Some Things Must Change.
“The fundamental question at the bottom of all politics”: a conversation with David Sirota
By Anand Giridharadas Feb.21.2022.
Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. 2018,
Today I have for you a thought-provoking interview with David Sirota. David is a man of diverse talents and projects. He has been a muckraking journalist, a speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders, a progressive pugilist on TV and Twitter, a very successful dabbler in film (as with “Don’t Look Up,” the recent blockbuster he co-wrote with Adam McKay), and the creator of a newsletter called The Daily Poster, which quickly established itself in official Washington as a fount of scoops at the nexus of money and power, illustrating the nitty-gritty reasons why so many political dreams die.
David had a lot to say about this political moment of crisis and stasis, and some practical advice for President Biden. But before we get to that, I want to make sure you’re covered on all fronts.
ANAND: In Washington, your newsletter, The Daily Poster, has become a real fixture. And something perhaps unexpected that happened, given the very different politics that you have as a progressive and Joe Biden has had historically, is that a lot of the case you’re making isn’t against Joe Biden’s agenda. It’s in favor of that agenda, but pushing back against the dilution of that agenda and the lack of will to fight to rescue that agenda.
DAVID: I think that there’s a difference between the stated goals of the Biden administration and what they’re willing to fight for. It reminds me of the old saying from Paul Wellstone: “If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them.”
I certainly think what the Biden administration has put forward rhetorically is — I wouldn’t call it idealism, I wouldn’t call it unrealistic, but it is certainly a relatively robust set of proposals.
The problem is, in my view, it hasn’t been really willing to muster much of a fight at all for those priorities. The White House has an enormous amount of power that it doesn’t appear to be using at all, except maybe to try to pressure the progressive caucus, for instance, to fall in line and vote for whatever piece of paper they can wave around as a “deal.”
I do think Joe Biden fetishizes the idea of getting a deal, no matter what is in the deal. The danger of that is that, whereas people in Washington fetishize deals, the average American is much more interested in what is actually in the deal, whether the actual details of the deal do something to improve their lives.
The role I try to play is following the corruption, the trail of money that tends to explain the gap between rhetoric and the reality. It explains the gap between telling the public you want something and then not actually fighting to do those things, because fighting to actually do those things would require you to have a confrontation with the donor class and with donor-sponsored members of your own party.
And this is where the Biden administration is mirroring the Obama administration: the absolute aversion to having any kind of conflict between the president and the conservative, corporate side of the Democratic Party. Just an absolute refusal to have that fight, which I would argue is absolutely the most necessary thing to have an appetite to do in order to actually get things passed.
Look, I don’t want to idealize FDR too much, but FDR had that battle with the right wing of his party. He ran primaries against members of his own party who weren’t supporting the New Deal. LBJ had those battles with the right wing of his party regarding the passage of Medicare.
History bears out that if you’re not willing to have a battle with the right wing of your party as a Democrat, then you’re not necessarily going to secure transformative legislation. You can go out and say you’re for transformative legislation, but you’re not really going to end up actually delivering because, as the old adage goes, power concedes nothing without a demand.
ANAND: If you are a geriatric millennial like me, you have never actually seen a president do the thing you’re describing. So I understand those FDR and LBJ references, but can you describe what the kind of fight you would want to see from Joe Biden would look like? Given the stalling of his agenda, what might a revival of it look like?
DAVID: Before I get into what Biden could do — not to idealize this, I’m not saying this exactly is what you want to do — but Donald Trump showed what having a battle with his party could be as a president. I mean, he constantly went after members of the Republican Party when he perceived them as getting out of line. Now, I don’t agree with his tactics. I obviously don’t agree with his ideology and the policies he was pushing, but that’s a very recent example of a Republican president willing to essentially go to war with members of his own party. Sometimes it was successful for him; other times it wasn’t.
So what does it look like for Joe Biden? Let’s take the Build Back Better Act. You can go to various states and various districts where you have recalcitrant corporate Democrats threatening to take down the bill. You can go, and you can campaign there for that agenda, and, either in an explicit way or at least a muted way, say that you expect and you demand the votes of those members of Congress whose districts or states that you’re in. And you can ask the public, the Democrats who turn out at your rallies, to contact their House members and Senators and tell them that they need their Democratic legislators’ support of that agenda. You can activate your social media network, your email list and the like, to do the same.
You can ask your allies in Washington. There’s a huge number of liberal groups who take direction from the White House about when they’re going to put pressure on things and when they’re going to push for a compromise. You can activate that entire network to echo the same message.
