This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 22 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by one of my favorite writers. Hamilton Nolan was at Gawker for a long time. He now does a Substack called How Things Work, where he writes about politics and labor and just a wide variety of political issues. So Hamilton, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Hamilton Nolan: Thanks for having me, man.
Bacon: So I want to start by—I love this shirt, by the way, so I want to start out by shouting out this very nice shirt. I appreciate it.
Nolan: Thank you.
Bacon: But we’ll go from there. I want to talk about first what’s in the news right now, which is this wealth tax in California. You wrote a piece on October 7 about the war against accumulated capital. And so I want to read one sentence from that and discuss from there. “There is no more significant ballot measure than this in the United States.”
So talk about why you think—we’re talking about this proposal to have a one-time 5 percent tax on the income of billionaires in California, that’s been aggressively, intensely opposed, unsurprisingly, by all the billionaires there, but also, sadly, Gavin Newsom and some of the Democratic politicians there. So talk about why this wealth tax is so important.
Nolan: It’s extremely important, I think, for Americans to understand that the greatest threat to our democracy today is these huge pools of accumulated capital in private hands. We hear people like Bernie Sanders talk about the oligarchy, and we hear that on the left, but it is vital, I think, for people to understand that breaking up these enormous fortunes is critical to us maintaining a democratic government in this country.
It is fundamentally incompatible with a democratic government to have one guy with a trillion dollars. And the level of wealth inequality, in particular in America, has gotten so far out of hand that it threatens our ability to have a democracy. As flawed as our democracy is, these two things are not compatible.
Bacon: Break that down a little bit more. Michael Bloomberg’s had a lot of money for a long time. We’ve had Rockefellers and so on. Democracy means you can vote, you have elections, people who win get in power, people who lose get out of power. So how does having super wealthy people threaten democracy?
Nolan: I think a useful way to think about politics and its goals is as a balancing of power, right? Democracy is a method of spreading power throughout society. It’s a method of giving some measure of power to all citizens in a society. And I think we can stipulate the flaws in American democracy, but that is what democracy is going for, to spread the power.
And when you have these enormous accumulations of private capital in the hands of a very tiny minority of people—money is power, and it throws off the ability to balance power in society, is the short answer. And in America, our political system obviously is very susceptible to being influenced by money. It’s very susceptible to having political power bought, not quite directly, but almost directly.
And so when money buys influence, and you have these obscene, enormous, nation-level fortunes in private hands, it just at a certain point crowds out the ability of everybody else to influence politics in a way that you have any kind of balance of power.
There are always inequalities, and this is nothing new, but at some point the inequalities of capital get so large that all the rest of the people added up cannot counterbalance the influence of the billionaires. And that is what we are really facing now, and it’s important, I think, that we internalize that we are there. We are knocking on the door of this situation. And so breaking up those fortunes is a critical public value that we all need to think about.
Bacon: Just a note here. Elon Musk is, I think, estimated to spend $336 million in this cycle, which is probably more money than everyone in Kentucky, where I live, has donated. Maybe we have a billionaire or two here, but that’s probably more money than everyone in our state has donated, is my guess, to the campaign.
OK, so in California, what you’re seeing is Gavin Newsom and some people who listen to this show might support—there are some mainstream Democratic politicians whom I probably agree with on 90 percent of the issues, who are saying, “We can’t do this wealth tax. Not because I disagree, Hamilton, that the wealthy have too much power, but if we had a wealth tax in California, the wealthy would just move to Texas or to Nashville, or wherever, or to Kentucky for that matter, and we would just lose our tax base in California because they would go.” How do you respond to that?
Nolan: A couple things. The mobility of capital is a real thing, and any state level wealth tax is going to face the issue that rich people can move. But by the same token, any city level tax faces that, any state level tax faces that, any nation level tax faces the issue that billionaires can fly off to New Zealand. So this is on one level an argument against doing anything, right? And so we can say, yes, it’s real, and internalize it.
When you look at the billionaire tax in California specifically, it was crafted to overcome this. It was crafted as a one-time tax. In other words, it’s not an annual tax, it’s a one-time tax on billionaires who were residents of California at the beginning of this year.
