What is the positive left-wing vision in American life right now? I mean, I think the positive vision would be like a society of shared flourishing and equality and human solidarity. All right. All right. In 2024, the Democrats didn’t just lose. They got — “Destroyed.” “Crushed.” “Crushed.” “Crushed, in 2024.” “The Democrats got shellacked.” But a lot has happened since Donald Trump returned to office. “About 62,000 veterans got pushed out of their jobs.” “There are growing concerns about tariffs.” “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls.” So where are the Democrats now? Do they have an agenda? “Only 28 percent of Americans view the Democratic Party favorably.” Liberal donors saying, “What did you do for me last time, when I gave you several hundred thousand dollars?” Is being against Trump enough? And are they ready for whatever the age of A.I. is about to do to American politics? My guest this week has to think a lot about Democratic Party battles and progressive angst. “Democrats can’t do what the Republicans have done.” “Democrats are still running as the underdogs.” That’s because the show that he hosts on MS NOW, speaks to millions of the most liberal American viewers. Chris Hayes, welcome to Interesting Times. It’s great to be here. It’s great to have you. So you are, in my own mind, at least not just a nightly news host and a podcaster, but a true man of the left. I think that’s true. Is that fair? I think that’s — Yes. So when we first met, you were writing for In These Times — Yes, that’s right. — which for those who don’t know is a classic, classical? I don’t even know what Socialist — Socialist — Socialist — A socialist newspaper. So those are your roots. And I want to talk to you about the left and where it’s going, what it stands for and how it relates to our exciting new technological future. But first we’re going to do a little bit of partisan politics, and we’re going to talk about the Democrats, which is not the same — No. — as the left — As they will tell you. As they will tell you — maybe. So here we are. And I would say, we’re about 14 months beyond a point in American politics when Trump had won and the Democrats were, I don’t know, flat on their backs, as beaten as I’ve seen — Very much so. as I’ve seen them since 2004 maybe. And now, there’s a certain kind of confidence on the Democratic side that they’re not just going to be living under Trump’s rule forever. But they’re also very unpopular. Yep. Unpopular with swing voters, unpopular with their own base, with the left. So, from your position, give me a “State of the Democrats.” How’s the party? Well, I think the first thing to just acknowledge is, first of all, thermostatic public opinion does a lot — Does a lot. So, then you’ve got I think just an incredible amount of overreach by Trump, a sort of misunderstanding of whatever mandate there was. He just has a project that’s distinct from what most Americans want, which is a project to transform the constitutional order into a personalist presidential dictatorship. And I think that’s actually not a particularly popular project. It’s not — Yeah, I would say it’s not what the people who had swung to Biden — Correct. — and swung back to Trump were voting for. Correct. That was not like the president having absolute authority to level — Levy tariffs, anywhere he wants. That was not the core issue of the 2024 election. So, all of that gets you a long way. I think the big question is right — So there’s a bunch of places where Democrats are still not trusted as much as Republicans. Things like immigration, crime, the economy — still, just if you ask the partisan trust question. So there’s ideological factions within the party — we can talk about that. Those ideological factions, I think, are a little displaced now on a few other more important axes that are the main ones of conflict. One is kind of “business as usual” versus “radical break.” And sometimes that looks like “go along to get along” or “fight, fight, fight.” So this would be, for example, the debate over the government shutdown — Yes. — would be a classic example of some people in the party saying, “If we do this, it helps Trump.” And other people saying, “How can you just stand here letting Trump run roughshod, if you have tools?” Exactly, and I think I want to give credence to both sides of the argument, because I think those are fraught debates that there is a real profound question. At one level, it’s like, should you be funding a Department of Justice that is like manufacturing, obviously, pretextual criminal cases against political opponents? I think there’s a case you shouldn’t. At the same time, by that logic, you’re kind of just pull yourself out into a total boycott of the government. Because in some senses, he’s doing some things in each department that are manifestly abusive from the perspective of a lot of legislators and Democratic politicians and voters. So I think there’s a real tension there that’s hard. You’ve got the momentum on the side of the fight, folks, not business as usual. And I think that’s going to be an interesting animating force in the primaries this year. The Democrats never really had their Tea Party levels of trust in the party establishment have been higher. The level of just pure rage at the party establishment. Like, I hate this party in anyone that at the top of it that animated a lot of the Tea Party and then Trump has not quite broken that way in the Democratic Party. So one big question is that looms over the party is like, how much do we see that play out this year, particularly along that axis. And related to that axis of conflict, status quo, radical change, or go along to get along versus fight is just New leadership for sole leadership. There is a real exhaustion, a real sense that people that came of age, 20 or 30 years ago and had their formative political experiences then, are not well tuned to the moment Yeah I feel like the connection to the leaders who kind of held the Democratic center together is gone. But before we get to who the New leaders are, how does this affect policy. Are there actual policy fights happening in the Democratic coalition right now that are meaningful, that we should be paying attention to Yeah there are some right. So like the clearest right is on foreign policy, particularly vis a vis Israel. I mean, that’s just an enormous clear fight. Like, should the US government align itself in a bipartisan fashion with the Israeli government, should it give them weapons, should it fund them. And does that just would you say that broadly tracks the kind of business as usual versus fight lines like in the main primary, which, for those who aren’t following it, closely pits the Democratic Governor of Maine, Janet Mills, against Graham Plattner, who really is a kind of Democratic Tea Party. Yes, very much so, complete with checkered, possibly Nazi adjacent tattoo tattoo past but they’re it would seem like Plattner would be fully aligned with no more liberal Zionism as the dominant force. Definitely And in fact, I think one of the things I think it’s worth actually spending a little time on this ideological fight, because I think it’s come to occupy a huge center of the fights. There’s a bunch of things that have been stacked atop it, if that makes sense. So the outsider, insider, incumbent, fresh voice. Status quo, radical break like age even