The last few weeks have been, to put it mildly, politically difficult for the president as his draconian deportation crackdown, the Iran war, soaring oil prices, and inflation crater his approval ratings. At this moment, it seems everyone except his core MAGA base has abandoned him, including staunch supporters in the influencer class.
Meanwhile, with the midterms coming up, some centrist Democratic pundits are prodding their party to engage in soul searching and move to the right to win back the working-class voters it lost to Trump.
What does the MAGA elite’s loss of faith mean for the rest of the Trump presidency? Will it temper the president or make him more dangerous? And are centrist Democrats onto something or will their advice diminish their party’s moral authority?
To discuss these issues and more, we are joined by The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie in this episode of Zooming In. We also discuss Jamelle’s vision for a more assertive Congress to push back against the imperial presidency.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube
Shikha Dalmia: Thanks for joining us for Zooming In, Jamelle. I want to talk to you about the future of our duopoly: the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. But let’s talk about you a little bit first because this is the first time you are appearing on our podcast. At a very young age, you’ve become a New York Times columnist, the most prestigious journalistic perch on the planet, where you’ve been writing brilliant columns commenting on policy and politics every week. You have become a sensation on Instagram through your short videos that you cut yourself. And then of course you do a podcast with The Nation’s former columnist John Ganz called Unclear and Present Danger, in which you guys discuss what the world is looking like now given that America is the lone superpower.
There are two things that are very clear about you: one, you’re very, very busy, and the other is that you come from the left. So tell us a little bit about your professional, personal, ideological journey—how you got to where you are today, what motivates you?
Jamelle Bouie: Sure. First, thank you so much for having me. I don’t often talk about myself, so I don’t have a ready-made narrative here. I went to the University of Virginia for a program called Political and Social Thought, which was kind of a Great Books program within the university’s politics department, led by one guy for 25 years. He has a very expansive and capacious vision of Western civilization. The class involved reading Plato and the Greek tragedies and Roman orations, but then also later in the semester we were reading Toni Morrison and W.E.B. Du Bois, and delving into South African literature, like lots of stuff in the broad West, you might say.
So that was my major. That’s what I studied. I didn’t have any ambitions of going into journalism. I was kind of uncertain as to what I would do. I, even at the time, very much considered myself on the political left. Political psychologists observe that your sense of what you believe is formed quite early and is very much a product of circumstances and lots of things not under your control. And there was never a time where I was like, “What do I think?” Very early on, even in high school, I did lots of debate and forensics and such—I identified myself as a person who was like, “Yeah, I am left of center,” whatever that means. That’s where I am. And that’s changed and grown and become more sophisticated in some ways over the years. But that’s always been my ideological orientation.
After college, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do. I was working for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs as an assistant around the place doing odd jobs here and there. I was also blogging. This was the age of the blog. And I was updating my blog, in conversation with other young blogger, writer, college student types. And it’s actually through all of that, through that community of blogging—people whom I still know, some of my closest friends even today—that I kind of got into journalism. I applied for a writing fellowship at The American Prospect. Many journalists have come through that magazine.
Dalmia: Ezra Klein.
Bouie: Yeah, Ezra Klein, that’s right.
Dalmia: Matthew Yglesias.
Bouie: Adam Serwer at The Atlantic. Lots of people. So I applied for this writing fellowship. I got the job. And that’s what got me into journalism, into writing for the public. And from there … I mean, it doesn’t feel like that long ago; even though, as I look back, it was like 16 years ago, it doesn’t feel like that long ago. But I was at the Prospect for about three years and some change. I was at The Daily Beast for a little less than a year. I was at Slate ... I feel like Slate is where I came into my own as a journalist and as a writer and public commentator. I was at Slate for almost five years. I covered politics, wrote about history more and more—very obviously as a left-of-center voice. And after four or five years at Slate, I was basically invited to join the Times. And I took the invitation.
I’ve been at the Times since 2019. I do think that both my style of writing and what I write—my subject matter—has changed quite a bit. When I was at Slate, I was known very much as someone who primarily commented on race. At the Times, I don’t really write about that very much. I think maybe that remains my reputation, but my actual body of work at the Times is much more focused on questions of U.S. constitutionalism, democracy, these sorts of things.
Dalmia: I think maybe your background at the University of Virginia grounded you for some of that work. And those are frankly the more important questions right now. What does a system of checks and balances entail? That’s the kind of work we are doing at The UnPopulist. Unlike you, my intellectual journey has been different. I mean, I have switched from being a libertarian to now being sort of a progressive classical liberal.
Which actually brings us to what I want to talk to you about: the Republican Party. Unlike you, that has changed quite a bit and it’s continuing to change even as we speak. I was struck recently when Christopher Caldwell—whom you probably know ... he was one of the early Orbánists in America. He, even before Rod Dreher, I think, started talking up Orbán’s Hungary and what wonders it was doing for Western civilization. And he was also an early enthusiast of Trump. And now he just recently wrote a piece in The Spectator called “The End of Trumpism,” in which he was essentially arguing that by launching the Iran war, Trump has fundamentally betrayed his own movement. He’s now carrying out the agenda of the very neoconservative democracy-spreaders whom he rose to prominence to destroy.
