#396 — The Way Forward
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Summary
Matthew Iglesias joins me to talk about why the Democratic Party has lost its way, and why he thinks it s time for a course correction. We also talk about identity politics and why we should all be woke about it.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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I am here with Matthew Iglesias. Matt, thanks for joining me.
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So how would you describe your journalistic and political background before we jump into the
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Sure. You know, I started writing a blog sort of in my spare time when I was a college student
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around 2001, 2002. Graduated, worked for a kind of a small progressive magazine here in D.C. called
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The American Prospect for a number of years. I've been doing different things, but mostly,
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you know, kind of digital journalism from Washington, D.C., writing about politics.
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I was working at Vox.com. I left there a little bit more than four years ago,
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go off on my own, start a substack. Like a lot of people, I think I felt a little pushed out of the
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currents in progressive politics that had been churning in the late teens, circa 2020.
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Been doing my own thing since then. You know, consider myself liberal, leftist center,
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a Democrat. I voted for Kamala Harris. But, you know, with the kind of increasing unease about where
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things had gone. And I'm sad that Donald Trump won the election, but I also hope this can be an
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opportunity to kind of set things aright, do some course corrections in left-of-center politics.
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Yeah, yeah. So you and I are in a similar spot politically. Perhaps there's some daylight
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between us, which we can explore. But how would you say the Democrats have lost their way? If you had
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to summarize the destroyed fortunes of the Democrats politically in this last cycle,
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what would you give as the primary reasons? I mean, you lose your way in many ways
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simultaneously. But, you know, I mean, I think primarily Democrats have gotten sort of out of
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touch with kind of mainstream cultural and moral values that people have. You know, I have some of
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my own criticisms. There are ways in which I myself am a little out of touch with mainstream
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cultural and moral values. But, you know, you really saw a party that has gotten so invested
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in certain kinds of identity politics and, you know, slightly loopy ideas about people and democracy
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in ways that I think don't really work and have lost or sort of buried the core of what it is that
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people like about the idea of a political party that cares about, you know, protecting vulnerable
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people and making sure that we're all taken care of has gone into this kind of hyper-focus on the
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idea of a kind of, you know, escalator of privilege and oppression in a way that has, you know,
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distorted the kind of basic epistemological soundness of how progressives think and talk.
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So let's talk about identity politics because have you migrated at all in your view of this issue?
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Because I, you know, you and I have never spoken before, but I dimly remember you making some
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fairly woke noises when I had my falling out with your colleague Ezra Klein back in, I think it was
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2018. Have you, are you in the same spot you were in there or did I, am I misrecalling what,
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No, I mean, I think you're correct. I mean, I have shifted my view quite a bit about, about what the
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balance of risks are in our society. You know, I think that when that went down in 2018, it seemed
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to me that, you know, all this stuff about political correctness, et cetera, was being really kind of
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badly overblown. And I think that was wrong. You know, that what we really saw over the next few
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years is that there was a real challenge among Democrats in kind of articulating, you know, basic
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approaches to crime problems, police brutality, other things that came up over the, over the past,
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you know, over the next several years. And, you know, I was on the wrong side of that. And I think
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more and more people have been catching up to the fact that, you know, we, we let things get too far.
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Yeah. So actually it's in the news now. I mean, I think it's probably still in the news. I just
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happened to read a, a nation article on this topic that I found especially galling. There's this story
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of the, the Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely incident on the, on the subway car in New York. Penny, as many
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people remember, was acquitted of, of murder charges and even manslaughter charges. And he was found not
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guilty of whatever Alvin Bragg threw at him. Yet I, it's still being covered. It seems to me in,
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in left-wing politics and media in ways that seem morally deranged and don't suggest that the,
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the democratic party is going to learn the lessons or, or it's guaranteed to learn the lessons that,
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that I think you and I agree that it should learn, right? So this, this nation article kind of lined up
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the case of Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione. I don't know if you read this article, but it made them
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seem essentially as equivalent cases of vigilante justice or pseudo justice that were, you got both
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monstrous acts of violence that are being celebrated by, in one case, the far left, in one case, the far
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right. And if anything, according to this author of the nation article, the Penny case where you had
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somebody to my eye, actually just simply trying to defend innocent bystanders from the, the rampages of
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a, a violent lunatic. You had the, what was optically judged to be the worst or, or least
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sympathetic case, which is to say that the writer of this article thought that his readers at the
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nation would find Luigi Mangione, the person who murdered a, a ran, more or less randomly selected
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healthcare CEO would seem more sympathetic than Daniel Penny, who, you know, by the lights of this
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author had effectively lynched a, a homeless black man on a subway car. How do you view that case?
