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Transcript: Why the Democrats’ Primaries This Week Are So Critical
This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. I’m joined by Ryan Cooper. He’s a senior editor at The American Prospect, another great liberal magazine you should also be reading. Ryan, thanks for joining me.
Ryan Cooper: Glad to be here.
Bacon: So I want to—you’ve been writing a lot about these primaries. We’ve been covering them a lot, too. We’ve got two more coming up this week in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But I want to go back to Michigan a little bit first. So now that we’re almost a week out, talk about what we saw. Did we learn anything about the results themselves in Michigan?
It looks like we had sort of a common breakdown of, Abdul maybe won the sort of younger vote, maybe the more college-educated vote, the counties around the universities. Stevens won Detroit for sure, some of the more rural areas. Anything surprising in the results, just looking at them from the usual progressive-centrist races we’ve seen?
Cooper: No, it’s more or less what we’ve come to expect from these sort of breakdowns, that the class base of the socialist movement in the United States is, like, downwardly mobile, highly educated people. And they tend to struggle with, like, older minority folks, particularly Black people. And so yeah, that was not too surprising.
However, I will note—oh, I forget his name, the fellow that turfed out the incumbent in the Detroit House District. He’s a DSA member and a Black man, not a—
Bacon: Donovan McKinney?
Cooper: That’s right, that’s the one. Yeah. Sorry, I should have taken some notes for this. But yeah, that, I think you see, like, a more return to form for kind of the natural tendency among Black voters to support fairly left-wing, at least economic policy, being basically very economically disadvantaged on average among all the sort of racial groups in the United States. And it’s not at all impossible to imagine Abdul El-Sayed racking up very large margins in Detroit. I would expect that to happen. But it will remain to be seen if he can do that or not.
Bacon: So the left has been very focused on economic issues, more—is it surprising that they’re not winning the sort of non-college vote, even though, even more than six years ago, the left is very focused on affordability? Is it surprising they’re not winning the voters who might be most concerned with affording things?
Cooper: On one level, yes, but on another level, no. You could certainly say, from a sort of, like, vulgar Marxist perspective, that you would think that the people that would be most directly influenced and helped by lefty policy—whether it’s, like, rent control, or expanding childcare subsidies, that sort of thing—that those people would be attracted to those policies.
But in practice, it’s rather more complicated than that, both as a matter of political mobilization and as a matter of how, at least certain fractions of those demographics tend to approach politics. Not so much as the just, “What can I get for myself?” But it’s more that, I believe that this more moderate Democrat is more likely to be elected, and so I shouldn’t support the lefty radical who might benefit me more personally, but is more likely to lose in the general election.
We saw that tendency with Cuomo. Some of his strongest districts across New York City were working-class Black districts. And this is a very long tendency in the Democratic Party, where it’s toxic in some ways, but it’s also unsurprising in others. It’s like, these folks like Cuomo have built up a connection there, and it’s not something that you can expect to happen automatically because the policy that you decanted out of a book from graduate school would theoretically benefit the poverty rate by the so-and-so percent.
Bacon: So we’re five days out. You’ve seen Kamala Harris endorsed him. Buttigieg was up there with him. Haley seems to have been very positive about him. There’s been the leaked Obama phone call.
So are we at a place where the party is pretty much—we talked about the very divisive primary all running up to it, but are we at a point where the party is pretty much unified around him fairly quickly?
Cooper: Oh, around El-Sayed, certainly. Yeah. I think that in addition to being clearly a progressive candidate, he’s also not a DSA member. He says he’s not a socialist. He’s a capitalist who wants to make capitalism better, you know—
What do you mean by that precisely? But he’s also clearly a very charismatic and talented politician. And you saw that—I think that when Obama was reaching out to Zohran Mamdani, he was like, “This guy is good.” And game recognize game. Obama, whatever else you want to say about him, is an exceptionally talented politician. And he knows when someone else is also talented, and I think El-Sayed is in that bucket.
He’s a guy who’s good, and the Democrats, they absolutely want to win that Senate seat. They want it very badly, and now El-Sayed is their only hope. He more or less must win in order for Democrats to have a good chance of taking the Senate. And whatever else you might disagree with him, if you’re Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg—clearly, we could set that aside at least until the general election is over, and then we can start fighting again.
Bacon: Now, I assume there’s no American Prospect view on this, but increasingly these days, I feel like if you read, let’s say, Jacobin, the Jacobin perspective is that the populist candidate is more electable than the centrist, because they’re going to win more working-class votes on economics. And then the Matt Yglesias view is, obviously the centrist candidate is more electable, because they’re going to win more sort of moderate voters in the middle. And my view, at least, is often that I would’ve said in 2020, Senator Warren, who I preferred, had a sixty percent chance of winning, Biden had a seventy percent chance of winning. In other words, I would’ve voted for Senator Warren—I would not have claimed Warren had a better chance of winning than Biden, who was a straight white guy who we elected, but I would’ve said that Warren could win, too.
And so similarly, I would’ve voted for El-Sayed, not because I think he’s more electable than Stevens, but because I think this is a Democratic year, so I think he can win and he’d be better on policy. But I’m curious where you are on these electability questions. Do you have an ideological or strong view about who is most electable in Michigan, or just in general?
Cooper: Yeah, it’s tricky. It’s something I’ve struggled with for my whole career. I can remember the 2016 primary between Bernie Sanders and Clinton, and practically Hillary Clinton’s entire argument was that, I am most likely to win, and then I know how to get things done. And so I was pretty resistant.
My general attitude is that nobody really knows with any degree of certainty who is more likely to win. It’s a moving target all the time. It’s not like you can reduce these things and say, “It always is like this.” And clearly, like, sometimes this type of candidate is in and this type of candidate is out. If you run the wild-haired radical in, like, 1952, like, that’s clearly not going to cut it. It’s not the type of electorate. But you could run somebody—
Bacon: Nor would the Black person win, 1952.
Cooper: Yeah, exactly. It’d be illegal in half the states.
Bacon: Yeah, exactly right.
Cooper: But by the same token, though, people are obsessed with this question, that it was how the election was decided, that the primary was decided in 2016, and I think again in 2020, it was like, who’s most likely to win? And so all the voters are supposed to put on their amateur pundit hat, and I just think it’s so difficult for people to resist talking their book, as you were saying, that they support this candidate and therefore they will think up reasons why you should vote for them because they’re the most electable candidate.
And I suspect that in the end, it may come down more to the candidate’s individual characteristics rather than what sort of ideological bucket that they fit into. Like, Bernie Sanders is bizarrely popular among moderates, and I think it’s just as much to do with his affect and his history. It’s things you can’t replicate, as someone who isn’t 80-whatever years old with the legacy that he has.
And it’s a tricky thing to suss out one way or the other. But I guess where I come down with it, as regards El-Sayed and Francesca Hong, Hong in Wisconsin, is that, you look at who—our biggest blowout election of the last, this century, 2008. And why was that? We had a very talented and charismatic politician with a very interesting story and a very compelling message, and he was very lucky. He happened to run as the Republican Party was directly responsible for blowing the economy up, and an obviously failing war. So what do we have now? I don’t know if the economy’s blowing up, but it’s certainly not doing great, because Trump keeps hitting the make gas prices go up button, and he’s involved in a clearly failing war. That also makes gas prices go up.
And I would say, for individual voters especially, it’s like, you should vote for the person who reflects your values the most, and then really try to help that person win, rather than putting your amateur pundit hat on and trying to guess what your neighbor’s going to vote for, because even the professional pundits are not particularly good at doing that. And we’ve repeatedly led people astray in saying, Oh, vote for Clinton, she can’t lose to the game show rapist guy. Oh, dang it.
Bacon: But it’s obviously true that Thanksgiving is popular, so we’re going to move to Francesca now and talk about whether you—yeah, I know she’s walked that back, this idea that you should cancel Thanksgiving. I’m referring to this tweet she had in 2021. So I’ve seen a lot of people I respect being, like, distinguishing between El-Sayed, who they feel like is a very talented politician, game recognizes game, and Hong, who they feel like is not as strong and maybe should be viewed differently.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Bernie and AOC have gone out of their way in a certain way not to endorse her, with excuses that don’t make a lot of sense. And so what do you make of her in Wisconsin, where the governor has really leaned into the, she cannot win idea? I’ve not enjoyed watching the last few weeks, because if nothing else, I think they’re making it harder for her to win by signaling she’s a bad candidate while she’s leading by 25 points. But what do you make of her campaign right now?
Cooper: Yeah. The big difference there is that she’s younger than El-Sayed, and she hasn’t been in the game for as long. El-Sayed, he ran for governor in 2018, if I recall correctly, and lost. I think that was a very useful experience for him to have. I guess these Democratic Socialists of America types, you need to, I think, in this day and age, come up with a little bit better of a wrap about your inevitable backlog of incredibly weird sounding tweets. That’s probably true. They’ve all got them. I’ve got them, I’m sure. I deleted my Twitter years ago, but you could probably find them if you were good enough friends with Elon Musk, at least.
And if you’re in leftist politics at all, socialist dorm room discussions or people talking about grad school debates, that often produce these very wacky takes—yeah, abolish Thanksgiving, abolish bedtime. And you need to, I think, develop a—in my view, the best approach would just be, like, if you actually have come around on this issue, which, getting rid of Thanksgiving, that is a stupid idea, that is not something a serious politician should be saying—you just say, Look, no, I don’t believe that anymore. That was just part of a sort of abstract discussion we were having, and let’s talk about something that actually matters. And not try to squirm around it, which is what I’ve seen Hong doing.
Bacon: Her first time answering you, she squirmed. I’m guessing she’s conscious of the fact that, like, some Native American groups think—there is some discourse about Thanksgiving celebrating colonialism and whatever else. I’m guessing she’s conscious of that, but I get your point.
Cooper: Yeah, that’s correct. It is a problematic holiday from many sort of perspectives. But as a politician, it’s like—
Bacon: As a politician—
Cooper: —a very extreme sounding position to take, for practically no benefit.
Cooper: —serious consequences. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It’s a completely ridiculous thing to be talking about. But the other thing I’d add about that, though, is that centrists should be a lot more careful about making these arguments during the primary. It’s not like the left has clean hands either. You saw Haley Stevens going all in on the idea that—what was it—that El-Sayed wants to blame the Jewish community for all of his problems. These sort of, like, toxic primary dynamics can easily be weaponized by Republicans in the primary. And especially—it’s one thing, maybe you’re having a tough primary fight, it’s one-on-one in Michigan, but the centrists in Wisconsin, they can’t even, how, how you say, scoop their poops in a group to unite around a single candidate.
