Today's episode was brought to you by popularism, polling, common sense, Matt Iglesias, Jonathan Schaitt, the New York Times editorial board, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, abundance, and my elementary school self, whose attitude I'm channeling today, a young, hardcore Catholic grade schooler who would hear her neighborhood public school friends noncommittally call themselves Christians and think, lock in. You need to pick a denomination. You need to pick a side, cowards. Okay? Because she may have been a little bit misguided in that energy back then, but I'm going to bring that same attitude to the concept of political centrism today. I'm locked in. I'm ready to pick a side. Okay, so it might seem strange to talk about centrism during a time in which Nazis are ascendant, but I'm going to do that annoying thing right off the bat where I make you read a quote from MLK's letter from Birmingham jail, which I do think is worth reading in its entirety, even though we are only going to, you know, sit with a couple snippets today. I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years, I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen's counselor or the Ku Klux Klan-er, but the white, kind of a good sign that I don't know how to say that aloud, Ku Klux Klan-er, but the white moderate who is more devoted to, quote, order than to justice, who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension, to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action, who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time, and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season. Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. That line about the white moderate is pretty popular right now. I've found myself really interested lately in the notion of political centrism, and it all started with a comment that I got on the Money with Katie newsletter a couple months ago. And so I went back, and I wanted to try to read it verbatim today, because I think there were a couple key words that really jumped out at me. I couldn't find it for some reason, but what I do know is that it had that familiar tenor of someone throwing up their hands at what they perceived to be, like, too much polarization and essentially saying the answer to our country's political gridlock is to start electing centrists, people who have moderate beliefs that are not so, quote, extreme. So this is a sentiment that I hear all the time, and I find it very noteworthy because of, A, the way it is deployed, B, the function it tends to serve, and C, how much it obscures the history of political change and the process by which society improves. So today, I'm kind of thinking about this episode like a spiritual successor to our What Comes After the Liberal Status Quo episode. Kara, when you think of centrism as an idea, like when I told you I want to do an episode about the myth of centrism. I was like Katie stepping into the center of her power. What did that bring to mind for you? Okay, first is the mythical quote, which I think is the symbol. If there were like a spirit animal in language, this would be it for centrist, which is fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. I feel like is the term you hear very often. Yes. I feel like growing up, I believe that centrists were the most rational because they're not drawn to either extreme. So there's like this implication of rationality. And it's like, I believe in gun rights, but not X. I believe in this, but not this. But I don't actually know. I couldn't list to you who a centrist candidate. Maybe Bill Clinton is because he ran as a Democrat, but was a Republican. But he's like the only example I can give. So to me, centrism does a few things. It tends to inadvertently favor the way that things mostly already are. It tends to imply that slow change is inherently preferable. But overall, what's interesting about this concept and the way it's often used is that there is no coherent hallmark of this belief system the same way that there is for conservatism or leftism, which both tend to have more coherent ideological underpinnings. So you just noted that, like, I cannot actually really even think of, like, who would I point to as a centrist politician? What would be a typical centrist belief? I'm thinking of Kamala Harris saying she owns a gun. Okay. Okay. So it's like kind of this idea of, well, yeah, I want that thing, but obviously there should be limits. Right. Like women should be able to get abortions, but only if they've been raped by a masked intruder. And only if they somehow were raped by a masked intruder and then caught that pregnancy at like two weeks in. It's like a centrist position. So to start today with a little bit of diabolicalized recreation, we're going to talk about pundit brain. because the most relevant centrist voices in society, I think, are not the politicians, but the pundits. They exist in the media ecosystem more than they exist in the political system. And they tend to be left-leaning. So I'm sure you could rattle off a bunch of centrist pundits that embody this ethos. The ones that came to mind for me that I want to spend a little bit of time with are Jonathan Chait