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And, and are you, are you, are you as baffled by some of the, the left-leaning intuitions you've
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heard about it as I am? Yeah. I mean, the, the, the Penny case is interesting because I think this is a
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little bit of a lagging indicator, you know, of the politics from a previous time when the indictment
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originally came down. I, you know, never looked into this in extreme detail. He was acquitted. It
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seemed like it was not that close of a call among the jury in a very liberal city. I think you've got
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to believe that, you know, there was no case, right? There's no strong case against him. And that if
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anything, you know, the racial politics on this probably went in the opposite direction of the one
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that I've seen some leftist people suggesting, you know, I think an African-American Marine who
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stepped up to defend other people on a subway would have been given the benefit of the doubt
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by left-wing people. But instead, a white seen as conservative one was viewed with, with incredible
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suspicion. So, you know, I think the coverage of that case that I've seen since the verdict in some
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of the further left sources, some of the Twitter feeds of left-wing politicians has been, has been
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pretty thoughtless and pretty bad. At the same time, if you compare the reaction to what it would
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have been four or five years ago, it's much more muted. You know, The Nation has always been a far
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left publication. When I was, you know, very enthusiastically voting for Barack Obama in 2008,
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2012, they were saying, oh, he's like, he's way too moderate. You know, we're much more left-wing than
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that. So, you know, I don't think it's surprising to see ideas in The Nation that I think are too far
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left. I don't think it's so surprising that a handful of politicians in New York City are fired
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up about this. When Penny was first arrested, you know, there were, there were big protests in New
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York demanding that this happen. When he was acquitted, much more muted response. I mean, I think that the
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country has moved to the right in a number of ways, Donald Trump winning the election, sort of most
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notable of them, but that we are seeing a, not an evaporation of kind of out-of-control left-wing or
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woke ideas, but a, but a recession of them back more to, you know, the kind of normal level that it's
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historically been at. But I did think that this case was a good example of, you know, racial politics
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on the left getting a little bit out of control. You know, you can't expect people to ride on mass
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transit if there's going to be mentally disturbed people acting out and threatening people. I think
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that's sort of common sense. It's something that transit officials around the country have started
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to recognize. And it is, it's good if bystanders come in and intervene and try to help people.
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It's, of course, tragic if when they do that, somebody ends up being seriously hurt or even
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killed in this case. But that just goes to show, you know, that we need to think more seriously
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about how we treat people with severe mental illness. The man who unfortunately died in this
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case, as I understand it, had been arrested many, many times, had been offered all different kinds
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of mental health support and treatment. But, you know, we've really moved away from being able to
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coercively treat people who are a danger to themselves and to others. And that's a real problem,
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I think, in our society. You can't just treat, you know, the public space as a kind of, you know,
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open venue for disorder and chaos. I have a heuristic in my mind that I would want the
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Democrats to absorb. I'm wondering if this goes too far for you. But it seems to me that any reference
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to race most of the time, virtually all of the time, is politically and even ethically
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suspect at this point, right? I think we should be very, very slow to talk about, think about,
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reference, point to, be motivated by the concept of race in our politics and really in our ethics.
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I mean, there are certain cases where I think you could defend it and perhaps those could readily
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spring to mind. But generally speaking, you know, 99% of the time, it seems to me to be the wrong
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direction to move. And politically, I think this is now obvious, but I think I could make the ethical
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case for that. Does that seem like it's overreaching to you? Well, I mean, it depends what we're talking
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about, right? I mean, I read a book recently about prison gangs. And obviously, I think if you want to
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understand how prisons function, the fact that many of them are sort of de facto controlled by these
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racially segregated gangs is very salient. It's very relevant. You can't speak intelligently about
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that without talking about race. At the same time, I mean, I really do think that what we want to do
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as humanists, as liberals in the sort of broad philosophical sense, is reduce the salience of race
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in our society, right? Is not injected into contexts where it's ambiguous or, you know, debatably
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relevant. And I think that a trend really emerged around five to 10 years ago of doing the opposite,
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right? Of sort of taking situations and finding opportunities to inject a racial discourse into
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them. And there was a view that that was going to help us make some kind of progress as a society.
