This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Adam Gurri. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, which is a great publication, a newer publication that writes about politics both in the U.S. and Britain, and a little bit abroad as well, but mainly focuses on the U.S. And we’re going to talk today about a project Liberal Currents is doing called The Reconstruction Papers. So Adam, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Adam Gurri: Thank you for having me.
Bacon: So tell people about Liberal Currents a little bit, just because I assume that’s a publication people are not as familiar with as The New York Times or the Washington Post. So tell them about Liberal Currents and what you’re doing, first of all.
Gurri: Sure. It’s an essay publication, mostly—so more commentary than news, though occasionally we’ve done a bit of news. Our focus is obviously through a liberal perspective. One of our inspirations when we started in 2017 was Jacobin magazine, which was created on the idea that socialism had been discredited in the U.S., in its reputation. They wanted to actually say, No, this is a serious intellectual tradition, and we are its number one exponents in the U.S.
We had the reverse situation, which was that liberalism was so successful that actually people didn’t take it very seriously, in the sense that they assumed a lot. We assume that we believe in free speech, we assume that we believe in different things, in human rights and such, but not a lot of thought was actually given to why anymore.
And actually, the enemies of liberalism spent a lot more time thinking about ways to attack it than the defenders thought about how to defend it, both intellectually and otherwise. So we wanted to correct that. We wanted to be one of the foremost exponents of what liberalism is, what it should be, why the world should be more liberal, and how we should go about it.
Bacon: So talk about The Reconstruction Papers and what you’re doing.
Gurri: Yes. From our point of view—the Trump era, liberal resistance to it. The very name “resistance” implies a negative response, right? We’re trying to stop him from doing bad things. And even in talking about the extreme destruction of the second term, it’s often about, It’s bad that he’s breaking this thing. It was so great before. We need to fix it as soon as we can, or stop the destruction as much as we can.
That’s all true, but we shouldn’t fix it to be the way it was before. All of these things had problems before Trump came along. Everyone agreed, for example, that tuition was out of control in colleges and no one could quite identify the cause. That the public funding of science—which was this tremendous accomplishment in the 20th century for the U.S., and still one of the biggest ones worldwide by far, in fact I think the biggest by a wide margin—before Trump it was getting creaky, bureaucratic, sclerotic in a number of ways.
So the Reconstruction Papers is saying, we’re not just going to go back to before Trump. First of all, that’s impossible, because it’s not how things work. If you tried to do that, you would just be doing a kludge that would be worse than what we had before. But second of all, what we had before could be better. Why limit ourselves?
Now that we have this window of opportunity, where the Republicans have shot their shot—they’re trying to destroy the administrative state, the New Deal state, really and truly for the first time—let’s shoot our shot. Let’s make the best version of all of these things that we can.
And The Reconstruction Papers isn’t as comprehensive as we would like it to be in that. There’s more that we could write. We’ll continue publishing new things, obviously, on the main site—potentially a future issue of The Reconstruction Papers as well. But it covers a lot. It covers a lot of different topics.
Bacon: Do you mean to invoke Reconstruction as in the post-Civil War?
Gurri: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a few things, right? Reconstruction, the original one, is both an inspiration and a caution, because they had the right idea. They weren’t just passing amendments to change what legal rights we had, which was obviously one thing they did do. But the whole goal of it, the whole idea of Reconstruction, was the slave power was not just a legal entity. It was an institution that had social and political power, and in order to actually destroy it, you couldn’t just outlaw slavery. You had to actually break the political arrangement, break the economic organization of the South in such a way that it wouldn’t come back.
And the caution is that they failed, right? They did accomplish a lot. But a lot of their gains were reversed, and then we had almost a century of Jim Crow. Some people—including Victor Ray, in our collection, in the Reconstruction Papers—refer to the era of civil rights reforms as the Second Reconstruction. So that would be the successful one.
The Voting Rights Act, even more than the Civil Rights Acts, I would say, being the spine of that, holding the whole thing together. That was fairly successful in actually enfranchising African Americans permanently, and other minorities as well that were disenfranchised elsewhere. And frankly, Southern whites, very disenfranchised as well. It was not just minorities that were disenfranchised there. It was also poor people, anyone that they didn’t really want having a chance at challenging the status quo.
