex a bit less. I honestly don't know if you should view that as a positive or negative. That's just, you know, people make choices. But it's true across men and women. And what it tends to be more is that people are having less casual sex, sex to the extent it happens is more in the context of long term relationships.

 

Again, I don't know if that's either good or bad. Also, in terms of social isolation up a bit for young people, more for elderly people, you know, and it's not, it's not gendered. So I think that is a sort of post COVID digital age conversation to be had about these things.

 

Absolutely.

 

I don't think there's any special reason to centre men in that conversation, or make it a sort of uniquely male thing. Much less say that this points to some systematic failing of feminism. I think it points more to, we haven't properly adapted to a digital world yet, you know?

 

Well, I mean, at least I mean, in the US, we certainly could spend more in, you know, I mean, the Republicans are really aggressively defunding public space, and sort of civic society. Right? I mean, that's what fascists do. They kind of want all public space and all civic society centred in fascism itself.

 

But, you know, I mean, they're not kind of, and so they're kind of systematically, like, you know, trying to defund, like, you know, institutions, which often provide, you know, sort of, like, spaces for people to meet. Yeah. Like schools, you know?

 

Yeah, the issue there, (and I'm going to pull us back, actually, because that's a whole side conversation), is, yeah, third spaces, everyone says third spaces. But regardless of whether they exist, people also don't use them. There's the chicken and an egg problem there.

 

Well, I mean, it's not even third spaces.

 

It's just like, like civic society and third spaces aren't necessarily the same thing. I mean, like, defunding schools, so people, so less people could go to schools. I mean, people do use schools. I guess the problem is, like, whatever you pick, Republicans are going to be aggressively evil on it.

 

Let me pull us back to the Democratic Party, and, like, what do we do about being feminised and racialised? Should we maybe, at this point, while saying many in our coalition are uncomfortable, and again, I see this on both the centre and the left, with being in the female, queer, non-white, coded party. With that said, and that does make our coalition behave badly at times. With that said, Democrats haven't caved to that pressure as totally as many centre-left parties around the world would.

 

So, to give a really clear case, trans rights. Now, you can find Democrats, Gavin Newsom springs to mind, who've talked out of both sides of their mouth and said some deeply, both incorrect and, I think, strategically unwise things there, right? By and large, Democrats are pretty solid on this. They support trans rights.

 

The extent to which rights are respected at a state level is purely a function of partisan control at this point. I could contrast them very unfavourably with a number of centre-left parties. I mean, most notably the Labour Party.

 

It's not as if Democrats haven't faced the same pressure. They've had a lot of people saying, oh, if you want to be perceived as, like, really for real people, you need to stop with all this gender identity nonsense. The same pressures that have made Labour buckle have been operating on the Democrats and have not produced the same result.

 

I can talk about why that is.

 

Please.

 

So, one really helpful book I read is Julia Azari, who's a political scientist.

 

She's great. You should have her on the programme. She has a recent book called Backlash Presidents, which is about, basically it's about, I mean, it's about Trump, Nixon, and Andrew Johnson, sort of, most obviously, but it's really about kind of how race has played out in presidential politics over the history of the US.

 

And one story about that is that the US started out really racist, and then over time it got less racist, right? Which looks less and less tenable right now. But what she argues is that instead what you had most of the time was you had both parties collaborating on trying to find a white supremacist compromise, right? I mean, you kind of, like, you know, the Compromise of 1850, you know, all these compromises, and what their compromise is about is white supremacy and how to, you know, keep, how both parties can sort of find a way to sort of, like, keep black people subjugated. And she talks about

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There are then various moments of racial, of sort of like, racial progress or, you know, utopian hopes, racial, racial hopes, which happened, you know, almost despite the president's in charge. So, you know, Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Obama, you know, not because of legislate, not because of legislation, but because, you know, he was a black president and that really underlined that this was a multiracial coalition, I think, and that a multiracial coalition, which wasn't centred on white people, could win. And after that, after each of those figures, you get this huge backlash, where, you know, what you've had is you've had, you've had, instead of a bipartisan racist compromise, racism becomes partisan.

 

There becomes a party which is not, which is often still pretty racist, but is committed to racial progress in some real way, and that creates these huge crises. And after each of them in the past, what you had was a return to bipartisan racism, right? That was, you know, post-reconstruction with redemption, the Republicans abandoned racial progress, and you get, you know, 100 years again of bipartisan compromise, which is a bipartisan compromise on racism. Then after Lyndon Johnson, you actually also, I mean, it's not as, it's not as big a break, but you also see this move with, you know, with like, with Clinton, with Jimmy Carter, I mean, who's kind of, people don't remember his presidency that well, but I mean, he was not, you know, he was not embracing racial progressivism necessarily.

 

Especially with Bill Clinton, you know, with triangulation, I mean, what he was triangulating was white supremacy. It was, how could we be, how could we be Democrats and get Black people to still maybe vote for us, but also attract white identity voters? And she talks about this kind of like, you get this kind of bipartisan commitment to race, racial, this idea of race blindness, right? That people can't see race, that you're not really supposed to talk about it. It's not supposed to be sort of centred in the conversation, but you address it by not addressing it.

