In my post-election essay, I said that the 2024 election marked the end of the Obama coalition. But what does that mean?
Well, in part it means that some of the political strategies the Democrats thought would turn Obama’s 2008 and 2012 coalitions into an enduring generational majority — they’ve failed. Democrats worked damn hard over the past few years to deliver what they thought, what they were told, Black and Hispanic and working-class and union voters wanted.
And instead of solidifying support from those voters, they’re seeing them flee to Donald Trump. But I’m also saying something about the structure of the Democratic Party itself.
The Obama era wasn’t just built around one person. It was a collection of institutions and power bases and elite networks. Michael Lind, a columnist at Tablet, the author of the book “The New Class War” and a co-founder of New America has argued that it was kind of a political machine, one built around urban political support, foundations, nonprofits, mass media.
There are parts of Lind’s analysis I don’t agree with. In particular, I think the machine has worked very differently after Obama left the White House than it did before. I think it’s been a machine without a boss, in a way that has not worked out well for the Democratic Party.
But I think seeing the Democratic Party through the lens of its component institutions — the places where the people who run it and staff it work when they’re out of power, where they’re educated, where they go to find deputies and hire staff and get funding and to see the people they used to work with and still listen to and learn from — I think that’s really important. That’s what a political party is. And because of it, I don’t think what’s next for the Democratic Party is just new ideas or campaign tactics.
I think it’s shaking free of an institutional structure, or maybe even an institutional straitjacket, that’s no longer working, maybe hasn’t been for some time. And it’s learning how not to listen so much to its funders and interest groups — and how to listen more to the people it’s been losing.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ezra Klein: So you’ve been arguing for some time now that the Democratic Party since Barack Obama has changed in form, that at its center is a different kind of liberal, what you call a gentry liberal, and a different set of institutions, nonprofits and foundations — what you call the Obama machine. Tell me about that.
Michael Lind: The Obama Democrats, in my view, are the first American national party that is also a national machine in the sense that it’s kind of replicated on the national level the sort of machine structure that has long existed, both in Republican machines and Democratic machines at the state and local level.
And the elements of the Obama Democratic machine — and it’s not that Obama was aiming for this, it’s just sort of evolved under his watch — it’s the cities. If you look at the 10 most populous cities in 2000, four of them had Republican mayors. Today it’s — they’re all Democratic. And basically every big city over a million or so people and every college town is 100 percent Democratic all the time — and this is kind of new. So since the population is largely urban now in the United States, to have a national Democratic machine really just means linking up these big-city urban machines and college-town, one-party systems. And the way it has been linked up in the Obama era has been through several methods.
The most important is campaign finance. We’ve seen this nationalization of politics — and this is true of the Republicans as well as the Democrats, but the Democrats pioneered this — where donors in San Francisco and New York and Chicago, a few other big Democratic cities, are increasingly influential in state and local and city council elections around the country. And that has a homogenizing effect on state and local Democrats and regional Democrats.
You have the old party structures of the ward healers and the party bosses and Tammany Hall, and that sort of thing. They still exist to some degree, but they’ve been so eroded that they have been replaced in these Democratic cities, where much of the American population lives, by nonprofits. Not by think tanks, that kind of nonprofit, but by service, delivery nonprofits dealing with homelessness, with education, with other things, which get grants from the city government to carry out functions that were performed before the outsourcing that took place beginning with the Clinton era.
These were performed by salaried civil servants. Since then, the number of civil servants has not gone up, but the so-called blended workforce of contractors, both nonprofit and for-profit, has just exploded.
Well, the number of civil servants has gone up at the state and local level. It hasn’t gone up in the civilian population federally. But state and local, it’s gone up quite a lot.
You’re quite right, and thanks for correcting me. But about a third of their income comes actually from Washington. It’s grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies. And there’s a real question, I think, of democratic legitimacy — small d — and this is true for the Republican equivalent, as well.
If these urban functions are being carried out by nonprofit employees — who get some of their money from local donations; they get some of it from rich people on the coast; they get some of it from government agencies like HHS; they get some of it from corporations; they get some of it from city council grants — then they have multiple masters. And in what sense — to whom are they accountable?
I think there’s something interesting in this that I’ve been wrestling with, and it’s one reason I wanted to have you on the show. Because I’ve been thinking about the way you describe this as a machine and the way you describe it as a modern form of patronage.
And I found that initially I rejected that. I was like, this isn’t like Tammany Hall, where Boss Tweed is handing out the jobs. But then I thought more about the role that foundations and nonprofits play in modern progressive politics, in the Democratic Party, the amount of power I know them to hold — in terms of what the White House ends up doing, in terms of what happens in Congress. It did seem to me that there was some explanatory value in thinking about this as a modern patronage network. Not exactly based on jobs, though sometimes based on jobs, but based on campaign-finance donations and grants.
So I’m curious to hear you describe a bit about how you think this is similar to and dissimilar from past networks of patronage and what we would have thought of as political machines.
The jobs thing is important, the political machines, particularly the ones in the big cities in the United States, where there were large immigrant diasporas.
One of the jobs of the local machine, could have been Republican or Democratic machine, was to pressure employers to hire Irish Americans or Italian Americans or whatever in return for votes. But it was done informally and extralegally. This has been replaced in the new progressive Democratic machine, in my view, by these categorical directives.
So for example, the Biden administration, when it comes to power, it says it will have this whole of government approach for equity — which in practice means affirmative action. It’s just another word for affirmative action. It’s not the personal kind of patronage in the past, where the ward healer would say, “I want one of my constituents’ sons to get a no-show job in the warehouse in New York,” or whatever.
