This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 27 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m joined by Paul Frymer. He’s a great political scientist. He’s written several really interesting articles and books, including Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and the most recent one is Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.
We’re going to talk about the Democratic Party, because Paul’s written a lot about unions and minority groups and how they influence and are influenced by the party. So Paul, thanks for joining me.
Paul Frymer: Great, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Bacon: So where I want to start, what made me think about you, was you had a book published in the late ‘90s, and it was updated after that, about the idea that African Americans and the Democratic Party are a—I think the phrase is—captured minority, where because they give all their votes to the Democratic Party, they have very little ability to influence either party, because the Democrats have their votes and the Republicans ignore their votes.
And what I’ve been watching the last few weeks is various Democratic candidates distance themselves from transgender Americans, the transgender rights movement, on sports and on other issues too. You’ve seen this with Talarico. You’ve seen this with the candidates in Iowa and others too.
And I’m curious if that analogy plays out here, where transgender Americans are—the Republican Party is very opposed to transgender rights, so you’re in a party that doesn’t really fight for you and wants to move away from you when it’s time to reach swing voters. But do you see that parallel existing between transgender Americans today and maybe African Americans in the past, and maybe still today?
Frymer: Sure. Yeah, I think the parallel is there. And I should say first that with African Americans it is a historical, longstanding process, that the party system itself was in many ways constructed out of conflicts over slavery and over race and over racism. So when we look at current events and parallels, we find certain parallels, but obviously the same kind of systematic historicization of it is much different.
But yeah, the concept in real time is that neither party wants to advance a group’s votes. And there are moments when transgender rights, in our current moment, is seen as toxic for the party that is claiming typically to represent them. And of course, the other party is trying to take advantage of that. And so yeah, you see the Democratic Party pulling away from that and trying to distance themselves, leaving transgender populations without many options.
Bacon: Are African Americans still a captured minority in your view?
Frymer: I think in important ways, yes. Obviously it’s complicated, and it’s had different historical moments. In our current moment, where it becomes most transparent is when conflicts over race, and particularly with regards to African Americans, come up, and both parties try to remove themselves from this conflict.
And that was historically, in the 19th century over slavery, the design of the two-party system was to focus on the median voter, right? And that median voter is historically a fairly moderate voter, if not conservative voter, on issues like civil rights. And so it leads the two parties to try to avoid the topic. When civil rights issues come up, the party system tends to struggle over that.
So we’re in a current moment. President Trump’s agenda certainly includes things like attacking numerous minority groups. There’s probably more intensity towards immigrants of a wide variety. Transgender issues, of course. Communists, as the Democratic Party are described. And certainly Trump is still in the aftershocks of President Obama and the racial politics there. So I do think there are certainly a lot of parallels there, but it’s certainly changed a bit over time, in form.
Bacon: Uneasy Alliances is written in the sort of Clinton era, right? Can you talk about—we’re talking about the book and when it was written, and so it’s describing the period of the Democratic Party post-civil rights era, of the 1970s and ‘80s mainly, right? That’s the time period for that book. And it’s describing, to be very reductive, the party breaking with Jesse Jackson in a certain way as the kind of framing, right?
Frymer: Yeah, so the Clinton era was very transparently strategic. Jesse Jackson had run for president in the ‘80s two different times. He was blamed by Democratic Party elites for the failure of the Democrats to win, especially in 1988.
It was thought that he was linked by Republicans with Michael Dukakis, who ran that year, was the candidate that year. And was seen by many Democratic elites as too powerful, as too much of a—again, to use the word toxic—symbol of the Democratic Party.
And Bill Clinton invented that term, the Sister Souljah effect, where he turned on Jackson as a way to strengthen his own place as a Democratic Party candidate, and as for the Democratic Party, that he was going to distance himself from Jackson and from African American interests in the party. And so that was a really strong component of Clinton. And it was part of the Democratic Party playbook for quite a while.
There’s a lot with President Obama as well. Certainly when he was running, he too distanced himself quite a bit from Jesse Jackson and the symbolic nature of Jackson. He made very clear over and over that he was running not as a raceless candidate, but certainly a de-emphasis on that, right?
It was others who continually brought race back into the fold with Obama, and he of course is skilled. But a lot of Obama’s strategic sense was not that different from Clinton. Since that time we’ve had a different set of politics, that we have Trump—
Bacon: Let me stop you there, because I want to come back to that. Your book, you did a new edition in 2010, and it ends with Obama, and I want to come to the last 10 years. But let me just talk about, why for Black people is this approach to politics problematic? The sort of Clinton, Obama de-race, distance themselves from the Black electorate. Why is it a problem?
Frymer: There’s pros and cons, right? You want to be a part of a majority. And so one of the things that happened in the Clinton era, this was over the crime bill, going back to a pretty notorious crime bill in our current context, as it’s been discussed.
The Congressional Black Caucus in Congress rejected a more conservative version that Clinton was pushing. And it led to a controversial bill. It still was quite conservative in many ways, but it had important things that the Congressional Black Caucus fought for.
That led to the 1994 midterm elections. Democrats lost those midterm elections. The Congressional Black Caucus lost an enormous amount of power in Congress.
Bacon: Ranking memberships, chairmanships, ability to influence the president, media.
