Hi, my name is Josh, and welcome to the Fair Deal Democrat podcast. Today, just a short episode to mark the demise of The Liberal Patriot, which was a sub stack run by John Halpin with contributions by Ruyy Texeira and others. They’ve been around four or five years.

And after, 1,500 or so entries on their Substack page, they’ve decided to give up the ghosts. They represented a very specific brand of a centrist rethinking about the Democratic Party.

One that I largely agree with. I found many of their takes very informative. I also appreciated the book, Where of All the Democrats Gone, that Ruy wrote with John Judas a couple of years ago, several years ago, I guess now.

Ruy wrote a a final column and I think really summarized the problem. Let me read the key paragraph:

“Currently, the desire for change [and he’s talking about within the Democratic Party] seems to be hovering around zero as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have been essentially been solved. Here at the Liberal Patriot, we know all about that.

Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems, nor is even very close to doing so, has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-minded ones.

A little hetero heterodoxy is fine, but there’s a limit! Hence, no money.”

I can’t speak to their financial situation. Apparently there’s no money. There’s a lot of that going around! But I would note that the problem I see in that paragraph and in the final columns that Ruy and John Halpin wrote is their bitterness.

And that’s been a consistent problem of tone with The Liberal Patriot. I never once, as much as I agree with many of the positions they take and found it helpful and informative in many ways, I never once got the sense that they were liberals or particularly sympathetic to the Democratic Party. Maybe they were 20 years ago or whatever, but never once did I sense that there was any genuine love or affection for what the Democratic Party has achieved. And, you know in spite of everything, the Democratic Party has achieved a lot, even in recent years.

In Obama’s first term, we got Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act that has provided health care for millions of Americans. That was a significant achievement that only the Democratic Party could do.

Could the bill have been better? Blah blah, blah, all those things. The reality of politics was it was what got through and it made a big difference. The other big achievement the that Democrats led during that sort of same time period. two thousand and ten s was um marriage equality and sort of full citizenship for ah the LGBT community. Yes, there are ongoing issues around trans rights and whatnot. But, you know, marriage equality was a big deal. The right to serve in the armed forces was a big deal. Full citizenship for the LGBT community is important. And it was a huge victory.

And it was one I like to attribute it largely to the rise of my generation, Gen X, within the Democratic Party. Once we once we turned about 30 and became a force, that’s when things started to turn around on that issue.

But, regardless of the generational posturing, the Democratic Party still produces important results, even in Biden’s term. Some of what he passed, the Inflation Reduction Act, some of the spending on infrastructure, there were important things there.

So, here at the Fair Deal Democrats, we’re always quite clear about why we’re Democrats. I never, ever, ever got that from The Liberal Patriot.

I never, you know, got sent the sense that they appreciated, the Democratic Party’s key role in civil rights movement and in environmental protection, all those things, even if later, the issues got more complicated around identity politics or over-regulation or whatever. Nonetheless those were those were important achievements, lasting achievements to build on, to reform if necessary, but real achievements.

So again, I’m sorry to see The Liberal Patriot go, but I think rather than sort of blaming the Democratic Party, one more sort of shot across the bow, complaining that they weren’t supported, I would say that support is a two-way street. I do hope they continue to write individually or find another um you know platform, but I fully understand why Democrats would not want to take advice from people who seem to have no love for them.

That’s it for today. Just wanted to give a short shout out and acknowledge their demise and wish them well in their future endeavors. Thank you for joining us. Have a great day.

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Welcome to the Fair Deal Democrats podcast. I’m your host, Josh Kilroy, a longtime political consultant and policy advocate. We’re going to talk today about a confrontation that is currently unfolding between an AI company and the United States military. On the surface it looks like a contract dispute. It is not. It is a question about who controls the machines that may one day decide whether people live or die — and whether those machines are even capable of making that call.

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Here are the facts.

Anthropic, the company that makes the AI model Claude, is the only AI company currently operating on classified U.S. military systems. They built a special version of their model called Claude Gov, stripped of many of the safety guardrails that exist in the public version, specifically to work in that environment. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon. The meeting was civil in tone. But when Anthropic didn’t agree to Hegseth’s demands, the Pentagon leveled an ultimatum: comply by this Friday at 5 p.m. or face consequences.

What were those consequences? Two threats, issued simultaneously. First, the Pentagon threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, a wartime emergency power normally used in manufacturing contexts to compel Anthropic to make its model available to the military for free. Second, it threatened to label Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would put its government contracts at risk. As one legal expert quoted in the Times noted, these two threats are fundamentally contradictory. One prevents the government from using Anthropic’s products. The other forces them to. The contradiction is the point. The Pentagon is pulling every lever it has.

So, what does each side actually want?

The Pentagon’s position is straightforward and, stated plainly, sounds reasonable. Pentagon officials say that lawful use must be the only constraint on how they deploy technology they acquire. They argue they cannot allow every contractor to dictate how the equipment they sell will be used. If they buy a weapons system, they get to decide how to use it within the law. They want all AI contracts to stipulate that the military can use the models for any lawful purpose, full stop. They are also not bluffing about alternatives, they have an agreement with Elon Musk’s xAI to use Grok on classified systems, though the Times notes Claude is considered a substantially superior product.

Anthropic’s position is also, stated plainly, reasonable. They are not refusing to work with the military. They are already working with the military. What they are asking for are two specific assurances: that their model will not be used for surveillance of Americans, and that it will not be used in autonomous weapons systems - drones, targeting decisions - without meaningful human oversight. Their spokesman said the company needs to ensure its models are used in line with what they can, quote, “reliably and responsibly do.”

That phrase, “reliably and responsibly do,” - is where this stops being a contract dispute and becomes something much more serious.

Because here is what the research actually shows about what these systems can reliably do.

AI researcher Gary Marcus, writing the day after the Times story broke, pointed to a new study by Keith Payne that ran a series of large language models through simulated nuclear crisis scenarios. The results should stop you cold. Across multiple models, the nuclear taboo — the deeply embedded international norm against using nuclear weapons that has held since 1945 — was, in the words of the study’s abstract, “no impediment to nuclear escalation.” In 95% of simulated cases, the models chose the nuclear option.

Let that sit for a moment. The restraint that human decision-makers have maintained through the Cuban Missile Crisis, through countless Cold War near-misses, through decades of genuine existential tension - that restraint was absent in 95% of AI-run simulations.

This is not a theoretical concern about future AI systems. This is about the models that exist right now, today, the same category of technology the Pentagon wants unrestricted access to by Friday afternoon.

And here is what we know about those models. They hallucinate: meaning they confidently produce false information. They are inconsistent, giving different answers to the same question depending on how it is phrased. They have no genuine understanding of consequences. They optimize for producing plausible-sounding outputs, not for being correct. Marcus has been documenting these limitations since 2018. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight in January. We are not in a moment that tolerates recklessness.

The Pentagon’s argument that lawful use is the only necessary constraint assumes that the humans in the chain of command will always be in a position to catch errors, override bad outputs, and exercise judgment. But that assumption collapses the moment you remove the human from the loop, which is precisely what autonomous weapons do. And it collapses further when you consider that these systems will be making recommendations faster than human cognition can evaluate them, under conditions of stress, incomplete information, and time pressure. The doctrine of human oversight only protects us if the human actually has the time, information, and authority to say no.

Anthropic is not being naive about national security. They built Claude Gov. They are on the classified system. They understand what the military does. What they are refusing to do is sign a blank check that says: use this technology however you want, for any purpose, with no constraints, including purposes the technology is demonstrably not capable of performing safely.

The Pentagon frames this as a contractor trying to dictate terms to its customer. But there is another frame: a company that understands what its product can and cannot do, refusing to let it be deployed in ways that could get people killed — or worse, that could trigger a catastrophic escalation that no one intended and no one can walk back.

Marcus closes his piece with a paraphrase of an old anti-nuclear button: one hallucination could ruin your whole planet.

That is not hyperbole. It is a technically accurate description of the risk. These systems hallucinate. They will be embedded in weapons systems. And the Secretary of Defense is giving an AI company until Friday afternoon to remove the guardrails.

Anthropic should not blink. And we should be paying very close attention to whether it does.

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1. When I was starting out in politics, I would drive a cab in Chicago for three or four months between campaigns. I did this from 2005-2010.

2. I hate Uber with the heat of 1,000 suns. The worst sort of big tech monopolist that used massive infusions of venture capital to artificially undercut taxis and other providers until many of them left the market.

Uber currently has about 75% of the ride hailing ridership, an unhealthy monopoly. This allows them to squeeze driver and customers alike. Many progressive cities and states have tried to address this by having drivers considered employees, entitled to a minimum wage and benefits. This has largely been unsuccessful.

In today’s Fair Deal Democrats podcast, I argue that cities should find ways to support - through savvy regulation, public awareness campaigns, etc - alternatives to Uber. I discuss some ideas for revitalizing the taxi industry, making alternatives ride hailing apps like Empower viable, and jitneys.

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I didn’t have the time in the podcast for specific ideas for the taxi industry, so I have added my notes below:

Fix the product before marketing it

The core reason Uber won wasn’t price — it was the app experience. Riders loved knowing exactly where their driver was, upfront pricing, cashless payment, and easy rating. Any serious competitive strategy has to match this. Several dispatch platforms, let local operators deploy a comparable app without building one from scratch.

Compete on reliability and trust, not price

Uber’s surge pricing, deactivations, and driver churn create real vulnerability. A local operator can market itself as the dependable option: predictable pricing, drivers who know the city, accountable service. This resonates especially for airport runs, medical transport, and corporate accounts where reliability matters more than getting the cheapest ride in three minutes.