 

You know, and then Obama made that, I mean, Obama kind of did a lot of the efforts to compromise too, you know, I mean, he did a lot of Black respectability politics where he's like, you know, telling Black men to take responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, I mean, ultimately his was a coalition led by a Black man, which was, you know, not really centred on white people, which, you know, had, or not really centred on white men. And so I think what you're seeing is people like Matt, Matt Iglesias, and to some extent, Gavin Newsom, I mean, people who are saying, look, we should compromise on bigotry.

 

We should go back to being at least partially this, you know, accepting this kind of ideas of white patriarchy.

 

Why has the party as a corporate institution resisted that, not perfectly, but certainly better than its international counterparts?

 

I think it's because we've done it so many times before. This isn't a sudden crisis, right? This isn't like, like, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates talked about this really well. For like white observers, to some extent, like there's this idea, 'oh, this isn't who we were'. 'How did this happen? How do we respond?' But for a lot of black observers, Ta-Nehisi Coates was saying, you know, this, I've seen this before, you know, this is, this is what they do. And I think, you know, what's happened over time, the parties have gotten sorted and the Democrats are just really, really indebted to and reliant on black voters.

 

And that's kind of like both pragmatically, like they need those votes. But also in their primary structure—the last couple of presidents that the Democrats have selected were selected by, mainly by black voters, right? Who selected Biden and who selected Clinton. And the primary is really set up that you can't like ignore them. You have to be accountable to them.

 

I think the primary itself is a big difference. Like the most European UK parties do not have primaries. So you're not forced to listen to your base in quite the same way. You can ignore them and they do. And that can rebound in trouble in polling in a general election. But that constant having to touch base with the core voters, I think, is a difference that's made a difference, perhaps.

 

Now primaries in turn create a whole load of other problems. But, you know, why have the Democrats not caved as much? Because their base doesn't want them to.

 

Yeah. But I also think it's because, I mean, there is a real sense in the US of the history, like, again, both parties are racist. It's a racist country. But also, like the Democrats are really morally indebted to the black freedom struggle.

 

I mean, as a party, their identity was shaped by that. It's something that gets talked about a lot. It's something people think about a lot. There, you know, there are representatives of that struggle who were in office, who ran for president in important ways. Obama's, you know, very tied to that struggle, however ambivalently.

 

And I think that's a big issue with trans rights, actually.

 

Because if you look at feminism in the US, one of the reasons that there has been much less openness to TERFdom is because black women overall do not find TERFdom appealing. TERFdom is really about, you know, this kind of image of carceral feminism, of white feminism. And a lot of black women really distrust that.

 

I was really struck by, there was a —oh God, I can't remember who it was—Bell Hooks was in discussion with a trans woman whose name I have embarrassingly forgot. Anyway, but what she said was, you know, they were talking, they talked about Beyonce.

 

And Bell Hooks has this kind of, has a pretty second wave take on Beyonce as, you know, being over-sexualised, basically. And that's a very TERF-coded thing, you know, being anti-sex work. But Bell Hooks was very clear that trans women were her sisters.

 

And Bell Hooks is super important, you know. Feminists in the US tend to want to be in allyship with her. See her as important. You can see this in the way that, like, I don't know if you know about this, but Michelle Obama was, like, constantly accused of being trans.

 

All the time.

 

All the time. And that's because, Black women are constantly degendered. 

 

So I think that when feminists in the US see women being degendered and see this sort of being put in place, it's seen as congruent with these other struggles. And, you know, the left is just, you know, I mean, Democrats just can't, you know, there are barriers to turning on black women in that way. You know, I mean, there's, again, there's a lot of, there's still a lot of racism.

 

There's a lot of sexism. There's a lot of bigotry against black women. But there's, you know, they're also, they're part of the coalition, and they get a say. And feminism in the US is very indebted to them. And I think it, you know, I think that's a big difference in how trans rights have been talked about here and why there is resistance to just tossing them, tossing trans people under the bus in that way. 

 

I think if you look at the overall composition of the Democratic Party now, like the sort of, 'we want to fight fascism' is almost perfectly aligned with it. I mean, one of the things that was a limiting factor for Republicans and Democrats was from, you know, the sort of civil rights era through to today is the sort of racial attitudes were split across parties. So you always, you know, the Republicans pretty, I think, quickly became the more racist party.

 

But there was always a sort of contingent within that that was pro-civil rights, certainly in the North. And likewise, even by-

 

Sorry, the journalist she was talking to was Janet Mock. 

 

Sorry, go ahead.

 

But then conversely, even within, even to like Clinton's time, there was a sort of Southern white racist contingent within the Democratic Party. And so Republicans had to tone down their racism in talking coded language about states rights and so on so as not to alienate that chunk within their own coalition. But equally, Democrats couldn't, just couldn't be as full-throatedly liberal as perhaps you might want them to be, because they were trying to hang on to that residual contingent.

 

I would say, I, you know, it's a process, but I would say the sort of turn point would be 2010, those midterms. They're just sorted from then on in, like anyone who's really invested in racism is in the Republican Party.  

