Is the Democratic Party being pulled too far left—or is moderation making a comeback? Jesse Arm, Charles Fain Lehman, and Rafael Mangual discuss the recent government shutdown and the role of the filibuster in shaping legislative outcomes. They analyze tensions in the Democratic Party between radical grassroots movements and centrist pragmatism. And they examine the rise of the “abundance bros” and what this techno-optimist movement says about our current politics.

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual. I’ll be your host for today and I am joined by two of my brilliant colleagues, Jesse Arm and Charles Fain Lehman, both of whom are at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Charles Fain Lehman: Just once I want you to be like one of my brilliant colleagues, Jesse, and then this idiot Charles who is on the show for, nobody knows why.

Jesse Arm: Realistically, it would be the opposite. Also, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Rarely do I hear the full name spoken aloud like that, the legal name.

Charles Fain Lehman: I use that all the time. I use it all the time.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right, that’s right. Actually, way back in the day, MI, which is now just known as MI, used to be MIPR. That was the full acronym, and that was kind of the shorthand for a long time and somewhere along the lines that died before I started. But there were still some MIPR folks here when I got to MI back in 2015. So let’s get right into the crux of that.

Jesse Arm: MIPR sounds like our Puerto Rico branch.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right. That or like, you know, our...

Jesse Arm: I’d be happy to set up if anybody, if Reihan is listening and wants to give that the green light.

Charles Fain Lehman: I’m all for it.

Rafael Mangual: It’s either that or the Republican-funded counterweight to NPR, right? It’s our new public radio channel. We’ve got some interesting news developing that I wanted to get right into for today. Of course, we are recording this on Wednesday, September 30th. No, October 1st. It’s October already, Jesus. And the federal government has shut down. This is what everyone’s talking about. And so Charles, maybe I’ll start with you. Why don’t you just kind of walk everyone through what is going on.

Charles Fain Lehman: The last one I believe was during the first Trump administration. There was a fight over border funding, I think in 2018. This most recent one happened, started today. There was a…

Rafael Mangual: And what’s the beef about? What are we fighting about here?

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, well, okay. So yeah, great, great question. Republicans, who control the majority in Congress, wanted to pass a clean extension. They wanted to… They didn’t want to make any modifications. Democrats, for a host of reasons feel like that was not an ask that they wanted to sign on to.

One explanation is that they were worried about Republicans clawing those dollars back and we can get into that a little bit later. Another explanation is that the Democratic base is extremely unhappy with the state of the country and feels like their representatives need to be making big sweeping gestures and this is perceived as a big sweeping gesture and that’s how they understood it. And then another one is that, and their substantive argument is they did not want to approve a continuing resolution unless they got two things. One was there are subsidies for people who are on Affordable Care Act, i.e. Obamacare marketplace plans, health insurance plans. There are subsidies that were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic that are supposed to expire. And Democrats said, we don’t want to those expire. We don’t want a continued resolution without funding those. And then the other one was that they wanted to undo some of the cuts to Medicaid, which were implemented in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that listeners may remember from a number of months ago that we talked about on the show. So, you know, they’re two big asks who are about a highly salient issue, a good issue for Democrats, which is health insurance, health care.

But basically they’ve decided that like this is where they’re going to draw a line in the sand. There are and we can talk about this if you want to get into this there, you know, I think there’s a really big political question here. It is generally thought that like being the one being the stick in the mud to cause a government shutdown is not good for you politically. That is I think the reigning consensus. But on the other hand, Democrats calculus is like we need to be seen to be doing something and we should be seen to be doing something on an issue that’s good for us. That’s the counter argument.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, that’s one way to look at it, but yeah.

Jesse Arm: May I interject briefly just to say that like to put this in the terms that my grandmother of blessed memory might have used and borrow a little bit of Yiddish to talk topless and kind of get straight to the point here. This is really happening because Chuck Schumer is scared of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has very bad favorability ratings in his home state of New York. AOC has better ones. As Angus King, the independent senator who is functionally a progressive Democrat, caucuses with the Democrats, put it the other day, in borrowing what Schumer said last March when we had our latest government shutdown fight, the irony is that by shutting the government, these guys are actually giving Donald Trump more power. At the end of the day, this is all politics. This is Schumer trying to stave a primary challenge off, to puff his chest, to do what he thinks he needs to do to try and win more goodwill from Democratic primary voters in the Empire State. And it’s sad. It’s really sad because there are a lot of people in the federal government and who rely on federal government services who are going to pay the price for this. And it’s also not going to have the intended political effect that Schumer believes it will for the Democrats nationally or for himself personally.

