Welcome, welcome to Fast Politics.
Thanks for having me, Molly.
Let's talk about socialism, shall we? How can it work?
Well, I think that we have to start with saying that socialism in various forms have actually been tried, in the sense that I think a lot of democratic socialists like myself like to do the no true Scotsman sort of argument and say that, no, no one has really had these ideas. They were all imposters just pretending to be socialists. So socialism was tried, of course, in Soviet-style systems. And that ended really poorly.
I would say, to the credit of those systems, that if you're living in a peasant country and you want to very quickly build an education system, a system of higher education, a health care system, and T-34 tanks, then there's something to command economies. But it's utterly irrelevant to our times and led to, obviously, terrific authoritarianism and other problems.
But socialism was also tried in the Nordic countries, where parties that came from Marxist roots, that called themselves socialists, ended up just administrating capitalism, but doing so in a way that really empowered workers and guaranteed social rights and things like that. So in my book, I try to, in The Socialist Manifesto, really get into some of these past experiments and say that there is a model of socialism that combines the best of the Nordic system with also the real world experiences of worker cooperatives that I think would be much better than capitalism and wouldn't be that scary of a prospect for those of us who rightly care about our democracy and the freedoms we do enjoy today.
I think that is, for sure, the kind of really... I mean, it's hard to look at those Nordic countries and not think that those people are... you know, you can get sick, you don't get bankrupt, you can have kids, you can send them to school. I mean, the argument against it that I've heard is that people sort of say, well, they're just so different because they're so homogenous.
Yeah. I mean, I think that, for one thing, these societies that exist today in the Nordic countries, and especially at their peak social democratic period in the '60s and '70s and '80s, were really created because of social democracy. So it often becomes a chicken or the egg question. Like, in the 1920s, Sweden was considered one of the most violent and unequal places in Europe. They didn't even really have universal suffrage, universal male suffrage, until the 1920s. And there was a massive workers' movement that was really pissed off about that and a million other things. They would engage in really violent strikes. And it was not the sort of harmonious vision that we have now of some of these states.
In Finland, you had a country that fought an actual civil war in the 1910s. It was extremely unstable. It was a country that does have a large linguistic divide that was especially prominent back then between Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers, languages that are actually not related remotely at all. So by comparison, I actually do think that there is a very consistently American culture for both good and bad. We take immigrants within five years. They're all taking out car loans and Ford F-150s. The idea that we live in a society with not a lot of commonality or social trust is totally wrong.
And even in parts of the country or in areas where there's still... you could say there's lots of persistent racism in this country. But the level of social integration that you have today in the American South between black Americans and white people are very much radically different than what it was even 30, 40 years ago. So I think sometimes people are overstating to what extent Americans have shown an unwillingness to unite around their politics.
So let's talk about our mayor. This has been the clearest example, in my mind, of someone who has gotten in there and been like, here's some democratic socialist programs that I would like to enact, and sort of been able to transmit pretty well what they are. I know you have a relationship with the mayor. Can you talk us through sort of what the thinking there was? Because, for example, Bill de Blasio, who really no one liked, did do some of these programs, did try to make forays into these programs, but was unable to message them in the sort of way that made, that I think sort of threaded the needle between these new ideas and the programs.
Yeah, I mean, I was one of the few Bill de Blasio apologists, and it was very tough. It was almost like he would... whatever, we shouldn't talk about Bill de Blasio. He's an enigma. I have been on television with him pretty recently and enjoyed the experience, even though he is too tall. But you do look back on that mayoral ship and see a person who really was unable to connect with the voting base, despite doing a lot of the popular programs. But that, you know... Even more if it turned out that Eliot Spitzer wasn't such a creep and we had... Eliot Spitzer de Blasio partnership might have gotten us social democracy in New York State. But yeah, obviously, the expansion of universal pre-K was really the biggest, one of the biggest just advances in the American welfare state in modern history. So he at least gets credit for that and also for battling with Cuomo early on.
But with Zoran, I mean, initially when he was running, my thinking was, hey, why not? Let's have a socialist run. Zoran's super charismatic. People will like him. Maybe he'll poll 5%, 10%, which is, by the way, it sounds like pessimistic now, but I think it was more on the bullish side than most people. He was polling 1%.
When you probably had that idea, he was polling 1%, 2%, right?
Yeah, my thinking was like, all right, and we'll just do rank choice. And hopefully we'll end up with Brad Lander or something, someone like that. But on his actual policy demands, when I looked at them, OK, the pilot grocery store program, the free child care, I think is a pretty straightforwardly good policy. And it exists in New Mexico. I mean, it's not... there are places where it's happening now, too. Freeze the rent and free buses. At a policy level, I actually had objections to all those things, even as someone who shares all of Zoran's normative commitments. With free buses, it was like, OK, yes, but service is deteriorating. So wouldn't we rather have that $600,000, $700,000 improving service? Or back then, interest rates were lower than they are now by a little bit. So couldn't that service $30 billion worth of improvements and so on? That was one of my objections.
