Trump & The Game of Populism w/ Samo Burja

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today, we're releasing a conversation I had in November 2024 with my friend Samo Burja, founder of Bismarck Analysis and senior research fellow in political science at the Foresight Institute. Samo specializes in breaking down human institutions to figure out where they're headed. In this conversation, we discuss a theory of why populists win elections but struggle to enact change in office, and how the theory applies to America's present politics. We hope you'll find this conversation valuable in light of the beginning of Trump's second term. To listeners new and returning, especially those who found us via last week's excellent conversation with Victor Davis Hanson, please enjoy.

Hello. Oh, hey, Erik.

Hey, Sam. How are you doing?

Pretty good. Let's talk about the challenges and the strengths and limitations of populism as a political strategy.

Yeah, let's get into it. You know, it's fascinating. There's this famous Steve Bannon interview where he's in Oxford talking to students, the PBS interview, and they're saying, hey, Trump is this, you know, the end of democracy. And he's saying the end of democracy, there are more people voting than ever before. And they say, oh, democracy isn't just people voting. And he's saying, oh, I'm a simple guy. I think democracy, I think people voting. But, you know, it just goes to this idea of like, you know, democracy is when people vote for the candidate who people want to win. Populism is when, you know, people vote for the candidate that you don't want to win. But it seems like what Ben was also talking about is what happened in the US is kind of happening all throughout Europe and other places in the world, which is sort of the rise of this, you know, populist movement. And he's been trying to stoke it. So Why don't you give some context for this and, and let's unpack further what's actually happened here. What's happening?

Well, you know, it's, it's my wonderful democracy versus your corrupt populism, obviously. And that's always the standard, right? And I think that the right also had its own critique of certain very popular movements that happened in, let's say, the third world. So here's perhaps the surprising point here. When Hugo Chavez ascended to power, for the political context of his country, he was kind of a populist. He was sort of proposing, hey, let's increase living standards. Let's do things differently internationally. Let's commune with Simone Bolivar. You know, actually, I'm leaving a seat open for Simone Bolivar at every presidential meeting. And that sounds like, you know, mildly insane. It's like, is he, does he think he's communing with the dead? No, he's just sort of appealing to this kind of like concrete national mythology that the country in question has. And I think a factor that underlines populism that is, I think, basically sort of universal is this appeal to popular sentiment. Now, popular sentiment can be right or it can be wrong. I happen to think that a lot of popular sentiment on questions like free speech or the challenges of how to process immigration, I think it's correct. But in the case of Venezuela, it was not correct in terms of what to do with the extremely functioning, extremely well-functioning before takeover oil company. And I think that the view there is that you acquire power or popular mandate Through basically popular support. So populism is democratic power most directly understood, and it has been a strategy that we have seen throughout political history. We've started talking about it in the last decade or so, but if you look at basically any historical republic, you could have the optimates and the populares, right? As you had in the Roman Republic. And you could have your own version of, say, 19th century version of, say, the culture war and so on. What is perhaps different though, is that I think the last time populism was truly used, when the popular mandate was the basis of political reform, the sort of opponent of populism was just basically feudalism or almost monarchy. If you look at 1848 in Europe or even, you know, 1776 in the United States, the popular mandate legitimates a break with the previous establishment and its replacement. And say in the American case, it's not quite a rebellion against feudalism. I think it's more sort of like a breaking from a kind of mercantilist republic, a merchant republic, crowned one, but still and creation of a new republic. And I think in the European case of 1848, with the revolutions in Germany, France, et cetera, there it's more straightforwardly the toppling of feudalism. And I think what's different is that for the first time ever, democracy is fighting the 20th century administrative bureaucratic state. People do not understand how extensive and expansive Modern states are. If you compare the United States today versus 1900, you know, you could sort of fund a 1900-sized state through tariffs and you didn't even need an income tax. There was no income tax, actually. You cannot fund a state that's sort of half of GDP in that way. Though, of course, there are, you know, people who float an idea of a return to that. I think Donald Trump's been playing around with, with that idea, or at least mentioning it in the U.S. context. So the balance of power is profoundly different from when democracy or a democratic force reshaped politics last. So the balance of power politically in an 18th century state in an American colonial context is already different from a 19th century fragmented small European state that just started industrializing, like a place like Bavaria, for example. Right? Or a place even like, you know, in a way France, which is a bit bigger. And that's very different from a place where the administrative state already exists. Now, the interesting part of this is that arguably populism is sort of what created the administrative state in the first place, rather wrote the political check that allowed this state to exist. You know, there's this whole forgotten period of early 20th century American politics where, you know, you have politicians like Huey Long. I think it's like probably decently correct to describe Huey Long as a populist, right? He was the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932. And then he was a senator for another 3 years. He basically assembled with popular mandate, a full-on political machine. And this was driven with a kind of redistributionist agenda. And at the end of the day, FDR's America, while it had significant elitist elements, was also populist in the most straightforward sense of like promising people things that they wanted, right? Basically, it was supposed to alleviate the aftermath of the Great Depression. Once the administrative state was assembled, There was this long history of sort of tweaking it from like the 1940s all the way to the present era. You could consider it sort of like a seamless transition from the Cold War era to the post— to the post-1990s neoliberal, fully globalized era. So you have like the Cold War period where it's basically the military-industrial complex on steroids, complex game of International diplomacy. And then post-1990s, it's sort of this attempt to basically allow enough economic growth to fund the massive states that have come into existence, right? So I think for a while in the 1990s, that seemed to kind of work even in places like Britain that have since fallen off. It seemed like economic growth would be fast enough. That the ever-increasing spending would be balanced, but this seems less and less likely over time. So eventually, I think Europe will have to basically abandon the kind of social democratic model. But the social democratic model is just a variant of the administrative state. Like I said, the sort of national security state, the like hyper-bureaucratized, hyper-regulatory agency of Washington, DC. Have in a deep philosophical sense, a closer similarity to Brussels than they do to 19th century American governance. And I think that sort of brings us to the paradox. The national myths of not just the United States, but all liberal democracies were made in a time before there was a bureaucratic entrenched establishment. And now there has been one for 80 years. So will the same tactics actually work against it? Unclear. It's clear it can win elections, right?