If you can’t run a decent political campaign, if you can’t do the ordinary blocking and tackling of raising money for one candidate and going out and canvassing and doing all the normal politician stuff people have been doing since the Athenian democracy 2,000 years ago, then you should really cool it with the attacks. The leftists can’t win. It’s like, you’re not winning yourself, almost on purpose, right now. And so, like, before you start with that, let me see you put together a decent campaign yourself in a primary, which should be easier to win than a general.
Bacon: Minnesota’s interesting, because it appears one thing that I’m not paying attention to is, like, the money difference is real here. And I’m wondering if what’s actually happening in these primaries is, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Angie Craig in Minnesota, they have lots of money. They’re not running ads saying, I am the centrist candidate. ICE is good. The police is good. Israel is good. Centrism is good. They are running ads saying, ICE is bad. I will fight ICE, but I have more money. And I wonder if that’s really what we’re not understanding, is, like, the actual target of a lot of what they’re doing is not the centrist voter as much as the voter who’s not paying that much attention.
So if one candidate is flooding the airwaves saying, I hate ICE, and the other candidate actually abolishes ICE but I never see their ads, I may not notice the difference. It appears that Angie Craig may win this race just because she is outspending Flanagan, and Flanagan’s more left-wing positions may not be that well known. As I look to today’s race, I think Craig might win while pretending to be liberal. That’s what I think is going on there.
Cooper: Yeah, it’s certainly possible. I haven’t checked any recent polls, if any have even been done. We certainly saw this dynamic play out unsuccessfully in the case of Michigan, where it was, what, almost $70 million in outside expenditures on behalf of—
Bacon: And those ads from AIPAC were not Israel is good, they were Haley Stevens is liberal, really. Yes.
Cooper: Yeah. I did an article in Zeteo being like, if, as an organization defending Jewish rights and the Jewish state of Israel, it seems a little unwise to be running explicitly dishonest advertising about—that’s just obscuring your actual motivations in an attempt to influence an election in the United States. But regardless, it didn’t work in Michigan. El-Sayed did win, but it was close, and I think that money told a lot because these are not particularly high turnout elections.
And this is an area where money—it’s like, the further down the scale of elections you go, the more the marginal dollar matters, down for running for, like, city council in a small town or something, where, like, $1,000 could potentially alter the election.
Bacon: And in a primary, the partisan difference doesn’t matter as much, so the choice isn’t obvious. They’re voting among Democrats, they don’t know what’s going on, so an ad can make a big difference.
Cooper: Yeah, absolutely. And particularly when you have just a huge episode in intentional dishonesty, where you’re trying to say that, Oh, no, this doesn’t have—Israel? Where’s that? No, we’re talking about the United Democratic Majority, or the United Majority for Democrats. And the one thing that—I haven’t been looking at the fundraising numbers in Minnesota recently, but the one thing that El-Sayed had, despite being radically outspent, was that he had enough to get out there.
He could run a serious campaign. He could get some ads—not, it was, like, a 12-to-1 disadvantage, but he wasn’t just totally buried. And I think that having enough to clear that bar makes a big difference, and I’m not sure if Flanagan has that level of resources.
Bacon: And I think this is the tricky thing about the Hasan Piker discussion, is that one reason you want Hasan Piker helping you in a primary is that it helps you raise money. You get the sort of, like, these, the Bernie, AOC, the national surrogates help you. I’m not sure El-Sayed can say, on balance, despite Hasan Piker’s controversial comments, I want him to come because he helps me raise money. He can’t say that out loud, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually what’s going on.
Cooper: No, that is 100 percent what’s going on. Hasan—who I like to check in with from time to time, just because he is, like, the one guy on the left more or less that we have who is even in the same galaxy as, like, Joe Rogan. He has a lot of followers. They have some money. They will donate to your campaign. They will go and door knock for you, if they’re, if you sell them on your arguments.
And it’s why they—nobody would play with someone like Hasan with kid gloves, as they do, if he didn’t have actual power. And that’s just what it is. I think it was AOC saying this the other day, that it’s like, you wanted a Joe Rogan on the left, there he sits. And it’s like, that’s for good and bad purposes. What are you going to do about it?
Bacon: Speaking of one congresswoman from New York—what did you make of the—she was asked about Hong on TV, and she distanced herself from Hong, and then said Woke 1 was crazy, and explained away both AOC and Hong’s comments about policing and so on, and then veered away from there. What’d you make of Woke 1 was crazy?
Cooper: It’s hard to say without being able to sit her down and dig out what she means by that precisely.
Bacon: But I assume she wants the vagueness as a feature, right?
Cooper: Yeah. Because I think you can certainly say that certain aspects of Woke 1 were crazy. People did go way over the line with harassing random people on Twitter. You remember, very towards the beginning of this, there was one of a lady who had made an off-color comment before getting on a plane. “Has Justine landed yet?” Justine Sacco, I want to say.
Bacon: Yeah, I remember this. OK. Anyway.
Cooper: This was in, like, 2015, but it was one of these iterations where the lady had said something that sounded kind of racist, even though it wasn’t actually. It was, like, a clumsy attempt to sound not racist, and the internet just teamed up to ruin this lady’s life. They got her fired from her job and stuff. She later recovered and found a new job and so on, but it was, like, that is crazy. And that stuff did happen on occasion.
I think you can also say that the backlash to Woke 1, as we may say, was entirely motivated by gutter racism, and an almost pathological desire on the part of the boss class to discipline their employees once more. That they were absolutely furious at the idea that employees could have any agency through unions, or sit-outs, or demand things happen, to be less racist in the workplace or less sexist, especially MeToo.
Bacon: Yeah. I think the backlash from the right is obvious, like, banning anybody even talking about race, with a lot of backlash from the bosses, many of whom voted for Biden, is my guess. But you have to come to work even though you have no COVID—like, all that sort of return to work and stuff was the bosses’ revenge, right?
Cooper: Oh, absolutely. And how woke was tied up with MeToo.
I think it’s definitely the case that large swaths of the management and executive class in this country, they view their young female employees as basically fair game, and the idea that they could get in trouble, like someone like Harvey Weinstein could go down for decades of—
Bacon: Charlie Rose being more representative of the people we’re talking about, because he’s more secure of them, is my guess.
Cooper: Yeah, exactly. Or Louis C.K. There’s dozens of them. I think that just absolutely drove that particular group of people crazy. And that’s the backlash to Woke 1. But the natural setup to the formulation Woke 1 is, what is Woke 2?
Because I think my biggest criticism of the first iteration of woke is that it wasn’t really hooked up to any sort of theory of power or achievement. That it was very much, like, shaming people on social media, and not, “How do we conquer the state and set up a regulatory apparatus that can actually achieve justice for the people?” And that’s not entirely the fault of folks who are just, like, sort of putting their critiques out there and whatnot, but, like, clearly I think we could do better, and we’re going to need to do better.
Bacon: So if I was going to take this really seriously, I’d say the bad version of Woke 1, I think, is the canceling people for a reason. But the sort of, we want to—let’s use the polite term—we want to take police funds from the police and reallocate them to social services. That was, like, that’s the more polite way to say defund. And, or Invest, divest was a term that I thought would’ve been more helpful to say.
So I think that even that idea was not well theorized, of how we’re going to do it. My guess is, like, Zohran Mamdani would be for that, I think, if he knew how to do it in New York. But I think what Woke 2.0 has become is this sort of more affordability, economic policy focus, more focused on economics, less on policing, racism, any issue like that, that you can’t sell well. And I think that’s probably good if the left is trying to win power, bad if you’re trying to take on policing, racism, immigration, what I would call the hard issues, the sort of issues that offend white people. I don’t know how to say this any other way.
That’s where my concern is, like, Woke 2.0 seems to me to be, like, affordability, Zohran politics, which gets you some places, but not everywhere. Is that wrong?
Cooper: Yeah, that’s definitely the bumper sticker slogan, a little bit of a tactical retreat from the police reform stuff. It is the encapsulation of it, both, that yeah, Woke 1 had not a great sales pitch, and I think a basically impractical approach to police reform.
You had so much obsessive talk about police abolition. Can you get rid of the police? And I think that the main theorists of the movement, who will say, Yes, we can do without the police, I think that is just not true. If you’re a big government—
Bacon: And they were not people who, like, work day-to-day in—they’re not, like, city council members. No. They’re, like, academics, so they’re not doing the work anyway.
Cooper: Yeah, they’re doing activism and stuff like that, but they’re not involved in serious contests for power. And despite—these people have done a lot of good work in many cases—I think, like, the fundamental question of politics, as it’s gone back probably to, like, pre-Homo sapiens level, you can watch monkeys doing this in the jungle: who gets the resources?
Bacon: Yes.
Cooper: And that always involves, at bottom, the potential or the reality of coercion. I don’t think there’s going to ever be a way around that permanently. Maybe Star Trek utopia in the far future, everyone’s got replicators, there’s no scarcity of anything, everyone can have whatever they want.
But in the real world, for the time being and the foreseeable future, we need—what I would say is establish the police, because the other side of the coin is that we have this rampant problem of police brutality and corruption that has not gone anywhere. In fact, it’s gotten worse in a lot of ways.
Bacon: And I would say we have police forces that are currently not accountable to the mayor, like the mayor of Boston, the mayor of New York. They don’t feel like they can control the—that’s what I want, accountable police, or, like, police under civilian control would be what I really favor.
Cooper: Yeah. They’re not police. They’re this weird combination—it varies from city to city, but it’s, like, a lawless paramilitary, or an actual criminal conspiracy. There are just straight up gangsters in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, with tattoos and—
Bacon: Sheriffs are worse than police in many cases, yes.
Cooper: And we’ve never really had a proper, like, European style or, you know, Nordic style police force that is strictly accountable to the civilian leadership, with proper disciplinary procedures and all that sort of thing. And that’s something that’s a lot more real. It’s something you can point to. That’s what I love about Nordic stuff. You’re like, No, they’re doing it right over there. We just got to copy them, and maybe somehow get rid of 300 million guns.
Bacon: That’s the hard—yeah, that part is harder too, because our forces will have to have guns and mili—yeah. OK, that’s helpful to think about. So when she said that—so I took that comment, and her talk about freezing her eggs, which we’re not going to talk too long about with two men here—but I take it that she probably is further down the line running for president than I maybe thought. Or, what do you make of her running for president?