Another one of my objections was freeze the rent, of course. Like, OK, that benefits a pocket of people, an important, sizable group of people, but it doesn't resolve the overall problem. With the grocery stores, five pilot stores are not going to really have a meaningful impact on prices. So I had all these policy objections. And in a sense, even as someone from the Marxist Socialist Left, I was basically giving the liberal objections or center left objections to Zoran's policies. But at a political level, those demands were transformative. And he's managed to take the energy from that political mobilization and his own communicative ability, the narrative that he was creating about New York, about making the race about affordability instead of about experience or crime or all these other things that seemed plain to Cuomo's hand. And he was able to now back it up with real policies. He's been able to, say, freeze the rent and support tenants, but also construct more housing, including public housing, but also private housing. He has been able to take an argument that he still isn't one with the MTA around free buses and turn it into the expansion of new transit plans and a broader sense of like, yes, this is our city. And even if we do end up having to pay a user fee before we use public transit, it is public, and it should be fast and accessible and so on.
All these points, I think he was able to back up this sort of narrative that he was saying with concrete policies. And just a couple days ago, not to date the podcast too much, Obama was pilloried, I think wrongly by the left, for saying that Democrats have focused a lot on policies. And I mean, he framed it a little poorly, in my opinion, like material gains instead of telling people stories and narrative. And I actually think there's a lot of truth to that. People want to see themselves in your vision. And Trump obviously had a little bit of that in 2016 before he decided to just lean into 100% crazy. And Zoran obviously had it in his election too. I think a lot of people saw themselves in his narrative.
It's interesting to me that that was something that Obama really struggled with. I mean, he was a very gifted orator. But ultimately, he went in there and did policy. And that was something Biden really struggled with too, like inability to transmit the policy to voters. Chips and science, that's an amazing piece of policy. Nobody ever... child tax credit? I mean, hard to think of a better piece of policy. I don't know how you feel about the child tax credit. But I...
No, no, I'm in favor of that. I think Clinton was able to sell things like that with a narrative. I think Biden, I mean, he was just unable to communicate. But I would agree that at the domestic level, we were gaining hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs at a time when the rest of the capitalist world, places like Germany, were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs. But he was unable to explain to people what he was doing and how they fit in. Whereas Trump will oversee the loss of manufacturing jobs, but stand in front of a new factory that's being created and kind of really bill it as something special. But actually, Zoran has been pretty good transmitting policy wins and explaining things in ways that voters get in a way that I have not seen a Democratic politician do in a long, long time.
Well, I think for one, actually having the ideology of being a Democratic Socialist, I think, has been to his benefit. So in a rough sense, this is going to make me sound like I'm dogmatic, but it is useful to be able to walk into a room or a situation and know the broad truth of the matter, like know the capital T truth that working class people are trying to survive, and they're creating a lot of the value of a society, and they're not getting a lot back, and they have less say compared to the powerful and the rich and people who control the jobs and use money to influence our politics. Then, obviously, at the policy level, it's more complicated, because if you scare away the people who are producing employment, you're going to end up also hurting the working class people. It's better to have rich people in the city conspicuously spending. There's lots of knockdown effects from their consumption. I'd rather them be here than take all the fintech jobs, move them to Texas. So we could get into all the policy complexity, but I think starting with, OK, I'm on the side of working people, and I'm going to articulate to people that I'm on their side, and then get into the nitty gritty of governance after that, I think there's a difference between that and being an ordinary liberal who'll potentially walk into that situation and say that there's a lot of good, nice people here with lots of different points.
So I think that's a really important bit, which is that he does actually seem to really believe what he's doing, which is almost completely without precedent. But it is also much harder to alienate very rich people.
I mean, you can make them mad, and they are certainly very mad at Zoran. But they were mad at the beginning. So I think the real risk is this. I'm in favor of actions that target the rich as rich people in New York and that increase their income tax, for example, which is already obviously higher than living anywhere else. I think they have a lot of fixed connection to New York. And there's no other place like New York. They also own a lot of assets in New York. So I don't think they're going to leave. But I think we should be very wary pissing people off as people who create jobs, which is only a tiny portion of these rich people. But with that tax, he just happened to target one of them in how we frame it. I think that was the problem. And also, the corporate tax rate thing, I think, is very potentially problematic, in part because, obviously, capital can move very easy. Capital can move more easily than in a federal system like New York. It's very easy to just have your taxes flow through New Jersey or Delaware or somewhere else. So I'm actually more wary about attempts to raise the corporate tax rate. I'm also wary of certain poorly designed wealth taxes. They all have to be analyzed at the policy level. But I do think the rich can sustain a higher income tax here and now.
I also wonder, though, a tax like the mansion tax at 1% of sales, why isn't that higher? Those are great examples. That's a tax that you just have to pay if you're going to move, period, paragraph. If your apartment is over $1 million, you have to pay. That strikes me as a pretty easy win for the city, right?