But now we’re seeing the unwinding of that. So we need—if there are two, we need a third.
Bacon: So I read—I don’t think I read all of them, but I read many of the Reconstruction Papers. So what Liberal Currents has done is, there are, I think, dozens of people who’ve written articles—maybe four pages, maybe 15 pages, that range in length—about their subject matter. So there’s foreign policy, there’s trade, there’s higher education, there’s domestic policy. So that’s a broad sense. But give people a sense of two or three ideas that are in the document they might want to think about.
Gurri: Sure. So one to think of, in terms of what has just happened in the Supreme Court, would be Anna Law’s contribution on immigration law. I think probably even more ambitious programs are possible, but our immigration status quo is so bad right now—even before, again, the Trump second term, it was so bad—that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. And her approach essentially was to say, Let’s take the low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit is essentially what she calls normalizing immigration law.
Right now, Congress has failed to pass any kind of bill for 20 years. There’s a lot of things that bipartisanly they have more or less agreed on for most of that time that would make the situation better off, including for people like us who believe that immigration is good. And we should just do it. And it should be reauthorized on a regular basis through Congress, so that it will normalize the process of actually revisiting how many people are here on TPS, just the different levels and numbers of each, and—
Bacon: Just to be clear, and make sure people understand—every year Congress should intentionally think through and pass legislation about how many people are entering the country new, not as a sort of—there should be a global number, right?
Gurri: I forget the exact cadence. I don’t think it’s every single year. But for example, the Voting Rights Act itself was reauthorized multiple times.
Bacon: Yes.
Gurri: And each time they reauthorized it, one of the things they would say is, We’ll reauthorize it again in this number of years. So after the Reagan one, I think it was quite a long time. Before that, they did it a couple of times relatively close together. And this is one of those inside-baseball, Congress things that a lot of people don’t know about. Having legislation be reauthorized like that gives Congress a more central role.
I would say a theme across the Reconstruction Papers is many of the problems of our system are downstream of the dysfunction of Congress. So the more you can do to force Congress to actually step up and fill the role it’s supposed to, the more that out-of-control presidencies and out-of-control courts will be reined in, almost just by happenstance. So making Congress regularly reauthorize some basic things about immigration law, according to Anna Law, will help a lot of things.
So that’s one—tied to the TPS, because TPS itself is a kludge, right? It’s like this, Oh, presidents can discretionarily give it to some people. Maybe we don’t make it quite so discretionary for them to revoke it—though it is discretionary for them whether or not they’re going to renew it. It’s just a mess in terms of how it works.
Bacon: What are the Supreme Court reforms in the document? I’ve forgotten now. What are the Supreme Court reforms themselves?
Gurri: Yeah. We actually don’t talk about it that much. One reason being that I actually am pretty optimistic that all the ideas are out there, for the most part. This has been discussed to death, and it’s really just a matter of having the will to do it. Nick Grossman, in his first essay—which is about the short-term things we need to do to get out of the immediate crisis, rather than the long-term vision stuff—says just outright that we should just expand the Court, straight up.
In my essay, which is on federalism, I mention that any and all of the things—almost everything we’re talking about that’s in any way ambitious—is going to require a Supreme Court to go along with it, which means we should just make one that will. Whether it is through a one-time expansion or—like Senator Wyden a few years ago had a court reform plan already that would work fine. It essentially would just create a fixed number of appointments per presidential term.
In theory, you need to pass an amendment to set term limits. What they wanted to do in practice was to just create a new seniority status, where you’re on the Supreme Court still, but you’re not actually seeing any cases after a certain number of years. So even doing that, and then immediately putting the older Republican nominees on the retirement path, and making sure that the number of nominees per term is such that the first Democratic president is going to create a Democratic majority immediately—just stuff like that, I think, will be good enough.
Bacon: The federalism essay is about giving states more power. That was very striking to me, so talk about federalism.