Caldwell actually goes further than just his critique of the war. He lights into Trump’s corruption, character, narcissism, megalomania. You could have written that piece; I could have written that piece; or William Kristol, a Never Trumper, could have written that piece. Since then, of course, you’ve had a number of other MAGA influencers who followed suit. You’ve had Tucker Carlson just this week issuing a mea culpa and saying he really repents having ever backed Trump and he’s got that on his conscience. And you have Megyn Kelly … all of them expressing disillusionment. But the base—Trump’s base—seems to be where it is. I mean, his approval rating on the whole has cratered, but his base is solidly behind him.
So here is the question: Is this elite defection meaningful at all? Does it have any practical political consequences? How do you think it’s going to affect the rest of Trump’s term? And the more interesting question is: Do you think it’ll make Trump more or less dangerous now that he doesn’t even have this postliberal elite that he cares about? He’s just reaching out to the base now.
Bouie: I’ll say first that this turn—of Caldwell, of Carlson, of this group against Trump—strikes me as: someone takes a date to the dance, and is having a great time for most of the party, and then finally goes to look at her face and is like, “I don’t know. I don’t know how much I’m into this.”
Dalmia: It’s been a rather long date, let me say!
Bouie: I mean, it feels like someone who has been in a years-long relationship and then at the end is like, “I think I’m being catfished.” It’s like, what are you talking about? All the things that Caldwell identifies about Trump were there at the jump. They were clearly identifiable! I think that for these voices, what they saw Trump as ... first of all, I think they projected some of their own impulses, desires, visions onto him, their own resentments onto him—and perceived him as having the same kind of enemies as they did. Those enemies being the post-1965 liberal order in the United States, the notion that the United States isn’t some blood-and-soil formation but is something centered on a set of ideas and propositions, the notion that there is no particular racial hierarchy that we ought to reify and establish or defend—all these things that they are preoccupied with.
“Americans like their demagoguery with like a taste of something sweet. They don’t just want it to be a pure ball of rage. I think of George Wallace, who if you actually watch George Wallace on the trail in interviews, that’s a charming dude. That’s a guy whom the press loved. Audiences loved him. I wrote years ago comparing Trump and Wallace, and one of the comparisons is that Wallace is this ultimate showman, and Trump is able to combine really vicious demagoguery with entertainment.” — Jamelle Bouie
In Trump’s bigotry and disregard for convention, they said to themselves: “This is a guy we can work with.” What they failed to understand is that Trump doesn’t actually care about that stuff on a substantive, ideological level. His actual goal is aggrandizement. “How can I make myself the center of the world?” Which, if it’s tearing down the existing structures of American life, that’s one way to do it. And they were clapping the entire time. Now that Trump decided that doing this is going to be fighting a war, they’re not so happy. But to me, it’s like: this is what you signed up for! You made the mistake of reading more into this guy than existed. And I just don’t take these mea culpas all that seriously. To me, it sounds like what you’re telling me is that you’re an idiot. Like, I don’t know how else to put it. What you’re telling me is that something that literally tens of millions of Americans immediately identified—like, not even a second thought; they saw the guy and were like, “I have his number”—and then 10 years later you’re like, “I don’t know what happened.” I just don’t take it seriously. And I actually am somewhat dismayed at the number of people who are looking at Carlson and saying, “Maybe there’s something there.” No, no, there isn’t.
As far as the practical political implications of this, that’s an interesting question because his base—Trump’s base—they understood what they were getting with that guy. They were under no illusions. They weren’t dependent on the support of these postliberal elites for making their decision to go with him. The cult of personality is not attached to any rational thought. It’s just its own thing. So what does it mean, politically, for Trump to lose the support? I’m not sure it really means anything. I think for Trump specifically, I’m not sure it means anything.
For MAGA, such that it’s a movement, it might mean something. As we look ahead to a post-Trump world, there will be figures who try to take up the mantle, who try to move the ball forward. And the disillusionment with Trump will certainly structure who is able to do that. You can imagine someone like JD Vance being really harmed by his close association with Trump as the vice president—falling into the same problem that Kamala Harris did, not being able to fully separate himself from Trump, especially if Trump is still alive. If Trump is still alive and he’s somehow willingly left the political scene, he’s still going to exert a gravitational pull on everyone in the Republican Party, but I think especially Vance. And so that might just open the door for someone else to take up the mantle, to try a version of these politics.
I’m not sure a version of these politics gets traction without Donald Trump. I think they actually depend on Donald Trump’s pre-political celebrity in order to work. When you begin to talk about this stuff without Trump, without Trump’s personality attached to it—I’m thinking here of a speech that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt gave last year—you hear that stuff and you’re like, “This just sounds anti-American.” Trump’s ability to kind of be like, “Am I kidding? Am I not?,” allows it. But when it’s just these guys talking, you’re like, “You sound like the guys we beat in World War II.”
Dalmia: … We won’t name them. I very much agree, but here’s the thing. Trump has created a solid base. I think it’s fair to say it’s the one effect he’s had—he’s radicalized the Republican base. So there’s that base which is sitting there for the picking. And then you’ve got the postliberal right. And there are figures—intellectual figures, political figures—who want to be a tribune of the postliberal right. I think JD Vance is the most prominent leader [for this crowd]. I think he’s genuinely an ideological guy. He genuinely has some kind of a postliberal ideological agenda that is a combination of his Catholicism, his nationalism, and his roots in Appalachia—and we will set aside his Indian wife and his mixed-race children. But he does have some vision of where he wants to take the party. How do those things interact—the radicalized base and then the postliberal right with certain political leaders who are trying to bring all that together?