have lined up around this axis. And I think in some ways, the reason it’s so important is because it just I think the experience of the Gaza war represented both just a genuine and profound wedge tension on a coalition that literally contains people on both sides of what is arguably the most polarizing issue in the globe over the last thousands of years. Like, people strongly and passionately on both sides. Both within the coalition. So you’ve got that that’s always going to be a huge problem for any political coalition. But what’s I think happened is it’s come to represent a bunch of other corporate versus grassroots establishment first challenger kind of axes. So it’s both a first level fight about an actual policy disagreement. And then there’s a bunch of ways in which that fight have come to embody something broader about what kind of Democratic Party it’s going to be. What about so what about domestic policy then, if the Gaza war is like the key place where policy lines up, are there meaningful domestic policy arguments. There’s a fight right now within the Democratic Party about ICE enforcement, which I think is a really important and interesting one. So there’s the ice needs to be reformed. So we should take the masks off. There’s ice needs to be abolished. The country did perfectly fine for 230 years without that particular agency. Which that is a kind of proxy fight for a larger fight, which I think isn’t actually being had right now in earnest, but will in the primaries. Meaning what should our immigration policy, which is what should our immigration policy be. I do think there’s a sense that the old consensus is dead. What was the old consensus. Consensus was what was called by the groups. The notorious groups was comprehensive immigration reform. Basically, the old structure of Democratic policymaking on immigration went this way. Increased enforcement, increased enforcement, particularly funds. There was a ton of money that was particularly in 09, 11, put into border enforcement. I think people sometimes underappreciate just how much the spending on the infrastructure of essentially immigration enforcement has gone up in this country. And then in exchange, a path to citizenship for the however many folks that are here now that started to come apart in a bunch of different directions. One, it starts to come apart because starting in 2014, there’s just a New phenomenon that starts happening. And I think this is also underappreciated. The immigration arguments that we had, particularly in the 90s and the tens, largely were about undocumented immigration, who were economic migrants, largely from Mexico. That was the focus of it. This New thing starts happening with right border resentments. We start getting it in 2014 meaning people who show up at the border claiming asylum, right. And who are not sneaking across to get exactly right. This is a key. Key difference. It’s like they’re not hiring a coyote to sneak in under night and then get over there actually coming and saying, there’s a part of your law that applies to me. And then those numbers, they expand, they contract, they expand wildly in 2023, quite famously 2020, right, 2021, early Biden, early Biden. But then they go right. They really grow. And then they come down to 22 to 23. They go really high. The reason I say all this and walk through this history, is that the way that policymaking happens in Democratic coalition politics is like they’re grassroots fights. And then there’s policy and then there’s what’s called the groups and there’s these coordinating middle spaces that these policy arguments happen in. I think there’s a lack right now of consensus on what is that affirmative vision there. But I see to me and you can tell me why this is wrong. It seems to me that there’s a desire actually to default back to back to what you just described as the old consensus from at least some Democrats that you’ll have people where essentially the view is O.K. Things got out of hand under Biden, but Trump’s enforcement is super unpopular. Correct but we don’t want to go all the way back to what the Biden administration was doing, which was effectively allowing millions of people into the country on the promise of giving them a hearing at some future date. We don’t want to go back to that. We concede that was unpopular. So what’s the sweet spot. Guess what we’re going to say we’ll do border enforcement like Trump is doing. That’ll be popular. And then we’ll do a path to citizenship. Problem solved. I hear that from Democratic politicians. I just think it’s not going to work. O.K right. I think there’s and to me it’s a little why is it not going to work. Well, I think there’s a few things. I mean, one, it reminds me of sometimes you see politicians to go back to that defining israel-gaza thing, sometimes a politician cornered on a question about Israel, and they say Israel has a right to defend itself. And it’s one of these thought terminating cliches. It’s just like when you have nothing else, just go with that. And it’s like, well, who can argue with that. It’s like this, path to border enforcement, path to citizenship has this kind of right. Who could be against it. That’s the sweet spot. And honestly, I think there’s a reason for it. I think there’s structural and actual substantive policy reasons that that’s a combination that works both in polling and policy. To me, the bigger thing is there’s a fundamental fight over what kind of country we are. Happening right now that cannot be addressed with that at that level. I mean, the emergence of a genuine blood and soil strain of conservatism. This country is for us and by us, the people who can go and visit their ancestors graves where they will bury their children. That’s what this country is. It’s not a country of ideas. It’s not a creedal nation. All that pluralist claptrap that you got taught. People come from all over and they can all be Americans. The famous Reagan speech, where he says can go to Germany and can’t be a German. You can go to Italy and can’t be Italian, but anyone can come here and be an American. This was his last speech. His last speech. Yes which is a perfect articulation of what used to be a fairly kind of consensus vision that underlied the debates happening above it, that consensus torn apart when that fight is happening at this elemental level, I think it’s very hard to come back in with the old policy question, without actually making an affirmative case for what kind of country you want. But why can’t you make the Reagan case and pair it with a moderate seeming agenda. I mean, I think you can. It seems to me like when I look at younger right wingers associated with nationalism, what you’ll see often is that if you push people even self-proclaimed Christian nationalists who believe that white America is under threat and so on are still kind of civic nationalists. Like the actual support for a true yes, I agree, heritage Americans are the only real Americans is really narrow. So if the Republicans seem to be moving in that direction, that seems like an opportunity for the Democrats to present themselves as an extremely Normie, mainstream party, but with the problem that nobody trusts them to enforce the border. Well, that’s the problem. And I think, well, one place that you have to deal with this head on is changing asylum law. It is bizarre to me that this