#418 — A Future for Democrats
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I am here with Richie Torres. Richie, thanks for joining me. It's an honor to be here. It's really great to meet you. Finally, I've seen footage, and that footage convinced me that there was still some sanity in the Democratic Party, which there were moments there where it really seemed like there was none. So thank you for insisting first. I fear the mythology is more impressive than the reality. No, I don't think so. We're going to get to the reality. So maybe you can summarize your background in politics. Okay.

How did you get here and what is your situation now in politics? I mean, the starting point for me is the Bronx. I was born and raised in the Bronx, spent all of my childhood in poverty. I was raised by a single mother who had to raise three of us on minimum wage, which in the 1990s was $4.25 an hour. And probably the most formative experience of my life was growing up in public housing.

which is owned and operated by the government. And in New York City, public housing is so savagely starved of funding that it has a capital need of $80 billion and counting.

So like hundreds of thousands of tenants, I grew up in conditions of mold and mildew leaks and lead without consistent heat and hot water in the winter. And I got my start in politics as a tenant organizer because of my lived experience in public housing. And then at age 24, I took the leap of faith and ran for public office. I had no deep pockets, no ties to the party machine, but I just spent a whole year doing nothing but knocking on doors. I went into people's homes, went

I heard their stories and I won my first campaign on the strength of door-to-door, face-to-face campaigning. I became an elected official at age 25. And what was that office? New York City Council. And so I served in the New York City Council for seven years before running for Congress. But about a decade before entering Congress, like I was at the lowest point of my life. I had dropped out of college. I

I found myself struggling with depression. I even attempted to take my own life because I felt as if the world around me had collapsed and underwent hospitalization. And I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would have a fighting chance to rebuild my life and a few years later become the youngest elected official in America's largest city and then ultimately become a member of the United States Congress. So I have a story that's highly unusual, but I feel deeply American.

Yeah. Yeah. And what's your background? What are your parents? So I was raised by a single mother, but both of them are Puerto Rican. My father was born in Puerto Rico and my mother, my family's, my mother's side has been here for three generations. So what, has there been an evolution in your politics? I mean, we're going to talk about your, your, how you view the democratic party and it's both its recent past and future, but where did you start with your, your, your kind of your set of political intuitions?

I entered politics as a progressive, never far left, but fundamentally progressive. And then I've become more moderate over time.

Although I will tell you the meaning of progressivism back then is quite different from what it has become. What year again, remind me? So I ran for office in 2013 and assumed office in 2014. Right. Well, 2014 is sort of the moment where we approached the cliff of whatever we want to call it, wokeness, identitarian, moral hysteria. I mean, there's the intersectionality piece.

That was, I mean, it was certainly on college campuses that was a vibe shift. Yeah. Then, so you were just, you were like the last sane person to step into politics on left of center? The world felt radically different back then. It seemed to me that social media was a far less powerful force then than it has become today. Now it's become the center of our political universe. But back in 2013, the progressive position on immigration was immigration reform.

And then it became open borders. Back then, the progressive position on public safety was criminal justice reform. And then it became abolish the police or defund the police. Or the progressive position on Israel back then was the two-state solution. And now it's BDS or globalize the intifada. So over the course of a decade, I've had a front row seat to the radicalization of progressive politics.

So how responsible do you hold the Democrats to be for Trump and Trumpism? I mean, did that radicalization deliver us into the hands of this increasingly grotesque counter argument? Certainly in 2024. I mean, I feel like we in the Democratic Party swung the pendulum too far to the left.

After the 2024 election, I wrote on Twitter, Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has alienated growing numbers of Americans with absurdities like Latinx, or free Palestine from the river to the sea, or defund the police. Are you here to tell us that you don't call yourself Latinx? No, no, no, no, no. I'm not aware of anyone in the Bronx who uses the term Latinx. It's a term that's been imposed on us by the college-educated elites.

But, you know, the Occam's razor holds that the simplest explanation is almost always the best. And the simple explanation is that we lost because of inflation and immigration.

You know, we saw the highest inflation in more than four decades and we saw a catastrophic mismanagement of the migrant crisis. How do you interpret that? I mean, that, that seemed to have been so obvious. I mean, that was just something that was politically optically. And the fact that anyone could just hold up a cell phone at the Southern border and it looked like a zombie movie.