Cooper: Of all the potential candidates that I could think of at the moment, I would be most pleased to see her as president. She’s the person that I trust the most, and when I see her trying to back away from Woke 1 a little bit, I’m willing to grant her quite a lot of rope to make a maybe arguably tendentious point, because I trust that she’s trying to do it in the service of, like, shoring up her political bona fides.
And yeah, it’s one of those things where you come back to, “Oh, isn’t it a risk? She’s so young. We’ve tried a woman twice and it didn’t work.” But, like, I think that there’s no way around it. The one time that I remember the whole Democratic Party, like, basically falling in love with a candidate was Barack Obama in 2008, the time we blew him out. And I think that enthusiasm and earnest support, full-throated endorsements and all that, matters a lot more than—or it can get you over the line—that there’s a value in enthusiasm and grassroots real energy that can’t be captured in, what do polls say about the popularity of this particular stance?
Because this is about as much about, like, storytelling and how people’s feeling about the future of the country and for their children and so on and so forth. And so I think she’s probably going to run, and at this point, she would be my candidate above any potential Jon Ossoff. He seems OK. He wouldn’t—
Bacon: I was going to say that, because I think as a left-of-center writer, you’re obligated to have written a Jon Ossoff for president piece. I did mine in February, just to have done my duty as a citizen. Two things about Jon Ossoff. One is, I read a piece by Greg Bluestein—he’s the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, politics guy, he’s kind of the Chuck Todd of Georgia politics, for lack of a better way to say that. Anyway, he wrote a piece saying Warnock is much more interested in running, which I didn’t know, and that was interesting to me.
And the second thing is, Ossoff feels a little bit Rubio ‘16, DeSantis ‘24, Harris—if every journalist thinks you’re a good candidate, you should not run. As a—the Obama exception, but usually that means, we pointed it out, that you look like the perfect—you hit all our check marks—usually means you’re going to flop. That’s what I would tell him. If I saw him, I’d tell him, like, “Be careful, we are bad at this.”
Cooper: Yeah, that’s the problem with the pundit profession, is you could as well predict by just flipping a coin, or hiring a turtle to eat different pieces of lettuce with people’s pictures on it, and see what’s going to happen. No, I don’t have particular feelings about Ossoff one way or the other. I think he’s grown a lot since he first came onto the scene in, what was it, 2018, thereabouts?
Bacon: He literally, like, looks much older. And going from 33 to whatever, maybe 42 or whatever it is, that is a big growth in age.
Cooper: Yeah. Start losing his hair soon, with any luck. No, I like Warnock too. I think they’re both all right. But when it comes down to me, when I’m basically, like, throwing up my hands at the idea of who’s more electable, as long as you’re talking about, like, credible candidates with a national profile—especially AOC, who’s pretty much the best fundraiser the left has ever had aside from Bernie, and who will inherit the whole Bernie machine if she runs—then we can’t just, we got to think a couple of steps down the road.
Because, like, in 2020 we elected Joe Biden, and it was like, you got this problem, you got this problem called Donald Trump, and somebody needs to do something about it. You need to enforce the law against this bunch of gangsters, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it, and he couldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court either, which is related. Centrally involved. They kept him out of prison, probably.
And he had this blue ribbon commission, and it was like, what do you expect? You elected a sort of moderate guy who’d been in the Senate for three hundred years. And he behaved like a guy with Senate brain. He can’t stomach the radical reforms necessary to unpack the Supreme Court. And so I think that if we just do a retread of that again, there’s really not that much point.
I guess you just delay the inevitable reckoning for the president for life, JD Vance or whatever. But we need someone with some steel in their spine, and that’s what I would be looking for almost more than policy. I think AOC has it. I’m not sure if Jon Ossoff has it. Maybe he does, but I’d like to see someone with some iron.
Bacon: It’s interesting you framed it that way, because I guess part of what I’m thinking about is a little bit about—there’s the left, or there’s the progressive policies, which I’m sure AOC will be for, and Ro Khanna will be for, and the other people probably won’t be for, like the Medicare for All, Medicare for more people, wealth tax, whatever that kind of stuff. OK, fine.
There’s a second group of reforms that is, like, we need to have proportional representation, or add some Supreme Court justices, or add states, or get rid of the filibuster, and that kind of stuff is not big government, small government, but actual reformist stuff. And I’m not sure Buttigieg has to be against that stuff, or Harris has to be against—like, to me, is the question—is a Democratic trifecta about big Bernie economic policy? Because then you only have two candidates who are going to do that. Or is it about sort of big government reform, save democracy, and then—I’m not totally sure Josh Shapiro has to be—I’m not for Josh Shapiro, but I’m not sure he has to be against that either.
Because Biden was too cautious in both ways, and in some ways more cautious on the sort of government-fixing stuff you’re talking about than the economic policy stuff. And to me, the urgency is the sort of fixing-the-government stuff as much as the policy stuff, and that’s where I’m more open to somebody. Can Jon Ossoff be pretty radical on government reform? Maybe, I don’t know. Caution on economics doesn’t necessarily mean caution on the reform stuff, I don’t think.
Cooper: No, they’re not logically tied together at all. If you’re just, like, a sort of theorist of contemporary, like, political institutions, comparative dynamics between different countries, you look at the United States system that we’ve developed, which bears very little resemblance to the Constitution as written. The filibuster’s not in there. Judicial review’s not in there, not explicitly. And you’re like, This, these are terrible—what are you doing? You got millions of people with no representation in the Congress. What is that?
Bacon: You don’t have to be a socialist to think that. This is not a socialist view, that it doesn’t work.
Cooper: No, it’s literally on the revolutionary slogan on the license plates in Washington, DC, “No taxation without representation.” As true now as it was in 1776. But I would prioritize, to your point, institutional reform over policy reform, because not only is institutional reform more important, but you’re not going to get any policy reform unless you do the institutional reform first.
We saw this with Biden. People told him. I told him. I wrote a column being like, “You have to reform the Supreme Court, or they’re going to strike down all your stuff.” They didn’t strike down all of it, but they struck down a lot of it. They hamstrung everything he tried to do through the executive action by just making up these nonsense rationales. And I don’t know if the center seemingly can’t quite, like, grok, for lack of a better word, the monstrosity of a decision like Trump versus the United States, which basically just threw the entire Constitution out.
The Constitution is not in operation at present. And, like, those people have, as far as I’m concerned, written themselves out of any sort of concern for their legitimacy, that any reform whatsoever that would reduce their power and return the United States more to a proper rule of law nation would be completely unobjectionable.
And that’s the thing that I’m looking for from any candidate, whether it’s AOC or Jon Ossoff. Will prioritize getting rid of—the filibuster, it’s been 20 years of this just sandbag around our necks, and you look at it like, this is totally unjustifiable, what you’re doing. It clogs up the entire workings of Congress, and it means that for ordinary business, people representing states that cover 11 percent of the population can block anything. What are we doing here? What are we doing? This is an embarrassment of institutional design, and it’s got to change. It’s got to change.
Bacon: So last thing. We’re talking about institutional reform, we’re talking about presidential, but is it possible the 50th senator is the Alaska woman, and therefore nothing can happen? These people are not radicals, right? Are we paying too much attention to the presidential nominee, who might be open to these ideas, and not enough to the—we’re not going to have exactly Joe Manchin and Sinema, but are there going to be different versions of those that we should be thinking more about right now?
Cooper: It’s certainly a possibility, and that’s why I would support Abdul El-Sayed. He seemed to have, again, the stomach necessary, where it is. You could end up—this wasn’t clear beforehand, but you got somebody like John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania, my senator. Since his stroke, he’s just not the same person.
And yeah, it’s how I view any politician. You got to be behind this sort of stuff, because we need people in all levels of the institution. But I do think the presidential support means a lot, because the president sets the direction for the party, and whether or not they’re winning with certain arguments is going to influence how the senators behave.
But it’s absolutely true, the Senate, it really is, it’s like the rotten boroughs of the pre-1832 Great Britain, where you’d have a constituency with two people in it. And it’s like that—I think it’s William Pitt the Younger had that one for a while, because the rest of it had literally fallen into the ocean over the hundreds of years. Yeah, that’s Wyoming right there. And but nevertheless, it’s like, this is what we have to go with.
And I think that it’s not impossible for me to imagine a sort of, like, fairly thorough restructuring of American government. The way that the Supreme Court in particular has bent over backwards to just undermine Democratic presidents doing the most simple stuff, trying to do a student loan forgiveness program that is clearly in line with precedent and the text of the law—”No, you can’t do that.” And then bailing Trump out from being prosecuted for trying to overthrow the government.
Bacon: And destroying public education in a day, yeah.
Cooper: Comically corrupt. And the making a hash of everything that the Founding Fathers of this country at least pretended to espouse.
And I think you end up with a sort of a crisis point, potentially. And we saw a lot of people like that in the 1861 or so, when it was like, you get pushed into a corner where it’s like, do you want to live in government of the people, by the people, for the people, or not? Do you want to just live in the John Roberts dictatorship, where he says, OK, Trump’s a king, and then all the Democrats just curl into a ball and say, All right? Doesn’t sound good to me. Not very moderate, certainly.
Bacon: And we’ll end on John Roberts’ dictatorship, sadly. Ryan, tell everybody where they can find your work.
Cooper: Ah, prospect.org. I also have a podcast. Everyone’s got to have a podcast. Leftanchor.com, you can find it there. We’ve actually had Abdul El-Sayed on a couple of times.
Bacon: Yeah, I’ll listen.
Cooper: Years ago.
Bacon: Oh, years ago, before he ran, or—
Cooper: Yeah. I’m trying to get him to come on now. I don’t think he’s going to, but maybe, we’ll see. We’ll see.
Bacon: He’s doing the go everywhere strategy, although he’s got your vote already, is the issue, I think. Good to see you. Thank you.
Cooper: OK. Bye-bye.
Bacon: Bye.
Reflecting pool lies
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Why the Democrats’ Final Primaries This Week Are So Critical
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
The primaries in Wisconsin and Minnesota are the latest contests between more centrists and more progressive Democrats. In the latest edition of Right Now, Ryan Cooper, a senior editor at The American Prospect, discusses those races and the recent primary in Michigan. Cooper says that progressives still have work to do with black Democrats and other groups who are more trusting of the Democratic Party. He also discusses the presidential prospects of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jon Ossoff.
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Trump’s Mindless Rollback of Offshore Wind Has Screwed Over Thousands of Workers
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in Massachusetts, he immediately relished the consistency of the work, the good pay, and the novelty of laboring at sea.