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Politically, let me give an example of a cultural win and maybe a political win. Where I think that, say, Viktor Orbán in Hungary has not managed to solve the fundamental problems Hungary faces. Hungary's economic growth is no better than, say, Poland or other Eastern European countries. The migration is a bit lower. They're interested in expanding nuclear power but haven't done so already. Yet at every level of government, the main conservative party, Sort of has a profound bench of people working in government. So Hungarian government is not smaller than say Polish government or Czech government, but it's staffed by cultural conservatives. So they tend to focus on things that promote basically a middle-class lifestyle. Even when we think of something like the child subsidies there are given in the form of like. Extra loans for a car and like discounts on baby car seats and tax breaks. So very much in a way aimed at developing not just higher fertility, but like just a middle-class society, right? That, that Hungarian conservatives that are modestly pro-market, modestly socially conservative, not even that religious, somewhat nationalist would like. So that's perhaps a cultural win. It's not a developmental win, and it involves the co-opting of the administrative state by Fidesz slowly, painstakingly with Orbán's reforms. They have not yet succeeded at raising fertility, by the way, despite that being sort of the flagship policy. They've raised fertility a little, but, and every little bit helps, but while spending several percentages of GDP, they have not managed to get it above replacement. Now, arguably it's totally worth it because 100% of GDP only exists because people are there, right? 100% of GDP is because of the humans who live there. But still, so I would call that a cultural win. But then I'll give an example of populist failure, which was successfully mobilizing against the bureaucratic and political establishment of a vote for Brexit in Britain. And Brexit did happen, but I don't think the outcome is one the population is happy with. And I don't think Britain then charted a new course. There was no British Renaissance after. For a little bit, it seemed like there might be. So we see here that like merely meaning winning an election does not automatically result in either figuring out an alternate political economy. It might just result in you picking up the same sort of Big government approach and making that the foundation of your power, and it remains kind of middling, not necessarily that effective. Or it might result in events changing, but you didn't even defeat the old establishment. Like Brexit did not actually change the British establishment or break it in any way. I'm of course raising these in context of Donald Trump's recent election win, where I think many people are very excited about the possibilities of the future. I mean. I am hopeful, but I'm noting that these outcomes exist, right? We have political science case studies where even a big electoral win seemingly driving a big change kind of dissipates when hitting administrative power and like deep bench of people to hire from the opposite team. And you can call them unelected and it's true, but what are you going to do? They have government salaries. authority and they can disobey your orders. And sometimes the courts are on their side.