Bouie: Yeah, I mean, the way to square that circle—the way you’re able to bring those things together—is through straight demagoguery, through translating whatever commitments Vance happens to have into the language of this angry mob-like political formation. I’m not going to write off Vance here; I think he’s a very skilled politician. I think he’s especially skilled in elite maneuvering—that’s why he’s vice president. I think it does remain to be seen how effective he is as a politician because he hasn’t really had to play in the big leagues. He hasn’t really ever been up against—choose your metaphor—apex level, S-tier politicians who might reveal him for who he is, or who I think he is at the very least. So it’s uncertain how this actually plays on the field. But he’s talented enough.
I think, for him, in trying to advance this vision, it’s about finding ways to keep together this quite fractious coalition on the right. He has to find some kind of demagogic message. The challenge is that in the American context—and this has certainly been true of Trump—Americans like their demagoguery with like a taste of something sweet. They don’t just want it to be a pure ball of rage. I think of George Wallace, who if you actually watch George Wallace on the trail in interviews, that’s a charming dude. That’s a guy whom the press loved. Audiences loved him. I wrote years ago comparing Trump and Wallace, and one of the comparisons is that Wallace is this ultimate showman, and Trump is able to combine really vicious demagoguery with entertainment.
And it works to sort of, almost moderate the message—people are like, “Well, I can’t take him that seriously.” Vance is a guy you take seriously. His whole persona is of the intellectual. He can spin a down-home tale about how he’s from Appalachia. But his political background—he’s come through the elite world. Even the way he talks betrays an intellectualism that may not be able to sell the message to even the Republican base. Especially if there’ll be someone offering the message in the way that they like. It’s not hard to imagine a Tucker Carlson, a very skilled showman, or a Marjorie Taylor Greene, a very skilled influencer—people whose experience before politics comes out of the world of entertainment—being able to do this thing again.
Dalmia: This is an interesting point because, if you look at Marco Rubio right now and Vance—who are both in Trump’s Cabinet—precisely because Marco Rubio has been through the political mill, run in a lot of races, won a lot of them, he actually has some finesse when he’s trying to message Trump. He keeps a certain distance from Trump and doesn’t endorse everything Trump says. He tries to put his message in his own words in a way that’ll go down a little bit better with the public. Vance has not managed to do that. I mean, for all his intellectual sophistication, he hasn’t been able to triangulate Trump—he’s just thrown in his entire lot with Trump. And you saw the same thing when he went to Hungary and this completely ham-handed pitch that he made for Orbán over there, where he starts dumping on Zelenskyy and Zelenskyy’s interference in the election when he’s sitting right there interfering in the Hungarian elections. So there’s just something tinny about him. And I think that’s probably because he hasn’t gone through the political mill.
But the one thing that I think he is better than anybody else at playing is a certain kind of Schmittian politics—the kind of politics Trump has inaugurated. You don’t rule in the interest of the common good. You don’t wield governing institutions in a neutral way. You use them to reward your [ideological] friends and punish your [ideological] enemies, which includes all kinds of social groups. And I think that Vance may take that up and maybe be an effective tribune for it. That could actually pull in the Republican base. To the extent that the base has been radicalized along exactly these lines, they hate the left, he’ll pick that up.
Bouie: Yeah, I think that’s a correct diagnosis of what Vance is able to do quite effectively. I think it could work with the Republican base. If he’s in a competitive primary, his ability to articulate that use of the state might be the thing that gets him the nomination, in addition to all the advantages built-in of just being the vice president.
“It’s hard to make cross-national comparisons, but the experience of Labour in the U.K. makes me think that attempting to shrink the differences is not going to work [for Democrats]. But it’s a path you can take. My own feeling is that rather than demand this Leninist level of conformity to a single agenda, Democrats should first kind of embrace the fact that the party has a lot of things going on in it and let the most talented people do the thing they’re going to do and pursue their ends. Inasmuch as you need something unifying, identify a set of principles.” — Jamelle Bouie
But where I find my skepticism … and, again, not to write him off, and who knows what the background conditions of the election are going to be; it could be that the country is falling apart and there’s not really much Vance can do. But assuming a level playing field, where my skepticism comes in for Vance is that that really is foreign to the American political experience, the American political tradition. One of our nation’s secular saints concludes its first inaugural asking us to say: “We are friends, we’re not enemies, we must be friends. Let us heed the better angels of our nature.” That is American scripture. And one thing that we expect of our political leaders is at least a nod to the idea that we’re engaged in a common endeavor.
Even Trump, when it’s time to run for elections—not this last time, but in 2016 and 2020—very much pitches himself as someone who is going to be president for all Americans. And if you observe the ads the campaign puts out for communities—that’s what they’re pitching. “Trump is going to make you a homeowner.” “Trump is going to help you get a good job.” “Trump is going to help create a flourishing community for all Americans.” That’s the message.
Dalmia: But he hasn’t governed like that.
Bouie: No, no, but I think the people who run his campaigns recognize that you have to gesture towards some kind of recognition: “Yeah, we’re governing for everyone.” And so the explicit us-versus-them, Schmittian politics of Vance … I guess I honestly don’t know how it will fare in the context of the other side dropping the mantle of Lincoln, dropping the mantle of FDR, dropping the mantle of Reagan, even—of these figures that embody this tendency in American life. The Democrats are going to run with it. And maybe against Trump, who can mobilize all of these infrequent voters who are like, “I want to vote for the guy who makes me rich,” it’s not as effective. But against just another kind of regular Republican politician, it might well be. One of my theories of American elections over the past 10 years has been that ordinary Republican politicians are laboring under real voter skepticism.