How did the Biden administration not make that a priority immediately? Because the Biden administration had become ideologically captured by the far left. You know, Trump said something that I thought was right during the presidential campaign. He said that every state had become a border state because the impact of the migrant crisis was felt not only at the border, but in cities like New York.

whose shelter system and municipal finances were completely overwhelmed by an unprecedented wave of migration. And I remember seeing a poll in December of 2023 indicating that 85% of New Yorkers

had concerns about the impact of the migrant crisis. And so the Biden administration waited two and a half years before finally issuing an executive order restricting migration at the border, securing the border. And by then it was too late. The damage was done. The Republicans had won the issue, had effectively weaponized the issue against the Democrats. And I remember seeing a poll indicating that the executive order had overwhelming support from

from the American people, from every racial category, Black and white, Latino and Asian. And so I asked myself, if the executive order was effective at restricting migration, and if it was broadly popular, then why did it take the Biden administration so long to issue the executive order? And for me, the reason is simple. He was pandering to the far left, which has outsized power over the policymaking and messaging of the Democratic Party.

And that outsized power is causing us to fall out of touch with the majority of Americans, particularly the working class. Yeah, he took two and a half years to issue that executive order. But if memory serves, something like two and a half hours to issue one on trans bathroom rights or whatever the particular object was. I mean, I take your point about the, I think Kamala Harris's loss was overdetermined, but, and inflation and immigration were certainly the major factors.

bright lines there. But famously, she was also a candidate who in the 11th hour of her campaign couldn't say something sensible about taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery for incarcerated undocumented immigrants. It seems so unnecessary to be that captured by the activist class in the party. I don't know if there's more to say about how we got there, but having gotten there and having seen that it was fatal for the chances of

achieving the presidency. Do you think the pendulum is swinging back? Is there any chance in your mind that we're going to spend the next four years wondering whether we, or the next three years, wondering whether we need to tack further left as a Democratic Party? It remains to be seen. I feel like there is a recognition that we went too far left on immigration. But, you know, I feel there needs to be a fundamental restructuring within the Democratic Party, a return to a rational center. But, you know, I worry that

I mean, Donald Trump is so aggressive that he is provoking a response. Yeah. That is, you know, there's a divide between what I would say two teams in the Democratic Party. There's team restraint and team resistance, right? There were those in team resistance who feel like we should react hysterically to everything that Donald Trump says or does. Hmm.

And then there are those who feel like we should pick and choose our battles and be strategic. But I worry that the momentum is on the side of hysterical, hyperbolic resistance. And the enormous expenditure of time and energy and resistance might crowd out the restructuring and moderation that needs to happen within the Democratic Party. But even if the resistance were turned up to 11, why would it have to find a center of gravity around identitarian, intersectional,

highly non-mainstream convictions and i could see becoming hysterical i don't think hysteria is the best strategy but if you were to want to become hysterical you could become hysterical over his corruption his incompetence the way in which he has done our country just colossal brands damage on the world stage alienating allies and standing shoulder to shoulder with autocrats

I mean, you could be as shrill as you want about that. What concerns me is the sense that there are still people in the party who think we didn't go far left enough, right? And that we should figure out how to alienate every last person right of center in America.

Do you think that conviction still has many subscribers or is the pendulum swinging back on that point? I feel like there's a symbiotic relationship between the far left and the far right. The far left has no greater friend than the far right and the far right has no greater friend than the far left. It's Newton's laws of physics, right? Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. And I feel like Donald Trump produces a reaction in the form of an emboldened far left. The far left had far less relevance under Biden than

than it has in the present moment. Well, so you are among your many powers, apart from just being eloquent and having your head screwed on straight. You, because of your background, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I would imagine you're almost like kryptonite to the far left. I mean, you have as many intersectional points as one could want. I mean, I guess you finally would have to change your gender to get to just to run the table.