Right. And then there's a question, we alluded to it in our last conversation of, okay, so you could either rebuild the bench from scratch, but then there's a question of, is it possible that the existing sort of officials can be converted in a sense? And, you know, in 2016, this was unfathomable because the resistance was so strong, the ideological sort of hatred of Trump. was so strong. But 8 years later, it seems like there's been this preference falsification wave where a bunch of people who are secretly supporting him for a bunch of years, or at least people who are neutral towards him, can now say so. And maybe now we'll have the exist— people who served Biden or who wouldn't have served Trump 8 years ago, maybe they'd have no problem serving Trump now. It feels like the resistance just isn't as, as strong. Do you see that that is—

I think they're, they will be more cooperative to a great degree, but I don't think, say, Elizabeth Warren and her allies would easily give up. And if I count the number of live players, it's sort of like, you know, I think the Democrats actually have more. The Democratic Party has more and the U.S. deep state has more. I mean, the other side, of course, you know, Trump plus Elon, You should never underestimate that. That's, that's pretty amazing. And Elon seems to be, at least for now, like more obviously influential than say perhaps Peter Thiel might've been in the 2016 administration and the 2016 election. That might've been a more subtle form of influence. And perhaps it's related to the fact that x.com is a form of populist power at this point. He can shine the spotlight of public opinion on all sorts of problems, all sorts of issues that otherwise would not have gotten airtime. Like in 2016, there was no comparable social media network, any, right?

Right. I mean, if Elon said, hey, I'm doing this fellowship where I'm going to take 1,000 people, you know, the best people in, in sort of business, tech, whatever, to, you know, work at the White House for a year or two. alongside me, you know, I bet he'd get some great, great people applying.

Of course. But would he do it? And can they be confirmed? Will the GOP actually cooperate, for example, with Elon Musk? Very unclear. Like, the significant chunks of the Republican Party are still deeply hostile to Trump. So they are not even enabling him politically. He is not in a position of close alliance, as for example, between Fidesz in Hungary and Viktor Orbán. Orbán built that party over many years from scratch. It wasn't like a hostile takeover, right? And the problem is Trump ran a hostile takeover in 2016. The voters love him, but a lot of this deep Republican establishment doesn't. And, you know, you can have examples of people who cannot be confirmed And are then given this title of a czar. Okay, what is a czar? Well, you have an office in the White House and you have the power to convene people.

Yeah.

Okay, you convene the people for whatever bureau you're supposed to handle, like immigration. You talk at them, you tell them the president really wants this. They hear you, they nod, and then they go back across the street and go to a— back to their office. And they do whatever they wanted to do. So the difficulty here is that not having the direct authority to remove people or manage people is a severe impediment. And I think the confirmation process will be contested from within the Republican Party. And you might ask, well, but why would, why would the Republican Party pass up this perfectly fine opportunity? To carry out a program similar to what I said, again, the Viktor Orbán program in Hungary, where you appoint people, you fire opponents, maybe you give, maybe you shrink the size of government a little bit, maybe you reduce the number of civil servants by great degree, maybe with Elon's help in identifying things, maybe just do it, you know, assign all the people each their own department and relevant agenda. However, they do not see a Trump administration and embedding into the deep state as a win for them. They see it as a win for Trump, and they see it as a win for Elon. While they might like Elon, I guarantee you Republicans probably see him as an outsider. The Republican insiders, they don't like him any better. So I think if he could get through confirmation, a bunch of people from tech and from government, this would work very well. It would work better than the Orbán strategy. Now let me explain why. I think the Orbán program is kind of basically a socially conservative program where you're basically appealing to the Hungarian baby boomer and you're appealing to their preconceptions. And in a way, there is no deep bench of highly educated, intelligent people. You have highly intelligent people in business, in tech, who, however, have very little political experience. That is not necessarily bad, but only if you can replace wholesale aspects of the function of the previous political establishment. As soon as you are in a room, you know, let's put it this way, Marco Rubio, does that sound like a name that's like a very different foreign policy?

No, I was, I think people are really frustrated or annoyed that it seems like business as usual or confused as to why he picked Rubia.

I think it's just the Republican Party. I don't even think it's the donors. Like Donald Trump received significant crypto donations. By the way, I do believe this is a reason to be bullish on crypto, you know, not investment advice, but I do in fact think that, you know, even at the end of the day, while Lina Khan was not ideal, Lina Khan was like not Was not terrible, and then now, in fact, it's very likely that they'll try to replace replace FTC and so on. So I expect the U.S. to take a number of stances that are going to be very positive on crypto, and Elon, of course, is pro-crypto. So I think that'll do well. And you know, in a way, it's cool that you allow Elon to sue. What was it? The Federal Aviation. I forget the FAA. Is that—

yeah.

Yeah. It's cool that you can sue the FAA and that like they let up on making you like chase down SEALs and torture them with sounds of rocket launches. Did you see that?

Yeah.