Trump’s success is precisely because he’s not perceived to be an ordinary Republican politician. And the one time he kind of was—2020, as the incumbent president—he lost.
Dalmia: So I guess you are a little bit more optimistic—in a sense—than I am, that you think that some kind of a moderate Republican figure can emerge ...
Bouie: ... No, I’m not optimistic about that. I’m more optimistic about how the broad electorate might respond to this stuff. But I’m absolutely not optimistic about the ability of the Republican Party to produce a figure who isn’t a maniac.
Dalmia: Now I think we are on the same page. Actually, that very nicely segues into what I wanted to ask you next, which is: What does the Democratic Party do about this?
After [the 2025] November elections, you had written this very nice piece saying: “Make No mistake, Trump Is an Albatross.” And you went through the results and showed how his extremist way of governing in his first year had completely backfired.
But there was another argument that you were also pushing back against—an argument we hear a lot from centrist Democrats like Ruy Teixeira or some of the folks in the Third Way crowd, who looked at 2024 and saw a durable realignment that Trump has wrought. They say Trump built a genuine multiracial working-class coalition around a culturally conservative agenda and positions that were anti-immigration, trans issues, DEI, what have you. Meanwhile, their point was that the Democratic Party has been captured by what Ruy calls a shadow party—a number of activist groups and academia, nonprofits, philanthropists, large sections of the media—and they now cater to the cultural elites, the young professionals who are hip and progressive.
Bouie: People like me—he’s talking about people like me.
Dalmia: And in doing so, they said, “the Democrats have alienated their working-class base. They’ve lost that foundational core of theirs.” And the prescription that follows from that is that Democrats need to return to their working-class roots and they actually want the next Democratic version of the party to move in a more centrist MAGA direction, which means becoming more culturally conservative on all kinds of issues.
And also economically right-wing—I wouldn’t call them “conservative” because Reagan was very different from the current right-wing economics—which means: “Be less globalist; be more anti-trade; more protectionist; definitely more anti-immigration.” Their read of the November elections was that it wasn’t merely a referendum on the extremist way that Trump has governed, not really a referendum on his agenda; and that Democrats really need to have a Sister Souljah moment: throw the radical left under the bus, and recover the working-class voters. What do you think about this?
Bouie: Yeah, whenever I read this stuff—and I do read it—it always strikes me that it’s shadowboxing with professional rivals and not so much an actual diagnosis of what’s happening in the electorate. For one, if you’re just observing how Democratic politicians up and down the ticket, across the board, have interacted with voters, you’d actually be hard pressed to find some of the stuff they say is weighing down the Democratic Party. The classic example is: “Democrats have to stop saying ‘Latinx.’” And you ask yourself, when was the last time an elected Democrat or Democratic candidate used the word “Latinx”? It’s 2020. There was like a month when it happened and that was it. “They’ve got to stop saying ‘Defund the Police.’” There was a month when it happened in 2020.
“So much of my recent thinking about political parties and partisanship is informed by how the Republican Party first came together in the 1850s. And what you see in that period is a party that does identify a principle first and foremost: ‘We are against slavery.’ They don’t really care why you’re against slavery. There are many reasons to be against slavery … And that is the lodestar. And we are going to pursue anything we can as a partisan organization to affect that in public policy. That doesn’t mean we’re going to take the maximalist position every time, but it does mean that this is where we’re always going to be aiming.” — Jamelle Bouie
To me, so much of this looks like fighting old battles from a half decade ago and not actually dealing with the facts on the ground. And what I perceive to be the facts on the ground—and I think my view is vindicated by events—is that the 2024 results were not actually the beginning of a new governing coalition. What happened was that using discontent with the economy, with prices in particular, in a sense that Trump represented the pre-pandemic world—which is emphasized by the fact that so much of Trump’s attempted political appeal in the election was about his liveliness as compared to Biden. It’s a very aesthetic message. Trump assembled a narrow electoral majority, a narrow plurality in the popular vote, a narrow majority in the Electoral College in terms of the pivotal states. That narrow majority could have become a durable coalition. There’s a world in which, having done this, the Trump administration then caters to that, focuses all of its attention on the price level, or at least taking steps to make people feel as if the price level isn’t so relevant in their lives. That’s a direction they could have taken. And in that world, I do think that this narrow electoral majority is built into a durable coalition that has a somewhat multiracial character, although I do think this is a bit exaggerated.
What happened was that the administration did the exact opposite. Everything it has done has exacerbated the very issues that people voted for them to relieve. That narrow electoral majority never congealed into any kind of durable coalition. It promptly fell apart. It fell apart because those pivotal voters did not vote for Trump because of a cultural agenda that either Trump’s biggest backers were pushing or our interlocutors here are clearly enthusiastic for.
I find it somewhat distasteful when I see people kind of, “Well, it’s not that I have a problem with [insert group]. It’s that the voters, these people who I have no connection to, I’m simply basing this off of polls—they’re the ones who actually have a problem with this. And so we have to concede to their prejudices.” It’s like—I don’t know, man, just say your piece and go with it. But the voters—even if they have these feelings, that wasn’t the most salient thing for them. The most salient thing was simply the price level—or, the price level and, “Yeah, it’d be nice if we could get rid of criminal illegal aliens.” The entire narrative of immigration in this country is that there are hordes of criminal illegal aliens doing terrible things. So voters are like, “Yeah, let’s get rid of them. Maybe the Democrats are coddling them, so let’s get rid of them.”