You can also load up the bill with some amazingly special programs for Arizona and West Virginia. And then instead of negotiating down the bill because Sinema or Manchin says they don’t like this provision or that provision, you can load it up with Arizona stuff, load it up with West Virginia stuff, put it on the floor of the Senate and dare Manchin and Sinema to strip it out.
I could go on, but the point is that there’s plenty of ways to twist arms, and I haven’t even talked about things like “Oh, you want this military base in your state? Well, I need your vote for this.” My point is that Biden has not shown any willingness to do any of that. And I want to be clear: it’s not a guarantee that it would work. At the end of the day, if Manchin and Sinema just want to completely sell out to their donors because they know they’ve got a lucrative lobbying job when they leave the Senate, they can.
But I’ll tell you what is a guarantee: If you don’t do those things, if you don’t try to really put pressure, then you are all but guaranteed to see your promised agenda get hacked away by those people you’re refusing to put pressure on.
ANAND: You recently launched a podcast with Alex Gibney, called “Meltdown,” investigating the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. One often hears claims about moments that supposedly changed everything. Say, that 1994 and Newt Gingrich explain X, Y, Z about today, or Richard Nixon was really the beginning of A, B, C in our current life, or the Scopes trial was really when… You are making a case for 2008 as having that kind of outsize, maybe under-noticed explanatory power for the present. Why?
DAVID: Because I think that that Donald Trump and Trump’s movement, the MAGA movement, was clearly both a backlash to what happened in 2008, 2009, and 2010 — the financial crisis and the response to it — and it took advantage of people’s frustration with what happened.
I don’t want to say that 2016 would never have happened if not for 2008, 2009, and 2010, but I think it’s undeniable that Donald Trump, who was historically unprecedented in a lot of ways — certainly the first president who had never really served in any governmental office at all — I think you have to ask, Well, how did that happen? Something must have happened to allow that to happen. It wasn’t just some sort of random situation. I do think it happened as a product of what happened in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
There are studies that have come out showing that, all over the world, after financial crises, typically right-wing populist parties are helped because people feel so angry. The conclusion in the studies is that the people feel so angry at the failure of the government to either prevent the crisis from happening and/or respond adequately to crisis, that it feels so human- and government-created, that it helps create the political environment for right-wing populists.
I think FDR understood the danger of that and spoke explicitly about how the New Deal and investing in the working class was not only a moral thing to do, not only economically necessary, but necessary to stop, back then, the domestic rise of fascism in America. I think that’s exactly what happened in 2008. People were so frustrated with the response, and out of that frustration birthed not just the Trump presidency, but Trumpism.
ANAND: I wonder how this argument relates to the discussion about economic anxiety versus racism. I don’t think this is what you’re saying, but a lot of the facile economic anxiety arguments after 2016 were proven completely wrong. In fact, the poorer you were, the more you were on the wrong end of power, the more likely you were to vote for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump. How does what you’re saying relate to the fact that Trump voters on average were better off than Clinton voters were?
DAVID: First and foremost, we have to understand that racism does not operate in a binary way. It’s not just that either you’re racist or you’re not racist. I think what we know from decades of studying this stuff is that it operates more on a continuum. And we also know that when people feel frustrated with the government, when people feel like they are in a resourced-starved situation, potential feelings of in-group solidarity and hostility towards the Other can be intensified, especially when a right-wing movement is there to stir that up. So, obviously, racism helped Donald Trump in 2016, but Donald Trump’s stirring up of racism was able to be more salient in an environment in which he and the Republican Party could opportunistically point at the failure of the response to the financial crisis to materially improve millions of people’s lives.
ANAND: In the Biden era, there seems to be some amount of reexamination of the Obama era and that 2008 crisis response. What do you make of that reexamination?
DAVID: I think the American Rescue Plan, the first bill that Biden passed, looked like a departure from the Obama administration, in the sense that the Democratic Party and Biden had finally figured out, OK, the least we can and must do is cut a really big check and make sure the check that we’re cutting goes to millions of people rather than to a handful of financial institutions. And that realization is kind of huge, a real departure. In our podcast, one Obama official admits, Look, it was a top-down bailout; it was a top-down policy. So the realization that we can’t do that again was something real and significant, even if it was kind of unstated as a departure from the way that the Obama administration had looked at the world.
But this idea that you have to constantly compromise, that you have to constantly try to find a way to appease your corporate donors while telling voters you’re solving the problem created by your corporate donors — that formula remains embedded as a culture in the Democratic Party.
That’s why the Democratic Party oftent seems so incoherent. Either you’re going to serve power and corporate money or you’re going to help people, and there’s no way to split that difference.