What I would imagine on that, I have no idea on the policy debate, I would imagine that because the rate is now relatively low, I don't know, a million, for people outside of New York, it sounds like we're crazy people. But that's like a two-bedroom apartment in most parts of the city. Because the rate's relatively low at a policy level, if they raised it to 2% but raised the cap to $2 million, maybe it generates less money. I imagine there's probably a way to go after realtor lobbies and basically say that this extra addition, bumping it to 2%, comes out of the buyer and seller agent. But those lobbies are so strong and so interconnected with the Democratic Party. It's like lawyers, real estate agents are part of the bread and butter of our shared party.
So I want to ask this Democratic senator, who I think is pretty smart, why there's no regulation when it comes to technology. None, right? Facebook, nothing. I mean, literally nothing. There is nothing. And he said, because a lot of Democrats get money from tech companies, that there's like a low-key grift there. Obviously, I'm not making a comparison between the Democratic Party and what we're seeing on the Republican side. Because what we're seeing on the Republican side is a kind of catastrophic grift that no longer recognizes Democratic norms. But that question of getting money out of politics so we can see some real legislation, what are your thoughts there?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an important component. I think when it comes to some of these issues, like the power of the tech companies, it's always three factors. It's, one, their lobbying dollars. It's, two, the fact that they are sources of employment for a lot of people in a lot of districts, including progressives, like the Ro Khannas of the world are in districts in which it is hard to take on Silicon Valley when it's actually such an important employer. But also, I think there is this ingrained libertarian sensibility in the US that I think has led to really adverse policy outcomes at times. I mean, I think it's fairly common sense to have, let's say, age verification on foreign sites. I know this sounds like I'm a conservative, but OK, a 16-year-old is going to figure out how to get around it or go to another site. But at least print some stuff for a 12 or 13-year-old boy so they don't develop... whatever. I think there's a strong case for that. There's a strong case for not allowing at least gambling advertisement on TV. So you can watch a sporting event, and you're not just bombarded with the stuff. Or telling companies that, OK, even if we allow, which I don't think we should, but even if we allow an app like CalShe or some betting app on your phone, it shouldn't be allowed to send you push notifications with offers. Things like that are common sense, but beyond all the money that's prevented good policies, there's also the sense of people are worried about the moral hazard of the state, which I think in extreme instances exists. I'm not for the death penalty because, in part, the moral hazard of just having the state kill people. But the idea that Pornhub having your data is more dangerous than the social effects of certain types of pornography being seen by very young people just developing, to me, is just silly. And I even hear it on the left, too. It's not just a right-wing argument.
Yeah, so interesting. Anyway, thank you. Thank you for coming on. So good.
I appreciate you having me on.
Some of you listeners probably noticed the show is in a different order. We are changing things up since we are now doing a lot more video. And yeah, really excited about this. You know what I'm also excited about? How stupid the GOP's plan to win the midterms is coming from Chris Rufo, who you may remember from DEI and CRT panics. So first of all, excited about the new format. Please like and subscribe and enjoy my dog on my lap. Christopher Rufo, known for DEI and CRT. So this guy is like basically the brain child of the admin. He is the person who comes up with some of their worst ideas. You remember... Particularly, thank you, Ron DeSantis, for this guy. Right. So he is the sort of brain behind, and I use brain in quotes. So he came up with DEI, which was this idea that law schools taught this high-level way to not be discriminatory. Well, now, and that was the biggest danger, was doing, was not discriminating against people. That was the biggest danger, and CRT. And now, these are these panics, these ways in which Republicans tell other Republicans that libs are taking stuff away from them. So now, Rufo, who has become, has gone from the very dark corners of the internet to being respectable, has... Don't quote it yet. Well, he's a senior member of the Manhattan Institute, which is a real think tank. And he's been on Ezra's podcast, which is a real podcast. So he has really, and he has a huge number of subscribers on Subtract. This guy is basically as fancy as it gets for people who espouse really problematic, really discriminatory views. And so he's no longer against critical race theory. Well, he is. But he is no longer focused on critical race theory and DEI. He has changed his focus. And now he's focused to the fact that, and I swear to God, I'm going to say this. And as I say it, I understand as a Jew what he's doing, because it's absolutely, this is what they did to the Jews, and now they're doing it to the Indians. To be honest, we can't even say past tense. Right now, one of the most popular things, right when people tweet on Elon Musk's Nazi platform, is the Jewish question. Right, and this is now the Indian question. And so what this is is a way in which, and again, this comes from a viral racist post by Beau French. Beau French is a statewide candidate in Texas, OK? He's the GOP candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner. Now, Texas Railroad Commissioner is like Florida's ag chair. It's a real position with real responsibilities. And Beau French is running for it, and he is famous for seeing a post from UT graduation and seeing a lot of Indian people in it and being furious, basically. He's furious that Indian people got to go to UT graduation because, just like with Jews, these people are mad at academic achievement. And so they're mad at these Indian college students because they went to college and did well there. And that is exactly the same as what we're seeing with these, these are right-wing extremists who are looking for someone to scapegoat. And they are now have focused on Indians. And again, why I think this is so interesting in this moment is that Donald Trump was really elected with the closest thing to a multiracial coalition of people who were signing off on racist things, like deportation. And so this crew, this multiracial coalition, is now laser-focused on the Indian question. And that is really, really not good and shows that we're in a lot of trouble.
