Do voters want woke?

Canceling Thanksgiving and peak 2020 politics

0:00What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. I'm B.A. Parker.

0:11Aisa Parker. Yes? Would you personally cancel Thanksgiving? Wait, what? What do you mean personally? What do you mean? I mean, you know, there's a lot of arguments with canceling Thanksgiving, right? Like, turkey is trash, right? Like, you know what I mean? I mean, there's still stuff in and chitlins. There are other things that bring me joy at Thanksgiving besides that. Are you a chitlin person? I'm fuzzing this up right now. Yeah, I'm from the South. Leave me alone. But, I mean, I wouldn't say I would cancel. I mean, I know the racist, harmful origins of Thanksgiving, but I also like an excuse to see my cousins.

0:47That's true. Why are you asking me this? Well, OK. Canceling Thanksgiving was an idea floated in a tweet by Francesca Hong. So you may know her as the lefty politician who was running in the Democratic primary in the Wisconsin governor's race. So back in the heady days of 2020, right, she tweeted. I'm going to just read the tweet. OK. Quote, cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize, we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original super spreader event that killed indigenous folks and women.

1:25So be it. I mean, to be fair, that was the kind of sentiment we saw a lot of on social media back in 2020. It's very big 2020, peak 2020 in the age of right. Right. You know, back when people were out in the streets protesting and when we were all still locked down, people were activated. Yeah. A lot of that stuff on social media, like just a lot of, you know, very maximalist, let's say, sentiments. And that particular tweet resurfaced a lot this summer because our opponents were trying to dunk on her and show how out of touch and unelectable she was.

1:58Like, can you believe it? The woke left even hates Thanksgiving.

The weaponization of woke

2:02Oh, woke. I mean, look at how the word has been corrupted. I know. I know, Parker. OK. Woke, as we all know at this point, originated in black slang forever ago. But then it got picked up by grassroots organizers. But today it has been like completely commandeered by conservatives to mock progressive ideas. And the thing about woke is it's super nebulous, right? It's hard to define. Right. Like woke was all those black squares on Instagram in 2020.

2:35That was woke, right? Or people who were very showily buying books about race in America. You know what I mean? Like Nancy Pelosi kneeling in Kente Cloth. Oh, yeah, that was not great. That was, ooh, that was, no, that was performative. That was, I know we don't like that word performative, but when you want to, when you look up performative in the dictionary, it is Nancy Pelosi on one knee in the Kente Cloth.

2:57A forever meme. Oh, my God. But the things we're talking about, Parker, those are fundamentally different ideas, different priorities. Yeah. Then calls to shift local funding to schools or just other things in black neighborhoods besides the cops or calls for reparations for black people, even if they all got a lot of oxygen in 2020 and they were all pushed into this big basket that is now caricatured as, you know, utter woke nonsense. Nonsense. Out of woke nonsense. Painful. Right? Like, all of that brings us to the AOC of it all.

3:29So, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, if you don't know, is the congresswoman from New York, was doing an interview on ABC and she was asked about Francesca Hong's canceled Thanksgiving tweet. And AOC was like, hmm, maybe we was doing too much. I have a local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy.

3:52In that interview with ABC, AOC notably declined to throw her support behind Francesca Hong and Francesca Hong ended up barely losing her race, right? And the host pointed out that AOC also had not put her support behind any of the other lefty or progressive upstarts who were challenging incumbent Dems or establishment Dems across the country.

Jamel Bowie on AOC and voter identity

4:16Yeah. And so, listener, this is what we're getting into today because there are some extremely consequential midterms coming down the pike, as you know. And so, we're chopping it up with Jamel Bowie of The New York Times about AOC's pivot and whether the energy around Rachel Justice from 2020 has completely evaporated. And why he thinks we might want to pump the brakes on saying, woke one was crazy, was crazy, woke one was crazy, was crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, woke one was crazy.