So in other words, if they move this year, it’s too late. It’s going to be the residency of who was there already, so it’s already locked in. It’s a one-time levy designed to overcome the Medicaid cuts from the Trump tax bill. So it’s very targeted. It’s one time, and it’s already locked in for the residency requirements. So they crafted it in that way specifically to avoid the ability of billionaires to flee the state.
Bacon: Do you think Newsom and politicians like that are sincerely opposing that, or do you think they might have other motives?
Nolan: It goes to show why it’s so hard to do this, right? Because if you’re Gavin Newsom, or any of his political peers really, your incentive is not to break up accumulated fortunes. Your incentive is to get elected in the next election, right? And the most direct path to doing that for Gavin Newsom, or for any of his peers, is to get money from those people. It is in their interest to cater to those donors and not to upset them too much.
So when Gavin Newsom says, Oh, I’m opposed to a state level tax, but we should have a national wealth tax, I have a fucking bridge to sell you, man. Do you believe that Gavin Newsom is going to get elected president and then proceed to pass a national wealth tax? He’s not. He is demonstrating his bona fides right now.
But to be fair to these craven politicians, many of whom are scumbags, this is a structural problem. Because of the effect of money in politics, it is hard for any politician to undercut themself and take themself out of those very powerful donors by supporting those wealth taxes.
Bacon: You had in your piece, some labor unions in California are opposing this too. That’s more striking. Is that the same thing, though? Even labor unions, they’re part of the structure too? How do you see their opposition?
Nolan: I think in California it’s a little bit different of an issue. Much of the labor movement in California is supporting it, so we should say that upfront. It was sponsored by SEIU healthcare, a big SEIU local, and much of the California labor movement is supporting it. But there are some outliers, like the California Teachers Association and the Building Trades.
I think in the case of the Building Trades, they’re probably opposed to it because they’re scared that they’re going to lose jobs ultimately. If billionaires flee the state, there’s going to be less—they are buying the business side argument against this.
And I think in the case of the teachers, some of the controversy in California was that this tax is earmarked mostly for healthcare. And some of the other special interests in the state are like, “What about us? What about education? What about that?”
The sponsors of the bill say, “Look, it’s designed to head off Medicaid cuts specifically. It’s designed to prevent the collapse of healthcare in California specifically as a result of this bill.” And so I think the teachers are being extremely shortsighted, I think, and anyone who would oppose this bill on that basis I think is very shortsighted. Saying, “What about us? What about us?” There are bigger issues at play here, right? And I think it’s disappointing for any union not to back this.
Bacon: I saw Derek Thompson once at The Atlantic, the journalist—I think his point was that if you tax income and capital gains more, that can hit the wealth of the wealthy, and also wealth taxes, the Supreme Court might strike it down, so why bother? So talk about those arguments.
Nolan: If you understand what a crisis this level of inequality is for society, and you understand how pressing it is for us to do something about it, it’s, let’s do something. And of course we should, yes, we should raise capital gains tax, and we should raise income tax. But the underlying problem we have is wealth inequality, not income inequality. Wealth inequality. And we need to do something now.
This is a crisis today. It is a crisis today that Elon Musk has a trillion dollars and can spend $400 million on the midterms, and that’s not even a lot for him. He hasn’t even started, and nor have his peers even started to spend what they can spend on politics.
And so when you understand how critical it is to do something, and you see this effort in California that is very well-developed, that is well-funded, that has gone to all of this enormous effort to get itself on the ballot, to overcome hundreds of millions of dollars of opposition spending already by billionaires, it’s like, let’s pitch in where—in the most helpful place right now.
All of these people, to me, are making basically the same argument as Gavin Newsom, which is, “I can think of a more perfect way to do this.” But they’re not going to do it. Is Derek Thompson going to be out there with a clipboard at fucking ShopRite in California getting signatures? He’s not. This work has been done. Tons of work has been done on this. Let’s support it, and if it’s not perfect, it can serve as a springboard for a national wealth tax.