Rafael Mangual: Well, that I think is right, in part because I was just on Twitter a little while ago or on X, I should say. I got to get that right at some point in life. And I saw AOC tweeting or posting that she was ready to negotiate and inviting Republicans to negotiate with her as if she’s the sort of self-appointed leader of the Democratic Party. And there was no pushback on that. I mean, so if anything, this seems to be boosting AOC far more than it’s boosting Schumer and even…

Charles Fain Lehman: I do want to make the argument that the other arguments the Democrats have made, which has to do with this thing called a “rescission,” which is sort of a technical term that I want to bring into the conversation, which is that…

Rafael Mangual: Right.

Jesse Arm: Ugh, so boring. Go on.

Rafael Mangual: Nerd.

Charles Fain Lehman: I know, know, I know, know, know, but it’s important to defend their position, which is, you know, the president has been very aggressive in his theorizing about what he’s allowed to do to not spend appropriate federal dollars. There’s been a big fight about impoundment, and about a lot of lot of nitty-gritty here.

Jesse Arm: Need to explain that one too.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, it doesn’t matter for our purposes. What you need to know is it is within the power of Congress to say you have to spend money on this. It’s also within the power to Congress to say, never mind, we don’t want you to spend money on this and to claw those dollars back. That’s rescission. One of the peculiar features of how the law currently works is that raising the debt ceiling, preventing government shutdown requires 60 votes in the Senate. Turns out that they can do rescission, at least in some cases, through 50 votes. And so part of what Democrats are saying right now is Republicans already clawed some money back earlier this year. Trump keeps talking about unilaterally doing it from various powers of the presidency he may or may not have. Why should we…

Rafael Mangual: Well, yeah, think you just got to win in the Supreme Court on that, right?

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, right, right. Well, that’s really in the weeds, but the bottom line is they thinking of the strategic logic of why would we sign on to a 60 vote deal if they can just turn around and stab us in the back with 50 votes later? Like why should we do that? That’s their, you that is the most theoretically logical concern. Although I agree ultimately with Jesse that like, yeah, basically what’s happening here is that they have a rabid base, then they can’t do anything because they don’t control any component of the federal government.

Rafael Mangual: Right. Well, they have a rabid base who’s used increasingly vitriolic rhetoric to describe the other side, which makes it almost impossible to justify playing ball in any kind of way. Right. I mean, you know, if Trump and the Republicans are fascists and Nazis, how could you possibly justify peeling off from your party to go and give them the 60-vote threshold? But it seems like what the Democrats are kind of doing is essentially inviting the Republicans to blow up the filibuster, which is something that they’ve threatened to do many times before and probably secretly want to happen so that when they are in power, they can exercise that power a little more freely. But that raises an interesting question, right? Because when you talk about the fact that you only need 50 votes in the Senate for a rescission package, but you need 60 for a spending package, I hear that and I think, well, that makes sense to me, right? I mean, it’s much more detrimental to the country to spend money we don’t have like a crackhead with $300 in his pocket that he just found. That’s going to be gone in a second. Here we are every other year having this shutdown fight because we need to raise the debt ceiling. Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing to raise the threshold for that particular fight compared to saving money.

Jesse Arm: I think the old problem with these funding fights was that the minority wanted to keep some leverage so it would resist the rules that would keep the government funded automatically. And today we have this bigger problem, which is that Democrats don’t trust Republicans to actually follow the spending laws that have already been passed. So it’s a little bit less about where the leverage lies now and more about the distrust over whatever existing arguments might be honored or not.

Charles Fain Lehman: Look, I think that is a more general problem with the theory of consensus that underlies the filibuster, which is the big barrier here, right? Like Republicans control a majority in both houses of Congress. They control the White House. They have a mandate to govern. They just don’t have a 60-vote mandate to govern. Like, those are those are different things and the premise of the filibuster as an institution is that it should be forcing comity. It should be forcing coordination. That does not appear to actually be happening. Certainly not in this circumstance. I tend to think more generally, right? To Jesse’s point about trust, like, you know, the Democrats do not believe, and Republicans often do not believe, that the other party is willing to play a coordinated game. And like, one opportunity to sit here and bemoan the fact that we shouldn’t, we can’t seem to be able to play a coordinated game and won’t everybody just get along. But I guess my response is increasingly, nah, they should just get rid of the filibuster and govern with the democratic majority that they’ve been handed. And when the other guys have a democratic majority, they should get to govern. And you know, that’s okay. This is a democracy.