“I thought it was the best thing in the world,” he said.
In his first eight weeks working offshore, Mullin made more money than he had saved in the previous five years.
But the industry was on shaky ground. Mullin had his bags packed for five weeks offshore with Empire Wind in New York when President Donald Trump’s stop-work order last year stranded him at home in Boston. Trump—who had railed against the industry in his 2024 election campaign—halted all future permitting last year and canceled 12 offshore wind leases this spring and summer.
Thousands of workers like Mullin who were promised steady, well-paying careers in offshore wind now find themselves racing to secure the few positions left or returning to their prior work. Meanwhile, the supply chain that emerged to support offshore development has been left adrift, including in towns in need of a promised economic boost.
“I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction.”
Those are less-discussed consequences of the political turmoil besetting the domestic industry, said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at Dartmouth College studying offshore wind. “All of the promises of economic development that offshore wind was supposed to help support have evaporated,” Wilson said.
For Mullin, the change was shocking.
“All of a sudden, the federal government is concerned with my work, and there’s nothing I can do to change how they view it,” Mullin said. “Now there are things completely outside of my control, changing how I make a living.”
Trump has long scorned offshore wind, calling the 2012 project he unsuccessfully opposed near one of his Scottish golf courses “disgusting and inappropriate.” His administration, which has inaccurately described renewables as costly and unreliable as it tries to block them in favor of climate-altering fossil fuels, said his offshore wind policies are good for the economy and workers.
“President Trump has delivered on his popular promise to reverse the Left’s costly Green New Scam to lower prices for families and businesses and strengthen our country’s energy security,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “By prioritizing the production of reliable, affordable, and secure energy sources, the President has restored US energy dominance—creating thousands of good-paying energy jobs across the country.”
Tim Sullivan, who was CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority until December, said he can’t comprehend the White House’s logic.
“It’s the strangest thing: I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction, particularly elected officials,” he said.
As a pile driver, a specialized structural laborer essential to offshore wind projects, Mullin lived and worked on a ship five weeks at a time, followed by five weeks at home with his family. It was a schedule that suited him well.
Mullin joined offshore wind projects across Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. His employer, an international contractor, even brought him and other members of his union across the Atlantic for a wind project off the coast of Scotland.
Now, Mullin is back to the same type of onshore construction work he did four years ago, before he started with wind. “The writing was on the wall that this idea that I’m going to go to the same ship, five weeks on, five weeks off, steady—that just isn’t the reality anymore,” Mullin said.
Joshua Grigsby, 42, took his son to Rio de Janeiro, Disney World, and SeaWorld. Natalie MacDonald, 26, stopped living paycheck to paycheck. Others bought homes and started families.
Inside Climate News spoke with over a dozen workers and union leaders who said the financial opportunities from the nascent US offshore wind industry had been unparalleled. They saw long-term careers ahead of them. They feel that opportunity slipping through their fingers.
Anthony Hibbard was on one of the first boats that carried ironworkers to Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts. What he found was “financial freedom,” he said, and he worked his way up to become a foreman on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.
After the Trump administration’s moves to scuttle the industry, Hibbard returned to local, onshore jobs in Portland, Maine, where he earns just one-fifth of what he did offshore.
“I make enough to get by, but I like to be smart with my money, and I don’t have the scope to continue being smart with it,” Hibbard said. “It’s definitely—you can feel the difference, that’s for sure.”
At the time Trump was elected, the US was projected to build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. By the end of his first year back in office, experts had reduced the estimate to 6 gigawatts.
The loss of offshore wind has had financial consequences for many union workers. While many were paid the same per hour as jobs they could find onshore, they could work more than double the hours, and the company covered many living expenses. Grigsby made double to triple what he did onshore.
When Zaheer Razi, 28, joined the Piledrivers Local 56 union as a commercial diver, he transitioned into offshore wind as soon as he could. The logic was that it could be the anchor for people’s careers, he said—union leaders told workers to “set your roots down,” expecting over a decade of steady work.
He’s still working on Revolution Wind near Rhode Island, but he knows it won’t last.
“I’m probably one of the few guys that’s probably going to be working till mid-August, I believe, and then it’s really going to be silent for the next two or three years,” Razi said. “It is very frustrating, but it’s out of our control. Nobody could have really predicted it, but at this point, we’re just riding it out for what we can.”
Razi’s project is one of the five major US wind farms that appear to remain on track despite the political backlash. But they are nearing completion and the permitting pipeline is all but blocked, meaning construction jobs will soon evaporate, according to multiple experts and union leaders.
Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a US policy think tank, attributed the lack of employment prospects to the political uncertainty that has stymied investor interest.
“We’ve trained them, we’ve given them this great experience, they’re building their futures for their families, and now they have no projects to work on,” Ohleth said of the offshore wind labor force, “and that’s because of the lack of market confidence.”
At the time of Trump’s election, the market research firm BloombergNEF forecast that the United States would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, enough electricity to power 13 million homes. By the end of last year, the firm had downgraded that prediction to just 6 gigawatts, according to Harrison Sholler, a wind analyst at BNEF.
For Garrison Biel, an offshore wind diver, the industry’s decline has meant there are close to no employment opportunities left. “They’re more gigs than jobs,” Biel said. “They’re like short hitches, trying to wrap things up, tidy everything up. So I know people that are still working, but it’s not like how it was the first couple of years when it started, where that’s all you needed to do.”
He switched back to commercial diving around eight months ago because “what was available left offshore was slim pickings,” he added.
Biel said the offshore wind industry was supposed to be reliable, with guaranteed time off to make up for the long periods away from home and the weeklong, 12-hour-per-day shifts.
Workers and officials discuss the Trump administration’s decision to stop construction on Revolution Wind at State Pier in New London, Connecticut on August 25, 2025.Tyler Russell/Connecticut Public via Getty
“Now, everybody that’s doing it, they get off the boat after working seven-twelves for a couple of weeks and they go right back to work, because they don’t know if they’re ever going to go back out on a boat again,” he said.
Grigsby was able to buy a house with his money from offshore wind. His union’s business manager, John Dunderdale, said at least a dozen other members of Piledrivers Local 56 did the same.
When these projects disappear, “you’re taking away their means of bringing back into the community,” Dunderdale said.
“Now you have a member sitting home, collecting unemployment, because there’s no work,” he added.
Benjamin Hawkins, who lives in Whitman, Massachusetts, said he made enough to upgrade his parents’ house and enjoy a new degree of “leverage” over his life.
“It’s heartbreaking, because you wonder about what’s going to happen in the future with your money,” Hawkins said.
He added: “Offshore wind was the reason I could improve that life, so to have the president affect my life, just as an average American—it was not on my bingo card.”
Offshore wind first began edging into the US energy market in 2011, decades after it had taken off in Europe. An Obama administration study that year predicted that a vibrant offshore wind industry could help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs while investing in infrastructure and creating “thousands of construction and operational jobs.”
The first US offshore wind farm, Block Island, came online near Rhode Island in 2016, and states began offering financial incentives to drive development. The Biden administration made offshore wind a central priority in 2021, and from there, state and federal agencies geared up for a boom. The federal government sold leases to major international energy companies that began to see the US as an attractive market, centered in the Northeast, Virginia, and California.
Construction and permitting began in force not long before Trump returned to office with a promise to kill offshore wind. “That’s like somebody working on skyscrapers, and then somebody saying, ‘We’re not allowed to build any skyscrapers,’” Biel said. “It’s just a kind of crazy thing.”
No comprehensive or exact estimate of offshore wind-related jobs exists, but New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority estimated in 2022 that a typical project creates around 1,000 construction jobs per year and 100 lifetime operational jobs.
Dunderdale said shutting down any project at that size and scale is a “huge hit,” both for the workers and their local economies.
“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work.”
Central to the fledgling domestic industry was the growth of training and certification programs, primarily through community colleges and unions.
Millwrights Local 1121, which operates across New England, met with developers in 2021 to start offshore wind job training, which would cost $10,000 to $20,000 per person. It was worth it, said the union’s vice president and business manager, Andy Benedetto, because they had heard there would be “years’ and years’ worth of work.”
“We invested millions of dollars in training, more or less, and lots of hours went into putting all this together, and now that work is dried up for the foreseeable future,” Benedetto said. “We hope not too long, but we built this whole workforce, and we sold this dream to our members that if they get involved and get the training and go on this first project, then they’re going to carry over for the next 10 years.”
His union wasn’t alone. Public and private investments poured in to develop the new workforce. New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts led the Northeast with millions of dollars in grants to training and research programs.
Ironworkers Local 7, which operates across the Northeast, received $300,000 from Massachusetts in 2022 “to be ready for when the work comes,” said Grant Provost, the union’s Maine business agent. “And the work never really came.”
Dunderdale helped build the only US-based school with heavy-lift training for Piledrivers Local 56. In total, offshore wind training cost the union about $30,000 per person, which he said was “an investment in the member.”
Esther Rosario, executive director of the labor coalition Climate Jobs New York, said unions that spent years preparing for the offshore wind economy have to reassess their plans.
“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work,” Rosario said. “You can’t apprentice somebody into a job that doesn’t exist.”
Offshore wind was billed as a boon not just for the building trades but for the entire economy. Manufacturing would move to the United States and locals would fill those jobs. For port cities like Massachusetts’ Salem and New Bedford, or New Jersey’s Paulsboro, the loss has threatened years of expected economic progress.
In August 2025, Trump canceled a $34 million grant to build an offshore wind terminal in Salem, which Frank Callahan Jr., president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions, said at the time put 800 construction workers out of a job.
“It means fewer jobs, fewer career opportunities,” Callahan said in a recent interview. As an example of this loss, he pointed to Prysmian Group, an Italian manufacturer, abandoning plans in January 2025 for an offshore wind cable plant near New Bedford.
At one point, Salem County, New Jersey—one of the state’s poorest counties—was poised to gain 1,500 new jobs for its population of 65,000.
“That’s a huge inflection point in that county’s economy that at this point is hard to see materializing any time soon,” said Sullivan, the former New Jersey official.
The thousands of offshore wind workers aren’t all suddenly unemployed. Most did some trade work before, and unions are used to moving members onto different projects when conditions shift.
Still, Provost, the Ironworkers business agent, said offshore wind is a huge dent in unions’ portfolio of opportunities.
“If we’re not building offshore wind, and we’re not building jobs like that, you got to get in on university- and state-funded projects, and that doesn’t keep everybody busy,” Provost said. “We’ve got a massive amount of unemployed people in Local 7 right now.”