Now it’s all done bureaucratically. You put down, “Are you AAPI?” That is, Asian and Pacific Islander. “Or African American or Hispanic/Latino or non-Hispanic white?” And then in order to get government funding, your organizations have to have the equitable quotas. They don’t use that name, but that’s what it is. So there is a jobs element there.
What is unique, that did not exist in the past, is the extent to which the donors simultaneously pay for the Democratic politicians, but they also determine what progressivism is. And they determine what progressivism is by deciding what to fund and what not to fund.
And so merely by omission, they can eliminate entire topics from the definition of progressivism. Because if progressivism is what the nonprofits that are called progressive are doing — well, if they can’t raise money, they’re not going to be doing it. So I’ve seen in the nonprofit sector, you simply can’t raise money from progressive donors on promoting collective bargaining and trade unionism.
And this is something — that the somewhat libertarian, neoliberal donor class is not terribly thrilled with unions. They may tolerate public-sector unions, but they don’t want them in their tech and finance corporations.
I’m going to push you on this. Because I know a fair amount about what the Hewlett Foundation funds, which is one of the very big funders on the Democratic side.
And they fund lots of figures, including on the right, who are trying to bring back labor unions, who are pro-sectoral bargaining. In the sort of anti-neoliberalism turn that the progressive foundation world has taken in the past couple of years, trying to revitalize labor has been a pretty big part of it. That doesn’t feel to me omitted at all.
Well, I think Hewlett, though, is not typical. It hasn’t been typical of the progressive foundations in the last 20 or 30 years. You’re quite right: They fund efforts across the political spectrum, on the right as well as on the left, as part of their “Beyond Neoliberalism” project.
But what I’m talking about is individual megadonors, their family foundations, apart from Hewlett, the Ford Foundation, and so on. And the reason the emphasis is on noneconomic cultural issues — which are perfectly legitimate in many cases, whether it’s gay rights or trans rights or environmentalism as defined as kind of a social issue — I think it reflects the interest of the donors.
If the donors wanted a strong union movement, then there would be all kinds of pro-labor think tanks all over Washington, D.C. But you wouldn’t have this pattern of single-issue groups where you have feminists over here, you have the human rights campaign over here, and so on.
In my essay after the election, I said at the end of it that I thought we were seeing the end of the Obama coalition.
The Obama coalition was exhausted and defeated. And as happens when you have to write after an election, I wrote a thing that I think is true — but didn’t have a lot of time to think that deeply about why I thought it was true. And working through some of your work on this — and you’re much more critical of, certainly, the Obama machine in its heyday than I am — sort of helped me think through this.
I want to play you a clip of Obama. This is from five years ago, and it’s once a leader of the Democratic Party talking a way I don’t think you hear Democrats talk that much.
Archived clip of Barack Obama: Now, this idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff: You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and, you know, share certain things with you. And I think that one danger I see among young people, particularly on college camps, is — Malia and I talk about this — but I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media: There is this sense sometimes of: The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people. And that’s enough.
I’m curious what you hear when you hear that and how it compares to you to the Democratic Party you see today?
Well, what I hear is someone who, even though he bequeathed this more centralized, homogeneous machine, I think — not necessarily deliberately — he actually worked his way up in Chicago politics and in national politics at a time when there were Blue Dog Democrats. Technically, there still are, but the poor Blue Dogs are almost extinct.
There were Gypsy Moth Republicans that you wanted to vote with your faction of the Democrats, across party lines. So, in that sense, I hear someone more like Lyndon B. Johnson or Franklin D. Roosevelt or any other Democratic president, where not only is your own party a coalition and you’re the power broker — you’re not the dictator — at the end of the day, you can’t get things done in our system of checks and balances without winning over a fair number of people in the other party.
This trend that you associate with the Obama machine feels to me like it got out of control after Obama left the scene. That when it actually had a political boss in the person of Barack Obama himself and the people directly around him, who had some power over it and some sense of it, it was actually fairly well restrained. Which is why Barack Obama was a very successful president.
But since then I think Hillary Clinton was much more dominated by “the groups.” I think the Biden administration was obsessed with Democratic coalitional management and keeping everybody in the coalition on board — in a way that was very different than how the Obama administration operated.
And so you sort of described this as an ongoing thing, with maybe even Obama as like, the shadow political boss. It looks to me like almost a culture that no longer has a boss, even to some degree inside the nonprofits.
I feel like the bosses of the nonprofits got weaker in recent years and the staffs got stronger. It’s like you have this machine, but you don’t have any political bosses anymore — and haven’t maybe for some time.
Well, I think that’s true of machines in the past. So, for example, they’re assembled by these very charismatic politicians who are, as you say, in the case of Obama, they’re flexible enough to tone it down when it’s backfiring and to keep it under control.
But when they leave you have — it’s kind of like after Stalin dies in the Soviet Union: You get this oligarchy instead of the one powerful figure. So you could call it the post-Obama machine, where basically no one is in charge and power goes down to the sort of self-perpetuating organizations.
It would be interesting for historians and presidential biographers to explain why Joe Biden, who was expected to be kind of the centrist, old-timey New Deal-ish Democrat who would keep the progressive single-issue groups under control, why he really was the most culturally left president. Much more so than Obama, who was careful to try to keep his centrist street cred.
And maybe it was personal incapacity. Maybe it was a calculation to win over the Bernie Sanders voters. I don’t know the answer.
I think this idea of the post-Obama machine feels truer to me, and I do think it’s worth spending some time on this question of Joe Biden. Because the Biden White House worked differently than other White Houses I’ve been aware of.