4:46Jameel Bowie writes op-ed for The New York Times and he posts videos on social media about politics and history like all the time at a dizzying clip. So, I asked him what came to mind for him when he thought of the basket of political priorities and concerns that are kind of sneeringly referred to today as woke one. When I think of woke, I sort of think of the kind of dismissiveness, the dismissive label given to a bunch of things, many of which were quite serious and important, right?

5:21If we just focus on 2020, the protests that emerge out of the killing of George Floyd, which have their roots, right, in the previous half a decade of protests of Black Lives Matter, that's serious, right? Like, that's not silly. And so, part of my frustration with the conversation about woke one or woke this is, like, what does this even mean to people? Yeah, I mean, part of what seems to be happening is that there's a whole bunch of things that get, like, collapsed into this giant basket of things that we call woke.

5:54But I feel that AOC in particular has to navigate a bunch of stuff around her identity that actually is kind of an inversion of what maybe Kamala Harris had to do during her two presidential runs, right? Kamala Harris was a centrist who was trying to appeal to progressives and people on the left who were skeptical of her. AOC is a progressive who was kind of playing at being a centrist. Do you see this as a sort of distance from the performance of progressive politics? Or do you think there's something, there's more of a substantive distancing that she's doing here?

6:26I might dispute somewhat the idea that Harris was in her 2020 campaign running as a centrist. Like, I would describe Harris as a standard issue democratic liberal, which because there is, like, meaningful representation on the political left in the way that there wasn't 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I think that appears to be centrism. I say that because I think that for both Harris and AOC, the thing that they are trying to navigate is primarily rooted in identity.

7:03Voters have a really hard time actually judging ideology. This is, like, a very common thing. When you ask voters— Can you say more about that when you say— Sure. —have a hard time identifying ideology? Are you saying that their identities are doing the heavy lifting? Yeah, the identities are doing the heavy lifting. For the typical voter, when they're judging ideology, they're kind of going on a vibe. And a vibe is structured by so many things. It's structured by your affect, how you speak, how you present yourself. You can have a genuinely extremist agenda, but if you present as just, like, a normal guy, you're not loud, you're not hyperbolic or anything, people don't read you as such.

7:45They read you as, like, much more moderate than you might be. And this has a gender and racial component as well. So it's simply the fact that candidates of color are read as being much more liberal than they actually are. And women are read as being more liberal than they actually are. And so Harris, I would say in 2020, was, like, doing this interesting thing of both substantively, like, she's a standard-issue liberal, but then also leaning in her identity to make her seem much more liberal as well.

8:15To say that, like, I'm obviously a progressive like you guys because, implicitly, here's my identity. In 2024, it was very different. She's trying to persuade voters that, like, she's not that liberal. So it's sort of like, oh, yeah, I have a gun and I was a prosecutor and I went to lead the military, you know, that is an attempt to kind of make up for the fact that she's not coded as being in the center. AOC is in a similar position, right? Like, she both is substantively quite progressive, but then also is just, like, coded as such.

8:47And I think that she has to – she will have to navigate this. Like, how do you show voters that you aren't as extreme as your identity characteristics signal to people? Okay. So – but in the case of AOC, right, she is a woman. She grew up working class. She is a Latina, right? All those things will be coded to people as progressive. But she is also a – I won't again, I'll forget member of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists.

9:21Of the DSA. Literally belong to the DSA, yeah. Right, exactly, right. So it does, though, feel like – we're talking about identity doing all this work – that she is navigating a specific basket of things that is also bolstered by some real thing. It's not like – it's not just – it's not just vibes. It's actually, like, sort of her priorities have been very lefty, progressive priorities. But even – I mean, the interesting thing is that even some of the anti-vibes, too – I saw this really interesting anecdote about Mamdani, who is also a member of the DSA, is – South Asian, is Muslim.

9:53Which, you know, all those things together in kind of the – how voters understand these things, it's sort of like, yeah, that person's a communist. But I read this anecdote, and I'm sorry I cannot place where it was, but it was someone noting that two very conservative people who voted for Trump, they supported Mamdani in the mayoral election. And they did so because they read him as being more moderate. And why did they read him as being more moderate?

10:24Because he talked about affordability all the time. And there's this thing, you know, voters are strange.

