This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Hi, this is Right Now on The New Republic, and I’m the host, Perry Bacon. My guest right now is Ed Burmila. He’s an author of a book about the Democrats, and he writes a lot about public policy and politics. And I want to talk to him about what we’re seeing from the Democratic Party right now, of 2026, right before the midterms, and kind of where it has been and where it’s going. So Ed, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Ed Burmila: I really appreciate you having me, Perry, thanks.
Bacon: Sure. So you wrote a book that is not a new book, but is very influential of my—it has really shaped a lot of my thinking about the party. The book is called Chaotic Neutral. It came out in 2022. Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center. So to summarize a quite long book that I’m guessing took you a number of years to finish, talk about what chaotic neutral means.
Burmila: The core argument of the book is that the Democratic Party often tries to run on the concept of competence, and it tries to win voters over in the modern era with this professionalism, in the sense that they are going to be the better stewards of the system. Which I think can be a convincing argument.
If you look at what the Republican Party does when it has control, you can make a very cogent argument that the Democratic Party is in fact better suited to manage. However, it’s often not persuasive to the exact kind of voters that they seem to struggle to try to reach. So in other words, the people that they’re constantly fretting over, how can we win over these few moderate voters in the center, these independent voters who don’t seem to know what they want, they are the least likely to be persuaded by an argument that the Democratic Party should be in charge simply because they’re better at being in charge of things.
So in other words, there’s a lack of real heart and substance to what it is the Democratic Party believes. Voters often have a hard time putting their finger on exactly what it is this party believes, because very often the Democrats’ own argument is, “We are competent. Put us in charge. We will figure it all out.”
Bacon: So what’s the chaotic neutral part of this?
Burmila: The publisher picked the title. That wasn’t my title, to be honest about that. They thought it was short and punchy. I liked the sound of it. I was afraid that I would be answering questions about Dungeons & Dragons for the rest of my life if they went with that title, but here we are. I’m very happy with it.
But I think they were believing that it implied that the sort of inability or unwillingness of the Democratic Party to stake out firm positions on things was leading to uneven results, and I think that title works well.
Bacon: OK, so it’s running on competence, is what you said at the beginning, as opposed to firm conviction. And I think the argument you make in the book is that works when Republicans are in charge, because Republicans are incompetent when they govern, particularly like the Bush and Trump versions, where we can debate whether the first Bush and Reagan were incompetent, but the last two Republican presidents have been very incompetent when they’re in charge.
So running as, they are incompetent, we will be competent, is actually an argument that helps you win when they’re in charge, right?
Burmila: Yeah. I think the best recent example we see of that actually comes from the United Kingdom, where the Starmer government entered power on the tail end of 12 years of the Tories absolutely running the plane into the side of the mountain. And you can stand there, much as the Democratic Party is set up to do in this election.
The midterms this year are a classic example of an election where the Democratic Party really can smile, wave, and not say too much, and probably do pretty well. Because the sheer ineptitude and incompetence and evil of the current administration is going to do most of the work for them. The problem is, what happens after you have some semblance of power? What is the plan after that?
Bacon: And so what would you say about 2009 to 2017 and 2021 to 2024? I think it’s clear that when they’re out of power, the Democratic Party’s goal is to kind of say nothing and say, “We will govern better than them.” What is your assessment on the last two Democratic presidents? Are they governments that have done poorly, or are they incompetent? How do you view them?
Burmila: I think they’re in the unfortunate position of building winning coalitions that they can’t govern with. In 2006, Rahm Emanuel briefly became a hero, and unfortunately, because his brother is highly placed in the public relations and media industry, we still have to hear about Rahm Emanuel constantly. He became the genius responsible for 2006, in the same way that James Carville and Paul Begala became the geniuses responsible for 1992.
And Rahm Emanuel’s theory was, we need to nominate and find a lot of candidates who can win from the center, which they did. And then they found, when Barack Obama became president with a numerically impressive on paper majority, he couldn’t really govern, because you had this group of people who were convinced that they could preserve their own careers and extend their hold on tenuous seats by tacking toward the center, pushing back against the things Barack Obama stated were his key agenda items, things like that. It didn’t work. As we all know, most of those people were swept away in 2010 anyway.