Bacon: That’s well said. I’m going to go to—you wrote a piece on September 7. The title is “Capital is Organizing the World to Its Advantage and Everything Else is a Sideshow.” And I want to follow up to say, I think a lot of people think about politics as maybe MAGA versus woke, to be very reductive, or Republican versus Democrat, or even authoritarian and far right versus democratic, small D.
And those are distinctions that I think are important. But a lot of your work, you center that the fight we need to focus on is capital versus labor, or capital versus everything else. Why is that the central fight in politics in your view?
Nolan: What’s happening in America today is capitalism, fundamentally, right? It’s not Trumpism, it’s not even fascism, I think. It’s capitalism proceeding as capitalism is in the nature of capitalism to proceed.
So the great fortunes that are being made—one quality of having a lot of money is that your job becomes defending your fortune. So if you think about these mega billionaires, people who have hundreds of billions of dollars, they enter into this political realm that is different from you and me putting money in our 401(k). Their job is to protect their fortune. And organizing the government and the laws of the country is just another business decision for them.
And as I said, because our system is so susceptible to the power of money, those people over time become the most powerful political forces in the country, and they will organize the entire government and the entire regulatory structure of our country in their favor.
And that goes for individuals, but I guess more so it goes for corporations, which are essentially robots that do this thing. They’re robots to make profits, and organizing the government in their favor is just another part of the algorithm.
And so really, we should recognize that this is the natural path of things if we do not directly block this from happening. Increasing accumulation of corporate power, increasing control of government by billionaires and corporations, that is the natural path of capitalism. And our failure to regulate business, to put adequate power in the hands of labor and workers, which is the counterbalance to that, is naturally going to cause this to happen. And so the things that are happening around us are this natural consequence.
And Trump is a fantastic example of what happens, because Trump is not ideological. Trump is a strong man, and he says, “You flatter me, and then you can do whatever you want.” And that’s exactly what we’re seeing, right? When you see the CEOs of all the tech companies sitting behind Trump at the inauguration and paying to fund his ballroom and all that stuff—that’s not because they’re Republicans. That’s because they’re businessmen, and they do that so that they can operate in the way that they want to. And that’s how you get fascism. Fascism is an outgrowth of this, and that’s what we’re all living through right now.
Bacon: Let me follow up to ask—so in some ways you would concede that some people in the Republican Party are very strongly opposed to abortion or transgender rights. There’s probably some sincere views there, right?
What you’re saying, though, is what’s driving the party’s decisions and what’s driving politics is not—our American politics is not really organized around transgender rights, even if that’s on commercials. It’s organized around this capital fight. That’s what you’re saying. You’re not denying that there are fights over things, but you’re saying what’s driving politics is this capital fight.
Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the history of the Republican Party, right? Is a party to serve the interests of the rich that reaches out to racists and religious people in order to get their electoral majority. That’s a short description of the Republican Party’s entire history, I think.
And that has always been the coalition of the right, because obviously billionaires are not a voting majority. So if you’re a party to serve the interests of capital, you have to still somehow cobble together this majority to win elections.
And so what’s the majority? The majority is religion and racism, fundamentally, and other forms of bigotry, many of them rooted in religion, and social conservatism. So that’s been, with ups and downs, the history of the Republican Party.
I think Trump sort of upset the coalition a bit, in the sense that the money people in the Republican Party have always assumed that they had the ultimate control of the party, and Trump came along—and not that Trump’s not a money person, but he’s not the genteel classic Republican—and he beat all those people. So that was a bit of a revolution of thinking, I think, of traditional Republicans. But that doesn’t fundamentally change the policy underpinnings of the Republican Party. They’re not that different.
Bacon: So one thing I like about your work is, you gave a sort of a discourse about capital and so on, the way a lot of people on the left who might write for Jacobin or whatever would say. I think that’s pretty Bernie Sanders, et cetera.
But one thing we’ve seen is this move in the Democratic Party, which is to say basically politics is about the wealthy using these quote-unquote cultural issues to win power, so therefore we need to ignore or minimize or even at times embrace Republican positions on other issues like transgender rights. We need to say, “Actually, they’re right on transgender rights. We should ban trans kids from sports. We should not defend them, because that helps the right win if we talk about those issues at all.”