and Matt Iglesias. And later, Ezra Klein, because he's kind of more— I was just about to say, where do you place him? He's, like, more centrist now. but not in the same way that these two are, in my opinion. But also, like, I think that you and I both respect and have learned a lot from Ezra Klein, and I don't think that MLK would have viewed Ezra Klein as an ally. Well, we know Ta-Nehisi coached us to view Ezra Klein as an ally. Friend but not an ally. Continue. I'm excited to show you something that Ezra Klein wrote in 2014 today because I think what you'll find is, like, he was not always this way. that is why I have to say we have again like there is a lot I think a lot of our listeners because we are to the left of Ezra Klein and how we communicate online that is the thing about him I think he is a leftist I think he is someone who has probably identical opinions to you and I, but feels obliged. He's conservative passing. Yeah, he's like conservative passing. No, he's centrist passing. And I will also add that as you're talking about this, I think I would refine my description of centrism to say that it's a performance and not an identity. And I feel like Kamala Harris tried to perform centrism. These pundits try to perform centrism, but no one actually is one. That actually fits nicely with my theory. And I think, of course, you have the er-reactionary centrist, Barry Weiss, the queen of the centrists. The queen of the, like, I'm the adult in the room. Great example of performance, too. There's an Onion headline that someone sent that was like, it was like a fake Barry Weiss quote that was like, Barry Weiss says ideological diversity begins and ends with her. Oh my God. So I don't want to spend too much time on the relatively tired Democrats should move to the center or Democrats should tack to the right stuff. Because it feels like old hat at this point. We've covered it ad nauseum. But part of the challenge with pulling centrist takes that make that same argument about how the right should moderate is that there aren't any. What about Brett Stevens? What about like the David Brooks and Brett Stevens of the New York Times? OK, that's fair. That's derogatory. In parentheses, derogatory. But I feel like they do kind of define themselves as being like, well, no Trump, but blah, blah, blah. OK, that's a good point. That is a notable exception. As I was looking for this sort of stuff, I was like, the biggest voices who dictate these conversations and tend to have the most impact on public opinion tend to be liberal people, but who are always arguing for, like, more moderation. Right. We're going to start with Matt Iglesias writing for Bloomberg. He makes me very uncomfortable. This is just kind of one of those, like, bingo card paragraphs. What the Democrats need, in other words, is not just more moderate candidates. They need a more moderate ideology. Democrats are currently rallying around time-honored progressive ideas like a defense of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. These stances can indeed help them return to power in the Senate, but only if they are accompanied by more eclectic and heterodox positions on everything else. A party that's against the domestic production of fossil fuels is not going to win in Texas, Alaska, or Ohio, okay? On a range of cultural issues such as the death penalty, late-term abortions, trans people's participation on women's sport teams, and immigration enforcement, Democrats have let themselves get persistently on the wrong side of national public opinion to say nothing of opinion in red states. Okay, I mean, this is just, that's just an unintelligent take. Okay, tell me why. I mean, there's a lot about just this whole ideology of becoming more moderate that I would like to unpack. Like, I would be curious how he would perceive the Biden administration, which repeatedly told the American public, like, in the lead up to the presidential election, like, no, you actually are fine. The economy is good. There are elements of the Biden administration that probably code as very progressive and elements that are very moderate. But when he talks about Democrats failing to become more moderate on these positions, I mean, we learned this with the episode on trans athletes. These aren't organic issues. These are issues that are astroturfed by billionaires, and we just don't have that support on the left. And so the idea that they're like coming up short, it's like, well, right, that's because someone has spent half a billion dollars coming up with a wedge issue that Democrats have to respond to and that is designed for them to not win at. So the suggestion that that's just like an organic thing that they don't know how to succeed, I feel like ignores the underlying trail of money. Carolyn, you're playing into my hand perfectly. You're playing into my outline perfectly. Thank you. Just two heads smashing. Brain mushed together. This is why we don't have guests. Yeah, this is about as classic as it gets. Okay, two things I wanted to call out. I immediately clogged the use of the word heterodox. Using the word heterodox to describe what are ultimately positions that conform with the status quo is rhetorically very