So the effort to put together a coalition that can just get you over the line to a majority, and then you find you have a difficult time governing with it, is a problem that recurred again for President Biden when he had this small Senate majority with two people who simply weren’t going to go along with anything. So on the one hand, you can see a person like Chuck Schumer saying, “I did my job. I got us to 51.”
And there’s a cogent argument to be made in favor of that. However, if the 51 are not 51 people who are all willing to pull on the rope at the same time in the same direction, what have you really won with power? And more importantly, how long are you going to be able to hold onto it?
So the thing the Republican Party has done so much better of a job of doing in our lifetimes, you and I, is they get a group of people together who have a bare minimum that they can all agree on that is the central core of their agenda. For example, they always want to cut taxes.
So when that comes on the table, they can all grab the rope and pull at the same time in the same direction. The Democratic Party puts together these winning congressional coalitions that do the first task, which is to get the Republicans out of power, but can’t do the second task then, which is to govern in a way that’s going to convince people, “I like what I see from these people, and I want more of it.”
Bacon: So it’s interesting you define the ideology of the Obama, Clinton, Biden—let’s say, for now, I use the term moderate, center-left, establishment. I think you might use those terms in the book too. But I think the argument is, this is not an ideological wing as much as a competence. Is that the right way to think about this? It’s less that they have a vision of government that is neoliberal.
Is your argument that these ideological words for this wing are less helpful than maybe the sort of, we’re going to govern on doing things competently? Is that the better way to understand them?
Burmila: Yeah, whatever term you want to use, the core issue is that everything is on the table and everything is negotiable. You often hear the sort of center or establishment, whatever you want to call it—I’m not trying to come up with a term that sounds derogatory. The mainstream Democratic Party. Everything is negotiable. There seems to be nothing that they won’t put on the table and say, “Maybe we can meet you halfway on this.”
And in order to really grab the attention of the kinds of voters who aren’t already reliably voting—many people are obviously already loyally and reliably voting for Democratic candidates, you don’t need to worry about them so much, they’re going to be on board. In order to expand beyond that and win the kind of voters that they believe they need to get in order to win elections, I think you need to tell people in clearer terms, “Here are the things we stand for.”
But more to the point right now, I’m interested to discuss ideology with you, but I think the larger problem that the Democratic Party faces right now is the fact that around the world, including here in the United States, right-wing parties are unilaterally seceding from the agreement.
For a century plus, they’ve had an agreement to share stewardship and compete over stewardship of a system whose fundamental basis they were able to agree upon. And instead, now what we have are these far right parties saying, including the Republican Party, saying, We would rather be the sole owners of a broken system than continue to be shared stewards of a system that, on a basic fundamental level, we feel kind of works.
And they have seceded from the agreement, and the Democratic Party—it’s almost like a marriage. If one person decides, “I am no longer going to be party to this agreement we made,” the other person can’t really stop them from removing themselves from it. So we can talk about things the Democrats could or should stand for, Medicare for All, whatever issue you want to throw on the table and say, “This is the important issue.”
The bigger problem right now is that there is just this fundamental disconnect between the political world that the Democrats want to inhabit and the political universe that the Republicans do inhabit right now. And the idea of talking about getting a strong Republican Party or whatever is a backward-looking idea, that we’re going to go back to the consensus era.
And I’m not entirely positive that kind of backward-looking theory of what the political competition is going to look like is really going to be a useful one.
Bacon: The reason I asked about ideology was, I think thinking about the sort of mainstream Democratic Party as less being full of an ideology of neoliberalism or centrism, and more of a kind of nothingness, is probably more accurate. We are for everything is negotiable is actually a very useful way to think about it.
They would not agree with that, but I think this too is, on some level, an ideology of sort of, we’re trying to win and details are TBD. We want to win power. It’s actually a very interesting way to think about it.
Burmila: I recently saw an interview with Jamie Raskin, who is camera-forward. He’s a person they put on TV a lot because he does well at it. And it struck me in the course of three or four minutes—
Bacon: House Democrat, Maryland, just for people who don’t know.
Burmila: Jamie Raskin is somebody that they’re very comfortable with getting on camera, and he sounded good. Depending on which part of what he said you listened to, you found something that you liked. And it became apparent as I was listening to him talk for three to four minutes, it was a kind of word salad approach. Not that he was incoherent, but that his tactic was to throw everything out there and hope that every voter could find something.