10:33I think it's really tempting to want to think of voters as having, like, very coherent views and stable views. Voters are strange and don't make a ton of sense. Or rather, they make sense on the macro level, not necessarily when you go at the micro level. Voters – when you talk a lot about things related to identity, voters are like, oh, that's a liberal thing to talk about. Right. And, of course, you mean certain kinds of identity, right? Because, obviously, Republicans lean into being God-fearing, evangelicals, right?

11:04Like, those are all identity markers, too. Yeah, to be specific. You mean talking about being brown or cool, right? That's what you mean. If you belong to any kind of minority group and that's what's being talked about. Or if you don't and you talk about that stuff, that's like, that person's a liberal. If you talk a lot about, you know, lowering the price of groceries, even if your solution is we have to have state controls over food prices, right? Like, people are going to hear that as, oh, this is like a reasonable person, right?

11:36This is a person who cares about ordinary things. This is a broad – this is like I'm generalizing. Like, it's all – it's not – these are not hard and fast lines. But generally speaking, how you present yourself does shape how people perceive you, even if on a more kind of like objective level, the solutions you're putting forth make you more liberal or not so, right? Like, that's – that is one dynamic. I'll say one interesting wrinkle to this is that even if you talk a lot about cultural issues but you're taking a more conservative stance as a Democrat, because you're talking about cultural issues, people are like, oh, this person only cares about the cultural stuff.

12:21You see what I'm saying? It's sort of like it's – your emphasis matters a lot, even like less so than the substance of what you're saying, but your emphasis matters a lot. And so for someone like AOC, part of navigating this will be like deciding what her emphasis is going to be as a candidate.

Vibes versus substance in campaigns

12:39This is where her identity might actually be quite advantageous, right? Like, because she's associated with DSA, because she is a woman, because she is Latina, because she's associated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, she probably has a lot more leeway to just not emphasize cultural politics.

13:00That's interesting because, okay, let's say she does play down the cultural war stuff, right? Like, she's kind of held to a different standard than a standard-issued Democrat because of her lefty politics, right? And she's still going to need to find a way to get buy-in from the more progressive members of the Democratic Party and the left who might be skeptical of her pivot right now, especially if she runs in 2028, right? Will she, though?

13:30I mean, you tell me! This is a quite serious question because from the perspective of, like, winning elections, not from the perspective of assuaging concerns, but just sort of, like, getting votes, it'll be more important to her in terms of, like, energy spent to persuade more moderate-leaning stalwart Democrats in South Carolina, for example, that she isn't a wide-eyed radical. Then it will be to persuade lefties in, I don't know, the New York primary or lefties in the Illinois primary.

14:08Do you think that calculus has changed since 2020? We're in a world in which people are much more skeptical of, I think, sort of leaning into identity. Not that AOC is necessarily doing that, but do you think she might have a—there might be a boom for her, that she might not have to lean so hard on these things that her identity can do a lot of heavy lifting? I think they don't have to foreground their identities at all, right? Like, they can just be like, yeah, this is, you know, who I am, and, like, let kind of the unspoken assumptions of what that means carry the day. Now, this can go both ways, right?

14:39Like, you can be a very, very moderate Democrat, but have—ideologically, but you're black, right? And so you can let your blackness do the work of persuading people that, oh, maybe you're a little more progressive than you seem to be. There's a certain famous black Democrat who did this, who may have served two terms as president. So, like, we have, like, a live example of this.

15:11But can AOC do the populism thing? Like, can anybody do the populism thing if they're not a white guy, right? Like, is that a thing that—is that a lane that exists in American electoral politics? I can't seem to think of anybody. That is kind of the thing that is unanswered. Can you do populism and not be a white guy? Because—

15:35In the hands of a white male candidate, it reads, I think, to a lot of voters, like, oh, this is a person just speaking common sense. You can claim the common sense quotes around that label. And I think it's, yeah, I think it's genuinely unclear if you can play that game with other kinds of identities or if those identities sort of, like, code these things as being, you know, much more outside the mainstream than they might be. Like, even—I'm going to use Mondani as an example again because he's sort of, like, I mean, he's our kind of central example of, like, a left-wing Democrat who wins, like, a major election.