Frymer: And in fact, if I remember, I think one of the things Newt Gingrich did as speaker was to get rid of a lot of the institutional aspects of the Congressional Black Caucus. And they, in certain ways, ceased to exist formally.
So being a majority is important. Everybody knows that. African American voters, among many others, they’re very pragmatic voters, and they recognize the importance of majorities. And African American voters are extremely loyal voters to the Democratic Party in a way that no other group is consistently the same since the 1960s.
The issue there is that because both parties are focusing on winning majorities, when the Democratic Party is trying to distance itself from African American voters, obviously the forms of representation are not ideal. Sometimes that form of representation is via attack, as Clinton used as a foil. Sometimes with Obama, it is extreme caution.
But what it is not—and this is the kind of theoretical argument of a captured group—farmers can get subsidies that hypothetically could be controversial, but the public doesn’t pay attention to them, right? Farmers are represented, whether they’re a majority group or not. They’re just added into coalitions. There are lots of groups. They’re added into coalitions. They’re given different factors.
And for African Americans as a captured group, there are elements of that, but there are important elements where the opposite is happening. There’s a real attempt by their own party, the Democratic Party, in the modern era to use them as a foil to distance themselves. And again, as a form of representation, that’s neither ideal, and it’s also quite unique in our political system.
Bacon: And how did that change the agenda that Black groups pushed? Did it minimize their agenda? Did they pull back their agenda? Did they stop demanding things? How did that play out? So you have the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights era, so what happens in those 30 years after that?
Frymer: So a lot of it goes through litigation. Litigation is a somewhat quieter method, or it can be. President Obama used the administrative state, and litigation over the Voting Rights Act, litigation within the EEOC. So a lot of his measures were quieter.
Where you see the real dramatic impacts, and this is actually where I kind of first got the sense of this, is during the Clinton era, I was a voter registrar within the Democratic Party. And we were sent—I was still a college student—and we were sent consistently to focus on these moderate voters.
And moderate voters are white voters, over and over. You think of the terms, the soccer moms, the NASCAR dads. They are symbolized as white voters. And so they sent us to the suburbs over and over.
Bacon: Although we should emphasize, Black people play soccer. These are code words in a certain way. We’re avoiding saying white by saying these other words instead, right?
Frymer: Yes, that’s exactly right. And so we were constantly sent to the suburbs, and these suburban white voters, we were trying to mobilize them to vote, and they’re constantly like, Yes, I know the issues. Yes, I’m registered. Yes, I know what’s going on.
And then a group of us on our own went into the neighborhoods which were on our maps listed as unnecessary to go into, because these neighborhoods were thought to be already strongly Democrats. Where I was living, this is New Haven, Connecticut, these were neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American and partly Latino. And you walk into these neighborhoods on your own, very few people are registered to vote. Many people didn’t know the major issues of the moment.
There’s both a huge mobilization that takes place around these moderate voters, and there’s a lack of mobilization, especially around the Black community. The way campaigns work, and they still operate this way, is the focus is on these moderate voters, and then on election day, get out the vote, right? You go and you rally people. But the long-standing mobilization, the real kind of engagement, the attempt to bring in especially communities that have long-standing been left out of politics, that’s critical, and that hasn’t changed in important ways.
It is reliant there on civil rights groups themselves, whether for Black interests or Latino interests, other immigrant interests and the like. They need to do this themselves. That puts obviously a huge weight on them, whereas the party is mobilizing other groups. You see this now, so much focus on the white working class voter, or the moderates of Michigan and Ohio and the like, right?
So this kind of thing takes place. One more line, I know I’m going on here, but another notable aspect with captured groups is that, again, there are many moments where African American voters are pivotal for elections. They turned the ‘20 election in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, right?
All those voters that Trump said were getting counted at 3:00 in the morning, those were largely Philadelphia, Atlanta, right, in those areas. But the Democratic Party doesn’t reward them, and reward that pivot, in the same way that it rewards the pivot around, again, the Wisconsin suburbs, right? Or Milwaukee.
Bacon: So I guess if we got one of the consultants on the phone, they’d say two things. One, they’d say there are more white people than Black people, obviously.
Frymer: Yes, obviously.
Bacon: And the second they’d say is that a swing voter is worth more than an unmobilized voter, because a swing voter takes one out of the Republican camp and into the Democratic camp, versus a person who doesn’t vote at all only moves one vote to the Democratic camp from the non-camp. So those things are both true, but that doesn’t—I’ll let you respond to that.
Frymer: Sure. So, one reality there. Consultants to parties, first of all, they’re not there to be historically-minded. They’re not there to think about a 10-year goal of the Democratic Party, or social justice, or any of that, right? Or the health of democracy. They’re there to win an election.
So they’re on the ground in a moment, and they’re dealing with realities that have been framed in that specific moment, as they’ve interpreted them. But—sorry, I’m losing my train of thought. The question was—
Bacon: I asked about swing voters counting twice, because they pull one. And then the second is that there are more white people than Black people.
