This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 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. Great guest today. I’m joined by Ryan Cooper. He’s a senior editor at The American Prospect, another great liberal magazine you should also be reading. Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Cooper: Glad to be here.
Bacon: So I want to—you’ve been writing a lot about these primaries. We’ve been covering them a lot, too. We’ve got two more coming up this week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But I want to go back to Michigan a little bit first. So now that we’re almost a week out, talk about what we saw. Did we learn anything about the results themselves in Michigan?
It looks like we had sort of a common breakdown of, Abdul maybe won the sort of younger vote, maybe the more college-educated vote, the counties around the universities. Stevens won Detroit for sure, some of the more rural areas. Anything surprising in the results, just looking at them from the usual progressive-centrist races we’ve seen?
Cooper: No, it’s more or less what we’ve come to expect from these sort of breakdowns, that the class base of the socialist movement in the United States is, like, downwardly mobile, highly educated people. And they tend to struggle with, like, older minority folks, particularly Black people. And so yeah, that was not too surprising.
However, I will note—oh, I forget his name, the fellow that turfed out the incumbent in the Detroit House District. He’s a DSA member and a Black man, not a—
Bacon: Donovan McKinney?
Cooper: That’s right, that’s the one. Yeah. Sorry, I should have taken some notes for this. But yeah, that, I think you see, like, a more return to form for kind of the natural tendency among Black voters to support fairly left-wing, at least economic policy, being basically very economically disadvantaged on average among all the sort of racial groups in the United States. And it’s not at all impossible to imagine Abdul El-Sayed racking up very large margins in Detroit. I would expect that to happen. But it will remain to be seen if he can do that or not.
Bacon: So the left has been very focused on economic issues, more—is it surprising that they’re not winning the sort of non-college vote, even though, even more than six years ago, the left is very focused on affordability? Is it surprising they’re not winning the voters who might be most concerned with affording things?
Cooper: On one level, yes, but on another level, no. You could certainly say, from a sort of, like, vulgar Marxist perspective, that you would think that the people that would be most directly influenced and helped by lefty policy—whether it’s, like, rent control, or expanding childcare subsidies, that sort of thing—that those people would be attracted to those policies.
But in practice, it’s rather more complicated than that, both as a matter of political mobilization and as a matter of how, at least certain fractions of those demographics tend to approach politics. Not so much as the just, “What can I get for myself?” But it’s more that, I believe that this more moderate Democrat is more likely to be elected, and so I shouldn’t support the lefty radical who might benefit me more personally, but is more likely to lose in the general election.
We saw that tendency with Cuomo. Some of his strongest districts across New York City were working-class Black districts. And this is a very long tendency in the Democratic Party, where it’s toxic in some ways, but it’s also unsurprising in others. It’s like, these folks like Cuomo have built up a connection there, and it’s not something that you can expect to happen automatically because the policy that you decanted out of a book from graduate school would theoretically benefit the poverty rate by the so-and-so percent.
Bacon: So we’re five days out. You’ve seen Kamala Harris endorsed him. Buttigieg was up there with him. Haley seems to have been very positive about him. There’s been the leaked Obama phone call.
So are we at a place where the party is pretty much—we talked about the very divisive primary all running up to it, but are we at a point where the party is pretty much unified around him fairly quickly?
Cooper: Oh, around El-Sayed, certainly. Yeah. I think that in addition to being clearly a progressive candidate, he’s also not a DSA member. He says he’s not a socialist. He’s a capitalist who wants to make capitalism better, you know—
What do you mean by that precisely? But he’s also clearly a very charismatic and talented politician. And you saw that—I think that when Obama was reaching out to Zohran Mamdani, he was like, “This guy is good.” And game recognize game. Obama, whatever else you want to say about him, is an exceptionally talented politician. And he knows when someone else is also talented, and I think El-Sayed is in that bucket.