Where they had to like demonstrate how distressed the SEALs are. So you have to kind of abduct a SEAL and they had to like play this audio. That was kind of insane, but that's cool. But wouldn't it be even cooler if you tasked the FAA directly to increase the number of launches that their mandate And their new KPI is the number of successful launches. Like, that's cooler, right? And I think to do that, you would need someone to run the thing and you need to fire a bunch of people. And, you know, I think that the call could be made. And the key question is, can they get it through the Republican Party? So I think perhaps not to Donald Trump's surprise, because I'm sure he's seen this before. But perhaps to Elon's surprise, the bigger— in about a month or two, it'll turn out that the biggest obstacle to any great dreams of reforming the American government he has at this point will be the ostensible allies of the Republican Party, right? Because they— you can't convince me that it's not, let's say the Marco Rubio appointment is not straightforwardly the Republican Party business as usual. And the Republican Party business as usual. You know, I kind of don't massively care if they run the country or if the Democrats business, Democratic Party business as usual run the country. Because I think while some things will be slightly different, it's much like Hungary, right? It doesn't outperform the counterfactual that much, right? Slightly more balanced budget, maybe slightly higher fertility. You get to the same place. You're just going with a slower speed.

And when I think about sort of Democratic Party as usual, I mean, some people say it's like Obama, some people say it's like Pelosi, Schumer, there's sort of a nexus of power. What is sort of the equivalent on the Republican side? Like, what is Republican Party business as usual?

I mean, first off to acknowledge, it was actually unclear whether President Harris would have been the Democratic Party as usual. I think both sides are perhaps seeing a slow motion succession failure. There's a reason all the like very formidable Democratic Party politicians, except maybe Gavin Newsom is now still left and AOC, they're all old. Like Elizabeth Warren is getting quite old now compared to the peak of her career. Like in 6, 7 years, she'll be like an Nancy Pelosi-like figure. And Nancy Pelosi is just like, you know, elder statesman from the 20th century, just still pulling all the strings. Kingmaker of who gets to be the Democratic Party's president. This is sorry presidential candidate. So I think that the Republican Party side, it's sort of you could imagine some people like maybe Ron Rand Paul doing something interesting, but outside of Trump himself, there's shockingly little. Let's put it this way: the most interesting right-wing political figure right now is. Center-right is like Elon Musk. The second most interesting one is Donald Trump. And I almost don't care who number 3 is. I don't think they're there. It's sort of like maybe the mavericks, right? The people like, like literally Tulsi, RFK, but none of those people are going to get confirmed. It's not looking currently like they're even going to try to get them through. So personnel is policy. And I think if one were to pursue, pursue this for real, I think what one is really doing is trying to recruit first, trying to beat your own ostensible political allies so they allow the appointment of true outsider talent. Number one, once that is done, Use the outsider talent to actually key chunks of the administrative state, because the real power in the United States lies in the administrative state, not in the elected office. It's very telling, for example, that, you know, when I talk to my conservative friends, they're convinced Joe Biden was not running the country. But as soon as Joe Biden leaves the seat and Donald Trump enters it, they are convinced Donald Trump is running the country. Maybe the country's not run from that seat. Maybe it hasn't been in decades. And, you know, maybe that sounds like, to my conservative friends, that sounds like cold water. To my liberal friends, that sounds like fresh hope. The resistance isn't going to be like as loud and people will play on the Republican team now, right? So previously the resistance was almost explicitly Democratic Party coded. It was the Never Trump stuff. But it was nominally, it was the Democratic Party restraining Donald Trump. It was the sort of left side. And I think currently the right side is going to be constraining Donald Trump. And then as soon as you have party infighting in a populist context, that gets very tricky. You can say that this person is like, you know, not actually a loyal Republican. You can pull your support. from them running in the race. Uh, but that doesn't mean you can put your own candidate to win that constituency. Let's think about things like midterms. So you can have a disloyal ostensible ally. If you try to replace them in their elected position for the purposes of pushing them to agree to the confirmations, you know, they would just be replaced by a Democrat. Yeah.

Fascinating.

It's actually like the game theory is not that clean. And, you know, perhaps, and this sounds kind of funny, but, you know, I, it's kind of expensive. It's sort of like if you wanted to have, say, a proper tech takeover of the United States and I was Elon, I would open this fund and I would go to all of my friends who are now So, you know, they're congratulating me for my genius. They're congratulating that they're all down for it. They're wearing the MAGA hat. They're saying nice things about Trump. They're excited to go to Mars. And you're like, oh, this is so good. Will you pledge $2 billion or $500 million to this fund I'm creating? And this fund's purpose is literally to go around and buy Republicans from their old donor base.

Fascinating.

Get them off their old donor base, like literally targeted bribes.

You were dropping too much interesting ideas that you got censored.

You got immediately canceled.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You were saying targeted bribes.