Um, you're also gay, right? I am. Okay. So that's, you've got that going for you. I have almost as many intersecting identities as George Santos. Right. Yes. Right. Yes. My running joke is after the expulsion of George Santos, I became the most prominent Jewish gay Latino congressman from New York. Right. I'm a category of one. Right. Yeah. So what does the far left do with you when you don't sing from their hymn book? Uh,

I think if I, if I were a white male, I would be seen as the enemy, but because I am black and Latino and LGBTQ and from the Bronx, I'm seen not only as an enemy, but as a traitor. And there's a special hatred for his reserve for traders. So I feel like I'm a uniquely detested figure by the left. And so what does that translate into? Uh, just.

in your efforts to govern? I mean, how do you function with your other, uh, the other Democrat, prominent Democrats who are, you know, some, I guess AOC shares the Bronx with you, right? Yeah. Yeah. How does that work? I mean, at the staff level, we have a cooperative relationship, right? So there are issues like capping the cross Bronx expressway where there's been collaboration. Um, I have no personal relationship with AOC, but, but I, I never take politics personally. Like my view is even if we only agree on a

a subset of issues, we should collaborate wherever possible for the good of the country. You know, my concern is that politics has become religiosity without religion. And there are those on the far right and the far left who say, you know, they alone have the absolute truth. Their policy prescriptions are the only path to salvation. And anyone who disagrees with them is not merely wrong, but evil.

and should be crucified at the stake for heresy. And I feel like that kind of fundamentalism is incompatible with politics, which is supposed to be, you know, an alternative to conflict. It's supposed to be a pragmatic enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. So what,

can Congress do? I mean, as many of us spectate upon the unimaginable progress Trump has made in devaluing our country on a level and in areas that really many of us who were not optimistic didn't anticipate. I mean, the idea that he would see some reason to cut 50 to 80% of the funding for basic scientific research in this country. I mean, it's like there's just own goal after own goal. Why?

What can a prostrate Congress do? And we're simply just waiting to win the midterms. Is that the next point on the landscape that we have to reach before anything useful can be done? There's no sign of independence from congressional Republicans. I mean, the Republican Party has become a cult of personality around Donald Trump. I've never seen a political figure who has had as much an iron grip on a political party as he has on the Republican Party. I mean, he can wake up one day

and just by sheer force of will make the Republican Party the party of protectionism and price controls. And I've seen Democrats quoting Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, so I feel like our political universe has been inverted. But I worry that we're entering a period of decline. If a superpower were intent on planting the seeds of its own decline, it would paralyze the global economy with uncertainty. It would erode confidence in the reserve status of the dollar.

It would discard due process. It would defund scientific and medical research. It would allow its manufacturing base to atrophy from neglect. And it would grow the deficit until interest on the debt becomes the largest share of the federal budget. And that's the story of America under Donald Trump. And that, to me, is a story of decline. I mean, I worry about the future of America.

And I worry about the impact of the reconciliation bill, not only on the social safety debt, but on the fiscal health of our nation. It will add a staggering $5 trillion to our national debt at a time when the debt has not only never been larger, but also more expensive.

I mean, most people do not realize that interest on the debt has become the largest line item in the federal budget, second only to Social Security. We spend more on debt than on defense or Medicare or Medicaid, and it is projected to ultimately surpass Social Security. So I think we're playing with fire.

So what can the Democrats do now? I mean, short of taking back Congress, is there anything what's happening among Democrats in the House and the Senate now? Look, we're exhausting every means of resisting Donald Trump.

in the courtroom, on the streets, in the halls of Congress. But look, there are limits to what you can do when Republicans control every branch of government. So ultimately, there's no substitute for winning. We have to win elections. But for me, it's not enough to win because, you know, if we win in 2026, our victory could be as much about the weakness of Donald Trump as it is about our own strength. I feel like we have to fundamentally transform the Democratic Party.

What does that look like in your view? Well, actually, more important than restructuring the Democratic Party is restructuring Democratic governance. I feel like there is a crisis of blue state and blue city governance in cities like New York and Chicago. You know, no state saw a greater swing toward Donald Trump than New York. And that to me was not a coincidence. That was a consequence of failing governance at the state and local level. And so I worry that misgovernance in blue states is actually...

creating an electoral challenge for the Democratic Party. In the next reapportionment, there's going to be a massive shift of population and political power

From the north to the south, from the midwest to the mountain west, from the rust belt to the sun belt, the south is projected to gain as many as 11 electoral votes. The northeast and the midwest could lose as many as 11 electoral votes. And so I feel like as a party, you know, we're going to have no choice but to become a big 10 party. That's going to be a necessity in order for us to compete in a much more complicated electoral landscape.