He’s a guy who’s good, and the Democrats, they absolutely want to win that Senate seat. They want it very badly, and now El-Sayed is their only hope. He more or less must win in order for Democrats to have a good chance of taking the Senate. And whatever else you might disagree with him, if you’re Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg—clearly, we could set that aside at least until the general election is over, and then we can start fighting again.
Bacon: Now, I assume there’s no American Prospect view on this, but increasingly these days, I feel like if you read, let’s say, Jacobin, the Jacobin perspective is that the populist candidate is more electable than the centrist, because they’re going to win more working-class votes on economics. And then the Matt Yglesias view is, obviously the centrist candidate is more electable, because they’re going to win more sort of moderate voters in the middle. And my view, at least, is often that I would’ve said in 2020, Senator Warren, who I preferred, had a sixty percent chance of winning, Biden had a seventy percent chance of winning. In other words, I would’ve voted for Senator Warren—I would not have claimed Warren had a better chance of winning than Biden, who was a straight white guy who we elected, but I would’ve said that Warren could win, too.
And so similarly, I would’ve voted for El-Sayed, not because I think he’s more electable than Stevens, but because I think this is a Democratic year, so I think he can win and he’d be better on policy. But I’m curious where you are on these electability questions. Do you have an ideological or strong view about who is most electable in Michigan, or just in general?
Cooper: Yeah, it’s tricky. It’s something I’ve struggled with for my whole career. I can remember the 2016 primary between Bernie Sanders and Clinton, and practically Hillary Clinton’s entire argument was that, I am most likely to win, and then I know how to get things done. And so I was pretty resistant.
My general attitude is that nobody really knows with any degree of certainty who is more likely to win. It’s a moving target all the time. It’s not like you can reduce these things and say, “It always is like this.” And clearly, like, sometimes this type of candidate is in and this type of candidate is out. If you run the wild-haired radical in, like, 1952, like, that’s clearly not going to cut it. It’s not the type of electorate. But you could run somebody—
Bacon: Nor would the Black person win, 1952.
Cooper: Yeah, exactly. It’d be illegal in half the states.
Bacon: Yeah, exactly right.
Cooper: But by the same token, though, people are obsessed with this question, that it was how the election was decided, that the primary was decided in 2016, and I think again in 2020, it was like, who’s most likely to win? And so all the voters are supposed to put on their amateur pundit hat, and I just think it’s so difficult for people to resist talking their book, as you were saying, that they support this candidate and therefore they will think up reasons why you should vote for them because they’re the most electable candidate.
And I suspect that in the end, it may come down more to the candidate’s individual characteristics rather than what sort of ideological bucket that they fit into. Like, Bernie Sanders is bizarrely popular among moderates, and I think it’s just as much to do with his affect and his history. It’s things you can’t replicate, as someone who isn’t 80-whatever years old with the legacy that he has.
And it’s a tricky thing to suss out one way or the other. But I guess where I come down with it, as regards El-Sayed and Francesca Hong, Hong in Wisconsin, is that, you look at who—our biggest blowout election of the last, this century, 2008. And why was that? We had a very talented and charismatic politician with a very interesting story and a very compelling message, and he was very lucky. He happened to run as the Republican Party was directly responsible for blowing the economy up, and an obviously failing war. So what do we have now? I don’t know if the economy’s blowing up, but it’s certainly not doing great, because Trump keeps hitting the make gas prices go up button, and he’s involved in a clearly failing war. That also makes gas prices go up.
And I would say, for individual voters especially, it’s like, you should vote for the person who reflects your values the most, and then really try to help that person win, rather than putting your amateur pundit hat on and trying to guess what your neighbor’s going to vote for, because even the professional pundits are not particularly good at doing that. And we’ve repeatedly led people astray in saying, Oh, vote for Clinton, she can’t lose to the game show rapist guy. Oh, dang it.