thing, which is the central technical issue at the heart of the way that we’ve experienced immigration in the country since really since 2014. I remember covering that was a huge moment. People’s kids start showing up at the border. The first child migration crisis. Yes it’s kind of weird that no, there has been no progress on rewriting the law on this. I mean, even just to flip it on the other side for a second, you would think a thing that a Republican unified government would do would be like, well, wait a second. Yes we’re going to close down the border using executive action. But this thing is broken and written by libs like let’s change asylum law. Yes, as you would imagine that. But you would imagine that a Republican administration would ask Congress to do a lot of things that this administration does not. But that’s a vacuum. For Democrats, it’s a vacuum, but it’s a vacuum. It seems to me that only relatively small, small group of self-consciously moderate Democrats would want to claim if you’re on the insurgent side, the insurgent side, and then you’ve got an insurgent vision. Plus, you agree with Chris Hayes that we’re having this kind of existential battle about what kind of country, what kind of country we are. Are you really going to want to be the Democrat who comes out and says, and by the way, we’re going to reform asylum so fewer people can apply for asylum here. That isn’t that an impossible sell in the Democratic Party right now. I don’t think it is. Honestly, I think my own way. I’m not the politician who’s going to do this right. But my own thing is. Well, we’ll see, man. Is your time may come. Just to be clear, I just want to say there is an absolutely, to me, compelling case for essentially or open borders, in a moral sense. Like, I don’t think we’re saving we’re saving this clip for when you do run for president. I mean, I don’t personally, I would not support it as a politician. I wouldn’t vote for it. But I also think it’s not like a ludicrous idea Yeah you and the Cato Institute are there Yeah, absolutely. And that animating moral spirit, you’re right to identify as animating a huge part of the left and fundamentally causing attention with the fact that most people don’t want open borders. And there are people that are morally committed to essentially that vision. And I don’t think they’re necessarily ethically incorrect, right. As a policy, I don’t think it works. And most importantly, it’s impossible, I think, to Marshal a majority support for that. So in this sense, to me, the fundamental thing I think to keep in mind is immigration policy has to be in the National interest first. Orderly and humane. And the key part of that, and this is why I come back around to this discussion about what kind of nation we are, the key thing that has fallen away, I think, on the Democratic side in this discussion is the first one. It is in the National interest immigrants are great. Immigrants are awesome. Like immigration is an incredible bounty and gift to this country. It is the reason that the differentiating thing that has made America different. Again, I’m just going back to the civic pluralism of like a 1980s public school education in New York City. It’s amazing that we have all these people from all these different places who bring all these different kind of talents and perspectives and come here and become American and bring that to do things like win gold medals and start companies and be your doctor. So you have to sell. You have to make that argument, but you have to make that argument in the style. You have to make the 1980s New York City public school argument, which was perhaps slightly more liberal than the country as a whole, combined with an argument that persuades people that you’re not going to do what Joe Biden did. And so maybe so that let’s talk about potential leaders of the Democratic Party who could make that argument or not. But who is the leadership class for the Democrats going into 2026 and beyond. Well, it’s very I think out parties are always in this position where there is no national leader, but you’re trying to discover one Yeah, but it’s a particularly intense one here, I think, because of the rupture represented by Trump. I mean, I think a really important thing to understand from the perspective of people in the broad center left is that it’s a real before and after situation. Like if you view Donald Trump’s Project as a fundamental assault on the constitutional order, which is to fundamentally transform the nation into something that’s not Democratic, it’s very hard to find continuity in the politics of old his abnormality and the abnormality of his conduct creates a world in which it’s like you’ve been untethered from the spaceship and you’re just like, floating out into space. O.K that’s right. So you didn’t give me a single name about people. Well, right. No, but the reason I say that is just because what I’m saying is, I think you need to understand that the way Democratic Party voters are viewing this is in extreme terms. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Yes No, I can see that. And I can see that the core reality for a lot of Democratic voters in 2026 is total frustration with anyone who told them in 2016 or 20 18 or 2020, this will go away. This will go away. You just have to be normal, restore normalcy and so on. But the dilemma for the party is that to win national elections, they actually have to be normal and restore normalcy. Well, but you also you have to win people who voted for Trump. Yes right. And this was something that Democrats didn’t think they had to do after 2016 because Trump didn’t win the popular vote. But guess what. After 2024, he won the popular vote. You also need to win Senate seats in seats that Trump won by more than a few points. So it seems like this is not an impossible problem to solve, but a very challenging one where you have this a base that wants an acknowledgment of rupture and abnormality and a swing constituency that you need to win or hold. That is just living in the New reality. So let me give three examples of national figures that I think are doing interesting things to pull off that, because you’re right, that’s the fundamental thing that you have to do. Mark Kelly, Ruben Gallego and Raphael Warnock. You can even say Jon Ossoff, too. Tell me what state each of those men represents just for the sake. So let me give examples of two states that are key states here, which are Arizona and Georgia, and the four Democratic senators in those states. They’ve all won statewide office. They’ve all won statewide office in the era of Trump. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly in Arizona, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia. I’m choosing this advisedly because of course, Arizona and Georgia being like the key states, that Biden won and that Kamala Harris lost. And particularly because they’re outside of blue belt, the blue wall. This was a huge deal that these states flipped to Democrats in 2020. And I think all four of them have. And I’m not saying they’re necessarily national leaders, but what I would say is that all four of them have their own way of dealing with precisely this issue. So Ruben Gallego’s voting record is fairly moderate. He, for instance, I think all four of those senators have not mistaken, voted for the Laken Riley Act. So the first that was one of the first votes. It was a big Republican led measure to essentially increase sanctions for immigrants who committed crimes. Name named for a woman who was killed by an illegal immigrant. Yep yeah. They all four of them voted for that. And I think we’re looking at their internal polling and understood the states they represented. I think there are issues with that legislation substantively. But putting that aside, I think all four have found different ways to rhetorically emphasize how abnormal and wrong. They think the direction of the country is, while keeping their eyes on the main issues that won them their Senate seats. I mean, Warnock is an amazing example. Warnock speaks in the register of a preacher, which he is broad moral language. That guy will bring it back to health and kitchen table issues every single time. He will call what’s happening aberrant and evil. And he will also go back to this kitchen table vision. And Mark Kelly is another great example. Mark Kelly’s got a fairly moderate voting record in the United States Senate. He’s being maybe prosecuted military pension possibly suspended, I think, all of which is clearly good for his political position, the best possible thing for it Yeah and so I think in all those cases, you’re seeing a combination of a rhetoric that speaks to the deep sense of Democratic and spiritual crisis in the center left, that I think all four of those are pretty popular figures with basically a voting record and of substantive policy agenda that pretty squarely sits in a kind center of the nation’s politics. I think I would say that all of them also have personal characteristics that separate them in some way from the kind of churchiness of academic progressivism, maybe. Warnock speaks the language of Christianity in a way that Democratic coalition tends to be comfortable with. Gallego, I would say, is just an unwoke Hispanic dude, if I can. You don’t have to comment on that, but that would be my take. And Mark, Mark Kelly is like the whitest white astronaut you ever saw. And some of again, these are some of these are policy positions. Some of these are identity positions. But all of them create a perception that this is a form of Democratic politics that is somewhat distinct from the kind of competition to say, Latinx the most. Yes right. I mean, I also do I think there’s a little bit of fighting the last war on that. I do think there’s a little bit of the alienating rhetorical excesses of a certain part of let’s say, nonprofit, academic and online left which came together in Twitter, particularly in 2014, 15 and 16, which were real, real enough Yeah but it did get kind of beaten out of people, a bit like the idea of what the language of that 2016 or 2020 primary looks like compared to now is pretty different. And I think partly that’s just because people lost elections and we Democratic Party lost the most important election of its lifetime. And you have to talk in a way that people understand and feels like a thing that they’ve heard before. So let me do the horrible thing, though, and talk about presidential politics in 2028, right. Yes I would say just as an observer of American politics, that if I were going to pick nominees for the Democrats in 2028, all of the guys you just mentioned would be very plausible presidential or vice presidential candidates. If you’re trying to maximize just maximize your popular vote, maximize your share of swing states. The people leading the polls in the Democratic primary right now are Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, who represent somewhat different models. They are. Harris is a legacy candidate who’s polling potentially could collapse upon contact with political reality. It’s name recognition. That’s possible. Newsom, tell me what you think about Gavin Newsom. I think Newsom has the Hillary Clinton problem, which is that Hillary Clinton was perceived outside of the Democratic Party and Democratic coalition as the ultimate lib. Like the lib. Lib who ever lived and was never actually like that much of a lib. It was like and also had a record that was fairly centrist, particularly as a US Senator. And that’s like the worst uncanny Valley for a Democratic politician to be in, where the base doesn’t trust you because you don’t have a kind of organic relationship with the left parts of the party. And then the swing voter just thinks like, that’s a lib. You want the inverse. You want the person that. Has authentic relationships with the left parts of the party and the grassroots, and also communicates broadly and is viewed as a not particularly partisan or liberal figure, Barack Obama being a good example of that. And I just think right now and this could change Newsom has the opposite set of factors, he is made very clear attempts to show that he’s bipartisan, centrist, independent. There’s some stuff he’s done around the billionaire tax and policy around trans folks that have been actual substantive things he’s done, but moves to the center Yeah or to the right, as some people would say Yeah, but I haven’t seen evidence that comes through. I just think there’s a reputational thing that’s very problem. Also partly if you’re just like the governor of California as a tough place to get the next Democratic nominee from. I mean, there like Kamala Harris, he has never run a important election in which he had to win large numbers of centrist to center right votes. And that showed up big time in Harris’s campaign style, I think, and you could see it as his weakness. But look, here’s his strength. His strength is that he is able to get attention and hold attention. And you, Chris Hayes, wrote a book recently called the Sirens’ Call. It’s a very interesting book. Highly recommended, even though I disagree with important parts of it, about what the internet has done to political culture. And you talk a lot about attention in that book. And what is the power of attention. And how has Newsome succeeded in grasping it Yeah, I mean, the thesis of the Sirens’ Call is basically that attention is the most valuable resource of our age that the competition for it has grown so fierce that it is increasingly valuable. But it’s both valuable to us, and it’s valuable to the companies that can extract it. That’s the main thesis of the book. But it has a specific importance in politics, right. Which is attention is prior to everything you need to do else in politics name recognition, is the thing we use. Part of why Gavin Newsom is running high is he has high name recognition. That’s been true forever. But it’s more true than ever because more things are competing for our attention than ever before. They’re filtered through these algorithmic platforms. That can pull us hither and yon. And so the primary thing you have to figure out, more than ever before in my lifetime to be a successful politician is how to get people’s attention and cut through that. Donald Trump did it incredibly effectively, had a whole bunch of innovation in how he did it. And I think you’re right to identify the fact that Newsom has a real talent for that. Like the whole shtick he did where he was like posting in Donald Trump’s voice, some people found it cringey, some people found it hilarious. But it worked. It got attention. It got attention. Yes so the question is right. So how does that fit with the analysis. I mean, look, the ideal situation