In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Larry Diamond, and Arlie Hochschild explore what the Democrats’ historic midterm landslide reveals about Donald Trump’s waning hold on American voters, how Democrats can balance accountability with a positive agenda ahead of 2028, and whether democratic institutions have proven more resilient than many feared.
Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy.
Arlie Hochschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We thought we couldn’t quite torture our East Coast contributors at 2 a.m., so we have this amazing West Coast panel. Or a bicoastal panel, since I’m currently in Europe. To update people on the current state of the election results: Democrats will control both the House and the Senate, and they will do so by really quite astonishing margins. According to the betting markets I’m looking at right now, they will likely control 56 Senate seats, up from 47.
They will win not just in swing states like Ohio or Michigan. They will win not just in blue states that have had Republican senators for a long time, like Susan Collins in Maine. They will win in Texas. They will win in South Carolina. They will win in Iowa. They are at the moment favored to win in Mississippi, though that race is currently too close to call. As we are recording, we have the Democratic candidate there ahead by 28 votes. They will win in Kansas. These are really quite astonishing results.
In the House, we are likely to see not a close race—not a slight Democratic lean, but a solidly Democratic House. At the moment, 261 seats are projected to go to the Democrats with some amount of certainty, and only 173 seats to the Republicans, with a number of seats still too close to call.
And then, of course, the governors’ races tell an astonishing story of their own. Republicans win in places like Florida, where they seem to be winning across the board. They are able to hold the governor’s mansion in places like New Hampshire or Vermont, where they have popular local moderate Republicans. But Democrats will win not just in California and Illinois and New York and Massachusetts, where you’d expect it. They will also win in Texas. They will win in swing states like Nevada and Arizona, in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania.
That is my attempt to summarize what just happened: a midterm blowout for the Democrats of historic proportions. Arlie, what do you make of all of this?
Arlie Hochschild: Well, when I stop jumping up and down, I think we should remember that Europe and the whole world have been tuned in to this election. What it tells us is that we’re awake, and that democracy, although it has been laid low, is functioning. So I think this is a really big deal. We can’t take it for granted, and we have lessons to learn from this, but it’s great news.
Mounk: Larry, what is your first reaction?
Larry Diamond: Well, I don’t know how partisan you want to get. I could express my purely partisan preferences, but as a democracy scholar, I think it’s great news in several respects.
First of all, we have an authoritarian president who has had authoritarian ambitions and an authoritarian agenda. Fortunately, he’s been too incompetent to make a great deal of headway in achieving them. But he has represented the most serious challenge to American democracy, I’d say, from presidential intent in American history. And he’s now been rebuked decisively and across the board. He has been rebuked geographically, politically, and demographically in the United States to an unprecedented degree.
Secondly, he’s going to be checked by large Democratic majorities. That’s true not only in the House, with dozens of Democratic seats as the margin, but also in the Senate, where it’s looking like the Democrats might potentially have something like a 55-to-45 majority. People thought it would be a miracle if the Democrats picked up four seats and won control of the House, but they may pick up seven or eight.
And then Democrats are winning governorships in states like Texas that were thought to be off limits. It’s not just Jon Ossoff in Georgia, but James Talarico in Texas. And you have Keisha Lance Bottoms, an African American woman, being elected governor of Georgia and Gina Hinojosa, a Latina woman, being elected governor of Texas. These people are not winning by small margins. They’re winning by large, and in some cases double-digit, margins.
And I’ll say one other thing that I think is encouraging. As social scientists, we thought for a long time now that the geographical political map had shrunk to a small number of swing states. We thought there were many states that couldn’t be flipped. That included not only the blue states in the West and the Northeast, but also solid red states like South Carolina and Texas and Kansas, and not least Mississippi. We thought that partisan orientations had crystallized to an unmovable degree. The fact that people have become open-minded again about their partisan preferences and their willingness to exact accountability is, I think, a very hopeful sign.
