Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. I’m joined by Ryan Cooper. He’s a senior editor at The American Prospect, another great liberal magazine you should also be reading. Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Bacon: So I want to—you’ve been writing a lot about these primaries. We’ve been covering them a lot, too. We’ve got two more coming up this week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But I want to go back to Michigan a little bit first. So now that we’re almost a week out, talk about what we saw. Did we learn anything about the results themselves in Michigan?
Cooper: No, it’s more or less what we’ve come to expect from these sort of breakdowns, that the class base of the socialist movement in the United States is, like, downwardly mobile, highly educated people. And they tend to struggle with, like, older minority folks, particularly Black people. And so yeah, that was not too surprising.
Bacon: Donovan McKinney?
Bacon: So the left has been very focused on economic issues, more—is it surprising that they’re not winning the sort of non-college vote, even though, even more than six years ago, the left is very focused on affordability? Is it surprising they’re not winning the voters who might be most concerned with affording things?
But in practice, it’s rather more complicated than that, both as a matter of political mobilization and as a matter of how, at least certain fractions of those demographics tend to approach politics. Not so much as the just, “What can I get for myself?” But it’s more that, I believe that this more moderate Democrat is more likely to be elected, and so I shouldn’t support the lefty radical who might benefit me more personally, but is more likely to lose in the general election.
Bacon: So we’re five days out. You’ve seen Kamala Harris endorsed him. Buttigieg was up there with him. Haley seems to have been very positive about him. There’s been the leaked Obama phone call.
Cooper: Oh, around El-Sayed, certainly. Yeah. I think that in addition to being clearly a progressive candidate, he’s also not a DSA member. He says he’s not a socialist. He’s a capitalist who wants to make capitalism better, you know—
He’s a guy who’s good, and the Democrats, they absolutely want to win that Senate seat. They want it very badly, and now El-Sayed is their only hope. He more or less must win in order for Democrats to have a good chance of taking the Senate. And whatever else you might disagree with him, if you’re Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg—clearly, we could set that aside at least until the general election is over, and then we can start fighting again.
And so similarly, I would’ve voted for El-Sayed, not because I think he’s more electable than Stevens, but because I think this is a Democratic year, so I think he can win and he’d be better on policy. But I’m curious where you are on these electability questions. Do you have an ideological or strong view about who is most electable in Michigan, or just in general?
My general attitude is that nobody really knows with any degree of certainty who is more likely to win. It’s a moving target all the time. It’s not like you can reduce these things and say, “It always is like this.” And clearly, like, sometimes this type of candidate is in and this type of candidate is out. If you run the wild-haired radical in, like, 1952, like, that’s clearly not going to cut it. It’s not the type of electorate. But you could run somebody—
Cooper: Yeah, exactly. It’d be illegal in half the states.
Cooper: But by the same token, though, people are obsessed with this question, that it was how the election was decided, that the primary was decided in 2016, and I think again in 2020, it was like, who’s most likely to win? And so all the voters are supposed to put on their amateur pundit hat, and I just think it’s so difficult for people to resist talking their book, as you were saying, that they support this candidate and therefore they will think up reasons why you should vote for them because they’re the most electable candidate.
And it’s a tricky thing to suss out one way or the other. But I guess where I come down with it, as regards El-Sayed and Francesca Hong, Hong in Wisconsin, is that, you look at who—our biggest blowout election of the last, this century, 2008. And why was that? We had a very talented and charismatic politician with a very interesting story and a very compelling message, and he was very lucky. He happened to run as the Republican Party was directly responsible for blowing the economy up, and an obviously failing war. So what do we have now? I don’t know if the economy’s blowing up, but it’s certainly not doing great, because Trump keeps hitting the make gas prices go up button, and he’s involved in a clearly failing war. That also makes gas prices go up.
Bacon: But it’s obviously true that Thanksgiving is popular, so we’re going to move to Francesca now and talk about whether you—yeah, I know she’s walked that back, this idea that you should cancel Thanksgiving. I’m referring to this tweet she had in 2021. So I’ve seen a lot of people I respect being, like, distinguishing between El-Sayed, who they feel like is a very talented politician, game recognizes game, and Hong, who they feel like is not as strong and maybe should be viewed differently.
Cooper: Yeah. The big difference there is that she’s younger than El-Sayed, and she hasn’t been in the game for as long. El-Sayed, he ran for governor in 2018, if I recall correctly, and lost. I think that was a very useful experience for him to have. I guess these Democratic Socialists of America types, you need to, I think, in this day and age, come up with a little bit better of a wrap about your inevitable backlog of incredibly weird sounding tweets. That’s probably true. They’ve all got them. I’ve got them, I’m sure. I deleted my Twitter years ago, but you could probably find them if you were good enough friends with Elon Musk, at least.
Bacon: Her first time answering you, she squirmed. I’m guessing she’s conscious of the fact that, like, some Native American groups think—there is some discourse about Thanksgiving celebrating colonialism and whatever else. I’m guessing she’s conscious of that, but I get your point.