Gurri: Yeah. It’s three things, right? So the one that I think is relevant to what’s happened the past year and a half, mostly, is the guaranteeing-the-Republican-form-of-government component. So I strongly believe that a lot of the problems in our system—and it’s not very timely to talk about right now, with the federal government going out of control, but most of the problems are local.
A lot of local governments—when we talk about police reform, for example, the worst police in our country are just random localities that aren’t very populous. They don’t have a big tax base. They engage in very predatory behavior. They’re not very professionalized. But whenever we want to do police reform, you can’t do it very systematically, because you kind of do it county by county or locality by locality.
So I’ve always believed that one path forward is: make state governments more democratic, A. B, make state governments stronger than local governments. And then C, do better fiscal federalism, the way that Canada does, for example, where we’re not putting a lot of strings attached to the block grants the federal government gives to states. We’re just trying to make sure that state budgets per person are more or less equalized, regardless of whether you have a lot of poor people in your state or a lot of rich people in your state, to summarize it very—
Bacon: I’m a little worried, because as I read what Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott each day—I’m a little worried about this idea. So talk about your idea a little bit.
Gurri: Yeah. So the Constitution, in theory, guarantees the Republican form of government for each state. We’ve never actually done anything with this. Even the Voting Rights Act has nothing to do with it. It just invokes the 14th and 15th Amendments—mainly the 15th, which is about not denying people the right to vote on the basis of race.
But I think we should actually just use that, and we should use that to authorize legislation that is very prescriptive about what is allowed as the form of government at the state level. And at minimum, that should mean one chamber—because almost every state now is bicameral, with two chambers like the federal government, and then a separately elected governor. So at minimum, the minimum-level change should be one of those chambers has to be done by proportional representation, meaning that whatever party gets 30 percent of the votes gets 30 percent of the seats, et cetera.
So that’s one thing. The other thing is, if you are going to have separately elected executives like the governor, like the attorney general in many states, a lot of these positions, they have to be either a runoff or ranked-choice vote, so that you don’t get a situation where someone has a lot less than a majority of the vote and wins. In both cases, you are pushing against minority rule.
And in the case of proportional representation specifically, you’re breaking up what a lot of people call our two-party system. I would call it a two-at-most-party system. Because most state governments are just one party. And then primaries are treated like, OK, we have primaries. You can just vote in those instead. But those rarely have the same level of turnout as a general election. Plus, they make elections a lot more expensive—you have to have two elections that you’re running in.
So proportional representation creates actual multi-partyism in every single state, actual party competition in every single state. In a state like Texas or Florida, what that probably means is the Republican Party mainly cracks up, and the different wings of it are competing with each other directly, but they’re not spoilers necessarily. Then they have to coalition with each other in the legislature to actually work. But it opens up the space.
The fact of the matter is, everyone right now is spitting mad on the liberal side of the spectrum, and many on the independent side as well—they’re spitting mad about a lot of what the administration has done. But the approval rating of the Democratic Party itself is still in the gutter, even though the Republican Party is doing so badly. And it’s because the Democratic Party brand is kind of terrible, frankly. It’s a combination of, obviously, Republicans hate them, but then Democrats feel like they’re just not doing anything. They’re not accomplishing anything, so they also don’t approve.
Having actual multi-party competition would open up the possibility of new liberal parties to run that don’t have the baggage of the Democratic Party, but can still coalition with them when they win. So in general—again, if you force it at the federal level, you say to state governments, You have to do this, or your elections don’t count under our authority implementing the Constitution—then gerrymandering is no longer a problem, and we’ve seen how big a problem that can quickly become.
Proportional representation makes that impossible. You can’t gerrymander governors, so you just make sure that there’s no spoilers where someone’s winning with 40 percent or less of the vote, or something insane like that. Or what we actually have now, which is just one party wins every single time. So you have actual multi-party competition. You don’t have minority rule in any case.
And at that point, those are the strings, in order to get the support of the federal government to consolidate power at the state government level. Because state governments, if they were actually democratically responsive, would be a far better way to govern than local governments, for the most part.
Bacon: All right. That was helpful, because that was a far-reaching idea that would be much different than... But I want to get people to understand that what you all are calling for in many areas of policy is just much different than where we are now.