Jesse Arm: The thing about... Go ahead, Ralph.

Rafael Mangual: You know, I was going say, I’m kind of with you on that. You know, the logic of the filibuster has always been a kind of counter-majoritarian argument, right? Like we want sort of in the tradition of Federalist 10, which for those of you who haven’t read it, go read it. It’s James Madison’s best of the Federalist papers. You know, we should have an extreme amount of consensus before Congress exercises the awesome power of government. And so by having this requirement for a 60-vote threshold, you ensure that all government action, which has real impacts and ripple effects throughout society, only happens when there is broad consensus. Now, that counter-majoritarian sensibility is something that I can appreciate from a distance. However, you run up against the following problem, which is that the Senate itself is part of a counter-majoritarian structure of government, right? Every single state, irrespective of its population, gets two senators, right? It is already kind of serving that counter-majoritarian purpose. So this is sort of a counter-majoritarian measure on top of a counter-majoritarian measure. Seems kind of redundant and maybe unnecessary. And so for that reason, I’ve kind of been persuaded to some degree that the filibuster may not make a ton of sense in the Senate.

Jesse Arm: Just heard Ralph say, “if you haven’t read it, go read it.” Or rather, he said “if you haven’t read it, go read it” with respect to Madison. But I heard “if you have Reddit, go read it.” So therefore, I thought Madison’s only available on this, on Reddit. In any event, I’m not sure which listeners are more likely to go and actually check out. My take on the filibuster is different, though. Or maybe not that different. It’s basically, my view is that it’s never been this sacred principle.

It’s survived mostly because there are a pretty rare number of circumstances in which it’s actually stood between the governing party and something that they really wanted. I think the moment it becomes the real obstacle between a party that holds the White House and Congress and a massive legislative prize, it’ll probably disappear. And we may be approaching that point on at least the spending rules.

The breakdown of the kind of normal appropriations process that has let the minority use the filibuster process or use the filibuster as this like procedural shield where it gets to duck responsibility while the majority takes the political hit for shutdown threats. That’s probably not a sustainable dynamic. But then again, I don’t know, dropping the filibuster for appropriations wouldn’t automatically empower only the left. There are internal divisions, I think, that would still make it hard to pass a unified spending package. In some ways, you remove the minority’s veto, and that would force the majority to govern rather than posture, and that would likely reveal basically just how much today’s parties are built for messaging, not legislating.

Charles Fain Lehman: And you know, and frequent panelists judge Glock is like, you know, clutching his head and like moaning, like sobbing quietly as he hears this conversation. We can get Judge on to argue with this. But I mean, I would make a stronger claim than either of you, which is that I take very seriously the folks like, Yuval Levin comes to mind, to the editor of National Affairs and sort of a great Republican constitutionalist theorist who are very concerned about the decay of the authority of Congress and the legislative authority. In principle, this is a democratic republic and we are a nation of laws and the lawmakers should be the ones who are making decisions about what the laws are. But they mostly don’t do that anymore, right? To Jesse’s point, they do a lot of messaging and they do a lot of party discipline and they sort of sign on to an agenda set by the executive. And this is true in both parties. And then we do a great deal of executive lawmaking where like the president makes a bunch of regulations with limited review and those are a lot of our laws. And then we have this other independent, unelected branch of like nine guys who have law degrees who call balls and strikes. And that is way more counter-majoritarian. That is, think, unjustifiably counter-majoritarian versus the people who got elected by the capital-P People should make the laws, and they should have fewer impediments to the act of making the laws. And indeed, I see this as a canonicalism. Congress cannot even make the government run, right? They are so dysfunctional that they can’t do that. That seems like an issue to me.

Rafael Mangual: Sure. It is an issue, but it’s not an issue that’s going to get solved by getting rid of the filibuster.

Charles Fain Lehman: If there was a 50-vote threshold, the government would be open currently.

Rafael Mangual: One of the things I think you’re doing here is that you’re misapprehending the source of congressional lethargy, which is, I think has a lot more to do with the fact that we have so empowered the executive branch and expanded the authority of what Congress can regulate beyond what it can possibly do with the time that it has. You know, this is kind of going back to first principles here, right? But like, Congress exercises most of its authority under the Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause was read relatively narrowly through the first quarter of the 20th century. Come FDR, all of a sudden we have this more expansive reading. Congress can’t possibly exercise all the new powers that it has as a result of that expansive reading. Combine that with the fact that the Supreme Court started signing off on things like expansive delegation and deference to executive agency actions, Congress figured out that, hey, we can just send messages. The executive can take all the political risk in making the rules and regulations that govern everyday life, and we can avoid political accountability. That’s really what I think is at the root of congressional inaction. They don’t really have an incentive to pass laws because, well, the executive can do it and let them take the political fall for it.