Win institutional contracts

Hotels, hospitals, universities, convention centers, and corporations are high-volume, repeatable business that Uber handles poorly at the B2B level. A local operator can offer dedicated accounts, monthly invoicing, guaranteed availability, and a direct phone contact. This creates revenue that doesn’t depend on winning individual riders one at a time.

Target underserved segments

Uber is weakest in suburban and exurban areas (thin driver supply), with elderly or non-smartphone populations, in medical/non-emergency transport (a regulated and reimbursable market), and for large groups or specialty vehicles. Owning even one of these niches well is more sustainable than trying to beat Uber at its own game in dense urban cores.

Driver retention as a competitive moat

Uber’s model creates high driver turnover. If you treat drivers well — stable income, benefits, predictable schedules, respect — you attract better operators and build a service quality advantage that’s hard to replicate. Happy, experienced drivers are your brand.

Coalition and cooperative models

Individual local taxi companies competing alone against Uber’s national network will struggle. Regional cooperatives or technology-sharing arrangements between local operators can distribute the fixed costs of app development, marketing, and dispatch infrastructure while preserving local ownership.

Regulatory engagement

Local operators have legitimate standing to push for level regulatory playing fields — insurance requirements, background checks, accessibility standards, and airport/venue access rules. This isn’t just rent-seeking; Uber genuinely operates under looser standards in many markets and closing that gap is fair competition.

With thoughtful regulation and support, cities can build a highly profitable alternatives in specific institutional, specialty, and reliability-focused segments while Uber fights over the price-sensitive commodity market.

Reason had a great article about the travails of the Empower app in Washington DC.

Enjoy the podcast.

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First, we must forbid “machine output from being presented as human.” I’m quoting from this essay by Gary Marcus, published on his substack page earlier this week. “No use of the first person by chatbots, and no more deepfakes of living people’s voices and images without express consent,” with a free speech exception for obvious parodies.

Second, we need a federal law protecting our biometric information. This includes fingerprints, facial geometry, iris and retina scans, and voiceprints. It is crazy that we have gone this far in the big data era without adequate protections for our privacy. Scammers are already having a field day with access to this information.

This law must require real consent before the collection of the data, in plain language, with an explanation of why the data is being collected, and how long it will be stored. Furthermore, it should require data minimization, the collection only of the minimum amount of data needed and a requirement to destroy the information when it is no longer needed.

This law must have a private right of action. This means that when a data breach occurs, the individual affected can sue for damages, instead of relying on slow-moving Attorneys General subject to regulatory capture.

Enjoy the episode! We’d love to hear from you.

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This issue resurfaced last month when the Department of Justice submitted amended testimony from senior SSA officials in which they acknowledged several instances of breached data by DOGE employees.

The amended filings were barely covered when they were filed in mid-January and they have disappeared from the public debate, but I wanted to discuss them because these data breaches were major betrayals of the privacy of Americans by the political and tech leaders who dominate our cultural landscape.

Privacy and data security are important priorities and provide pivotal metrics for judging their trustworthiness. These data breaches deserve more attention from the American public.

The two major news articles I found were by The Washington Post and NPR.

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From Wikipedia, here were the closest states in 2024:

States where the margin of victory was under 1 percentage point (10 electoral votes; all won by Trump):

1. Wisconsin, 0.86% (29,397 votes) – 10 electoral votes

States/districts where the margin of victory was between 1 and 5 percentage points (87 electoral votes; 72 won by Trump, 15 won by Harris):

1. Michigan, 1.42% (80,103 votes) – 15 electoral votes

2. Pennsylvania, 1.71% (120,266 votes) – 19 electoral votes (tipping-point state)

3. Georgia, 2.20% (115,100 votes) – 16 electoral votes

4. New Hampshire, 2.78% (22,965 votes) – 4 electoral votes

5. Nevada, 3.10% (46,008 votes) – 6 electoral votes

6. North Carolina, 3.21% (183,046 votes) – 16 electoral votes

7. Minnesota, 4.24% (137,947 votes) – 10 electoral votes

(“2024 United States presidential election,” Wikipedia)

Robison doesn’t get too much into the specifics of exactly how this would work, but I suggest a series of primary days with two states: Wisconsin-Michigan, Pennsylvania-New Hampshire, Georgia-North Carolina, and Nevada-Arizona, before opening it up to primary days with 8-10 states, loosely grouped by geography.

Robison doesn’t think that a primary process focused on battleground states would favor moderate candidates over progressive candidates. I disagree, it almost certainly would. But this is a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, enjoy the podcast!

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For additional information, here is Kevin Erdmann’s take on the bill.

Here is a New York Times article on the topic from last week.

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Here is a slightly revised transcript of the episode.

Welcome to the Fair Deal Democrats Podcast, I’m your host Josh Kilroy. Today, we’re going to discuss an extraordinary piece of legislation that just passed the U.S. House of Representatives this week, the Housing for the 21st Century Act. This bill passed on Monday, February 9th, 2026, with remarkable bipartisan support: 390 votes in favor and only 9 against. In a time of deep political division, this overwhelming support tells us something important, housing affordability has become a crisis that transcends party lines, and Congress is finally taking meaningful action.

This is long-overdue federal leadership that mirrors the bold reforms we’ve seen at the state level, particularly in California, which has been pioneering innovative housing solutions for the past several years.

Before we dive into the specifics of the bill, let’s understand why this legislation is so critically important. America is facing a severe housing shortage and affordability crisis that threatens the very fabric of our communities. Across the country, from major cities to smaller towns, people are struggling to find affordable places to live. Families are being priced out of neighborhoods. Young people can’t afford their first homes. Essential workers - teachers, nurses, firefighters - can’t afford to live in the communities they serve. Renters are spending increasingly large portions of their income on housing, often exceeding the recommended 30% threshold.

This isn’t just an economic issue, it’s a quality of life crisis that affects health, education, family stability, and economic opportunity. The shortage has been decades in the making, created by restrictive zoning, outdated federal programs, and regulatory barriers that make it expensive and time-consuming to build housing. The sponsors of this bill, Representative French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, and Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California who serves as the ranking member, recognized that solving this crisis required bipartisan cooperation and comprehensive reform.

Importantly, this federal legislation follows a model that’s already been proven effective at the state level, particularly in California, which has led the nation in housing reform.

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The Housing for the 21st Century Act takes a smart, evidence-based, two-pronged approach to addressing the housing crisis. First, it aims to dramatically boost housing supply by removing unnecessary regulatory barriers and red tape that make it expensive and time-consuming to build new housing. Second, it modernizes federal housing programs that haven’t been substantially updated in decades. The underlying philosophy is straightforward and correct: we need more housing, we need it faster, and we need it to be more affordable.

This approach is grounded in basic economics - when supply is constrained and demand is high, prices rise. By removing barriers to construction and streamlining approval processes, this bill will unleash housing production across the country. This is exactly the kind of bold, practical reform we need.

Let’s start with one of the bill’s most significant components - reform of the HOME Investment Partnerships Program. Now, you might be wondering, what is HOME? Created in 1990, HOME is a federal program that provides grants to states and localities to fund affordable housing activities. It’s been a cornerstone of federal housing policy for over three decades.

Here’s the problem: the program hasn’t seen major reform since its creation 35 years ago. Over time, it’s accumulated layers of bureaucratic requirements, particularly around environmental reviews. These reviews, while well-intentioned, can significantly delay housing projects—sometimes by years. This is exactly the kind of outdated regulatory burden that’s been holding back housing production nationwide.

The Housing for the 21st Century Act proposes the first substantial reform to HOME since 1990. Specifically, it would:

• Limit duplicative environmental reviews - if a property has already been reviewed under one federal program, it won’t need to go through the same review again

• Exempt new construction on infill lots from NEPA review - that’s the National Environmental Policy Act. Infill lots are vacant parcels within already-developed areas, where environmental impact is minimal

• Exempt smaller projects of 15 units or fewer from certain reviews - recognizing that small-scale development poses less environmental risk

• Exempt the acquisition of real property for affordable housing from some reviews - speeding up the process of converting existing buildings to affordable housing

The goal here is to cut down the time and cost of developing affordable housing without compromising genuine environmental protections. This mirrors reforms California enacted in 2025 with AB 130 and SB 131, which created sweeping CEQA exemptions for infill housing. California recognized that environmental review was being misused to delay housing projects for reasons unrelated to environmental protection. Governor Newsom called those reforms “a game changer,” and early results suggest California’s approach is working. The federal government is now following California’s lead, and that’s excellent news for housing production nationwide.

The second major component addresses one of the most critical barriers to housing: restrictive local zoning laws. Many communities have zoning codes that prohibit density, ban certain types of housing like duplexes or apartments, or create other barriers to new construction. These rules often date back decades and don’t reflect current housing needs. Exclusionary zoning has been a primary driver of the housing shortage.

The bill creates two innovative types of grants:

First, planning and implementation grants for regional agencies that want to update local codes. This is important because it provides financial incentives for communities to modernize their zoning without forcing them to do so. It respects local control while encouraging much-needed reform.

Second, the bill would fund what are called “pre-approved housing pattern books.” Think of these as catalogs of housing designs that have already cleared regulatory hurdles. Local governments could choose designs from these pattern books, dramatically speeding up the permitting process. Instead of reviewing every project from scratch, communities could fast-track projects using these pre-approved designs.

This approach is particularly clever because it reduces both time and uncertainty for developers, making housing projects more financially viable. It’s also similar to strategies California has been implementing. California’s 2025 legislation (SB 79) allowed by-right development near transit stops, and numerous bills have streamlined permitting processes. California has also created standardized application forms and limited the number of hearings local governments can hold on housing projects. The principle is the same: reduce unnecessary delays and make it easier to build the housing we desperately need.