So one minute he’s talking about how when the Democrats retake the House, they’re going to have these affordability panels or whatever. The country is slowly backsliding into fascism. That’s what people want, affordability panels, right? But on the other hand, then he threw some language in there to throw a bone to people like you or I, for example, about how they’re going to get tough and hold the Trump administration accountable and things like that.
And it generally creates the impression—on the one hand you could say this is smart electioneering. You give something to everybody. But ultimately, whenever you pay close attention to what these people are saying, you get to the end of the statement and you find yourself fundamentally wanting to know what is the core of what they believe. Which of those eight things you just threw at us are the things you’re actually going to do, and which are the things that you’re saying because you understand that it’s smart politics right now, in an election year?
Bacon: So your book was very prescient, because it comes out in 2022. It’s at a point where Biden is still somewhat popular. But you argued we’re in this continual cycle where Democrats win an election by being in the quote unquote center. They think they’re geniuses because they won the election. They’ve saluted the James Carvilles or the David Axelrods or whoever ran the campaign, and the candidate is a genius, and then they lose the election. And then the midterms happen.
And you predicted 2024, which is, the Democrats would think being in the center would be right, and then they were in the center, and they lost. And on some level I feel like it’s now following your script again. Republicans are in charge now, and Democrats can run on competence again. So is this how you feel like the patterns are just continuing?
Burmila: I felt when Biden won in 2020, the cynical part of me thought this is going to be an interregnum. We’re going to get four years of this, and then we’re going to go right back to Trump. Unless they’re willing to do whatever it takes to try to find ways to make important structural changes to the system, not just fiddling around on the margins or coming up with technocratic fixes or getting the perfect white paper.
Biden did good things when he was president. The Democratic Party did good things when Biden was president, and they had a congressional majority that allowed him to do things. The problem is, they are only now in 2026, when it’s theoretically too late, the damage has already started to accrue—now they’re coming around to, oh, maybe we need to do something about the federal courts. Maybe Congress was explicitly given a constitutional power to alter the makeup and the composition of the federal court.
Bacon: Like Clyburn coming out for—
Burmila: People like you and I were screaming that 12 years ago.
Bacon: Clyburn coming out for more judges in 2026 is very frustrating.
Burmila: Very frustrating, yeah. And they’re talking about things like statehood for the District of Columbia, and although the political situation in Puerto Rico is much more complicated, if they want it, statehood for Puerto Rico. Those are things that people were telling them, and you were being dismissed with a kind of hand wave and a, “Go away, little child. Everybody wants a pony.” This kind of condescending talk.
And now all of a sudden they’re realizing, wait a minute, these are changes that need to be made. And they are. The problem is, we’ve waited until the rainstorm has started, and now we’re going up and trying to fix the hole on the roof. The time to fix the hole on the roof was when the weather was dry.
And they have their own rationale for why they couldn’t do things. Manchin and Sinema stopped all of our efforts in the Senate and everything. The question is, Kyrsten Sinema was handpicked by Chuck Schumer for that race in 2018. He said, This is the person. This is going to be the future of the Democratic Party. And the party itself and its voters, its primary voters, have to get better at spotting these kinds of charlatans who aren’t going to stand for or believe in it.
I’m the happiest person in the world that Graham Platner imploded as a candidate, because that was a guy who just screamed from miles away, I believe in nothing. Nothing I say means anything, and the second I get in office, I’m just going to be this self-aggrandizing, power-hungry—the term online, slopulist, kind of slop populism. That’s what you get out of these people, and then they get into office and look what you get from them.
And I think voters are starting to get better, a little bit too late, at spotting that kind of charlatan.
Bacon: Because if you ask the Biden people now, they will claim, We agreed with you on structural reforms. We didn’t have the votes for it. But if you look back at how they actually behaved in 2021, it was clear that they believed, If we govern from the center and we build railroads, then the working class will come.
They believed all the James Carville, Rahm Emanuel stuff, and they didn’t prioritize structural reform because they are stuck in the thing you were describing, this sort of, We will govern competently and inherit the earth.