You’ve been very much on the end of being like, “Yes, the fight in America is about capital. At the same time, no, we should not embrace or ignore what the right is doing to hurt trans kids or women who want abortions or Black people.” So talk about why you think it’s useful still to stand up for those marginalized groups, even if that maybe helps play into the Republican culture war on some level.
Nolan: Yeah. I think that the bargain that the Republican Party strikes, that we just talked about, is, capital says we want our interests and we’re willing to throw some people under the bus to get it. That’s fine. We’ll throw whoever you want under the bus, just give us what we want.
The opposite of that is belief in human rights, right? And so you can’t triangulate your way out of that and say, “We’ll also throw some people under the bus if you vote Democrat. We’ll give you the, we all hate trans people.” That’s not what the opposite of that is. That is not the contrast that you want to make. The contrast is human rights. Human rights above capital. Humanity is more important than capital. Capital serves humanity and not vice versa.
And if you start from a place, I think, of human rights and belief in human rights, your politics will proceed in a healthy direction. And you should never triangulate your way out of human rights, because that is the path to all atrocities in history. All of history’s atrocities proceed from saying, “Let’s bargain away somebody else’s human rights.”
And so I think even electorally speaking, you have to offer voters an actual alternative, and not a weak version of the other side. And that is something the Democratic Party’s been banging its head on for decades and decades unsuccessfully. I grew up in Florida, the state where they keep running former Republicans for governor. Not only is it inhumane, but it doesn’t work, because you’re not offering voters an actual alternative.
Bacon: Union density is the cause of and the solution to our problem. You write about labor more than most people who write about politics. It’s a big focus of yours. You wrote a book about the importance of unions and having a stronger labor movement. So talk about why union density is the cause and solution, because I think labor is underpowered in Democratic circles and Democratic Party discussions right now.
Nolan: Yes, thank you. I love to talk about union density. I want all pundits to talk more about union density.
Union density just means the percentage of the workforce that are union members in our country. In the mid-1950s, one in three workers in America was a union member. Today, it’s one in 10. And that’s the scale of decline of organized labor power since the middle of the twentieth century.
And along with that has come the inequality crisis that we talk about. Along with that has come the imbalance of power that we talk about, because all of the power that is being sucked away from the working class in the form of fewer unions doesn’t disappear. It goes to somebody else. And who’s it go to? It goes to the investor class, and it goes ultimately to billionaires and to corporations.
And I like to center unions in the discussion of the way that American politics has gotten out of whack. Because when unions were ubiquitous and powerful in society and in our politics, we had a very different political landscape. We had a very different economic landscape. We had much more shared prosperity in this country, and we didn’t have the kind of oligarchy that we have right now.
And the two things are directly related, again, because we’re talking about balances of power. Power goes from one side to the other, and on one side is the working class, and on the other side is the people who have power today.
And so I just think that is so important, if you’re going to think about these issues in a political context, to understand that this imbalance of power is rooted in a loss of power for the working class, and that was caused by the decimation of labor power in this country. And then to think about how do we get that back, which is a separate discussion.
Bacon: I’m going to leave this conversation with this idea you’ve mentioned. When I’ve brought up democracy, you’ve brought up not elections or the way we talked about it, but this idea of the balance of power. I think that’s an important distinction. Part of what happens in democracy is you have a bunch of different interests that are balanced, as opposed to a few that are dominating.
You said one third of Americans versus one tenth of Americans in unions. That is not because Americans en masse are saying, “No, I do not want to be in a union.” That’s not what’s happening, right? That might be happening to some extent. Explain why that number has declined so much.
Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. Public opinion polls show, in fact, that unions today are more popular than they’ve been in 60 years. So not since the 1960s have more people approved of unions. And people want to be in unions. We know that statistically. People like unions and celebrate unions and wish that they had a union, but they don’t.
And why don’t they? That’s a book in itself, but the short answer is, it was a reaction of capital against that level of labor power, right? So after World War II, when you had very strong labor power, partly as a result of the industrialization and deals that organized labor struck with the government to unionize the industrial power coming out of World War II—capital doesn’t like that. The business world does not like labor having that much power.