Bacon: But it’s obviously true that Thanksgiving is popular, so we’re going to move to Francesca now and talk about whether you—yeah, I know she’s walked that back, this idea that you should cancel Thanksgiving. I’m referring to this tweet she had in 2021. So I’ve seen a lot of people I respect being, like, distinguishing between El-Sayed, who they feel like is a very talented politician, game recognizes game, and Hong, who they feel like is not as strong and maybe should be viewed differently.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Bernie and AOC have gone out of their way in a certain way not to endorse her, with excuses that don’t make a lot of sense. And so what do you make of her in Wisconsin, where the governor has really leaned into the, she cannot win idea? I’ve not enjoyed watching the last few weeks, because if nothing else, I think they’re making it harder for her to win by signaling she’s a bad candidate while she’s leading by 25 points. But what do you make of her campaign right now?
Cooper: Yeah. The big difference there is that she’s younger than El-Sayed, and she hasn’t been in the game for as long. El-Sayed, he ran for governor in 2018, if I recall correctly, and lost. I think that was a very useful experience for him to have. I guess these Democratic Socialists of America types, you need to, I think, in this day and age, come up with a little bit better of a wrap about your inevitable backlog of incredibly weird sounding tweets. That’s probably true. They’ve all got them. I’ve got them, I’m sure. I deleted my Twitter years ago, but you could probably find them if you were good enough friends with Elon Musk, at least.
And if you’re in leftist politics at all, socialist dorm room discussions or people talking about grad school debates, that often produce these very wacky takes—yeah, abolish Thanksgiving, abolish bedtime. And you need to, I think, develop a—in my view, the best approach would just be, like, if you actually have come around on this issue, which, getting rid of Thanksgiving, that is a stupid idea, that is not something a serious politician should be saying—you just say, Look, no, I don’t believe that anymore. That was just part of a sort of abstract discussion we were having, and let’s talk about something that actually matters. And not try to squirm around it, which is what I’ve seen Hong doing.
Bacon: Her first time answering you, she squirmed. I’m guessing she’s conscious of the fact that, like, some Native American groups think—there is some discourse about Thanksgiving celebrating colonialism and whatever else. I’m guessing she’s conscious of that, but I get your point.
Cooper: Yeah, that’s correct. It is a problematic holiday from many sort of perspectives. But as a politician, it’s like—
Bacon: As a politician—
Cooper: —a very extreme sounding position to take, for practically no benefit.
Cooper: —serious consequences. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It’s a completely ridiculous thing to be talking about. But the other thing I’d add about that, though, is that centrists should be a lot more careful about making these arguments during the primary. It’s not like the left has clean hands either. You saw Haley Stevens going all in on the idea that—what was it—that El-Sayed wants to blame the Jewish community for all of his problems. These sort of, like, toxic primary dynamics can easily be weaponized by Republicans in the primary. And especially—it’s one thing, maybe you’re having a tough primary fight, it’s one-on-one in Michigan, but the centrists in Wisconsin, they can’t even, how, how you say, scoop their poops in a group to unite around a single candidate.
If you can’t run a decent political campaign, if you can’t do the ordinary blocking and tackling of raising money for one candidate and going out and canvassing and doing all the normal politician stuff people have been doing since the Athenian democracy 2,000 years ago, then you should really cool it with the attacks. The leftists can’t win. It’s like, you’re not winning yourself, almost on purpose, right now. And so, like, before you start with that, let me see you put together a decent campaign yourself in a primary, which should be easier to win than a general.
Bacon: Minnesota’s interesting, because it appears one thing that I’m not paying attention to is, like, the money difference is real here. And I’m wondering if what’s actually happening in these primaries is, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Angie Craig in Minnesota, they have lots of money. They’re not running ads saying, I am the centrist candidate. ICE is good. The police is good. Israel is good. Centrism is good. They are running ads saying, ICE is bad. I will fight ICE, but I have more money. And I wonder if that’s really what we’re not understanding, is, like, the actual target of a lot of what they’re doing is not the centrist voter as much as the voter who’s not paying that much attention.