smart. The other one that jumps out at me here is the mention of fossil fuels, because it's a little subtle, but to me, it really illustrates how far gone we are from a politics that would ever attempt to make a normative suggestion about how we should combat climate change to be like, well, we'll lose Texas if we talk mean about fossil fuels. It's like, babe, Texas is gerrymandered to fuck. You are not going to win Texas anyway. If you think that like, maybe if we don't like talk about renewable energy, the Texans will vote for Democrats. So he was talking about climate change, trans athletes, late term abortions, the death penalty. So another thing here and the immigration enforcement. Okay. So out of all of these, immigration is the only topic that voters care about as a priority issue. Like, it's funny to me that he's talking about topics that in many ways are a binary. Like, you either believe in a woman's right to choose or you don't. And some people will haggle over, like, 12 weeks to 20 weeks or whatever the fuck. But, like, the late-term abortion question, no, there is no moderate position in the realm. That is a fallacy argument to begin with. Like, we've talked about that in our abortion episode. And so it's striking to me that he's picking topics that code conservative, where it's like, well, so you're just suggesting that Democrats take on conservative talking points as opposed to something a little bit more sticky that like actually you could, I could theoretically understand the idea of a centrist position on the economy. I'm sure that you could deconstruct it quickly, but like, do you know what I mean? Like he's picking topics that are like, what the fuck is a centrist position on late term abortions? What the fuck? More importantly, what the fuck does Matt Iglesias know about late term? I would love to get on a live with him and be like, tell me what you know about late-term abortions, my friend. The centrist position is that you're allowed to terminate a late-term pregnancy, but only if that baby was going to be a blue-haired wokey. So the other piece that I wanted to spend a second with is a Jonathan Shait piece a couple months ago from The Atlantic. And I want us to read this because I think, similarly, it captures a few essential qualities of the centrist pundit op-ed in major media outlets that you will see time and time again, primarily relying on conventional wisdom or common sense beliefs about Americans or American politics in order to explain current events with what ultimately amounts to like fan fiction So Caro, please read the headline and subheadline for me. And Jonathan Chait is different from Jonathan Haidt, but is Jonathan Chait also fixated on the kids in social media or is he more? Distinction without a difference. No, no, Chait is more specifically like a politics writer. Okay, I always get them confused. Me too. Okay, am I reading the title? Wow. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So we're going to use the biggest political upset with the largest groundswell of organic support in modern history. And we're going to use that as an example for why it doesn't work. Incredible work. How much did he get? Do you think he got paid like 70 grand for this column? I mean, these guys, can we also just note, these centrists are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They're like the last writers making like half a million dollars a year at these outlets, which is just something that we should explore at some point today. And not a coincidence, by the way. Unbelievable. Elite opinion laundering is a very lucrative job. Yeah, truly. Okay, title, What the Left Still Doesn't Get About Winning. Subtitle, Mom Donnie won by a modest margin in a deeply blue city, not because of his radical commitments, but despite them. What a crazy gumbo soup statement. Also, for him to say, Donnie won by a modest margin. I'm like, oh, do you mean he overcame the greatest points deficit? It's like saying the Patriots-Falcons-Super Bowl game was like, yeah, but they only won by a few points. It's like, yeah, but it was the greatest comeback in football history. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? I can't even, okay, continue. You earnestly making a sports reference right now? I know, that was a little flash of old Caro. Yeah, wait, when was that Super Bowl? The Patriots-Falcons Super Bowl, Katie? Yeah, what are you talking about? Oh my God. Okay, we'll talk about this later. When was this? When was it? It was when I was in Boston. I must have been 22 or 23. Oh, dude, never mind. It was like the single biggest moment in Boston history of my lifetime. I feel like I just found out that my boyfriend's allergic to something after five years of dating. And I'm like, why didn't I know this about you? You care about football? We honestly, there's never enough time in the day, Katie, for us to talk about everything we have to talk about. Okay, so this piece is basically exactly what you would expect it to be, but I do want to call it a couple things. If you will please read this paragraph. Do you think the editors help these centrist writers finagle the sorcery of these sentences? Or do you think it's just a natural