Mounk: One of the things I’m thinking about in a purely analytical mode today is that there’s a lot of talk about America being very polarized and divided. Of course, that is true in some important respects. But I think sometimes this is presented as if we are Bosnia-Herzegovina, as if there are these immovable blocks of voters who are either on the Democratic or the Republican side. In this picture, if I knew who your parents and grandparents voted for, I’d know who you’re going to vote for. Every election is just an attempt to mobilize your base and get them out to the polls. There’s really no movement between the parties, so we have to live in this era of very close-run politics forever.
I think there’s been very good evidence all along that that’s not true, because the demographic coalitions within each party have shifted very rapidly. The way that Trump won in 2016 was very different from how he won in 2024. And I’ve been arguing for a while that it is possible for both Republicans and Democrats, if the stars align, to build a really convincing majority. I think we see that in the midterms today.
This was not really because of Democratic strength. It was because of a deep rebuke of Donald Trump. Democrats were able to build such a broad majority against Donald Trump in this referendum on him that they were able to win in places like Kansas and Texas, and that they may be able to flip a Senate seat in Mississippi, which would really be quite remarkable.
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Arlie, you’ve spent much of the last 20 years speaking to voters, most of whom were enthusiastic about the Tea Party. They probably voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and I imagine they voted for him in 2024, and perhaps in 2020 as well. You did this in the Louisiana Bayou for your first book on this topic, and in Appalachia for your follow-up book.
I always think it’s least interesting to think about the true MAGA diehards. It’s more interesting to think about some of the very decent people you portray and talk to in your books: people in rural communities, in mostly red states, who probably did support Trump and the MAGA movement Trump and the MAGA movement for these years. What do you think is going on with those voters and those communities today? Are we partially seeing some of these voters changing their minds? How does your research make you reflect on how Democrats were able to build this big anti-Trump majority today?
Hochschild: Good question. Just to back up, I got to know people in the second-poorest and the whitest congressional district in the country. Many of these people were coal miners. That’s the dominant industry in eastern Kentucky.
It’s a region that used to be New Deal Democrats back in the day under Roosevelt. Then it became moderate, and for a while it was moderate Republican. Then, over the last three elections in this district, over 83 percent voted for Donald Trump. So I wondered why. What had swung things so far right?
The story is in a way local, but I think it tells a global story. They were hit by the loss of coal. Not every place has had coal and then lost it. But globalization and offshoring and automation, and even AI looking ahead, can create regional losses in a context where some regions are doing fine. Those regions are winners and others are losers. And in those losing regions that are getting economically battered, there’s a story of loss that sets up a predisposition for restoration. It’s a recipe for right-wing takeover.
What happened in eastern Kentucky is that coal jobs went out. People not only lost their jobs, and so did truck drivers and people in related industries, but they also lost their whole way of life and their pride. They would get in a truck and drive six hours trying to find an industrial job, and sometimes that wasn’t available in the area. These are very local people, very proud people, and they took a hit. Opiates came in as coal jobs went out. They didn’t see a bottom, and they didn’t see any answers for them in either the Democratic or the Republican Party.
It was into that vacuum and that sense of loss that Donald Trump came. And it’s almost as if he excavated shame and discouragement and fear, and he processed it and lit it aflame. It’s what I would call, and called in the book, a kind of emotional capture.
He went in there and he said, hey, I see who you are. That was an appeal for recognition. He gave them a very compelling narrative of stolen pride: Who took your pride? It didn’t just go away; someone took it. He moved shame to blame. And thirdly, he had a kind of anti-shaming ritual that really consolidated that narrative. I’m saying all this because that capture was pretty hard to break. It took a lot of mistakes.
Mounk: Do you think it has broken today? Do you think what we’re observing is that it’s broken? Or is it more that other groups of voters who moved to Trump in 2024 have moved away from him today?
Hochschild: That’s a great question. That is the question. No, I think the people I came to know have not said, now I see the Democratic Party and all the possibilities. Yes, I do want health care for my children. And by the way, those Medicaid cuts that Trump just made support the addiction recovery center that my children go to. So no, I don’t think it’s a story of the scales having fallen from their eyes. I think that emotional capture is hard to move.
But I think he’s made so many mistakes, and we are in a way profiting from all the fallout from his mistakes. It’s not that progressives have done wonderful things.