Now let’s talk about manufactured housing - often called mobile homes, though that term is outdated. Manufactured housing represents one of the largest sources of affordable, unsubsidized housing in America. These are homes built in factories and transported to sites, which can be significantly less expensive than traditional construction. For millions of Americans, manufactured housing offers a path to homeownership that would otherwise be out of reach.

However, manufactured housing has faced significant and often nonsensical regulatory challenges. Currently, there’s a rule requiring these homes to have a permanent chassis—essentially, they must be built on a frame that can be moved, even if they’ll never actually be relocated. This requirement adds substantial cost without providing any real benefit for most manufactured homes. It’s exactly the kind of outdated regulation that drives up housing costs unnecessarily.

The Housing for the 21st Century Act would rightly revoke this permanent chassis rule, reducing costs. Additionally, it would establish the Department of Housing and Urban Development - HUD - as the chief federal regulator of manufactured housing construction and safety standards. Right now, regulatory authority is somewhat fragmented, creating confusion and inefficiency. Consolidating this authority under HUD should streamline the approval process and create more consistent, sensible standards.

By making manufactured housing easier and cheaper to produce, this bill opens up an important avenue for affordable homeownership. This is smart policy that recognizes we need diverse housing options at different price points to meet America’s needs.

The final major provision I want to discuss involves leveraging private sector investment - a smart approach to expanding housing production without requiring massive new government spending. Currently, banks face caps on their public welfare investments - essentially, limits on how much they can invest in community development projects. The bill proposes lifting these caps, which could unlock billions of dollars in additional private sector investment.

This is particularly important for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, which is the federal government’s primary tool for incentivizing private development of affordable rental housing. By allowing banks to invest more, the bill could significantly expand the financing available for affordable housing projects. This is fiscally responsible policy that multiplies the impact of every federal dollar by catalyzing private investment. It’s the kind of innovative approach we should be pursuing more broadly in housing policy.

So where does the bill go from here? It now moves to the Senate. Interestingly, the Senate has already passed a similar bill called the ROAD to Housing Act back in October. Over the coming weeks, both chambers will likely work to reconcile these two bills into a single piece of legislation that can be sent to President Trump’s desk for signature.

One notable element that’s not included in the current House bill is President Trump’s proposal to restrict institutional investors - large companies and investment firms - from acquiring single-family homes. This has been a contentious issue, with some arguing that corporate buyers drive up prices and compete with families for homes.

The Housing for the 21st Century Act represents a significant, bipartisan breakthrough in addressing America’s housing crisis. This is the kind of bold, practical reform we’ve needed for decades. By reforming outdated programs, reducing regulatory barriers, modernizing manufactured housing rules, and unlocking private investment, the bill takes a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to increasing housing supply and improving affordability.

What makes this legislation particularly exciting is that it’s following a proven model. California has been leading the way with similar reforms—streamlining environmental review, limiting excessive hearings, creating by-right development near transit, and removing barriers to housing production. California’s 2025 CEQA reforms under AB 130 and SB 131, which Governor Newsom called “game changing,” demonstrate that these approaches work. The federal government is now applying these lessons nationwide, which is exactly what we need.

Will this solve the entire housing crisis overnight? No. But it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about housing policy—moving from a mindset of restriction and delay to one of abundance and action. The overwhelming bipartisan support suggests a genuine recognition that we must build more housing, and we must do it faster. This legislation gives us the tools to do exactly that.

In today’s podcast, I discuss “The Waymo Paradox.” The paradox is that even though fully autonomous vehicles - cars that drive themselves - are quite likely still decades away, they are already 80-90% safer than the typical human driver. We don’t need the technology to be perfect for it to be worth it to aggressively scale up autonomous vehicles. Within a decade or so, we could save tens of thousands of lives by increasing the use of these cars.

But, as with so much of our current tech, we should be wary of corporate oligarchs controlling this technology. I argue that we should look at public utilities as a potential better way of managing autonomous cars.

Articles cited in the podcast:

Kelsey Piper, “We Absolutely Do Know that Waymos Are Safer than Human Drivers.” On The Argument substack

Yarrow Bouchard, “Self-driving Cars Aren’t Nearly a Solved Problem.” On her Strange Cosmos substack

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Geez, who wants to relive the Biden era? In today’s podcast, I review Kamala’s strengths and weaknesses and conclude that Kamala Harris will never be president.

She would enter the race as the frontrunner with some impressive advantages: she has universal name ID; she is a proven fundraiser; and she remains popular with Black women and party insiders. For many, she was placed in a terrible position when Biden dropped out and she played a bad hand as well as she could.

Although she complains in her recent campaign memoir that she didn’t have enough time to run a full campaign, in fact, the campaign went on too long. She peaked in the first three weeks of the campaign and slowly faded after the convention.

Harris had multiple opportunities to present Americans with a fresh positive vision of the future, she completely failed to separate herself from Biden’s widely unpopular positions on immigration, biological males in women’s prisons, locker rooms, and domestic violence shelters, and his slow response to inflation. While she delivers a good speech, she seemed flummoxed in live interviews and generally not great at thinking on her feet.

The Democrats will have numerous great candidates ready to take center stage in 2028, we should move on from the past and give them the opportunity to shine.

Newsom has close relationships with big-money donors, has worked well many of the interest groups that impact Democratic primaries, and is a charismatic presence across the media spectrum.

Gavin Newsom will never be president of the Unites States.

In today’s podcast I discuss three factors that I think make it highly unlikely that Newson will win the Democratic nomination, much less the general election.

1. Lack of a clear lane. Newsom has a complex record. He has balanced conflicting heavyweight competing interest groups - labor, developers, social justice advocates, environmentalists - in the face of fiscal constraints and growing public anger of rampant homelessness and social disorder. Tied at the hip to billionaire Big Tech donors, especially at Meta and Google), he is not positioned to be the darling of the left, or labor’s candidate (although he sided with labor on many key bills). Pete Buttigieg will have a strong claim for the LGBT vote and other key constituencies that Newsom would need to claim the nomination. Older voters, always overrepresented in elections, will find few reasons to support Newsom over candidates like Buttigieg, Wes Moore, or Andy Beshear.

   
   In spite of signing a long series of housing reforms advocated by Abundance progressives - all of which we strongly supported here at the Fair Deal Democrats - he is not positioned to be the moderate candidate. In part, this is attached to his socially liberal record as governor (about which, more below), but also because moderate candidates need to win the African American voters to have a path. And Newsom is, to be blunt, a white man’s white man.
   

   He is the avatar of the slick, coastal limousine liberal and that will be a huge impediment in the midwestern states where the bulk of the voters live.

2. Moral Peccadillos. People in California have long been about Newsom’s affair with the wife of his close friend, former Deputy Mayor, and campaign manager in 2005. Newsom was already in the process of divorcing his first wife, Trumper Kimberly Guilfoyle when the affair happened, so the betrayal is really to his close friend. The wife was also someone who worked in his office. This was not the sort of “I was lonely on the road and had a moment of weakness” type of transgression, this was a deliberate violation of a family and his workplace.
   
   He smartly admitted the whole affair immediately and with contriteness, so voters weighed that against his tenure as Mayor when they re-elected him. Over time, he was able to move into state government, where again, this was factored against his record.
   
   But advancing electoral in California is one thing, winning over socially conservative African American voters in South Carolina and Georgia, is another thing. While this affair is far back in the past, it could still be potent considering Newsom for the first time. Especially if there is anything else that comes out.
   
   But after Clinton and Trump, are voters still prudish enough to consider marital fidelity a dealbreaker, the sophisticates might ask? Clinton was a towering candidate in a weak field and Trump is sui generis, so it is very much an open question how this will impact his national political fortunes.
   
   One other incident that attracted national attention occurred during the pandemic. While strictly enforcing a mask ban, Newsom attended an event with wealthy donors in Napa Valley where no one was wearing a mask. At the time, the arrogance of one rule for politicians and their wealthy friends and another rule for working families was immensely off-putting and given poorly the social distancing efforts have aged in retrospect, this will still leave a sour taste in some voters’ mouths.

3. His Legislative Record. While, on the whole, we here at the Fair Deal Democrats think Newsom was a pretty decent governor, he does have some bills that he’s signed that will hurt him. To take just three examples:

   1. Decriminalizing Loitering. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill that preventing police from arresting people for loitering in places known for prostitution. This bill had the informal effect of decriminalizing prostitution, mostly in low-income neighborhoods. It increased social disorder in neighborhoods that could afford it least.

   2. Extending Funding for High-Speed Rail. It is a fever dream of a certain segment of California’s urbanist/environmentalist community to have a high-speed rail line. The Fair Deal Democrats thinks that it would have been a good idea if it could have been done. But that is not how it played out.

      
      Protracted political disputes about where to place the tracks, endless legal battles, shameless exploitation by an army of consultants, have made the high-speed rail a joke. Its price tag has soared into the stratosphere - from $33 billion in 2008 to at least $89 billion today. The whole project was expected to be completed by 2020. Now they are hoping to complete the Bakersfield to Merced section - a literal train to nowhere - in 2031.
      
      It is highly unlikely that this project will ever be completed. Newsom would have been wise to pull the plug on this grotesque boondoggle. But just this year, he double-down and secured funding of billions of dollars a year through the year 2045. This is a visible example of endless waste and government ineffectiveness that will be hard for Newsom to live down.

   3. Deceiving Parents about Their Children. Newsom signed a bill that technically allowed children to socially transition into a different gender identity at school without the school notifying the parents. Basically, it made the school a partner in transitioning vulnerable children with gender dysphoria behind the parents’ back. Schools are facilitating major health decisions without the parents’ involvement.
      