One of the ways it worked differently was it was just much more concerned with keeping the left engaged in the coalition. Back in the Obama administration, there was constant bickering between the White House and what it called the professional left, which was many of these groups. Robert Gibbs, a press secretary, would unload on the professional left, and then people get mad at Robert Gibbs, and he would stand by his remarks. And this was understood — at every level. Rahm Emanuel was like this; Barack Obama, himself, was often like this. There was much more tension between the Obama administration and the left than there was between the Biden administration and the left.
And maybe that was the Biden-Bernie Sanders alliance. He almost did lose a nomination to Bernie Sanders. So the sense that the left was a much more live force had changed. But I think in a weird way, you see it with Bernie Sanders, himself. Because Bernie Sanders, as a left figure, used to be quite left on economics but culturally moderate on other things, more pro-gun.
And it’s one way Hillary Clinton ran against him. That sort of famous line that you can break up the big banks, but it won’t solve systemic racism. But over time, Sanders also became much more coalitional in his approach to the left. He’s not saying no to anything, either. One of the critiques many people made of the Democratic Party in this period, and I think it’s true, and it goes beyond Biden to these figures, is that just nobody said no to anything.
And so then you have things like Kamala Harris signing an American Civil Liberties Union document saying yes to gender surgery for undocumented immigrants in jail, and that gets used against her in all these ads. That sort of reflects a culture in which nobody is saying no to the groups at any level of American Democratic politics.
But I’m not exactly sure why that evolved in the way it did. And I’m curious how you see it if we broaden it from just Joe Biden.
I’ll ask you the question, but first I’ll point out that a lot of this started in Obama’s second term. His Education Department issued the transgender directive saying that then the Department of Justice and the Education Department would cut off funding and maybe investigate K-12 schools that don’t let high school kids join sports teams of the opposite sex, and so on. And I got the impression that this took even Obama by surprise. I don’t think this was something he was pushing. It was just like the bureaucracy filled with these single-issue nonprofit groups.
So, here I have a question for you, Ezra, related to this. How much do you think the internet and Twitter, in particular, which we know progressives use more heavily — or at least they did before Musk — than conservatives, how much has that empowered these groups? In the old days, if you upset the environmentalists or the feminists or another single-issue group, well, people would write angry letters to The New Republic. But it was like, the age of paper, right?
But now they can denounce this, and then millions of suburban/urban progressives around the country will retweet their condemnation of the Democrat for caving in on this issue. Do you think that’s a factor?
I definitely think it was a factor in the 2018-2021 era, where I think that Twitter, in particular — I think it maybe goes back before that, too — was a tremendous accelerator of ideological amplification and division. I don’t think there’s a Bernie Sanders campaign that succeeds in the way it does in 2015 without Twitter and Reddit and places online where the intensity of his support could turn into money, could turn into media coverage. I remember being at Vox back then, and we were watching anything we put Bernie Sanders’ name on go to the top of Reddit. And that leads to a lot more media oxygen for Sanders.
The same thing, by the way, is happening on the right with Donald Trump. I don’t think there’s a Trump campaign in the way we ultimately see it without Twitter, either. So I definitely think that’s true.
There’s also another dimension to this that you just made me think about with the example of trans kids in the Obama administration. Which is: There were issues where the principals understood the issues really well and had political experience with them.
So Barack Obama had as much experience or more experience than anybody in the Obama administration running and navigating race issues in American life. And he knew where he was going to let things go in the administration and knew where he wasn’t. But you had some new issues begin to emerge, particularly around gender, where the principals didn’t have very much experience with them.
They had not been used to this. I mean, you talked about feminism, but I would describe the issues out there differently. You had so many female politicians who actually knew how to navigate that and knew what they thought their constituencies would bear and would not bear, and had a lot of credibility in the room on it.
And on some of these newer issues, it took time — I think it’s still taking time — to have politicians who feel comfortable with it. And when they didn’t feel comfortable with it, a lot more was outsourced to staff. And in some of these cases you got outcomes that now, looking back, Democrats probably wish they had held the line a little bit closer in.
I want to be very careful because I’m not comfortable with the “Let’s just let’s throw trans rights overboard.” But I think that what you normally do in a movement like this is you decide which things you’re going to fight for and which things you’re maybe not ready to have a fight over — or maybe haven’t even decided what the position should be on.
The kids-in-sports question has been incredibly difficult for Democrats, even though it’s so far from the most important question in trans rights or trans nondiscrimination out there. And I think it just wasn’t one that they were ready for, and nobody just kind of put the stop on it. I think also what you see about that Kamala Harris-ACLU questionnaire: There was this pressure to say yes to edge cases.
So what I think of after two decades in the nonprofit sector, at various times, is Lind’s law of nonprofit advocacy: You go as far as the voters support your position, and then you go beyond the border into further territory where the next position is unpopular. And this is a deliberate strategic move, because if you just are advocating for what everybody believes anyway, then you’ve won. Nobody’s going to write you a check.
But if you go 10 or 20 or 30 percent further, into the controversial realm, then you will be attacked. And in the case of progressive nonprofits, you’re being attacked by the right, which is what you want. And you can say, “We’re being attacked for this.” And then you can link it to your previous gains by saying, “They don’t only oppose this bridgehead in enemy territory, but they want to roll back everything we’ve done in the last hundred years.” So I do think that kind of edginess, that’s baked into NGO annual fund-raising newsletter culture. That’s how you get people to open their wallets.
And I think that explains a lot of 2020, whether it was the trans issue, whether it was the “Defund the Police” — things that make perfect sense if you’re a nonprofit trying to pry open the wallets of a small number of billionaire megadonors. And big foundations are just electoral poison.