16:13Mondani did not run as a populist, right? Like, he ran this, like, very traditional, almost, like, pressing the pavement, not quite, like, patronage campaign, but sort of, like, yeah, I'm, like, going to fix—I'm going to fix the streets and, you know, lower the prices and— Fix the potholes. Fix the potholes. I'm going to— Make rent more affordable. Right, a very traditional, quality-of-life municipal election that did not rest on, like, a loud populist appeal. Now, we have, like, Michigan Senate race right now, Abdul El-Sayed, is running a populist campaign.

16:45His rhetoric is very much billionaires are dividing us. Right, anti-elite. That kind of—so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out for him. Like, if he wins, and that's a case data point in favor of, you can be a different kind of identity and run that kind of campaign. I mean, you're talking about Abdul El-Sayed, and you're talking about Mondani, and you're talking about ALC. The—and the thing that we often hear is that their particular constituencies, because of where they're running, that you can't just port the kind of—their politics and the way those things work to, like, a general election or even just, like, a Democratic primary, right?

17:21Do you buy that? Yes and no. I mean, I think there are specific things that you probably can't port, but there are, like, broad things that you can. In the case of Mondani, state-run grocery store is probably not going to fly in a lot of places. But if you kind of abstract that out a bit and you say, what is a problem that people in this area have? And I have this commitment to public intervention. How can you do, like, an intelligent public intervention with regards to this particular problem? And then you run on that, right? That's the thing anyone can do, right?

17:53Like, you could even make the case that sort of the Trump 2016 was that campaign. Build the wall, right? A simple slogan, simple message, simple intervention that you could repeat and always return to. Recognizing that voters want the performance of politics as well. You know, this is a thing that I think actually Democrats are quite bad at, which is there's, like, this norm in Democratic politics that is, oh, the thing that we're supposed to do are, like, be the responsible adults of politics.

18:24And can't let things get too crazy. But voters like performance. They want you to – they want to feel as if you understand why they are angry or why they are upset, so on and so forth. It's much mocked these days, but, like, Bill Clinton's I feel your pain in the 92 election was actually quite significant. Because it was, like, Clinton, in a very literal way, just being like, yes, I'm going to perform. I'm performing your uneasiness and unhappiness and reflecting it back at you.

18:56And voters like to see that. That's something I think that candidates like Mamdani – I think Osloff's doing this well. I think they're – I mean, John Ossoff in Georgia, a different kind of candidate, but he's doing this well. Kind of performing for people their anger at the present situation. Mm-hmm. But given the moment we're in, the sort of anti-woke backlash moment, do you think we are still in a moment where people want the performance of identity?

19:25So I don't think people want the performance of identity. But I also don't think that people are opposed to candidates who are Black or women or candidates of color. I think it's worth separating those two things out. And that's, I think, the point I've been trying to make, that it's not so much that voters are going to say, that person's a Latina. I don't want to vote for her. I think that's the moment we're in. It's, like, an implicit thing. But it's not something that is actively run on. And I do think that foregrounding that as, like, a message is probably not going to be very effective.

19:59And probably wasn't very effective in the past. That's where I think identity plays. It's interesting, I mean, think about just the whole notion of an anti-woke backlash is that there's very clearly an anti-woke backlash in sort of the world of, like, elite political commentary and the world. And in, like, corporate corporations and, yeah. And, like, rarefied atmospheres. But in public opinion, there isn't really one, right? Like, in public opinion, you know, DEI is, like, 20 points more popular than President Trump.

20:33And one thing to add to this is that, like, different things become salient, right? And so I think if you were to ask someone who is, you know, hostile to wokeness, if you were to tell me what positions that includes, they might say, well, you know, being pro-Palestinian is woke. As it turns out, that's a highly salient issue for a lot of people, being pro-Palestinian. And I think it's, like, it's also, like, an 80-20 issue among Democrats, like 75-25s. It's, like, 80-20 at this point, right?