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And I think that's really wrong. I mean, it's wrong. It's wrong as an electoral politics question,
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but it's wrong as a question of human psychology and interaction, right? We don't want to be
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encouraging people to think in terms of racial and ethnic categories. That's sort of contrary to
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the American value ethic historically. Obviously, we have had a lot of people in American history
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who do encourage people to think in terms of racial categories. But classically, what you would say
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is, well, those people are racists, right? They're doing something bad by saying we need to be
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thinking about race all the time. We need to be thinking about racial categorizations all the time.
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And we should be moving away from that. You know, I have one of my grandparents is from Cuba.
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And so, you know, a question arises in the scheme of, you know, American ethnicity. Does that mean I'm in
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some sense? Am I a Hispanic person, quote unquote? And, you know, I think in most real world senses,
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it's like, no, you know, I have light skin. I only speak English. I was raised in a Jewish household.
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Don't you know, Matt, you're Latinx. Did you get the memo?
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At the same time, you know, it's a true fact about my family, my ancestry, et cetera. But, you know,
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there's no fact of the matter about these kind of schemes and categorizations where people,
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we have family members who are from different places. We have ancestries. But it's not healthy
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to encourage this kind of, you know, obsessive thinking about race and ethnicity.
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Yeah. Well, the painful irony for me, and this is something that I've whinged about,
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I think for several years at this point, is that the Democrats, you know, up until yesterday,
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thought about race, spoke about race every bit as much as white supremacists on the right. I mean,
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you have to go all the way to the neo-Nazis to find people on the right who are as vocal about the
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salience of race and racial difference. And that just seems patently crazy to me. I mean, just,
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and it's, I mean, what's wrong with identity politics, in my view, you know, there are many
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ways you could come at this, but it's, I mean, to come back to the Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely case,
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and perhaps make it generic. I mean, if you described a situation on a subway car where
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there was a, you know, a violently deranged and threatening person who came on the car and
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terrified everyone, you know, including women and children, and a man at some risk to himself
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and in some, at some obvious risk of future prosecution stood up to try to pacify this
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person and attempted to use the minimum amount of force, but because of his, you know, lack of
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perfect skill wound up severely injuring or even killing the aggressor. If you describe that
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situation generically to people, left of center, as you move further left, and you don't actually have
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to move that far left. I mean, really just a step left of center. I think you meet people reliably
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who don't know how they feel about that situation, no matter how exhaustively you describe it and
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describe the motives of people involved and the testimony of bystanders, et cetera. They don't
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know how they feel about it until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved, right? And
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if you swap the skin colors on the various participants, they feel differently, reliably
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differently. If you tell them that the victims are Jewish, they feel one way. If you tell them that
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they're black, they feel another way, all of these markers of identity are incredibly salient for
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them morally. And that, to my eye, is the very definition of not actually thinking these things
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through in moral or ethical terms, right? It's just, it is a layer of political delirium that is
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riding atop of our, you know, otherwise serviceable moral toolkit and visibly, palpably damaging it.
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So what I think we need in the Democratic Party to reboot, and we're going to come to your list of,
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I think, nine principles that you wrote about on your blog, Slow Boring, which seemed to have been
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quite influential. But I think that, you know, one place to reboot from is just a call for basic
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moral sanity and honesty, right? And if changing skin color in a situation changes your intuitions as
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reliably as it does for a white supremacist, the onus is on you to make moral sense of that.
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I think that's right. I mean, I think that what happens in the identity politics space on the left
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is people have taken a, you know, I would say a widespread moral failing, right, which is to judge
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cases in part based on the identity of the people involved and your kind of group affiliations and
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turn it into a kind of a virtue. And I don't know, you know, I think there's probably a lot of people
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whose snap judgments of a situation might be influenced by information about the ethnicity
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of the people involved. But what's become very unusual on the left in America is for people to
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say that that's good, right? To say like that that's true and correct. And in a more abstract
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policy sense, I think there's been a move to, you know, a lot of disparate impact type logic. I mean,
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a kind of circular argument that I've seen play out in D.C. where I live, but in a lot of other cities
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is, you know, there's been a move in cities to have cameras, you know, to catch cars who are
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speeding, right? And then in D.C., in Chicago, in a number of other cities, once these were installed,
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it's come out, well, you know, they're catching more people speeding in Black neighborhoods.