So if one candidate is flooding the airwaves saying, I hate ICE, and the other candidate actually abolishes ICE but I never see their ads, I may not notice the difference. It appears that Angie Craig may win this race just because she is outspending Flanagan, and Flanagan’s more left-wing positions may not be that well known. As I look to today’s race, I think Craig might win while pretending to be liberal. That’s what I think is going on there.
Cooper: Yeah, it’s certainly possible. I haven’t checked any recent polls, if any have even been done. We certainly saw this dynamic play out unsuccessfully in the case of Michigan, where it was, what, almost $70 million in outside expenditures on behalf of—
Bacon: And those ads from AIPAC were not Israel is good, they were Haley Stevens is liberal, really. Yes.
Cooper: Yeah. I did an article in Zeteo being like, if, as an organization defending Jewish rights and the Jewish state of Israel, it seems a little unwise to be running explicitly dishonest advertising about—that’s just obscuring your actual motivations in an attempt to influence an election in the United States. But regardless, it didn’t work in Michigan. El-Sayed did win, but it was close, and I think that money told a lot because these are not particularly high turnout elections.
And this is an area where money—it’s like, the further down the scale of elections you go, the more the marginal dollar matters, down for running for, like, city council in a small town or something, where, like, $1,000 could potentially alter the election.
Bacon: And in a primary, the partisan difference doesn’t matter as much, so the choice isn’t obvious. They’re voting among Democrats, they don’t know what’s going on, so an ad can make a big difference.
Cooper: Yeah, absolutely. And particularly when you have just a huge episode in intentional dishonesty, where you’re trying to say that, Oh, no, this doesn’t have—Israel? Where’s that? No, we’re talking about the United Democratic Majority, or the United Majority for Democrats. And the one thing that—I haven’t been looking at the fundraising numbers in Minnesota recently, but the one thing that El-Sayed had, despite being radically outspent, was that he had enough to get out there.
He could run a serious campaign. He could get some ads—not, it was, like, a 12-to-1 disadvantage, but he wasn’t just totally buried. And I think that having enough to clear that bar makes a big difference, and I’m not sure if Flanagan has that level of resources.
Bacon: And I think this is the tricky thing about the Hasan Piker discussion, is that one reason you want Hasan Piker helping you in a primary is that it helps you raise money. You get the sort of, like, these, the Bernie, AOC, the national surrogates help you. I’m not sure El-Sayed can say, on balance, despite Hasan Piker’s controversial comments, I want him to come because he helps me raise money. He can’t say that out loud, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually what’s going on.
Cooper: No, that is 100 percent what’s going on. Hasan—who I like to check in with from time to time, just because he is, like, the one guy on the left more or less that we have who is even in the same galaxy as, like, Joe Rogan. He has a lot of followers. They have some money. They will donate to your campaign. They will go and door knock for you, if they’re, if you sell them on your arguments.
And it’s why they—nobody would play with someone like Hasan with kid gloves, as they do, if he didn’t have actual power. And that’s just what it is. I think it was AOC saying this the other day, that it’s like, you wanted a Joe Rogan on the left, there he sits. And it’s like, that’s for good and bad purposes. What are you going to do about it?
Bacon: Speaking of one congresswoman from New York—what did you make of the—she was asked about Hong on TV, and she distanced herself from Hong, and then said Woke 1 was crazy, and explained away both AOC and Hong’s comments about policing and so on, and then veered away from there. What’d you make of Woke 1 was crazy?
Cooper: It’s hard to say without being able to sit her down and dig out what she means by that precisely.
Bacon: But I assume she wants the vagueness as a feature, right?
Cooper: Yeah. Because I think you can certainly say that certain aspects of Woke 1 were crazy. People did go way over the line with harassing random people on Twitter. You remember, very towards the beginning of this, there was one of a lady who had made an off-color comment before getting on a plane. “Has Justine landed yet?” Justine Sacco, I want to say.
Bacon: Yeah, I remember this. OK. Anyway.