you I think if you’re designing this in a lab, is someone that both has a proven ability to speak to swing voters, that the voters you need, and is also really good at attention. And the kind of nightmare scenario in a Democratic primary is someone who’s bad at the former and good at the latter, right. I don’t think the Democrats nominate someone in 2028 who is kind of pure creature of base craziness or whatever. I do think, though, that there’s a way in which the narrative of attention is itself potentially it’s something that people can reach for as a substitute for again, doing hard things like pivoting to the center right where you say, I mean, if you look at the Senate, he is pivoting to the center. Well, he’s pivoting to the center. But from, I would say from a position. And this is to your point, as governor of California, right, where that’s the problem. It’s where he’s starting from. Yes is tough. It makes the. He’s tough, but he’s trying to do it. I mean, clearly it’s not like he’s not like what he the thing that I think you’re going to see a lot of politicians try to pull off. And it’ll be interesting to see how the base responds is like maximal maximal kind of like attentional trolling resistance rhetorical performance and substantive pivot to the center. That’s, that’s what you’re going to see a lot of people try to. But you do have a lot of situations right now that I see again, as a conservative looking at liberals. If you look at the Democratic Senate primary in Texas, in Texas Yeah, right. James Talarico has a kind of religious pivot to the center. But fundamentally, I don’t see that in his positions. He’s just doing a Christian gloss on very conventional progressive messaging. I just wonder if you see that again, as the author of a kind of attention thesis as a situation where Democrats are like, yeah, we’re winning. We’re winning the attention war, and therefore, we don’t have to worry about swing voters. I think we have to interrogate some of the premises here because underlying this listen, listen to this academic liberalism, Chris. Interrogate the go on, interrogate the premises premise. Well, here’s I mean, here’s the question. All this depends on how much we’re dealing with median voter theory here. Like, there’s a median voter. That voter is in the middle of a traditional ideological axis. There cross-pressured on issues, and they move towards the people who substantively align with their policy views the most. I think there’s a lot to that. I think that’s clearly was very true on immigration in 2024. Like really clear story to tell there about that. I also think that Donald Trump and his success just like, confounds that in a million different ways. And people will be like, well, he moderated on Social Security and Medicare. And it’s like, yes. That mattered. I think that mattered a lot. Yes, yes, yes, yes it mattered. Was it the. Was that why Donald Trump became the President of the United States. Twice I’m a little skeptical about that. So the reason I say that is the question presumes that the way to go back is that you need to move to the center on this traditionally ordered axis, right. Which is like the left right axis and on individual issues. And I’m just a little skeptical that that’s true. You need to be perceived as a moderate percent. That is true. You need to be perceived as relatively independent, as not a kind of traditional partisan. To win swing voters is the way that you get that perception what your substantive policy is on asylum law. Maybe not. Like it’s just not clear to me that those two things add so neatly to each other. All right. This seems like a good moment to pull away from electoral politics a little bit and talk about the left just as a force unto itself. A force that wants to pull politics in its direction, doesn’t necessarily want to worry about exactly what the median voter thinks, but wants to be a kind of gravitational force in American politics, independent of what you need to do to win election after election. I’ve asked you where things stand for the Democrats. Where do things stand for the left. What does the left want besides Donald Trump out of office and defeated and so on. What is the positive left wing vision in American life right now. The question of the left is a little complicated, because we’re talking about the people to the left of liberals, the kinds of folks online who would use liberals and insult because the left of that. Let’s start with people who would define themselves as left as opposed to liberal, mainstream Democrat, whatever else. People who have a self-conscious identity. I mean, I think the positive vision would be like a society of shared flourishing and equality and human solidarity. All right, all right, all right. Well, then let me frame the question differently. Before we got to the possibility of some kind of artificial intelligence revolution. And we’re going to talk about that possibility in a minute. But let’s bracket AI for a second. It seemed to me like the left all across the Western world had run into a kind of big cul sac obstacle, whatever else in the last 10 or 15 years. Basically, you have a bunch of countries that are rich, have big welfare states. They’re all pretty expensive. These societies are getting old at a really rapid clip. And it seems to me that basic dynamic, just traps the left in a kind of desperate attempt to shore up a status quo that’s under threat, and defensive, battle a defensive battles and doesn’t leave room for a utopian revolutionary vision which is essential to the left, as I understand it. So, yeah, I think that’s a fair critique. I mean, I think that it’s not a critique. To me, it’s like the challenge. And what is are there well, solutions. I think that is truly the case of the center left parties of the socialist international in Europe. I mean, which are completely hollowed out, moribund and electorally in a lot of trouble. The Western hemisphere is a very different story for a bunch of different reasons. And, well, we can stick to America, but in the US Yeah I mean, look, one attempt to do that was the Green New Deal vision. Was look, let’s talk about of techno utopian world. We could have a world. And this is actually a world that still exists, possibly in the future, although it seems like so remote of essentially like 0 marginal cost energy that’s carbon free. That would allow us to do all sorts of things. And a society in which we don’t have this enormous concentration of both wealth and energy, wealth concentrated, that’s much more distributed and much more equal. The biggest issue right now on the left, I think, is they have the wind at their backs on the central political economy question, which is does American capitalism work for the ordinary person. And I think the polling reliably shows people say the answer to that question is no. Profoundly no. Younger people, especially younger people, especially. And I think the level of wealth, concentration we’ve seen, the explosion in spending by the wealthiest folks on our political campaigns, whether it’s efficacious or not, and the tech folks all there at the inauguration, all of this, creates a world that should be ripe for a left critique and in some ways has been. I mean, there’s a reason that the mayor of New York is a Democratic socialist, which would have been a very remote possibility 15 years earlier. The