Burmila: I hate resorting to sporting analogies, but you put together a soccer team and one of your 11 players is occasionally going to try to help the other team score. You put together a team where everybody is not advancing the ball toward the same goal, literally and figuratively in that metaphor. But the idea that, OK, we have this 51-person Senate majority, or whatever the majority happens to be, but hey, a couple of these people are going to stab us in the back at the first possible opportunity. My question is, what is the real point of putting together a winning coalition like that?
Yes, you press the pause button on the Republicans feeding the country into a wood chipper. That’s positive, undeniably. I can see the value in that. The problem is, if you can’t govern with the coalition you get victory out of, it’s not going to be in power for long. So if your sole goal is slap together whatever coalition can get us into power, that’s always going to be chasing the carrot on the stick. You’re never really going to get it, because every time you get into power with a coalition like that, you’re going to fail to govern effectively enough to keep power.
Bacon: So we’re in the middle of an election cycle, and I just finished interviewing somebody about transgender rights. We were talking about the Josh Tureks and the Talaricos, their comments about transgender athletes and distancing themselves from the trans movement in a certain sense. But my sense is that the party may have learned this too late—my sense is Talarico is actually not the Joe Manchin, Sinema type, that he’s pretending.
He’s read all the bad advice about seeming heterodox and all this stuff that allegedly gets you elected. I’m skeptical, but I don’t think he’s actually going to—I think most of the people they have running for office in swing states, Roy Cooper, Mary Peltola in Alaska—I do think most of the people running—
I’m not sure. This is an interesting question. Do you think they’ve again recruited a bunch of people, potential senators, who are going to vote against core ideas, or do you think they’re better on this front?
Burmila: I believe that they’re shaping up in this midterm to do well. I think they’ve nominated—or the voters have nominated and the party has supported—a pretty good crop of candidates. The question I keep asking whenever people circle around to this particular issue is, how much of governing over the next two years is going to be specifically focused to the issue of transgender kids playing school sports?
Bacon: Let me stop—what I meant was on the Supreme Court and all the—I guess what I’m saying is, the people they’ve recruited are doing a little triangulation on the trail right now, particularly on transgender rights. But do you think that Roy Cooper or Talarico will vote for structural reforms in 2029 in a way that Sinema or Manchin were definitely not?
You talked about how 2009, 2021 featured these kinds of congresses full of people who didn’t agree with the core agenda. It feels like these people—Talarico may be pretending to be moderate, but has pretty similar views to you and I, and will actually do most of the things in government we need. Do you agree with that?
Burmila: I would. And we’re not going to know until we see it in action. But the point I was making is, if they hold positions that are controversial or unacceptable to a lot of voters on that one specific issue, I don’t think it necessarily negates the whole package.
The problem that the Democratic Party is facing right now is that they’ve become, in essence—when one party starts moving in an authoritarian direction, the opposition party inevitably becomes a kind of catchall for opposition that doesn’t necessarily agree a lot on specific issues. And their agreement might not be there on what to do with a particular issue in higher education or whatever, or these transgender political issues when they come up.
If they can agree on the core concept that the Republicans have broken the system, they’ve seceded from the agreement that we’ve governed this country with for quite some time—if we can get everyone pulling in the same direction on those issues, I think that is the best thing that they can hope for going forward. They’re always going to squabble internally about specific individual issues.
There have to be some core things related to righting the wrongs of the Trump administration, reining in this imperial presidency, reining in these courts which have decided to sign off on the fact that the legislative branch is effectively vestigial at this point. If we can get all of the candidates pulling in the same direction on those issues—and I do believe that even these more moderate presenting candidates that they’re running right now seem to get it on those issues. Talarico seems like he understands that.
We never know until they’re in office. We’ll see how they behave once they’re there, if they are elected. But there seems to be a sea change, and people are understanding what the Trump administration is, and they’re starting to see what the core of the problem is, in a way that, unfortunately, I think the leadership seem to be the last people to be getting on board with it. But we can talk about the leadership separately if you’d like to.
Bacon: Because I think that’s the core issue you’re making me think about. That’s what we have to hope for: if we want to see the fascism stopped or reduced, we have to hope the Democrats win a trifecta, and then the members there have to pass some structural reform—Supreme Court, filibuster, all these things that are only going to be passed with 51 votes. And that’s the key thing.
We know Manchin and Sinema would not do that, and the mistake was recruiting people who were so independent, but who really were tied to nothing. Roy Cooper has been the Democratic governor and the Democratic attorney general, and is a fairly partisan Democratic person. You would think that he’s different, and that’s what I’m getting at. Sherrod Brown. It feels like the people who are being recruited were not likely to have the exact same thing.