And so there was a decades-long procession of, first of all, anti-union laws. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, the end of World War II, that undercut a lot of the methods that unions used to strike and organize and accumulate power. We’re still suffering from that today, have not been able to overturn that in almost 80 years now.
And also the professionalization of the union busting industry, and just a procession decade by decade, a concerted and very well-organized effort by business to undercut the ability of unions to organize and to maintain power.
And I also place some blame on the shoulders of the labor movement for a failure to counteract that. And that, again, is a separate discussion, but we should have done a better job fighting that. We didn’t. There were unions that got lazy in their position and allowed that slow decline of power to happen. That, by the way, is still happening today.
And so it is possible to turn that around. It is possible to have a resurgence in labor power. The conditions are there. People want it. It’s going to take some legal reform. It’s going to take some spending by unions. It’s going to take some radicalization by people within the labor movement. But it can absolutely happen. And I tell everyone, if you’re frustrated with politics, unionize your workplace, because that will ultimately have more effect on this class war that we’re in than elections.
Bacon: September 28, “The Free and Unfree Press: Journalism and Its Adversaries.” You write a lot about the media, and it’s an important subject obviously for us personally, but I think you make an argument it’s an important subject for the country. And you were writing about Bari Weiss and CBS. But the point you made here:
“Something that many people who work in the press do not like to acknowledge is that the press is a participant in a fight, an ideological, political power struggle against entrenched power itself. Powerful people and institutions, as a rule, do not like journalism, because journalism properly done makes it harder for powerful people to carry out their will with no public oversight or pushback. Some in the media find it uncomfortable to state these things plainly because they are wedded to the idea of objectivity, and they mistakenly believe that political conflict is a sign of political bias. It is not.”
But this idea that entrenched power and the press are perpetually in conflict, so the press, if it’s doing well—Elon Musk should hate the press, right? Or, the press is doing its job well, basically, right?
Nolan: Yeah. And rest in peace to The Washington Post, Perry.
Bacon: Yes.
Nolan: Look, one of the good side effects of being unemployable in the respectable part of the media is we can just say these things which are true in a straightforward way. And “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” is the old slogan about the role of the press.
It’s an illusion, in other words, that the press is this objective thing that sits above society and politics and the economy and passes judgment with no bias and so forth. Everybody really knows that’s not the case. There’s a lot of not only built-in sort of Overton window baked into the coverage that goes into The New York Times, The Washington Post, and things like that.
But there was a whole economic arrangement that supported journalism for 100-plus years that’s been destroyed, right? Ad-supported journalism that put a local newspaper in every community, that has been blown up by Big Tech. And Big Tech has taken all the money that used to go into those local papers, and now all the Google guys have it. And that is a basic example of political economy coming for the structure of the press.
And what do reporters do? Reporters shed sunlight on power. Reporters tell the public what powerful people and institutions are doing, and they do that in order to keep those powerful people and institutions honest, right?
The basic theory is, the government shouldn’t operate in secret. The most powerful business in your town shouldn’t operate in secret. The richest people in your town shouldn’t pull all the strings without people knowing what they’re doing.
Bacon: And these are beliefs. They’re not ideological beliefs necessarily, but they’re beliefs. The powerful should be accountable to someone is a belief that journalists as an institution, as a group, have generally. And that is not a neutral—
Nolan: No, it is implicit in journalism existing, that you should know what these people are doing. Otherwise, why do we write all this stuff?
Bacon: Exactly.
Nolan: And that again is a balance of power argument. It’s that these people, if they operate in secret, it is impossible for the public to judge and to knowledgeably exercise its power in society.
And so the function of good journalism has always been to keep the power of the powerful in check. And the powerful have always not only despised journalism, but bought journalism for themself, right? Hearst bought journalism because he wanted to control that conversation.
And same as Rupert Murdoch, and same today as the Ellisons buying journalism, and Bezos at The Washington Post, buying journalism because they do not want that conversation happening out of their control. And so journalism has to continually reinvent itself in places outside of the control of the rich and powerful in order to stay honest. And we’re obviously going through that process today still.