Frymer: Yes. So there’s also a reality here. There are groups out there that are not terribly popular with the Democratic Party, right? The Democratic Party as it’s currently construed, its relationship with white rural voters, for instance, is tense. But it doesn’t lead to a sense within party elites of, we have to stop reaching out to these voters, because reaching out to these voters is—again, I don’t think it’s the best word, but toxic, or disruptive to the party coalition.
There is a sense that reaching out to Black voters, and especially in specific moments, is disruptive to a party that has often held together different coalitions that don’t always fit that well, especially when race is at the forefront, and that is seen as disruptive to this moderate median voter, again, in a different way.
The Democratic Party has the liberty to reach out to different racialized groups in a way that it feels, and its consultants feel, is more disruptive, contested, when it does so with African Americans. And again, you’re seeing it with transgender issues. With transgender issues we’re dealing with very small populations. We’re dealing with very symbolic matters, and yet there is this sense that a word here or there is enough just to set everything on fire for the Democratic Party.
Bacon: It’s an interesting question. In 1992, do we think that being for civil rights was toxic? And in 2024, or 2026, do we think being for transgender rights is toxic? Part of this is, I’m not sure about that.
Some of my friends on the more left say you can be for civil rights and win elections, and that part I am not sure about. I think the party strategy is often overdoing it, and it has real downsides to these interests. I’m actually not sure that you can win an election in the moral way that I would like.
Frymer: Yes, I absolutely agree with that. So there is a conventional wisdom that gets set out, and as we know, we don’t know why elections turn, ultimately at the end of the day.
Bacon: It’s very complicated.
Frymer: It’s very complicated. Everyone is trying to interpret. Everyone is saying, “Oh, the Democrats on transgender issues.” Democrats on Black Lives Matter. Democrats on COVID. Any of these things, right? So there’s this constant theme.
One of the things with largely white consultants, part of their own, I guess we could say, ambivalence about race, is they overreact a lot to what they think might be happening, right? A lot of white consultants, and just generally mainstream consultants in the Democratic Party, including many Black consultants, thought it was a bad idea for Barack Obama to run in 2008. That he wasn’t going to win because of his race. He brilliantly showed that doesn’t have to be the case. He ran a great campaign, and he really transformed things.
A quality of a lot of these candidates, you can include Donald Trump here, is you ignore the conventional wisdom. Because everyone told Trump he couldn’t win in 2016 either. Or ‘20, or ‘24. And so we get these conventional wisdoms, these truths, and we’re seeing that in the popularist movement now, among consultants.
They use their own ambivalence about race and they overreact. And no doubt Clinton was an element of that, in overreacting to Jesse Jackson. So their own deeply embedded politics are loaded within that.
Civil rights groups, progressives, other groups are not wrong to say there is a different form of politics that can address this. There is one that is also mobilized, right? Mobilized long-term. Change the politics. Focus with transgender rights as well. You don’t need to be scared of it. Focus on it. Or address it, right? I agree with all of that.
And so part of what, in making arguments about African Americans as a captured group—I’m not a consultant, right? I’m trying to be a kind of political historian in understanding the dimensions here and why it is recurring. Again, a lot of that is historicized and institutionalized and the like. But I completely agree with you that the political transcript that can be written can be very different.
I will just add one point there, which is that the conventional wisdom does work to demobilize progressive arguments. Because if progressives lose once, they’re thrown out the window. The conventionalists can lose 15 times in a row.
Bacon: Run the same campaign over and over again.
Frymer: That’s right, and they’re still the convention.
Bacon: You’ve written a lot about—in the same period you were writing about African Americans, you also wrote about unions and the study of unions in this period. Are unions also captured by the Democratic Party, or is that a little bit different? Because the period from the 1970s to the 2010s is also a decline in the influence of unions in the Democratic Party as well.
Frymer: Yeah, so it’s pretty incredible that what was a third of the private workforce was unionized, right? Hugely Democratic Party. Major role in legislation, major role in voter mobilization, major role in society and organization. That under the Democratic Party watch, it declines dramatically. What is it, 6 percent now, the private workforce today.
Most of that is under the Democratic Party watch. NAFTA is a Bill Clinton policy, right? The NLRA is not reformed by the Democratic Party despite having majorities across all the federal branches many years. That is stark, right? That the Democratic Party would allow that to happen under its watch.
And that is suggestive, again—the labor movement has been historically, certainly over this time period that we’re talking about, the ‘70s to the ‘20s, maybe changing a bit now, but has been in the shadows. You don’t see the Democratic Party, when they’re looking for a vice presidential candidate or anyone besides the Department of Labor, being a person from a union, right?
They are there to do the grunt work, but they’re not at the center of things, and they haven’t been. Again, because of history, these are short-term analogies as opposed to the same category.
But I want to say one other thing there. Part of my interest in labor is that the labor movement, going back to the early 20th century, was an opportunity, right? If you really want to create the alternative—the people who argue that the Democratic Party should be colorblind, focused on class, right? The union movement was the way forward to that. To try to create a really diverse labor movement. And there were a lot of huge voices that wanted that, from a Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Cesar Chavez. You can go on and on, right?
There was a real opportunity there, and so part of my interest that shifted to the labor movement was the failure of that. That fell apart, and it leaves you today also with this white working class movement, much of which was formerly labor union, that is left out of the Democratic Party and left out of a broader coalition where they might have felt a greater attachment to it.
