Good conversation, even though I largely disagree with her views on what would make for a better Democratic party.
More "pro-business liberalism", I would best interpret as classical liberalism with better "UX" is not the answer. Yes, certainly good positive experiences with government services are important, agree there. If you're going to be the party of good governance you need to be better about delivering good governance.
But that part aside, the things she laid out is largely the Democratic party that formed over the last 30 years that ran into the rocks -- that forged a neoliberal governing consensus that helped grease the runway for increased monopolization and income inequality.
The CHIEF failure of the Democratic party has been ignoring rising economic inequality, taking the working class for granted, and not take up the mantle of economic populism. They did this to the best interpretation, because their coalition reformed around educated technocrats elites.
While the social issues we took up were not without good cause, and the educated liberal class is for the most part well meaning, we ceded the populist terrain to the right and a demagogic conman who does not care about anyone but himself.
Instead of building a multi-racial pluralistic coalition on a *class-based* axis, we got the hodgepodge of interest groups, identity-oriented politics, and "everything-bagel liberalism" as Ezra Klein puts it, that doesn't cohere into any narrative about what we stand for.
Her calling all the antitrust actions unfair is just erroneous. Corporate concentration has never been higher. Big-tech are nation state sized companies and rapacious rent-seekers.
Later on you talk about Dems being anti-competition. It is difficult to resolve the tension between capitalism, which thrusts us into competition with each other, and the belief in caring about and redressing our common concerns. But one of the core aims of antitrust is to restore market competition! Monopolies are a bastardization of market capitalism. The path I see is robust, *effective* universal public goods and a *effectively* regulated market capitalism.
Dems should be more nuanced in their treatment of the tech industry, but much of the criticism focused on big tech is absolutely warranted -- the epistemic collapse you broached is in good part an outgrowth of their careless stewardship of the information commons under the protections of section 230 and their anti-social algorithmic incentives.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I'm pretty unformed in my own thinking, and may land between you and Kelsey, but here’s my ~current stance:
We can all agree that the Dems have neglected (and thus lost) the working class. The question becomes: why?
One case is that Dem policies have "ignored rising economic inequality." I used to be pretty sympathetic to this. But Biden was one of the most pro-labor presidents of the last 50 years. He bailed out the Teamsters, he appointed Lina Khan to run antitrust, unemployment was at a decades low; yet the working class moved more toward Trump in 2024 than ever before. Meanwhile, as business-friendly as some neoliberal Dems have been, the Rs are vastly vastly more so. They are not the party of redistribution.
My conclusion is that while the working class (reductively, it's very diverse) in part is animated by material inequality/interests, it also has other values/political priorities that shape political allegiances, including cultural and quality of life issues, which we talked about more in this conversation. Zohran's campaign showed that "affordability" is a winning message, and I want Dems to lean into that, but IMO it is a quality of life thing as much as as a "screw the rich" thing. Do voters actually hate inequality abstractly, or do they just want a better life/opportunity for themselves? Do they hate institutions because they are wealthy or because they don't deliver what people want? Again we need an explanation for why Trump — who is pro-billionaire but anti-"cultural elite" and anti-institution — is a more successful working class populist than Biden.
Separately there are policy qs of whether antitrust works, how to regulate tech, etc. This is case-by-case and I'm no expert, but I think Kelsey's arguing that you can do more for competition by lowering barriers to entry / supporting small businesses vs. punishing the top. This seems fair to me, e.g. I'm much more interested in laws around data interoperability/portability, public funding for shared AI resources like CalCompute, etc than I am in breaking up tech conglomerates. I am very worried about corporate power concentration & cronyism but not sure if antitrust is the policy lever I'd choose to limit that.
I'm going to jump in again. I don't want to be a pest; I don't have good answers either. But I want to complicate this statement slightly:
"We can all agree that the Dems have neglected (and thus lost) the working class. The question becomes: why?"
I guess the first question I would ask is what time frame you're thinking of. I often think about this article arguing that an important change happened in the 70s, post-Watergate. The Democrats expanded their coalition to include precisely the sort of centrist pro-business politicians that Kelsey spoke approvingly of.
But I don't know if there was an option to hold the working class together as a voting bloc; off the top of my head I can't think of a Left party in another country that succeeded where the Democrats failed in maintaining a core working class constituency.
I am inclined to believe that the biggest shift, in the last couple of elections has been shifting racial coalitions (and that's caused by some combination of Obama having a non-replicable strength with voters of color, white backlash to Obama and, I think, a more fragmented news environment).
I can come up with partial explanations but they all fall short of my confusion about the 2024 election and how people decided that they wanted to repeat 2016-20, but I guess many people you talk to didn't find the first Trump term that notable or off-putting which is probably true even if I find it surprising.
Democrats lost touch on cultural issues. They seemed to stand for things that a lot of Americans did not understand or relate to. The fight for equity, for instance, was leveraged effectively by the right to stand for being anti-opportunity, which is deeply ironic.
"But Biden was one of the most pro-labor presidents of the last 50 years."
Only 5.9% of the population is in private sector unions. "Did something for the teamsters" is a nice headline, but organized labor (outside public sector unions) just isn't a big force anymore. Most of the working class is not in a union, and many of the existing unions are basically their enemies (the teachers union closed the schools for two years, and the medical guilds drive up their healthcare cost).
Think of a typical working class person. He's working in an amazon warehouse or he's an HVAC tech or she's some low level office or service worker. A bailout for the teamsters does nothing for them.
What did happen is that 27.9% of GDP was spent on COVID lockdowns, which is the kind of spending you get in a world war except we paid people to stay home from work and order uber eats rather then the battle of midway (those working class people were delivering the uber eats BTW while you were in zoom). Then Biden passed three gigantic party line spending bills that Larry Summers said would cause inflation, and they caused inflation. That inflation meant that most of the working class saw a fall in real wages during Biden and responded to that.
School closures, race riots, woke silliness, exploding crime, millions in basically illegal asylum claims flooding the border. Oh and Biden was senile and his replacement is one of the worst politicians ever with no organic support.
Dems failed on culture, economics, and providing even basic government services.
I think you’d resonate with Corbin Trent’s Substack, America’s Undoing. He’s been writing a lot about public competition, among other topics. https://americasundoing.com
I just read the transcript. Enjoyed the interview!