No, no, no. I would just say be an alternate constituency, right? Be alternate funders of political campaigns. Be alternate lobbyists. Just raise Let's say $40 billion or $20 billion sounds like a lot of money, but $20 to $40 billion to buy the Republican Party, I guarantee you no one has attempted that. At the end of the day, you know, there's a question, well, why shouldn't Elon fund it? It's like, well, he already spent $44 billion buying Twitter. And, you know, clearly this did not seem like a great financial choice at the time. Now, perhaps it'll turn out to have been a great financial choice. I guarantee you it would not have been had this election, had the Democratic Party won this election. So you want to do this so that people are committed. And you know, it's not like the other team ever had difficulty raising $10 or $20 billion donations from Silicon Valley. People, once they put their name and money on the line, cannot walk it back. So that's, that's, that's a big deal. Like that's a big deal. Basically you want other people to stake on your team. So to, you know, basically provide what I think would be a winning strategy for a proper fast growth US, I think the solution is to have all of the fair weather Trump enthusiasts among Silicon Valley elites commit a significant amount of money to a fund. And the fund is used to lobby establishment Republicans. And wean them off their preexisting donor base because their preexisting donor base is tied basically to the paper belt, right? You know, we might not think of Wall Street as the paper belt, but it kind of is. And Wall Street, Raytheon, and so on, the classic defense industry, even parts of sort of oil, right? I think this, this kind of has to be done. That would be one possibility. There are other ways. But I think that's the best one. I think the carrot might work better than the stick because the stick is, you know, Trump denounces you and you lose the election. Well, if you do that to me, then my seat goes to the Democratic Party. So it's like a very limited strategy.

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Visit choosquad.com and mention Turpentine One thing Elon is good at doing is putting pressure on, you know, he's good at a lot of things, obviously, but, you know, raising money, evangelizing, and putting pressure. So I suspect if, if, you know, Republicans are acting out of line or really trying to sort of thwart him, he will put them on blast in a way that perhaps—

I mean, Donald Trump was never bad at that either, but we saw what the first administration was like. It was a constant sort of like trying to work with establishment figures who 3 months later inevitably betray him. And then all of the Trump supporters inevitably telling me that this is actually brilliant and was the plan all along and that the next one's going to be different. There were just 4 years of that. Did people forget?

Yeah, but Trump didn't own Twitter and he's not Elon.

That's true.

Yeah, obviously he could get—

Trump could get banned from Twitter. Elon cannot get banned from Twitter. And, you know, Trump doesn't get banned from Twitter now either.

Yeah. And also the social, you know, Zuck complimented, you know, Trump and, you know, it seems like even the social networks, or at least Meta is not beholden to the Democrat Party anymore. Maybe Google still is. I don't know. But it's a new sort of battlefield there. It's a new digital sort of space. And we'll see. We'll see what that means.

Well, I do think that the digital space and the popular support are important and controlling perceptions is important. However, I want to point out that, you know, the New York Times is still there. Harvard is still there. The administrative state is still there. I think there is a post-election high, but I don't think it's going to last. I think that the messiness of this politics is going to show that there's a limited amount of things you can achieve with populism, right? At some point, you cannot just pressure every single Republican lawmaker and party operative. You have to have your own people. You have to have people who are loyal to you. And that is not the current Republican Party. Now, from the Democratic Party side, from the left-wing perspective, this is sort of good. Turns out the real checks and balances in the American system was internal party fracturing. Maybe the U.S. can't really have a one-party state left or right because too many people defect on their own team all the time. You know, in China, they have to use pretty extreme measures to get the CCP to stick to itself. But I, I, I do feel that the challenge of governing a country after one has achieved sort of the populist success. The first step is securing control of the administrative state. And then only after you have really the step of properly shrinking it, right? I feel like first you have to have control, then you can maybe shrink it. And I just think that there is in theory a good opportunity to do that over the next 4 years. And I would honestly be excited to see it because I think the U.S. government kind of needs a partial reform and reset of its key institutions. Like, you know, all of the regulation's gone too far and the ambition's gone out of government. It's been a very long time since anyone was excited to work in government. So maybe there's an opportunity to do that, but it involves the transmutation of popularity into basically legal power. And essentially, like, just having the people who want to do the work for you. Like, if you're paying someone a salary to do a job and they're just passively kind of sabotaging your policy agenda, well, that's a big problem, isn't it?

Yep. It is worth, you know, because we're talking about populists, populism, and you started the conversation by talking about there's left-wing populism too. And you mentioned Chavez, et cetera.

I mean, in the United States, AOC would, I would qualify her as left-wing populism.

Yes. But, but left-wing populism is about sort of the government doing things for you, where it seems like this populism is, I don't want to say it's libertarian necessarily, but it's like, you know, get wokeness out of our schools, get it out of, get the trans stuff out of the schools. You know, it's sort of like, it's somewhat like, you know, get this sort of like get out of our spaces, basically let us live our life. You know, it's like, let us sort of, you know, not be blind, sort of gaslit or something. It's like a reactionary populism. Basically, but it doesn't seem to be asking for handouts in the same way, right?