question is, what kind of society do you want. But isn’t but isn’t the question, how do you pay for the society you want. Because it seems to me that yeah, that vision, that vision is in principle very popular. Bernie Sanders has been a very popular figure making that kind of case. The right, the populist right, has traded on elements of that vision and tried to appropriate it and so on. But when it comes to are we going to do a massive New public works program. It seems like the left hit one wall with inflation under Biden, it spent a lot of money and got inflation, which is incredibly unpopular. And the other wall is that, yes, you can tax the billionaires and that’s popular. But to fund a totally revised welfare state, you need to tax a lot more people than that. And that is deeply unpopular too. And does anything change those facts for the left. Well, I would say there’s a different set of questions that are to me, a little more important. I think one of the traps in center left policy in the last say, 30 years, is that we have this pre-tax and transfer inequality and then tax and transfer is to change it. And we just keep getting more and more inequality in what the market does. And then the recipe is more and more redistribution. And it’s more than rhetorical ask rich people in New York whether the leftist project of taxing wealthy people in New York has been rhetorical. It has very much not. I mean, I won’t ask you how you’re aware of that, Chris. It is the most redistributive tax regime in the entire country. There’s a New line put in above $25 million. They’re trying to get the billionaire tax in California like they’re. That’s real stuff. That’s real money. The problem is can’t have a political economy that just keeps producing like this, larger and larger forms of inequality that then have larger and larger amounts of redistribution to produce an equitable society. So the question then becomes, well, what is the vision for an equitable market economy or labor market, or labor force or society that is genuinely middle class. But even for that have to as far as I can tell. Like, I just don’t think you get that more equitable society by passing some pro-labor regulations or something like mentioned the Green New deal, any story you want to tell about changing. Just the way people are employed and paid in America itself would require massive public works spending, massive New industrial policy, and that money has to come from somewhere. And the left certainly doesn’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare or anything like that. So it still stuck saying we’re going to add another line above 25 million, to get the money to create the predistribution. Well, I just think that it’s thinking in two narrow terms to think about this specific tax and transfer question. I mean, the other thing I’ll say is there really is a lot of money at the top. Like you can’t fund a welfare state with it, but you can start with a wealth tax like that. That actually is a very developed, clear idea. It’s very popular. It would be fought tooth and nail, but there yeah, there really is a lot at the top. But yes, you’re correct that you have to build I mean, what’s the most durable form of social transfer. Social Security and Medicare. Really Social Security the most. And Social Security is actually relatively regressive as a tax and is broadly shared. And so to get back around to the point I think you’re making is that you do at a certain point, have to take the tax revolt head on. Yes you do. You have to convince some middle to upper middle class people that they should pay more taxes Yeah, but the thing I would say about that is if that’s what your ultimate project is. Which is I mean, this would be what, say, Bernie Sanders Medicare for all would require. And he was clear about that. There will be more in taxes and yes, for you. He didn’t try to wave away the math on that. He was crystal clear about it. That said, that is only a plausible political vision. A shared vision if you’re also really going after the billionaires. I mean, a country in which those people who are billionaires are paying us lower effective tax rate and. Yes Is this a campaign cliché? Yes Is it true. Percent it’s also true is not a world in which you can plausibly ask people to have this shared vision. All right. Let’s talk about how artificial intelligence might shake up the landscape. Because I think it enters into all of these. Yes very much so in powerful ways. But start again. Since we’re talking about the left, there is a narrative to which I have contributed that says basically the left right now, meaning academics, intellectuals, activists and so on. Less so politicians maybe, is just not taking AI seriously enough that there’s a bunch of people on the left who just keep wanting to say, it’s just not as big a deal. It’s getting hyped. It’s the AI companies talking their book. And what is actually being delivered is not a game changer to the extent that that’s what the left is saying, I think it’s wrong. I don’t know how big a deal I is, but I think it’s a pretty big deal. But do you think that’s a fair critique How do you see the left wing conversation on artificial intelligence. I think there is a fair amount of that. I think there’s a little bit of wishful thinking of this is the metaverse. It’s the right, it’s crypto, the metaverse. We had a run of things from Silicon Valley that were not and indeed changing. In defense of people saying that there is very recent evidence of an enormous bubble in which one of the most powerful, rich companies in America literally changed its name to Meta. And it was ridiculous, right. The holodeck. The holodeck didn’t appear. It’s like sometimes everyone does jump in the hype pool and everyone is wrong just as a baseline. That’s an important thing. That and the reason I say that is because that is a very key part of the way that I think a lot of people think about this has happened before. You would concede, I don’t think you agree with this, but you would concede that more people are all in much bigger ways for AI than I think ever were for tooling around in virtual reality. Well, I think Mark Zuckerberg was in for it. I think the distinguishing thing is that it’s just obviously a more impressive and useful technology you can explain to a person very quickly what it does or what it could do that’s useful in a way that you couldn’t with the metaverse. So that’s the key thing. I mean, so I would say, yes, there’s a certain amount of it’s all a scam. I do think it’s probably worth distinguishing between the technology and the business model, which are distinct. I was thinking about this the other day, there was a company called kozmo.com in 1999 to 2001. I remember them well. And urban fetch. And their idea was you would be able to order anything you wanted, whether it was soda, a VHS, groceries within an hour, two hours, whatever. And it was like the typical classic late nineties.com boom. And it, went out of business very quickly, but they clearly were on to something. They were just a little too early. So, I think it’s important to keep this distinction in your head between is the technology useful and going to be transformative, and is the current business model or business hype around it correctly valued in the market. And the reason I say is because those get conflated sometimes in