Bacon: The Substack model is precarious because it relies on a lot of dispersed people giving you $10 a month, or I don’t know how much you’re charging. Subscribe to Hamilton’s Substack. I do think it’s excellent. But that model is challenging in that it requires lots of individuals. The good thing, as you hinted at, is that you are free from the ultra rich coming down on you, right?
Nolan: Yeah, the model that we’re under, where we all kind of beg for money from subscribers, is great if you can make it. But that model in the big picture is going to produce a much smaller number of journalists than the model we had before, which was ad supported and could put a local newspaper in every—Topeka, Kansas probably had 50 reporters in it, right? And today there’s probably not 50 reporters in the state of Kansas.
And that’s a result of all that advertising money being totally sucked out of our industry. And so yeah, independent journalism’s great, and everybody please pay for whatever you like to read or consume. That’s the way it will exist. But also, we need to think about public funding of journalism as a social good, and hope that—
Bacon: I’m glad you brought that up, because right now with this government, it is worth asking. I generally think public funding journalism can be a positive thing. Right now with this government, if they were funding journalism, wouldn’t they demand that it be, Trump good, actually, Trump is winning the election, Ilhan Omar’s parents are terrorists? What would it look like right now?
Nolan: Yeah. You could argue that Trump is already doing that by other means, by approving the Paramount merger. That is an in-kind donation to state media. But yes, I hear what you’re saying. The good news is you can do this on the state level too, right?
California just passed a public funding bill for journalism, signed by Newsom, which is great, funding local journalism in California. Every state can do that. New York has a version of that which we’re going to try to help renew.
And you can do it on the state level and hopefully not be quite so polluted ideologically as it might be on a federal level. But ultimately, I think it needs to be more of a PBS sort of vision, where you’re like, “We’re funding local journalism as a social good.”
Bacon: August 30, “You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits.” And you wrote about some of the people I think write punditry. You mentioned James Carville, you mentioned Matt Yglesias, people who I regularly mock—or disagree with, I should say, and occasionally mock when I think they’re being disingenuous.
But I wrote this—I put this on Bluesky, and immediately people were like, “How is he saying we can ignore these pundits?” You went through the David Brookses and so on, and you said there’s no reason these people need to be followed or their arguments analyzed, because they don’t have any special insight. Getting a job at The New York Times is not a sign of great intelligence, as you argued, and I worked at The Washington Post, so I think I can speak to that being true.
But the question is, the responses I got when I posted that were along the lines of, “These people set the discourse, so we need to debate them because they are setting the discourse.” And I think you mentioned Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat. I do think there might be a point where they do set the discourse. So can we really ignore the bad pundits?
Nolan: And shout out to you for being not a bad pundit at The Washington Post, a rare thing.
I think this has been a revelation for me personally, because I’m speaking as somebody who worked at Gawker. I spent years of my life—a stupid part of my brain is taken up with mocking Tom Friedman.
I’ve wasted hundreds of hours of my life writing jokes about every bad pundit in America. So I have had a revelation, which is that the power of any pundit comes from our attention. We give these people power. We, as readers, as news consumers, as citizens, we give writers and so forth power by reading them and talking about them. That is what gives people influence, and we have control over that.
And as somebody who is immersed in the independent media, and who knows how many smart writers there are out there with smaller platforms—and I would argue that the smartest writers that I could think of in America almost all have smaller platforms than any of those people that we just touched on. I had a revelation, that’s, “Let me pay attention to the people who are actually smart, and not waste my brain on the people who—”
How many things do we read just to hate read? Every time you see a Bret Stephens headline, you mentally are like, “I hate this, and this is going to be horrible.” And we can ignore it, and we can lift up those who are actually smart. And by doing so, I think that we will all kind of contribute to a healthier and smarter discourse.
Bacon: Let me follow up to say, I think what people are saying, and maybe they’re not saying it well, is these arguments are out there, and they need to rebut them because these are the arguments that are going through.