      This bill passed at the height of the gender identity movement, which is now in retreat. At a time of widespread mistrust in government, to grant a government agency the right to withhold crucial information about their children is a huge mistake. Signing this bill, which he did only last year, already looks like bad and it will continue to age badly.

Democrats will have a number of strong candidates for president, and the Fair Deal Democrats is excited about the opportunity to help a center-left win the nomination and presidency.

But Gavin Newsom will never be President of the United States.

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This was a lively conversation about complicated issues and I appreciated Cohen’s willingness to share his experience and wisdom with the Fair Deal Democrats.

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The real story isn’t about the ads you see but the power you don’t. It’s about the candidates who never run, the policies that never get debated, and the slow, systemic drift of our democracy away from the will of the majority.

We tend to imagine corruption as a transaction: money buying votes, quid pro quos in backrooms. But money’s real power is quieter and deeper. It decides which candidates get to run, which policies are thinkable, and whose voices get amplified or ignored. It has rewritten the rules of self-government—slowly, invisibly, and almost entirely within the law.

Bonica correctly notes that money does very little to change the results of a general election. Ads on TV and social media, direct mailers, and billboards do very little to change the minds of voters. Field efforts to mobilize voters are more helpful. They can ensure that occasional or lukewarm voters vote, but even that accounts for 2-3%.

For legislative races across the country, only the primary matters. And here money becomes a factor. The ability to raise money quickly becomes a filter that limits who can become a viable candidate. The media gives candidates with money more coverage and enables them to hire staff and the infrastructure of a campaign. Thus, the field is tilted in favor of candidates who are either personally wealthy or who have a network of early donors to draw from.

Before a single vote is cast, candidates must survive what insiders call the “money primary.” This invisible, high-stakes contest demonstrates the ability to raise substantial funds. Because of partisan sorting and gerrymandering, the winner of the general election in most districts is a foregone conclusion. This makes the primary election the place where money truly matters…”

Candidates without early financial backing from wealthy networks struggle to hire staff, gain media attention, and establish credibility. Many promising candidates drop out due to lack of funds before voters ever get a chance to evaluate them.

The whole essay is worth reading. Enjoy the podcast.

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Two points to emphasize: one, Democratic Representative Jake Auchincloss from Massachusetts, is a rising star in the Democratic Party; two, this legislation should only be the first step toward a much more comprehensive regulatory framework for the online economy. This framework must include extensive data privacy protections, regulation of how algorithms manipulate consumers, and ensuring that online platforms do not get so powerful that they are “too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.”

The mission of the Fair Deal Democrats is to rejuvenate America through a revitalized Democratic Party that represents the best of middle America.

This video was inspired by Nathan Witkin’s recent post on his Substack, After Babel, and relies on reporting by Charlotte Alter in Time and Jonathan Limehouse in USA Today.

I will have a post tomorrow about how Congress is trying to regulate social media to crack down on sex traffickers and other predators.

Congrats on your new book deal! Your industriousness has paid off.

In spite of the fact that I am a centrist proudly affiliated with the Democratic Party and you are not, I frequently find your observations to be insightful. For instance, your insight that the film Parasite was not about a rich family and a poor family, but rather a rich family rising and the fall of a middle-class family into poverty. This explained why the Kim family had certain social skills common to the middle class and why they were so dreadful at the low-wage jobs they now possessed.

Furthermore, like many other people, I find your personal story to be powerful. As the oldest son in a family that took in many foster children in the 1980s and adopted four of them, I have a keen empathy with their experiences. This led to my doctoral thesis on the Illinois child welfare system—more precisely, the creation of an Office of Inspector General and a Code of Ethics specific to the field of child welfare.

I gave your first book to my mother, who rightfully takes great pride in her years as a foster parent, and she enjoyed it immensely.

I commend you on your professional success. I haven’t seen many of your lectures, but those that I have seen are well-composed reviews of the literature in psychology.

However, I think that your concept of “luxury beliefs,” while it captures the annoyance that many people feel toward progressive elites, especially those in the universities and legacy media, is empirically and theoretically weak. You have made occasional gestures to the point that these luxury beliefs are non-partisan, even perhaps non-political. On Substack Notes, for example, you recently cited the example of tech moguls who won’t let their own children use smartphones without tight restrictions. But the cultural impact of the idea—its great success—stems from its use as a cudgel against the Left, particularly progressive college and university students.

Incisive critiques of your work, especially from Ruxandra Teslo and Yascha Mounk, have been out in the public discourse for well over a year, and while I’ve seen a number of your podcast appearances and read a number of your essays as a free subscriber to your Substack, I have not seen a direct response to their critiques. When you appeared on Mounk’s podcast, he focused (rightly so) on your book and only briefly and superficially addressed the concept.

If you have directly addressed their concerns, I would love to be pointed to the appropriate resource. But a number of careful searches, using various AI assistants, have turned up nothing of note. If it is the case that you haven’t rebutted their arguments, I urge you to do so in the near future, certainly before your book comes out.

The clearest definition you offer of luxury beliefs is in The New York Post where you wrote: “These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” It has become one of the most viral concepts in the culture wars. It’s punchy, intuitive, and satisfying to wield in an argument. But as Ruxandra Teslo argues in her essay “Shut Up About Luxury Beliefs,” the idea is more misleading than illuminating.

You claim that elites have moved from conspicuous consumption of goods to conspicuous consumption of beliefs as the central mechanism for asserting social status. But Teslo, correctly in my view, argues that this is just factually inaccurate.

“Its empirical foundations are rather shaky: it’s simply not the case that we have witnessed a historical shift towards elites signaling with beliefs rather than material goods or that elites are somehow unique in using nonmaterial things for signaling purposes.”

What truly signals status is scarcity. Elite schools, hard-to-get achievements, and money still serve as signals. Beliefs are cheap and widely available, making them poor candidates for elite status markers.

Teslo writes:

“To the extent that some elite groups have dropped material means as a way of signaling status (think of SF tech bros and academics dressed slovenly and making a point out of not really spending much time on their appearance), they have mainly been replaced by showcasing access to other scarce resources. The SF tech bro might look like a poor person, but he will surely brag about the amount of funding his company got, whether he got invited to the party of an important person in Silicon Valley, and so on. Similarly, the academic hierarchy is established by how many papers one publishes and where. Again, this is possible, because there is a limited amount of articles that get published in Nature, so those will serve as good status markers within the elite.”

Personally, I would still assert that material means of status signaling are still widely prevalent. Elites are still identifiable by the clothes they wear, the neighborhoods they live in, the cars they drive, and the foods they eat. These are still perfectly adequate status markers in the vast majority of cases.

There is a non-material aspect of signaling, but this is often in-group identification and competition. Regarding in-group identification, Teslo observes:

“...beliefs are more of a signal of belonging to a group or to fit in, than a way to order people within a group or to display status externally. You might need to repeat certain orthodoxies to be accepted in a group, but there are diminishing returns to doing so once you have been accepted. The hierarchy within that group will then be determined by access to things that are scarce…”

Yascha Mounck, in a podcast interview with Teslo, discusses the competitive aspect of beliefs:

“…these luxury beliefs are a useful form of social competition among people who have roughly equal status. One area that’s obviously true is in grad school, before the time when you can have real achievements, where you may be insecure about your status. And so embracing these kinds of political views becomes a particularly tempting thing to do.”

Teslo also claims you are mistaken in attributing cynical motives to elites and their beliefs.

Underlying sentiments and motives is another area where the “luxury beliefs” concept is mistaken: it suggests elites consciously adopt bad ideas because they know a priori that the implementation of these ideas won’t hurt them. This assumed nefariousness of elites is never really spelled out directly, but is heavily implied…

…However, I’m skeptical that ideologies are adopted in such a calculated manner. Instead, they’re more likely to be shaped by vibes, social dynamics, and the need to belong. Over time, ideologies evolve into forces with their own momentum, exerting influence that transcends materialistic interpretations. That’s because signaling to oneself that “Yes, I am a good person” can be an incredibly powerful behavior motivator.

Her alternative explanation for elites adopting beliefs that could negatively impact the poor and most vulnerable among us is that most elites are “lazily well-intentioned.” They conform, go along with group vibes, and like seeing themselves as good people. Self-signaling—convincing yourself you’re moral—matters as much as signaling to others (Teslo, “Shut Up”). Again, I find this explanation more persuasive.

Mounk is more favorably disposed than Teslo to the idea of “luxury beliefs.” He writes:

“There are all kinds of ideas and policies that would have bad effects if implemented. But there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves.”

Thus, Mounk’s reformulation of the luxury belief thesis is: A luxury belief is one that you can only hold because your insulation from hardship shields you from experiencing its downsides. This sharper definition avoids lumping together every elite-favored idea and prevents the concept from being wielded as a universal cudgel. It also preserves its core insight: e.g., wealthy progressives supporting drug decriminalization may avoid the worst neighborhood consequences, while poorer communities bear more risks. For a right-wing example, Veronique de Rugy has observed that for wealthy Trump supporters, tariffs are a luxury belief.

Teslo approves of Mounk’s reformulation, but even so, she urges caution. The concept of luxury beliefs misunderstands how status-seeking works, overstates elite cunning, understates conformism, and gets weaponized into a culture-war epithet. Instead of moralizing about elites playing status games, we should analyze how temperament, identity, and institutions actually shape the spread of ideas. As she writes:

“…the solution isn’t to descend into chaos, but to cultivate better elites. Recognizing elites as imperfect, fallible individuals rather than malevolent, entirely self-serving creatures, and placing them within an accurate historical narrative is important. What we need is a shift towards a discourse that is more rational and centered on the factual essence of issues. Adopting yet a new instantiation of the old class struggle framework to interpret the world is unlikely to contribute positively towards that objective.”