What happens? Tariffs, inflationary pressures, now this war that exacerbates the problem with the price level. And then a deportation campaign that is completely disinterested in people who break the law and is entirely focused on ordinary law-abiding people who just happen to be undocumented. Pivotal voters see this and they’re like “This is not what I signed up for” almost like clockwork. I was saying this in February, March of last year—you could observe it happening in real time. Almost like clockwork, voters were like, “Well, I don’t like this. This isn’t what I wanted.”
This isn’t to say that Democrats were in the clear. It is to say that the overall electoral picture is not nearly as calcified, not nearly as settled as I think this narrative would have you believe. In fact, things are quite open. And there’s no necessary pressure, I would say, on the Democratic Party to try to shrink the difference between them and Trump. Because the country didn’t vote in affirmation of MAGA. The country voted for an actually kind of narrow set of things. This doesn’t tell us what the Democrats ought to do. I think it suggests that that particular path isn’t demanded by the circumstances. It’s one path you can choose to take. I’m not sure it will be effective.
It’s hard to make cross-national comparisons, but the experience of Labour in the U.K. makes me think that attempting to shrink the differences is not going to work [for Democrats]. But it’s a path you can take. My own feeling is that rather than demand this Leninist level of conformity to a single agenda, Democrats should first kind of embrace the fact that the party has a lot of things going on in it and let the most talented people do the thing they’re going to do and pursue their ends. Inasmuch as you need something unifying, identify a set of principles. In the current era, it might be: “We’re for democracy, we’re for fairness in democracy, we’re for economic equality, we’re for getting rid of the billionaire class, we’re for social fairness, we’re for making sure that no one can bully other people.” Those are your principles, and you connect those to being a Democrat. These are the things you believe. And then you let it play out however it plays out.
But this notion that the 2024 election means that Democrats have to adopt, let’s say, a vocally anti-trans kind of politics—first of all, I think it’s wrong. On a very basic moral level, encouraging a political party to basically bully a minority because it might get you a couple votes is reprehensible.
The other thing is I’m not even sure it’d be effective. In point of fact, most Americans don’t really … I’m not saying this in a way to downplay the importance of the issues to the people who experience this, but your typical voter doesn’t give a shit all that much. They’re told in an ad that Kamala wants to give surgeries to inmates, and they’re like, “That sounds silly, I don’t like that.” But otherwise they’re like, “I don’t know, this doesn’t really affect my life.” And what you see in actual electoral contests is that when Republican candidates try to make elections about this, it falls flat because it really is a niche issue.
Dalmia: Who was it in Virginia? Tried to follow the Trump script, running for the gubernatorial race, and just made it all about the trans issue.
Bouie: Winsome Sears. She was the Republican nominee against Abigail Spanberger. She was like, “Spanberger wants a man in girls’ locker rooms,” and she lost by 17 points.
Dalmia: Yeah, she tried to capture Trump’s slogan and said, “Abigail is for they/them and I’m for us.” So she changed one little phrase. But I take your point.
“I would like to see a Democrat try a message that’s effectively something like this: ‘We believe in a nation of immigrants. We believe in a society that includes everyone. Some of the greatest Americans came from other places.’ You go down the list. ‘Things have to be fair.’ And then you propose the 2013 deal with the one wrinkle of: ‘If you did it the right way, we’re going to expedite you. We’re going to do everything we can to get you in the door as quickly as possible. If you did it the wrong way, you have to pay a fine and you go to the back of the line.’ This would be a vast liberalization of the existing American immigration system. But because it would be orderly, it’d be rational, there would be a sense that if you did the right thing, you were rewarded, and if you did the wrong thing, you were punished ... I think people would be like, ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’” — Jamelle Bouie
When I read centrist-Democrat prescriptions, there is something that does resonate with me in the sense that, in every country, the middle class is always the most conservative force. The elites tend to be progressive and then people who are lower income don’t tend to care about cultural issues, but they have their own reasons to be progressive, at least on economic grounds. But the middle class just want a stable system where they can get ahead, keep what they’ve got. So having roots in that class is kind of important. I agree with that.
But what always strikes me when I am reading these prescriptions are two things. One, they have a very static idea—and you touched on this—about public opinion. They see a right-left binary and they want to move to the median voter. It’s a very fixated-on-the-median-voter approach. And Trump’s genius was—if you had tried to figure out who the median voter was pre-Trump, it would have been a very different median voter than the median voter right now. That’s because Trump didn’t play on the left-right binary [at that time]. He just moved the axis in a completely different direction. And so, what coalition of values and principles will congeal on that axis? That’s kind of unknowable. You just have to swing it and see where it settles—the point that you’re making. So that very static way of thinking about public opinion is always striking to me.
The other thing that strikes me—also something you touched on—is that it’s kind of completely non-normative. Like, what do we stand for? Any Democrat who’s running has to pay attention to public opinion, obviously, and where the vast majority of middle-class voters stand. But that’s more to inform: “Okay, we’ve got work cut out for us. If this is where people are, what do we do? How quickly should we move? What are the strategies we can apply?” But you need to have a lodestar. You need to have a principle. And I’m not sure what the principles of the Democratic Party are right now.