Bacon: As a politician—
Cooper: —serious consequences. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It’s a completely ridiculous thing to be talking about. But the other thing I’d add about that, though, is that centrists should be a lot more careful about making these arguments during the primary. It’s not like the left has clean hands either. You saw Haley Stevens going all in on the idea that—what was it—that El-Sayed wants to blame the Jewish community for all of his problems. These sort of, like, toxic primary dynamics can easily be weaponized by Republicans in the primary. And especially—it’s one thing, maybe you’re having a tough primary fight, it’s one-on-one in Michigan, but the centrists in Wisconsin, they can’t even, how, how you say, scoop their poops in a group to unite around a single candidate.
Bacon: Minnesota’s interesting, because it appears one thing that I’m not paying attention to is, like, the money difference is real here. And I’m wondering if what’s actually happening in these primaries is, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Angie Craig in Minnesota, they have lots of money. They’re not running ads saying, I am the centrist candidate. ICE is good. The police is good. Israel is good. Centrism is good. They are running ads saying, ICE is bad. I will fight ICE, but I have more money. And I wonder if that’s really what we’re not understanding, is, like, the actual target of a lot of what they’re doing is not the centrist voter as much as the voter who’s not paying that much attention.
Cooper: Yeah, it’s certainly possible. I haven’t checked any recent polls, if any have even been done. We certainly saw this dynamic play out unsuccessfully in the case of Michigan, where it was, what, almost $70 million in outside expenditures on behalf of—
Cooper: Yeah. I did an article in Zeteo being like, if, as an organization defending Jewish rights and the Jewish state of Israel, it seems a little unwise to be running explicitly dishonest advertising about—that’s just obscuring your actual motivations in an attempt to influence an election in the United States. But regardless, it didn’t work in Michigan. El-Sayed did win, but it was close, and I think that money told a lot because these are not particularly high turnout elections.
Bacon: And in a primary, the partisan difference doesn’t matter as much, so the choice isn’t obvious. They’re voting among Democrats, they don’t know what’s going on, so an ad can make a big difference.
He could run a serious campaign. He could get some ads—not, it was, like, a 12-to-1 disadvantage, but he wasn’t just totally buried. And I think that having enough to clear that bar makes a big difference, and I’m not sure if Flanagan has that level of resources.
Cooper: No, that is 100 percent what’s going on. Hasan—who I like to check in with from time to time, just because he is, like, the one guy on the left more or less that we have who is even in the same galaxy as, like, Joe Rogan. He has a lot of followers. They have some money. They will donate to your campaign. They will go and door knock for you, if they’re, if you sell them on your arguments.
Bacon: Speaking of one congresswoman from New York—what did you make of the—she was asked about Hong on TV, and she distanced herself from Hong, and then said Woke 1 was crazy, and explained away both AOC and Hong’s comments about policing and so on, and then veered away from there. What’d you make of Woke 1 was crazy?
Bacon: But I assume she wants the vagueness as a feature, right?
Bacon: Yeah, I remember this. OK. Anyway.
I think you can also say that the backlash to Woke 1, as we may say, was entirely motivated by gutter racism, and an almost pathological desire on the part of the boss class to discipline their employees once more. That they were absolutely furious at the idea that employees could have any agency through unions, or sit-outs, or demand things happen, to be less racist in the workplace or less sexist, especially MeToo.
Cooper: Oh, absolutely. And how woke was tied up with MeToo.
Bacon: Charlie Rose being more representative of the people we’re talking about, because he’s more secure of them, is my guess.
Because I think my biggest criticism of the first iteration of woke is that it wasn’t really hooked up to any sort of theory of power or achievement. That it was very much, like, shaming people on social media, and not, “How do we conquer the state and set up a regulatory apparatus that can actually achieve justice for the people?” And that’s not entirely the fault of folks who are just, like, sort of putting their critiques out there and whatnot, but, like, clearly I think we could do better, and we’re going to need to do better.
So I think that even that idea was not well theorized, of how we’re going to do it. My guess is, like, Zohran Mamdani would be for that, I think, if he knew how to do it in New York. But I think what Woke 2.0 has become is this sort of more affordability, economic policy focus, more focused on economics, less on policing, racism, any issue like that, that you can’t sell well. And I think that’s probably good if the left is trying to win power, bad if you’re trying to take on policing, racism, immigration, what I would call the hard issues, the sort of issues that offend white people. I don’t know how to say this any other way.
Cooper: Yeah, that’s definitely the bumper sticker slogan, a little bit of a tactical retreat from the police reform stuff. It is the encapsulation of it, both, that yeah, Woke 1 had not a great sales pitch, and I think a basically impractical approach to police reform.
Bacon: And they were not people who, like, work day-to-day in—they’re not, like, city council members. No. They’re, like, academics, so they’re not doing the work anyway.
Bacon: Yes.
But in the real world, for the time being and the foreseeable future, we need—what I would say is establish the police, because the other side of the coin is that we have this rampant problem of police brutality and corruption that has not gone anywhere. In fact, it’s gotten worse in a lot of ways.