Mounk argues that “luxury beliefs” risks functioning as a conversation-stopper rather than a clarifying lens. In particular, in your hands, “luxury beliefs” is an epithet to be hurled at progressives. In practice, the rhetorical move is akin to the left’s dismissal of opponents as speaking from “privilege.” It shifts debate from evidence to motive-impugning instead of engaging with whether an idea is right or wrong.

Rob, you have correctly identified how progressive elites can be extremely annoying. But, as Noah Smith noted, all elites are annoying to the ordinary people they lord over. Believe me, the suffering poor during the Gilded Age would have appreciated some relief from the predations of the Robber Barons and were instead told to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” That some succeeded at this makes it no less arrogant and infuriating.

I am sure you have a long career ahead of you, whether it is at a university or in the conservative think tank world. Success in either will require head-on engagement with those who constructively critique your work.

All the best,

Josh Kilroy

LA County CEO Fesia Davenport (Photo: LA County website)

They do not care about you!

I’m talking about our elected leaders and the professional class that runs our government. Some are great, many are adequate, most are pretty ineffective. Some have an issue or two that they are passionate about, but the interest of citizens is rarely a top concern of our political class.

Some people get taken care of. Those people aren’t you and me. As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

Over the summer, something happened in LA County that perfectly encapsulated the sheer contempt our elected leaders have for us.

The Background

This brings us to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. There are five supervisors, each of whom represents two million people. Once elected, supervisors are almost impossible to defeat, and they are sealed off from the people they claim to represent. The County is the conduit for most federal funds, meaning they have discretion in the spending of billions of dollars with minimal oversight.

Currently, the Board does not have an elected County Board President. Supervisors take turns serving as Chair for a year. preparing meeting agendas and presiding over sessions. There is a County CEO, an administrative position to oversee the routine operations of the bureaucracy, but this job is not as powerful as, for instance, city managers in most small towns.

This means that there is no one elected official who represents the County as a whole with direct control of the administration. Many people believed - myself included - that the County would be served having an elected County Executive with the power to run the administration, set the budget, and appoint and remove department heads (with Board oversight).

This led to Measure G, a referendum on the 2024 ballot, which created a County Executive position and increased the number of supervisors from five to nine. Although controversial, Measure G passed 52-48%. The new governing structure will be implemented in 2028.

The Fair Deal Democrats supported Measure G and are modestly hopeful that it will improve County governance.

The Scandal

Measure G had some opponents. One of them, it turned out, was Fesia Davenport, the current CEO of Los Angeles County. Her position would be eliminated and her responsibilities folded into the new County Executive role.

How dare the voters chose a governance model that impacted her career!

This summer, she fired off an angry letter to the Board of Supervisors - her bosses - demanding compensation for the distress that the citizens of LA County caused her by voting for Measure G.

As Ms. Davenport wrote in her demand letter:

“The text of the motion [the ballot language for Measure G] impunes my professional reputation. The text of the motion makes the case for structural changes - i.e. from an appointed executive to an elected one, from five Supervisors to nine Supervisors, and so forth. However, the text of the ‘motion does not stop at calling for structural changes. Rather it conflates desired structural changes with the desired attributes of the ECE and by implication undesirable attributes of the current CEO.

Specifically, the text states, “…the lack of strong, elected executive leadership has our ability to address these challenges.” There is an implicit correlation between the desired future state (i.e. a “strong elected executive) and the disfavored current state (i.e presumably a weak appointed executive).”

Of course, the discussion about Measure G had nothing to do with the specific job performance of Ms. Davenport but rather was a broader conversation about how best to allocate power in a county of ten million people.

To add gasoline to the fire, Ms. Davenport continued, as reported by the Los Angeles Daily News:

Another argument made by Davenport was that as a 27-year employee of the county, she was not ready to retire in 2028 and that passage of Measure G ends her career at least two years earlier than she planned [emphasis mine]. This briefer work tenure could affect her retirement benefits. She had requested an extension of her contract through November 2030 to provide a 24-month overlap with the new, elected county CEO.

Sweet Jesus! This woman is paid $862,000 a year as an executive. Part of the deal in serving in high-paid executive position is that there are no guarantees. To be clear, if she retired today, she would have a pension of hundreds of thousands a year. Apparently, the voters owe her a maximum benefit even if only for work she had planned to do but will not actually perform. She is an at-will employee.

Never mentioned, she could just get another job when the CEO position is phased out. You know, like ordinary people do when they are victims of corporate downsizing or business closings. According to the LA Times, she is considered “capable and easy to work with,” which you would expect from someone making over $850K a year. But the political class doesn’t do things the way ordinary people do.

Her demand was for two million, “to earn interest on the funds to help mitigate the lifelong impact of Measure G on my retirement allowance.” All because - by voter demand - her job will be phased out two years before her unofficial plans to stay until 2030.

The Board of Supervisors was only too happy to submit to her full $2 million dollar request in August of this year, but under one condition, that they do it in secret. Even though they are supposed to publicly report out any settlements over $100,000, the Board of Supervisors ensured that this settlement was kept away from voters.

Even worse, Davenport cashed the multi-million dollar check but still has her job!

Zero accountability.

The Backlash

It was only because a determined journalist, Nick Gerda, with local media outlet LAist went through the fine print of county records did this scandal ever come to light. This is why supporting local journalism is so important. He first reported on this in mid-October.

James Rainey, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, became curious about this case because “large payouts to public officials; they happen fairly often, but typically when people are asked to move along.”

I wondered if I was missing something, so I called an expert observer of the county’s governance, who sounded equally flummoxed. “I can’t believe it’s that easy for the County of Los Angeles to write a $2-million check to an employee and for them to stay,” said the expert, who declined to be named to maintain good relations with county leaders. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

Of course, it makes total sense: the political class takes care of their own. In California, elected officials are insulated from voter by the size of the districts, but also by the costs of running for office. Because of the election regulations, it is all-but-impossible to run for office without first hiring a political consultant and a compliance firm to handle all of the campaign finance regulations. The only way candidates can be credible is if they are independently wealthy or, more common, if they are sponsored by a special interest group that will give them the up-front resources for a campaign.

Because it is so difficult for voters to have a voice, it is a lot easier to prioritize the needs of the interest groups and the professional class of administrators, like Ms. Davenport, who help politicians keep the interest groups happy.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram said it well:

What a sick trick this is on Angelenos already saddled with a county government in financial distress, to see the executive overseeing a problematic budget stick it to the citizenry by adding a new expense based on her supposed embarrassment.

The Supervisors will continue on and face no consequences for their secret deal. Taxpayer money will continue to fund homelessness services that provide good jobs for non-profit professionals - an important donor base - but do nothing for homeless people in need, transit service will continue to be mediocre at best, and other services will continue to suffer.

But the Supervisors will continue to raise big bucks for their re-election campaigns. And they will continue to win with no real opposition. Scandals come and scandals go, but the permanent governing class remains.

They do not care about you!

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Ezra Klein Twitter Photo (Photographer Unknown)

Ezra Klein is awesome. Seriously, people, get off his ass.

My sense is that there has been a simmering resentment to Klein among many progressives over the last several years. Since ascending to his position as a premier opinion writer/podcaster at The New York Times in 2021, he has been the measure of what a high-minded public intellectual can be in contemporary America. This, in and of itself, is enough to cause resentment among the chattering classes.

Klein Calls Out President Biden

Last year, Klein had the temerity to call for Biden to drop out in February, months before his implosion at the first debate against Trump. While conceding that Biden has been a good president, he pointed out the obvious evidence of Biden’s decline as a communicator and as a candidate.

…what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this. He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago. That’s not insider reporting on my part. Go watch a speech he gave in Pennsylvania, kicking off his campaign in 2019. And then go watch the speech he gave last month, in Valley Forge, kicking off his election campaign. No comparison here. Both speeches are on YouTube, and you can see it. The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.

The denial of Biden’s decline often took the form of decrying “ageism” and claiming that his age was only an issue because the media kept talking about it. To this Klein replies:

…to say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age? If you have really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you. In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age. This is not a thing people need the media to see. It is right in front of them…

This upset all of the official progressives who said it would be too hard to convince Biden to drop out, that an open convention was unworkable, and that even if Biden were to drop out, Kamala Harris was the only viable replacement. As The Nation’s Joan Walsh sniffed: “We [pundits defending Biden-Harris] have added up the various risks and benefits of Biden-Harris 2024, and concluded that it’s less risky to run the incumbent. We could turn out to be wrong, but we’re neither stupid nor feckless.”

Well, they were wrong, grievously wrong. And they were absolutely feckless. What was impossible was staying with Biden, what was grossly irresponsible was refusing to devise a process that gave potential candidates other than Harris a chance to demonstrate their appeal to Democratic voters before the convention.

In the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal, were the anointed babblers appreciative of Klein’s ability to predict disaster BEFORE it happened? Did they say “we should listen to this guy more often? Hell NO! The resentment of the bloviators only became worse once it was clear that Klein had been a bold truth-teller who absolutely should have been heeded, while their own cowardice set the path for Trump’s triumphant return.

Abundance

After the election, Klein (with Derek Thompson) released Abundance, which argued that Democrats should focus on making government more effective at building infrastructure, facilitating health, and fostering scientific innovation. Their book was meant to shake up a Democratic governing elite that has accepted sclerotic government action that prioritizes placating all of their diverse constituencies over practical results for voters.