Bacon: So let’s go to the 2010s now. You were hinting at it, and let’s come to that now. It felt like Black activists may have read your book or something like that, because there is this period where it seems like Black Lives Matter rises and makes an argument like, “We are currently captured and ignored by the current Democratic Party. Let’s do something different.”
The fact that a movement called Black Lives Matter erupts while a Black man is sitting in the White House is very ironic on some level, but I think captured is exactly what you’re getting at. And so how do you see both the rise and maybe the decline of the BLM movement in these last 15 years, let’s say?
Frymer: Yeah. Obama is important to it, certainly symbolically, right? He raises the stakes. He raises the hopes.
Bacon: That’s a good term, yeah.
Frymer: He mobilized voters. So even though in some ways when he’s running, he’s playing a bit on the Clinton playbook, he’s not Bill Clinton. He is a different candidate. And again, he’s raising hopes and dreams of people that we can live in a different America. And a lot of that is not just him as a figure, it’s also a lot of what he’s saying. He makes the comment about Trayvon Martin. That’s not nothing, right? These are big comments.
Prior to that, and as we know, he’s also somewhat of a Clinton Democrat on crime. He wasn’t a huge progressive on crime. He made some symbolic claims. But even actually during Black Lives Matter, the height of it in the 2020s, I’m trying to think of his role there. He’s quiet.
Bacon: He made some generic comments encouraging the protests in 2020, but he’s not at the front lines of them. He’s following the public as opposed to leading it.
Frymer: Yeah. That’s always been his place there. So on the one hand, he’s not unimportant. On the other hand, the idea of Black Lives Matter, as you say, during the Obama era and moving forward, is suggestive of the fact that this is not a coalition that is attached to the Democratic Party.
Even at its height, it had expressions of the Democratic Party, but not huge efforts by legislators to make any kind of meaningful changes. I think there was a constant sort of, “Where are we going here?” And here again, everybody is kind of trying to spin their wheels as to what is now publicly possible and what is not.
Bacon: What does a median white person think about Black Lives Matter becomes the question, right?
Frymer: And there are overreactions on multiple sides. When Obama was elected in 2008, it was the end of race in America. We had solved all problems. And so there’s some of that. But certainly the Black Lives Matter movement, those who are—I hesitate to use the word leaders, because part of the movement is that it’s supposed to be—
Bacon: Kind of leaderless.
Frymer: Leaderless. But yeah, it sees itself certainly not as an arm of the Democratic Party in any way, shape, or form.
Bacon: And this argument that African Americans need to have a different voice and need to not be so tied to the party, I think that has taken hold. You see more efforts. My sense is Black Lives Matter doesn’t have any formal leaders, but I think there now is a clear fissure among Black activists between sort of Clyburn and the people on Twitter who are more aligned with Black Lives Matter. And their argument is that Clyburn is captured and we need to have another force. I think this is what’s happening now.
Frymer: Yeah. The other thing that’s going on right now that the Democratic Party’s been struggling with is Donald Trump. He raises the stakes.
Bacon: He raises the stakes on all these things.
Frymer: A loss is catastrophic. A loss in this midterm election is catastrophic. Now historically, Democrats have been saying that for a long time. Now it seems real, right?
Bacon: Electability was an argument Clinton was making on some level, being made today. But the difference between George Bush’s second term and Donald Trump and JD Vance’s first term is much different, obviously.
Frymer: Although in 2005 or so, George Bush was pretty catastrophic.
Bacon: I meant Bill Clinton compared to the first George Bush. George H.W. Bush seeking a second term was actually not as catastrophic as George W. Bush became.
Frymer: I don’t know if your memory is this, which I’ll say to my students, in 2000 when Al Gore and George Bush tied, this is the younger George Bush, it was almost like a shrug from the American public, right? Kind of like, “Oh, we got these two candidates.”
Bacon: Who cares who wins? Legacy men whose dads have been in politics. They seem normal, and then it turned out to be very consequential, yes.
Frymer: Whereas if the ‘26 midterms, the Republicans win them, there’s a lot on the line here. And one of the interesting things actually that Trump has been doing—Trump throws so much out at you, right?—but one of the things that he has really done a lot, with less attention, is the civil rights agenda. He has dismantled so many pieces of that long-standing civil rights agenda, and it’s not the headlines, right?
Bacon: I think this goes to what you’re hinting at, that the Democratic Party is nervous about talking about, like as it was running the Department of Education or DOJ, these issues. The party, I would argue, both the sort of mainstream but even the popularist, the Bernie, AOC progressive wing, both have agreed the problem is winning the white working class. So talking about civil rights, talking about government agencies, talking about democracy itself—I would argue the party is unified, the centrists and the progressives, around, we need to do economic policy that attracts the white working class.
They might have different views of the economic policies. One might be Medicare for All, say progressives, Medicare for those who want it, say the centrists. But both of them, defending the DOJ Civil Rights Division is a priority of neither one right now, right?
Frymer: Yeah, no, it’d be an interesting hypothetical: what if the economy was going well? What would be the Democratic Party message? And obviously even if the economy was going well, there’s going to be great inequality.
Bacon: Inequality, no matter what.