Cooper: This was in, like, 2015, but it was one of these iterations where the lady had said something that sounded kind of racist, even though it wasn’t actually. It was, like, a clumsy attempt to sound not racist, and the internet just teamed up to ruin this lady’s life. They got her fired from her job and stuff. She later recovered and found a new job and so on, but it was, like, that is crazy. And that stuff did happen on occasion.
I think you can also say that the backlash to Woke 1, as we may say, was entirely motivated by gutter racism, and an almost pathological desire on the part of the boss class to discipline their employees once more. That they were absolutely furious at the idea that employees could have any agency through unions, or sit-outs, or demand things happen, to be less racist in the workplace or less sexist, especially MeToo.
Bacon: Yeah. I think the backlash from the right is obvious, like, banning anybody even talking about race, with a lot of backlash from the bosses, many of whom voted for Biden, is my guess. But you have to come to work even though you have no COVID—like, all that sort of return to work and stuff was the bosses’ revenge, right?
Cooper: Oh, absolutely. And how woke was tied up with MeToo.
I think it’s definitely the case that large swaths of the management and executive class in this country, they view their young female employees as basically fair game, and the idea that they could get in trouble, like someone like Harvey Weinstein could go down for decades of—
Bacon: Charlie Rose being more representative of the people we’re talking about, because he’s more secure of them, is my guess.
Cooper: Yeah, exactly. Or Louis C.K. There’s dozens of them. I think that just absolutely drove that particular group of people crazy. And that’s the backlash to Woke 1. But the natural setup to the formulation Woke 1 is, what is Woke 2?
Because I think my biggest criticism of the first iteration of woke is that it wasn’t really hooked up to any sort of theory of power or achievement. That it was very much, like, shaming people on social media, and not, “How do we conquer the state and set up a regulatory apparatus that can actually achieve justice for the people?” And that’s not entirely the fault of folks who are just, like, sort of putting their critiques out there and whatnot, but, like, clearly I think we could do better, and we’re going to need to do better.
Bacon: So if I was going to take this really seriously, I’d say the bad version of Woke 1, I think, is the canceling people for a reason. But the sort of, we want to—let’s use the polite term—we want to take police funds from the police and reallocate them to social services. That was, like, that’s the more polite way to say defund. And, or Invest, divest was a term that I thought would’ve been more helpful to say.
So I think that even that idea was not well theorized, of how we’re going to do it. My guess is, like, Zohran Mamdani would be for that, I think, if he knew how to do it in New York. But I think what Woke 2.0 has become is this sort of more affordability, economic policy focus, more focused on economics, less on policing, racism, any issue like that, that you can’t sell well. And I think that’s probably good if the left is trying to win power, bad if you’re trying to take on policing, racism, immigration, what I would call the hard issues, the sort of issues that offend white people. I don’t know how to say this any other way.
That’s where my concern is, like, Woke 2.0 seems to me to be, like, affordability, Zohran politics, which gets you some places, but not everywhere. Is that wrong?
Cooper: Yeah, that’s definitely the bumper sticker slogan, a little bit of a tactical retreat from the police reform stuff. It is the encapsulation of it, both, that yeah, Woke 1 had not a great sales pitch, and I think a basically impractical approach to police reform.
You had so much obsessive talk about police abolition. Can you get rid of the police? And I think that the main theorists of the movement, who will say, Yes, we can do without the police, I think that is just not true. If you’re a big government—
Bacon: And they were not people who, like, work day-to-day in—they’re not, like, city council members. No. They’re, like, academics, so they’re not doing the work anyway.
Cooper: Yeah, they’re doing activism and stuff like that, but they’re not involved in serious contests for power. And despite—these people have done a lot of good work in many cases—I think, like, the fundamental question of politics, as it’s gone back probably to, like, pre-Homo sapiens level, you can watch monkeys doing this in the jungle: who gets the resources?
Bacon: Yes.