this discussion in ways that I think are not helpful, and particularly, I think people on the left who are like, it’s all BS or it’s all going to go away. It’s like, yeah, there might be a huge crash, but very clearly this is a transformative technology. So then the question becomes, how people on the left think about that transformative technology. And I would say overwhelmingly it’s extremely negative. And I think let me defend why it’s negative. One is it really is the case that they just took everyone’s intellectual property without compensation and trained up models that could then replace the people that generated that. That’s like an actual thing that happened. That’s pretty messed up. It’s kind of a crazy transfer of value when you think about it. Like artists that made stuff, people that wrote things. Now newspaper columnists, newspaper columnists, I mean cable TV. I’m in the Anthropic settlement, I have also received literature from the Anthropic settlement. So like, yeah, a B the people that are controlling it are a tiny sliver of people. And one of the fundamental insights of the left is like real intense forms of concentrated power of billionaire capitalists making huge decisions for everyone is pretty bad. And right now you’ve got what, five or six people that are making decisions about how trillions of dollars of capital is allocated and what all of our futures are going to look like. Like, no thanks man. I don’t like that at all. Well, fortunately, the people making those decisions are completely normal in every way. Hold no eccentric views about the nature of the human future. No, I think that story makes sense. But then what is an actual left wing I politics look like. Because right now, such an interesting question. Now you have Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has called for a moratorium on building data centers. To me, this seems like something that is likely to be fairly popular in a lot of places and ultimately basically useless, that it’s basically NIMBYism, not in my backyard. And what will happen is the data centers will get built in other states, or they’ll get built in the Middle East, or they’ll get built in Africa. And at most you’re slowing down. I may be a tiny bit. You’re not doing anything about China, and you need some other plan. So let me. Can I argue against that for a second. Just because I think the question is like, O.K, well where do you start. So I think there’s a real parallel to the arguments around globalization, trade and neoliberalism that happened in the late 1990s because people said the exact same thing there. It’s like, well, what are you going to do. You’re like, this is just the way the world is moving. And if we don’t make this trade deal, then other countries will make that trade deal and things are going to get automated. And what you want to cling to factories for the rest of your life. And this is just like the way the world is moving. And yeah, you kids can go riot in Seattle with your dumb WTO protest and try to save the Owls. But like, in the end, that’s all going to be ineffectual. And then what really happened was like, Donald Trump and JD Vance came along to be like, hey, man, probably not a great thing to absolutely sledgehammer the entirety of our industrial base. And just take millions of people and turn their towns into absolutely hollowed out husks and leave everyone just like, begging for enough opioids to kill the pain of what had been taken. And I want to go back and be like, wait a second. Those people were right. They were identifying something correctly when they said, back when we had this debate the first time, that there were going to be enormous consequences to this model of economic development, to a bunch of policy decisions that were actually made, remember, that led to that destruction. So the downsides of data centers, as I understand it is yes, there are some questions about electricity generation and green concerns pretty big ones. Well, I don’t think we’re going to resolve that. I’m not convinced that big. But my concern with data centers is the thing that they are enabling and how it transfers. That’s what I’m talking about. O.K, but my point. But the reason I say that is no, because I’m saying the full thing. I’m saying if you’re saying my project is to put a crowbar in the wheels of the machinery of the creation of a New vision for how the world will be ordered, and the way I’m doing is I’m stopping this data center. What else do you want people to do. I mean, I think you do need to figure out the right place to put your crowbar. So if this is to use a different historical analogy, right. If this is akin to the Industrial Revolution, in the end, the people who smashed looms and so on didn’t really have a plausible agenda. And the people who instituted child labor laws and tried to and did. So that would be a left friendly example. I’m not sure that works. Like, look, there is a part of me, certainly, that looks at certain laden projections for the future of A.I. And it’s like, yeah, you stop it wherever you can. And if you’ve got to use NIMBYism that I might oppose in other circumstances to do it, so be it. I just don’t see the path from that data center doesn’t get built in Oregon totally to. Well, we prevent I from doing something bad. Yes I mean, the reason that I defend that project is just because as a means into the politics of it ultimately. I mean, Lawrence Lessig said this to me, the Harvard Law professor, and he’s been thinking about A.I. and democracy, where he’s like, he said, the thing that stuck with me, he’s like, imagine if we had the nuclear arms race. But it was just private companies like well and well and but also the people building the nukes were talking to the nukes and the nukes. The nukes were nukes. Me the nukes, me. The nukes were saying, don’t you want to press the button. A lot of things. No, no, it’s a very I agree. And we’re having again, we’re having this conversation I should note in the shadow of an ongoing dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic about the uses of Anthropic technology. But wait. In that debate, you’re on the side of the other side. You don’t want like if I said to you, Chris, should the Department of Defense take over. No, that’s what they’re threatening. They’re threatening the Defense Production Act. right. But you don’t want. No, I mean, I race managed by Pete Hegseth. No O.K. So what is the solution to Lessig’s conundrum. I mean, there has to be at the broadest level I mean, let me just be clear. Maybe I don’t maybe a board, maybe a board of peace to manage Yeah no, I mean, I don’t but some kind of civilian governmental control. Civilian governmental regulation. I mean, right now, as far as I can understand, there’s 0 regulation. I mean, I don’t think there’s nothing. Now, again, I am not at all enough not even begin to be at the threshold of being enough of an expert. Or I want to tell you, what should the governmental regime be. But stick sticking to the level of politics though, right. It seems like there’s a line that Democrats, liberals, and not only Democrats and liberals, but some form of populist I backlash, which, by the way, everyone who works in A.I. expects. If you talk to people who are Dario said it in Yeah he said it on my podcast. But like you, everyone who is in that small sliver of people who you mentioned