Abundance commanded attention from a party still out to sea after the traumatic loss to Trump. Although the basic case for improving government efficacy was unassailable, progressives dismissed the book’s recommendations because, they claimed, this only reinforced conservative narratives about over-regulation and the inefficiencies of government action. In fact, Klein and Thompson believe in an updated version of the large, but vigorous, state championed by the New Deal.

The populist left was especially incensed that Abundance did little to challenge the large corporations exerting economic and political power. The Phoenix Project stated:

“Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance helped rebrand Reagan-era economics for a new generation, but behind the gloss lies a familiar web of tech, real estate, and right-wing influence…At a moment when U.S. democracy is threatened by MAGA authoritarianism and deep inequality, doubling down on private-sector solutions while ignoring redistributive policy is a dangerous distraction.” (Quoted in Democratic Voters Choose Fighting Corporate Power Over Neoliberal Abundance ‘Scam’: Poll | Common Dreams, by Brett Wilkins).

In Foreign Policy. Isabella Weber writes that:

People are angry after having faced scarcity amid plenty for too long. Rebuilding democratic power requires addressing the enormous economic power imbalances that have accumulated over decades. But the vision outlined in Abundance mostly neglects questions of power and redistribution.

Elsewhere in her essay she notes:

The first pages of the book lay out the abundance vision from the perspective of the lived experience of everyday life. It reads like a rich suburb gone green. Markers for the single-family home setting include, for example, solar panels just a “few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof” and a drone that “pauses over a neighbor’s yard like a hummingbird.” The fridge is full and stocked with fresh vegetables. People are well off. The upper-middle class experience that might well reflect the authors’ lives is available to everyone but without anyone having to give up what they have. Who could possibly object to this green American dream? It is a utopia that the authors explicitly embrace…

This strikes me as a misrepresentation of what Klein and Thompson were seeking to accomplish. Their thesis is simple almost to the point of being simplistic: “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” The “we” in that sentence is Americans, but the authors are explicit in clarifying it means Democrats in particular. The future they imagine is one where there are more houses for people to live in, more and better medicines to improve health, safer roads, improved public transit, healthier foods, etc. By laying out a positive vision of what contemporary America can be, they spell out a political philosophy that centers concrete results for the public good and the processes that can bring these outcomes into being.

One common attack is that Abundance does not lay out a popular message for campaigning. One survey purported to demonstrate that anti-corporate populist slogans polled better than talking points about zoning changes and streamlining permitting processes. I have no doubt that this is true, but successful Democrats have to govern once they win and reality will gradually favor those politicians whose policies actually produce positive results when they are implemented. Good policy matters and is sometimes even the best politics.

It is true that they do not spend a lot of time railing against large corporations. But it is not true that fail to challenge the powers that be. As anyone who has lived in California in the last decade knows, Klein and Thompson pose a sharp challenge to the interest groups that run the state, and by extension, other deep blue jurisdictions: some unions, some environmental groups, many of the NGOs that profit from, for instance, homelessness, and an entire class of consultants.

Abundance is a clarion call for internal reform within the Democratic Party and in that, I found it to be highly successful. Once those internal reforms - for quick, responsive governance - are understood as necessary, then they are the benchmarks to measure corporate malfeasance and social inequality, as well as the tools for developing a political message. You can develop metrics for housing supply, how quickly new medicines are approved, how streamlined approval processes are. But those are tasks they leave for others, and appropriately so. It would not do for the person who coined the term “the everything bagel” to overload his book with an excessive agenda.

There is not much that is new about Abundance, but it is an impressive summation of existing critiques of government ineffectiveness pitched to the needs of our political moment.

In the aftermath of the success of Abundance, the left populists were primed to go on the attack against Klein, like dry kindle awaiting a spark.

Then Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Klein on Charlie Kirk

I have to say that Kirk had never really been on my radar during his lifetime. He seemed to be another conservative talking head in the mode of Rush Limbaugh. And I think the review of his comments and positions after his death underscores the truth of that view. I underestimated his appeal and did not anticipate the powerful, quasi-religious sentiment his death would unleash on the right. Upon hearing of his death, I recorded a quick podcast urging people to focus on his humanity and to feel sad for his death and for his family.

Ezra Klein did something similar. He wrote an op-ed piece that stated that Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…

I did not know Kirk, and I am not the right person to eulogize him. But I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project….

Political violence is a virus. It is contagious. We have been through periods in this country when it was endemic…When political violence becomes imaginable, either as a tool of politics or a ladder for fame, it begins to infect hosts heedlessly.

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment…Political violence imperils that.

Ezra brought compassion and humanity into an overheated moment in American politics. Judging from the instantaneous outrage from professional left-wing commentators, you would be forgiven for thinking that he had farted out the melody to “Deutschland Uber Allies.” His benign, well-intentioned effort to build a bridge across political divides only revealed how deep division run in our society.

Nicholas Grossman wrote for Arc Digital:

Ezra Klein declared that “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” going beyond opposing political violence to hold up Kirk as a model. In doing so, Klein accidentally gave the perfect illustration of how America’s mainstream media and liberal elite has facilitated the Trumpian fascism we’re dealing with now…

Debating Kirk would require acknowledging Kirk’s real arguments, calling out the bad faith rather than going with the most generous interpretation. And that they will not do. It would interfere with the fictional character they created. Debating Kirk’s actual arguments is left to the people Klein is scolding, the ones who he implies are doing politics the wrong way.

That leaves us with a massive asymmetry, where Charlie Kirks work against rule of law democracy, Ezra Kleins pretend that they don’t, and together they work to convince everyone that all this is fine, just normal disagreement, so the people taking attacks on democracy seriously are the problem.

It’s reminiscent of professional wrestlers, where some are “faces” the crowd is supposed to cheer and some are “heels” the crowd is supposed to boo, but the show needs both of them. So while they stay in character and act antagonistic in public, they ultimately see each other as colleagues pursuing a joint goal.

Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs calls Klein and people like him (which presumably includes me) “hand-wringing accomplices to the right, sanitizing their propaganda for them,” adding “Ezra Klein is actually a bad advertisement for a politics of “discourse” and “engagement,” because he suggests that it involves being weak in our confrontations with white supremacy and genocide.”

In The New Republic, Nacona Nix says that Klein’s column, “elevates Kirk as a civic exemplar and, with that confessed “commonality,” substitutes professional fraternity for moral judgment. It privileges solidarity with a fellow talker of politics over the substance of what was said, and over those Kirk’s rhetoric demeaned.”

As is the standard these days, these columns all hype Kirk up to be the next Hitler and makes anyone who says that these are voices to engage with are modern day Neville Chamberlains.

Ta-Nehesi Coates Responds

By far, the most noteworthy response to Klein came from Ta-Nehesi Coates in Vanity Fair. Coates cites many of same Kirk quotes and opinions listed by other writers, but he ups the ante as only he can. Coates is a brilliant writer whose essays in The Atlantic as well as his best-selling books, including Between the World and Me were required reading for progressives in the 2010s. After almost a decade spent writing comic books and other non-political writing, Coates returned to political commentary with a book on the Israel-Palestine conflict in 2024.

For all his brilliance, Coates is fixated on the idea that every day is a relentless violent assault on Black Americans by their white counterparts, that we are never really removed from Mississippi circa 1875.

And Coates writes:

And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize?…

…More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.

Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

With the gauntlet thrown down - I mean, geez, Ezra may as well have been accused of being the Grand Wizard the KKK! - Klein felt like he had no option to respond. He invited Coates to his podcast to address their differences. Klein is clearly in a reflective mood. In his introduction he states:

For me, one of the central questions animating the show this year — and that has been animating it since the election — is: How did we get here? How did we let these people get back into power? What went wrong in our approach to politics that we ended up here?

A little later, he spells out part of his reasoning for his op-ed:

One thing for me is that in the immediate hours after somebody is murdered in public, when you see that sort of grief and horror pouring out of the people who loved him — and many people loved him — my instinct then is to just sit with them in their grief.

He adds:

I worry we are already in a cycle of political violence, of mimetic violence. I think about Pelosi. I think about Shapiro. I think about the near assassination of Trump.

After that happened, I thought about me, I thought about you. I thought about all kinds of people I know. So, I do think there’s just something about when violence takes hold, there’s something about it that begins to breach all lines.

I took this to mean that his op-ed was an attempt to use his public platform to break a cycle of violence through an act of grace, a reaching out in kindness.

Klein then poses this question to Coates. “Given everything you read that Charlie Kirk said — and we probably don’t have very different views on the value of the things he said — why do you think he was winning?”

Coates replies:

Any sort of sober examination of the history of this country says that those of us who believe in equality, those of us who believe in respecting the humanity of our neighbors — and of everyone — that we’re up against some really, really powerful forces of history and powerful narratives….And I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance and warmth are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s a powerful, unifying force. And I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger.

Klein inverts his earlier question, “why are we losing?”

Coates replies:

I am descended from people who, in their lifetime, fought with all their might for the destruction of chattel slavery in this country. And they never saw it. They never saw it. In my personal belief system, they died in defeat, in darkness.

So I guess the privilege that I draw out of this, the honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.

The fact of the matter is, as horrifying as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, and as horrifying as the feeling is in this moment, that we are in an era of political violence — and I don’t want to sound flip here. Political violence is the norm for the Black experience in this country. It just is.

Coates’ critics, including John McWhorter, have accused him of serving less as a political analyst and more of a spiritual advisor. In an essay in The Daily Beast, McWhorter writes, “white people were receiving [Coates’ article The Case for Reparations] as, quite simply, a sermon. Its audience sought not counsel, but proclamation. Coates does not write with this formal intention, but for his readers, he is a preacher.” And he preaches unending white guilt for the harms suffered by Black Americans. Harms that were, in his opinion, undiminished by the success of the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society.