Gurri: Yes. Oh, yes.
Bacon: It is reconstruction. It is not reform. It’s not tinkering. And so I wanted to get that. So now I want to talk less about the ideas and more about kind of where we are.
So I think—and a lot of people I agree with, Jamelle Bouie’s writing in this direction, you guys are doing good stuff in this direction—a lot of people who are thought leaders I think of are describing a big we need to have a big reconstruction-style of June 2029.
But the Democratic Party, I would say both wings of it, are not there. And I’m going to start with the Zohran, DSA, Bernie Sanders wing—and they might reject me framing it so directly here—but I think their agenda seems to be, If we do a lot of economic policies that help the working class, we will win elections, and that will be the way to restore democracy. I’m dubious of that, and I assume you are too. So talk about why we can’t just do working-class affordability and that’ll solve every problem.
Gurri: Yeah. I want to do those things, obviously.
I think they’re good policy and such. But for Biden, I think he did a lot of really good things, and what we just saw is he didn’t get any credit for them, right? The CHIPS Act and the IRA were both incredible policies—just great stuff that we should have been doing—and a ton of money was poured into red states, mostly because it was easier to build there, frankly. No other political reason than that. And those states all went super-majorities for Trump anyway. It didn’t matter. They voted for the guy that came in and immediately killed all that stuff.
So I just think that theory of change clearly does not work, and that we actually have to do something more fundamental. So yes, for example, the original Reconstruction Republicans in the 19th century believed that they needed to change the actual plantation economic system, but they very much believed you had to change the institutions and the incentives and all that stuff as well.
And I think it’s just clear that rural areas right now have a way disproportionate influence on our politics. If you actually were to force a lot of states, and the House, for example, to really be proportional—if you were to get us out of the two-party frequent-switching situation in the House—I think that the situation will change considerably.
I don’t necessarily think the DSA would be against it, though. I get that most of their talking points are—
Bacon: But it’s not that they’re just there. They don’t talk about it very much.
Gurri: Yeah. No, I agree, they’re not. I do think that just from a self-interest point of view, their success—I was talking to this political scientist, Jack Santucci, who’s written a lot about proportional representation in his work. And he was saying that the situation with the DSA rising right now, like in the past primaries that they had, where they were successful, is very akin to the situations where European countries that got proportional representation actually finally did it. And it is because they wanted to institutionalize the factions of their parties, rather than have this within-a-party competition thing.
The DSA—like a future DSA-type party in a multi-party system—could still coalition with the Democratic Party, but it might be better for both of them to stop competing for the same voters internally and consolidate themselves a bit, and then just coalition with whatever they get in the general election.
Bacon: All right. So you answered one part of my question, which is, for one faction, affordability will solve everything—we’re dubious of that. I think that both the center-left and the left in the Washington, the official party—they both believe that to win an election, you have to talk about economic issues. People don’t care about democracy, they don’t care about institutions. Hillary and Harris lost because they said democracy too much, and all people care about is prices.
So in a campaign sense—in other words, the question might be: do we want President Buttigiegto read your agenda and do it in office, but maybe not talk about it? Or do you think talking about it—is it bad politics, good policy? Do you think that’s the conventional wisdom in Washington, that institutions, democracy reform is good policy, bad politics? Do you agree with that?
Gurri: Yeah. So I try to be pretty humble about talking about what works in a campaign. Because I’ve never run or won one.
Bacon: Only person in the world that feels that way. Good for you.
Gurri: Yeah. No, I really just don’t like armchair doing it. What I can say, just from the sense of perceptions—again, having no authority whatsoever on the subject—is, for example, our trade proposal, Steve Randy Waldman’s trade proposal. Everyone has said, How the heck are you going to explain this to voters? It’s very technocratic. But I think it’s easy.
His trade proposal is essentially an old idea at the top level, which is free but balanced trade. And I think that’s relatively easy to sell now of all times, because Trump is just all about tariffs—and of course he’s done the worst possible version of them, but that’s a good way to discredit just bluntly doing tariffs. But no one wants to go back to the neoliberal trade regime, mostly because it resulted in deindustrialization and trade imbalances, which were very related to each other.