So I guess there are two issues. One is, are they recruiting different people than before? Is one question. The second question would be, both Obama and Biden, particularly Biden, despite the obvious need for structural reform, focused on these sort of economic issues, on this code that you will win the working class if you do this.
My biggest worry right now is that if the Democrats won a trifecta, they would spend nine months on some kind of affordability bill. They would pretend as if housing costs in Louisville, North Carolina, Houston, Idaho, and New York City are all the same problem.
To me, this sort of focus on affordability—because some things are unaffordable, there are different things unaffordable in different places that require different solutions. And spending nine months on an omnibus affordability bill will win very few votes and take away all the time from structural reform. That’s my biggest concern right now. How do you feel about that?
Burmila: I think we’ve had enough experiences of seeing that happen that we’re both justified in being skeptical. We can’t prejudge anything. My personal belief is that a lot of what happens in those scenarios—it’s called leadership for a reason. People take their lead from what the people who are in the leadership positions are going to do. If you have people who are telling the members of Congress, telling the people in their caucus and their coalition, “We need to do this. What do we need to do to get you on board with it?”
That’s not going to be successful in 100 percent of cases. You’re going to have people, and Sinema was a good example of someone who just wasn’t going to be satisfied no matter what she was offered, because she defined herself as somebody whose job was to be against the party and be different, right? Oh, look how independent am I. I’m gumming up the works. Doesn’t that present me as intellectually interesting? It doesn’t, but that’s the kind of persona she was trying to fill.
We’ll have to see moving forward. I fear that with the leadership that’s still in place, their tendency is always going to be to revert to what they know, which is, “Let’s do some focus groups in Central Pennsylvania. Let’s see what words they throw out about gas prices, and then we’ll—” How long after the 2024 election were they talking about egg prices?
Because some focus group that they did after the election in 2024 said, “Say egg prices a lot.” And by the end of 2025, we have effectively right-wing death squads roaming around major cities killing people, and we have these people going on camera and going on their social media accounts and talking about, Donald Trump promised to bring down the egg prices, and he didn’t. It’s just disconnected from reality. But the nature of people in elite positions is that they are disconnected from reality. So unfortunately, it’s a lagging indicator.
And I fear the same thing you fear, that they’ll waste the first year doing these kinds of consensus respectability politics that people are used to from their formative political experiences. I do hope that this new generation of people that’s attempting to enter Democratic politics at the national level will be able to start moving the needle a little bit.
The problem is, when we start talking about incremental progress toward the Democratic Party getting—the clock is ticking. The clock has been ticking for quite some time. We are now at a crisis point where the bad things that could happen are no longer hypotheticals. We’re seeing them. You and I don’t feel right now, because we’re sitting in our homes and pleasantly conversing, like we’re living in a crisis, but politically, we are living through a crisis point right now.
And the longer it takes to get that message through to them, for them to truly understand—the past is not coming back. We’re not dialing back the clock to 2009 and having the ideal sort of politics where the Democrats want the highest tax rate to be 38 percent and the Republicans want it to be 34 percent. They’re set up constitutionally, their personality is set up to have those kinds of debates, but you can’t force it.
One party has unilaterally abrogated that kind of politics. They’ve withdrawn from the agreement. They want sole control over the machine, and they don’t care how much damage they do to it in the process of wresting control of it from the other party. And until the Democrats realize that’s where we are right now, they’re not going to make forward progress.
Bacon: So let me finish, and it’s going to take a little bit to go. You keep talking about elites in the party, and I think that matters a lot. I want to talk about four different groups of elites in the party and what they’re doing.
And I want to talk about, we are in a democratic emergency, and I want you to describe, with these four groups, do they really appreciate this, and are they willing to act on it aggressively? Let’s start with Jeffries and Schumer. Put them together. Do you think they understand this and they are prepared to act?
Burmila: I think we need a leadership change. I think you need people who have a greater sense of urgency, and people who have a clearer sense that when you tell voters Donald Trump is the Antichrist in order to try to win their vote, you can’t then get into power and say, The Antichrist and I are working together to see where we have some common ground.