Klein then tries to draw Coates out to explain how progressives have failed in this historical moment. For Klein, this failure calls for a rethinking of how we operate.

Politics is for power. So I think the question I am genuinely struggling with isn’t how to have a great kumbaya moment — but that we have to take seriously that something we’re doing is not working.

I had Sarah McBride, the first trans member of Congress, on the show, and we were talking about how every single survey you can offer on trans rights has gone in the wrong direction in the past couple of years. We’ve just begun to lose that argument terribly — and that has put people in real danger….

…But the place I’m trying to push toward is that there is a diminishment of the political coalition-building that we now need to do because we have come to the view that a pretty wide variety of people are in some ways deplorables…

…There are a lot of people who live in places we used to win not that long ago.

I’ve been thinking about Obamacare. When Obamacare passes, there are Democratic senators in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in West Virginia, in Missouri, in Indiana, in North Carolina, in South Dakota, in North Dakota.

And I’ve been thinking that, for a lot of us — to twist a line about capitalism — it has become easier to imagine the end of the country than winning a Senate seat in Missouri or Arkansas. And I think that’s a problem.

But for Coates, this problem is not a failure by progressives, but just the ongoing unfolding of racism and hatred for oppressed people. So while politics does require respectful discussion and outreach, any gains are fragile. His task is not political outreach, but rather to continually bear witness to the suffering of the oppressed.

I have a basic level of respect that I accord to everybody….there’s a respect that has to be had for people with whom I disagree.

At the same time, I recognize that part of my audience — and I would say an important part of my audience — is people who have never enjoyed that respect. People who, in fact, are subjects of the kind of hate that Charlie Kirk was harvesting.

And I can’t ever a) contribute to making them feel like they’ve been abandoned, and b) I can’t ever stand by and watch somebody do that and in the name of unity or whatever, act like that’s not happening. Because there are real consequences.

Klein observes that maybe progressives - working through the Democratic Party - might have to make room for people who might agree with them on economic issues while disagreeing with them on issues like abortion or the rights of transwomen to compete in women’s sports.

Drawing the Line

Perhaps the most telling exchange of their conversation has to do with “drawing the line.” Who can we (here meant as progressives) have a productive public discourse with, even if we disagree with them, and who is so repugnant that any positive engagement is futile.

Coates starts the exchange by saying: “When I hear or see people who are honored and commemorated in such a way that they almost become a national religious figure, and then I see their content, and I see that their content is actively destructive to humanity, I have to draw a line there….For me, the bigger question is: Where are the lines? I think there’s no problem with saying: Listen, you can’t throw epithets at people. You are out if you do that.”

Klein responses with a key question for our time, “What does it mean to be on the other side of the line?” This momentarily throws Coates, but then he responds, “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible….I actually think that’s not a hard line to draw. I think not calling people out of their name, that’s actually a basic value that most people have.”

But Klein thinks that this is too easy in some sense. He points to Trump’s example. “I think that one reality is that the president of the United States is a person who, in his comportment as a human being on the public stage, I would have said in 2008, 2012, in 2016, should be on the other side of the line…I think he’s a person who does not act with any sense of public, or even personal, decency….But the thing that I am struggling with is that for most people, or a lot of people, the plurality of the voters in the last election: He is somehow not way over the line. That means there are a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I thought we would have found unacceptable.”

Klein continues to the political question: “what happens if 35 percent of the country, 40 percent of the country, the dominant political force in the country, is inside that [meaning Trumpism]. Does that change anything or not? Does the line just hold?” Are Democrats going to write off people who voted for Trump and who may have listened to Charlie Kirk, or is there some way to engage them? And if there isn’t what does that mean for our country, the democratic project we have set for ourselves?

Coates replies:

“Welcome to Black America. That’s our history. The line we have drawn in general has not been majoritarian politics, unfortunately. That has just been what it is, you know? And at the times that it has been majoritarian politics, people have done things and fiddled with government or done extremely violent things to make it not so….when I look at the times that we have lost, if I think specifically about the Black tradition, for instance, it’s hard for me to say that politically they did something wrong. You know what I mean? Reconstruction falls. What was the thing that should have been done?

On the contrary, I see a kind of courage that I wish we had today in a lot of people. I see people willing to die and take bullets all the time. What more could Ida B. Wells have done to get the anti-lynching bill passed? Here is somebody who was banished from Tennessee on threat of being killed, after she saw her friends murdered and lynched.

And when I look back at that long tradition, and I look back on the times that people have won and the places they’ve won, it’s often not been their heroism that was the decisive factor, ultimately. It has often not been their strategy that was the decisive factor.

Sometimes what you are fighting for is against the tenor of the times and success is not possible. In that case, as Coates says, “the privilege that I draw out of this, the honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.”

Klein that shares his perspective:

I think that there is a work of politics that for a bunch of different reasons has become demeaned. And this does not speak well of the people in power doing it, but I think that they are not doing it well….

And I think that the idea that political coalition-building, building across these gigantic differences, building across public opinion — both not just as you wish it existed, but as it exists — has often become seen and treated as betrayal, cowardice, moral fallibility.

I think it’s fine to say people have different roles, and, in fact, it’s good for intellectuals to criticize politicians. But my view is that the political practice became too weak.

Coates and Klein represent two poles of thought about how to engage politically in a democracy. For Klein, democracy might often put people in situations where they are expected to participate in a give-and-take political process with people they profoundly disagree and even intensely dislike. In contrast, Coates is embedded in a proud tradition of Black American thought and practice in which the task was to know who you were and who your allies were. In the face of intractable and violent racism, the fatalism was sadly, all-to-well earned.

Critical Responses

Reed Galen, a commentator with The Lincoln Project, used the contrast with Coates to castigate Klein. In a passage of stunningly bad faith, Galen writes:

Coates serves as an excellent foil to Klein due to the strength of his beliefs. Klein sees himself as a simple purveyor and shaper of liberal technocratic political opinion. A kindly farmer-cum- performative male. He expresses a desire for people to ‘find meaning in my’ work. To what end? Coates again takes him to task for his remarks about Charlie Kirk, noting that at some point a thinker, or an individual must ‘draw a line.’

Klein rejects this notion out of hand, and in the process yet again reveals himself. “I don’t get to draw the line.” Of course he doesn’t. To have a line would require a set of beliefs that are sacrosanct: Personal tenets that transcend podcasts and politics and dictate how one sees the world, lives their life, and imparts their values to those around them.

Klein is vaporware in human form. As he asks nothing of his fans, he expects the world to ask nothing of him, other than acceptance that he belongs in the position in which he’s found himself. It may be that Ezra lives in a gilded cage: Wanting to offer more than he does, but hemmed in by the strictures of a neo-liberal worldview that disallows straying from orthodoxy.

The passage perfectly embodies the pure envy of the commentariat. Klein understands that his platform gives him an opportunity to shape, in a small way, the larger public discussion, especially on certain political topics. Further, he is aware of trade-offs, that one choice of topic or guest precludes other possible choices. Klein has clearly chosen to focus on how contemporary politics is dysfunctional and how the Democratic Party has lost its way as a party for working people.

When Klein says that he doesn’t get to draw the line of what and who is acceptable in American politics, that is a clear-eyed statement of fact, not an admission that he lacks core values. Klein is quite transparent about his values: a commitment to the dignity and worth of all people, concern about climate change, and an advocate for effective government that serves the public good.

And contrary to Galen insults, Klein asks that his audience engage with serious ideas with a commitment to understand, rather than simply to cheer for one’s tribe and jeer the opposing tribe. This is exemplified by his commitment to “steel-manning” the ideas of those from different perspectives, rather than attacking a distorted chimera. The meaning that people can find in his work is a way of looking that the world that connects their lives with the broader social trends.

All of this contrasts quite well with Coates, who, again, I respect as a talented writer. But Coates continually reassures his audience that they are the benighted fighting off the unwashed. They are always on the right side of the line! Again, this is what McWhorter was referring to when he called Coates a “spiritual leader.” And Coates rarely asks anyone to think through trade-offs that might improve lives for many, but at a cost. And I found Coates’ writing on Kirk to be the opposite of “steel-manning.” Kirk’s whole career can be written off by a few bigoted remarks, uncharitably interpreted. You can bet that Coates doesn’t feel that way about Malcolm X, and he actually cut deals with the KKK! (To be clear, I have a lot of respect for Malcolm, but he was far from perfect and nowhere near as effective as Martin Luther King).

The writer Harjas Sandhu uses the pioneering sociologist Max Weber’s essay Politics as a Vocation to contrast Klein and Coates. Weber, discussing the work of politics, argues that well-meaning politicians can have one of two modes: they can pursue an ethics of ultimate goals or an ethics of responsibility. Sandhu then quotes Weber:

[A]ll ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility.’ This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism….However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends--that is, in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’--and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action.

Sandhu then applies this to Klein.

Ezra finds himself in the unenviable position of having an immense amount of power—and an unfortunately admirable sense of responsibility. He clearly doesn’t want this. What he wants is to be the outsider, the journalist who criticizes from afar, the man who can change the world with his words and go home to live a peaceful life. He doesn’t want to be a politician: he wants to be the moderator of political culture. Furthermore, he wants to believe that shaping political culture is good enough to fulfill his sense of responsibility…Politics has been his vocation for his entire life, not as a politician but as a journalist. He knows what he wants to do, but he’s afraid, just as any normal person would be. It’s pretty clear that he’s having some kind of mid-life crisis.