So I think, like, campaigning on a top level—we want free but balanced trade, the tariffs don’t work—you could say to the people who care about this stuff, which is some, it’s not no voters—you could say, Look, Trump did all these tariffs and our trade imbalance got worse, and China’s trade surplus got better, so clearly that’s not working. Here’s an alternative where we get the best of both, essentially. And that actually is true in this case, for his policy.
Not all the things we go into are like that, though. Like Moira Berstein’s essay is about climate-risk mitigation for housing, specifically. And that’s a super-detailed technocratic thing.
Bacon: This is, in other words—this is not a campaign guide.
Gurri: Exactly. It’s really not. I would like for Democrats, especially ones running for office for the next two years, to see this, have it in mind, and think about how they can position themselves so that if they implement these things, they haven’t been misleading. I want them to talk about the spirit of the thing, or the high-level public-facing elevator pitch for it. I don’t want them to just say, Oh, we won’t do that, and then do it. I don’t want that, obviously. I want honesty. The level of sheer dishonesty in the Trump era has been mind-boggling.
Not encouraging that by any means. But it’s definitely not a campaign guide. It’s more of a governing philosophy, I would say, even more than a policy document.
Bacon: And that leads me to the next question. So there are two views of the Republican Project 2025, and I think it’s worth putting both of those. One view is that it unified the party’s elite class around a set of goals. They worked out what they’re going to do, and they did it. So that’s a thing the Democrats might want to emulate.
On the other hand, if Harris won the election—and Harris almost did—it would’ve helped that the Republicans put out a bunch of radical-ish stuff in a document that she gets to run against. So in a certain sense, how do we view this enterprise itself? Is it important that the Democrats put out some detailed agendas in this, or they look at yours, look at what CAP does? Is it important that these documents are broad and ambitious, or is it important that they don’t include anything that the other side will use during the campaign?
Gurri: I think you can’t avoid the latter anyway. As we saw with the Harris campaign, she was very minimal, right? She didn’t necessarily push a bunch of big, bold plans. She was very USA is great, we stand for more than this. Frankly, she ran the campaign that everyone’s been asking Democrats to run.
Bacon: Yes.
Gurri: And some of the people who think that didn’t—who want to defend that style—will say it’s because she had history. She didn’t just appear out of nowhere that year. But every candidate is going to have history. They’ll find something, or they’ll make something up.
Bacon: In other words, she ran the populist, poll-tested, economic—move to the right on social issues—campaign these guys, the David Shor crowd, all want, and she just lost.
Gurri: Yeah. No, exactly. I don’t even think she moved to the right, right? But she was very patriotic, and she was not very divisive. She wasn’t very woke, in terms of the stuff—like, whatever. So I don’t think you can shrink from that kind of thing.
I also think part of the game with The Reconstruction Papers, and things like it, is even if it’s not a campaign document, we are sending it to people that are not just policy and media insiders. We are actually trying to make the case for a vision of liberalism that we think is good, and that we should persuade people to want to have. And I don’t necessarily think an election campaign is the place to do that, except at maybe a very high level. But we’ve got a couple of years—let’s proliferate this. Let’s try and get this as popular as it can be, or things like it.
A lot of politics is not just the campaign, but consolidating what your side is on—which, I agree, Project 2025 was probably more focused specifically on elites, but there was some broader conservative-world discourse about it as well.
Bacon: Because you said earlier that adding justices to the Supreme Court, you think, has almost been socialized enough in the party. So do you want Buttigieg, do you want Gavin Newsom or Whitmer or Slotkin to talk about that kind of reform even—adding justices to the Supreme Court? Do you think that we’re already there? Do they have to talk about that? Where do the ambitious-but-controversial ideas go, you think, during the campaign?
Gurri: I think you can’t run to do the specific reform, probably. Again, this is just speculation. But I think you probably don’t run on, I’m going to expand the Court, so much as you run on the corruption of the Court. And that’s what gives you the door to, Here’s what we’re going to do, whatever they end up deciding to do.