However, I do think that being anti-tech will be a major part of the Democratic party going forward. Look at this last year: tech is in the bag for trump, they donated to him and bent their platforms to support him. They are to the left what the universities are to the right: an institution that we perceive has been captured by the other side.
Moreover, tech is extremely unpopular. If someone ran on breaking up tech monopolies, they would win votes.
agree, I think SV is dramatically underrating how unpopular they are among the broad public (not just Dem elites etc). Big Tech, AI, social media, "the phones" poll poorly across both parties and most demographics — and part of it is because most people's experience of these technologies is in fact quite bad/antisocial/etc, in addition to the partisan stuff. have been thinking about how to write about this gap!
The rank and file tech workers tend to vote Democrat, so I hope party elites can keep the anti-tech rhetoric in check.
I *do* think there are specific bad actors to go after, like social media and phone-based gambling. Just attacking "billionaires" is a bad strategy IMO.
The one positive thing about a second Trump term that I hope we all come away with is what a real, lived, informed perspective on what the actual alternative to liberal democracy is.
Honestly I think Americans were incredibly naive to think authoritarianism couldn’t happen here. My grandparents fled Germany. While there are differences it was an incredibly modern society and ultimately not that long ago. Like a generation ago
I’ve been stuck on the opening line of this Substack post for a while now.
"These days I am quite stressed about the fate of 'liberal democracy.' Frankly, it’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Biden Dems talked about it."
It’s frightening because it’s not just an expression of anxiety about “liberal democracy,” it’s an admission of never having understood what that term actually means, paired with a kind of pride in that ignorance. And this isn’t a one-off lapse; it reflects a much wider cultural problem.
When citizens begin to treat civic illiteracy as a personality trait, or ideology as a substitute for understanding, democracy doesn’t die in dramatic fashion — it dissolves quietly through neglect. People who never learned (or who have forgotten) what their system is built on can’t recognize when it’s being dismantled.
What’s especially dangerous is the way “liberal democracy” is dismissed as branding, as though it were just shorthand for a political party’s platform. It isn’t. It’s the structure that upholds everything else, the rule of law, individual rights, equality, dissent. To misunderstand that is to mistake the foundation for the wallpaper.
I mean yeah that’s why I started out this post that way! I am admitting to not, prior to this year, fully appreciating the system and why it works how it does. Thus I spent a lot of this year reading and learning, and now have a deeper understanding.
But IMO people with your position need to ask themselves why “saving democracy” failed as a pitch at the ballot box vs. scolding people for “civic illiteracy,” which is something this podcast tries to answer.
I didn't mean it as a scold, but more as an observation that this is a really deep problem.
I do spend a lot of time thinking about why the messaging didn't connect, and I have a lot of thoughts on why, very few of which place blame on folks that didn't understand, care about, or believe in the threat that we're seeing. I'd love to speak more about this if your interested!
And yes, I did use ChatGPT to clean up my original response. I couldn't get the words I wanted to share quite right. I've pasted it below:
This is the reply I've crafted:
I've been struggling with a response to the first line of this substack post for quite a while.
"These days I am quite stressed about the fate of “liberal democracy.” Frankly, it’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Biden Dems talked about it."
This scares me because, on its face, it reflects a deep misunderstanding of basic American Civics. Worse, it's posed in way that seems almost proud of the stance the author has, while also demonstrating that this level of civic disengagement is broad.
The saying "those who don't understand their history are doomed to repeat it" is applicable here. People who don't understand the system of government they have are apt to let it go, without understanding the consequences. It is extremely problematic that influential people think liberal democracy is a brand, or simply the kind of policies the Democrats are running on, interested if recognizing that it's what guarantees individual rights and equality before the law. It mistakes the fundamentals/foundations of what people ate provided with only what they see either in the news, on social media, etc.
I'm not sure whether this is a failure of it education system, the news media as a whole, the audience, or a consequence of the success of the country as a whole, where most people never have to worry about our remember how it's run and why
Yes it’s a deep problem. I don’t think I have any “pride” about it, just being honest — papering over doesn’t work, plenty of people feel this way. Also your original pre ChatGPT comment is phrased better, you don’t need the AI!
Interesting conversation! One thing I picked up from your summation of narratives that undergird Silicon Valley (technology drives progress, empowering brilliant individuals is good, market competition surfaces the best and should not be constrained) is the surprising lack of any notion of the public good. While reasonable people can sign onto all of the three points, do these rules ensure that such an ecosystem will endure after it has been mined by brilliant individuals/orgs for their own benefit? Not to be all “we live in a society”, but what is their obligation to the rest of the world?
I think SV folks would argue that point #1 *is* about the public good. Science and technology drives public good: life-saving vaccines and medicines, machines that save us from backbreaking labor, economic growth that allows countries to focus on stuff like human rights, etc. Connecting to #2 and #3, there's also a Hayekian argument that if brilliant technologists are free to pursue their self-interest, they will end up spontaneously creating many of these societally beneficial innovations.
Separately we can have an empirical discussion about whether this has in fact happened. But I think SV earnestly believes that its philosophy does result in the greatest good.
Yes I think I follow the Hayekian argument about markets as knowledge producing mechanisms, which add to the public good. My impression is that the SV folks think their obligation to the public stops there, and they are justified in capturing most of the value from their inventions/discoveries for themselves.
My impression of silicon Valley is that they believe that they do not in fact capture most of the benefits of their innovations on account of information being inherently something which is difficult to contain. Whether or not this is actually true is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree, but I think they genuinely believe that, for example a company which makes a breakthrough will genuinely not capture most of the benefits of the new innovation on account of people following in their footsteps and producing similar products, even though these products would not have been produced without the companies original effort. It appears to me that in silicon Valley, it is a common belief that society insufficiently incentivises New science and technology on account of information being a public good in the economic sense.
I think that summary may be accurate... and it is also deeply disturbing if "that's all there is" to the SV philosophy... where is the soul? where is the art? where is the humanity? how do we develop empathy, dignity, and grace? what matters if all there is is technology and markets and wealth accumulation (because wealth accumulation matters more than value creation to most people in tech and most people in general in the United States).
One additional thing I think is interesting is, we’re already starting to see Democratic candidates emerge who embody the kinds of changes you both talk about — here in Georgia as well as in Maine and Texas. Candidates willing to talk authentically and forcefully about what’s going on in America right now, bringing a willingness to fight that frankly hasn’t been there among national level Dems in way too long.