The millwrights “did a good job, and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”
And just because workers can transition doesn’t mean they want to. If he had a choice, Hawkins said, “I’d never work on land again.”
In addition to the financial opportunity, Razi said offshore wind was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “We were meeting people from all over Europe, all over the world, and it was just a great environment to learn as somebody being in their mid-20s,” said Razi, who is finishing up an offshore diving job.
Living and working together consistently for weeks on end, crews became good friends, even vacationing together and learning each other’s languages. Hawkins joked that every rigger knew how to curse in at least three languages.
“It’s like being at the UN,” he said.
Benedetto said the millwrights he represents are eager to return to offshore wind, but they feel burned by political headwinds turning against them.
“They did a good job,” he said, “and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”
Last November, Mullin’s building in Boston caught on fire, and he lost everything he owned. Six weeks later, he said, he was able to buy a condo near the city. “That would not have been possible without offshore wind,” he said.
Mullin said he wishes others, especially young people entering the trades for the first time, could have the opportunity he did.
“It’s just too bad because they were good jobs and people were happy with them,” he said. “And it really was just a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”
A Tech Prophet Finally Gets Her Second Coming
The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.
Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.
“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”
Cyberselfish “contains a warning that was largely ignored.”
Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.”
Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 issue below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.”
“No sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys,” Borsook, now 72, told me on a recent video call, reflecting on the central question that animated the essay. “So why are they so hostile to it?”
On the strength of that Mother Jones piece, Borsook was able to get a book deal—and that, she will tell you candidly, is when her troubles began. The manuscript was meant for Wired’s publishing imprint, but the deal fell through. The work was rejected by a second publisher after they’d bought it and paid her advance. “They killed the book,” Borsook says. “They said it didn’t have sufficient literary quality and wanted all their money back.” She was forced to repay them with money from Public Affairs, the publisher that eventually brought it to market. “I ended up being $65,000 in debt,” she says.
The original and 2026 versions of CyberselfishZando
While Cyberselfish made a splash upon its release and earned critical acclaim, its stridency and withering thesis also proved hard for some to swallow. It got a nuanced and tough review at Salon by a former Wired editor, Brad Wieners, who argued that some of its critiques of tech, and of the magazine where they both had worked, were outdated. “Borsook has us spend too much time coloring in a map of yesterday that does not correspond to today’s territory,” he wrote. Even a friend of Borsook’s, Elizabeth Weise, noted in her own review for Time that the book could be exhausting. “She is a ranter, (many friends suggested that Cyberselfish should just be called ‘Rant’),” Weise wrote, “who talks a mile a minute in sentences so encrusted with obscure cultural references that it’s often necessary to interrupt and ask for footnotes.”
Her critics could not dispute her brilliance. But as Borsook sees it, the book was both the height of her public profile and also the end of her professional life. “I cannot complain about the media arc,” she says. But, she adds, “It didn’t turn into anything and then I was never able to get anything published ever again, on tech or not-tech. A magazine article or a book. It was like some curse had been laid down on me. It was the weirdest damn thing.”
Financially, things got even worse. Eventually, she was evicted and lost almost everything she owned when she could no longer make payments on her storage unit. For several years, she only got by through free rent as a live-in host at an Airbnb owned by friends. Borsook has a permanent moderate traumatic brain injury from being shot, as she has put it, “accidentally on purpose” in the head as a teenager by a friend. While doing research for My Life as a Ghost, a 2013 performance and art installation about the incident, clinicians told Borsook, who had always believed her injury was mild, that it was better classified as moderate. “It was sort of a shock,” she explained to me by email, “and one of those moments telling me how much I didn’t want to identity as/admit to being disabled.”
Borsook also has severe chemical and scent sensitivities which date to childhood, but that she says doctors told her were probably worsened by the TBI. These factors make it difficult to find a suitable place to live, especially in housing-strapped Santa Cruz, where she’s long been based, or to work traditional office jobs; today, one of the things keeping her afloat is an ongoing GoFundMe a friend launched in 2024.
“I felt ashamed for most of the last 25 years,” she says. The book, she came to believe, “was bad and I was ashamed. That’s how I walked around.”
Paulina Borsook speaks during a panel at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in 2000.John Anderson/Getty
But decades later, after this cascade of misfortunes and a deeply internalized if unearned sense of chagrin, something changed. Through a series of events—which Borsook hastens to point out she had nothing to do with—the curse was at least partly lifted. In the last year, Cyberselfish received a new and respectful round of attention, helped along by the advocacy of fellow journalist and Nerd Reich author Gil Duran, who was disturbed and angry by Borsook’s erasure from tech history. In September 2025, he wrote a viral Bluesky post about what he termed a “mush-brained” Wired essay about selfishness in Silicon Valley that entirely ignored Borsook. The next month, Duran interviewed Borsook on his podcast.
The book’s new moment also has a lot to do with, frankly, how spooky some of the predictions are, many years on. Borsook saw clearly how the tech world’s contempt for government could turn into a desire to destroy it, something that’s come true with the destruction wrought by DOGE. She clocked how debilitating selfishness and blindness to privilege could turn into hatred for one’s neighbor, especially poor people on the streets of San Francisco and Palo Alto that the new tech glitterati had to walk by on their way to work. She also saw an obvious and worrisome gender essentialism emerging, specifically how awkwardness with women and a lack of success romantically was morphing into what Borsook called, in our conversation, “creepy socio-biological stupidity” and rank sexism.
Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter ThielShawn Thew/Pool/CNP/ZUMA; Tim Wagner/ZUMA
Now that Borsook’s worst and most apocalyptic visions have come true tenfold, people are ready to listen. She was featured in the New York Times last year, and a new profile by her old employer Wired, with whom, she writes in Cyberselfish, she often had a fraught working relationship, is in the works. (Her time at Wired, she has written, began happily, but was marked by a dawning realization that the magazine’s leadership was, as she saw it, sexist, not in their treatment of her, but “in their values and treatment of others.”) Last month, she sat for an interview on CNN, where she was hailed as the journalist “who saw today’s tech titans coming.”
“Totally Rip van Winkle all the time here,” Borsook told me recently by email. “Just confusing, as you can imagine.”
In a foreword to the republished version, Duran writes that the 2000 book was “work of prophecy,” adding, “Like most products of that cursed genre, it contains a warning that was largely ignored at the time of its publication. The disastrous results of this oversight fill today’s headlines and pose an existential threat to freedom and democracy.”
But Duran points out that despite this new round of respect and recognition, Borsook is still not in a stable place financially. “Paulina is looking at years of struggle,” he says. “She’s elderly and frail. It’s great this has brought some attention to her, but we all know that books aren’t going to take care of your financial problems. I hope we can continue to build and find ways to honor her work by making sure that she doesn’t have to suffer. Maybe one of these podcast millionaires can break off the dividends for the journalist who got it right.”
Borsook does see another slim silver lining in what’s happened to her lately: “The reputational renaissance I’ve had, you usually get posthumously,” she says dryly. “At least I’m still alive.”
Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert is an annual draw for tech titans.Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post/Getty
The genesis for Cyberselfish was a kind of queasy fascination, “mongoose-to-cobra style,” as Borsook put it in the book, with Silicon Valley’s emerging cultural dynamics. It was a place full of “technolibertarians” (a word she popularized) who considered any and all government regulation to be oppressive, but at the same time happily took government funding—and lots of it. They went to Burning Man, they loved shooting guns, and they were likely to use some variant of the word “pagan” to describe their spiritual beliefs. They were often men who were very unskilled in dealing with women, and they were, as Borsook wrote, not deeply rooted in the places where they physically made their homes.
“Silicon Valley companies and executives and workers may identify themselves not with where they actually live and work and go to movies and send their kids to school but, more saliently, as members of a high tech archipelago,” the book explained. They were also—and here we feel the ground shake ominously, a slight shifting under our feet that presages a future, devastating earthquake—not very involved or very interested in politics: local, state, or federal.
The new Silicon Valley ruling class was so disconnected from government, in fact, that they didn’t seem to have a great understanding of why it existed at all, or how it might benefit them. Cyberselfish recounted a telling conversation Borsook had while spending a week at the “plushy Lake Tahoe getaway of a Silicon Valley guy who’s made it.”
“He complained,” Borsook wrote, “about how the local Tahoe building code wouldn’t let him alter the silhouette of his megachalet. I nodded sympathetically, yet pointed out that in Los Angeles, where there were no such planning guidelines until recently, plutocrats often tore down existing structures and rebuilt monstrosities that take up the entire lot, blocking their neighbors’ views.” In response, Borsook’s friend looked at her in puzzlement; the consequences of deregulation were quite literally something he never considered.
“He had never heard of the tragedy of the commons, where one sheep too many consuming more than its share of common resources destroys the whole,” Borsook wrote, “nor had he thought much about what participating in a community means.”
One of the unique strengths of Cyberselfish is that Borsook wasn’t just living and working among the emerging tech elite, but trying to date within it too. As Borsook experienced in spades, people often show themselves, unintentionally, in very revealing ways in romantic contexts. The book recounts a startling and depressing first date with a guy with a bungalow in Palo Alto and the world at his feet. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in the late ‘80s, and he picked her up in his BMW. She told him about living in Manhattan during the stock market crash of 1987 and seeing a young Black man panhandling with a sign that read “I need money to go home to North Carolina to get some food.” Borsook had been struck by this, a perfect distillation of how “hard and heartless” she’d found New York. In response, her date looked over from the steering wheel and sniped, “A long way to go for groceries, don’t you think?”
“I was stunned,” Borsook wrote in the book. “This from a guy who’d been a scholarship boy himself, who’d traveled all over the world in rough and not cruise-line conditions. His reaction was my first encounter with the strange lack of philos in high tech.”
“My mother used to give me no end of grief,” Borsook told me, over how she was unable to find a boyfriend even in such a male-dominated culture. “I used to say, ‘I can’t find anyone I relate to.’”
Paulina Borsook in Toronto in 2000.Colin McConnell/Toronto Star/Getty
Borsook is not the person to talk to if you are looking to feel better about today’s tech bigwigs. She has a visceral disgust for Elon Musk and calls Peter Thiel “the Antichrist, as far as I’m concerned.”