Jesse Arm: Yeah, we’re getting into pretty weighty territory. I guess, just to tie a bow on the point that I was trying to make earlier, I really just think that if you have reform that restores majority accountability on the basic budget bills, that would probably be healthy in principle. But yeah, in the current partisan climate, it’s just as likely to expose both sides dysfunction as to resolve it. And all that’s to say that this shutdown is probably going to fail.

Charles Fain Lehman: Good. That would be good.

Jesse Arm: The blame is going to fall more on Democrats than on Republicans, even among mainstream kind of left of center media outlets. I think that’s the narrative that’s kind of beginning to take shape. It’s not the same as the inverse when the circumstances were different with the Cruz shutdown all those years ago. But I’ll tell you what, whoever nukes the filibuster, regardless of what the circumstances are, I do actually believe will pay a political price for it because they will be the ones to have shattered a norm for whatever it’s worth. So, no one’s going to it.

Charles Fain Lehman: I think we’re well past that.

Rafael Mangual: I mean look the filibuster has been nuked in other contexts already right? I judicial appointments is a good example. I don’t see that coming back to bite anybody but you kind of gave an answer to the next question that I wanted to put to you.

Jesse Arm: Well, I think that came back to bite the Democrats.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, sure, we play… Because Republicans play tit-for-tat.

Rafael Mangual: Right, right. But what I’m saying is I don’t think that hurt their political brand in any real way. Maybe, maybe because they lost, but not on any sort of principle grounds or because they lost political support from their base.

Jesse Arm: I think they regret doing it. I think that was a, that’s a chink in their armor

Charles Fain Lehman: I think that that’s very… last thought, I think that that’s good, right? And just to be in the matter that I’m abstract, I’m very abstract for just one second, which is that the solution to many, we want the solution to many of our problems to be resolved through process or through institutional design, right? Like we want to create rules that foreclose bad outcomes, but like, actually, I think in a good and functioning democracy, when people do things that are bad, they are penalized electorally. And when people do things that are good, they are rewarded electorally. And so my response is like, maybe they were, I don’t actually think that they were penalized electorally for that, but also like that’s good. And I think that we should expose our elected legislators to more situations in which they are held directly accountable for decisions that they are formally empowered to make rather than going, we don’t really want them to exercise power and we also don’t want them to be accountable. I think you want to turn to power and accountability rather than trying to turn both down.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I just think you’re assuming that the policymakers actually want to exercise that power and risk the political accountability. So let me just put this question to you, Charles, because Jesse already answered it, which is who do you think comes out the winner or loser here?

Charles Fain Lehman: I don’t really think it matters. I mean, what I would say is like, look, as I said at the start, I think it’s probably right that set, all else being equal, the guy who starts the fight looks bad. And then I think the counter argument is like, is anyone really going to remember? Is anyone going to remember this in November of next year? Probably not. Is it going to matter in New Jersey and Virginia, the two upcoming gubernatorial elections? No, I think the Democrats are going to win. And then more generally, you know, I think the best counter argument is like, it is actually a pretty good issue for the Democrats if Republicans allow subsidies for Obamacare health plans to elapse and they get to go look, Trump drove up in the cost of your health insurance. What?

Rafael Mangual: But is it Republicans allowing them? Is it Republicans allowing that? By design, they sunset it, right? I mean...

Charles Fain Lehman: If the cost of health insurance is going up, that’s better for Democrats than Republicans is my assertion.

Rafael Mangual: Sure, Democrats were involved in the process that set the fund set provision, right? I mean, if they wanted this to be forever, they could have made it that way.

Charles Fain Lehman: It doesn’t matter to the voters. 63 different components. The voters don’t care. I think that’s a winning issue. that if we’re talking about the cost of health insurance, Democrats are doing better. So I think in total, I actually just don’t think it will matter that much. I think that you know, the conventional wisdom that they lose is right. But also just like I do not foresee an election in which it is salient enough to make a difference and that other factors matter more.

Rafael Mangual: Fair enough. All right. Last question on this and Jesse, I’ll start with you, which is how do you think this gets resolved? Do Democrats cave? Do Republicans cave? And how long does it take?

