Democrats Need to Ditch ‘Loser Politics,’ with Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias is one of the few people writing about Democratic politics who is trying to win rather than just be right. He cofounded Vox, built one of the most widely read political Substacks in the country with Slow Boring, and has spent the better part of a decade arguing that the Democratic Party has been squandering winnable elections over what he calls, in a phrase I find very useful, “dumb shit.” He is a Democrat who thinks his party lost the plot and wants it to find it again.

We started somewhere unexpected: What does it mean that the last shared cultural experiences most Americans have, save the Super Bowl, are national elections, which are also the most divisive things in our lives? Yglesias has written extensively about the decline of monoculture events—things like American Idol—that used to give strangers something to talk about. What replaced them is fragmentation, and he thinks that has done real damage to our sense of community and our politics.

From there we got into the state of the Democratic Party, which Yglesias sees as a three-way fight between the establishment, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and a center-left faction that gets almost no attention. He makes the case that the DSA’s rise is less about socialism becoming popular and more about Israel becoming a purity test, and that the moderate Democrats winning elections in swing states deserve far more coverage than the primary fights that dominate the discourse.

We also talked about housing, which Yglesias has been writing about longer than almost anyone and which he considers the single most important practical issue in American politics. We ended on why he thinks public schools should go back to teaching patriotism, and why the civil rights movement’s greatest leaders understood that better than today’s progressives.