Some of the technolibertarians of early Silicon Valley were laced with cyberpunk ideas like a disdain for national borders, an interest in freedom in all its forms, and a love for drugs. “Many people agreed with decriminalizing psychedelics or had unusual dealings in their intimate lives,” Borsook recalls. (The book uses the term “nerverts” to talk about computer nerds who engaged in then-more-uncommon sexual practices like polyamory and BDSM.) But as such instincts combined with a love of the free market and reflexive disdain for government regulation, it cohered into something approaching a religious belief. Today the leadership class of modern-day Silicon Valley is simply dominated by cultural and religious conservatism.
DOGE under Musk created conditions that even Borsook couldn’t have dreamed of, along with what she calls “the appalling collusion of Trump with the big tech companies.” She’s particularly struck by the irony of DOGE stripping away funding and protection for national parks. “They live in California with all this great natural beauty,” she says, impatiently. “How do you think that got preserved?”
“I don’t celebrate Steve Jobs, but he’d be rolling in his grave,” she adds. She’s also disturbed by how transphobic the titans of the tech world have become, pointing out that trans people have always been present in Silicon Valley: “It’s really weird. They’re all obsessed with a stupid, kind of retrograde idea of gender and masculinity.”
Borsook is also worried by the tech world’s messianic vision in of AI, their conviction that it will solve every problem. “We’re living in the effects of the casino economy,” she says. “Until that changes, how are we going to change Silicon Valley? If there’s a big crash in AI, that may give us a real corrective. Because it’s all made of papier-mache and spit.” But in her reflexive drive to understand how people use tech, she is interested in how many ordinary people are using AI chatbots to confide in, as an alternative to therapy or human confidantes. She’s reminded of the ELIZA experiment in the 1960s, which simulated conversation with a psychotherapist using tools like pattern-matching.
“Some people are so much more comfortable with [AI]. But why would I rather talk to this than a friend, or a boyfriend, or a therapist?” Borsook asks. “AI bores me.”
It’s common with prophets to ask them to predict the future, or show us the way to a better tomorrow. In the closing moments of my conversation with Borsook, I can’t resist the impulse to do so. When I tell her that I’m struggling with a certain, say, overwhelming sense of pessimism and despair lately, she doesn’t disagree. “I tend to be a Debbie Downer,” she says, with a laugh. Because she’s a writer and not a tech activist, “I tend not to be prescriptive on how I think about the world.”
“There’s so much fear right now around making a living,” Borsook adds, including among people in the industry. “How do you channel the fear into something productive? I don’t have an answer for you, but I think there are a lot of people who could find common cause who wouldn’t have in the past.” In the end, and despite what the isolationists of the tech and politics world might have to tell us, and whether we like it or not, she adds, “We’re all in this together.”
Transcript: Even GOP Pollsters Rattled as Trump Hits Record New Low
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
For years now, it was an unquestioned truism in our political discourse that Donald Trump held the advantage on the economy. Yet the evidence is mounting that Trump has completely thrown this away, and now even Republican pollsters are sounding the alarm about the problem. This comes as a new analysis finds Trump’s approval on the economy down at an abysmal 33 points underwater, a drop of 42 points from 2018.
Yet some commentators, and some Democrats as well, think he still possesses some sort of political black magic that we all overlook at our peril. And we don’t understand why. So we’re talking to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been arguing well against the myth that Trump is Teflon. Alex, good to have you back.
Alex Shephard: It’s great to be with you.
Sargent: So last week we learned that the Trump economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, and worse for Trump, April and May were revised down by 103,000 jobs. On this, Trump is absolutely cratering in the polls as well.
CNN’s Harry Enten averaged the polls and found that during the 2018 midterms, Trump’s approval on the economy averaged plus nine points. Now, Enten calculates it’s minus 33 points. That’s a 42-point swing against Trump. Alex, have you ever seen anything like that?
Shephard: I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this before. I think the big story of this presidency is that Trump was elected because voters were mad about inflation after the pandemic, and they blamed Joe Biden and his party, the Democratic Party, and they had rosy visions of Trump’s presidency and they brought him back to office. And then Trump and the people around him—and I should say many Democrats as well—saw that victory not as a rebuttal, or a refutation against the Democrats. They saw it as an endorsement of his entire cultural, non-economic program.
And what we’re seeing now is that that was totally wrong. It was just flat-out wrong. And the big story is that voters wanted prices to go down. They did not give Biden the credit that I think his administration deserved for managing inflation, and they brought Trump back in, and Trump took two deliberate acts that sabotaged the work that the Democratic administration had done. He launched a global trade war in April of last year, and then he launched a war against Iran in February of this year, and that’s the presidency right there.
Sargent: I think that’s exactly the story. I want to play something that CNN’s Harry Enten said about all this. He notes that what’s driving Trump’s huge drop on the economy is inflation. And he says that in the latest CNN poll, Trump’s approval on inflation is fifty points underwater. Listen to this.
Enten: But now in term number two, in our latest CNN poll, look at this—Trump 50 points under water. Fifty points under water. I went back through the history books. Again, I told you—I dug deep into them. I dug deeper into them than anyone has basically dug into any polling archive you could before. And no president before President Trump actually had a negative 50-point-or-worse net approval rating on inflation. What does this all mean? Take a look here—Trump’s negative net approval rating: Every single poll since March 29, 2025 has had Trump in the negative.
Sargent: So, two things there. First, no president has ever matched Trump’s terrible numbers on inflation. And second, he’s been in negative territory for the great bulk of his second term. We just talked about the big story of the Trump presidency—he’s been underwater virtually the entire time. Alex, do you think all this has really sunken in with the hive mind that interprets national politics for us?
Shephard: Absolutely not. I think that—I mean, this has been, I think, a story that goes back to Trump one, right? Which is that people have misinterpreted—there’s this idea that there’s a kind of shiny-object theory of the Trump media, that basically coverage goes wherever new news is being made. And especially in the case of the economy and the Iran war, which has been stuck in this kind of quagmire for several months now, that attention doesn’t focus there.
And I think that people then make this leap to say that this is the superpower that Trump has—he can distract you by putting your attention on these other damaging scandals. And the numbers just don’t back this up at all. People are really, really pissed off that they voted for this guy to lower prices and he’s not doing it. That does not mean that the other stuff doesn’t matter or it matters less. But I think that there’s just a lot of anger over that. And I think that that’s really what’s going to drive the midterms, you know, probably for Democrats—it’s looking that way.
However, I also think that the absence of commentary on that, both by sort of mainstream and left-leaning outlets and the Democratic Party, is a huge missed opportunity. I think there’s just a real reluctance to put the blame for this on Trump’s shoulders, even though he took two deliberate acts to sabotage the economy, which is exactly what happened.
Sargent: Can I just bring up a phrase that I cannot stand? It’s when Democrats say, Trump’s negatives are “baked in,” so we don’t have to remind voters about them. You know, yes, you do.
If there’s anything that Donald Trump has proven, it’s that voters forget about what he’s done to the United States of America very, very quickly. And you’ve got to drive it home over and over. Like, you don’t want voters saying, prices, you know, they’re really driving me crazy, it’s both parties. No, it’s Trump. Trump did this to you. Trump did this to you. Say that, Democrats, right?
Shephard: Yeah, I think that it’s this overinterpretation of Trump’s return to power. It’s this idea that because Trump got reelected, that somehow negates all of the kind of Resistance 1.0 work that happened. It’s like when you talk to Democrats who say they shouldn’t impeach him if he comes back. There’s, I think, this larger sense that they focus too much on Trump’s malfeasance.
And that’s just not true at all. I think one thing that was sort of true was that, especially in the first term, they decided to treat Trump as an aberration. This kind of fever dream that Republicans were in. But this is the party of Trump now. That’s why he is able to hold on to power. And, you know, there’s no daylight between Congress and him on Iran or the trade war. So if you look at the economy, that’s one issue there.
But I think the other issue is that there’s just this fear—they’ve looked at focus groups that say Democrats care too much about Trump. And that’s, you know, true to the extent that what voters are saying is they want an alternative to these things. And one way that you showcase your alternative is that you point out what the other people are doing and say, we’re going to do something different here.
And I think on that point, Democrats have really, really dropped the ball. And I think, you know, there’s a real lack of urgency in making a kind of argument for what they will do with the, you know, limited amount of power that they’ll have if they retake one or both chambers of Congress in the fall.
Sargent: GOP pollsters are very aware of what’s happening right now. The Wall Street Journal reports that some of these Republican pollsters are sounding the alarm about Trump and the economy and the Republican Party. One Republican pollster made what I thought was a really telling point.
He said that he’s seeing something new in his focus groups of voters in battleground states, which is that these voters “know exactly to the dollar the amount of their power bill.” Same with health care and food prices.
Now, The Wall Street Journal says Republican analysts think time is running out for Trump and the GOP to regain their image as better on the economy. That sort of thing, where voters are hyper-focused on their everyday costs, is an extremely difficult thing to dislodge, I think.
Shephard: And I think it’s also frustrating, as somebody who thought that coverage of the Biden economy was very unfair and was frustrated by Republican attacks and the inability of Democrats to push back. But I think that there’s a real fear of claiming ownership over economic policy, right? Of arguing that Democrats are actually a lot better at this, and that what Trump is doing is sabotaging the economy.
And when you look back at attacks that Biden faced during his term in office, right? So many of them were unfair, but they were very focused on the everyday well-being of Americans, right? And you’re just not seeing Democrats do that as much as they could.
And I think—this is what I wrote about last week—but you’re also not seeing them tie it into the other big story of this administration—or one of the other big stories of this administration—which is, you know, historic corruption that we have not seen ever in this country, even in the Gilded Age.
And you have a presidency that is self-dealing, whose family’s making billions of dollars, while basically, you know, many Americans are struggling to make basic needs, right? They know what the cost of their power bill is—and the president is making, you know, two billion dollars from the crypto industry.
Sargent: Absolutely. You actually brought something to mind, which is that at the end of the Biden presidency, when Donald Trump took over, The Economist had this now very famous cover, which described the U.S. economy as the envy of the world. Ask yourself this, Alex. How often do you hear a Democrat say that Donald Trump inherited an economy that was the envy of the world, according to The Economist? You almost never hear that.
You almost never hear them say Joe Biden actually left Donald Trump with a very good economy because Democrats are better. And the reason they don’t want to say that kind of thing is this lack of confidence that you’re getting at. They don’t think they can win arguments, I think. And that’s a particular example of one they don’t think they can win. They think voters just decided Biden was a disaster, and they just never want to talk about that again.
And I kind of get that, but they’re throwing away this opportunity to say, we Democrats, we keep leaving Republicans with good economies and they keep destroying them. I think we should hear more of that.