There is a conflict I think about sometimes some years ago between Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it had to do with Obama criticizing activist tactics, which he did quite a bit. And this is postpresidency for him, and AOC making this point that not everybody’s job is to be within the Overton window: that activists have a different job than presidents, than politicians, etc.
But on the other hand, the implication of that point was that Obama was doing exactly what he should have been doing, even though this was being used as a criticism of him. That if everybody has different jobs, then actually it is the job of the politicians to hold the line at where the politics net out for their side.
Because as you say, the nonprofits are — and as AOC said — the nonprofits are not there to win 51 percent of the vote. But the politicians are. And I think this goes to the coalitional dynamic that you’re describing, and I saw this a lot covering policy in the last couple of years, where when you weave in the nonprofit complex into the official party, people are moving between it — all the time. Going from the administration to the nonprofits and nonprofits to the administration. Members of Congress are bringing in these groups every time they’re doing legislation and sort of taking their temperature and the coalitions really matter and you’ve got to stay on the side of the coalition or they’ll get mad at you.
And then you’ve mixed up people’s roles. And, by the way, I think that’s a Twitter thing and a social media thing, too: where people who used to operate in quite different spheres of politics were endlessly thrown into one conversation together — collapsing the roles between activists, between politicians, between media figures, between political scientists, between grass roots organizers, between donors. Like, everybody is in the same discourse level, acting as if they’re doing the same thing — when they’re really not.
I think you’re right. But I think it’s a danger for the Republicans, as well. Because there’s this very online — people talk about the New Right, but they’re sort of like, the moderate, thoughtful policy wonks like Warren Cass and others. And then there are just these internet autodidact gurus who compete — they’re not competing for donations necessarily, like the progressive nonprofits are. These gurus on the right are competing for money. I mean, it’s a commercial law —
And attention —
And attention that translates into Patreon subscriptions or whatever. And that’s always been the big difference between — for the last 30, 40 years. The Democrats, their agenda tends to be shaped by nonprofits.
The Republicans, going back to Murdoch and Fox, and exacerbated in the internet era and in the Twitter era: They’re a counterculture, but they’re a commercial counterculture. So in the old days, Rush Limbaugh, he had to sell Ronald Reagan gold coins or whatever. [Laughs.] He wasn’t raising money from the Koch brothers.
And I think now it’s going to be a problem for the Trump administration. That is, if you have a lot of younger staffers, in particular, who are immersed in this very online culture, where they’re trading shocking memes back and forth every day or so, and they’re going to end up staffing various positions — they’re not necessarily going to be on the same page as their political-appointee bosses.
We’ve been talking about the way the Democratic Party has changed, and we’ve been talking about the way some of those changes have led to Democratic Party weakness. But you can look at this from the other perspective, too. If you look at the time period of 1950 to 2000 and look at how well Democrats do presidentially in the popular vote — when they have this more working-class, labor-oriented base — and you look at 2000 to 2024 and how Democrats do in the popular vote: They do better.
I mean, 2024 is the first time Republicans have won the popular vote since 2004. And they look to people estimating this, who I’m reading, likely to win it by one- to two-ish points nationally — in arguably the worst environment for incumbents we have seen since 2008, worldwide. We have just seen, in every wealthy democracy that has had an election, the incumbent party get destroyed. And the Democratic Party — actually its loss, if you look at this on a chart, is much more modest than the losses of other parties that were in power in this period. Compare them to the absolute annihilation of the Tories in the U.K.
And one argument you might make on that is: This has not been masterful politics from Donald Trump and JD Vance. That how extreme they are — “childless cat ladies” and all the rest of it — has held down what could have been a very, very strong Republican performance to something that, if you have 2 percentage points of the vote, could go the other way: Republicans don’t even win in 2024.
Well, that’s true. But as David Axelrod pointed out the other day: The only two groups where Harris improved over Biden are college-educated whites and people making more than $100,000 a year. So I think that the two narratives about what happened on Tuesday: One is it’s a long-term realignment, and the other is it’s a short-term result of the anti-incumbency backlash because of the post-Covid inflation.
I think they’re both correct. And I think of this in terms of a Covid analogy. So Covid can affect lots of people, but the ones who have prior vulnerabilities are the most endangered. So I think the Democratic Party had a lot of prior vulnerabilities going in, but there’s no doubt that being the incumbent party, it suffered at the same time like these other incumbent parties, both on the right and the left.
But one thing the narrowness of the Republican victory has left me thinking about is the fact that we’re in a realignment doesn’t mean the Republican Party has realigned into a necessarily winning coalition. It might yet. But this all seems very consistent to me with the realignment looking something like Republicans have 48 percent of the vote naturally, and Democrats have 52 percent.
And so in 2020, you have a very similar coalitional structure. But it’s a bad year for the incumbent because of the pandemic and also because Donald Trump is bad at being president. Trump loses three points for the incumbent effect, and he gets beat in the popular vote by four to five points.
And this year, when the Biden-Harris administration are the incumbents, and it’s a very, very bad year for incumbents, and they lose a couple points as a penalty to that. Trump wins by one to two points. And so you might have a realignment.
But one thing happening in the Democratic Party right now is the sense that they need to rethink everything, that the way the coalitions have restructured is going to consign them to minority status forever, potentially.
Certainly, I think a lot of Republicans feel themselves on the cusp of like, a grand era of winning. And this other story seems possible, too: that the realignment is not actually that advantageous for Republicans, and in a very good year, or what should have been a very good year, they did OK.
And if you look at the Senate races, they actually didn’t do that well. In the battleground states, Democrats won six of the seven contested races, at least as I say this right now, before Pennsylvania is fully called. But it looks to me like Republicans will win Pennsylvania. That’s a perfectly fine outcome for Republicans, I guess.