Mounk: One way of putting this: the metaphor you use in Strangers in Their Own Land, and expand upon in the later work on that stolen sense of pride, is that people feel like they’re standing in line for the American dream, and other people are coming in and cutting into the line. This idea that immigrants, African Americans, even the brown pelican, the state bird of Louisiana, are cutting in because environmental regulations prioritize its interests over ours. And in that narrative, Donald Trump might be a bully, might be unlikable, and you might have some reservations about him, but he’s the bully we need to protect us from these line cutters. Perhaps that fundamental story is still there, but people have lost faith that Trump is a good bully, or an effective bully, or a bully who actually stands up to people. That may mean people are going to go in search of the next bully. But they’ve given up hope on this bully. Is that one way of extending your metaphor?
Hochschild: Yes, that’s very well said. And that is a background fear that I do have. So as a caution: let’s celebrate, but let’s learn from this about how vulnerable democracies are.
Mounk: Larry, you know a lot about American politics, but you know most about democracy around the world. How do you think this compares to other moments in which a would-be authoritarian populist falls out of favor with people?
Diamond: Being shown to be frauds.
Mounk: It seems to me that there’s a bit of a pattern. These figures are able to dominate everything for a while. There’s a period in which every political conversation in a country ends up being about them: about the comparatively harmless Silvio Berlusconi in Italy for 15 or 20 years of disastrous Italian politics, about Narendra Modi in India, about all these different figures.
And then there are two interesting moments that sometimes happen when they lose their hold. The first is when most people who gave them the benefit of the doubt, who believed in some of the premises and went along with it, realize that these figures have failed completely to live up to those premises. That’s when the majority against them builds. The second is when suddenly they’re no longer the center of every conversation, and everything in the political system is no longer about them. It feels to me like we’ve very clearly reached that first point today, and we may reach the second point quite soon, in the coming weeks and months.
How does this compare to what happened with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or what is happening with Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, and with some of these other moments when figures who seemed quite dominant in the political system suddenly feel like they’re being swept to the margins, at least temporarily? How does the international perspective help us understand what’s happening in the United States today?
Diamond: Well, it certainly has a lot of the feel of Orbán’s decisive defeat in the parliamentary elections in Hungary earlier this year, and of Vučić’s defeat just about a week ago, nine days ago. And as long as we’re on the comparative theme, we might note that Narendra Modi has probably peaked and is starting to decline in India. I think there are some similar reasons in each case.
People may have a certain tolerance for corruption among a charismatic populist elite who has, to put it in Arlie’s language, emotionally captured them. The populist is speaking to their identities, to their sense of dignity and their cultural aspirations, and also to their material aspirations. The populist is giving them a narrative that they’re processing in a way that is not entirely fact-based or rational—this is a very important implication of Arlie’s two books. That’s what the emotional component is.
But at some point, performance does enter in here. When your life is getting harder and harder, when affordability is getting worse and worse, some of the layers of commitment do get stripped away. I’m now speaking very suggestively and hypothetically here, because it’s Arlie who has done the really deep fieldwork. But I have a hypothesis that there are rings of commitment. There’s a hard core that hasn’t been stripped away even today, that is still emotionally captured and very much aligned culturally and symbolically with Trump.
But there are some pretty significant layers that got ripped away tonight from Trump, from MAGA, and from the last 10 or 20 years of the Republican Party. Certainly the young Latino voters you were referring to by implication, Yascha, who had defected to Trump in 2024. Also some other younger voters, and a lot of historic Republican voters who are really hurting as a result of rising gas and diesel prices and rising fertilizer prices. In the cities and suburbs, there’s the lack of affordable housing and the high cost of groceries, hamburger meat, and so on. This hurt Trump and the Republicans very, very badly. We could see it coming from the polling data, and it was even worse.
I just want to make one more point for the moment, Yascha. I think there’s a historic opportunity for the Democrats here, but only if they don’t fall back on their worst instincts. Those instincts push these voters away with the Democrats’ own brand of identity politics, which makes these voters defensive and feel like and makes them feel like their pride is still being stolen by all these elite, effete, college-educated, big-city people.