It used to be that Republicans were for liberty; even though it was in a very flawed sense, that banner of freedom is the one that they carried. Democrats carried the banner of equality and justice.
It’s really striking to me how this whole pendulum has shifted when you listen to the centrist Democrats talk about immigration, for instance. This is an issue I’ve been writing about for 30 years. They talk about how Democrats have changed on immigration, that they used to be far harsher once upon a time—even during the Clinton era—than they are right now. I’ve actually observed the opposite shift, which is how much more radical Republicans are now on immigration. I mean, you couldn’t get a Reaganite Republican immigration bill pushed right now. “Amnesty” has become a dirty word. And yet, right now, if you were listening to centrist Democrats, you’d think the Democratic Party is the radical party on immigration. Why? Because Biden apparently opened the borders, even though he didn’t. Obama deported a record number of people, and still couldn’t get a deal passed through Congress because there was a very radical Republican wing in the House that wouldn’t even let the bill come to a floor vote. So instead of pointing out that the Republicans have been radicals on immigration, they have internalized the idea that they are the radicals on immigration. This complete reversal of self-understanding has been rather remarkable to watch.
And I think that’s partly because of what you are saying, that if you don’t have certain normative principles that you are fighting for, then you are just being moved by public opinion—or what you perceive to be public opinion. And the public opinion is perceived to be anti-immigration.
Bouie: Right. I put it this way. It’s clear, I think, if you take a survey of public opinion on immigration, what you’d find is some combination of: “We think it’s neat that the United States is a nation of immigrants, it’s part of our self-conception; we don’t like the idea of people not waiting their turn.” I think that’s where the public is on immigration. And added to that is a belief that the immigration system is much more orderly and coherent than it actually is.
People think it’s like going to the DMV. You go to the immigration office. You get in line. It may take a while. Eventually, you get up there. You give them your paperwork. They’re like, stamp: citizen or stamp: you’ve got to go home. That’s it. And what they don’t like is the notion that you can just run up to the border, do a long jump over the fence, and become a citizen. But that’s not how it works.
Dalmia: That is not how it works. If you know anything about our immigration system, that is not how it works. It’s taking 150 years for H-1B holders, if they are Indian or Chinese, to get a green card right now.
Bouie: Exactly. So the point of making that observation is that the sense that there’s a fixed kind of set of attitudes and beliefs about immigration, other than the most vague generalities, is a mistake. In fact, this is a place where public opinion is, within reason, quite malleable. You can emphasize the punishment part of it. But even then Trump, in terms of his messaging, was like: “I’m not against legal immigration, just the criminals, just the people breaking the law.” So even there, you focus on punishment and then you have to make some concession. You can focus on making the concessions and downplay the punishment, which I think is what Biden tried to do and it didn’t work out. But you can maneuver within there. And so the idea that it requires you to take some draconian stance—I don’t think it’s right. I think it’s right to say that the first thing you have to do is actually stake out a set of principles. So what’s the principle?
Dalmia: If fairness were a principle, you could make an argument that our immigration system is broken. So the only way people can come in is by breaking the law because the system is not functioning. So let’s fix the system so that people can get a fair try.
Bouie: Right, right. If I were running an election, I would like to see a Democrat try a message that’s effectively something like this: “We believe in a nation of immigrants. We believe in a society that includes everyone. Some of the greatest Americans came from other places.” You go down the list. “Things have to be fair.” And then you propose the 2013 deal with the one wrinkle of: “If you did it the right way, we’re going to expedite you. We’re going to do everything we can to get you in the door as quickly as possible. If you did it the wrong way, you have to pay a fine and you go to the back of the line.”
This would be a vast liberalization of the existing American immigration system. But because it would be orderly, it’d be rational, there would be a sense that if you did the right thing, you were rewarded, and if you did the wrong thing, you were punished ... I think people would be like, “Yeah, that sounds good.”
“What I take inspiration from are the Reconstruction Congresses. First of all, they faced a hostile executive—at least for the first few years, in Andrew Johnson, who was hostile basically to anything more than the most cursory Reconstruction policies. You do as much as you can to let the South back in. You let even the former Confederate leaders take their old power positions back, and you get back to the way things were, the Constitution as it was, except no slavery. Johnson had no particular problem with slavery by another name. So the Reconstruction Congresses faced a hostile executive and this colossal challenge of rebuilding the country.” — Jamelle Bouie
That’s what I want. Is that going to the left? Is that going to the right? I don’t know. What [I do think], though, is that it requires first this principle: “We actually want immigration.” And then the kind of going into the world and actually thinking about what voters are saying in a serious way.
So much of my recent thinking about political parties and partisanship is informed by how the Republican Party first came together in the 1850s. And what you see in that period is a party that does identify a principle first and foremost: “We are against slavery.” They don’t really care why you’re against slavery. There are many reasons to be against slavery, but the principle of the party is that, “We are against slavery. And that is the lodestar. And we are going to pursue anything we can as a partisan organization to affect that in public policy. That doesn’t mean we’re going to take the maximalist position every time, but it does mean that this is where we’re always going to be aiming.”