So why are democratic cities and states so badly run? I mean, if we're on the right side of most or any political arguments, why is there so much dysfunction that serves as a campaign commercial for the other side? I have two diagnoses. I think the problem with the Democratic Party is that at times we're more responsive to interest groups than to people on the ground. And the problem with the progressive movement

which has outsized power within the Democratic Party, is that it's more concerned with progressive purity.

than with actual progress, than with the actual competence and performance of government. You know, one of my frustrations as a member of Congress is I feel like federal governance has come to consist of blue state representatives like myself passing laws like the Inflation Reduction Act, whose benefits overwhelmingly flow into red states. Like of the 20 congressional districts receiving the most IRA investment, 19 of them are Republican held.

Because those are the easiest places to do business. Those are the easiest places to build. You know, if you think about the AI revolution leading to the proliferation of AI data centers, where are those data centers going to be cited? It's not going to be cited in New York, which closed Indian Point, a nuclear plant facility. It's going to be cited in states like Texas, which have an abundance of energy. I had a clean energy developer tell me that it is easier for him to create clean energy infrastructure in Texas than in New York, in states that deny climate change.

than in the states that consider it an emergency. And so there is a crisis of blue state governance that we have to come to grips with. Is this of a piece with what is now being called the abundance agenda in democratic circles? So I'm a strong proponent of the abundance movement. And for me, abundance is the best framework for re-imagining

what it means to govern progressively, to govern as a democratic party. You know, if the Republican party is going to be the party of less government, then we as Democrats should not be the party of more government. We should be the party of better, cheaper, and faster government, right? A government that builds a government that works. And, you know, progress is measured not only by more spending, but by more supply. Like for me, what matters is not

Only whether there's more or less housing spending, but whether there's more or less housing supply. Like, are we pursuing policies that expand the supply of housing? Are we contracting it? Are we making housing more abundant and affordable? Are we making it more scarce and unaffordable? And it's often the case that in blue cities and blue states, we're pursuing policies that actually contract the supply of fundamental public goods that we need and want. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it seems like the variable of competence should be uncontroversially the target. One thing that's on display with Trump and Trumpism, leaving the verbiage aside, is colossal corruption and incompetence, right? And if you oppose both of those things, it seems like you're on the winning side of two very important arguments. And none of that requires an appropriation

an approach to, you know, civil rights that Martin Luther King wouldn't recognize or any of the other sinkholes of confusion that Democrats have fallen into. I mean, we're going to get to October 7th and the anti-Semitism that has exploded left of center, but... Can I comment on that? Because I feel like abundance is a fancy word for competence. Right. And it just feels to me our politics values ideological purity more than competence. Competence has become the most undervalued

virtue. But, you know, the American people have a clear pattern of punishing incompetence. You know, when Donald Trump was incompetent in managing the response to COVID, he lost the presidential election in 2020. When we as Democrats were incompetent in managing the migrant crisis, the Democratic nominee lost the election in 2024.

You know, when George Bush sloppily mismanaged the response to Katrina, you know, his poll numbers never recovered. And you might recall when Biden sloppily withdrew from Afghanistan, his poll numbers never recovered. So...

I feel like the clear lesson here is that the American people value competence, demand it, and punish incompetence. And there's this common refrain that, you know, we have a messaging problem. We did not have a messaging problem. We had a reality problem. Inflation was a reality.

The migrant crisis was a reality. And so I just hope that we're not only focused on improving our messaging, but also improving how we govern. Okay, so let's talk about some very errant messaging post-October 7th.

literally before Israel had done anything in response, we had an explosion of, it's not too far to say it, explicit support for the death cult that had murdered 1,200 people in Israel on October 7th. And this support was in the quads of our finest universities. We know that it was not an accident.

It was not purely organic, but obviously the sympathy was there to be leveraged by people taking to social media and in many cases, you know, directly funding protests. We definitely have an anti-Semitism problem. There's an anti-Semitism problem on the far right, obviously, and that's been with us forever. But there's one on the far left, which is increasingly shrill and increasingly hard for otherwise sane and ethical people to parse.