I don’t think Klein is having a “mid-life crisis.” It seems more plausible to me that, first, he is experiencing the collapse of a model for doing journalism that no longer works and, second, he is responding to the real political events of the moment.

Klein emerged in the early years of the 32st century as a young superstar blogger noted for his strong leftist politics. Later, he moved into the mainstream journalism at the Washington Post before leaving in 2014 to co-found Vox. The promise of Vox was to develop a mode of journalism that, by better explaining the news, would promote a liberal political ideology. For various reasons, this promise was not fulfilled - in part because the younger writers went full woke at the expense of co-founder Matt Yglesias and a commitment to honest journalism - and Klein moved on to the New York Times as a columnist/podcaster.

It seems to me that as Klein matured and his willingness to explore the complicated messiness of American society and its politics increased, his political outlook changed. He is still committed to progressive values and causes, but he experiences the limitations that contemporary liberalism inevitably has and wants to engage with them. His core mission is to communicate the complexity of our politics in a way that advances a progressive agenda, but one that is perhaps less progressive than it was twenty years ago.

In contrast, Coates’ core mission is to bear witness to the communities who have been historically marginalized. As he stated, “I can’t ever a) contribute to making them feel like they’ve been abandoned, and b) I can’t ever stand by and watch somebody do that…”

This contrast in ethical commitments extends to how they respond to the revulsion some voters feel toward the progressive professional class and their values. Klein asks

Even before the question of what your policies are — and I believe this very deeply — there is a question of whether or not people feel like you respect them and like them, even if they disagree with you. Before people will give you power, they don’t even ask if they like you, they ask whether you like them. And I think a lot of the country feels we don’t like them….Changing that is going to require making moves that somehow send a loud enough signal that people begin to think we have changed it at some level.

Personally, I couldn’t agree more. But Coates, consistent with his world view, comes back with a challenge.

(w)hat I want from you is I want you to take as seriously people who are in the tent and who are vulnerable and afraid. And if you have to convince them of something that’s extremely, extremely uncomfortable, or tell them that you’re taking a position that is extremely uncomfortable, I just think you owe them a little more.

One thing that intrigues me about Coates’ position is that the Black community is the heart of the MODERATE wing of the Democratic Party. They are historically much more concerned with better schools, better services, and safer streets than the college-educated whites who occupy most of the staff positions in the federal government and run most of “The Groups” that set the progressive policy agenda, including “defund the police.” Pivoting to the center could comfort many of the “vulnerable and afraid” people in the tent of the Democratic Party, something which seems to have never occurred to Coates.

But if you view those who disagree with you - those who are on the other side of the line - as irredeemably violent and racist then any appeal to some portion of those people can be seen as moral backsliding. To return to McWhorter’s point, Coates is trying to comfort the congregation rather than encouraging to expand and welcome possible new members.

A Walter Lippman for the 21st Century

Many of the people writing about Ezra Klein think he is more powerful than he actually is, mostly because they underestimate the power that conservative platforms give to people like Sean Hannity, Megan Kelly, or Ben Shapiro. Then there are the influential new media commentators like Joe Rogan and now Tucker Carlson. Even on the left, Rachel Maddow is arguably more influential than Klein. Charlie Kirk definitely reached more people than Klein ever has.

But Klein is such a lightening rod precisely because he works in a legacy publication and represents what remains of its impact. He can trace a direct lineage through such important New York Times writers from the past as Tom Wicker, William Safire, and James Reston. His most important precursor, in my opinion, is Walter Lippman, a co-founder of The New Republic and a nationally syndicated columnist for decades. He had much more influence than Klein or any of today’s contemporaries could ever hope to have.

Lippmann wrote subject-defining books on topics such as public opinion and the cold war (a term he is credited with introducing to the broad public). Most crucially, Lippmann thought deeply about the public impact of journalism and how it functioned in democracy. While his thinking was idiosyncratic, Lippmann believed that the public was too poorly versed in public policy to directly guide political decision-making. Thus the function of journalism was less to provide the straight truth of the issues and more to sway the public to support the interventions of a technocratic elite.

Klein’s public profile is somewhat similar to Lippmann’s (allowing for the differences between the mid-20th century and today), in that their influence stems from their ability to persuade the educated public, including elected officials and the professional class in government. Klein has more faith in the general public although he is clearly thinking through how his commentary can be a positive force in an era of distrust and corruption.

Contrary to the criticisms offered by the Reed Galens of the world, I think Ezra Klein has set and met high standards for himself in terms of how he conducts himself. He picks challenging, relevant topics, thinks through them seriously, and finds equally knowledgeable and engaged people to discuss these issues.

Klein sees the crisis of our times clearly and acts deliberately to address this crisis in our social and political institutions.

I sometimes disagree with him - he still tends to hue to the orthodoxies of “high liberalism” for my taste - but I always learn something from him. I do think that there is a disconnect between his nuanced takes on topics and his progressivism. In his heart, I believe he thinks he is still the young lion of the left and he is reluctant to see that his thinking is now too subtle for ideological rigidity. This self-perception of himself as the lefty crusader is what him so vulnerable to the criticisms of writers like Coates. I understand his struggle. I still have the progressive values of my youth, but I now see that they are best achieved through more centrist and incrementalist policies.

I see Klein much as I see myself, an “anti-establishment institutionalist.” The institutions we have, in government, education, the media, etc are suffering from serious moral rot. In some cases because the institutions no longer serve a useful purpose (the Electoral College or the filibuster), or use outdated standards that block needed actions (some environmental review boards or the Federal Trade Commission), or because of “mission drift” (colleges). In many cases these institutions are run or used by special interest groups to impose poor policies. The task, as I see it and how I think Klein sees it, is to revitalize and streamline our crucial institutions so that they are run for the common good.

Klein is both bolder and more insightful than most of his critics. In a age of elite corruption, his commitment to the strictest principles of public discourse is to be admired.

If Klein is embedded in a lineage that stems back to Walther Lippman (and also Herbert Croly, another co-founder of The New Republic), then Charlie Kirk is the true heir of Rush Limbaugh, someone who mastered the communications technology of the day to reach tens of millions of Americans.

Did Kirk say over-the-top things? Absolutely. More so than what you will find a thousand times a day on X or Instagram? Certainly not.

More to the point, what Kirk believes is essentially the platform of the Republican Party. They are still repugnant beliefs, but they are standard issue conservative rhetoric that are on the ballot in every state in every election cycle. To treat them as if they are outside the bounds of our civic discourse is to declare half of the country deplorables not worth of debate.

To Ezra’s critics, I ask: how’s that working out for you?

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The election of Donald Trump last November has raised existential issues for Democrats as we organize to protect our democracy and develop a plan to a vision for getting America back on the right track.

In recent years, trans right advocates have become major players in the Democratic Party coalition and, under Biden, made significant gains. These gains included enhanced job protections, the ability to serve in the military, and increased access to medical care.

Most Americans are highly tolerant of recognizing the rights of transmen and transwomen. However, several issues have become hot button issues that put Democrats on the defensive. One, should transwomen, biologically male, be allowed to play in women’s sports. Two, should transwomen have access to women’s prisons, domestic violence shelter, locker rooms and other single-space places. Three, should children have access to gender-affirming medical, including access to puberty-blockers, hormones, and surgeries.

While rank-and-file Democrats are relatively evenly divided on these issues, within the broader public, ie independent voters, there is entrenched opposition to these policies. Trump has officially revised the position of the federal government to say that there are two sexes and his administration has ended funding for medical research on trans health care. This summer, the Supreme Court ruled that states could ban gender-affirming care for minors.

Meanwhile, research increasingly questions the mental and physical health benefits of gender-affirming medicine. WPATH, the professional medical association for trans heath care, was caught in a major scandal when internal emails showed that many of the most prominent practitioners of gender-affirming care were fully aware that the evidence base for their procedures was negligible and that they changed their Standards of Care to meet political concerns from the Biden Administration.

The Democratic Party will not abandon its historic commitment to human rights for everyone, especially a trans community that is under siege. But it does need to have blunt and robust internal discussion about the issues mentioned above. My guest today is at the heart of this conversation. Ellie Swimmer (a pseudonym) is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG), a relatively new non-profit advocacy group that questions the medical approach the gender dysphoria and is opposed to biological males in women’s spaces.

Here is the link to the DIAG website.

Here is the link to their YouTube page.

The Fair Deal Democrats is committed to a robust public discourse on even the most heated and controversial issues and we proudly present this interview with Ms. Swimmer.

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She worked on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992 as a scheduler/advance person, then worked in the administration at the Education Department.

Regan has worked for Gary Hart, Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, and former Cook County Clerk (and also Mayor of Chicago for nine impactful days) in her long, impactful career.

In this week’s podcast, we discuss all of these personalities, the No Kings protests, and her retirement spent as a writer, most notably of her memoir In That Number which I highly recommend.

Her essays can be read here.

Thank you for listening.

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I first met Chris Larson in the summer of 2010. He was on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors and was running for the State Senate. Larson decided to challenge a Democratic incumbent, Jeff Plale, who was not a good ideological fit for the very progressive district, which ran from the town of Oak Creek, up through South Milwaukee, Cudahy, and the Milwaukee lakefront all the way up to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus.

For a variety of reasons, Chris’ campaign manager was not working out. I was brought on to run the campaign for the final two months. Against the odds, Chris won a landside victory and it remains one of highlights of my career as political consultant.

Since then, Chris has been a leader of the progressive caucus in the State Senate, especially on key issues like the environment, protecting public education, and sound economic development.

Wisconsin is a perennial battleground, usually won by just a couple of percentage points, sometimes by Democrats, sometimes by Republicans. It will be the same in 2026, where there will be an open race for governor and a heated battle to control the legislature.