Which gets at something that’s maybe more characteristic of the Dems than the GOP — were such a less homogeneous party that we simply don’t fall in line the way the Republicans do, so I’m not sure we can just decide to become more populist and pivot to that, and everyone just follows that line. We need great candidates who can break through and capture our hearts — maybe that’s a strength, maybe that’s a weakness? I’m sure it’s a bit of both — but great candidates tend to be the key for how the Democratic Party changes course.
And I feel optimistic we’re going to see lots of them emerge in the primary process next year.
On the network state stuff, one area they could really help is by creating and promoting standards for verification and trust - cryptographically verifiable identity documents, company formation documents, etc.
Most of these standards already exist but adoption by governments is nonexistent (though the EU is making good progress). The Wyoming DAO LLC framework is a good start.
No no no no!!! This is utter garbage. I’ve lived in China. The reason China is safe is not because of its censorship and surveillance, its because of the lasting influence of Confucianism, as well as its ethnic homogeneity. Chinese crime rates were just as low prior to the modern surveillance state, and other confucian-influenced cultures (Korea, Japan) have crime rates that are ALSO JUST AS LOW, and they have strong human rights protections. Its the culture.
This bullshit is inexcusable authoritarian bootlicking, and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself for posting it.
50 year-old lifelong liberal / progressive white cis male techie here, who's been living in the Bay Area, mostly in SF, since 1999.
My observation: I broadly interpret this discussion as "what happened / what went wrong with the Democrats?" while I am finding myself instead asking "what happened / what went wrong with tech, and young techies in particular?"
I feel like there is an ongoing conflation and confusion through this discussion between "the Democrats" and what is actually the online left. The policing, the censuring, the aggressive language policing is much more an artifact of the online left and it is the Republican party who has very successfully convinced many people -- including apparently not just tech right investors but also a lot of terminally online "tech floaters" or self-described libertarians -- that "the Democrats" hate them, hate competition, hate markets, and so on.
I find this wildly confusing as this has never been my experience. To the contrary, it has always been and continues to be the Republican party that is opposed to individual liberties. That this would come as a surprise to anyone reflects how deeply disconnect from our history and our politics many young people seem to have become. I wonder if the obsession with winning, with competition, with building has come at the cost of being a confident, self-actualized, empathetic person in the world with a common sense ability to see how politics and politicians attempt to shape narratives about ourselves and one another, to sow division to further their own projects.
I agree with the commenter here who correctly argues that anti-trust actions should not be considered anti-tech. This is something that Marc Andreessen and his ilk would like to have you believe. The idolation and adulation of figures like him and Elon Musk is another reality distorting force that seems to have addled the minds of so many young techies. These men are just morally corrupt and completely detached from reality as far as I can tell. Just listen to them and take them at face value. They are on an aggrieved mission to do what exactly, I think it is now clear they themselves don't understand. But they have managed to successfully convince, it would seem, even lesbian anti-establishment techies that "the Democrats" "hate tech."
This is all just so perplexing to me. What is happened today in this country was indeed always there to see, and while I am incredibly frustrated with actual Democrat politics and politicians, to lay the blame mostly at their feet for the rightward drift of tech is to absolve tech of its own failings.
Let me try to start again from the top, because I think my initial comments were based on slightly misunderstanding the post, and seeing the discussion in comments has helped clarify.
If I understand the conversation as two people who do not find politics (and, in particular, partisan politics) appealing talking about the barriers the feel or encounter, I'm quite sympathetic.
For myself, for example, I had intended to write about politics as one of the topics on my substack but have ended up mostly writing about music, because it's way more enjoyable. Writing about politics, I feel a much more aggressive critical voice in my head telling me that I need to be very careful about how I express things, and it makes it harder to write.
So, perhaps I'm just externalizing my own neurotic voice here, but reading the conversation I kept having more questions. For example, the current title, "how dems lost the future" makes me think of Henry Farrell's comment ( https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-usable-futures )
"One of the big problems of American politics - and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere - is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause."
As that makes clear the current problems are real but also weird. There's an odd void in American politics in that not just liberalism but most established political traditions are struggling to articulate a vision of the future.
"Speaking at the second annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in January 1992, Rothbard rubbished critics of the paleos for telling them they couldn’t ‘turn the clock back’: 'We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal ... We shall repeal the 20th century'."
All of that connects to one of the major topics of the conversation; how does SV think about the world. The descriptions are interesting, and believable, but one of the things that's clear is that there is much that's admirable about the SV ethos (I say as someone who was reading Wired magazine back in the mid-90s) but there are also tensions between that ethos and both certain threads of liberalism and what's popular.
I understand that you and Kelsey Piper regularly encounter people who feel negatively about the Democratic party because of real and perceived criticisms of the tech industry. But that didn't come out of nowhere, the Democratic party had been a big booster of SV, through the Obama years and, I would argue, two of the important contributors to that change have been (a) the rising political muscle of SV which isn't always comfortable (see, for example, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster ) and the rise of cryptocurrency which is one of the biggest, most visible embodiments of the idea that, " Building companies is good, even if they’re software-as-a-service slop companies. You don’t have to win a majority’s approval for the worthiness of your thing. You can build a thing and sell it to the people who do think it’s good, and that’s enough." but also attracting a lot of skepticism.
You can also, for example, see a challenge to that part of the SV ethos in _Abundance_ ("This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” -- a key part of that idea is that there have to be decisions made about what we need, and what is actually good for us, rather than just things that can sell (they make this more explicit, "The kind of abundance we seek differs from the kind of abundance our generation has seen. ... American politics has been focused on enacting what the historian Lizabeth Cohen calls 'A Consumers' Republic.' It has been remarkably successful. Catastrophically successful. We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what's needed to build a good life. We call for a correction. We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy. ")
These are difficult questions! I don't expect the two of you to have easy answers to them! But part of what was frustrating about the interview was that it sometimes felt like you were offering easy answers, like Kelsey saying, "the thing that actually most consequentially increases all of those freedoms is just a Democratic party that is more libertarian and more pro-business in a way that is achievable" is embedding a bunch of assumptions and presenting it as common sense.
I think the conversation about "meritocracy" is interesting and I appreciate that you don't present it as an easy question. I agree, merit hierarchies have their place! People at the top have often done something valuable to earn their place and, at the same time, I think any political party needs to have some ability to say, "there are many people who have succeeded in America through their hard work and creativity, some people who have succeeded by fraud, and a lot of people who are struggling who still work hard and are good people and shouldn't been forgotten."