Frymer: But if the economy was going well, and the public felt the economy was going well, which is part of Trump’s success in ‘24, was a memory of the economy being pretty good—
Bacon: When he was president the first time.
Frymer: Yeah, the first time. So what would be the Democratic Party message? And it would be interesting to think, because you’re right, we mobilized around certain key principles, and Trump has helped us with those, because he’s tanked the economy. And healthcare, all of that.
But would the Democratic Party focus on things like civil rights? Would it focus—there’s been more local focus on ICE, obviously, out of Minneapolis, Los Angeles. But yeah, where would the focus be? Affirmative action, I assume, is just dead in the water for the Democratic Party.
Bacon: But this view that the party has to move to the right on, quote unquote, social issues, I think is not just shared by centrists right now. I worry that Bernie Sanders has internalized that in a certain way too, and I worry AOC and those people have internalized it a little bit too.
Frymer: Yeah. I think AOC I would see different than Bernie Sanders here. Even historically, Bernie has not been a huge person on that. Mamdani is another. It’s unclear whether that’s a huge concern for him. So yeah, you have also the issues over Gaza that are also a part of the party. There’s so much going on, right? And things to be sorted out. And it’s happening so fast and furious.
But I do think when there is a step back and a discussion of this, where does the party stand on these broad standing issues of civil rights? Title IX is another, right, involving gender and college education, and it also expands into the workplace. These have been left out. And I think, as you say, there is a goal among a lot of progressives to focus on the economy.
It’s obviously an earnest, meaningful goal. But there are things that are not being discussed, and it’s not clear as well, right? I know my colleague Jake Grumbach points a lot to youth voters among African American voters, Latino voters, being very supportive of a DSA agenda on all these types of fronts. But I think a lot of this still needs to be sorted out, as to the consequences of it.
Bacon: So let’s finish by talking about the latest book you’ve written, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Talk about that book and what that’s trying to do. And I’ll emphasize I’ve not read that book.
Frymer: Yeah, so my work in general across these themes has been about the importance of whiteness, to use the woke term. But an identity of the United States as a white nation throughout, and the consequences that has had, whether it’s for partisan politics like captured groups, whether it is for unions, where race has also been central historically. And so that led me to be interested in empire, the ideas of the US empire and the ideas of expansion. And President Trump has brought a lot of this alive, obviously, in a lot of different dimensions.
And so it led me to go out of my comfort zone of the 20th century and 21st century and all the way into the 19th and even 18th century, and understanding the idea of America as an expansionist nation and as an empire. And what was really striking from the start and throughout was the heavy consciousness of being a white nation. And it is not something I have to parse out. It is everywhere in the language.
And it exists really—I think the breaking point maybe is the New Deal. It might even be a bit after the New Deal. The civil rights movement isn’t just a moment of trying to eradicate discrimination and its policies. It changes the whole tenor of what America is, right? 1965 is also an immigration law that opens up the United States to much of the world. All this, of course, is part of the backlash that we’re seeing right now.
But so the argument of the book is that the United States is attempting to expand, and it is doing that throughout the 19th century. It is using—because I’m also interested a lot in boring words like institutions and structures. The party system serves as that, with different groups in terms of representation and captured interests. Institutionally, the United States used a number of different ways to generate a politics of both expansion, but also a way of handling matters when the United States confronted populations that were not white and were not European.
And part of expansion is you confront populations that are not your own. And so as the United States expanded and thought of itself as a white nation, thought of itself very broadly as a white nation, in the sense that pretty much all Europeans were included in that—but as it came into conflicts, whether it was with African slaves, whether it was with Native Americans, either within US borders or in Mexico and elsewhere, whether as we moved to the Pacific with Asian immigrants, there was this constant talk and fear among party leaders and among the populace of, “How do we keep America white?”
And throughout the book there’s a lot of explicit—
Bacon: Keep America white. This is not a Donald Trump invention. This has been the historic trend.
Frymer: No. He is pulling out a lot of themes. And in this book, part of what I try to do, I quote a lot, and I quote at length a lot, because the language is stark.
One of the things that has been lost in history is Abraham Lincoln’s efforts at colonization in the early Civil War years.
Bacon: Meaning that African Americans should be emancipated and move.
Frymer: Emancipated and sent off.
Bacon: Sent. That’s correct. Sent, not moved.
Frymer: And there are long conversations with lots of statistics of how, the number of people necessary to move via boats, and all this kind of stuff. So the kind of stuff that Trump is talking about, mass deportation, it goes back to Lincoln. It failed, fortunately, under Lincoln. It of course reappears in the Eisenhower years and the like. So we had Chinese exclusion in the late 1800s. It’s been a constant thematic.
And one of the interesting things about the US, for the purposes of this book about empire, is it actually ends up in many ways constraining our empire ambitions. So for instance, the US had opportunities, this is now in the 1840s, 1850s, of taking all of Mexico. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave us the land that became much of our Southwest, again, very transparently, the conversation was, how do we get as much land as possible with as few people as possible? And I think we took 60 percent of Mexico’s land, and we got a little less than 1 percent of its population. We looked for empty land because we wanted—
Bacon: To keep America white.