I would urge every one of your listeners to listen to every word of James Talarico’s acceptance speech tonight after his Senate victory. It was remarkable. I think it’s one of the greatest election victory speeches of recent decades. He talked about love, he talked about inclusion, he talked about “love thy neighbor.” He spoke in religious terms, and he spoke about unifying rather than dividing.
The lessons are abundant from the recent victories in Serbia, Poland, and Hungary, and also from what would be happening in Turkey now, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being prepared to be shown the door in the next election if he hadn’t arrested all of the opposition. What was the name of the opposition campaign in Turkey’s municipal elections in 2019 and 2024? It was a campaign of radical love. And if you listen to James Talarico, it’s exactly the same language. It’s inclusion, not division.
Hochschild: Wow. Yes, I just want to say I love what Larry has just said, and I think it’s worth really pausing on it and taking it in. We’ve got a huge opportunity that, honestly, I wasn’t sure we would have. Democracy is so precious, but it’s also more fragile than we knew. So what’s to learn? Now’s the time, once the celebration and dancing is over, to ask: what have we learned?
We’ve come very close to really losing things, as Trump has disregarded every check and balance and stamped on things. And we’re still in danger of his calling a state of emergency and suspending things. I don’t think we’re home free yet.
So it’s time to not make any mistakes. And Larry, I think you’re right that Talarico is really setting the mood that will work, because it’s a reach-out mood. Without quite realizing it, the Democratic Party has become more and more marginal. It used to have labor unions as the big middleman between the working class and the Democratic Party, and now we’re down to nine percent of workers who are unionized. So that’s gone, and left to itself, the party has almost forgotten about social class.
What’s to learn is that we do have to reach out and strengthen ourselves. We do that by eating some humble pie and taking very seriously the fears and the shame that people have suffered when their sector, their portion of American life, has fallen on their heads. We should take that as our job to help fix.
Mounk: There’s going to be endless intra-party sniping over the next days and weeks as people try to understand and interpret these election results. Clearly, a lot of the very progressive candidates won in a blue tsunami environment that allowed them to win even in swing states. My impression so far is nevertheless that the more moderate Democrats got many more votes. Take one of the most-watched races, in Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed looks like he’s going to win convincingly. At the moment, he’s up by nearly seven points. But Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor in Michigan, with the same electorate on the same day, is running 12 points ahead of the Republican candidate.
So that’s a five-point margin between the more moderate, more mainstream Democrat and the progressive Democrat. Probably every European newspaper and many American newspapers are going to treat El-Sayed’s win as the true story of the election tomorrow. In a tsunami environment, you can drop five points and still win Michigan. And given how important it is to rebuke Donald Trump at this moment, I think that’s a good thing. But in an ordinary election, five percentage points makes the difference between a Democratic president and a Republican president, and potentially between a president aligned with the MAGA movement and one who is not. So I think it’s important to keep that in mind.
What do you think Democrats should be doing now? I’ll tell you that I’m a little bit torn about that. They are taking a big majority in the House and a significant majority in the Senate, though not a filibuster-proof majority. They obviously should be looking into the enormous corruption, rule-breaking, and norm-breaking that Trump and his administration have been inflicting on the United States and its people for the last two years.
I also worry, though, that they may become too consumed by that. For example, they might try a third impeachment, which may well be warranted in terms of what Trump did, but which can only result in a third failure in the Senate, as in the previous two instances. That would be a self-inflicted wound. In fact, it would allow Trump to keep doing what he wants to do, which is to be the absolute center of American politics.
So my gut is telling me that Democrats need to make sure there’s accountability for what Trump’s administration is doing. They obviously need to proactively stop what they can of whatever Trump and his people may be planning for the next two years.
But they also need to actually offer a positive vision that prepares the country for a true end to the Trump era in 2028. Getting that balance right is going to be very hard, and it’s going to involve a lot of judgment calls that are going to be difficult. So any thoughts about how Democrats can both push for accountability and resist what the Trump administration is doing for the next two years, but without gifting Donald Trump the position of being the absolute center of attention, in hearing after hearing, in ways that might actually extend his relevance and his dominance of American politics beyond his natural sell-by date?