I guess part of what I'm saying in all of this is that, I think there's an interesting discussion of what you encounter when you talk about politics (or imagine talking about politics) with the people around you, and then there's a separate question of, "So, it’s worse than I expected. And I started asking myself, what could I have done and what can I do now to get us off this track and on a better one?" That's a question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now, and I'm curious to see how your answer to that question evolves as you continue to think about it -- because it is difficult.
I listened to the entire discussion and I think--tell me if I misheard--there was NO discussion of the fact that overall Trump won white voters and Harris won POC voters; that Trump overall won male voters and Harris won female voters.
So what you were discussing is how can Dems win more white and male voters, right? That's in broad strokes where the difference in winning national election lies.
Easy: Just have the Dems become more racist and misogynist! Problem solved.
As you both agreed, it's not so much about policy but "vibe" and the vibe everyone knows is that Dems are less hateful than Repubs.
I was excited to see this conversation between two writers I enjoy, however I found the conversation a bit dispiriting. There were interesting observations about the experience and culture of SV but at times it felt insular and superficial (I thought about softening this sentence, but in the spirit of argument I left the more pointed version) .
A couple of thoughts.
First, I'd love to see Jasmine interview David Karpf about the idea of "futurity" in SV ( https://davekarpf.substack.com/ )I appreciate his interest in the history of tech culture and it would be an interesting companion to the Fred Turner interview.
Second, the entire discussion reminded me of some of the coverage in 2016 in which it felt like the writers were extremely familiar with an entire Democratic milieu, and saw Trump as a figure without context. He was written about but never with the same sense of being part of a broader community, and that contrast in coverage made it easier for people to project whatever they wanted on Trump.
Third, I have no objection to some of the concrete suggestions (support centrist candidates in the primaries, try to encourage people to be more open to disagreement, reduce the burden of unnecessary regulations) I think all of those are more difficult than the conversation implies.
I think the hope for the Democratic party is to combine building a broad coalition with an approach to policy-making which is broadly speaking technocratic -- conducted with an awareness of tradeoffs and the ability to think about policy goals across multiple domains (I'm think, for example, of Matthew Yglesias' argument that it would be good to connect domestic energy policy to foreign policy). I sometimes see the phrase that combining both of those traits is "table stakes" for a new leader of the Democratic party.
But those are really difficult tasks! Part of respecting liberal democracy means recognizing that there's a lot of muddling through and any given leadership will have strengths and weaknesses (for example, I think Sanders in 2016 might have been helpful for coalition building, but I'm less confident that he would have been a good manager of the policy process).
The conversation feels, at times, like it contrasts the existing flaws of real people with the imagined perfection of some ideal candidate, which is always going to make the current institutions look worse.
There are real problems with the Democratic party but it is helpful when trying to build an accurate diagnosis to acknowledge the constraints (real or perceived) that people are operating within.
I had a longer comment earlier (that I deleted most of), but I've been thinking about this conversation today, because it strikes at so much of what bothers me/interests me about the moment that we're in, politically.
I have two contradictory thoughts that I'm not sure how to reconcile -- and maybe you can help!
1) On the one hand, I'm as horrified by what the Trump administration is doing as it sounds like you are. I voted for Harris, campaigned for Harris, and have taken part in protests now during the 2nd Trump administration. What this White House is doing leaves me profoundly saddened, and I only hope we can put back together what it has broken when Trump has left the scene.
2) Voters aren't children, and we shouldn't treat them as if they are. They're adults, and the only sane option is to treat them as if they knew fully what they were doing when they walked into the voting booth last November/mailed in their ballots/etc. I don't think it's fair to say, "well, I voted Trump, but I really didn't think THIS would happen." I'm sorry, you saw January 6 like we all did. You'd seen enough to know what he was capable of.
Also, the media may not have emphasized it enough, but he talked constantly about "I am your retribution" and that he wanted to go after "the enemy within" during last year's campaign. Maybe voters didn't see that, but... we're all big boys and girls, right?
Here's the thing: democracy can't work if the winning coalition of voters doesn't get what they want. How can anyone have faith in the process if they do what it takes to win, execute successfully enough to win, and then don't get to implement their policies? Trump's coalition won in 2024, and they deserve their swing at the plate. They won fair and square.
Even if I wanted to -- and I do, believe me -- it's simply not possible to "rescue" Trump's voters from the consequences of their vote now. Again, they're adults. They voted for this, and they'll get another shot if they want to change course in November 2026.
Again, I'm not sure how to reconcile those -- but I feel both equally strongly.
I don't think anyone's interested in rescuing anyone from consequences, but figuring out how to persuade voters to remember this for the next election / offer a more compelling alternative. (I also think that "the Trump coalition gets to implement what they want" exists within the normal bounds of policy and does not mean overriding rule of law, etc.)
RE: Why didn't Trump voters know what was going to happen? This baffles me too; I asked Kelsey for her take in the interview. She said 1) Trump fatigue, which I think is real, and 2) "It is just much harder to persuade people of a simple fact about the world if they don’t think you share their values." #2 is very well-put. The Dems were not trusted messengers when they said "Trump will be bad," because people didn't trust the Dems themselves. From my conversations with a few Trump voters, it seems like "vote against the Dems" was the bigger thing than "voting for Trump." People are recency biased and have short memories.
Adults can be wrong about things! I'm deeply unimpressed by people who say they didn't know what they were voting for...but I'd rather give them grace, a measure of forgiveness they're not yet able to explicitly ask for, and work towards enabling fully free and fair elections in the future.
Oh, I completely agree with all your points. I think I'm just stuck on this idea about Trump voters not really knowing what they were voting for, because it's an idea I see thrown around a lot, and it's one I'd like to believe too. But what I keep asking myself is, "how do we know that?" We can't get inside the heads of 75+ million people and know what they were thinking 11 months ago. Are we *sure* we've got the diagnosis right?
Good conversation, even though I largely disagree with her views on what would make for a better Democratic party.
More "pro-business liberalism", I would best interpret as classical liberalism with better "UX" is not the answer. Yes, certainly good positive experiences with government services are important, agree there. If you're going to be the party of good governance you need to be better about delivering good governance.
But that part aside, the things she laid out is largely the Democratic party that formed over the last 30 years that ran into the rocks -- that forged a neoliberal governing consensus that helped grease the runway for increased monopolization and income inequality.