Frymer: To keep it. We wanted to settle it with white Europeans. So it’s a really powerful story that admittedly I learned a lot about as I was reading. And this is what Trump has really brought back out, right? This sense of white European imperialism. Although he at times, as he is apt to do, says things that don’t necessarily fit his agenda, right? Venezuela as a 51st state probably doesn’t fit.
Bacon: It would not fit. I’ll finish with this. I guess there are two theories competing in liberal Democratic politics, both kind of here and abroad, I think. One—I had Thomas Zimmer, he’s a historian, on. He was talking about how you need to have people who lean in and really defend the multiracial, pluralistic project.
The idea that that’s the way to fight for liberalism, is to admit that we want a thing that has all races and ethnicities and religions as part of it, and defend that pluralism. And you have to defend it formally, because the right is fighting it formally, so you can’t just do it sideways. The project has to be to formally defend that.
Others say, and I think Mamdani might be in this group himself, that the way you defend that project is to talk about economics and class issues, and therefore you win more of the white majority, whether you’re in Britain or Germany and so on.
I tend to think the first thing is correct, that you do have to fight the pluralistic fight and win that, while talking about economics too, but it can’t just be done through economics only. But where do you stand on that? And I’m reducing a lot of arguments very simply, but I think those are the two strands, and there are good faith arguments on both sides of that.
Frymer: Yeah, I agree with you. There are good faith arguments on both sides. They have meaningful supporters. There is the New Deal argument, right? The New Deal was the biggest success of the Democratic Party. It brought in the working class. It raised the working class, and in important ways it raised the living conditions of African Americans and everybody in the United States.
The question is, the New Deal was exclusive in many ways over civil rights. And the arguments were made, it’s going to help everybody, and let’s just keep riding it, and then we’ll find opportunities to make more specific progress. Those opportunities never really arise fundamentally.
And so I agree with those who say we need to confront the divisions in our society. We need to confront the history of our society. And we need to have honest conversations about that. It’s hard to say that, for me, honestly, in this moment where we are having even the most basic mentions of that we were a slave nation taken out of our politics. So is this our moment?
There has to be a momentary pragmatism of a certain level, again, to win an election. Elections are seen as the foundation of our democracy, but they’re also not so great for our democracy.
Bacon: No, they’re not. Yes, that’s a good point.
Frymer: They force this goal of winning, and they put aside all the things that we need to have these conversations of. And people say, Oh yes, we do need to have those conversations tomorrow.
Bacon: Tomorrow never comes.
Frymer: Tomorrow never comes, right? And I think that’s why a really important part of the progressive movement is pushing for things like proportional representation that might change some of these dynamics, take away the pressure of having to win these winner-take-all elections. I think that’s something that is meaningful going forward.
But yeah, absolutely, for greater representation and equality and the health of our democracy, we need to have these conversations be transparent. But they’re not going to happen in national politics. I think that’s reality. And people like Trump recognize that some of the places that are having that are universities, so we’ve got to gut them as well.
Bacon: Yeah, as well.
Frymer: Or high schools, or go all the way on down. Or museums, parks.
Bacon: You used the word pragmatism. Just to drill down, to me, pragmatic means James Talarico should not call for reparations, probably, in this term. I don’t think that necessarily means that Marcy Kaptur needs to say, “I voted to ban the education of gender ideology,” which is code words for being—I agree that the Democrats probably can’t press forward on civil rights that much right now.
I guess my concern is that they’re embracing things that are going backwards at times. That’s where I would say the pragmatism maybe is, try to stay even. Don’t embrace moving backwards, though. That would be my concern.
Frymer: Yeah, actually I think that’s a great point. And I think the best politicians do that, right? They don’t go back. They don’t emphasize, but they say it matter-of-factly, and they keep moving forward. At times Obama did that. At times Obama did make the comments about pull your pants up and the like. But I think Obama often was good at just saying, “Let’s stay focused here.” But not, as you say, not trying to step backwards.
And I think from what I’ve seen, Jon Ossoff has been pretty good on that. Again, not emphasizing, but not stepping back, and often using half a sentence or a sentence. Not to be provocative, but to make clear it’s still part of our liberal agenda.
I think AOC, personally, I think she’s shockingly good in a lot of ways of bringing in a politics, and I’d be very excited to see. She’s going to be a great example if she were to run for president, right? Is America ready for her? Maybe, right? It’s not clear. I don’t think the conventional wisdom’s clear. I don’t think America is where Trump is at.
Bacon: No.
Frymer: I think we’re going to uncover that there’s been so much work done from Black Lives Matter, from so many different movements, and diversity, and immigration. We are a nation that is not what Trump is envisioning. And so I think we’ve overreacted in a sense there. A lot of that’s going to come back.
But is AOC ready to do that now? I think she’s incredibly skilled. That would be the interesting example. Could she pull that out? She would be able perhaps to do that, certainly in a way that Bernie would not emphasize or provide, both symbolically and articulating it.
So as the Democratic Party thinks about those kinds of issues, right? She would be that candidate in 2028 that I think could definitely provide it. But you probably read the article too, right, the interview with her just the other day, which mentioned her support among Republicans is 1 percent.