So they won the Senate, the House — it’s all very close. They won the presidency. But in a year when maybe it could have been much more dominant, it doesn’t make this coalition they’ve assembled look like such an obvious majority coalition.
I agree with that, but we have to keep in mind that neither party is what I call a conventional big-tent party of the kind that existed, you know, in the ’80s, the ’90s, even the 2000s.
The post-Obama Democrats really are this incredibly homogenous, well-policed, on-message machine, with these powerful single-issue progressives kind of dictating the platform. The Republicans are this island of broken toys [laughs] — this coalition of misfits who oppose the post-Obama Democrats for various reasons.
There’s the various elements of Trump’s coalition that he put together, with skill or by accident. They don’t necessarily have much in common with each other. There are antiwoke social Democrats. There are libertarians who hate big government. There are the evangelicals and those were all part of the old Republican coalition.
But then there are also trade unionists who think they’re getting nothing from the Democratic Party. There are growing numbers — they’re still a minority — of African Americans and Latinos who don’t think they have any loyalty to the Democratic Party. So one of the things we’re likely to see if the Republicans get a trifecta, that is they control all three of the elected branches of government, then these tensions are going to come out.
And that can be an opportunity for Democrats. But I think the only way the Democrats can seize that opportunity is to say, “We’re not going to be a homogeneous, conformist machine anymore. We’re going to be a big-tent party, and we can have some Democrats who oppose transgender medicine, and we have others who want a tough line on illegal immigration.”
Like most of the parties from the age of President Martin Van Buren to the present, they pick three or four or five issues that are the litmus test, that everybody has to agree with, and then you have a free vote depending on your constituency on other issues.
One place where I think that the actions of this Democratic coalition are in tension with the narrative about this Democratic coalition is that it often sounds like what people are saying is, “Well, the Democratic Party really abandoned the working class.”
We used to have this trade-unionist party, and the people in it were more working class, and they held much more power in it. And then you have Bill Clinton and the North American Free Trade Agreement. And now here we are. But since Bill Clinton, and as the party has become more college educated and this realignment has been underway, the party’s economic policy has become relentlessly more left.
Barack Obama was well to Bill Clinton’s left. Hillary Clinton ran on an agenda well to Barack Obama’s left. Joe Biden ran on an agenda — and governed on an agenda — to Hillary Clinton’s left. It was a notable and not accidental thing that after the first presidential debate, as this clamor arose for Biden to step aside, his biggest defenders were Bernie Sanders and the squad.
Biden was the most pro-labor president, certainly in my lifetime. It didn’t seem to matter.
So what do you make of both the way in which the Democratic Party did become more economically populist in a substantive way, as it became more the party of this class. And what do you make of the fact that that didn’t seem to protect it at all among the voters that these sorts of material policies were supposed to attract?
Well, I think you have to distinguish two things: You have to distinguish a bipartisan consensus, first in favor of neoliberalism and then in favor of post-neoliberalism — a work in progress from progressivism on these cultural issues. So what has changed is, and you’re quite right about this: In both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans — at least the Trump wing — there has been a bipartisan move away from free-market globalization.
I think with the Republicans — who were really indistinguishable from under George W. Bush from today’s progressives on immigration — the Republicans became more restrictionist. And I think you’ll see more restrictionism from Democrats in the future under pressure from their voters.
So I think we’re undergoing a shift as big as the shift from the New Deal consensus that was shared by Republican presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon to the sort of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair neoliberal consensus.
And the main reason for that shift, I don’t think is domestic. I think it’s geopolitical. It’s the rise of China that made the business elite and the donor class and more and more intellectuals and economists rethink neoliberal economics. But since this shift is taking place at different speeds in both parties, then it’s kind of like it was in the neoliberal era, where the parties basically agreed on high levels of immigration and more free-trade agreements, at least after 2000.
So they’re going to fight over abortion, and they’ll fight over gay marriage. And I think on these other issues, assuming you have two post-neoliberal parties, the post-neoliberal Democrats and the post-neoliberal Republicans, then these issues are favoring the Republicans.
Let me give you an example: In a Marist Poll of registered voters by National Public Radio, on behalf of NPR, 57 percent of Latinos agreed that all illegal immigrants should be deported. And the number was slightly lower for Black Americans.
This is not what Democrats have been telling themselves. When it comes to voter-ID requirements, that you have to show a photo, a government ID, in order to vote: According to Pew, 75 percent of Blacks, 81 percent of whites, 84 percent of Asians and 85 percent of Hispanics want mandatory photo voter-ID laws.
And this is Pew Research Center — it’s not a right-wing push poll or something. And just one more example: The Supreme Court decision against race-based affirmative action was approved, according to Gallup — again, a nonpartisan agency — 52 percent of Blacks, 63 percent of Asians, 68 percent of Hispanics and 72 percent of whites approved the Supreme Court ban or partial ban on race-based affirmative action.
So the Democrats — it’s not simply enough to say, “Well, we’re post-neoliberal, and we’re more pro-union, and we want strategic trade and industrial policy.” These other issues — they just are not on the right side of these issues, even for their Black and Hispanic constituents.
I think this is a place where it’s very important to look at the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party. Because part of what that power has been based on, and I see this based on a lot of reporting and good firsthand knowledge, is a sense that the way to understand what many of these collections of voters want — if you’re going to slice them into Black voters and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters and Hispanic voters and union voters, too, by the way.