The CHIEF failure of the Democratic party has been ignoring rising economic inequality, taking the working class for granted, and not take up the mantle of economic populism. They did this to the best interpretation, because their coalition reformed around educated technocrats elites.
While the social issues we took up were not without good cause, and the educated liberal class is for the most part well meaning, we ceded the populist terrain to the right and a demagogic conman who does not care about anyone but himself.
Instead of building a multi-racial pluralistic coalition on a *class-based* axis, we got the hodgepodge of interest groups, identity-oriented politics, and "everything-bagel liberalism" as Ezra Klein puts it, that doesn't cohere into any narrative about what we stand for.
Her calling all the antitrust actions unfair is just erroneous. Corporate concentration has never been higher. Big-tech are nation state sized companies and rapacious rent-seekers.
Later on you talk about Dems being anti-competition. It is difficult to resolve the tension between capitalism, which thrusts us into competition with each other, and the belief in caring about and redressing our common concerns. But one of the core aims of antitrust is to restore market competition! Monopolies are a bastardization of market capitalism. The path I see is robust, *effective* universal public goods and a *effectively* regulated market capitalism.
Dems should be more nuanced in their treatment of the tech industry, but much of the criticism focused on big tech is absolutely warranted -- the epistemic collapse you broached is in good part an outgrowth of their careless stewardship of the information commons under the protections of section 230 and their anti-social algorithmic incentives.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I'm pretty unformed in my own thinking, and may land between you and Kelsey, but here’s my ~current stance:
We can all agree that the Dems have neglected (and thus lost) the working class. The question becomes: why?
One case is that Dem policies have "ignored rising economic inequality." I used to be pretty sympathetic to this. But Biden was one of the most pro-labor presidents of the last 50 years. He bailed out the Teamsters, he appointed Lina Khan to run antitrust, unemployment was at a decades low; yet the working class moved more toward Trump in 2024 than ever before. Meanwhile, as business-friendly as some neoliberal Dems have been, the Rs are vastly vastly more so. They are not the party of redistribution.
My conclusion is that while the working class (reductively, it's very diverse) in part is animated by material inequality/interests, it also has other values/political priorities that shape political allegiances, including cultural and quality of life issues, which we talked about more in this conversation. Zohran's campaign showed that "affordability" is a winning message, and I want Dems to lean into that, but IMO it is a quality of life thing as much as as a "screw the rich" thing. Do voters actually hate inequality abstractly, or do they just want a better life/opportunity for themselves? Do they hate institutions because they are wealthy or because they don't deliver what people want? Again we need an explanation for why Trump — who is pro-billionaire but anti-"cultural elite" and anti-institution — is a more successful working class populist than Biden.
Separately there are policy qs of whether antitrust works, how to regulate tech, etc. This is case-by-case and I'm no expert, but I think Kelsey's arguing that you can do more for competition by lowering barriers to entry / supporting small businesses vs. punishing the top. This seems fair to me, e.g. I'm much more interested in laws around data interoperability/portability, public funding for shared AI resources like CalCompute, etc than I am in breaking up tech conglomerates. I am very worried about corporate power concentration & cronyism but not sure if antitrust is the policy lever I'd choose to limit that.
I'm going to jump in again. I don't want to be a pest; I don't have good answers either. But I want to complicate this statement slightly:
"We can all agree that the Dems have neglected (and thus lost) the working class. The question becomes: why?"
I guess the first question I would ask is what time frame you're thinking of. I often think about this article arguing that an important change happened in the 70s, post-Watergate. The Democrats expanded their coalition to include precisely the sort of centrist pro-business politicians that Kelsey spoke approvingly of.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161025182816/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/
But I don't know if there was an option to hold the working class together as a voting bloc; off the top of my head I can't think of a Left party in another country that succeeded where the Democrats failed in maintaining a core working class constituency.
I am inclined to believe that the biggest shift, in the last couple of elections has been shifting racial coalitions (and that's caused by some combination of Obama having a non-replicable strength with voters of color, white backlash to Obama and, I think, a more fragmented news environment).
I can come up with partial explanations but they all fall short of my confusion about the 2024 election and how people decided that they wanted to repeat 2016-20, but I guess many people you talk to didn't find the first Trump term that notable or off-putting which is probably true even if I find it surprising.
I honestly do not understand in this comment or your other one what the specific substance of your critique/disagreement is.
I appreciate you saying that. I'll try to think about a better way to explain myself.
Democrats lost touch on cultural issues. They seemed to stand for things that a lot of Americans did not understand or relate to. The fight for equity, for instance, was leveraged effectively by the right to stand for being anti-opportunity, which is deeply ironic.
"But Biden was one of the most pro-labor presidents of the last 50 years."
Only 5.9% of the population is in private sector unions. "Did something for the teamsters" is a nice headline, but organized labor (outside public sector unions) just isn't a big force anymore. Most of the working class is not in a union, and many of the existing unions are basically their enemies (the teachers union closed the schools for two years, and the medical guilds drive up their healthcare cost).
Think of a typical working class person. He's working in an amazon warehouse or he's an HVAC tech or she's some low level office or service worker. A bailout for the teamsters does nothing for them.
What did happen is that 27.9% of GDP was spent on COVID lockdowns, which is the kind of spending you get in a world war except we paid people to stay home from work and order uber eats rather then the battle of midway (those working class people were delivering the uber eats BTW while you were in zoom). Then Biden passed three gigantic party line spending bills that Larry Summers said would cause inflation, and they caused inflation. That inflation meant that most of the working class saw a fall in real wages during Biden and responded to that.
School closures, race riots, woke silliness, exploding crime, millions in basically illegal asylum claims flooding the border. Oh and Biden was senile and his replacement is one of the worst politicians ever with no organic support.
Dems failed on culture, economics, and providing even basic government services.
I think you’d resonate with Corbin Trent’s Substack, America’s Undoing. He’s been writing a lot about public competition, among other topics. https://americasundoing.com
I just read the transcript. Enjoyed the interview!
However, I do think that being anti-tech will be a major part of the Democratic party going forward. Look at this last year: tech is in the bag for trump, they donated to him and bent their platforms to support him. They are to the left what the universities are to the right: an institution that we perceive has been captured by the other side.