 

I think there's either been sorting since then, right? Because Joe Manchin held on even past then. And he's kind of like the, the, you know, like he's the legacy Democrat, you know.

 

But that's a 'grandfathered in' thing. You couldn't recreate Joe Manchin from scratch. That's because those voters had a pre-existing relationship with him that was forged in the before times.

 

Like if you ran someone who looked like Joe Manchin, talked like Joe Manchin, had Joe Manchin's views, in West Virginia today, they'd lose by 30 points to a swastika-shaped piece of coal.

 

Right, well, that's why, that's why Joe Manchin stopped, you know, didn't run up to his last third because he knew he'd lose.

 

Yeah, he could hold out because he personally had that relationship. But even that wasn't enough. But you could never do it again, I think, is the point. And, To an extent it's bad because—well, for many, many reasons it's bad because that means the restraints have come off the Republicans—but there is a flip side to that in that things that the Democratic Party would not have said and not committed to historically, they now can.

 

Because they don't have to worry on our side about keeping a sort of residual clump of Southern identity voters in our party. We can also be untamed, in a way. And people see that as a bad thing and they sort of cry, oh, partisanship, as if these were two equal things.

 

But no, I think it's bad that the Republicans have dropped even the veneer of respectability. But it's good, on the other hand, that Democrats are now more empowered to dig their heels in. I think that's right.

 

I mean, in fact, Julia Azari says at the end of her book, you know, like the positive thing is that there's this, there is this democratic partisanship, which is really, you know, I mean, it's about multiracial democracy. It's partisanship for multiracial democracy, in large part. And they're not, you know, they're not, you know, people aren't really, I mean, there's a lot of shilly-shallying by the Democrats, but not in comparison to like redemption, you know, not really in comparison to like Bill Clinton.

 

I mean, you know, Joe Biden went in and he, I think, I think Julia quotes this, you know, somebody asked him on the campaign trail, they said (maybe it was you, I can't remember) Somebody asked him on the campaign trail how many genders are there? And he said, at least three, don't get in my face, Jack.

 

This is my favourite Biden quote. How many genders are there? "At least three". Can you name them? "Don't play games with me, kid".

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

So maybe it was an article by you I was reading.

 

II've quoted it, but a lot of people have quoted it.

 

I think it must be from you.

 

I love that. Yeah, it's great. I mean, people are always like, oh, 'Biden's neoliberal'.

 

He, in a lot of ways, kind of like, in a way that Obama didn't, he was really like, you know, well, we're, we're done with the neoliberal consensus thing. And he, you know, I mean, that, that's what, you know, I mean, like, the big stimulus checks were, you know, kind of like anti-neoliberal. I mean, it was kind of, I mean, you know, if you see neoliberal democratic policies as the idea being about efficiency above all, you know, the point of the stimulus checks wasn't really efficiency.

 

It was to like, you know, we're going to help people. I mean, the same thing with the, with kind of going pretty big on student debt. You know, I mean, that wasn't a neoliberal, like, oh, we need to like perfectly target, you know, to only those who need it.

 

That was like, that was the sort of like big idea policy. Like, you know, this is, these, you know, this debt is like fundamentally unjust and we're going to address that by like getting rid of it as much as we can. You know, so, I mean, like in response to, you know, there was this huge backlash.

 

And in response to, you know, Biden kind of, I mean, with huge exceptions, you know, Zionism being the like, you know, nightmarish exception. But, you know, he kind of doubled down. He kind of, you know, he kind of said, we're about multiracial democracy, Jack.

 

And, you know, and that's, you know, and then even after, you know. And that's true for the economic side too, because going big, spending a lot on the federal level, I think, you know, there's a wider conversation about did that work politically. But, you know, that is something past generations of Democrats, including even to a degree, Obama, would have been scared of because big spends like that would have been cast as giving money to the undeserving, i.e., you know, the nonwhite.

 

And Bill Clinton certainly would have been scared of that. Yeah. But there's a racial element to that.

 

And the reason Democrats feel empowered to be like, you know, no, we're going to spend the GDP of Italy on clean energy is because they no longer have that fear that people whose votes they need are going to read that in a racial way. And that is, in a sense, good.

 

Yeah, it's great.

 

I mean, it's unambiguously good, I think. I mean, I think that the only way we get out of this is through, you know, enthusiastic partisanship in favour of multiracial democracy. Like, otherwise we're screwed.

 

I can't say we're going to win for sure, but that's the only path. And I think there are positive signs. At the beginning of Trump's term, I mean, everybody, including Democrats, have decided that, oh, people want fascism.And that was really super bleak. And you saw, you know, you saw people like John Ossoff going off and, like, signing up to the Lincoln-Riley Act, right? That sucked. That was really bad.

 

But then Trump delegitimised himself by being Trump. You know, that's what he does. And the Republican Party, you know, is all, I mean, the Republican Party is also Trump. They don't really have any ideas. I mean, you can see they're like, you know, "oh my God, we've got to address affordability". And the only thing they could think is like, "we should cut capital gains tax or something".

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