I mean, you can keep going like this. That the way you’ll understand it is by listening to what the groups purporting to represent them want. And in some cases that can be telling. I think unions are more often reasonably good at telling you what at least parts of their membership want, although they have a broader agenda than just that.
But I think specifically in the case of nonwhite voters, it proved really, really deceptive. So the groups that were, in a sense, representing Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition — they were part of what was leading Democrats, many of them in 2020, to say they were going to decriminalize border crossing, unauthorized border crossing. But that wasn’t what Hispanic voters wanted.
It was many of the groups representing Black Americans that pushed the Democratic Party toward “Defund the Police” rhetoric. And not all of them went all the way there, but they went much closer. And in cases, Kamala Harris did go there. But that was never popular, and certainly is not now popular, among Black Americans.
And so there’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe. In the room where the Democrats are sort of making these decisions, you have staffers from these groups, and they’re often maybe the only Black person in the room or maybe the only Hispanic person in the room, so they’re granted a degree of deference.
But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups. And this is a place where I think the Democratic theory, political theory, has just actually and truly failed. The Democratic Party moved into a position of thinking it was doing more than it ever had before to win over the allegiance of this multicultural electorate.
And it has lost huge amounts of support among that very same multicultural electorate. Because the people it was listening to as its guide to how to win them over were nonrepresentative.
That’s exactly right. If all of the leaders of these various communities are career nonprofit people or academics funded by the Ford Foundation and other big grantors, they’re AstroTurf.
And this is the big difference between modern progressivism and the older liberalism. The two greatest civil rights leaders of the 20th century: A. Philip Randolph was a union leader of the railroad porters union, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister, part of this mass-membership organization.
And then beginning in the ’60s and ’70s — I won’t name names — but the way you become a spokesperson for women or L.G.B.T.Q. or African Americans or Hispanics is not having this mass organization behind you of members. It’s also not winning elections. It’s your success in getting grants for your nonprofit or for your university program.
George W. Bush or maybe it was Karl Rove — I don’t know who came up with this — but was very clever during the Bush administration. They were being denounced as being anti-Black by the designated spokespeople for the Black community in the media and in the nonprofit sector. So Bush invited a bunch of urban Black pastors to the White House who were actual real grass roots leaders. They didn’t approve of him particularly, either, as I recall, but that’s the difference.
Something this makes me think about is the way this has played out in Democratic policymaking, often outside of the major issues people are paying attention to. So one thing that’s been very important to Democrats in the past couple of years, and is obviously central to the Biden administration’s policy legacy, is the decarbonization investments.
Put aside what you think of them. The Biden administration certainly wants to build as much green energy infrastructure as fast as it can. And I’ve done a lot of coverage of the way that permitting and procurement and land-use rules and environmental litigation and legislation have proven to be real obstacles in Democrats building fast and affordably. You have example after example of major energy projects being stalled in environmental litigation, getting sued because this thing that will build a huge number of solar panels and create a huge amount of solar power could conflict with an endangered species or some other set of laws. Even if really just what’s happening is these laws are being wielded by people who don’t want the thing in the first place.
And so I was covering and watching what was happening in Congress as people tried to grapple with this and tried to think about on the Democratic side what permitting reform might look like. And when I would talk to the people working on it, I was just stunned by the power of small groups, environmental justice groups, and so on, that didn’t really represent anybody, or at least not any large numbers of people.
They would just explain to me that if you couldn’t get them on board, they couldn’t move forward with this at all. And I would say, “Well, what is the power of these groups — like, what is their leverage on you?” And there was never an answer. It was just a coalitional decision that had been made in the culture of the way the Democratic Party now made policy.
It wasn’t that somebody thought they would turn votes on them. It wasn’t even anybody thought that one version of this would be more popular or even more noticed than another. It’s just that a culture of how you make policy had emerged, a culture of who you listen to had emerged. And it couldn’t be broken, even if that meant a genuinely smaller chance of achieving a goal that you believed and had told everybody else was existentially important: the speed of decarbonization in the coming 10 years.
And I really began to understand it as that. This is probably where I departed from the version of this calling it a machine. It seems like a culture to me. Not a culture sort of built on anything. It’s a culture built on norms and practices, not exactly on leverage.
Well, it’s not new. Back in the 1990s, I was having a conversation with a Democratic staffer about some sensible educational reform — I don’t remember what it was — and he worked for Senator Ted Kennedy at the time. And he said, “Well, we’ll have to run it past the Groups.”
That was the first time I had heard of “the Groups” — clearly with a capital G. So when you say it’s a culture — but on the other hand, it has to be perpetuated from generation to generation. And if you pull the plug on the funding, then a lot of these groups would wither away. And if you funded other groups — and I take your point about the Democrats being rhetorically and sometimes substantively more pro-labor, but I think the Economic Policy Institute is like that — the only real protrade union think tank of any stature in Washington still, right?
The Economic Policy Institute.
Yeah. It’s been around for 40 years. So money talks. And if these groups are raising money from the same donors that you need to raise money from as an elected politician, then I think it’s perfectly rational to worry that if you stiff the groups, they will go running to Daddy Warbucks and say he betrayed our cause.
How much do you see this as different on the Republican side? Was it different on the Republican side in the era of George W. Bush? And is it different on the Republican side in the era of Donald Trump?
Because it’s not as if there aren’t Republican interest groups, not as if the Chamber of Commerce has not at many times wielded enormous power, the business roundtable. And with Trump, it often seems to me to have moved into — he’s not even listening exactly to groups, he’s listening to individual people who are giving him money. He’s got this very funny but dark riff where he basically says: He didn’t like electric vehicles, but then Elon Musk came to support him, and now he’s got to like electric vehicles.