This is a real conflict that happens: as the 1850s get on, they’re trying to build up the party. Stephen Douglas is thinking about becoming a Republican because he’s alienated from the Buchanan administration. He feels burned by his efforts to instantiate popular sovereignty. And you have Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans saying: “No, that might be where a lot of voters are, but letting Douglas in dilutes the principle and makes it difficult for voters to know where we stand and who they should support if they have this principle.” And I think there’s a lot there just to think on as Democrats think about how they rebuild their party. To the extent that centrists are arguing that creating a set of highly ideological litmus tests is ineffective, I totally agree with them. I think that’s absolutely right. But when the prescription appears to be: “Just follow what’s most popular,” then I do think you run into trouble.
First, you muddle your own message—people just don’t know what you stand for anymore. Second, I think it actually makes the work of building out a partisan organization more difficult. It is easier to pull together a coalition if you can basically talk to voters and figure out, in the doing, “Do you agree with this principle? Yes? Then we’re for you.” Do that kind of work of everyday political appeal. And I think one of my frustrations as an observer of these discussions—and somebody who contributes to them as well—is how much of it is conducted by people who have no practical experience in politics. Stipulated: I don’t have practical experience in politics. I’m just a guy who’s looking around. But I feel like I’m aware of that. I recognize the lack of my practical experience.
And I do think that the fact that so much of these arguments are being led by non-practitioners, who imagine politics almost as a video game—you just turn up this knob, you turn up this dial, you give yourself these attributes, and then you win the median voter—I think it does a real disservice to figuring out how to move forward. One of the things that needs to be taken more seriously is that so much of this is going to be figured out in the doing. We don’t actually have a sense, sitting behind our desks, of how to reach voters and what voters care about. And the data-ization of politics maybe has obscured that quite a bit. This is actually what I take from Mamdani. Everyone’s looking for some sort of hard ideological lesson to take from Mamdani. What I take from the guy is: you still have to just go to people and talk to them and see what they want and hear them.
And really try to hear what they’re saying. You can kind of get this through public opinion. I think in watching the reaction to Trump from the public, you can kind of begin to understand what voters are saying about immigration, the economy, or what have you. But ultimately, you just have to talk to the public. Politics is just talking to the public. It’s not whatever it is we do on X or wherever.
Dalmia: Yeah, Mamdani’s genius to me was that he ran on core voter concerns—affordability. You couldn’t knock him off that message of affordability. Even when he was going to Indian American gatherings and doing the bhangra and eating samosas, he was talking about the cost of that samosa or the kebab. So what was interesting was he was super focused on his message. But the soft cultural agenda of his—which I actually support—of basic down-home decency and toleration and pluralism, he didn’t hit you over the head with it. He just carried it [in his persona]. It was a soft cultural power that he had. And I think that’s ... I don’t agree with his economic policies. I mean, I think that what he’s practically doing to make things affordable in New York are going to have the opposite effect in some ways.
I’m much more of an abundance liberal in the Matt Yglesias framework than Mamdani’s “let’s rent-stabilize homes in New York.” But that said, that was his genius—working with core voter concerns and then channeling the cultural commitments of progressives in a very soft, gentle way.
Bouie: Right, right. And the kinds of people he talked to, and—I’d say even in his presentation—him always wearing a suit sends a certain message. Like: “This is a regular guy who respects you.”
Dalmia: Right, and I actually joke: his campaign was the first time that I felt visible as an Indian American in America. Nobody has spoken to me like that before. And that alone charmed me, even though I disagreed with a lot of his economic agenda.
Okay, I have to talk to you about one last thing, because it is so core to The UnPopulist agenda—what we are doing at this publication. You had this very interesting piece last month, which was: “What is the left’s theory of power?” And you meant constitutional power. The question you were asking is: What governing institutions should the democratic left deploy to right the ship of the republic once it’s in office? And your answer was something like: the Imperial Congress to counter the populist right. Tell us exactly what you mean by the Imperial Congress, because in some ways there are a lot of echoes to what we are doing here at The UnPopulist. Our biggest problem now is to rebuild our institutions that have been decimated by four years—by the time that Trump’s [current term] ends—of an authoritarian presidency. Trump has no respect for the Constitution. He is the embodiment of the Imperial President. And so, to counter that, you need another body. So your idea of an Imperial Congress really appeals to us. But I was also sensing some tension with where we are going. So explain to us what the Imperial Congress means to you.
Bouie: So I think the tension there might just be that, yeah, I’m on the progressive left. I described myself as sort of a social democrat through and through. I want a government that’s going to actively work to shape the national economy in ways that may represent a real difference with what y’all are doing at The UnPopulist.
“So this [congressional] aggressiveness, this sense of our own authority and our own power and our own ability to discipline and structure the other branches, which is right there in the text—that’s what I mean by an Imperial Congress: one that doesn’t just take its constitutional role seriously, but that had its own constitutional vision and is acting as kind of the first mover. Right now, so much of the way the American political system has worked is that we’re all reacting to what the executive branch does or what the judiciary does. And it would be a better equilibrium if [they instead reacted] to what Congress does, where they’re finding ways to sort of work around Congress.” — Jamelle Bouie
That policy difference aside, what I take inspiration from are the Reconstruction Congresses. First of all, they faced a hostile executive—at least for the first few years, in Andrew Johnson, who was hostile basically to anything more than the most cursory Reconstruction policies. You do as much as you can to let the South back in. You let even the former Confederate leaders take their old power positions back, and you get back to the way things were, the Constitution as it was, except no slavery. Johnson had no particular problem with slavery by another name. So the Reconstruction Congresses faced a hostile executive and this colossal challenge of rebuilding the country. And what they do is they assume the leadership role. We describe this in the historiography as Congressional Reconstruction. They sidelined the president using their constitutional authority to structure and shape the executive branch, to rebuke the executive branch.