Jesse Arm: Hmm, I didn’t think you’d ask me that. I don’t know. I think it’s good open-ended question. Honestly, I saw a tweet earlier from a guy named Logan Dobson who works in the polling and data space where he pointed out the prediction markets answer on this question, which I believe they essentially said they expected to go longer than 10 days, but less than 35. So I don’t know.

Charles Fain Lehman: which is the record.

Jesse Arm: I’ll take a cop out and just answer with that and say that I think like Logan pointed out prediction markets are a really fantastic way at quantifying conventional wisdom unironically

Rafael Mangual: That works.

Charles Fain Lehman: I’m skeptical. Democrats, Republicans picked up through, I think three Democrats, yeah, three Democrats on the first vote. So it’s 55-45. Rand Paul voted against because he hates when the government spends money. But then three Democrats, well, one Angus King, the progressive independent and two Democrats, flip sides. I think that they will get to 60. I can buy 10 days. I don’t think it’s much longer than that. And this is for the simple reason, the longest one is the 35 day shutdown over border funding.

Donald Trump can go the distance. He will wait as long as he needs to to win a fight. Basically, nobody else will wait as long as Donald Trump. And so I think he wins on that, you know, who’s going to blink first? It’s not the president. And that’s, you know, I think, I think they’ll bring blink first.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s right.

I think that’s right. I think that’s right. And that kind of takes me to another topic that I wanted to talk to you guys about, which is, you know, it seems like the Democrats have kind of increasingly painted themselves into this corner of non-cooperation through sort of extreme position taking. And it really raises an interesting question, which is like, is there a world in which the Democrats moderate? And, you know, there are a bunch of different issues that I think kind of highlight the problem. One of them that I’ve been thinking a lot about is, you know, the reactions to ICE enforcement throughout the country. I mean, you’ve got these facilities in Illinois and Portland being, you know, protested every day, vehicles being blocked all the time, these fights being picked with the Customs and Border Patrol agents and the ICE agents. You’ve got ICE agents getting heckled in the street everywhere they go. When they’re in courthouses, people are sticking cameras in their face. You know, one of the ICE facilities was just shot up in Dallas, Texas a week ago. I was just watching some coverage of that. It turns out that the writings of the alleged shooter were recovered and there’s all this anti-ICE rhetoric. It made clear that he was targeting ICE agents. Of course, he ended up hitting three migrants, which, you know, is not great before he ultimately turned the gun on himself. Where do we go from here? just seems like you’re hearing things like the Gestapo and Nazis and fascists. It’s like there is no exit if that’s the sort of lines that were drawn.

Charles Fain Lehman: You know, I think I think this ties into the shutdown conversation and the immigration conversation and the core issue for me here is to what extent are Democrats accountable to their sort of radical base? And I think, you know, some… if we have listeners who are you know, sympathetic to them? They’ll go the Republicans have the same problem. That is to some extent true. Donald Trump’s superpower though is his ability to discipline the base. He’s actually extremely good at getting the base to go along with him. You may disagree with his ideas, but he’s to getting the base to go along with him.

It’s not obvious to me that Democrats have that same set of powers. In fact, I think they probably don’t. And so I think about this in a couple of contexts. I think about something like the anti-Israel/pro-Palestine movement. Our colleague, Stu Smith, has done some great coverage of Ro Khanna’s appearance, Representative Ro Khanna, rising star of the Democratic party. His appearance at Arabcon in Michigan. And, you know, Khanna…

Rafael Mangual: Yep. At ArabCon, right?

Charles Fain Lehman: was on the stage or was in the same room as a bunch of people who were quite openly sympathetic to and supportive of Hamas. He’s tried to sort of distance himself from that, but it’s like he clearly sees this as a constituency he has to talk to. This is a guy who wants to walk the moderate progressive line. And then, you know, to talk to the immigration context, Josh Barro, the commentator, writes for the New York Times, he had a piece, I think a couple of weeks ago, basically saying, Democrats need to get serious about immigration enforcement. And he asserted on X that you know, the next Democratic president is not going to make the same mistake as the Biden administration. He’s not going to come in and essentially open the border for three years. And I think that’s probably wrong. I am deeply skeptical

Rafael Mangual: Especially if the next Democratic president is AOC.

Charles Fain Lehman: Right, I’m deeply skeptical of the ability of Democrats to discipline the radical wing of their party that dictated policy, you know, in 2020, that dictated policy through much of the Biden administration that is sort of nominally on the outs, but they don’t really have still any immune system to resist it.