Cooper: And that always involves, at bottom, the potential or the reality of coercion. I don’t think there’s going to ever be a way around that permanently. Maybe Star Trek utopia in the far future, everyone’s got replicators, there’s no scarcity of anything, everyone can have whatever they want.
But in the real world, for the time being and the foreseeable future, we need—what I would say is establish the police, because the other side of the coin is that we have this rampant problem of police brutality and corruption that has not gone anywhere. In fact, it’s gotten worse in a lot of ways.
Bacon: And I would say we have police forces that are currently not accountable to the mayor, like the mayor of Boston, the mayor of New York. They don’t feel like they can control the—that’s what I want, accountable police, or, like, police under civilian control would be what I really favor.
Cooper: Yeah. They’re not police. They’re this weird combination—it varies from city to city, but it’s, like, a lawless paramilitary, or an actual criminal conspiracy. There are just straight up gangsters in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, with tattoos and—
Bacon: Sheriffs are worse than police in many cases, yes.
Cooper: And we’ve never really had a proper, like, European style or, you know, Nordic style police force that is strictly accountable to the civilian leadership, with proper disciplinary procedures and all that sort of thing. And that’s something that’s a lot more real. It’s something you can point to. That’s what I love about Nordic stuff. You’re like, No, they’re doing it right over there. We just got to copy them, and maybe somehow get rid of 300 million guns.
Bacon: That’s the hard—yeah, that part is harder too, because our forces will have to have guns and mili—yeah. OK, that’s helpful to think about. So when she said that—so I took that comment, and her talk about freezing her eggs, which we’re not going to talk too long about with two men here—but I take it that she probably is further down the line running for president than I maybe thought. Or, what do you make of her running for president?
Cooper: Of all the potential candidates that I could think of at the moment, I would be most pleased to see her as president. She’s the person that I trust the most, and when I see her trying to back away from Woke 1 a little bit, I’m willing to grant her quite a lot of rope to make a maybe arguably tendentious point, because I trust that she’s trying to do it in the service of, like, shoring up her political bona fides.
And yeah, it’s one of those things where you come back to, “Oh, isn’t it a risk? She’s so young. We’ve tried a woman twice and it didn’t work.” But, like, I think that there’s no way around it. The one time that I remember the whole Democratic Party, like, basically falling in love with a candidate was Barack Obama in 2008, the time we blew him out. And I think that enthusiasm and earnest support, full-throated endorsements and all that, matters a lot more than—or it can get you over the line—that there’s a value in enthusiasm and grassroots real energy that can’t be captured in, what do polls say about the popularity of this particular stance?
Because this is about as much about, like, storytelling and how people’s feeling about the future of the country and for their children and so on and so forth. And so I think she’s probably going to run, and at this point, she would be my candidate above any potential Jon Ossoff. He seems OK. He wouldn’t—
Bacon: I was going to say that, because I think as a left-of-center writer, you’re obligated to have written a Jon Ossoff for president piece. I did mine in February, just to have done my duty as a citizen. Two things about Jon Ossoff. One is, I read a piece by Greg Bluestein—he’s the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, politics guy, he’s kind of the Chuck Todd of Georgia politics, for lack of a better way to say that. Anyway, he wrote a piece saying Warnock is much more interested in running, which I didn’t know, and that was interesting to me.
And the second thing is, Ossoff feels a little bit Rubio ‘16, DeSantis ‘24, Harris—if every journalist thinks you’re a good candidate, you should not run. As a—the Obama exception, but usually that means, we pointed it out, that you look like the perfect—you hit all our check marks—usually means you’re going to flop. That’s what I would tell him. If I saw him, I’d tell him, like, “Be careful, we are bad at this.”
Cooper: Yeah, that’s the problem with the pundit profession, is you could as well predict by just flipping a coin, or hiring a turtle to eat different pieces of lettuce with people’s pictures on it, and see what’s going to happen. No, I don’t have particular feelings about Ossoff one way or the other. I think he’s grown a lot since he first came onto the scene in, what was it, 2018, thereabouts?