That’s the basic illogic of that position, is that they’re using Trump justifiably and in a way that’s intellectually defensible as a boogeyman. But then there’s this sense they can’t avoid reverting to where you try to find some issues or some bill or something where you and the boogeyman can bang out an agreement. And fundamentally, I don’t think that makes any sense. There needs to be, at some point, a change toward leadership who are more aggressive.
Bacon: 2028 candidates. I’m going to call it the mainstream bloc. These are different people, but Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear. I know people will say their favorite among those people are different, but let’s call them the mainstream Democratic candidates for now. Do they understand the urgency we’re in? Are they up to taking it on?
Burmila: I think there’s a strong potential they can be swayed that way, because what you’re describing are people whose political instincts are to put their finger up in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. And given enough time and exposure to the wind, I think people like that, they like to be front-runners politically. They’re all driven by their perception of what they believe voters want.
So I believe if they’re not there, they can be convinced. If enough of the wave starts moving in one direction, those are not people who are going to stand up and try to part the sea around them. They’ll go along with it.
Bacon: AOC and Ro Khanna. These are people who are progressive, so in theory, they could be open to the democratic emergency. But what I see from AOC particularly is this sort of Zohran one, by talking about class issues. There’s parts of the Bernie Sanders agenda that I like, but this whole idea of Bernie 2016 is this focus on affordability, and we can afford stuff.
And you would end up not taking on the democracy stuff, because you would be convinced, if only we passed a big enough economic plan, people in West Virginia would vote for us, and that’s not going to happen. So do you see—are Ro Khanna and AOC, while being for transformative policy, are they so economic fixated only that they also will not rise to the challenge?
Burmila: I think what happens with candidates like those is we’re conflating long-term and short-term party building. The economic policy ideas they present are an effective long-term party building idea. You don’t change partisanship and party attachment overnight. These voters who’ve become attached to the Republicans since the late 1980s are not going to change their views because they get one economic stimulus bill out of the Democrats or some job creation program. That will take time.
So I believe the economic focus that office holders like the people you just named have is appropriate, but it’s not going to produce quick results. I don’t hear anything from that group of people that suggests to me that they reject the idea that structural change is needed. I could see someone like the people you named standing there and saying, We need Medicare for All, but I can’t see them simultaneously saying, Oh, and by the way, I’m opposed to DC statehood. Anything’s possible. That’s not my read on that group of people.
Bacon: Finally, it was weird in 2025 that Ezra Klein spent the first three months talking about California’s housing costs and how Texas was better, while democracy was being destroyed. And it was weird that he felt the need to praise Charlie Kirk’s politics in the middle of 2025. Or Charlie Kirk’s effectiveness, or whatever that column was about.
The elites in the media, particularly, let’s say The Atlantic, The New York Times, these sort of center-left media elites who spent a lot of 2025 attacking the left for whatever, identity politics, as opposed to looking at the threat of Trump, and also appreciating the 2024 election. Kamala Harris ran the way they said she should run in 2024. Actually, she lost because of inflation, anti-incumbency.
So the instincts of the elite media—because the Democratic congressmen, Democratic leaders, Democratic voters do follow them. So if the elites on Bulwark, MSNBC, The Atlantic, the NYT are saying, No, Democrats cannot be for structural reform because that’ll cause some huge backlash, and use the electability code and so on, that will also stop transformational change, particularly on these democracy issues. So can these media elites be convinced we are in a democratic emergency? Or can they at least stop being a barrier to it?
Burmila: The question is how much of a barrier they are. That’s up to the office holders themselves. If we have Democratic candidates and elected officials who see that somebody telling me that I need to do X and Y runs contrary to the reality that I’m doing the opposite of X and Y, and my voters are responding to it—that’s how you’ll break that cycle. Elite media exists to speak to elites.
Ezra Klein is not writing his column for the kind of proverbial person in a diner that he’s always talking about to read. He’s writing that column in order to reach people who are working on Capitol Hill, who have high-ranking positions at think tanks and things like that. He has an audience, and he knows what it is. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party can’t extend its remit to fixing the media as well.
You’re always going to have this kind of chattering class of people whose job it is to try to figure out what’s going to sound good but also advance their own careers, and those two things are often different. I don’t want to call out anybody by name or pick on any individual person.