Bacon: Also we’re in this partisan era where that number’s going to go down. But in talking to you, I’m thinking, if you’re Jon Ossoff, you’re a middle-aged white man, you might be able to—this is a tricky thing. His campaign can be, I’m appealing to civil rights issues in a subtle way, and people don’t see me that way because I’m a white man. AOC will have to spend the whole campaign saying, I’m not as civil rightsy as you think I am, even though I’m a young person of color.
I don’t know which approach is better, because there are some days where I actually thought Joe Biden, in a lot of ways, pushed forward on racial issues more than Barack Obama did in many actual policy cases. But having a Black man in the White House is obviously very important.
Frymer: Yeah. I think Joe Biden will get his moment at some point in time. He has been attacked so thoroughly by the Democratic Party, among everything else.
Bacon: For losing, basically.
Frymer: Yeah. But I think he actually—we forgot. He was trying, in some different ways. Not always successfully, but not always unsuccessfully either.
Yeah, I think it’s going to be a really interesting moment. You’re right, the white male candidate has a liberty to go in directions. The opportunity that somebody like an Obama or an AOC has is they can speak another language, and their personhood provides an opportunity there, right?
For people to envision what they mean. It’s funny, even my mom would always say in the Obama years, what’s happening, he’s becoming that moderate conservative, but he was so progressive when he ran. And I said, “All he kept saying was, ‘We’ve got to bring everyone together.’”
Bacon: Yes. He was not progressive when he ran. He would admit that himself if you asked him.
Frymer: No, yes. But everybody saw something in him. And so that’s the tough thing there. Ideally we have these huge conversations, but how do we do it, and where do we do it, and what forum do we have them take place? Certainly our national politics are nasty and all about the 15-second sound bite and the like.
So we really need to restore our communities. It’s cliche to say this, right? But to figure out ways to have these conversations, ongoing conversations, and then jump at the moment when the opportunity is there and try to win that moment. That’s what Trump did, right?
Bacon: That’s what Trump did, yes. He really created and seized on a moment.
Frymer: We have a lot to learn from Trump strategically, right? Because I don’t think American politics was ever where he was.
Bacon: No. But he managed to win anyway, and to change a lot of issues. Actually, if you look at the polls, there wasn’t huge anti-immigrant sentiment in March 2015. He created something. It was latent, but he mobilized it into a political force in a way that is a lesson.
And I do think that—I used to work at The Washington Post, the billionaires did a lot of bad stuff, but I also think that Bernie and Warren did a good job of building out the problem in America, that what connects everything is the inequality and the billionaires, not what Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is doing. And I think they did a good job. They didn’t win the presidency, but they actually did change the conversation a lot.
Frymer: No, absolutely. I think a lot of the terrain that we’re fighting on is from their efforts. And from the reality of that. The billionaires are unheeded by any warnings. And they just keep going and going. Yeah, I think that agenda has been changed.
But it is interesting. I’ve said this to different friends. The moment at the Super Bowl when Kendrick Lamar is singing about Drake and the whole crowd is singing, and all of America, not all, but is singing along with Kendrick Lamar against Drake. And I sat there thinking, Drake was massively popular like a minute ago.
And I keep hoping and thinking, actually deep down, that moment is going to happen again post-Trump. Where he’s going to be Drake. I was never a Drake fan. Just because I do think there is a mass public that has not bought into Trump at any point in time. And they’re not mobilizing around it, and that’s depressing. The public has not done more about a lot of the egregious hatred that has been out there, and evil towards our fellow people. But I do think there’s a bigger public out there that doesn’t want this.
Bacon: I always thought he would never really get below 38 percent, I would say, because I thought there’s a permanent 40 percent who’s with the person in their party no matter what. And Biden never—I think the G. Elliott Morris polling, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, I think he’s now at 35 percent and maybe 34.
I think his approval ratings are the lowest for any modern president at the midterm. I think Bush fell to the high 20s at the very end, but Bush wasn’t this low this early. So obviously Hurricane Katrina, this huge event, and the Iraq War, huge events, and nothing like that has happened, fortunately, in a certain way.
But I wonder if we get to the point—because at some point in 2009, no one would say they voted for George Bush, who won two terms. And I wonder if we’re getting to that point, where beyond the sort of hardcore 25 percent, no one else—I do have people I know in my life who voted for Trump who are increasingly like, “I voted for him, but I don’t agree with this. Obviously, I don’t want people killed who protest ICE.” ICE is becoming more unpopular. I wonder if we’re not realizing that we are at that point right now where voting for Trump became embarrassing. I wonder if we’re almost getting there right now.
Frymer: Yeah. I’ve been hearing that anecdotally from people who go to the Jersey Shore, which is Trump country. That the flags are gone.
Bacon: The flags are gone. That’s a good symbol.
Frymer: I have a neighbor, actually, even here in Princeton, New Jersey, who’s had big Trump signs up, and they’re all gone. And there was a moment where you didn’t have to just be a Trump voter, you could be a proud Trump voter.
Bacon: Yes, correct.
Frymer: And I think some of that is dissipating. I think one difference between Trump and Bush: Bush deflated as a person, right? He was depressed even at the end of his term. He was saying he didn’t do a good job, and he hasn’t been seen much since. Trump isn’t going to do that, right? He’s going to triple down to the very end. But I do think that a lot of the public isn’t listening to him anymore.