An example in the current moment is: You’re going to reduce drug prices in America and your pharmaceutical donors are going to take in less profit because you did that, or you’re not going to reduce drug prices in America and you’re going to help your pharmaceutical donors preserve their outsize profits and preserve a system where Americans pay the highest prices for drugs in the entire world and you’re going to betray your campaign promises to your voters.
It’s a binary choice, and the party never wants to admit that there is a binary choice, and it doesn’t want to admit that, typically, when it chooses to serve corporate interests and betray its rhetorical promises to voters, it ends up not going so well — for instance, in midterm elections. And so that fundamental contradiction still remains embedded.
ANAND: I’m curious what you think are the psychological effects on the public of an age of impunity. People experience 2008 and see nothing happens to those bad actors. People experience Katrina, see nothing happens. People experience Iraq, maybe go fight in it; they see nothing happens. People lose people to opioids; they see nothing happens. People see the Capitol insurrection; nothing, or at least too little, happens. There are criminal investigations of Trump in 80 of the 50 states, and it seems like none of them is going to lead anywhere. What do you think is the toll of that on average citizens in fueling some of the rage you’re exploring?
DAVID: The straightforward effect is that people lose faith in government. They lose faith in democracy. People keep being told democracy is under threat, democracy is facing an existential assault, we’re going to lose our country. But among regular people, I think there’s a sense of apathy towards protecting democracy when people have gone through so many examples of a small-d democratically elected government simply not delivering and not holding people accountable.
So then when Republicans try to limit voting rights or there’s the insurrection at the Capitol, it creates, potentially, a shrug, a willingness to just accept it. Because, hey, look, what does the government really do? It doesn’t hold the criminals, the real criminals at the top of the economic ladder, accountable. People perceive that it’s not delivering real systemic help in the middle of various economic and pandemic crises. So why do I really care that this or that assault on democracy has happened? That’s the real danger.
ANAND: The reception of the movie you co-wrote, "Don't Look Up," has been fascinating. In some ways, it must have succeeded beyond your wildest dreams, almost breaking the internet with simultaneous viewing around the world. But I saw so many examples of people praising it blithely, not seeming to realize that they are what you are critiquing, that they are the obstacles you sought to satirize. How did you make sense of the reaction?
DAVID: The movie has generated all sorts of responses, which is great because clearly it has made people think. There are a ton of themes and storylines in the film. It is, among other things, a climate allegory, a commentary on society's treatment of science, a critique of media, and a lament about governmental corruption. Different people are going to interact with different parts of that story in all sorts of ways. I also think the movie gives voice to universal truths that we all know are real, but that we often don’t talk about or even put into words — and I’m guessing even folks in some of the industries that are being satirized are able to accept the truisms, or at least aren’t offended by them. For instance, many people working in media know that so much media these days reverts to frivolity and distraction. It’s undeniable. The hope is that by making that undeniable problem explicit and laughing at it, that might prompt some reflection and ultimately some change.
ANAND: Who do you think are some of the most underrated progressive leaders on the horizon?
DAVID: I want to preface this by saying that I don’t love the “Who’s the next Bernie?” thing and I don’t organize my politics around the so-called Great Man Theory of History. All these people are humans; I don’t think any of them is the be-all and end-all.
But, obviously, people like AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones, to cite three members of Congress. Ro Khanna, certainly. These are people whom I disagree with on various tactical things; I don’t think they’re perfect people. But I think they’ve been willing to expend some political capital to try to change the paradigm. Another person that comes to mind is a Joe Neguse, a member of Congress from Colorado. He was an impeachment manager, is a super charismatic guy, has been a principled progressive.
Zephyr Teachout is running for attorney general of New York. If she was able to win that office, that could be incredibly transformative because it is such a powerful position. My friend Josh Shapiro is running for governor of Pennsylvania. He’s the attorney general there; he’s the one who broke open the Catholic Church scandal; he’s taken on abuse in the college lending area.
Fundamentally, if you want to know who a promising next-generation leader is, ask yourself: Is their formula “I just need to find a way to try to appease corporate donors and tell voters I’m solving problems created by corporate donors”? Or is that person somebody who is willing to answer the fundamental question at the bottom of all politics, the binary question, even just willing to acknowledge that it is the question, that it exists, which is: Whose side are you on?
The Democratic Party wants everyone to believe that is not the question. But it is the fundamental question. If you see a progressive politician who is willing to admit that’s the question and who’s willing to answer that question by saying, “I’m really going to be on the side of people in a binary fight against corporate interests who are hurting them,” then that is somebody who has promise.
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