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And so that's bad, right? Somehow the cameras are discriminating or something. And you think that
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through and it's like, well, by definition, right, we've put cameras in place precisely because
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cameras aren't subject to these kind of biases. If people are speeding more in African-American
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neighborhoods, that could be a disproportionate benefit to the pedestrians living in those
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neighborhoods, right? I mean, if people are driving unsafely by your house, by your kid's school,
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that's really bad, right? You have learned something about the world from that. And it also
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just doesn't matter, right? I mean, there's, you know, cities should set speed limits appropriately.
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It shouldn't be too low. The fine shouldn't be too high, whatever it is. But if you
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have reasonable traffic rules, then you should try to enforce them and get people to drive
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safely. And this kind of endless inquiry about the identities of people involved or trying to draw
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inferences or trying to draw obvious conclusions about what's right and what's wrong based on those
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kind of things, it doesn't make sense. It's not something that you find, you know, if you look
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at the kind of the great reference points that even progressive-minded people look to, say, you know,
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who are our moral leaders in the past? Who are our political heroes? That's not how they talked.
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It's not how they acted. You know, these are ideas and habits of thought that have arisen
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relatively recently, I think, out of a kind of slightly odd academic milieu that I don't totally
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understand. It's not, you know, I was a philosophy major when I was in college and, you know, read political
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moral theorists, et cetera. None of the people I was assigned said that you should proceed on that
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kind of basis. You didn't get to that chapter in Rawls where it said... Right. I mean, you know,
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it's not Rawls. It's not Mill. It's not part of the liberal tradition. It's not part of the Marxist
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tradition even. It's... I don't know 100% what it is, but it's become very, very dominant and especially
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became ultra-dominant about five years ago. And, you know, it's something... I mean, this is part of
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what I wrote in my piece, but, I mean, it's something that Democrats really desperately need
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to move away from back to, you know, an ideal of treating people as individuals and judging them
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based on what they do. You know, we can talk about the history of America, right, in which obviously
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racial categorizations were a very important part of American history for a long time. That's like a
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real fact. We don't need to lie to people about that, but it's not something that we should encourage
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on a forward-looking basis. Well, why isn't wealth inequality as a focus an appropriate surrogate for
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rectifying the disparities as people that have, obviously, a historical explanation that people
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are still worried about? I mean, if it is, in fact, true, and last I looked, it seemed to be true,
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although these data are a few years old, that, on average, African-American families have one-eighth
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the amount of familial wealth as white families. And that's a disparity which might have, you know,
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several reasons, but the most glaring certainly is the history of racism and racial discrimination and
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racist policies in America, right? I mean, that has a legacy effect that would seem undeniable,
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but whatever the reasons, it is the current reality. And if you just focused on class,
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if you focused on disparities in wealth and all of the opportunities that correlate with wealth,
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you know, educational opportunities, et cetera, health outcomes, if you focus on those things
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in a way that was race-blind, you would obviously disproportionately advantage or appropriately
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and proportionately advantage, depending on how you thought about it, people of color without ever
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stepping onto this terrain of politically invidious and morally suspect distinctions,
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which, you know, of the sort that we saw during COVID, where you have, you know, the Biden
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administration saying that we're going to privilege black and brown people for the vaccine,
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because that's obviously the good thing to do, or we're going to give, you know, aid to black,
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you know, businesses run by black and brown Americans before white Americans, because that's
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obviously a step in the direction of equity. I mean, that, you know, it's understandable that,
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I mean, the good intentions at the bottom of all that are recognizable,
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but it is understandable that that is just akin to just obvious political evil when viewed from
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the perspective of a desperately poor white American who, you know, should be just as much
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within the circle of our social concern as any other poor person.