And if you’re going to do the Wyden plan, for example—because a one-time expansion, that’s just obviously, we’re redressing a specific wrong. But the Wyden reform, or something like it—which I think is a good idea, and we should do regardless of whether we do the one-time expansion—is saying, Look, the way we’ve been doing this isn’t working.
The stakes of every single judicial nominee have gone through the roof, especially Supreme Court ones. Often it’s not about election results, it’s about who happens to die with what timing and who happens to be in office at that time. The connection to actual elections is zero, pretty much, except that you have to win as often as possible to get your chance whenever it happens to appear.
Let’s tie it to elections. They won’t be these existential, once-in-a-generation affairs. But they’ll still have independence. They’ll still have whatever 10-year we end up giving them. So it’ll be like the Fed. The Fed gets appointed on a regular basis, not lifetime. No one thinks the Fed is not independent. We can keep the Supreme Court independent without having it be like an appointed kingship or something for life.
So I think you can run on that. Running on a Wyden-plan-type thing, I don’t think, is a bad idea. If you’re going to do the one-time expansion, I would say you probably don’t want to run on that. You just want to run on: the Supreme Court is out of control and lawless and corrupt, and we need to do something about it.
Bacon: OK. Project 2025 was done by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank. A lot of the things that are happening now in the Democratic Party are happening from either candidates themselves, politicians, or Center for American Progress, Roosevelt Institute. These are all think tanks that are very tight with the party.
How does Liberal Currents—you all are not trying to be really tight with, you all are not a party or affiliated think tank in a certain way. You’re not in office. How are you going to socialize your ideas in a way, the way that... Because you’re not in the party, you don’t really want to be. So how do you get your ideas moved within the party without this sort of being-inside-of-it sense?
Gurri: Yeah, we are moving into it more, I would say. So it’s, like, how—as you were implying, I would think—we need to change the party if we want them to do the right things in 2029—if they have a trifecta. Part of changing the party is not just changing the elected officials in it. It’s also changing the overall—I don’t know—the intellectual environment, the policymaking environment around it.
And we had a fundraiser at the end of last year in order to grow much larger. Part of it was to promise to produce the Reconstruction Papers as well. I’m having conversations with people like yourself to try and spread awareness of it, with people who are watched by policymakers as well. We’re reaching out to some policymakers directly, inasmuch as some of our writers are connected to that world. Long story short, just like we’re trying to transform the Democratic Party through primaries, we’re also trying to transform the media and think-tank environment around the Democratic Party. And we want to be a big part of that. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Bacon: That leads me to my last question, which will be—so talk about where you, Liberal Currents, see last week. In other words, the New York primaries—I perceive you all as being not necessarily where DSA is, but not necessarily where Hakeem Jeffries is either. And I perceive that to be a place where actually a lot of Democratic voters are, too.
My sense is the average Democrat that I talk to is not a hardcore socialist who is for Medicare for All at all times—I’m not against, I’m for that, but I’m just saying—nor are they Israel is great, we must defend Israel at all times. My sense is most of them are, “Trump is bad. We should win elections, fight him, and make sure there’s not another Trump again.” That seems to be where—now, I’m not sure they would call that liberalism. They would just call that logical. But is that where you all are, in a certain sense?
Gurri: Oh, yeah, definitely. Chance Phillips wrote something about last Tuesday for us, and he called it the Democratic Tea Party, which everyone hates. We got 100 replies that were like, Don’t call it that. The Tea Party was terrible, and they were astroturf. Fair enough. But anyway, that’s what everyone calls it.
And his point was, the DSA was, like, the single biggest winner, because they were well-organized—they’d benefited from about a decade of socialism becoming less of a terrible, scary word on the left. But also they weren’t the only ones. Outside of New York City, there were a lot of not even left, but, like you were saying, candidates—
Bacon: Outliers.
Gurri: —that were not Hakeem Jeffries, who were not strongly pro-Israel, and who just are running on, I’m pissed off about Trump, and I’ll do something about him, because I know you’re pissed off about him. And Chance lists a few of those who are not DSA. Even Lander himself—Lander used to be DSA, obviously. He’s my district, by the way. And I voted for him.