21:04Yeah. And it's a place where, yeah, you can be outspoken on this. And you're probably not going to get, like, if there is a woke penalty, you're not going to get the woke penalty because it's, like, a thing people care about. So if you were getting a woke penalty, if people were just giving out, you know, red cards for transgressions, for woke transgressions as they saw it, like, what do you think those lines would be? It feels like a cop-out. But some of this is, like, you know, I know, I probably will know it when I see it. So, like, if I hear a candidate, if you hear a candidate, like, using sort of, like, academic language, if someone says intersectionality in a speech, it's, like, yeah, they're probably going to get docked for that by listeners.

21:44Even if they're totally right. That's, like, a signal to people. They're, like, I don't know what this person might be, might care too much about that stuff and not enough about me. So what you're saying is that AOC is not automatically going to get docked for being a Latina. She's not automatically going to be docked for being a woman. But she also has to be mindful of stepping on any traps that might draw any attention to wokeness. Whether that's, like, the language she might use. Whether that's, like, the posture she might take. And people might even be open to those things because a lot of the things that people associate with wokeness are actually not unpopular.

22:17Is that what you're saying? I think so much of it, to go back to the beginning of our conversation, is about vibe, is about sort of intangibles that are influenced by identity, that are influenced by the things, but are not, like, completely governed by them. And so it's totally possible to shape one's vibe for voters, shape those intangibles. It's a difficult balancing act to be able to do even if you aren't a Latina or you aren't a Black man or a Black woman. At this level of politics where part of what you're trying to do is show many different groups of people that they can identify with you, A, that you understand them, B, and that you're on their side, C.

23:05That's a tough task. It's, like, it's genuinely difficult to do. And there's a reason why often the most successful candidates simultaneously have, like, a brand, but also they appear to be many different things to many different people all at once. When we come back. You might be, you know, might be identified as, like, a very woke politician, but if you're able to kind of successfully ride public opinion but not be beholden to it, to sort of project leadership, you can kind of excel despite whatever ideological identification you might have.

23:45Stay with us.

Redbaiting and left politics today

23:50So we've been talking to Jamel Bowie of the New York Times about wokeness, especially as it's attached to the political left in this moment. And I asked Jamel what he thinks about the fact that avowed leftism is something elected officials are still kind of reluctant to embrace. Like, it's still not okay to be a lefty. It's still very easy to redbait and call people a socialist or even a commie, you know.

24:20And those are, like, pejoratives. I mean, it's still very easy to redbait. I think it's still an open question how effective that redbaiting is these days. Okay. I mean, right now, part of the administration's rhetorical posture towards Democrats is that they're all communists. This was a big thing at the midterm convention in Texas earlier in September. And that certainly works for, like, some voters. But it tends to work for voters who are already inclined to vote for Republicans, right? Like, at this point, half of the voting electorate is under 45, which is that half of the voting electorate are people who were children or did not exist in 1989, right?

24:57They do not have a Cold War context anymore. So some of this is, like, I don't think it's as effective. Part of me thinks about how leftism, lefty politics, has generally been coded in American politics for the past half century. During the Cold War, obviously, too associated with the Soviet Union, so on and so forth. But post-Cold War, as I have experienced it, left-wing politics seems to have been coded as as much a kind of, like, bohemian cultural orientation as it is, like, a politics, right?

25:40Like, if you're a lefty, then you're, like, you're a vegan. Absolutely, yeah. You know, all these cultural signifiers attached to it. And so I do wonder, right, as you get more, for lack of a better term, like, normie lefties in politics who are basically sort of, like, state politicians, but they also believe in, like, democratic control of the economy, then it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Because the other thing, too, is that it's actually not clear to me whether or not when a voter hears DSA, they think socialism or Marxism, or whether they simply think this is a more, you know, intense Democrat.

26:26You see what I'm saying? And so there's also this dynamic of what do these things actually signal to people? But you said, like, okay, you probably can't be a viable candidate for major office in, like, North Carolina as a DSA member. But you have Francesca Hong, who was running in Wisconsin as an avowed lefty, right, as a socialist. And AOC was very reluctant to embrace her, did not throw her support behind her in her primary campaign. So what do you make of that, right?