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Yeah. I mean, you know, something I like to tell people, remind people of is when Barack Obama was
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president, you know, early in his term, he was trying to do a big healthcare bill that, you know,
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among other things, it expanded Medicaid, it gave extra money to low-income people to help take care
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of their health needs. And Rush Limbaugh, you know, conservative radio host, very influential
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guy while he was alive, he used to say, oh, this Obamacare, this is really a reparations program,
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right? Because that was, he was trying to sink an effort to help poor people by making it out to be
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just an effort to help black people, right? He was trying to mobilize, you know, racial division to
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defeat an egalitarian economic program. That's a very classic trope in American politics. And if you go
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back, Martin Luther King's book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community? He talks about how,
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you know, the only way we are going to develop what he wanted for black people, you know, living in
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slums, living in ghetto neighborhoods, was to build an alliance with lower-income white people who had
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similar needs. And in the freedom budget that he and Bayard Rustin and Philip Randolph put together,
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you know, they say, we're going to have quality education when we have good schools for everyone.
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We're going to have good jobs for everyone, right? That's sort of how you try to create a politically
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tractable vision as you decrease these kind of racial divisions. And, you know, it's obviously,
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it's politically toxic. I remember in the summer of 2020, I was in rural Maine, you know, and there's
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a kind of affluent town by the coast, and they had all the Black Lives Matter, you know, banners up there.
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And then there's a poorer town inland, you know, people living in trailers, things like that. All white
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in both cases, very white state. You know, and obviously, you know, if you're living in a trailer
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in Penobscot, Maine, and the lumber industry that your family used to work in has gone away,
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things like that. I mean, you don't want to be lectured by other people about how privileged you
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are in life. And I think that's just completely obvious. It also does a disservice, actually, to
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William Julius Wilson talked about the truly disadvantaged, by which he meant, you know,
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poor Black people living in, you know, high-poverty neighborhoods, right, really cut off from
00:25:07.800
economic opportunity and kind of functional social institutions. You do no favors to people in that
00:25:15.120
kind of situation to kind of hyper-focus on, you know, microaggressions or kind of pure
00:25:22.760
representational politics among the elite. Because, you know, the only people able to take advantage of
00:25:29.360
those kind of opportunities are actually people who have achieved a fair amount of prosperity,
00:25:35.360
right? So if you want to help people who are really suffering, which I think you should,
00:25:40.840
you know, you need to focus on kind of objective indicators of deprivation, whether that's income,
00:25:46.480
wealth, health status, other kinds of things like that. That's common sense politics. That's the way it
00:25:51.540
was done by almost everybody up until, you know, the 20-teens. And it's been a dead end. And I think
00:25:59.920
that should be the message of the extent to which all kinds of people swung toward Trump this time
00:26:07.760
I want to, again, I want to jump into your nine principles, and this will take us over some of the
00:26:12.660
ground we've already covered, perhaps, but in greater detail. But before we jump into your nine
00:26:17.360
principles, I'm wondering, what do you think Biden's legacy will be at this point?
00:26:22.620
You know, I mean, I think it's going to be quite meager. His whole pitch was that he was going to
00:26:27.820
sort of save the country from Trump. To go out the way that he did, to be succeeded literally by Trump,
00:26:35.900
you know, means there essentially is no legacy, except that we don't know what's going to become
00:26:41.260
of Trump, right? I mean, if he turns out to be as threatening to American institutions as
00:26:47.260
I'm certainly concerned he might be, that could leave Biden with a very bleak legacy.
00:26:53.100
If four years of Trump goes okay in America, you know, then he'll be a kind of a funny trivia
00:26:57.860
answer, right? Like Benjamin Harrison, who served between two Grover Cleveland terms. And that's
00:27:03.340
because, you know, who even remembers Grover Cleveland, right? So Biden may just not amount to
00:27:09.420
anything when he, I think, actually had a lot of promise, you know, in 2020. He had some appealing
00:27:16.860
ideas, I think. And I think that the vision of kind of a figure from an older generation who was going
00:27:24.800
to try to bring Democrats back to stability is why he won the primary, you know, in a very kind of
00:27:32.240
tumultuous time. He was seen by rank and file Democrats as a steady pair of hands who was going
00:27:38.760
to, you know, both beat Trump, but also bring the party back to a set of values that, frankly,
00:27:44.500
Biden had been associated with for most of his career. And then that's not how he governed. And
00:27:49.320
I'm, you know, I'm quite taken aback by it and have been consistently for the past several years.
00:27:55.280
And what do you actually expect of a second Trump term at this point?