It's understandable given the level of misinformation and disinformation spread on this topic. It's understandable that people are confused about what's happening there and about what Israel could be doing or should be doing. But the clear dissection of the depth of the confusion happened on October 8th before Israel had done anything in response. We saw this explosion of support for Hamas essentially as a legitimate resistance organization, right? The

throwing off an occupation in Gaza that hadn't been occupied for a decade and a half. What do you make of the animus toward Israel and just the animus toward Jews left of center in our politics now? For me, October 7th did not change the state of anti-Semitism. It simply revealed a process that had been unfolding for a long time, a process of demonizing both the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

And to your point, almost as troubling as October 7th itself was the response. On October 8th, I saw masses of Americans go to the heart of Times Square, the most Jewish city in the world, and celebrate and cheer the mass murder of Jews. You know, I never thought as a millennial who remembers the trauma of 9-11, I never thought in my wildest nightmares that Osama bin Laden's letter to America

would be spreading virally on TikTok. And there's no single explanation for what is unfolding in our politics, but it seems to me one of the most influential ideas on the far left, on college campuses, is the idea of intersectionality, which seems to divide the world into two categories, the oppressor versus the oppressed, and Israel is seen as the oppressor.

that can do no right. And Hamas is seen as the oppressed that can do no wrong. And that seems to be the distorting, simplistic lens through which the war in Gaza is seen, through which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen. And it has deprived a whole generation of Americans

of the ability to empathize with Israelis who were victims of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Yeah. I guess there's some doubt as to whether or not the Holocaust even happened in certain circles. I mean, now we have some of the biggest podcasts on earth, platform people who are just asking questions about what happened in 1941 and 42, and maybe Hitler wasn't such a bad guy after all, and maybe they just accidentally killed Jews or killed them out of compassion because

There were so many prisoners of war, they just couldn't figure out what to do with them. And wouldn't it, it might not be more compassionate to euthanize them rather than have them starve. And this is the kind of thing that is. Tucker Carlson's favorite historian. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is Tucker Carlson's favorite historian and one of Joe Rogan's favorite historians. Who said that the central villain of World War II was not Adolf Hitler, it was Winston Churchill. Yeah, yeah. Which would have been unsayable only a few years ago. Mm-hmm.

And it shows how corroded our culture has become by antisemitism, both on the far right and on the far left. But to your point, the far left antisemitism enjoys greater respectability in American culture, in American media, in American education. And I find it ironic that the academic intelligentsia often has the least amount of moral intelligence. And that point was driven home to me during one of the congressional hearings. You might recall one of my colleagues asked me,

The president of elite universities is calling for a genocide of Jews harassment. Now, I'm from the Bronx. I represent a district where the median level of educational attainment is less than a college degree. But if you ask the average Bronxite, you know, is calling for a genocide of Jews harassment, they would say, of course it is. It's worse than harassment.

But if you ask an academic, you get a coldly legalistic formulaic response. And it seems to me the loss of moral common sense is not a bug, but a feature of what the higher education industrial complex has become. Yeah. I mean, I have a, I must say when I watched those hearings, I had some sympathy for the college presidents because they

I do think that the appropriate norm on a college campus is to be able to talk about anything. Yeah. Right? As long as you're just talking, I think you should be able to say anything and then reap the reputational consequences of having advocated that idea. But what was happening on the campuses was quite a bit more than talk. Can I challenge that actually? Yeah. Because that's a fair rule, but then enforce it. Yeah.

Even handedly. That was the thing that was so calling. I feel like the lack of neutrality and enforcement amounts to viewpoint discrimination, which to me is the opposite of academic freedom. We know what would have happened had anyone been calling for the lynching of black people or trans people. If there were a KKK encampment, it would have been shut. If you misgendered someone, you would have been fired and canceled in a heartbeat.

Transgendered KKK members would have been bulletproof. So the selective enforcement of the rules, I think, is what I find most unsettling. Yeah.