26:57That there's still a kind of lefty politics that, you know, prominent progressives in the Democratic Party are skittish about being too close to. Yeah.

27:12I would read that myself as, like, less about ideology and more sort of, like, can this person ball kind of analysis, right? Say more about that. What I mean is that Francesca Hong, part of the reason this became a thing, right, is this tweet she had about Thanksgiving years ago. And when confronted with that tweet, she answered in this sort of, like, convoluted defensive way that really demonstrated, I think, a lack of, like, media training.

27:47A lack of sort of, like, being fast on your feet, being savvy when confronted with these things. And so if you see that and you are a high-level, effective politician, even if you have ideological sympathies with the person, you might be like, I don't know if I want to, like, put my neck out for someone who doesn't seem prepared for some pretty basic things you're going to get hit with. So that's all I mean. It sounds like you're saying, does Francesca Hong have sufficient riz? Like, can I throw my weight behind her if she can't, you know what I mean, finesse her way out of this answer?

28:19That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And I think it's worth always remembering that there's more to successful politics than just simply, like, your ideological label or ideology you have. And the calculation that politicians should make when they're thinking of endorsements is, like, one part patronage, one part building alliances, that kind of thing. But it's also one part, like, okay, does this person know ball, right? Like, is this person going to win? And I think it's important to recognize that when trying to analyze what's happening.

28:51Like, in some cases, it's not so much that people are turned off by a set of views. Is that the person just, like, can't hang. But I do think that people see someone's inability to hang, whatever their ideological inclination, right? It's like, oh, well, this is the problem with people of that ideological inclination, right? It's like, oh, right? Like, oh, look at this lefty. Like, I think a lot of people responded to that Francesca Hong answer as, like, see, lefties are unserious because her answer was bad. I think that's part of what was happening there. And so that's why I say, like, as we get more normie lefties, basically, running for office, how does that change?

29:27So what sounds like we're saying is that wokeness, like, the sort of substance of wokeness, every time I use wokeness, I feel like I'm letting them win by using it this way. But it seems like the substance of what people call woke 1.0, right, is actually not irradiated in and of itself, right? Like, it needs better branding. The politicians who align themselves with wokeness need to ball better, right? They need to step their games up. They need to be more depth, more agile politicians. But the actual meat and potatoes there, or vegan chicken potatoes.

30:02Soy curls. Is not—soy curls, right? That stuff is not anathema to voters or people, really. Right. I think that's right. I think there's a way that it's entirely possible to run a campaign that speaks to questions of civil rights and voting rights and, like, the rights concerns. And also connects those to sort of the more affordability concerns to kitchen table concerns, you might say, and treats them as part of a whole. And I do think that the—to the extent that sort of, like, wokeness is an electoral handicap, it really is about vibe and language and positioning and how people—how voters perceive you, not so much the substance.

30:48My view is that your actual ideology isn't as much of an obstacle as it might be. So you might be, you know, might be identified as, like, a very woke politician. But if you're able to kind of successfully ride public opinion but not be beholden to it, to sort of project leadership, you can kind of excel despite whatever ideological identification you might have. So, Jamel, we know there is a lot of skepticism, a lot of discomfort among Democrats, especially Democratic leadership, towards the DSA.

31:19But there's also this concurrent giant and maybe existential anxiety among members of the DSA and the left more broadly about, like, the relationship they should have to the Democratic Party. Like, should they be trying to run as Dems to push the party to the left? Should they agitate from the outside to avoid being, you know, co-opted by electoral politics? And it seems like the political figures we've been talking about, whether that's AOC, whether that's Mamdani, whether that's Francesca Hong, are working out that tension, like, out loud with everybody watching.

31:52And wokeness, and the conversation about wokeness is about this tension in a lot of ways, right? Trying to figure out what is viable, what needs to be filed down in the name of pragmatism. What do you think these things, the sort of tensions between the left and the Democratic Party, what do you think is going to land?