Hochschild: Well, this is a great way to look at what the Democrats now have to do. One is to restore accountability. Yes, that’s huge. That’s basic. But I think it’s interesting what Larry was picking up about Talarico’s acceptance speech. What it is is a restoration of civility, and that in itself I think is hugely important.
Because without us quite looking at it, Trump, like other—what shall we call it? the big word is fascist—those leaders do something to our emotions. They change the feeling rules. They say, for example, as is being said today by people like Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth, that empathy is a bad thing. Empathy’s a silly thing. If you’re feeling sorry for people, that makes you weak. Actually, Musk has said it destroys civilization.
And that’s not just something on the side. There is a kind of chest-beating: anger is good, revenge is good. Even awe is kind of being privatized. There’s an emotional regime, I believe, that has been quietly insinuated into our hearts, and it’s being proposed to us as a way to be a human being.
So I think there needs to be a whole movement to restore civility. And I’m not talking about just Mother’s Day cards and Christmas cards and sort of formalistic, bowing niceness. I’m talking about the real deal, and there we’ve been assaulted. There’s been a shock and awe that Steve Bannon describes. They’re trying to get us confused, with too many things to look at, and we have been a little pushed back on our heels.
We haven’t said, hey, wait a minute, what is it to be an American? What is it we need to reaffirm? So I think we need to actually name the thing that these kinds of highly centralized regimes impose on us. And we might call it civility at the very minimum.
Diamond: Decency, yeah. I strongly endorse that, and I’d like to see more of it on our college campuses too, Arlie. I think you’ll agree with that. We’re working hard on that at Stanford and other campuses, as I’m sure you are at UC Berkeley. I never use the F-word in referring to Trump. I just think it’s polarizing and blinding and so on.
But deep authoritarianism, and certainly all forms of fascism, is a politics of dominance, a politics of strength, a politics of deliberate cruelty. I think that’s part of what got a massive rebuke tonight, along with the politics of just complete and total arrogant corruption.
Talarico spoke a lot about this, but in very simple and elegant terms. He said, “It’s not about left versus right, it’s about top versus bottom.” And he tied this into Musk spending $200 million to try to rescue Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race—of course, with spectacularly little success.
I think Democrats can fruitfully pivot now to a kind of good populism: a populism of standing up truly for ordinary people against the monopolies and oligopolies and billionaires and trillionaires, and against the massive redistribution of wealth and power away from ordinary Americans—working class, middle class—to this technocratic elite.
There are things that can be done on the tax code. There’s much more that can be done on the affordability front beyond the housing bill that they addressed. But real progress is going to require some give from the more determined left-of-center constituencies in the Democratic Party. Because if you want to build more, you’ve got to loosen regulation. This is a point that Frank Fukuyama has been making repeatedly in the pages of Persuasion.
So I think there is an agenda there on the economic front that at least they’re going to be able to send from the House to the Senate. We’ll see if they can pick up a few Republican votes for some of these bills.
I also want to say, if I can echo something I wrote again for your magazine about democratic reform: I think the winning hand here on the accountability front, beyond investigations—of which there will be many by the appropriate congressional committees—is not impeachment. The American people are tired of that pointless drama. It’s reform.
There’s real scope now for reform to ban partisan gerrymandering, ban congressional stock trading, tighten oversight procedures for corruption, and strengthen the autonomy of the inspectors general in the different cabinet departments. And I think the Democrats should push a bill that would substantially constrain the scope of presidential pardons. It is clearly President Trump’s intent now to pardon everyone who ever walked into the Oval Office. He said as much on multiple occasions.
They probably can’t get a lot of these things passed—certainly not a constitutional amendment—without substantial Republican support. But they can draw lines, create an agenda for the future, and put the heat on Republicans on some basic good governance reforms that would not be explicitly partisan.
Mounk: Well, the other thing here is that I just think it should expand the ambition of the Democratic Party for 2028. And I say this again as somebody who cares about our democracy more than as somebody who has a partisan political preference. It’s always seemed to me that the only thing that would put a real end to the MAGA era is a decisive electoral rebuke. Now, we’ve had the first part of that today. It is a very decisive rebuke, but it’s a midterm election.