Yeah. Like you can have whatever rule you wish, but enforce it evenly. Right, right. And clearly for the purposes of a college campus, one rule is that you shouldn't be able to shut down the functioning of a campus. You shouldn't be able to shout so that no one can be heard from the stage or cancel classes or, you know, we need to be able to educate the kids who are paying to get educated there. There's a misconception about the First Amendment. Yeah. Like the First Amendment protects speech. Yeah.

not conduct. There's no first-member right to erect an encampment or blockade a building or harass and intimidate Jews on college campus. That's not speech protected by the Constitution. That's conduct that violates either the law or university policy. Yeah. It's the double standard that everyone noticed that was so infuriating there. Why doesn't that just end the argument? No one can deny that

had trans people been treated that way at Columbia or Harvard, or black people, or pick any other intersectional identity you want, no one can deny that a very different moral immune system would have come online at the level of the administration. But because it's the Jews, everyone had to kind of go back to their manual and try to split hairs and figure out, okay, how do we respond to this situation?

But that's the, I think the point about intersectionality. And once you categorize Jews as an oppressor class or privilege class. Yeah.

then you're declaring them fair game for discrimination. Discrimination that would never be tolerated against any other minority in our society. Yeah. How did the Jews become a privileged class when still within living memory, nearly half of them were exterminated in ovens in Europe? I mean, how is this, for as long as anyone's been paying attention, certainly you look at FBI hate crime statistics,

Since 9-11, every year since 9-11, even in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, when Islamist terrorists brought down the Twin Towers, you had more hate crimes against Jews in America than any other group. How does this notion that they're at the top of the oppressor class get so secured in left-of-center circles? I think, one, there's a long history of scapegoating and fear-mongering against Jews.

Jews have often been a convenient target for scapegoating. But I think much of it is simply indoctrination. I worry that our social media platforms and our college campuses

are indoctrinating the next generation of Americans, not only with a hatred for Israel, but also a hatred for their own country. Yeah, or a hatred for the West, too. I'm not aware of a civilization in human history that has ever succeeded on the strength of self-loathing. Like a society that no longer believes in itself will not long endure. And I have found that there's often a disconnect between how an immigrant sees America and how a native-born Gen Zer might see America. Yeah.

And I'm overgeneralizing, but I feel like there's a kernel of truth here. You know, an immigrant sees America and sees a land of opportunity. Whereas a member of Gen Z will see America and see nothing but a system of oppression, nothing but racism and sexism and xenophobia. And look, there's certainly a danger in excessive nationalism, but there's also a danger in a deficit. Right.

Every civilization needs some degree of self-love, and I feel like we have a culture of self-loathing in the West. One thing I found inspiring about the Israeli left is before October 7th, during the passionate debates about judicial reform, you had a mass mobilization of Israelis, largely from the left, protesting the judicial reforms. And I found it striking that there were Israelis who were singing the Israeli anthem, HaKtikvah,

and waving the Israeli flag and proudly proclaiming their Israeli patriotism. And I feel like that's such a stark contrast to what we see from the American left, where you have leftists burning the American flag or denigrating the United States. And I feel like the, I wish the American left would embrace the patriotism of the Israeli left.

And my hope is that I can represent a patriotic liberalism within the Democratic Party. Because I feel like one of our miscalculations is ceding the value of patriotism and American exceptionalism to the political right. Yeah, we have an opportunity to get that straight with the 250th anniversary of the country coming up here next year. That will really be a depressing sacrilege if

the centennial there becomes just a mega, you know, triumphal story with the left whinging in a way that just can't find a patriotic lane. We need left-of-center patriotism. Otherwise, yeah, it's not yet another own goal. And Donald Trump has no love for America. He loves no one but himself. That's pretty clear. The ideology of the Republican Party is no longer conservatism, it's Trumpism. Yeah.

And he has contempt for the democratic institutions that have sustained what I would consider to be the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever seen. And I feel like the Democratic Party is uniquely positioned to affirm the exceptionalism of America as a multiracial, multiethnic, expansive democracy, the likes of which the world has never seen. Well, I love that aspiration. Between us and that happy day, I see a few roadblocks. Yeah.

We have to dream. Yeah. Well, one is there's a lot of energy aimed at AOC and Bernie at the moment in the Democratic Party, or at least it seems to be so judging from reading the New York Times. It strikes me as highly unlikely that that's the future of the party that's going to deliver the vision you just articulated. I wonder if you share that sense. I mean, the

The strand of truth that I think has to be addressed in the kind of platform they articulate is the problem of wealth inequality. I think that's just, that is a problem and any sane and compassionate governance would want to address it. But a descent into our own populism that fails to purge this anti-American, even anti-Western civilization strand of leftism, I think is going to be a disaster for us.