The structural future of the left

32:12This, to me, seems to come to kind of a fundamental question of what the DSA is. Is it para-party organization that is about advocacy of its views, is about maybe cultivating and finding people with its views, but is not principally about trying to engage in electoral politics and win office? Or is it something like a faction within the Democratic Party devoted to its particular ideological interest and interested in trying to win power within the Democratic Party to win elections?

32:52This is like a fundamental divide. And I do think this represents some of the growing pains of the American left, since there's a long stretch where the American left, in whatever form, wasn't particularly electorally viable, didn't have very much popular representation, was kind of, in a lot of ways, fringe. Or, to the extent that it wasn't, was like a bohemian cultural affectation. I'll put it this way. Bernie Sanders, in 2016, 2020, garnered the most votes of a validly left-wing presidential candidate since Eugene Debs a century earlier.

33:27That's the time horizons we're talking about. That it's been a very long time since there's been this kind of viable political left in the United States. That the collapse of the Soviet Union, that I would say both the success of Obama-era liberalism and its clear limitations and failures, like, open up the space for more. It's funny, the sort of, the limits of Obama-era liberalism was like, that was a question I asked in, I think, 2016, like, at the end of, I asked on Twitter, like, how did the Obama era change your politics? And what effect did it have on your politics?

34:00And almost everyone said they pushed them to the left because they were so frustrated with, like, you know. And some of the people were, like, people in his administration who responded, like, people worked in the White House. So, like, it was, like, seeing those sort of limits of that kind of. That's the thing. It's sort of, like, you can, I mean, this, similar, involving Obama, but, like, you know, pre-black president, there are always fantasies about, like, what a black president would be like, right? And then you get the black president, and it's like, oh, yeah, he's the president, right? He's the president. He is constrained by the presidency. He has all these, has to do all the dirty things that the American state has to do.

34:37Oh, yeah, this is not great, yeah. And so that both is disappointing, right? You're like, oh, my fantasies are collapsing. But it also opens up. It opens up the imagination, okay? Well, what else can you do? Yeah. Let's say you do get a president, AOC, right? Lefties will run into the same thing. What are – you have this fantasy about what it could be, but this is an institution within a structural environment with real constraints. And so, like, what does – what do those constraints mean? And how does that affect your sense of –

35:09The political possibility. Possibility, how you feel about all of this. And it's going to – I think it'll – I think if that happens, it's going to be a similar kind of phenomena of, like, you're happy that it happened, but you're disappointed and frustrated by the constraints that will shape how things work going forward.

35:29And, like, there are two paths you can go. I mean, there's one path that's, like, retreat, and there's one path that's, like, thinking about, well, how do you change the nature of the constraints? That's basically been the direction of conservative politics. You know, they get Reagan, who was, like, the first bona fide conservative, moving conservative to occupy the White House, and they're frustrated, right? Oh, we have this Democratic House we have to deal with. We have the administrative state we have to deal with. We have all these constraints. We have all these liberal judges we have to deal with.

36:01All these constraints on what we want to do. And so they devise a bunch of theories and ideas about how you might remove those constraints. And then the next 40 years of conservative politics is trying to remove the constraints, trying to reshape the structural environment so that you can do what you imagined you'd be able to do in the first place. And so maybe that's the direction, you know, if you get a DSA president the next 20 or 30 years goes. Like, how do you change the overall environment to make the kind of presidency or make the kind of administration you had in your mind a real thing?

36:37Jamel Bowie is an opinion columnist for The New York Times. Thank you, Jamel. Appreciate you, bro. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me, man. And y'all, that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram, though, at NPR Co-Switch for more. This episode was produced by Christina Kala. It was edited by Courtney Stein and Jasmine Romero. Our engineer was on Lee Huang. And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of The Co-Switch Massive. Right, Parker? I mean, that's Xavier Lopez and Jess Kung and Maya Dangerfield and Kayla Lattimore and Leah Dinella and Dalia Mortada and Barton Girdwood and Yolanda Sungwani.

37:13As for me, I'm Jean Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. Be easy, y'all. Hydrate.