There is a connection between going towards the consensus politics of the type you mentioned before, writing praiseworthy columns about Charlie Kirk or what a great guy he was or whatever, and perceived legitimacy and career success in that field. I don’t begrudge people that, but it’s certainly not something that any self-respecting elected official should be looking at as a legitimate barometer.
You and I, of course, are both in a similar position. We are in a media environment now where every individual has to carve out their own niche and try to build their audience and everything. That’s what the statements these people make are aimed toward. They’re not aimed toward good public policy and good politics.
They’re aimed toward, what will people continue to pay me to want to hear and respond to and find interesting. So I certainly hope that the Democratic Party doesn’t, in any future scenario, find itself responsible for leading those people in the right direction.
Bacon: I meant only as a barrier. Only because Biden read David Brooks, and Obama read David Brooks, and this sort of centrism of Obama and Biden seemed to be influenced by this sort of David Brooksy view that if we compromise in the middle and come together and so on.
When I read your book, I thought there was almost a mind meld at times between the sort of centrist wing of the Democratic Party and the centrist wing of the media, and that’s what I was getting at, is, is that a barrier? Your point is the politicians ultimately decide things, not the journalists. That’s true.
Burmila: Yeah. If you don’t have the strength of your own convictions as an elected official to worry about making Matt Yglesias mad—no offense to Matt—but that’s not your primary goal when you’re a senator. That’s not the thing you need to be worrying about, or it shouldn’t be the thing that you’re worrying about. You’re going to have to be able to accept that kind of criticism.
If you can’t accept the criticism of a columnist saying that your ideas are too radical, how can you accept going out on the campaign trail or facing your constituents and dealing with their anger and their difficulties and their issues that they want to see addressed? You need a thick enough skin that you’re not terribly concerned what these—you and I read The Atlantic. How many people are really reading The Atlantic? No offense to The Atlantic. My point is, it’s driving elite discourse. It’s not driving real world politics.
Bacon: OK. All right. That’s a great place to end on. Anything else you want to say about where we’re in this place where the Democrats are about to win the election? I guess that’s my worry. That’s why I wanted to have you on. It feels like the Democrats are about to win an election by a lot, and it is going to make Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer look very competent. And maybe in terms of election winning, they might be.
But I worry they are about to make the same—I worry they’ve not internalized some of the mistakes of Clinton, Obama, Biden. That’s my worry, is they’re replaying that playbook, and they will win the election, not because they’ve done anything right, but because the party out of power wins the midterms when you have a terrible president.
Burmila: Yeah. One thing the Republican Party has done a better job of doing in our lifetimes is putting its head down and saying, “We lost this election. Keep doing the same thing, but harder, we’ll win the next one.” And the Democratic Party, in contrast, tends to over-interpret defeat and victory. They over-interpret victory.
We’re still hearing about James Carville 30 years after he won one election where there was a field of many candidates and a desperately unpopular incumbent Republican. I’m very happy for him and proud of his success or whatever, but why are we still talking about him? Why do we still hear about him at all?
The point is, there’s this over-interpretation of victory, where every time they win, they see it as a total justification of whatever they did in that election, and there’s no willingness to stand back a little bit and say, Hey, did we win this one just because Trump’s kind of salting the earth behind him as he destroys the country? Which is the correct interpretation.
And again, to go back to the analogy of what we saw in the United Kingdom with the Starmer government, they won an election that they couldn’t help but win. They couldn’t help it. And then just governed themselves into irrelevance, because they didn’t stop and think, OK, we got lucky here. We got a big assist from the Tories crashing the bus and giving us an opportunity to take over. What constructive things can we do with it? Rather than just patting themselves on the back and saying, See, we were right. I knew this would win. If we just gave them centrism hard enough, eventually they’d come around to it.
There’s multiple reasons you can win an election. Some of them don’t have anything to do with what the strategists told you to do in that given election.
Bacon: Are you watching what’s happening in Britain now, because you’ve referred to that twice? I worry that Burnham is doing the same policies as Starmer with slightly better messaging. I guess what I’m getting at is, it would be—if Starmer were the British prime minister in 2028 and ‘29, that would’ve been helpful for us, the living example of the sort of popularism, David Shor politics melting down in Britain and being completely ineffective would’ve been helpful to tell Pete Buttigieg or Shapiro, “Don’t do that.”