Bacon: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at.
Frymer: Yeah. When he’s coming up with these threats, when he’s saying, I just did the greatest deal ever, I’ve got this greatest economy ever, I do think a lot of the public is just tuning out.
Bacon: And maybe we might look back, and it’s not Hurricane Katrina, but the Iran war creating these massive high gas prices. That might end up being what took him from 42 to 33, and he never comes back. Even though it’s not Katrina or Iraq in terms of influence on everyday Americans, or deaths. It’s not as catastrophic for deaths in the US. Iran is different. But I think it might end up being politically as toxic.
Frymer: Yeah, and hopefully it stays so. It is, again, a long-term discussion the left needs to have, is, what if he did well on the economy, and didn’t go into Iran? Would we have just allowed all of this other stuff to happen?
Bacon: The authoritarianism to happen.
Frymer: The authoritarianism, the racism, the xenophobia, just the cruelty, right? And we’ve seen incredibly brave people have lost their lives fighting against that on the streets. But as an American public—you probably as well, since the day Trump was elected in ‘25, I furiously click the polls looking for, when is it going to drop? When’s it going to drop, right? And throughout a lot of that early ICE period, it wasn’t dropping, or it was dropping very slowly.
Bacon: And the period when he was destroying higher education—he was destroying universities with no backlash, and in fact being encouraged by news outlets and things like that.
Frymer: Yeah, it’s a pretty depressing statement about America.
Bacon: No defense from the Democratic Party for higher education, or anything.
Frymer: Yeah, it’s something we need to not forget. And obviously we want this economy to be our vehicle to get past it, but it does worry us long term. Would a smarter, less unhinged racist authoritarian—
Bacon: If he did not tank the economy by doing an unnecessary war, would he be able to sustain popularity? That’s unfortunately probably maybe. Because the first year, if they had not—the ICE overreach, I think Minnesota was another inflection point, but if they avoid Minnesota and the Iran war, is he at 43, probably? Something like that?
Frymer: Yeah, I think that’s right. Again, overreaching was part of his whole thing. And a belief that they could proudly try to make America white again is a big part of who they are. And that coalition is still there, and it’s going to stay there.
These coalitions don’t disappear entirely, especially when they get built up over time. And the MAGA right is there, and especially the younger MAGA right is going to stay there, and they’re institutionalized in certain ways. They have some power.
But yeah, I think it’s concerning how much the left kind of sat back. Again, we were stunned. We had a lot of things to focus on. And a lot of the left’s still angry at Biden, and angry about all sorts of different matters. I’m not sympathetic to all this.
But I think these are important conversations we need to have, of what does it mean to be an American today? I hope, and I do think it’s still a post-civil rights message in a good way, that we are a diverse nation. That we have huge things we still need to face and won’t face, but that we’re not a MAGA nation either. That we don’t want to go back. But yeah, I’m humbled and worried about where we’re at.
This is where I think on the left, there are some on the left who argue America is very left and just needs to be harnessed, and there are others on the left who are like, I’m not sure where America’s at and how we go here with.
Bacon: I’m closer to the second group. I take it you are too?
Frymer: Yeah, I’m closer to the second. I just think historically, for so much of our nation, we have had features that are not great. We’ve also had features that are amazing, right? And that’s why we’re a complicated, fascinating nation, and a nation that I am proud still to call my own. I am an American, and I say this with my students. But I am an American who—the nation is a complicated nation, and it was from day one. And you can’t ignore—complicated is a nice word, right?
There’s some really awful stuff. And Trump is not new to that, right? A lot of these people are like, Trump is against American values.
Bacon: Which ones? As you said, there’s a long history of Americans sounding like Trump. The idea that Lincoln wants Black people to be—what’s the phrase—ejected from the country is something I think people don’t know. I knew that, but it’s worth focusing on.
Frymer: Yeah. And so it’s just, I think, these realities. And deportation has been a piece of America throughout our history.
Bacon: The entire time.
Frymer: Including President Obama, right? Again, not with the same desire to be so forefrontly hateful in the things that Trump has done. But Jamelle Bouie says this time and time again in a really good way, is, Trump is not new, but he is. Or he’s doing it in a way that we didn’t perhaps—
Bacon: You can always find the antecedents of things Reagan did or so on, but Trump is doing it in a more forward, direct, aggressive, authoritarian way.
Frymer: That’s right. Reagan did a lot of this. Bush had elements of this. A different form, especially on things like immigration. He saw it as a positive. But these features are here in the United States.
And I think the left, we also probably do need to have conversations. How do we address this? I can say as well, as a university professor, that the over-the-top, as AOC called it, Woke 1.0, it’s not always terribly successful either. It’s not completely as unsuccessful as some make it to believe either.
But we need to rethink how we promote messages that are inclusive and yet don’t lose the important thread that we have inequalities that need to be addressed, right? We’re a nation at a huge crossroads. We have huge issues, but we have the skills and the weapons to do good things. They’re still here. Trump hasn’t gotten rid of all these things, including a populace that I think wants a different America.
Bacon: Great, optimistic, so rare these times. Paul Frymer, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.
Frymer: Great. Thank you. Thanks.
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