I think what it’ll take is a really decisive rebuke in a presidential election. And if Democrats are capable of certainly picking up Texas and potentially picking up Mississippi in a midterm, then they should be capable of winning a presidential election, with many, many, many swing states and some states that are not usually swing states rebuking the MAGA agenda. And if we are in the running for that, then that might also put pressure on Republicans and on Republican primary voters to choose a different kind of candidate. Perhaps suddenly a window does open for a moderate Republican—I’m thinking, for example, of Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah—to run in an anti-Trump lane. I don’t think it’s very likely.
Diamond: I think it’s a fantasy.
Mounk: I think that after this election there is going to be a moment when the political constellation shifts. But in order to do that, Democrats need to actually try to speak to the middle of the country, right? There are all kinds of fancy theories about what explains the 2016 vote and the 2020 vote and the 2024 vote. One relatively straightforward one is that most Americans are very angry with the status quo. They don’t trust the elites. The old partisan loyalties, where you just blindly vote for whoever your mom and dad voted for, are mostly gone. But Americans aren’t actually extreme or radical.
What we’ve seen each time is that Joe Biden, I think, had some bad policies that pushed the country too far on questions like the border with Mexico, for example. People got enraged with that: Let’s vote for Trump. Trump came in; he was much more radical, much more extreme. What do they do? They delivered the blue tsunami we’re seeing right now.
I think it’s still possible to build these big majorities. But for the sake of our democracy, the Democrats need to have the ambition to do that. And if they do that, Larry, and if they are able to win a similar majority in 2028 as they did in 2026, then you might not need to abolish the filibuster in order to get a lot of things done. Because Democrats would, on a similar performance two years from today, have 60 Senate seats or more, as well as the House, as well as the presidency. And that might be a moment in which you institute a lot of these deeper electoral and other reforms.
Diamond: Yeah, well, I think a bottom line of what you’re saying, Yascha, and Arlie as well, is that it’s not going to be enough for Democrats to just oppose Trump, investigate Trump, or even propose the kinds of reforms of American democracy that I think are urgently needed, like ending partisan gerrymandering. They’ve got to have a positive economic agenda that features some degree of economic justice and addresses the wreckage Arlie was referring to—of jobs and hope and economic opportunity—that was wrought by globalization, by automation, and by social and technological change.
There are people who have ideas. I’ll tell you somebody who I think is being very underestimated now, who I think is going to be a serious presidential candidate, particularly if AOC doesn’t run: Ro Khanna. Whether or not you agree with all his policies, he’s thinking in these kinds of terms about an economic New Deal to stimulate industry and create jobs.
Hochschild: Yes, yes. I agree with that.
Mounk: I’m personally quite skeptical about Ro Khanna, though I’m always in favor of former podcast guests becoming president of the United States. Perhaps Arlie or Larry, you can consider doing so.
One of the stories of the election that we haven’t mentioned is Jon Ossoff. I think part of the reason for that is that in what should be a swing state, he was running so far ahead in the polls that it wasn’t really considered a swing-state election anymore by tonight.
He is likely to win by, I believe, about 20 points, which is really quite remarkable. He’s currently up 18 points in the prediction market margin. And when you look at the betting markets for the 2028 presidential election they are now led by Jon Ossoff.
You now have Ossoff with a big jump up today to 22 percent, then AOC and Gavin Newsom at 14 percent, and then a whole bunch of people at 5 percent or below: Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, et cetera, et cetera. So it’ll obviously be very interesting to watch how that primary plays out. Any personal predictions or favorites, Arlie or Larry?
Hochschild: Well, of all you mentioned, I think a lot of exciting people and minds have come forward, but I do think Jon Ossoff has a special gift. And he is a populist of a quite remarkable sort. He will talk about one crime after another that Donald Trump has permitted. Having reminded his audience of all the terrible things going on while we’re watching—it’s like a horror movie somehow—he’ll then say to the side, Have you been watching that? Did you notice that? He’s inviting people to develop a critical consciousness of all of the ways in which democracy is being eroded.