And I think that’s sort of how he thinks about it. He seemed to change his position on TikTok after meeting with a major donor — who is also a major TikTok investor. Trump had been in favor of, as president, of forcing TikTok to be sold off to an American firm. And he reversed his position on that. Sort of famously suggested to a bunch of oil executives that if they gave him enough money, they could have huge amounts of influence in his administration.
The Democrats listened to the groups. It seems to me now that Trump just kind of has transactional relationships with individual people who can help him, and he’ll sort of do what they say if he decides that it’s worth it to him.
Well, I can’t speak about Trump individually with any authority, but I think going back even to the ’80s and ’90s, while the Democrats have been a coalition of mostly nonprofit, AstroTurf funding groups, the Republicans have been kind of a Trump tribe.
I mean, there’s a group of people. They’ve had the white working-class for several decades, and it’s expanded now with working-class people of other races. Their other electoral constituency, not their donors but their electoral constituency, is small-business owners, particularly in the physical world.
I’ll just read you a list of the industries that give the most money, proportionally, to the Republican Party: poultry and eggs, mining, livestock, home builders, automotive, steel, dairy, oil and gas. This is quite different from the Democratic list of tech, education, public sector and so on.
But here’s an interesting point that Jerry Taylor, formerly of the Niskanen Center, made for me — and it impressed me very deeply. He said that most people, in all parties, don’t have this litmus test of issues and you have to check off every issue. They basically kind of belong to one party or the other, and they follow the cues of the leaders. And you particularly see this, I think, on immigration and trade with Trump. So when Bush was the leader, he says, “Oh, immigration is great.” “Free trade — we need more free trade agreements.” And most Republicans, the small-business owners and the white working class, they went along because “He’s the commander in chief of our party.”
And then Trump comes along and says, “No, no, no.” The opposite. And then they sort of follow along with him. And I think this is backed up by the famous political science research that shows that the mass public does not have consistent, systematic opinions. You have to be an intellectual or a member putting together a party platform to try to make sure your different beliefs cohere.
And this gives the Republicans, I think — under anybody, not just Trump — more flexibility than the Democrats. Because the Democrats don’t have, they used to have it, but they don’t have like this, just this demographic base where they say, “OK, we’re going to dial back on trans issues.” Or “We’re going to add nuclear to the list of the Green New Deal.”
They just don’t have that flexibility that the Republicans do. Does that make sense?
It does and it doesn’t to me. Because I would say that if you go back even a couple of years, the Republicans do not feel to like they have very much ideological flexibility. They’ve all signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. If you’re thinking about the sort of mid-2000s or 2010s, they all have to be against the Affordable Care Act. They can’t stake a more moderate, or it’s very hard to stake, a moderate position on health care. And what’s interesting to me about Trump and one of the reasons he’s been effective is that he just doesn’t play by those rules personally, that he has a small set of things he cares a lot about.
He’s very anti-immigration, he’s quite anti-trade, very mercantilist, very skeptical of alliances, very zero-sum oriented. But on the other side, he just doesn’t care. And he’ll move around on abortion. He makes his promise to the right wing that he’ll appoint judges for them, and he fulfills that promise, but it’s a very transactional promise.
I don’t think Donald Trump spent a lot of his time as a person thinking about pro-life issues. And he has much less sense or internal pressure of what goes with what than other people do. So he’s much more willing to bob and weave on the things he doesn’t care about. And the list of things he doesn’t care about is very long.
Well, I think that’s right — but it’s also because he’s rich.
And it’s also because he’s rich. But Mitt Romney was rich, too. And Mitt Romney did not go —
Well, your typical Republican member of Congress — even if the public does not want cuts in Social Security and Medicare, your libertarian donors do. And they’re not —
Yeah, but I think if you looked at the number — and there are quite a few of them because members of Congress are overall pretty wealthy, particularly in the Senate. I think if you looked at the Republicans who are independently wealthy — like, look at a Rick Scott. That dude is extremely rich. He’s extremely rich. I don’t think you would find they’re more moderate or more independent in this way than the other ones have been.
No. My only point was: Do you have to raise enormous amounts of money every two years if you’re a member of Congress? And that creates, to me — the big dividing line, which I think will manifest itself if the Republicans do end up having a majority, is their donors are not on the same page as their voters.
And you think that’s still as true as it once was?
Yes. I have it on good authority that the Republican donors in 2024 want to cut deficit spending and have taxes cut, too. Well, the only way you do that is by drastically cutting government programs — and it’s the whole George W. Bush agenda.
And now the heaviest-weight donor on the Republican side is Musk, and he’s been very clear that he wants to cut, I think he called it $2 trillion from the federal government. I had Vivek Ramaswamy on the show, and having him on — it was a very interesting conversation — convinced me that there’s a much bigger part of the MAGA movement that on a lot of these government-spending issues looks like the Republican Party used to look, with a much more nationalist and internationally skeptical set of trappings or, even, you could say, commitments. But that in terms of how they feel about federal spending, that they remain much more libertarian. And Musk, who clearly wants to and will probably exert tremendous influence in the Trump administration, I think, has very strong antiwoke feelings.
But if you look at his beliefs about government and taxes and so on, they’re pretty standard Republican rich-guy feelings. And so some of the ideological swerve that people assumed was going to happen when JD Vance was picked on the ticket — it may not happen, because I do see a Republican donor class more authentic to the Trump movement emerging and cohering, and it wants to ban a bunch of books from schools, but it also wants tax cuts and big government spending cuts.
Well, I think that’s right. You can think of the Republican Party as being three parties: There’s the donor party, and they’re just libertarians. They’re pro-gay rights, and they’re pro-abortion and all of that but also free trade, and they want unlimited labor arbitrage, and they’re anti-union.