And they begin to articulate a constitutional vision: “This is what we think the United States is, this is what we think the role of the government ought to be in making that possible.” They turn that constitutional vision first into legislation and then into constitutional amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—which, when you look at the burst of amendment-making in American history, these amendments are often a consolidation of things happening on the state level that make their way up to the federal level. But here you have the Congress really taking the lead: “We think this is how the U.S. ought to be organized as a country, and we’re going to constitutionalize that vision.” So in part what I mean by “Imperial Congress” ... and in all of this, they are looking at challenges to their authority and trying to head them off. So with Johnson: “We’re just going to impeach him. We’re going to try to remove him.” They don’t successfully do it, but in doing it, they basically sideline him as a political force.
When the court seems to be potentially an obstacle—and this is in the lead-up to the last years of the war, the beginning of Reconstruction, when the court appears to maybe be an obstacle—they say: “We’re going to pass a law where every vacant seat is eliminated, so we can at least gridlock the court and neutralize it as a potential opponent. When there are complaints that they can’t intervene that deeply into states, this Congress has the guarantee clause of the Constitution and imposes upon us a duty to make sure that every state has a republican form of government, and we’re going to give it to them.”
So this aggressiveness, this sense of our own authority and our own power and our own ability to discipline and structure the other branches, which is right there in the text—that’s what I mean by an Imperial Congress: one that doesn’t just take its constitutional role seriously, but that had its own constitutional vision and is acting as kind of the first mover. Right now, so much of the way the American political system has worked is that we’re all reacting to what the executive branch does or what the judiciary does. And it would be a better equilibrium if [they instead reacted] to what Congress does, where they’re finding ways to sort of work around Congress.
I think this is also going to be necessary. And this goes to a piece I wrote: I think Trump has very much revealed the weaknesses, for just our democratic health, of relying so much on the executive. And the transformations in the court and in jurisprudence and constitutional doctrine are such that ideas like completely independent agencies may not hold water anymore. We have to find alternatives.
And I think the only viable alternative is a Congress that is taking an active role in everything. Even if this Congress is going to create new agencies, it structures those agencies differently in a way to create more congressional accountability. They’re less independent, but they’re now dependent on Congress in a way that they may not have been before. A Congress that articulates and gives an expansive reading of something like the necessary and proper clause—saying this actually gives us a lot of authority to do the things we need to do to shape and structure the country—and a Congress that doesn’t look at itself as subordinate to the president or especially the courts, but says to both: “We can tell you what to do. The executive is there to execute our will, and we’re going to make sure it happens. The courts are there not to trim our sails, but to make sure that we stay on constitutional course. And if the courts are ...
Dalmia: ... You wouldn’t want to do away with judicial review, would you?
Bouie: Not necessarily. You don’t have to do away with judicial review, but you can break up the authority of the courts, you might say. The court enlarges. It has more on its plate. So some of the court’s own influence right now is a function of the fact that it’s given itself less to do and can now spend a lot of time articulating doctrine. The court of the 1890s or 1880s, for example, is dealing with thousands of cases a year. And you just don’t have the time. You don’t have the time to write 100-page opinions giving your detailed history of X, Y, or Z. No, you have to actually come to a settlement, a judgment about the issue in front of you. So a court that has more to do, that has many more members ...
Dalmia: ... But isn’t that what the shadow docket is doing right now? Which is a huge problem because it means you’re not even getting a ruling. You just make a decision and you’re not even getting a ruling—and the ruling is, actually, as you’ve pointed out, going entirely in the direction of a very strong executive.
Bouie: Right, the shadow docket is the court attempting to make law without giving reasoning, without actually explaining itself. So, as I think of it: you would have a larger court, one that works through panels. It’s not the whole court hearing everything; it’s panels of justices hearing various things, and they’re just doing a lot more, and they’re responding a lot more. They are responding to a Congress that wants to do stuff. Congress has articulated its own constitutional authority to do X, Y, or Z, and the court either doesn’t have the time, or maybe recognizes it doesn’t have the strength, to do the aggressive kind of consolidation and pushback that the Roberts Court has done. So that’s one vision.
But the main thing is just a Congress that says to itself: “We are in Article I of the Constitution. We are the first branch, and it is our job to provide national leadership. That’s our job. It’s the president’s job to execute our vision. It’s the court’s job to make sure we’re not going too crazy. But it’s our job to have a vision.” And that, I think, has been missing in American politics for a very long time.
Dalmia: Yeah. I mean, over the years—and this is actually something the libertarians at the Cato Institute have been talking about—Congress has neutered itself. It has given away its prerogatives of oversight. It has delegated away its powers. It cannot perform the accountability function in an effective way. And that’s why I think, if I were to encapsulate the disagreement between you and us, is that we want to restore Congress to be an effective check on the executive, but not have a grandiose vision of what it itself should accomplish. So I think we have to have you back to have another debate about this.
Bouie: This actually is a good example of what I said earlier about finding principles and not worrying too much about the whys. We have a shared principle here: a stronger Congress, a Congress that really does occupy the center of American [political] life. Once we accomplish that, then we can have our disagreements about what we want it to do.
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