Diamond: I’ll say a couple of things. For a while, people were saying that the Democrats don’t have any candidates, that they don’t have any talent, and so on. I found that extremely shallow and irritating. I think it’s now apparent after this election that there’s a lot of talent, young talent, in the Democratic Party. Right now, the Democratic Party is like the Milwaukee Brewers. They’re just rich in young talent that’s gonna win a World Series.
I do agree with the implication of both of you. Right now, not just in the polls but in emerging judgments about raw talent and ideological and programmatic positioning, Ossoff may well be the leading Democratic presidential contender. I think he’s gonna have staying power because of his rhetorical talent and a certain type of charisma that will have long legs.
To win in 2028 and really form a governing majority, the party is gonna have to bridge its two wings, the progressive wing and the centrist wing. Ossoff may be able to do that. I don’t think he’s the only one, and others may find their own ways to do it. But the progressive wing is not gonna go away.
I don’t know who will be the nominee, but I have a hypothesis. The last three or four people standing on the stage are going to include Ossoff and someone who’s carrying the Bernie Sanders flag of progressivism. That means a somewhat more radical approach to economic redistribution and to the classic variable of how much state intervention you want versus market. If AOC doesn’t run, I really don’t see who is on the horizon who will capture that with a more coherent substantive program than I predict Ro Khanna will have.
I think Gavin Newsom is going to fade. I don’t think he’s decided where he is on the spectrum. And I think a lot of the next round of presidential politics is going to put a premium on authenticity. I don’t think that’s Newsom’s strong suit.
Mounk: Very politely put. It is past 3 a.m. on the East Coast, and past midnight even on the West Coast, so thank you so much for staying up so late. I have one last question that I want to ask each of you, and then we’re gonna start wrapping up here.
I’ve held off on writing that Trump is fading for a long time. A lot of overexcitable columnists, some of them my close friends, have written that article every month since October 2016. Clearly, Trump has dominated the American political system for a very long time. At this point, though, I think it is fair to say that Trump does feel very much on the way out. His hold on the American political system is fading.
He is going to continue being president for the next two years. He can do a lot of damage, even with Democrats now controlling the House and the Senate and most governor’s mansions in the country. So it’s going to be a rough two years, but it does feel like his moment is fading for good. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the MAGA movement is fading for good. We’ll have to see whether JD Vance or somebody else becomes the standard bearer in 2028. Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump Jr. might at some point be the standard bearers, which I think is imaginable.
Nevertheless, I want to do a little bit of introspection from the perspective of a political scientist. For good reason, we warned about the dangers to democracy. Larry, when you were co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, you helped to launch my career by publishing a couple of articles in which my colleague Roberto Foa and I were warning about the danger to democracy before 2016, before it was cool. Is it time to revise that judgment to some extent, or at least to moderate it a little bit?
Has it turned out that some of these authoritarian populists have really degraded democratic institutions in their countries, but have not been able to capture them to the extent that some of us came to worry about over the last 10 years? We did not think that Viktor Orbán could be displaced, at least not easily, through free and fair elections in his country. The elections weren’t entirely fair, because he had accumulated unfair advantages through his control over the media and so on. But by a democratic vote of the Hungarian people, he was swept out of power, and he conceded.
We did not think that would be possible with Vučić in Serbia. Some people don’t think it’s possible with Modi in India. I am personally gaining more and more confidence that it might be possible with Modi when he outstays his welcome, in the way that Trump has just done in the United States.
At this point, the administration of elections is in the hands of governors and secretaries of state, and there has been a blue wave, a blue tsunami, against Trump. I think it is absolutely in the hands of the American people to sweep Trump and his clique from power in 2028 if they decisively vote for a candidate who is able to capture the public imagination.
Now, that’s still compatible with a world in which a lot of countries are forms of—I’m not sure competitive authoritarianism is quite the right word—competitive wannabe authoritarians. These are people who are trying to capture the institutions, who don’t care much about democratic norms, who increase corruption, and who degrade the quality of democratic governance. All of those things can continue to be huge problems.
But have we overstated the degree to which this is a battle to the death between democracy and autocracy? Have democratic institutions proven themselves to be more resilient over the last 10 years than we might have expected? Arlie and Larry, you get the last words today.