Well, you know, there, there's, there's like a few differences here. It's sort of like, in a way, a direct handout is perhaps more politically powerful than getting out of someone's way because they are directly dependent on you.

Yep.

And in the other one, you are protecting them from a plausible danger from the other side or from someone else. to meddle in their affairs again. And I think people are more grateful for an existing dependency than they are afraid of meddling that hasn't yet materialized. I think that politically there's a difference, but the key similarity is that you're trying to build vast popular appeal. You're trying to build popular appeal for a measure and bring popular opinion as a form of pressure, mostly on elected officials, but even, for example, on companies, like boycotting concrete companies, right? Concrete companies fearing bad PR. And finally, also just sort of social pressure, because no one likes to be unpopular, even if the public has no direct mechanism to remove you from your position. If they really dislike you, you're going to try to work on your PR just because it'll be unpleasant to be the head of a university or a school or a federal agency or whatever exposed to that. And you might be closed opportunities in the future because of it. I think this sort of like difference that's, it's this more libertarian strand. Like what I worry about, about it is that it's, it's trying to achieve a vacuum. And I think that if you say, let's, let's say, what would it even mean to get wokeness out of schools? Does that mean like firing 80% of academics? Does this mean that people would be happy to not send their kids to college because there are now fewer colleges? Or does it mean that you fire 80% of quote unquote woke people? And then people who are from the same social class, educated with the same degrees, have the same opinions, but now know to shut up about them for about 4 years, get hired in. And sure, maybe, you know, your daughter or son has like a slightly less left-wing college experience and you're a little bit happy about that as a conservative parent, but don't we just end up at the same spot? You, you, you would, you would have to fundamentally like shrink the number of people going to college, for example. Or you would have to figure out, hey, what does like a right-wing university exist? Like, how can someone make a career out of being like, I don't know, like a free market guy, for example, or being a pro-tech guy in technology studies or whatever in the university. And that'd be a good career move and that'll promote them up. And someday they'll get to teach at Harvard because then they'll spend their entire intellectual career doing that. Right.

This was Curtis Yarvin's critique of Chris Rufo's activism against critical race theory, where he was saying, hey, you can outlaw critical race theory, but people are still going to believe the same thing. They'll just call it something else. And they'll find ways to espouse it. But I wonder if the difference here is, you know, Democrats just got lost. They just got— they lost the popular vote. And I think there's consensus that You know, wokeness is not working. And so maybe there'll be internal pressure to stop sort of conceding to sort of, maybe Nikole Hannah-Jones has way less power than she used to have or way less sort of credibility. And people will say, hey, like even internally on the network, like, you know, we don't need to listen to this. And so, and maybe that will sort of, you know, ooze out to me.

What will this election as a means to reform the Democratic Party, I think might just work. But that's very different from what I think people talk about by default. No, I would totally agree with you that within the Democratic Party, I think marginally the faction that supports the most, you know, the deepest push for culture war, I think that faction has been disempowered. I think like the anti-crime, more socially moderate one has some advantages. I don't think that the big government One has been like really disabled within the Democratic Party though. So it's sort of like imagine like Gavin Newsom big government, but now it's like this now with 50% less crime. It's like, you know, I can't believe it's it's it's not butter. This sort of rebranding where it's like oh, we really want is like you know clean streets and a clean environment, and you know. We we're going to make America cities like thrive, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if if they actually did that in California, you know, that's actually a solid argument for the presidency. It's not clear that's going to happen, but I don't think that the Democratic Party is moving away from managerialism or from the administrative state as the means to implement policy. Like like does that make sense? I'm like. evaluating it from this, like, kind of like from the, hey, I want people to leave me alone perspective. And they're like, well, we're not going to leave you alone, but the things we're going to tell you to do are going to be less onerous. Right. So see, that's the kind of reform I expect on the Democratic Party side.

Right. Well, it's interesting because there's, and I'm not sure if we've talked about this before, but there's sort of the, you know, the Noah Smith, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, You know, sort of like abundance, you know, leftism movement, which to me kind of seems like conservatism in a way, or at least free market, like what they're, you know, they want to deregulate housing. They want to, what they call supply-side liberalism, but basically, you know, deregulation, you know, housing. They want to get rid of sort of laws that prevent us from building, being able to build. They want to free up sort of the building. I guess they would say they want to, you know, increase state capacity or industrial policy. just like much more effective government. And they want to focus on this, you know, healthcare, et cetera, as opposed to some of the culture stuff because they realize that they're losing on the culture stuff.