The way I interpret it is, we’re still just starting to see—so you see polls that say Trump’s approval rating is the lowest it’s ever been, but more interesting than that even is, even before it dipped that low, on the disapproval side, it’s almost 100 percent strongly disapprove, where they show disapprove or strongly disapprove. People are very mad.
And I was talking to an elected official who goes to a lot of union events. And for years, those union events always had tons of people with MAGA hats. But last year—this was like June or July last year, even, not even that late—she went to one, and none of them were. They were all pissed off. So there’s a lot of anger to channel into.
And like you said, it’s not let’s do socialism in America anger. It’s, We have to stop this. This is outrageous. And like you said, they don’t even think of it as liberalism or socialism or something. It’s just like a politics of, We reject this, and we want something better. And so candidates that come in and are like, We will make it our number one thing to reject it, are coming in.
Bacon: You said something about the media environment that intrigued me a little bit, because I worked at FiveThirtyEight, and that was a smaller publication, but at that point there was Twitter, and that was very easy. Everybody was on Twitter. You could really socialize your ideas. So I’m curious—you were talking very openly, which is rare of people, about how we want to change the idea structure, we want to change the intellectual environment in the party.
I’d be curious how you do that. Because I learned about you all through Bluesky, and that’s how I’ve come to see you all, but that is not necessarily reaching the average Democrat the way Twitter was. A lot of elite commentators will refuse Bluesky as too left or too Dem—whatever it is, they won’t join it. So is that a big barrier? What is your strategy to reach people who are not?
How do you shift the environment when—because I don’t perceive you all to be on MSNBC a ton either, and none of you have a New York Times column, as far as I know. What do you do to reach the—how do you influence the party if you’re only on Bluesky and things like that? So talk about how you’re trying to reach the party.
Gurri: Yeah. So Bluesky was very helpful, because a lot of, like you said, the left flank of the party world is in there. It also is one of the few feed-based, not video-based, sites—
Bacon: That’s a good point.
Gurri: —that will actually let you link to things—
Bacon: Yes.
Gurri: —and doesn’t tank that. We’ve done well in terms of just pure views, because you can actually link to things there still.
Perry Bacon: Because Twitter suppresses anything that has a link on it now. So does Facebook. So it’s very hard, very bad for written content.
Gurri: I’ve heard that even LinkedIn does—not that LinkedIn would be the place.
Bacon: I’ve heard that too, actually, yes.
Gurri: Yeah. So there’s that. We’re growing our email list a ton, so we do newsletters. We are seeking to grow in video a lot. We’re investing a lot in that effort on YouTube in particular, but everywhere, really. The Reconstruction Papers itself is in print. It’s not yet shipped out, but getting it out into the print world and mailing it to people, bringing it to conference events and things like that, is another channel.
And then again, conversations like I’m having with you. Again, I live in New York City. We fundraised a lot last year, partly so that I could take this all on and do a lot more media promotion of us. So, getting on MS NOW, we’re getting on other things like that. That’s the goal. We’re still getting there, but that’s certainly something we want to do.
Bacon: Because I think of Hasan Piker as having a lot of—if I was going to take up two news things that I’m reading more than I did last year—Hasan Piker’s done a really great job post-2024 in making himself prominent, and I think you guys have too. He’s more on Twitter, you guys are more on Bluesky. He’s more in video, you guys are more on text. And I know you don’t have the same policy views exactly, but the critique of the Democratic Party is similar from both outlets, I would say.
Gurri: Yeah, makes sense.
Bacon: All right. Anything else? So tell people where they can find you and where they can find Liberal Currents’s work.
Gurri: Yep. There’s liberalcurrents.com, where you can subscribe to us. You can see all our social media there. I am on Bluesky. Adam Gurri—a very easy-to-Google name. I am literally the only Adam Gurri, so it’s very easy to find me.
Bacon: Adam, thanks for joining me. And the Reconstruction Papers are on Liberal Currents’s website, obviously.
Gurri: Yep. I encourage people to check those out. There’s a big link at the top to get to them.
Bacon: Thank you for joining me. Good to see you. Take care. Bye-bye.
Gurri: Thank you. Bye.