I mean, perhaps give me your thoughts on wealth inequality and the shadow it's casting over our society now, but how do we deal with that and still find our way to this goal of a patriotic and a celebration of what is possible once we become no longer ideological, but merely competent and sane? Look, for me, the single greatest challenge confronting America is the affordability crisis.

You know, in New York, about one-fifth of the young black population has disappeared. In the early 20th century, African Americans fled the South or the North in order to escape Jim Crow. And now we see African Americans escaping the North or the South in order to escape the affordability crisis. And even though consumer goods like computers have become dramatically more affordable and more abundant over time,

The fundamentals of human flourishing, like higher education and health care and housing, have become unaffordable and scarce over time. And I feel like the central project of the Democratic Party should be to address the affordability crisis.

that is immiserating the American working class. I mean, that's where we're feeling most miserably. So I think about it, I mean, wealth inequality is a real challenge, but I think about it as an affordability crisis. Do you think if we address class... And that's what's radicalizing the next generation. Right. And for good reason. You know, if you spend $100,000 to go to college, maybe even more, and you find yourself unemployed or underemployed,

You're going to feel bitterly disillusioned with the system if you're struggling to keep pace with the crushing cost of housing and healthcare and higher education. And the inflation in these areas is out of control. You know, the promise of America is supposed to be if you work hard and play by the rules, then you will have access to a decent life. Well, there are people in America who are working hard, who are playing by the rules, and who are not only working poor, but working homeless. Mm-hmm.

Like the majority of household heads in the New York shelter system are working people. Right. How much of the problem of race or the apparent problem of race or racial inequality is a problem of class, do you think? I feel like the two are inextricably bound together.

And if I were setting the agenda for the Democratic Party, I would focus more heavily on class. I feel like we in the Democratic Party should be defined not by identities, but by ideas. And we should speak not in the language of three-letter acronyms like CRT and DEI and ESG. We should speak in the language of opportunity, opportunity for every American. Right.

We should give every American a fighting chance at the American dream, at a decent life. That to me is a unifying message that will broaden the democratic coalition. So if you were going to reset the approach to DEI or affirmative action, is there an approach that focuses on class exclusively, economic disadvantage exclusively that you think solves the problems we want to solve? Or is there some more to the apparatus that we need?

So I'll take one example on workforce development and education. I feel like in America, we have a cultural obsession with the baccalaureate, and we should rethink the notion that everyone must go to a four-year college and learn Shakespeare and then enter the workforce. Like there's a significant subset of our population that prefers

vocational schooling, career and technical education. And instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all model on everyone, why not allow people the freedom and flexibility to choose the path that's right for them? Why not allow people to bring a Pell Grant not only to a four-year college, but to a union apprenticeship? There's a quote from John Gardner who served in the Lyndon Johnson administration, and I might be misremembering the quote, but he said, a society that exalts the

mediocre philosophy but devalues excellent plumbing will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. And that encapsulates what I believe. But for me, there's nothing more corrosive to a society than structural unemployment. And I've seen people in my district who will go to college, drop out, and end up not with a degree but with debt and become structurally unemployed. And when you're structurally unemployed,

you're much more susceptible to contact with the criminal justice system, deaths of despair, substance abuse, mental illness, what's been described as the disappearance of work. I feel like that's the central pathology.

that we should be confronting and we should restructure and reimagine higher education and workforce development in America to the benefit of the working class. Yeah. Well, AI is going to be making that even more interesting to navigate in the coming years. Although the irony of AI is that it actually might bring more dislocation to white-collar work. Oh, yeah, exactly. And to blue-collar work. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. All these people who read their Shakespeare are going to... But originally it was projected that all these truck drivers would

would lose their employment. No, no. And instead, we're going to live in a world where the diagnostic capabilities of a doctor are more replaceable than the social-emotional skills of a nurse. Yeah, yeah. I think that's coming faster than anyone thought even a few years ago. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about it? I'm pessimistic about, on at least two fronts, I'm pessimistic about our ability to, even in success, not exacerbate