00:27:58.660
I mean, it's very hard to say, you know, I mean, everything that you get from Trump
00:28:03.120
is very contrary signals all the time. You know, he campaigns the whole time. He says,
00:28:09.100
we're going to have tariffs on everybody. And then his allies in the business community say,
00:28:13.820
no, don't worry, he's not really going to do that. There was a Wall Street Journal
00:28:17.120
article this morning which said, no, like he's really he is going to do that. There was this kind
00:28:22.060
of, I think, slightly unnerving story about ABC settling a defamation case with Trump that I think,
00:28:31.080
you know, I'm not a lawyer, but most people who are informed about these things say they think ABC
00:28:37.240
could have won that case if they'd taken it to court, almost certainly would have won. But,
00:28:41.500
you know, they wanted to settle it because the Walt Disney Company didn't want to make Trump
00:28:45.560
angry, didn't want to make him upset. You know, he's going to put in an FBI director who says he's
00:28:51.300
going to like purge the institution and find Trump's enemies. So, I mean, who knows? You know,
00:28:57.980
it's, it's, if there's anything that I know from 20 something years of covering politics, it's that
00:29:03.680
it is very hard to predict the future. I hope it goes okay. You know, not all of his ideas are
00:29:09.040
terrible. I think people had some valid reasons to want to vote for him. I think it's unfortunate
00:29:15.080
that Republicans threw up somebody with really a kind of a low character. You know, nobody,
00:29:21.300
nobody has ever said to me about Donald Trump, well, if you only, like, if you really knew him,
00:29:26.740
you know, if you saw what he was like behind closed doors, he's so much more thoughtful. He's
00:29:31.020
so much kinder than he comes across as. And you hear that every other president, you know,
00:29:35.920
maybe it's BS, but like people who worked for George W. Bush, people who worked for Biden,
00:29:41.200
people who worked, you know, people who lost Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, their closest aides
00:29:46.240
will say, you know, this person is so great. I talk to people who worked for Trump in his first
00:29:50.500
term and they'll say, you know, no, like this guy's totally nuts. It's, it's exactly what it
00:29:55.340
seems like. And that, you know, that worries me. Do you think Trumpism and the more generically
00:30:02.920
this trend of right-wing populism in America ends or, or gets severely mitigated in the absence of
00:30:10.380
Trump? I mean, is Trump a singular figure that has potentiated this cult of personality that has
00:30:16.260
subsumed the Republican party? Do we swing back to a, a more normal Republican party after Trump or
00:30:22.380
not necessarily? You know, there's an element of personalistic politics to Trump that's,
00:30:27.800
that's very unusual. And that I think is going to be hard for anybody else to replicate.
00:30:33.200
There's also an idea though, of a kind of a crude nationalism to Trump that I think has kind of
00:30:40.620
deep roots and that you see in a lot of different countries and a lot of different contexts that I
00:30:46.400
don't, I don't like, you know, I don't think it's morally admirable to be saying things like,
00:30:52.260
we should have taken the oil, that kind of thing. I don't think that, you know, there's very
00:30:56.660
legitimate criticisms of how immigration policy was handled under Joe Biden. I also don't think
00:31:01.840
that trying to promote, you know, indifference to people because of, they were born in another
00:31:07.180
country is like a good thing. This is a form of identity politics that I think, you know,
00:31:14.180
can be quite problematic, but that also is, is kind of deep in the, in the structure of democratic
00:31:20.920
politics and isn't going to be vanishing. I did think, I thought that if Trump had lost,
00:31:26.380
you know, that the, that the spell would kind of break on this, that Republicans would say,
00:31:31.720
you know what, like this guy had some good points, but fundamentally he's a loser. He's dragging us
00:31:38.040
down by being so weird. We have a lot of other people in our party who can talk about border
00:31:43.180
security without being so nutty and without having these kind of authoritarian aspects. Since he won,
00:31:49.820
you know, winners tend to prosper. People are going to try to copy him whether they can or can't.
00:31:54.600
What do you make of the failure on the part of Democrats and the Biden administration to deal
00:32:00.520
with the immigration problem at the border, which was so obviously politically disastrous? I mean,
00:32:05.820
even if you had no other concern about it, the, the optics of it were so terrible.
00:32:10.780
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