Hochschild: We have to be cautious. When we look at the rise of right-wing leaders in this country and around the world, we’re looking at two things. It’s tempting to focus on the leader, but that’s just one thing. The other is the followers and their emotional predisposition, and we have to look at that.
In my work, it was clear that people were looking for a Donald Trump because their lives had been turned upside down. They were upset. They were afraid that they were going down and that there was no bottom to that down. That fear, that predisposition to hear the tyrant’s siren song and to be emotionally captured, is very important.
Today we’re faced with an AI revolution. Word is that for some half of the tasks that entry-level jobs call for, AI can do better than a person can. So we’re in for another major disruption. This time it doesn’t affect blue-collar rural workers. It affects the middle class.
I see Donald Trump heroizing and touting the wonders of AI, but creating no plan and offering nothing to meet the needs of an unemployed middle-class person who’s just gotten four years of education, can’t pay back the loan, and is very uncertain about what the next job is. It’s a disaster that could very well happen.
We’re not China, which can just tell the managers of its industries, don’t fire anybody. And we’re not yet Finland, which says, okay, we have a free job retraining program for all our people, because the economy does change and we’ll need to upgrade our skill sets. That’s a public offering. I see those as two models, one bad and one preferable, for what’s going to hit us.
So focus on the predisposition to accept magical answers and be emotionally captured. We need to look at that now and do something about it now.
Mounk: Arlie, thank you very much. You’re probably unaware of this, but you just advertised my new book, which is out in the spring. It is precisely about what happens to our society if those kinds of job market effects from artificial intelligence prove to be real. Larry?
Hochschild: Wonderful. I look forward to reading it.
Diamond: Me too. I would completely embrace what Arlie said. I’d go a bit further, and then I’ll give a more direct answer to your question, Yascha.
Over the next few years, we’re looking at the disappearance of long-haul trucking jobs, probably the disappearance of Uber driving jobs, and the disappearance of a lot of the remaining factory jobs, which are increasingly going to be taken over by robots. What worries me is the slowness in the creation of new types of jobs.
And it’s not only the United States. Many young people in China aren’t finding jobs. Combine this with the algorithms and social media that keep driving polarization and division, and with AI turbocharging narratives of division. It’s certainly a period where there’s going to be a lot of raw material for anger, division, suspicion, and the emotional, not fully rational, side of politics.
Then you look at specific countries. I think we’re turning the tide, at least for now, in the United States. We’ll see if we are on the cusp of a truly realigning period in American electoral history, as we had in 1932 and 1980. Or we may just be in a period that a number of democracies are in now, where the alternation is between more rational and democratic politics, in terms of commitment to liberal democracy, and the politics of illiberal populism morphing into authoritarianism.
It’s hard for me to imagine now someone other than Marine Le Pen being elected president of France next year. You know Europe better than I do, but you certainly have to favor her.
Mounk: She’s certainly odds-on to win, I would say.
Diamond: I’m not saying Alternative for Germany is gonna come to power in Germany. It’s the country of your birth and you follow it closely, but they’re gaining. Europe has a lot of problems. Ironically, because they worry about the United States, I think that if you look out over the next few years, continental Europe is in deeper trouble than the United States.
So I agree with Arlie. We need a lot of caution, and it’s incredibly premature to think that the battle is essentially won and all we have to do is clean up in 2028. I don’t want to panic your listeners, but I want to close with this. There’s something else that worries me that I think we’re not even beginning to take into account.
And that is, weak as he will be in terms of the capacity to get any legislation or any appointments through the Senate—judicial, ambassadorial, anything else—he still has enormous discretion in foreign policy and military policy. That is the discretion of aggression, or the discretion of resignation and passivity in the face of aggression, with regard to Ukraine.
I am very deeply worried about Taiwan right now. If you’re the People’s Republic of China and you’re looking at an aging, politically weak, wounded, and cognitively deteriorating president who has already signaled his transactional attitudes toward foreign policy ... I think we’re going to be in an extremely dangerous period in world affairs in the next two years, for democracy and for international security.
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