the kinds of problems we've been talking about, right? I mean, I think we're totally capable of leaving aside the problem of building AI that is aligned with our interests and may yet just kill us, or AI that's not aligned with our interests and may yet kill us. Even if we built it perfectly so that we could use it however we wanted to and without any loss of control, I think we're still capable of not understanding the political and economic changes that this is going to force on us. And we'll be celebrating

a handful of trillionaires in the pages of our business magazines as unemployment skyrockets and we just can't figure out how to spread the wealth around. Which is to say that if we anticipate building it safely, which is by no means guaranteed or by some accounts even likely at this point, we have to see that even safe AI

that's just kind of pulling wealth out of the ether is something that we could disastrously misuse because we haven't anticipated the political and economic consequences of it. It simply has to be a tide that raises all boats. And, you know, that's going to sound like communism to half the country. And it shouldn't because if, you know, we just can't have, I mean, what is the end game? You know, trillionaires with their, you know, building compounds in New Zealand and, you know,

It could be the greatest force for inequality the world has ever seen if we don't play our cards right.

And be it behind all that, there's the genuine concern that we're just in an arms race with China and other bad actors. And that this is, it's like nuclear proliferation if, if nukes were easily copied, you know, and didn't require any rare materials to be created. So it's, uh, it's in some ways scarier than that. And I suspect AI is much more susceptible to proliferation than nuclear weapons. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's just, um, like I, I,

I'm not sure what to make of what will become of the AI revolution. I'm hopeful that it could be a net good for humanity. I feel like technology has been the greatest catalyst for human progress. And pessimism about technology, apocalyptic fears of what technology will bring is almost as old as humanity itself. If I remember my Plato dialogues correctly, even Socrates feared that the advent of writing would mean the end of human intelligence. And I think it's fair to say writing has been a net benefit for humanity. Yeah.

No, I do think this is a fundamentally different breakthrough technologically, and I'm convinced we will see its implications relatively soon. And it's a level of exponential progress we've never seen. Yeah, yeah. But it is just, it's humbling to realize that even the good version poses problems that we will find difficult to navigate. Speaking of the future, maybe, hopefully nearer term than the rise of superintelligence, I'm

malicious or otherwise, what are your thoughts about 2028? What's, uh, is it indecent to ask you who should be running? Who should, uh, who in the democratic party stands a chance of being a viable candidate at this point? Well, naturally I have a preference for center left candidates and I tend to have a bias toward executives. So I feel like our greatest bench of talent is in the governorships, but I've, you know, I'm impressed with governors like Wes Moore, uh,

Josh Shapiro. I do feel like we have a wealth of talent at the gubernatorial level. And then Mayor Pete is just one of the most gifted communicators in the Democratic Party. So I feel like we have a stronger bench than people realize.

Well, Rishi, I know you have a plan to catch. Is there anything we haven't touched that you think we should cover in the remaining time? No, that's, that's, uh, I, I feel like, I think we, we in the democratic party and those of us on the rational left need to be more comfortable pushing back against more relativism and speaking with moral clarity.

and defending America and defending Western civilization, which is worth defending. Because I do feel like we live in an age of moral confusion. You know, if you're, speaking of Israel, if you're an Arab woman,

in the Middle East. And if you're born in Israel, you could rise to the highest echelons of Israeli society. You could become a member of the Knesset. You could become a member of the Israeli Supreme Court. You could be the judge that puts the prime minister in prison. Whereas if you're born in Afghanistan, you will have acid thrown in your face for daring to be literate. And anyone who fails to see the fundamental moral difference between those two realities is profoundly morally confused. And I

And I feel like those of us on the rational left should be at the forefront of combating that kind of moral nihilism and confusion. That was better than...

I could have ever hoped anyone would say it. I would say that anyone who can't sign on the dotted line there and see the implications of what you just said, just that it's just obvious that there are right and wrong answers or better and worse answers to fundamental questions of human flourishing. I just think there's no future in our politics for an orientation that can't thread that needle that you just effortlessly threaded there. And yet it's as...

We push left of center, it becomes harder and harder to have that conversation on half a dozen fronts. Well, Richie, there's no alternative but to see you more and more part of the conversation. So thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for coming out here. And it's great to get you on the podcast. It's an honor to be here.