Shephard: Yeah, and I think that there’s a related thing here. I think part of the issue is that you have a situation where the Democrats basically made the best of a bad situation, and Trump is making the worst of a good one, which I think is a delicate political argument to make. But it’s not one that’s wrong.
And I think what it overlooks too is the almost suicidal nature of economic policy under this presidency. So, almost the entire story of this presidency from the very beginning—it starts with DOGE cuts, which begin basically the moment that Trump takes office again. It sort of peaks, for a while at least, with Liberation Day—that’s Trump’s massive global tariffs, where he puts tariffs on basically every country in the world in April of 2025.
And then, if things weren’t bad enough then, he launches a war against Iran in February, at the end of February. Essentially, seemingly, you know, convinced that air power alone will win this war and that Iran won’t close the Strait of Hormuz, even though, as we now know, many people in the military were telling him that this was a very real possibility.
And now you have a situation where the president has strangled an otherwise fairly good economy based on his own completely bizarre economic theory about tariffs that no expert—even conservative economists—believes. No one has believed this since the 1880s, basically. And then, also, you have this kind of hubris, right? This sort of imperial hubris that I think people also don’t credit Trump for as well—that U.S. naval and air power and economic might can withstand anything that you throw at it. And that sort of leads to the situation that we’re in now, where—I think part of it is Democrats have called Trump’s response to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz a sort of capitulation, right? A huge failure.
But it almost understates the problem here—that this is a presidency that launched a war based on the premise that it would be over shortly, that you would be able to do regime change in a massive country with huge military infrastructure that essentially has been run by the IRGC for years anyway, and now is stuck in a situation where Iran is fully calling the economic shots.
They’ve announced that they’re closing the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely. And it’s not like Iran hasn’t taken actions that have decided important elections in American history before. And so he’s just completely at the mercy of this IRGC-run country now. And there’s a thing that does feel like just deserts, or like schadenfreude, as an anti-Trump commentator. But I think the insanity of that is something that is still not well covered, and Trump’s own role in it.
Like, Joe Biden did not make the cost of eggs go up in the post-pandemic period, right? But Trump has basically taken every concrete action you can to destroy the economy right now. And it seems to largely be held aloft by posts or statements that he makes every Sunday or Monday morning before markets open, like clockwork now. And yeah, there’s no sign that that’s going to change between now and the midterms.
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at there is that, to a very uncommon degree, voters can directly perceive a link between what Donald Trump is doing and what’s happening to their own economic situation. That’s extremely rare, that you have such a direct link. But here’s yet another way that Trump has just outdone all his predecessors.
It’s a thing in political science that voters blame presidents for the state of the economy, often unfairly, but here’s a case where he absolutely is responsible for the state of the economy. He’s just breaking one record after another.
Shephard: There is a thing where—especially as a reporter who used to cover, you know, the domestic economy—it is very frustrating in some ways to have a president who does actually control whether the economy is good or not. Because I think you’re sort of taught, and experts will always tell you, like, actually, voter perceptions on the economy, they’re kind of ridiculous, right? We just saw that with Biden. And in this case, it’s—yeah, it’s very literally true.
Sargent: So this is really interesting: According to The Wall Street Journal. Another GOP pollster, David Winston, sent a cautionary note to Republicans back in June. It said this: “If Democrats could sustain leads on the economy and win double-digit margins among independents, as some polls show, a blue wave is possible.” So this pollster said that back in June, and guess what? Dems are now leading on the economy in some polls, and they are winning independents by double digits in the generic House ballot matchup now.
So, according to this Republican pollster, a blue wave is very possible. Alex, just to your point about Trump’s mismanagement of everything and just how palpable it is, I really think Republicans went into the summer expecting Trump to recognize the situation that he was creating for the Republican Party. And they kind of expected him to try a little harder to turn things around. And instead he just went out there and said, I don’t give a shit about anything, basically. What do you make of all that?
Shephard: I mean, I think that that’s sort of the dynamic between congressional Republicans and the president right now, too—is that they want him to do things that will help them. And that requires essentially discipline on both a messaging standpoint and a policy one, that Trump is not actually capable of doing. And with Iran, I think right now he’s trapped in a place—and has been trapped in a place by Iran—where if he doesn’t give them the JCPOA, the Iran deal that Obama reached with Iran in 2015, plus more, right, they are not going to open the strait.
And Trump came to political prominence attacking Obama for many things, many of them very racist. But one of those was the Iran deal, right? His entire premise as a politician has been that he is a good deal-maker. And the only way out of this mess is to make a very bad deal, right? And that’s entirely his fault.
But you know, I think there’s another issue here as well, which is just that congressional Republicans want something to run on, right? Like, that’s not the president. And Trump does not want them to be able to run on anything that’s not him. And that’s the place that they are in right now. And they cannot run on economic stewardship, which has been the backbone of Republican messaging—not just on the economy, right, on everything—for more than half a century now. They can’t do that. They can’t run on, you know, we’re making the trains run on time, or good governance, because this administration is clearly a mess.
And I think the biggest issue is that voters returned Trump to power knowing fully who he is. I think this is one of the things that actually is really misunderstood about the presidency and many of his supporters. They know who he is. Many of them like that he’s crazy and unhinged. But others—a lot of the people that voted for him in 2024—did so kind of holding their nose and saying, look I don’t like the guy, but I have good memories of the economy between 2017 and 2019. And you know what, a little bit of crazy is worth it if I can get that back.
And what you’re seeing now, I think, is something that is kind of phenomenal, which is that they’re now saying, actually I may think the Democrats are woke, right, I may think that they got crazy, they want to cancel Thanksgiving, right, they want to do all this crazy stuff, but I’m OK with woke if it gets me better economic leadership.
And I think one of the things that frustrates us collectively—if I can speak for you as well as me—is a failure to press that case fully. This is a kind of generational opportunity that they haven’t had since the end of the Clinton presidency, the scandal-marred end of the Clinton presidency, to change the narrative about how Democrats actually lead, and to make it realistic.
The big challenge for the party is, how do you change a multigenerational impression that Democrats are not going to help your bottom line— tjat they’re going to take your money and they’re going to give it to somebody else? And I think that that’s an opportunity that’s being lost here.
And then the other opportunity is just to make a larger case against Donald Trump’s leadership here. That’s the story, in every way. The corruption is the story. His leadership of the Iran War is a story. And his leadership of the Republican Party is the story. And I think we’re hearing a lot of Democrats say it’s really expensive when you go to the grocery right now. And it is—but who made it expensive?
Sargent: I could not agree more, Alex. I think that we have an opportunity here to see Democrats really speak to voters in a whole new way. I think voters’ ears are open. They’re ready to listen to a new case. Alex, good to have you on, man. Thanks so much.
Shephard: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Fore! Trump’s DC Golf Course Is Already in the Rough
When President Donald Trump takes flight on Marine One from the White House, he often gets a bird’s-eye view of a municipal golf course located at East Potomac Park, a national park better known to locals as Hains Point. Perhaps the flyovers inspired his recent ambitions to transform the beloved local links into a world-class golf course worthy of PGA tournaments.
Trump recently said construction on the new course will begin September 1. But his aerial view of this particular building site may obscure one of the park’s key features: Its water hazard.
Water from the Potomac River floods its sidewalks and drowned the city’s dreams of a modern swimming facility. Now, it threatens to wash out Trump’s golf fantasy and leave behind a disaster that will make the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool look like a minor embarrassment.
The “builder in chief” first publicly mused in May about remaking the East Potomac links. A month later, he toured the site with golf course designer Tom Fazio and announced on Truth Social that after “studying the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links” he had concluded that “on this fantastic site, with water and unparalleled views of DC’s Monuments, we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World.”
In June, Fazio told Golf.com that Trump would move quickly to complete the course before he leaves office. “The president happens to be a guy of action,” Fazio said. “He wants to get it done now.”
“The president happens to be a guy of action. He wants to get it done now.”
Of course, any local with a fishing pole could have pointed out the glaringly obvious flaw in his plans. “Let’s be honest,” says Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which has sued the Trump administration over its plans for the golf course. “The island is sinking.”
The US Army Corps of Engineers created the 330-acre East Potomac Park in the late 19th century from a hodgepodge of material dredged up from the bottom of the Potomac River to widen shipping channels around the city. In 1897, Congress declared the artificial island a public park that would be “forever held and used for recreation and the pleasure of the people.” In 1917, park officials hired the legendary architect Walter Travis to design a public golf course, which opened in 1920. It was wildly popular, and in 1973, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Unlike the excess of cost and amenities at Trump’s private courses, golf at the no-frills East Potomac is cheap—an 18-hole round on the blue course costs as little as $41, less for kids, veterans, and seniors. In 2025, people played more than 125,000 rounds of golf at the municipal facility. It’s not the sort of course Trump would ever actually play. But the park’s tantalizing views of Washington’s monuments and undeveloped riverfront must seem like so much wasted potential to the billionaire developer.
The environmental realities of East Potomac, however, present some major obstacles for fulfilling Trump’s vision. Ed Stierli, Vice President of Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, says when he saw the early renderings of Trump’s course, “One of the first questions I had was: Are they completely ignoring the landscape here?”
The simple answer is yes. Much of East Potomac lies at sea level within a 100-year floodplain, and various studies have found that the artificial island has sunk at least five feet since its inception. Meanwhile, the water level around it has risen more than two feet thanks to climate change and other contributors. Today, it’s not uncommon for the river to top the seawall and come up 25 feet inland after a big storm or high tide, leaving picnic tables marooned like rafts on a small lake. (The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
“Good grief,” said Mark Mungeam, the president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, who is familiar with Trump’s plans but was unaware of the extent of the sinking. “That speaks to the folly of this project.”
In June, I biked down to East Potomac to meet DC resident Alex Rosen, who recently founded the community group Save East Po to fight Trump’s golf course. While we talked, the sidewalk flooded as the tide came in. “There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water,” Rosen said. “It’s a common occurrence.”
“There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water.”
The regular flooding, along with years of underfunding and neglect by Congress, has taken its toll. The nearly 150-year-old seawall that surrounds East Potomac Park is crumbling. The sidewalk that runs around the perimeter of the 2-mile-long peninsula is in many places falling into the river and has been fenced off— unusable.
For years, Republicans in Congress have starved all national parks for funding, creating a backlog of more than $2 billion in needed repairs just in DC. But in 2020, it passed the Great American Outdoors Act to try to address the neglect. Even the $500 million the bill allocated for projects related to the National Mall ahead of America 250, though, wasn’t enough to save East Potomac Park from being swallowed up by the river.