I worry that Burnham is slightly smarter, and therefore no one will be as unpopular as Starmer was. Is Burnham doing the same thing slightly better, and therefore will make it hard for us to make the same critique?
Burmila: You may be correct that he’s doing the same thing slightly better, but it’s an interregnum. And if they don’t manage to do something constructive other than pander toward far right policies and try to give people 10 percent of the racism they want, the far right will be back in power in there before long. And the same dynamic plays out here.
If the Democrats get back in power, or get some portion of power back, and they don’t act as aggressively as the system will allow them to do something to assert themselves, they won’t be in power long. And we’ll keep dealing with these one step forward, three step back dynamics, where whenever the center left is able to take power, it doesn’t hold onto it for very long, because it’s unwilling to face the reality of what the new political dynamic looks like.
Bacon: And what would a center left that—because you made the point abroad too—what would a center left that looks at the realities of politics be doing? If you were giving Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and President Shapiro advice in 2029, what would you say?
Burmila: I would tell them that none of their policy ideas, that maybe economic policy or social policy needs to be moved back toward the center, are relevant until they fix what’s structurally broken in the system. Because if you gave them a magic wand and said, “Go ahead and make any change you want,” the change will be undone when you lose power in a couple of years, because people see you as spinning your wheels, paddling water, whatever metaphor you want to use, that you’re not actually advancing an agenda, you’re not fixing what’s broken in the system, and you’re not taking away the tools the Republicans are going to use to undo any positive change you can think of to make right now.
Bacon: So the agenda shouldn’t be affordability, it should be X. What are the four or five things they should do?
Burmila: We are out of the sort of normal politics where they’re debating what the best economic policy is. We need court reform badly. We needed court reform 15 or 20 years ago. What that court reform can look like is obviously going to be an issue for debate. They need to, as the Republican Party did in the late 19th century to break the conservative Democratic stronghold on the Senate, we need to expand statehood and try to reform the Senate that way, to the extent that political reality allows.
Obviously, we can’t add like eight new states like they did in the 1880s. But things like that. They need to do something other than pass more laws, or create more rules, that the Republicans will simply ignore when they get back in power.
They need to create a reality in which the kind of rules that the Democrats and liberals want to be in place will mean something. And if you don’t have that reality in place, where the rules you create to constrain the presidency, for example, mean something, you might as well not be creating them.
Because the core of the kind of Hakeem Jeffries Democrat strategy is, We will make these changes and then just stay in power forever. Their plan to reform the federal courts as recently as a couple years ago is, We’ll just win every election from now on. And that strategy worked for zero elections. Zero elections. It lost the very first one.
So the idea that you can reform the system by simply always holding power is not realistic in a two-party system, and I’ve been screaming this for 20 years. You’re going to lose some elections in a two-party system, no matter how competently you govern. It’s going to happen. And if the other party is simply going to pull the string and unravel everything you did while you were in power, then you’re never going to be able to make this workable as a system of governing or as a system of change.
Bacon: Ed Burmila—I recommend, it’s four years old, but I think people should read Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center. It’s a great book, and it’s a great book if you’re following politics right now, because it’ll give you a sense of, these are the patterns that Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton followed. These are mistakes that keep being made. You are watching the same thing happening over and over again. It’s not in your head.
We are seeing the same patterns again, and it’s crucial we spend the next two years—whether you’re progressive or a centrist, I think the key thing is to push the Democratic Party to stop listening to the Axelrods and the Carvilles and the people who’ve made the same mistakes. I’m not sure who the new consultants are, but I just think the key thing is, if someone has been saying, I should be listened to because I’ve been there before, stop listening to them, because those people have got us where we are now.
I’m not saying that David Axelrod and James Carville caused fascism. I am saying their strategies to prevent fascism have not worked, and it’s worth listening to other people.
Burmila: I could not agree more. You don’t want to be taking your lead about how to get out of trouble from the people who were steering the ship when you got into trouble in the first place. You might want to consider at some point that maybe we need a different strategy. Maybe it’s time to try something else other than promising people affordability panels and thinking that this imaginary centrist voter we’ve created in our minds—in Chuck Schumer’s case, literally—is going to clap and applaud and love to vote for this. So couldn’t agree more.
Bacon: Ed, good to see you. Thanks for joining me.
Burmila: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