Cooper: Yeah. They’re not police. They’re this weird combination—it varies from city to city, but it’s, like, a lawless paramilitary, or an actual criminal conspiracy. There are just straight up gangsters in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, with tattoos and—
Cooper: And we’ve never really had a proper, like, European style or, you know, Nordic style police force that is strictly accountable to the civilian leadership, with proper disciplinary procedures and all that sort of thing. And that’s something that’s a lot more real. It’s something you can point to. That’s what I love about Nordic stuff. You’re like, No, they’re doing it right over there. We just got to copy them, and maybe somehow get rid of 300 million guns.
Cooper: Of all the potential candidates that I could think of at the moment, I would be most pleased to see her as president. She’s the person that I trust the most, and when I see her trying to back away from Woke 1 a little bit, I’m willing to grant her quite a lot of rope to make a maybe arguably tendentious point, because I trust that she’s trying to do it in the service of, like, shoring up her political bona fides.
Because this is about as much about, like, storytelling and how people’s feeling about the future of the country and for their children and so on and so forth. And so I think she’s probably going to run, and at this point, she would be my candidate above any potential Jon Ossoff. He seems OK. He wouldn’t—
And the second thing is, Ossoff feels a little bit Rubio ‘16, DeSantis ‘24, Harris—if every journalist thinks you’re a good candidate, you should not run. As a—the Obama exception, but usually that means, we pointed it out, that you look like the perfect—you hit all our check marks—usually means you’re going to flop. That’s what I would tell him. If I saw him, I’d tell him, like, “Be careful, we are bad at this.”
Bacon: He literally, like, looks much older. And going from 33 to whatever, maybe 42 or whatever it is, that is a big growth in age.
Because, like, in 2020 we elected Joe Biden, and it was like, you got this problem, you got this problem called Donald Trump, and somebody needs to do something about it. You need to enforce the law against this bunch of gangsters, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it, and he couldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court either, which is related. Centrally involved. They kept him out of prison, probably.
I guess you just delay the inevitable reckoning for the president for life, JD Vance or whatever. But we need someone with some steel in their spine, and that’s what I would be looking for almost more than policy. I think AOC has it. I’m not sure if Jon Ossoff has it. Maybe he does, but I’d like to see someone with some iron.
There’s a second group of reforms that is, like, we need to have proportional representation, or add some Supreme Court justices, or add states, or get rid of the filibuster, and that kind of stuff is not big government, small government, but actual reformist stuff. And I’m not sure Buttigieg has to be against that stuff, or Harris has to be against—like, to me, is the question—is a Democratic trifecta about big Bernie economic policy? Because then you only have two candidates who are going to do that. Or is it about sort of big government reform, save democracy, and then—I’m not totally sure Josh Shapiro has to be—I’m not for Josh Shapiro, but I’m not sure he has to be against that either.
Cooper: No, they’re not logically tied together at all. If you’re just, like, a sort of theorist of contemporary, like, political institutions, comparative dynamics between different countries, you look at the United States system that we’ve developed, which bears very little resemblance to the Constitution as written. The filibuster’s not in there. Judicial review’s not in there, not explicitly. And you’re like, This, these are terrible—what are you doing? You got millions of people with no representation in the Congress. What is that?
Cooper: No, it’s literally on the revolutionary slogan on the license plates in Washington, DC, “No taxation without representation.” As true now as it was in 1776. But I would prioritize, to your point, institutional reform over policy reform, because not only is institutional reform more important, but you’re not going to get any policy reform unless you do the institutional reform first.
The Constitution is not in operation at present. And, like, those people have, as far as I’m concerned, written themselves out of any sort of concern for their legitimacy, that any reform whatsoever that would reduce their power and return the United States more to a proper rule of law nation would be completely unobjectionable.
Bacon: So last thing. We’re talking about institutional reform, we’re talking about presidential, but is it possible the 50th senator is the Alaska woman, and therefore nothing can happen? These people are not radicals, right? Are we paying too much attention to the presidential nominee, who might be open to these ideas, and not enough to the—we’re not going to have exactly Joe Manchin and Sinema, but are there going to be different versions of those that we should be thinking more about right now?
And yeah, it’s how I view any politician. You got to be behind this sort of stuff, because we need people in all levels of the institution. But I do think the presidential support means a lot, because the president sets the direction for the party, and whether or not they’re winning with certain arguments is going to influence how the senators behave.
And I think that it’s not impossible for me to imagine a sort of, like, fairly thorough restructuring of American government. The way that the Supreme Court in particular has bent over backwards to just undermine Democratic presidents doing the most simple stuff, trying to do a student loan forgiveness program that is clearly in line with precedent and the text of the law—”No, you can’t do that.” And then bailing Trump out from being prosecuted for trying to overthrow the government.
Cooper: Comically corrupt. And the making a hash of everything that the Founding Fathers of this country at least pretended to espouse.
Bacon: And we’ll end on John Roberts’ dictatorship, sadly. Ryan, tell everybody where they can find your work.
Bacon: Yeah, I’ll listen.
Bacon: Oh, years ago, before he ran, or—
Bacon: He’s doing the go everywhere strategy, although he’s got your vote already, is the issue, I think. Good to see you. Thank you.
Bacon: Bye.
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