I think that that's, that's like in a way promising, but I feel that's a very intellectual and coherent response. And then the question is, who is the power base within the Democratic Party that backs this? Like I could see like, say, a pragmatic Gavin Newsom sort of embracing Andrew Yang as his, like, idealist side, right? And then, like, it may be inviting Noah Smith to write a policy paper, but then as soon as Noah Smith is, like, inconvenient, I imagine Gavin Newsom, like, dropping him in an instant. What? Never knew you.

I could see Dustin Moskovitz, Reid Hoffman. I mean, these are, you know, technocratic.

Okay.

Yeah.

Increment, you know, you know, utilitarian, you know, Sort of pragmatic to some degree. And so I could see them getting behind such a day. I think one question I have is, does it have voter appeal?

But Erik, that would be still technology entering politics, just technology entering politics on the Democratic Party side, which arguably was sort of attempted in different ways by, you know, basically by Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, again, Rehoboth and so on. Though Hoffman seems extremely motivated primarily by an anti-Trump agenda rather than a let's make the Democratic Party work agenda.

Yeah. And I'm a, you know, big fan of Reed Smoot.

Dustin Moskovitz is a good suggestion because we know for a fact that, you know, he has donated huge amounts of money, which is very admirable for something he believes in, even if one disagrees with what he believes in. I think that it's like he has basically, if someone is willing to give a lot of their personal money to reshape society, like I almost think that's legitimate actually. It's like you're putting, you know, it's skin in the game, right? Like if you have like $20 billion and all you do is tweet, I probably shouldn't take your tweets that seriously. If you have $20 billion and you give $1 billion and create a thing called the Open Philanthropy Foundation, and you like, you hire the smartest nerds you can find to like prevent the AI apocalypse. Look, I can respect that. There's no bullshit. I just believe you that you actually think this is extremely good for society. So, so I don't know. I think that there's, there is something there, but I think someone would have to seize the narrative. And say, "Hey, we lost because the people want cheap electricity. They want abundance. They want clean, safe streets." And on top of that, we can of course have all this classic progressive policies. You want to have a welfare state? That's great. We'll fund it through exports. We'll fund it through cheap energy. We'll just grow enough, right? And in a way, that was kind of the Bill Clinton promise. If you think about it, the modern Democratic Party. Is way less technocratic, way less pragmatic, way less interested in economic growth than say the Bill Clinton era one was.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting.

But I think we need kind of a tech live player to organize, let's call it the tech left, even though calling it the left almost implies that it's progressive. Let's call them, let's organize the tech liberals to pursue This agenda and just actually deliver on these goods, because I think if they delivered on these goods in California, look, the rest of the country would want to be California. The Democratic Party has a state where they have free rein; they should use it. They should make it the most desirable place in the U.S., and I guarantee you other politicians will then run on, hey, our state should be just like California. Currently, they're running on. Our state will never be like California. Thank goodness.

Yeah.

The—

if you had to guess what the candidate looks like in 2028 on the, on the left, or the archetype of the candidate, what would that guess be?

Okay. I think AOC with kids is actually an extremely—

really?

Yes. Extremely potent political candidate. Here's a vision of the future. I'm just telling you, you know, Erik, what I think could work.

You're the messenger.

Yeah, yeah, don't shoot the messenger. So AOC has like one or two beautiful children. She shows up in happy photo ops. She says how after, you know, the Trump election, she really listened to all those podcasts people recommended. And you should realize that the establishment was out of touch. And you know that Americans, like, you know, Hispanic Americans and white Americans and, and everyone Right? What we, what we really need, what we really, really need is to have an America where, you know, families can be prosperous again. Working class families can be prosperous.

Okay.

And then that rhetoric, I think it can just literally do her entire agenda. You could just do, you know, the Green New Deal or whatever after, and no one would stop you. It would be, I think people very fundamentally respond to the optics. And I think. AOC in the public's perception is almost a single woman, but if the AOC in the public's perception is a married mom, then I think she's conservative enough to win.

Okay.

I think the first woman who's going to be president in the United States will be a conservative, socially, like, like personally conservative woman. She'll like seem like a family woman. She'll have to push a little bit. So I'm not a stay-at-home mom. But I am a mom. I'm a family woman. My family is the most important thing to me, and I'm here to protect your family. I'm not your HR lady. I'm a concerned mom.

Why do you think that would have more appeal than like a Josh Shapiro or something like, or more, you know, centrist?