Moreover, tech is extremely unpopular. If someone ran on breaking up tech monopolies, they would win votes.
agree, I think SV is dramatically underrating how unpopular they are among the broad public (not just Dem elites etc). Big Tech, AI, social media, "the phones" poll poorly across both parties and most demographics — and part of it is because most people's experience of these technologies is in fact quite bad/antisocial/etc, in addition to the partisan stuff. have been thinking about how to write about this gap!
Would love your take on this!
The rank and file tech workers tend to vote Democrat, so I hope party elites can keep the anti-tech rhetoric in check.
I *do* think there are specific bad actors to go after, like social media and phone-based gambling. Just attacking "billionaires" is a bad strategy IMO.
I think attacking billionaires is good strategy and the right thing to do.
Does that extend to Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and Jay Z?
There are a lot of people who admire billionaires.
The one positive thing about a second Trump term that I hope we all come away with is what a real, lived, informed perspective on what the actual alternative to liberal democracy is.
Honestly I think Americans were incredibly naive to think authoritarianism couldn’t happen here. My grandparents fled Germany. While there are differences it was an incredibly modern society and ultimately not that long ago. Like a generation ago
OMG when I saw you two together I said, “Oh f#%€, I gotta hear these two”…can’t wait! Haven’t even started yet.
I’ve been stuck on the opening line of this Substack post for a while now.
"These days I am quite stressed about the fate of 'liberal democracy.' Frankly, it’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Biden Dems talked about it."
It’s frightening because it’s not just an expression of anxiety about “liberal democracy,” it’s an admission of never having understood what that term actually means, paired with a kind of pride in that ignorance. And this isn’t a one-off lapse; it reflects a much wider cultural problem.
When citizens begin to treat civic illiteracy as a personality trait, or ideology as a substitute for understanding, democracy doesn’t die in dramatic fashion — it dissolves quietly through neglect. People who never learned (or who have forgotten) what their system is built on can’t recognize when it’s being dismantled.
What’s especially dangerous is the way “liberal democracy” is dismissed as branding, as though it were just shorthand for a political party’s platform. It isn’t. It’s the structure that upholds everything else, the rule of law, individual rights, equality, dissent. To misunderstand that is to mistake the foundation for the wallpaper.
I mean yeah that’s why I started out this post that way! I am admitting to not, prior to this year, fully appreciating the system and why it works how it does. Thus I spent a lot of this year reading and learning, and now have a deeper understanding.
But IMO people with your position need to ask themselves why “saving democracy” failed as a pitch at the ballot box vs. scolding people for “civic illiteracy,” which is something this podcast tries to answer.
Also are you writing this with ChatGPT?
I didn't mean it as a scold, but more as an observation that this is a really deep problem.
I do spend a lot of time thinking about why the messaging didn't connect, and I have a lot of thoughts on why, very few of which place blame on folks that didn't understand, care about, or believe in the threat that we're seeing. I'd love to speak more about this if your interested!
And yes, I did use ChatGPT to clean up my original response. I couldn't get the words I wanted to share quite right. I've pasted it below:
This is the reply I've crafted:
I've been struggling with a response to the first line of this substack post for quite a while.
"These days I am quite stressed about the fate of “liberal democracy.” Frankly, it’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Biden Dems talked about it."
This scares me because, on its face, it reflects a deep misunderstanding of basic American Civics. Worse, it's posed in way that seems almost proud of the stance the author has, while also demonstrating that this level of civic disengagement is broad.
The saying "those who don't understand their history are doomed to repeat it" is applicable here. People who don't understand the system of government they have are apt to let it go, without understanding the consequences. It is extremely problematic that influential people think liberal democracy is a brand, or simply the kind of policies the Democrats are running on, interested if recognizing that it's what guarantees individual rights and equality before the law. It mistakes the fundamentals/foundations of what people ate provided with only what they see either in the news, on social media, etc.
I'm not sure whether this is a failure of it education system, the news media as a whole, the audience, or a consequence of the success of the country as a whole, where most people never have to worry about our remember how it's run and why
Yes it’s a deep problem. I don’t think I have any “pride” about it, just being honest — papering over doesn’t work, plenty of people feel this way. Also your original pre ChatGPT comment is phrased better, you don’t need the AI!
Why are people so sensitive to being "scolded" or "corrected"? Where is this coming from?
Interesting conversation! One thing I picked up from your summation of narratives that undergird Silicon Valley (technology drives progress, empowering brilliant individuals is good, market competition surfaces the best and should not be constrained) is the surprising lack of any notion of the public good. While reasonable people can sign onto all of the three points, do these rules ensure that such an ecosystem will endure after it has been mined by brilliant individuals/orgs for their own benefit? Not to be all “we live in a society”, but what is their obligation to the rest of the world?
I think SV folks would argue that point #1 *is* about the public good. Science and technology drives public good: life-saving vaccines and medicines, machines that save us from backbreaking labor, economic growth that allows countries to focus on stuff like human rights, etc. Connecting to #2 and #3, there's also a Hayekian argument that if brilliant technologists are free to pursue their self-interest, they will end up spontaneously creating many of these societally beneficial innovations.
Separately we can have an empirical discussion about whether this has in fact happened. But I think SV earnestly believes that its philosophy does result in the greatest good.
Yes I think I follow the Hayekian argument about markets as knowledge producing mechanisms, which add to the public good. My impression is that the SV folks think their obligation to the public stops there, and they are justified in capturing most of the value from their inventions/discoveries for themselves.
My impression of silicon Valley is that they believe that they do not in fact capture most of the benefits of their innovations on account of information being inherently something which is difficult to contain. Whether or not this is actually true is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree, but I think they genuinely believe that, for example a company which makes a breakthrough will genuinely not capture most of the benefits of the new innovation on account of people following in their footsteps and producing similar products, even though these products would not have been produced without the companies original effort. It appears to me that in silicon Valley, it is a common belief that society insufficiently incentivises New science and technology on account of information being a public good in the economic sense.
HERE HERE!!!
I think that summary may be accurate... and it is also deeply disturbing if "that's all there is" to the SV philosophy... where is the soul? where is the art? where is the humanity? how do we develop empathy, dignity, and grace? what matters if all there is is technology and markets and wealth accumulation (because wealth accumulation matters more than value creation to most people in tech and most people in general in the United States).