Bacon: He literally, like, looks much older. And going from 33 to whatever, maybe 42 or whatever it is, that is a big growth in age.
Cooper: Yeah. Start losing his hair soon, with any luck. No, I like Warnock too. I think they’re both all right. But when it comes down to me, when I’m basically, like, throwing up my hands at the idea of who’s more electable, as long as you’re talking about, like, credible candidates with a national profile—especially AOC, who’s pretty much the best fundraiser the left has ever had aside from Bernie, and who will inherit the whole Bernie machine if she runs—then we can’t just, we got to think a couple of steps down the road.
Because, like, in 2020 we elected Joe Biden, and it was like, you got this problem, you got this problem called Donald Trump, and somebody needs to do something about it. You need to enforce the law against this bunch of gangsters, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it, and he couldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court either, which is related. Centrally involved. They kept him out of prison, probably.
And he had this blue ribbon commission, and it was like, what do you expect? You elected a sort of moderate guy who’d been in the Senate for three hundred years. And he behaved like a guy with Senate brain. He can’t stomach the radical reforms necessary to unpack the Supreme Court. And so I think that if we just do a retread of that again, there’s really not that much point.
I guess you just delay the inevitable reckoning for the president for life, JD Vance or whatever. But we need someone with some steel in their spine, and that’s what I would be looking for almost more than policy. I think AOC has it. I’m not sure if Jon Ossoff has it. Maybe he does, but I’d like to see someone with some iron.
Bacon: It’s interesting you framed it that way, because I guess part of what I’m thinking about is a little bit about—there’s the left, or there’s the progressive policies, which I’m sure AOC will be for, and Ro Khanna will be for, and the other people probably won’t be for, like the Medicare for All, Medicare for more people, wealth tax, whatever that kind of stuff. OK, fine.
There’s a second group of reforms that is, like, we need to have proportional representation, or add some Supreme Court justices, or add states, or get rid of the filibuster, and that kind of stuff is not big government, small government, but actual reformist stuff. And I’m not sure Buttigieg has to be against that stuff, or Harris has to be against—like, to me, is the question—is a Democratic trifecta about big Bernie economic policy? Because then you only have two candidates who are going to do that. Or is it about sort of big government reform, save democracy, and then—I’m not totally sure Josh Shapiro has to be—I’m not for Josh Shapiro, but I’m not sure he has to be against that either.
Because Biden was too cautious in both ways, and in some ways more cautious on the sort of government-fixing stuff you’re talking about than the economic policy stuff. And to me, the urgency is the sort of fixing-the-government stuff as much as the policy stuff, and that’s where I’m more open to somebody. Can Jon Ossoff be pretty radical on government reform? Maybe, I don’t know. Caution on economics doesn’t necessarily mean caution on the reform stuff, I don’t think.
Cooper: No, they’re not logically tied together at all. If you’re just, like, a sort of theorist of contemporary, like, political institutions, comparative dynamics between different countries, you look at the United States system that we’ve developed, which bears very little resemblance to the Constitution as written. The filibuster’s not in there. Judicial review’s not in there, not explicitly. And you’re like, This, these are terrible—what are you doing? You got millions of people with no representation in the Congress. What is that?
Bacon: You don’t have to be a socialist to think that. This is not a socialist view, that it doesn’t work.
Cooper: No, it’s literally on the revolutionary slogan on the license plates in Washington, DC, “No taxation without representation.” As true now as it was in 1776. But I would prioritize, to your point, institutional reform over policy reform, because not only is institutional reform more important, but you’re not going to get any policy reform unless you do the institutional reform first.
We saw this with Biden. People told him. I told him. I wrote a column being like, “You have to reform the Supreme Court, or they’re going to strike down all your stuff.” They didn’t strike down all of it, but they struck down a lot of it. They hamstrung everything he tried to do through the executive action by just making up these nonsense rationales. And I don’t know if the center seemingly can’t quite, like, grok, for lack of a better word, the monstrosity of a decision like Trump versus the United States, which basically just threw the entire Constitution out.
