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Transcript

The Depolarizers: Marshall Kosloff on Big Political Shake-Ups

How Democrats lost their “new majority.”

American political parties go through periods of upheaval about once a generation. Since around 1980, we’ve been in the sixth party system.1

But that system, sparked by Southern whites leaving the Democratic Party, appears to be coming to an end. What happens next will tell the story of a generation and a new chapter for America.

That’s why I was excited to talk to Marshall Kosloff, who hosts The Realignment, a podcast covering the transformation of American politics in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 victory.

In addition to hosting The Realignment, Marshall is a media fellow at Hudson Institute, where he hosts the Arsenal of Democracy podcast. He is also Executive Producer of Endless Frontiers, an upcoming national competitiveness summit in Austin, Texas, where he works as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at America's Frontier Fund.

One thing I really admire about Marshall’s political analysis is his ability to look at the big picture, always seeking to identify the issues that define and drive our politics. Marshall and I discussed a number of interesting topics in this episode that I think you’ll enjoy, but here are a few key threads I wanted to elevate.

Realignment and Big Ideas

In context for the 2024 election cycle, Marshall references the work of Depolarizers guest Patrick Ruffini in understanding America’s primary realignment as a shift from racial identity becoming less salient and class and education identity becoming more salient. He points to the example of a young man in Texas: to determine how he will vote, you likely want to know whether he has a college degree rather than whether or not he’s Latino or Black. While this seems obvious now, it was not the way Republicans saw politics in 2013.

The Disadvantages of Left Populist Efforts, and the Limits of Polling

As two Southerners discussing politics, Marshall and I share a lot in common when it comes to recognizing Democrats’ weaknesses in strategies and assumptions for winning over less ideological voters. Marshall notes that to overcome some of its Party’s weaknesses, many Democrats are pointing to the need for “left populism.” Under Biden, Democrats tried this left populist approach, blaming higher prices on “greedflation,” for instance. Greedflation comes from the Democratic focus on polling and public opinion. Left populists will point to endless polls showing support for policies like single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, and other left-wing goodies, but when these policies are actually on the ballot, they fail. Vermont’s attempt to pass single-payer healthcare led to a Republican becoming governor, and he has remained undefeated since. Marshall argues that these left populist tactics didn’t work as well as right populism because the right has merged a socio-political critique with their economic critique, whereas progressive policies are seen as primarily benefiting the college educated at the expense of the working class.

As Democrats shift their strategies to regain ground Republican populists like Trump and Vance have made, I asked Marshall about the blind spots that may exist for the Democrats who are trying to emulate the populist tactics they’re seeing from the right.

Marshall’s response noted a recent conversation he’d had with Senator Chris Murphy.

“The left populist approach we tried during the Biden administration, said, hey, college is crazy expensive, you have debt, so we're going to offer to have your student loans forgiven or we're going to make college free for you. If people don't want to go to college in the first place, that isn't as appealing of a pitch to you. And it's going to basically sound like, oh, this is about forgiving the student loans of people who aren't you and basically making you pay for it. Or they're saying you should do this thing you don't want to do in the first place. So that is just a real blind spot. And the other real blind spot, too, is around… the arguments around going against big industry… The left populist take is, look, we need to talk more about billionaires, and we need to talk more about corporations and how they’re screwing everyone over. I pointed this out to Senator Murphy on our podcast. We tried greedflation in 2022. There was aggressive messaging around the idea that this was greedy corporations getting together in ways that raised prices… But did the greedflation message break through? Was that what people were really interested in? No, it wasn't interesting. Chris Murphy pointed out that these things take time. So his pitch is for a Democratic Party that makes this pitch for the next few years. But my response is that left populism isn't existing in a vacuum. So it's not this question of, okay, insert greedy corporations and billionaires making everything bad. It's the reality of the right pitch is going to be, sure, billionaires suck. That's a thing. That happens. We don't like Wall Street either. But actually, it's Joe Biden and his massive spending bills that caused this problem… Which is more compelling? Greed-flation or, hey, out of touch, old Joe Biden and his friends are spending all this money that made the debt go really high and made inflation go really high. That is just much, much, much more compelling… You have to deal with ideas that aren't your own. They treat left populism like a talisman. Like, OK, so deploy universal health care, deploy free college, deploy universal labor participation — not understanding that there's just very little proof that this stuff is appealing enough in the first place.”

The Melting Pot of Democratic ideals

Since Marshall has discussed the Abundance agenda a good deal on his podcast, I asked him about what he would prescribe as the perfect “concoction” of Democratic ideals that could include progressive, populist, Abundance, and centrist ideologies. He cited a line from his winter reading, The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Depolarizers guest Ruy Teixeira.

“It actually included a line towards the end that no one ever cites: There are all these debates about the future of the Democratic Party. Are we going to be more centrist? Are we more left? At the end of the day, we should recognize that politics is actually about synthesis. There's never any one faction that actually wins. We read back on Bill Clinton winning in 1992, and we said to ourselves look, he was the DLC, new Democrat, centrist guy. No, he actually campaigned. He had that, but he also campaigned very, very, very aggressively populist… So we should just note that it's not a choice over whether we're more left or more centrist. Like actually some coalition that's going to merge these things together are going to be really, really critical.

What the Center Needs to Compete

We at Welcome continue to work to grow a centrist faction for Democrats, so I asked Marshall what he thinks the ecosystem for partisan centrism needs to thrive in the years to come.

“What the center really needs to do is start with its critique that the status quo DC system is broken, and to what degree can the center bring in outside people?… To what degree can the centrists find JD Vance people? Because — something I learned from spending all this time on the right — is that the right was very good about elevating JD: JD gets a think tank fellowship at AEI. JD gets support to launch a nonprofit. He gets all these different, and that's very, very frustrating… So if you look at the right, there are so many academic programs where you can get paid to read Tocqueville. You can get paid to debate the thought of Christopher Lasch. You can get paid to debate these realignment projects as a high school student. And the funding exists because there are all these big Republican donors who are like, oh yeah, our existing institutions are centered around elites. Republicans recognize that colleges basically only serve left people on your average university campus, so they went on to build their own infrastructure to elevate ideas. And that just doesn't exist on the left. As I did more of these programs, I started getting all these LinkedIn messages from all these left of center kids who are like, hey, I saw you did this program, but I listened to The Realignment and you seem pretty centrist. Why don't these programs exist for me? Why aren't there more spaces like this that take ideas seriously?

As Marshall lays out, Democrats have ample opportunity to learn from their past, their mistakes, and their opposition on the right.

Like what you’re hearing? Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts, and subscribe to hear new episodes of The Depolarizers. You can also support our work to depolarize American politics via our 501(c)3, The Welcome Democracy Institute.

1

There are some arguments that the seventh party system has already started.