assumes that 2028, 2030, if we get that far right, then our politics will be consumed by people who have some version of your reaction. But that could go in a lot of different ways or differently politically different political valences of that same reaction. It could be the Steve Bannon anti. But just on the left do you think that the idea that you need to regulate A.I. for safety actually breaks through as a political issue. Or do you think it only breaks through if it’s like about job loss. I think that part of what’s difficult to disentangle is there’s such an obvious concerted effort to paint a maximalist picture of the possibility of the power of the technology by people that are right now in rounds of investment raising. For companies that are absolutely bleeding capital, that are nowhere near profitable, that you have to. So there’s a skepticism of like, is it really going to be the doomsday machine. And it’s going to be Hal and all this stuff. I’m pretty worried about that, actually. But just descriptively, I feel like that doesn’t have that much purchase. I think the thing that does have purchase are two things. One is this notion I’ve talked about this a bit is just to the extent they have a business proposition, which they do, is to replace white collar workers with machines. Basically we automated all these other jobs we’re going to automate these jobs. And to go back to the metaphor I was using before about the big trade debates, it’s like, yeah, what do American politics look like if you turn Marin County into Youngstown and Park Slope into Gary, Indiana. Probably not great. What is the American economy look like. So I think there’s a real sense of the sledgehammer is coming for the part of the economic capitalist American project where people have homes and they take vacations and they send their kids to good schools. And it’s like, if the project of A.I. is to just now take out that layer, I think you will create insane amounts of political backlash. But I also think you’ll American politics will go even more insane than they are now. Do you. I think you essentially gave an answer to this question earlier when you talked about the problem with redistribution. But it seems like the left under those circumstances could take a form of saying, look, we need UBI, universal basic income, job guarantee of some kind. Well, that’s well, see, these are different things. Very different. There’s a version that says you basically want to look at all the money that the people in the A.I. world are going to be making, and you want to tax it, just directly subsidize Americans out of that largesse. Or you need a politics that basically protects work. And it sounds to me like you are on the job side, not the UBI side. I guess I haven’t thought it through enough to feel like I have a very fixed view on either. I think there also can be complementary in certain ways. I think to me, the animating principle here, which I think is the animating principle for a lot of left liberal resistance to. This is just like. An increasing appreciation of the specialness of being human and the dignity of being human and humans doing human things like making stuff and sharing it with each other, and a world that feels increasingly designed to strip away, extract, exploit and reduce that fundamental humanness. And that, to me is kind of like the beating heart beneath whatever the policy is. I don’t know. It’s not like a job gives life meaning, but we need space for people to be able to create a stable world for themselves, raise their families, be with their friends pursue their goals and projects, and be engaged in the world and their communities. So this is a good place to end because this is where I wanted to ask you about this. I think the left has been radically underestimating the capacities of A.I. and in a way that has left wing politics somewhat unprepared for where we’re going. At the same time, I am glad I appreciate the extent to which the left critique of A.I. has been framed in those terms as a kind of defense of humanism and dare I say, human exceptionalism in the face of machine alternatives. Because that’s not the only possible direction for the left to go in. There has been a kind of various kinds of anti-humanist tendencies on the left for as long as I’ve been alive. There’s a kind of secular materialism that is incredibly reductive about the human mind and dismisses free will. There’s a kind of academic deconstructionism that reduces all human art, to power relations. And then there is a kind of environmentalist left that is skeptical, let’s say, about the human contribution to the biome. So I’m really happy to have the left in there defending human exceptionalism. Are you confident that will stick like, as opposed to a world where the left decides that we need to defend the parasocial relationships that people have with their A.I. that are just as important as male, female marriage of the old school. I think that’s a direction the left could take. Do you. That feels very remote from what’s happening now. But I think it also I agree. I think it depends. I think it depends a lot on the trajectory of the technology and also the deployment of it. I guess the thread you’re pulling on intellectually is like this Yeah, species exceptionalism. Is there something particularly uniquely great about being a human and distinct about it. And if you’re a materialist or you’re an animal rights activist, you’re skeptical of those claims. I guess I would just say, again, as of sociological fact, what I find bracing at this moment and which I feel deeply, just speak for myself for a second. It’s really put me in touch with humanism in a deep way of what it means to be human. What’s amazing about being a human, what’s distinct about being a human, what the tradition of the arts and why it’s important to read and study and actually write, write for yourself and not hire a robot to go to the gym to work out for you, which is like what we’re doing in colleges in Massachusetts. And I think that right now that’s the dominant reaction, which I think is good. And I think I’ve been thinking about this just to say this about because I think it connects in some ways to one of the things that I saw, we saw in Minnesota, which is this notion of I think coming out of COVID and the experience of that, this sense of the power and importance of just human connection face to face and community connection and neighbors, neighbor is the term that all the folks in Minnesota were using and that there does feel like there is above and beyond this I discussion a kind of resurgent humanism and appreciation of human connection in a lot of what’s happening right now in this political moment on the broad center left Yeah, yeah. And, well, 2, we can end with politics. But just do you think 2028, is it an A.I. election. Like, is that your expectation. I feel so much radical uncertainty about the future trajectory. I know you have to end. You have to end by giving me a prediction. Imagine that you’re Claude or ChatGPT, and I’m typing in and I’m asking you, here’s what I think. I think in the sense that I think it will be. I think the odds of being the center of whatever the economic story is in that year are high enough that that’s likely to be the dominant thing. O.K, I’ll accept that. Chris Hayes, thank you so much for joining me. I enjoyed it.