One additional thing I think is interesting is, we’re already starting to see Democratic candidates emerge who embody the kinds of changes you both talk about — here in Georgia as well as in Maine and Texas. Candidates willing to talk authentically and forcefully about what’s going on in America right now, bringing a willingness to fight that frankly hasn’t been there among national level Dems in way too long.
Which gets at something that’s maybe more characteristic of the Dems than the GOP — were such a less homogeneous party that we simply don’t fall in line the way the Republicans do, so I’m not sure we can just decide to become more populist and pivot to that, and everyone just follows that line. We need great candidates who can break through and capture our hearts — maybe that’s a strength, maybe that’s a weakness? I’m sure it’s a bit of both — but great candidates tend to be the key for how the Democratic Party changes course.
And I feel optimistic we’re going to see lots of them emerge in the primary process next year.
On the network state stuff, one area they could really help is by creating and promoting standards for verification and trust - cryptographically verifiable identity documents, company formation documents, etc.
Most of these standards already exist but adoption by governments is nonexistent (though the EU is making good progress). The Wyoming DAO LLC framework is a good start.
No no no no!!! This is utter garbage. I’ve lived in China. The reason China is safe is not because of its censorship and surveillance, its because of the lasting influence of Confucianism, as well as its ethnic homogeneity. Chinese crime rates were just as low prior to the modern surveillance state, and other confucian-influenced cultures (Korea, Japan) have crime rates that are ALSO JUST AS LOW, and they have strong human rights protections. Its the culture.
This bullshit is inexcusable authoritarian bootlicking, and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself for posting it.
50 year-old lifelong liberal / progressive white cis male techie here, who's been living in the Bay Area, mostly in SF, since 1999.
My observation: I broadly interpret this discussion as "what happened / what went wrong with the Democrats?" while I am finding myself instead asking "what happened / what went wrong with tech, and young techies in particular?"
I feel like there is an ongoing conflation and confusion through this discussion between "the Democrats" and what is actually the online left. The policing, the censuring, the aggressive language policing is much more an artifact of the online left and it is the Republican party who has very successfully convinced many people -- including apparently not just tech right investors but also a lot of terminally online "tech floaters" or self-described libertarians -- that "the Democrats" hate them, hate competition, hate markets, and so on.
I find this wildly confusing as this has never been my experience. To the contrary, it has always been and continues to be the Republican party that is opposed to individual liberties. That this would come as a surprise to anyone reflects how deeply disconnect from our history and our politics many young people seem to have become. I wonder if the obsession with winning, with competition, with building has come at the cost of being a confident, self-actualized, empathetic person in the world with a common sense ability to see how politics and politicians attempt to shape narratives about ourselves and one another, to sow division to further their own projects.
I agree with the commenter here who correctly argues that anti-trust actions should not be considered anti-tech. This is something that Marc Andreessen and his ilk would like to have you believe. The idolation and adulation of figures like him and Elon Musk is another reality distorting force that seems to have addled the minds of so many young techies. These men are just morally corrupt and completely detached from reality as far as I can tell. Just listen to them and take them at face value. They are on an aggrieved mission to do what exactly, I think it is now clear they themselves don't understand. But they have managed to successfully convince, it would seem, even lesbian anti-establishment techies that "the Democrats" "hate tech."
This is all just so perplexing to me. What is happened today in this country was indeed always there to see, and while I am incredibly frustrated with actual Democrat politics and politicians, to lay the blame mostly at their feet for the rightward drift of tech is to absolve tech of its own failings.
Let me try to start again from the top, because I think my initial comments were based on slightly misunderstanding the post, and seeing the discussion in comments has helped clarify.
If I understand the conversation as two people who do not find politics (and, in particular, partisan politics) appealing talking about the barriers the feel or encounter, I'm quite sympathetic.
For myself, for example, I had intended to write about politics as one of the topics on my substack but have ended up mostly writing about music, because it's way more enjoyable. Writing about politics, I feel a much more aggressive critical voice in my head telling me that I need to be very careful about how I express things, and it makes it harder to write.
So, perhaps I'm just externalizing my own neurotic voice here, but reading the conversation I kept having more questions. For example, the current title, "how dems lost the future" makes me think of Henry Farrell's comment ( https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-usable-futures )
"One of the big problems of American politics - and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere - is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause."
As that makes clear the current problems are real but also weird. There's an odd void in American politics in that not just liberalism but most established political traditions are struggling to articulate a vision of the future.
It's worth noting, also, that one of the more powerful political factions right now is explicitly anti-future. From here ( https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century )
"Speaking at the second annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in January 1992, Rothbard rubbished critics of the paleos for telling them they couldn’t ‘turn the clock back’: 'We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal ... We shall repeal the 20th century'."
All of that connects to one of the major topics of the conversation; how does SV think about the world. The descriptions are interesting, and believable, but one of the things that's clear is that there is much that's admirable about the SV ethos (I say as someone who was reading Wired magazine back in the mid-90s) but there are also tensions between that ethos and both certain threads of liberalism and what's popular.
I understand that you and Kelsey Piper regularly encounter people who feel negatively about the Democratic party because of real and perceived criticisms of the tech industry. But that didn't come out of nowhere, the Democratic party had been a big booster of SV, through the Obama years and, I would argue, two of the important contributors to that change have been (a) the rising political muscle of SV which isn't always comfortable (see, for example, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster ) and the rise of cryptocurrency which is one of the biggest, most visible embodiments of the idea that, " Building companies is good, even if they’re software-as-a-service slop companies. You don’t have to win a majority’s approval for the worthiness of your thing. You can build a thing and sell it to the people who do think it’s good, and that’s enough." but also attracting a lot of skepticism.
You can also, for example, see a challenge to that part of the SV ethos in _Abundance_ ("This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” -- a key part of that idea is that there have to be decisions made about what we need, and what is actually good for us, rather than just things that can sell (they make this more explicit, "The kind of abundance we seek differs from the kind of abundance our generation has seen. ... American politics has been focused on enacting what the historian Lizabeth Cohen calls 'A Consumers' Republic.' It has been remarkably successful. Catastrophically successful. We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what's needed to build a good life. We call for a correction. We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy. ")
These are difficult questions! I don't expect the two of you to have easy answers to them! But part of what was frustrating about the interview was that it sometimes felt like you were offering easy answers, like Kelsey saying, "the thing that actually most consequentially increases all of those freedoms is just a Democratic party that is more libertarian and more pro-business in a way that is achievable" is embedding a bunch of assumptions and presenting it as common sense.