Well, I think AOC is the most charismatic Democrat, and the second most charismatic Democrat is Gavin Newsom, who's a shark. But then you kind of have to run a, a dark Brandon-style campaign. You have to run a Like, like dark Newsom. It's like sort of like, oh, you know, their guy is crazy, but our guy is, our guy is sharper. Our guy can beat him in debate and he's going to protect, he's going to protect the excellent people doing good work by being absolutely ruthless. And look at him, he's so competent. And again, the optics are just, you know, say what you will, but the photo op of Gavin Newsom's family with the dog is just like. Beautiful, right? The the the the core thing here is that I think Americans want to feel a personal connection with their like head of state, and I think that's very normal in all of human history. People have wanted to feel a personal connection with their head of state. I think it makes us feel safe. I think on a subconscious level. All humans are really terrified of government.

Yeah.

And, you know, if the king or the czar or the pharaoh is the father of the nation, well, then I don't need to be that scared. This is my dad, right? He's going to protect me on a subconscious level. And, you know, the reason, you know, I, I don't know, Erik, like in terms of pure charisma, who, not who you agree or who you like, but in terms of pure charisma of the current field of democratic Party politicians, elected officials. Is there anyone who's in the same category as, let's say, AOC? And then maybe Gavin is more like a slick politician. It's not quite charisma, but it's so practiced and so done perfectly. He feels like, you know, a high— like, if we ask ChatGPT, generate a California Democratic Party president, like, what did they look like? I think they would just— it would probably generate something close to Gavin Newsom. Like, like optically, he just looks that way.

Yeah. I don't know if it's, could there be a Trump of the left? Like, could Mark Cuban or some, someone like that come out of nowhere and, you know, build a, build an audience? I mean, maybe because the Republicans aren't.

Well, I think they would have to be, have a social media following.

Yeah, of course.

Right. And that's why, again, sorry, I hate to bring it back to AOC, but AOC does do the social media game super well. I think behind Donald Trump. Second most skilled person at social media.

Yeah. Cuban's not bad, but she, he's no, he's no AOC.

Exactly. But, but maybe he'll get better, right? Like people can get skills. And, and I do think like, for example, there's this whole generation of, if I have to predict where the next generation of Democratic Party politicians will come, I think it's after the baby boomers all depart. I think that you will see a sudden upswing in Millennial social media personalities running for office. I think we might yet come to see the influencer era of congressmen. So, but I expect that's more like 10 years out because the gerontocracy in both, both houses is just very severe. It's still getting slightly older every year, but that can only go on for so long. Like the current incumbents will just, you know, Nature will take its toll.

Yeah, maybe as a last question, do you think blue cities will now be more empowered to sort of be a bit more conservative or a bit more hardlining now that we shifted a little bit?

I think so. I think some mayors will take the opportunity to end up running their cities in a very different way.

Yeah, that makes sense. Is there anything yet covered in this conversation or Maybe as, uh, any last points?

I think that we have seen populism emerge as a phenomenon in the last decade because traditional media has been bypassed. In fact, this was a phenomenon of the internet. It will continue to be transformed by the internet. So minor changes in what happens to TikTok, what happens to X.com, what happens to Facebook and Instagram. What happens to YouTube moderation policies. These will have a disproportionate effect on the success of the populist strategy. The populist strategy is essentially gather a lot of attention first, public attention first, public support second, convert that into offices and positions of power. This is what allows party outsiders across the Western world to enter into politics. It's the same in Italy, Britain, Poland, the United States, and so on. And populism is a strategy in this sense, in this narrowly defined sense, where we're not talking, we're not saying this is small government or this is socialism, because each of those, depending on how you frame them, both of them actually have a lot of popular appeal. Like if you look at general opinion polls, you can like slightly rephrase How you are in favor of this or that policy, and it swings 60% vote, 60% of the population either way. So what I think we're going to see in the Western world is this question of, can we survive live players entering into politics and being in constant friction with the administrative state? Is this the new balance of power? Where it's productive and where these states actually become better and more agile? Or is this a transition period between one form of administrative state to another? And left or right, eventually people will have to embrace, let's call it the EU approach of just censoring the internet until the populists go away and let the insiders run their things the way they have run them. To be clear, I don't think that would work super well. But I'm not convinced the constant bumping and friction between, we can almost call it a deep state if we want to, let's call it a deep state and populist upstarts empowered by social media. I don't think this works very well. So I think we're struggling to find a model of digital democracy that actually works. And perhaps digital democracy procedure software in the minarchist version. Maybe it can replace the administrative state, but then you need a deeper vision of reform. You need a new political economy. You cannot just be using the will of the people as this constant mobilized check on the administrative state, because when the people aren't paying attention, the administrative state just does what it does. And they're by default sort of your enemies. So we need to find a new political harmony.

Yeah.

That's a fascinating note to, to end on. Sam Altman, this has been a great discussion as always. Until next time.

Till next time.

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