So David Brooks’ column has power, not just because we’re reading it, but because it’s in the thing we’re all reading, so I need to rebut that. And I agree with you that rebutting it reinforces its importance. But maybe we’re talking about, why are you not going to be able to rebut Bret Stephens’ arguments in a way that really stops them from coming up?
Nolan: You’ll never rebut Bret Stephens’ arguments, because Bret Stephens’ function in the world is to be the guy who makes bad arguments. It’s like wanting to get rid of every cockroach in the world. You’re not going to do it, man. It exists.
Bacon: If Bret Stephens died, God forbid, they would hire some new scrolly right-wing person to do something similar, right?
Nolan: There are slots at The New York Times for each ideological slot, and they’re just going to put a new Bret Stephens in place. And when you understand that—again, we’re in an attention economy. You can spend your attention on good things, and by doing so, you make those things more powerful too.
Bacon: And I’ll finish by—I think this might be the one subject we might mildly disagree about, so I wanted to probe it a little bit. “AOC must run for president,” Hamilton wrote on July 30. “History is calling. Sorry.”
OK. So I like AOC, so let’s lead with that. My concern is that there’s a strong movement on the progressive left, and if it becomes centered in one candidate, then I worry it becomes like a personality thing about her.
I think you’re seeing that in New York a little bit, where, are we reforming police? Are all of our needs and wants captured in one person? I feel like there’s a strong movement, and maybe I’d like to see 10 candidates pursue the movement, as opposed to one person represent the movement and all its interests.
Particularly, I would argue, this one person—I like a lot of what AOC does, but I perceive her, and I thought the Woke 1.0 comment was pretty reflective of my concern, which is that it seems to me that her approach is, “I’m the person from the left, and I represent the left, but my job as a candidate is to move to the right, to appease the sort of moderate Midwestern person, to appease the Matty Yglesias Democrat who has to be convinced that I’m electable.”
So in 2027 I’m wondering if I would prefer Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker, and a few other people maybe pursuing, seeing, “Oh, there’s a big base of progressives. Let me pursue those people a little bit,” as opposed to one person who I have to watch move to the right for an entire year. That’s not going to be fun, and I’m not sure how productive that’s going to be. So tell me why I’m wrong.
Nolan: I hear your concerns. My thinking is this. We’re in a serious situation for all the reasons that we just talked about. We need some radical changes policy-wise. So we need a truly left candidate. We need somebody who is effectively a successor to Bernie to run in the primary. It’s not going to be Bernie. So who is it? Who are the options?
Bacon: Let me probe the question. You’re saying there has to be somebody, but there’s a big movement out there. So let’s say there’s 20 people. Let’s say AOC’s not running, even Ro Khanna’s not running. There’s 20 people running. They can’t all say Israel has a right to defend itself, wealth taxes are too complicated.
If only because there’s an economy of voters to the left of them, somebody will be like, “Oh, maybe I should say something. There’s 30 percent over here. I can’t win the oligarchy-friendly Democratic vote, so I need to win something else,” right?
Nolan: For my whole lifetime, the role of the left has been to try to pull the Democratic candidate in their direction. And what I’m arguing for is that maybe we’re in a position of power where we can be the candidate.
And there is a huge policy difference, and difference in impact on the world for people’s lives, between having an actual left president and the left being like, “We’re trying to pull Joe Biden. We’re trying to pull Obama.” And also, that’s what primaries are for, right? Primaries are to contest that within the party. And so we absolutely need a truly left candidate.
None of them—Beshear and Pritzker and Ossoff, none of them are left candidates. They’re all center left people who maybe can be pulled. So who is the left candidate? We must have a left candidate.
And if Ro Khanna is the left candidate—I think Ro Khanna has good politics, more or less, but I don’t see Ro Khanna winning. And that’s a subjective judgment on my part.
Bacon: Winning the primary is what you’re talking about right now.
Nolan: Where charisma is extremely important, yeah. And star power is important, and AOC has that. And I guess my question to everybody who disagrees with me is, who is it then? Who’s the name?
Bacon: I had not heard your full analysis. What I was coming into this with was, do we need a left candidate? That was the question I was trying to probe with you.