Rafael Mangual: No, I think that’s right. I mean, Jesse, one of the potentially promising signals that there might be some appetite for moderation on the left is the rise of the abundance bros. And these are people who are of toeing a bit more of a middle ground on things like regulation and housing policy and I just wonder what you make of that, right? This sort of Ezra Klein-ish kind of a tick to the center. Is that viable? Does that go anywhere in the modern Democratic Party?

Jesse Arm: Yeah, for larger context here, there’s a book written by Ezra Klein from the New York Times and Derek Thompson from the Atlantic called Abundance. It tiptoes into this territory of conversations around some deregulation with, and around housing issues, around green issues, even around some broader economic issues, and saying that for the Democratic Party to succeed in its goal and really the progressive and liberal left-of-center movement in the United States to succeed in its goal of delivering a large competent government that can do great things and bring people up, which is something that left-of-center Americans generally buy into, you have to embrace certain numbers of deregulation so that government can work in tandem with the private sector to achieve very big things. It’s an interesting faction, but everybody also kind of wants a slice of it. And the people who are kind of at the helm of this abundance movement, like Klein and Thompson, are welcoming a very, very large tent.

Ro Khanna, someone you mentioned before. I think Ro Khanna is actually particularly fascinating because, Charles, I think, used the term moderate progressive to describe what he’s trying to do. It’s accurate, but it’s a different slice of, if you think about politics as more of a round circle or as a horseshoe, as sometimes people use the terminology, horseshoe theory to describe people who are kind of so far out on the fringe of the right or so far out on the fringe of the left that they begin to come together and sound like each other. Khanna is someone who sees his political opportunity as right there on that far end of the horseshoe left, so far that he can begin scraping up some people on the hard end of the right. Particularly on foreign policy and economic policy issues. This is someone who feels very comfortable in the realm of, know, there’s Glenn Greenwald out on the far left who has his show and Anna Kasparian from that that faction as well, became famous doing the young Turks thing with this guy Cenk Uygur. If you don’t know these people it’s not important but they’re often cross-pollinating with certain right-of-center voices who are flirting with what…

Rafael Mangual: Including me, by the way, I appeared on Anna Kasparian’s podcast because I think she’s actually moderated on one issue that I write about, which is crime and policing. And she was nice enough to invite me on to sort of, you know, give the more conservative data.

Jesse Arm: Well, he has to do that in order to have a kind of cross-pollinating relationships with shows like Tucker Carlson’s, Candace Owens’s, who have flirted with views traditionally associated with the left on certain economic policy and foreign policy questions. So that’s what’s going on broadly, right? But you have people specifically on the abundance question. Zohran Mamdani is willing to throw out the buzzword abundance if it puts a few...

Charles Fain Lehman: He’s willing to say the word.

Jesse Arm: Yeah. Well, the point is that saying the word alone appears to be enough from the perspective of folks who are the gatekeepers of this movement. Now, do I think some degree of moderation is ostensibly possible? Sure. I saw one of the Pod Save America bros, this group of Obama speech writers who are millennials, who became very successful and famous and built a media company after their time in the Obama administration go on the offensive against Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, because she came out against a bill, believe SB 79 in California, which would do precisely that lower some of the barriers and intense regulations that prevent being able to rapidly expand the supply of housing in California and encouraging governor Gavin Newsom, who now has this bill on his desk to sign it, to not listen to the anti-development folks, the Karen Bass wing of the party that have now rejected that. So there’s a lot going on here. It remains to be seen. I guess it’s ostensibly possible that some of these folks could win small fights on the moderation front, but it’ll be a difficult ride.

Rafael Mangual: You know, I’m thinking about this Pod Save America reference that you made in the SB 79 bill. And I just wanted to add some context because the cynic in me wants to say that I don’t really believe that this is a moderation thing insofar as it is like, hey, we had massive fires in the Palisades and we want to rebuild our houses more quickly in the really nice parts of California that 99.9 percent of Americans will never be able to afford to live in. And that’s actually really more at the root of that particular bill than some moderation on the theory about the government’s role for regulation. But yeah, that’s probably too cynical for Charles, who’s rolling his eyes and trying not to.

Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, I think that’s plausible. I mean, look, if we’re the abundance guys, I am broadly, you know, I am I’m sympathetic to, supportive of many of their goals, like I think they’re good goals. And I, in fact, agree often with their theory of politics, which is that like, a great deal of political dispute is downstream of insufficient supply, that the pie is too small. And we’re fighting over too small of a pie. And actually, we should just try to grow the pie. I think that’s correct. And, you know, I’m willing to sort of endorse that as a theory. Where I have engaged with them and I’ve engaged with them a little bit, I have often, you know, tried to say basically like a set of the things that I believe are important for accomplishing the goals that you want, right? Like I actually don’t, you know, I quite publicly think that marijuana should be illegal. Most of the abundance of people do not think that. I’m not going to try to persuade them of that fact, but I will try to say to like cops are good and public order matters and that public safety is a good thing. And they all like kind of agree with this.

And I’m like, how can I give you tools to advance this? This is like a big moderate position that I most of the country is on the right side of. And indeed, you know, I think we were talking earlier about this sort of like polarization, and I think that’s a common theme in American politics. There really is a coherent middle. And the question is just like, who is able to grab on to the middle? Who is able to be politically persuasive to the middle? That thesis, I think, is persuasive to the middle. And the question is just like, the challenge I think there is that  the politician who has most effectively seized control of the middle of the discourse in America today is Donald Trump, right? This is what he did in 2024. He’s extraordinarily effective at speaking to the median voter. He swayed the median voter substantially to his side, which is why you won a plurality of the popular vote. The challenge, as I have argued in several contexts, is basically for a long time, the Republican Party was a vessel for an ideological movement, whereas the Democratic Party was a coalition of disparate interests. I kind of think that has flipped that the Democratic Party is increasingly the vessel for an ideological movement with sort of this like rump wing that’s like what about 1990s style Clintonism much like you know the Rockefeller Republicans were in the 1960s for the Republican Party. Whereas the Republican Party is now this like big confusing coalition of like RFK voters and traditional conservatives and whatever the heck Joe Rogan is and I think it becomes much harder as the old Republican Party learned. It is very hard to discipline out a well-organized ideological movement, particularly when you’ve lost the center to the other party.

Rafael Mangual: No, I think that’s right.

Jesse Arm: Yeah, that’s really compelling. I would like to expand on that just to say that it really is important to impart that message that is so shocking to comprehend, but that Donald Trump is one of the most powerful moderating forces on our politics right now. The way this goes awry, the way the center can kind of reassert itself in a way where its vehicle is the left or the Democratic Party is a realm in which

The Republican party makes its political program about exclusively anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-Semitic sentiment or anti-Indian sentiment or any of those items, not primarily first about protecting women’s sports or some of these other cultural issues that were hot button in the election. Now, do I have the confidence that the democratic movement, if it’s moderating effort is led by Ezra Klein, who’s welcoming on Ta-Nehisi Coates at the first, to his podcast at the first sign of trouble within the Left of Center Coalition to actually correct the fact that you should speak ill of Charlie Kirk immediately after a bullet runs through his neck and that hating white people is something that if you have prose lovely enough to describe it is something that is laudable or should be the basis of a political program.

Rafael Mangual: You mean majoritarian pigs, Jesse?

Jesse Arm: Yeah, or that cops or pigs or any number of issues. No, that’s not going to work out. But you know, I don’t know. There are glimmers, right? There are these figures. There are people like Gavin Newsom who say, I’ve got to have Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk and these guys on my podcast. I’ve got to be able to communicate with them. I’ve got to be able to crack some jokes. And mainly I’m here to kind of put on a show and I’m here to kind of fight the fight. And I’m here to represent the normal center. But at the end of the day, Newsom’s just still not willing to go that extra mile on some of these issues like pediatric gender medicine. He’s not, because really what the core of this, what a lot of this is about is that the median Republican donor and the median Republican professional staffer or operative in Washington, DC is actually probably nominally more centrist than the median Republican primary voter in the United States, whereas the median Democratic Party donor and the median Democratic Party staffer or operative in Washington DC is well to the left of the median Democratic primary voter. And that’s the core tension that’s at the root of a lot of this.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s exactly right. Fom Joe Rogan to Bill Maher, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that, you know, I didn’t move to the right, the left moved away from me. And I do think that that’s the story of the modern Democratic Party. But we’re running up against time, so I want to close on a bit of a lighter item. So it was announced a couple of days ago that my fellow Puerto Rican Bad Bunny is going to be doing the NFL Super Bowl halftime show all by himself, which a lot of people are excited about, some others not so much. I wanted to get your takes on that announcement and also just ask what’s currently dominating your playlist? I think our listeners want to know what keeps our heads bobbing.

Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse, you said your nuanced opinions on this. I have very limited opinions, so go ahead.