The Constitution is not in operation at present. And, like, those people have, as far as I’m concerned, written themselves out of any sort of concern for their legitimacy, that any reform whatsoever that would reduce their power and return the United States more to a proper rule of law nation would be completely unobjectionable.
And that’s the thing that I’m looking for from any candidate, whether it’s AOC or Jon Ossoff. Will prioritize getting rid of—the filibuster, it’s been 20 years of this just sandbag around our necks, and you look at it like, this is totally unjustifiable, what you’re doing. It clogs up the entire workings of Congress, and it means that for ordinary business, people representing states that cover 11 percent of the population can block anything. What are we doing here? What are we doing? This is an embarrassment of institutional design, and it’s got to change. It’s got to change.
Bacon: So last thing. We’re talking about institutional reform, we’re talking about presidential, but is it possible the 50th senator is the Alaska woman, and therefore nothing can happen? These people are not radicals, right? Are we paying too much attention to the presidential nominee, who might be open to these ideas, and not enough to the—we’re not going to have exactly Joe Manchin and Sinema, but are there going to be different versions of those that we should be thinking more about right now?
Cooper: It’s certainly a possibility, and that’s why I would support Abdul El-Sayed. He seemed to have, again, the stomach necessary, where it is. You could end up—this wasn’t clear beforehand, but you got somebody like John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania, my senator. Since his stroke, he’s just not the same person.
And yeah, it’s how I view any politician. You got to be behind this sort of stuff, because we need people in all levels of the institution. But I do think the presidential support means a lot, because the president sets the direction for the party, and whether or not they’re winning with certain arguments is going to influence how the senators behave.
But it’s absolutely true, the Senate, it really is, it’s like the rotten boroughs of the pre-1832 Great Britain, where you’d have a constituency with two people in it. And it’s like that—I think it’s William Pitt the Younger had that one for a while, because the rest of it had literally fallen into the ocean over the hundreds of years. Yeah, that’s Wyoming right there. And but nevertheless, it’s like, this is what we have to go with.
And I think that it’s not impossible for me to imagine a sort of, like, fairly thorough restructuring of American government. The way that the Supreme Court in particular has bent over backwards to just undermine Democratic presidents doing the most simple stuff, trying to do a student loan forgiveness program that is clearly in line with precedent and the text of the law—”No, you can’t do that.” And then bailing Trump out from being prosecuted for trying to overthrow the government.
Bacon: And destroying public education in a day, yeah.
Cooper: Comically corrupt. And the making a hash of everything that the Founding Fathers of this country at least pretended to espouse.
And I think you end up with a sort of a crisis point, potentially. And we saw a lot of people like that in the 1861 or so, when it was like, you get pushed into a corner where it’s like, do you want to live in government of the people, by the people, for the people, or not? Do you want to just live in the John Roberts dictatorship, where he says, OK, Trump’s a king, and then all the Democrats just curl into a ball and say, All right? Doesn’t sound good to me. Not very moderate, certainly.
Bacon: And we’ll end on John Roberts’ dictatorship, sadly. Ryan, tell everybody where they can find your work.
Cooper: Ah, prospect.org. I also have a podcast. Everyone’s got to have a podcast. Leftanchor.com, you can find it there. We’ve actually had Abdul El-Sayed on a couple of times.
Bacon: Yeah, I’ll listen.
Cooper: Years ago.
Bacon: Oh, years ago, before he ran, or—
Cooper: Yeah. I’m trying to get him to come on now. I don’t think he’s going to, but maybe, we’ll see. We’ll see.
Bacon: He’s doing the go everywhere strategy, although he’s got your vote already, is the issue, I think. Good to see you. Thank you.
Cooper: OK. Bye-bye.
Bacon: Bye.