And I think the Bernie example is good, in that Bernie did more while losing for progressive left-wing politics than—I covered the 2004 primary. Howard Dean did what I’m saying. He saw the left opening. He said some stuff, but if he had been president, I think he would’ve governed like an Obama or a Bill Clinton. I think you’re right about that.
And so Senator Warren also—I’m not sure if she’s purely the most left, but she actually believed in things in a way that I think, as you say, Beshear, Pritzker, Ossoff. Because I think the Ossoff buzz is built around, we can pull him left and he will code as electable. I think that’s the whole thing there.
Nolan: Yeah. The left does not need to settle for doing that in 2028. We’re powerful enough right now that, at the minimum, running a candidate is the minimum. The worst that can happen is you lose. Bernie lost, but he accomplished a lot, as you said, and also he didn’t lose by that much. He was a very real political player.
And maybe the pendulum has swung enough for us to win, but the only way to find out is to run a candidate. So if it’s not AOC, I just have a hard time knowing who it is. And if somebody can tell me, great. Who is it?
Bacon: Let’s say AOC runs. If she does a Woke 1.0 thing, I found that irritating. And I worry I’m going to spend a whole year, yes, AOC should win, but it would be nice if she didn’t throw us under the bus every third day. Is that a realistic concern? How are you going to handle it if that’s what she’s doing? Because I think that’s a realistic concern.
Nolan: That’s the nature of politics, maybe. You either are going to elect an establishment Democrat and be pissed at them for not moving left, or you’re going to elect a leftist and be pissed at them for trying to move to the middle a little bit. And that, by the way, is what’s happening with Zohran in New York right now. People are mad at him about the police and stuff.
But that’s the nature of politics, and also speaks to why you shouldn’t make heroes out of politicians. It’s not about who the politician is, right? It’s about the policy. And my subjective judgment is that overall, if you put a leftist in and get annoyed by them throwing bones to the center, you still are substantively getting more policy-wise, and you’re going to have a better world than you would having a centrist and trying to pull them left.
Bacon: Your point is, you live in New York, you’d rather have Zohran than—what was the guy who’s running for Congress now? I’ve forgotten. Brad Lander. You’d rather have Zohran than Brad Lander, and definitely you’d rather have Zohran than Andrew Cuomo. That’s your point.
Nolan: Absolutely. And also I think that it’s not that Zohran is perfect, or that you have to make a hero out of him, but overall he starts closer to you, his beliefs are closer to you, his platform is closer to you. And there’s also, I think, a value in—one of the values of Zohran getting elected is it shows what’s possible.
A Democratic socialist is the mayor of America’s biggest city. That moves the Overton window. That expands people’s belief in what is possible and what’s realistic in politics. And I think going into 2028, it opens up people’s vision of what can happen within the Democratic Party, and somebody like AOC could in fact be the nominee.
Bacon: Yeah. Hamilton, we’ll end there. You mentioned in the middle of the conversation that some of the best people you read are writing in the independent space. Do you mind naming those people? I think people should read you. Do you have any recommendations of people they should read?
Nolan: You’re putting me on the spot. Oh my God. I would just shout out a couple of media co-ops, like Defector. I think Defector is a great worker-owned media publication, I encourage people to subscribe to. My favorite writer in America about Donald Trump is David Roth at Defector. If you’re not familiar with him, great dude to read. Hellgate is a great worker-owned publication here in New York City.
And there’s a ton, and I’m going to stop because I’m going to forget people, and then they’re going to be mad at me. But seek out independent media and read it. People will find that the quality in independent media is as high or higher than you’re going to get in more famous publications.
Bacon: Good. Hamilton, tell people where they can read your book and your Substack, and then we’ll close out.
Nolan: Yeah. I wrote a book called The Hammer. It’s about the labor movement, some of the things we talked about, why it declined, and how we can bring it back, and why that’s important. You can buy that wherever books are sold. And my publication’s called How Things Work. You can read at hamiltonnolan.com.
Bacon: Yeah. Hamilton, great to see you. Thanks for joining me.
Nolan: Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.
Bacon: OK. Bye-bye.
Nolan: Bye-bye.