Jesse Arm: Okay, so Bad Bunny is like the most streamed artist across the globe, but not in the United States. So I basically look at that and say, okay, if the NFL is obsessed with globalizing its product, figuring out how to make as much money as possible, then sure, I guess Bad Bunny makes sense as a selection for the Super Bowl halftime show.

But if you think of the NFL and football as the most powerful force in American culture and something that’s at the center of so much of what we talk about, care about, one of the few elements of like common culture still in America today. The late night shows, nobody’s watching them. NFL football is like the one thing that consistently Americans are tuning into week after week and reacting to nationally. So with that said, I don’t think it’s a particularly nativist or xenophobic to... I don’t think it’s particularly nativist or xenophobic to suggest that the Super Bowl halftime show should be in English. So that’s basically my take. I say that as a Bad Bunny fan, someone who doesn’t speak Spanish but went to a Bad Bunny concert at Barclays in Brooklyn.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, yeah. I’m a huge Bad Bunny fan.

Jesse Arm:  But I don’t like the selection. Now, that was years ago.

Rafael Mangual: Did you see John Hamm at the concert? Apparently, he goes to all the shows. No, look, I’m with you. I’m a huge, I’m a huge Bad Bunny fan. I thought his last album was fantastic. Baile Inolvidable is an amazing song, but I think you’re right. I mean, when I think of the NFL, I mean, I think of Luke Combs and Kid Rock. I don’t think of Bad Bunny, you know, dancing salsa in a linen shirt.

But Charles, I want to get your take on this and then we’ll go back to Jesse to ask him what’s on his playlist.

Charles Fain Lehman: I don’t have a strong opinion. I’m not going to watch the Super Bowl halftime show because I’m a loser. I mean, I’m sympathetic to the argument. You know, on the other hand, like American popular culture is often polylingual. And that’s been true for a long time, particularly it’s, you know, it’s Spanish speaking. I can see a room for it. I don’t have a strong opinion either way.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, I could see more room for it in like, you know, the Major League Baseball All-Star game, right? Where like, you know, 35 percent of the league is Spanish speaking. But I mean, the NFL just does not have a big Latino component among its players, among its staffers. So yeah, just, it does seem weird to me, but you can’t get off the hook. What’s on your playlist, Charles?

Charles Fain Lehman: I listen to lots of podcasts when I go for a walk.

Rafael Mangual: It’s got to be music. It’s got to be music.

Cod. What do I listen to? I don’t even know. I listen to the same old things over and over and over again, because they’re like, I just don’t have time to listen to music. Jesse, you got a better answer. That’s true.

Rafael Mangual: All right, you’re a nerd. I love you though. Jesse.

Jesse Arm: I’m sorry to keep dwelling on the previous question, but we would also be remiss not to point out that Bad Bunny made a bit of a show in a statement earlier this year saying that he would no longer tour in the United States out of fear that ICE agents would begin appearing at his shows and carting people off. Again, someone who is making a big show of a declaration of the fact that they’re not looking to perform in the United States, I don’t think makes sense a selection of the Super Bowl halftime show. And who’s on my playlist? I listen to the pop singer from Israel, Omer Adam, a lot. But I think he would make zero sense as a Super Bowl halftime performer and I would never endorse it.

Charles Fain Lehman: See now I’m looking at my Spotify. I have three recent radio plays. I have “Vienna” by, is that Elton John? Yeah, no, Bill Joel, excuse me. “Vienna” by Billy Joel. I have “Russell County Line,” which is 49 Winchester, which is country. And I have Let God Sort Em Out, which is the most recent Clipse album. So I’m diverse.

Rafael Mangual: Okay, that’s fair enough. I’ve got, right now, my sort of, one of my favorite rappers ever is Joell Ortiz. He’s from Brooklyn, New York, which is where I was born and raised, and he’s got a new album out, which I think is absolutely fantastic. So that has been my sort of main gym playlist. It’s called Love, Peace, & Trauma.

Charles Fain Lehman: See, I listen to other podcasts.

Rafael Mangual: Fantastic. I know gangsta rap and the Manhattan Institute doesn’t always sound super coherent, but it’s what gets me going to the gym. All right. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the great conversation as always. Unfortunately, we have to leave it there. For those of you listening, thank you for tuning in. Don’t forget to leave us a comment, drop us a like, share the show, subscribe, ring the bell, do all the things, ask us a question. Hopefully we can get to it.

I want to thank you both. I want to thank our wonderful producer Isabella Redjai. And until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast and we will see you again soon.

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