gift that you have, and that's why you become a centrist columnist? I don't know. Does being a shitty person make you a sundress pundit or becoming a sundress pundit? It's like skilled rhetorical work. Like that subtitle was rhetorically impressive. I'm going to push back though. Once you start reading this paragraph, you're going to eat those words. Okay. Does Jonathan Chait have free will? This isn't even a house of cards. It's like a poor police sketch of a house of cards. Okay, all right, all right. Begin with the basic political geography of the city. All right, I'm with you, John. New York is overwhelmingly Democratic. Last year, Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump in New York City by 37 points, which was quite low by historic standards. Previous Democratic presidential candidates have carried the city by 50 to 60 points. In politics, making it in New York City says almost nothing about whether you can make it anywhere. A win is a win, but Momdani's nine-point margin over Cuomo is deeply unimpressive in a city where Democrats usually win. I'm sure I'm going to feel this way many times today, but I'm just like, I'm blown away by how bad that logic is. That's just like a shockingly bad argument. Yeah, I'm like, do you see any issues with the logic that you'd like to point out for everyone? I mean, to state it really plainly, the shock of Momdani's campaign is that he's not like a Hillary Clinton who was a state senator for decades. This is a completely unknown candidate, a Muslim candidate in New York City who went from polling at like one or two percent. And then in what, seven months was suddenly competing with Andrew Cuomo, a dynasty candidate. That is the most important. The idea that they're just using this like it kind of reminds me a little bit. I wonder if we're going to talk about Nate Silver, where it's like these guys. I thought about that. These guys kind of define themselves as being numbers guys. And I will say outright, I am not a numbers person. But like just using your head, you're like, this can't possibly be the most useful set of numbers for you to illustrate how people, like when you think about the stats of how people vote in elections and how like nine times out of 10 people just vote out of name recognition. Like we think it's all complex and people are weighing things out, but it's just the people they know. The fact that Mom Donnie won is shocking. It is shocking. One other thing that I'd like to point out about this, just to state it even more plainly, he is comparing a Democrat running against a Republican, Kamala Harris running against Donald Trump, to a Democrat running against another Democrat. Yes, great point, Katie. This is why I'm not a numbers person. And going, uh, it's like not that big of a margin. Right. And it's like, well, Mom Donnie beat the Republican in the race by 44 points, not nine points. Right. And he would have beat him by more if you didn't functionally have another Democrat. It was two Democrats, one running as an independent, but two Democrats versus a Republican. And Momdani still beat the Republican by 44 points. It would have been a 90 point blowout had Cuomo not been in the race. Right. So something that you'll notice about these highbrow centrist arguments is that they also tend to infantilize those who have more ambitious goals. If you will please read the following and then just like note the points where word choice or like the language being used sticks out to you. The fallacy seized upon by Mamdani's giddy supporters, okay, is that his victory overturns the conventional wisdom that voters punish extreme candidates. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on X that Mamdani's election revealed important lessons, such as focus on shifting economic power and that the elites have little idea what's actually mainstream. Many have noted Mamdani knack for mobilizing enthusiastic swarms of young voters and the fact that he garnered more votes than any other New York mayoral candidate since John Lindsay in 1969 But I going to explain why that doesn matter Yeah exactly The problem With a complete non sequitur. That really doesn't make any sense. Can I just say, I think this is like, this is revealing my inner Swifty, but I'm like, I've read this before in every article about why Taylor Swift actually isn't that good, and it's actually not that impressive. The problem that extreme candidates tend to face is that, though they may mobilize supporters, They also mobilize voters against them. What? And what matters in politics is not how many votes you get, but how many more you get than your opponent. What? What? You may recall Trump insisting that he must have won the 2020 election because he pulled in more votes than any candidate in history, except for Joe Biden, who won more. What? So you're using two examples. Folks, this is in one of the most supposedly prestige magazines in the United States. Okay, can I just say, I understand Trump didn't win the 2020 election, mostly because it was stolen from him. You'll hear that on the next episode. It's so incredible to me that this guy is using two of the most shockingly successful political candidates of the last few years as