I think the conversation about "meritocracy" is interesting and I appreciate that you don't present it as an easy question. I agree, merit hierarchies have their place! People at the top have often done something valuable to earn their place and, at the same time, I think any political party needs to have some ability to say, "there are many people who have succeeded in America through their hard work and creativity, some people who have succeeded by fraud, and a lot of people who are struggling who still work hard and are good people and shouldn't been forgotten."
I guess part of what I'm saying in all of this is that, I think there's an interesting discussion of what you encounter when you talk about politics (or imagine talking about politics) with the people around you, and then there's a separate question of, "So, it’s worse than I expected. And I started asking myself, what could I have done and what can I do now to get us off this track and on a better one?" That's a question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now, and I'm curious to see how your answer to that question evolves as you continue to think about it -- because it is difficult.
Voted for trump. Still would.
I feel like your in some alternate world.
I listened to the entire discussion and I think--tell me if I misheard--there was NO discussion of the fact that overall Trump won white voters and Harris won POC voters; that Trump overall won male voters and Harris won female voters.
So what you were discussing is how can Dems win more white and male voters, right? That's in broad strokes where the difference in winning national election lies.
Easy: Just have the Dems become more racist and misogynist! Problem solved.
As you both agreed, it's not so much about policy but "vibe" and the vibe everyone knows is that Dems are less hateful than Repubs.
TLDR: You didn't discuss gender and race!
I was excited to see this conversation between two writers I enjoy, however I found the conversation a bit dispiriting. There were interesting observations about the experience and culture of SV but at times it felt insular and superficial (I thought about softening this sentence, but in the spirit of argument I left the more pointed version) .
A couple of thoughts.
First, I'd love to see Jasmine interview David Karpf about the idea of "futurity" in SV ( https://davekarpf.substack.com/ )I appreciate his interest in the history of tech culture and it would be an interesting companion to the Fred Turner interview.
Second, the entire discussion reminded me of some of the coverage in 2016 in which it felt like the writers were extremely familiar with an entire Democratic milieu, and saw Trump as a figure without context. He was written about but never with the same sense of being part of a broader community, and that contrast in coverage made it easier for people to project whatever they wanted on Trump.
Third, I have no objection to some of the concrete suggestions (support centrist candidates in the primaries, try to encourage people to be more open to disagreement, reduce the burden of unnecessary regulations) I think all of those are more difficult than the conversation implies.
I think the hope for the Democratic party is to combine building a broad coalition with an approach to policy-making which is broadly speaking technocratic -- conducted with an awareness of tradeoffs and the ability to think about policy goals across multiple domains (I'm think, for example, of Matthew Yglesias' argument that it would be good to connect domestic energy policy to foreign policy). I sometimes see the phrase that combining both of those traits is "table stakes" for a new leader of the Democratic party.
But those are really difficult tasks! Part of respecting liberal democracy means recognizing that there's a lot of muddling through and any given leadership will have strengths and weaknesses (for example, I think Sanders in 2016 might have been helpful for coalition building, but I'm less confident that he would have been a good manager of the policy process).
The conversation feels, at times, like it contrasts the existing flaws of real people with the imagined perfection of some ideal candidate, which is always going to make the current institutions look worse.
There are real problems with the Democratic party but it is helpful when trying to build an accurate diagnosis to acknowledge the constraints (real or perceived) that people are operating within.
I had a longer comment earlier (that I deleted most of), but I've been thinking about this conversation today, because it strikes at so much of what bothers me/interests me about the moment that we're in, politically.
I have two contradictory thoughts that I'm not sure how to reconcile -- and maybe you can help!
1) On the one hand, I'm as horrified by what the Trump administration is doing as it sounds like you are. I voted for Harris, campaigned for Harris, and have taken part in protests now during the 2nd Trump administration. What this White House is doing leaves me profoundly saddened, and I only hope we can put back together what it has broken when Trump has left the scene.
2) Voters aren't children, and we shouldn't treat them as if they are. They're adults, and the only sane option is to treat them as if they knew fully what they were doing when they walked into the voting booth last November/mailed in their ballots/etc. I don't think it's fair to say, "well, I voted Trump, but I really didn't think THIS would happen." I'm sorry, you saw January 6 like we all did. You'd seen enough to know what he was capable of.
Also, the media may not have emphasized it enough, but he talked constantly about "I am your retribution" and that he wanted to go after "the enemy within" during last year's campaign. Maybe voters didn't see that, but... we're all big boys and girls, right?
Here's the thing: democracy can't work if the winning coalition of voters doesn't get what they want. How can anyone have faith in the process if they do what it takes to win, execute successfully enough to win, and then don't get to implement their policies? Trump's coalition won in 2024, and they deserve their swing at the plate. They won fair and square.
Even if I wanted to -- and I do, believe me -- it's simply not possible to "rescue" Trump's voters from the consequences of their vote now. Again, they're adults. They voted for this, and they'll get another shot if they want to change course in November 2026.
Again, I'm not sure how to reconcile those -- but I feel both equally strongly.
I don't think anyone's interested in rescuing anyone from consequences, but figuring out how to persuade voters to remember this for the next election / offer a more compelling alternative. (I also think that "the Trump coalition gets to implement what they want" exists within the normal bounds of policy and does not mean overriding rule of law, etc.)
RE: Why didn't Trump voters know what was going to happen? This baffles me too; I asked Kelsey for her take in the interview. She said 1) Trump fatigue, which I think is real, and 2) "It is just much harder to persuade people of a simple fact about the world if they don’t think you share their values." #2 is very well-put. The Dems were not trusted messengers when they said "Trump will be bad," because people didn't trust the Dems themselves. From my conversations with a few Trump voters, it seems like "vote against the Dems" was the bigger thing than "voting for Trump." People are recency biased and have short memories.
Adults can be wrong about things! I'm deeply unimpressed by people who say they didn't know what they were voting for...but I'd rather give them grace, a measure of forgiveness they're not yet able to explicitly ask for, and work towards enabling fully free and fair elections in the future.
Oh, I completely agree with all your points. I think I'm just stuck on this idea about Trump voters not really knowing what they were voting for, because it's an idea I see thrown around a lot, and it's one I'd like to believe too. But what I keep asking myself is, "how do we know that?" We can't get inside the heads of 75+ million people and know what they were thinking 11 months ago. Are we *sure* we've got the diagnosis right?