Then there’s the Republican primary electorate. The primary voters who, like the Democratic primary voters, are much more likely than the public to be college educated and to be philosophically ideological and consistent. And these are your small-business owners, the kind of proverbial local car dealer in the small town or the suburbs.
And they are politicizing. Today, as in the past, utterly opposed to organized labor, to a higher minimum wage and all of that, because many of them have low-wage service businesses. And then finally, there’s the Republican general electorate, which Trump has successfully expanded and advances well by reaching out to African Americans, to Hispanics and to others. But between elections, the politicians are going to hear mostly from the donors, and they’re going to be eyeing the next primary, when the primary electorate is much more anti-government than the general electorate.
When you think about these parties going forward: Let’s say you’re the Democratic Party, and you want to win back these working class voters. You think the realignment that is now sort of found — or seems to be nearing an almost terminal form — where Democrats really are the party of the affluent and the college educated, and Republicans really are the party of most people who don’t have a college education.
You want to do something about it. And you look at Joe Biden, and you think, “Well, this guy tried to run a full employment policy. He tried to have much more industrial policy. He tried to be very pro-union.” I mean, certainly supportive of minimum wage increases.
And it didn’t work. It anti-worked, right? It failed.
What do you do? Is it aesthetic? It’s the kind of person you’re nominating? It’s the cultural issues? If you were a candidate who — like, a new era for Democrats has to begin. Like, I believe the Obama era has ended. And at this point, the politicians sort of photocopying what he did are getting too far from what he was able to do and the sort of influence he was able to exert.
What sends strong enough signals that it breaks the way the system is realigning? Do you look around and see people who are an example of that or have been successful at that?
Well, Bill Clinton. I think you need to have a Sister Souljah moment with some of these nonprofit groups, and it can be the Greens or it can be the trans movement or something else. And just say, “Look, you’re a part of our team, and we agree with you on many things, but we’re not going there.”
The other thing that Clinton and Gore did successfully was to build up the Democratic Leadership Council, which I think some on the left called Democrats Looking for Cash. But in a big-tent party, you could say, “Well, we’re a different kind of Democrat.”
But there are various kinds of Democrats. There’s not just one kind of Democrat. So there’s historical model for this. When it comes to appointing people to office — and this is something I would advise both parties to do, Republicans as well as the Democrats: Don’t appoint ideologues — whether they’re from left-wing nonprofits or from right-wing Substack accounts or whatever.
Appoint staffers and former elected officials and staffers who worked for elected officials, like congressional staffers to the executive branch and to agencies. Because even if you’re kind of a young, very online staffer for the Senate committee or a House committee, through your boss, you do have a sense you have to make concessions to be politically viable.
So I think with the Democrats, in particular, I would have more appointees to the executive branch in the future from the government itself — both elected officials and government staffers. It could be state legislatures and city councils. And fewer people from the World Wildlife Fund or whatever.
When you imagine where the Democratic Party might evolve from here, what should the power centers be?
I mean, it is going to be a collection of institutions — all parties in a way are. And political parties themselves are much weaker than they once were for all kinds of reasons, including campaign-finance laws. So when you imagine this party that has created its Sister Souljah moment with at least some of the groups — certainly they’ve declared some independence from them. Maybe a stronger leadership that is able to say no more easily.
But are there alternative bases of support? If you imagine a healthy party, are there institutions and power centers that should, that exist now but should be wielding more power than they are? Is this just subtraction or is it also addition?
Well, I think it’s mainly subtraction of the influence of big donors and of the nonprofits. Because if you look at normal political parties in the U.S. past and also in modern-day democratic Europe and Asia, the party line, the agenda, the policies, the campaign strategies — they are set by career politicians and their staffs. They’re political parties. And it’s very odd to have any political party in any democracy where basically the politicians have to accept this agenda from like, nonprofit organizations funded by the donors that they have to raise money from.
So I think at the end of the day, the party politicians are going to have to emancipate themselves from dependence on nonprofit staffers and from megadonor contributions. I don’t know how they do this now with the Supreme Court being so hostile to campaign-finance reform. One suggestion I made to a Democratic friend is that you make the leaders of the Democratic Party and the campaign committees, and so on, Democrats elected from swing districts.
Because it’s a problem for both parties when you have your Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer and the Democrats and like Mitch McConnell and the Republicans being from the safest seat. And so my Democratic friend explained, “Well, but they do that so that your Democratic leader does not lose the next election in the swing district.”
So —
That’s happened to Tom Daschle.
So I can see that. But I do think that if your leaders come from these completely safe seats, then just because of their environment, they’re not going to be as sensitive to the need for the party to attack to one direction or another as the more exposed elective representatives.
I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Well, a couple of books that I’ve read in the last a year or so, that I think are more timely than ever: John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes” (2023), making similar criticisms of the captivity of the Democratic Party to what they call the shadow party of nonprofits. And I think Democratic leaders thinking about rebuilding the party ought to read “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” by Judis and Teixeira.
On the New Right, you have some really dynamic, innovative thinkers. One of them is Sohrab Ahmari in his book, also from last year, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.” Whether this is influential or not in the Trump-Vance administration, we’ll see. But it’s worth reading by itself.
And my third book is about one of my heroes or heroines: Mary Harris Jones — Mother Jones, as she was nicknamed — who lived from 1837 to 1930. Great Irish American immigrant labor activist. And the book is, from 2001, Elliott J. Gorn’s “Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America.”
And I’ll leave your listeners with a quote from Mother Jones: “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.”
Michael Lind, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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