examples for why it doesn't work. But I'm like, it did work. Trump did, he did work. Yeah, exactly. His approach did work. Exactly. Mondani's approach did work. It's almost like voters like extreme ideas. This is another thing about centrism that I think you're kind of getting at, is also like the definition of centrism forces other ideas to be described as extreme. But I would even push back on that and be like, no, they just like ideas. This isn't an idea. You're not giving me an idea. You're just like chewing dinner and then spitting it into my hand and saying, do you want some? So we're going to come back to this like common sense idea of voters punishing the extremes, which is basically what he says outright. He says, and I quote, Momdani's victory supposedly overturns the conventional wisdom that voters punish extreme candidates. To your point, he's talking about Donald Trump. He's talking about Zeran Mamdani, two people with, like, unapologetic ideas that have rabid fan bases as a result. So you would think, like, huh. Bernie Sanders. Maybe, Jonathan, what you should take from this is that voters don't actually punish candidates that have extreme ideas. But words like giddy, the scare quotes around phrases like shifting economic power or the idea that elites are out of touch. He doesn't have to say, well, these people are just unserious to convey his perspective about those who believe in silly things like shifting economic power. Lastly, he argues that Mamdani was able to win because he embraced more centrist ideas on some of his supposedly unpopular positions. Again, no evidence, no evidence that any of this was unpopular with anyone other than the people who wrote for The Atlantic. But here's what he says about this, and I think this is the most, like, flagrantly bad faith part of this article. It should also be noted that, like, 99% of centrists are white men, followed by white women. You have to be a white man or woman who communicates in a certain way in order for any of this to be communicated as intelligent. Except for Thomas Chatterton Williams. Oh. Yeah. I share an imprint with him and it's... Or Coleman Hughes. Coleman Hughes. Free Press Coleman Hughes. But he's a conservative. We are not letting any of the fuckface columnists at the Free Press come into this circle of, like, actually successful centrists. These are people who are getting paid by Barry Weiss to write clickbait on Substack. I will at least give Jonathan Chait the credit of being on The Atlantic. Yeah, instead of doing something highbrow, like making a clickbait podcast on Substack. Exactly. Okay. Here's what Jonathan Chait said. Have some fucking self-respect. Seriously. Stand on something for once in your life. Okay. Pick a side. Okay. Despite running against despised opponents, Momdani still had to make ideological compromises. He praised the centrist abundance agenda. Okay. Did he, though? Or did he just head pat Derek Thompson when he was asked about it on Derek Thompson's podcast? Oh, my God. Okay, well, you just brought up Derek Thompson. Katie, we have to pause and I have to talk about his paternity leave post. Okay, okay, yeah. Do it. So Derek Thompson is the co-writer of the Abundance book with Ezra Klein. He writes for The Atlantic and also he started something called The Argument, which we talked about in the... The Argument! Yeah, The Argument. He posted on Substack a list of all the books he read on his paternity leave and how reinvigorated he was to return to work after taking some time off on paternity leave. And he was in the comments being like, well, you get a lot of reading done when you're holding a baby. And I was like, get your wife, get your wife on the phone right now. I will be on the phone with her for five minutes. Dump him, dump him. Any man who talks about his paternity leave as reinvigorating his desire to work again was not helping his wife as much as he should have. So back to Jonathan J. Do not cut that in the edit. The women are not mad enough. The women are not mad enough. Okay. Yeah. The tragedy of heterosexuality is Derek Thompson talking about how much reading he got done on his paternity leave. It honestly gave me a nosebleed. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm going to start this from the top. Okay. Despite running against despised opponents, Momdani still had to make ideological compromises. Oh, flag. He praised the centrist abundance agenda and promised to scrap needless regulations. He renounced the phrase, globalized the intifada, globalized the centipada, apologized to the New York City Police Department for having called it racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety, and promised to keep Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. We don't know how Momdani would have fared without these moves towards the center, okay, but his strategy suggests a keen awareness of his own weaknesses. He ran like a candidate who understood what some of his fans wished to deny. He managed to win in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, not because of his radical commitments, but despite them. This is just so weak. Okay, two quick points. Number one, I find it really interesting that...