In 2011, the National Park Service commissioned a geotechnical study to investigate repairing the East Potomac seawall. It concluded that the project would require sinking new footings down as much as 10 feet into the river and possibly more than 100 feet into the bedrock below all along the park’s more than three-mile-long perimeter. It was going to cost “millions of dollars per foot—not miles, per foot,” says Kym Hall, the former National Capitol Area director at the National Park Service who was involved in the discussions. “It is an astronomical amount of money.”
Instead, the Park Service used the new funding to shore up the seawall around the Tidal Basin to protect the Jefferson Memorial and the famous cherry trees, as well as part of nearby West Potomac Park. But Hall says that even with the new appropriation, NPS could afford to fix only part of the Tidal Basin, which is less than a third of the size of East Potomac Park. After years of careful planning the Tidal Basin restoration still cost $113 million and took two years of construction.
To do what Trump wants to do at East Potomac, “They would also have to address the seawall,” says Stierli, who notes that conservation and park advocates have long been in favor of fixing it. “Unfortunately, what’s moving forward here is almost a replica of the type of thinking we’re seeing with the Reflecting Pool: An administration ignoring climate, ignoring science, ignoring the Park Service’s own plans.” He notes that the administration has fired most of the scientists who’ve worked on East Potomac. Trump is just “charging ahead, completely detached from the reality of this site and its landscape.”
Excited to unveil the design for the East Potomac Golf Links renovation from Fazio Design.
Like iconic public courses of Bethpage Black & Torrey Pines, East Potomac will offer locals—of the National Capital Region—championship-quality golf at affordable, highly discounted… pic.twitter.com/foLZAAcsj3
It’s not just flooding that threatens Trump’s vision for East Potomac. “Hains Point is basically an artificial piece of land made up of dredgings and other waste soils, and with a very high water table,” says Peter Feldman, a hydrologist who did a stint at EPA working on the Superfund program. Putting a golf course there, he says, “would seem to be a poor idea generally.”
The DC government learned the hard way what sort of hazards lie below the surface of the artificial landmass. In 1936, East Potomac Park gained an outdoor swimming pool, with an attendant pool house that was renovated in the 1970s. Eventually, the National Park Service contracted with the DC government to take over its management. Former DC mayor Adrian Fenty even trained for triathlons in the only outdoor Olympic-size facility in the city. His administration famously installed a heater so that it could be used long after the rest of the city’s outdoor pools had closed for the season.
In 2014, the city decided that the time had come to upgrade the aging facility. Officials envisioned a state-of-the-art competitive aquatics facility that would include spectator seating and diving platforms, plus a renovated pool house. Preliminary engineering studies had warned that construction would be challenging. Just taking soil samples became an ordeal as boring holes quickly flooded.
“You can think of it like a sponge, or [like when] my wife gets out of the shower and leaves our bath mat completely soaked. It looks fine on the surface but once I start walking over it, the water all comes up,” Daniel Spielvogel, an engineer who co-authored a study on the site, would later explain at a contract dispute hearing. “It moves around. It squirts out on the floor. Those are the disturbance-sensitive soils that we want to avoid.”
Nonetheless, construction began in 2018, and almost immediately ran into trouble. Excavating the century-old site proved to be more like an archeological dig than a building project. Undocumented sewer, water, and electrical lines gummed up the works. An ancient pipe that flushed water from the pool into the Potomac River swamped the site along with groundwater that was not, as the contractor assumed, seven or 10 feet down, but just below the surface at roughly the same elevation as the river.
Workers installed sump pumps, only to see them swallowed up by the soupy soils that frequently caved in and threatened workers’ safety. When Spielvogel visited the site in September 2018, he found a “disgusting mess” of “muddy trenches and open excavations.” Things did not improve, and in 2020, the DC government cut its losses and, citing “significant flood risks,” abandoned the whole project. The site was filled in, and litigation ensued.
Ultimately, the city lost $14 million in taxpayer money, and residents lost an outdoor pool that had been in operation for almost 100 years. Today, all that’s left is a weedy lot, a monument to the risks of ignoring the realities of nature.
The former East Potomac Pool, pre-renovationNeill Williams/District of Columbia Aquatics Club
Groundwater flooding the excavation site of former East Potomac pool house in 2020AECOM/DC Department of General Services
The site of the old East Potomac Pool today.Stephanie Mencimer
If Trump has a vague understanding that water and soil problems might be an issue for his championship golf course plans, his solution is not reassuring.
In October 2025, Trump shocked the country by demolishing part of the White House to build a ballroom. While discussing the project with the president, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested using the East Wing debris to elevate the new golf course. “Trump told Burgum he thought the idea was brilliant,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
The administration began depositing some 30,000 cubic yards of White House rubble full of rebar, plaster, lead paint and asbestos between the fourth and ninth holes of the existing East Potomac golf course. Aside from the obvious environmental concerns, as a practical matter, covering East Potomac Park in White House wreckage is unlikely to solve its flooding issues. “I think they’re going to need a lot more soil than that,” says Mungeam. “That’s just a tiny amount of what would be needed to build a championship golf course.”
Here’s why: East Potomac Park is built on “hydraulic fill,” which is both too soft and too weak to support much vertical construction, like for restaurants or clubhouses. If new fill is put down too quickly, or if it’s too heavy, it can cause the existing land to slide or settle, and the site can take years to stabilize.
High groundwater will likely exacerbate the problem, as will climate change. Like Washington, DC, itself, East Potomac faces extreme vulnerability to storm surges from hurricanes, particularly as the sea level rises. The US Army Corps of Engineers expects the Potomac River to rise more than three feet by 2080. Not even tearing down the rest of the White House would likely yield enough material to create a PGA-caliber playing surface on Hains Point.
The existing East Potomac golf course is basically flat, making it perfect for beginning and amateur players. But championship courses require such technical features as deep bunkers, water hazards, and dramatic slopes. Because of the park’s high water table, the only way Trump could create those sorts of enhancements is to bring in tons of new fill to pile on top of the existing land mass, which only will create more problems.
The result of all the earthmoving and extensive heavy truck traffic needed to bring in so much fill would compact the existing weak soil, and lay the foundation for future drainage issues, Mungeam says. And simply filling in the flood plain won’t end the course’s water wars. When golf course designers fill in a flood plain like the one at East Potomac, he says they’re required to create a new one to equalize the water.
If Trump’s hasty and ill-conceived construction fills in too much of East Potomac Park, the chronic flooding will simply move elsewhere—perhaps to nearby parts of the National Mall, such as the Jefferson Memorial, where taxpayers just spent more than $100 million rebuilding the seawall. The water, Mungeam explains, “has to go somewhere.”
Like so many of Trump’s monomaniacal plans to make over DC without any public input, much less expert guidance, his golf course takeover triggered a lawsuit. In February, local golfers and the DC Preservation League asked a judge to block the administration from pursuing any further action at East Potomac until it had complied with various environmental reviews and procedural requirements. In May, the plaintiffs went to court to request an emergency injunction after reports that the administration planned to close the course immediately and start renovations.
“I don’t want another demolished East Wing. I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”
US District Court Judge Ana Reyes declined to issue an injunction barring further work on the golf course. But she, too, was suspicious about Trump’s intentions. In early July, Reyes ordered the administration to come up with a plan to regularly update the court on its plans before “the bulldozers are starting. I don’t want another demolished East Wing,” she warned. “I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”
Even with court oversight, opponents of Trump’s golf course worry that if Trump is allowed to move forward with the golf course construction, the whole park will go the way of the old swimming pool.
“My fear,” says Save East Po’s Alex Rosen, is that “they will dig a bunch of plumbing, they will move a ton of earth, and they will make a bunch of changes before realizing ‘oh, the water table here is actually pretty high.’” If that happens, he predicts, the administration will “throw their hands up and say ‘oops, our bad’” and leave behind a big, expensive mess that renders East Potomac unusable long after Trump leaves office.
At the same time, Rosen and other park lovers acknowledge that Trump is right about one thing: As with the crumbling seawall, the existing East Potomac golf course has long needed some TLC. But careful upgrades were already in the works before Trump got involved.
In 2019, the National Park Service signed a 50-year lease with the nonprofit National Links Trust that included a plan to rehab East Potomac. Legendary course designer Tom Doak was working pro bono, with community input, to preserve the essential character of the municipal course originally conceived by Walter Travis back in 1917. But in December, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the lease.
“This is a municipal site,” says the DC Preservation League’s Miller. “This is not Pebble Beach, and it doesn’t need to be.”
Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts
Can steam replace chemical fumigants? Watsonville berry growers will put it to the test
The Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commission is testing out a high-temperature steam alternative to chemical fumigants on five berry fields in Watsonville beginning in September as part of a three-month pilot program.
¿Puede el vapor reemplazar a los fumigantes químicos? Los productores de berries de Watsonville lo pondrán a prueba
Esta traducción fue generada utilizando inteligencia artificial y ha sido revisada por un hablante nativo de español; si bien nos esforzamos por lograr precisión, pueden ocurrir algunos errores de traducción. Para leer el artículo en inglés, haga clic aquí.
Cinco productores de berries de Watsonville probarán una alternativa a los fumigantes químicos del suelo en sus campos como parte de un programa piloto de tres meses dirigido por la Oficina del Comisionado de Agricultura del condado.
El programa piloto busca explorar una alternativa no química a la fumigación del suelo mediante la inyección de vapor a alta temperatura para reducir las plagas del suelo, las semillas de malezas y los patógenos de las plantas, como hongos y bacterias, según David Sanford, comisionado de Agricultura del Condado de Santa Cruz.
Sanford dijo a Lookout que el programa piloto, con un presupuesto de $175,000, está financiado por el Departamento de Regulación de Pesticidas de California. Añadió que este método agrícola alternativo existe desde hace años y continúa siendo objeto de investigación.
“Los aspectos de ingeniería son realmente complicados,” dijo Sanford. “Es difícil familiarizarse con las máquinas que son funcionales y que realmente funcionan. Esto todavía está en proceso de desarrollo y sigue teniendo un fuerte componente de investigación.”
Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioner David Sanford in September 2023. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz / Lookout Santa Cruz
El equipo utilizado actualmente para este método agrícola funciona a pequeña escala, y se está trabajando en tecnología que permita adaptarlo a la agricultura comercial, dijo Sanford. Como parte del programa piloto del condado, explicó que trabajarán con personas que están comenzando a construir equipos a escala comercial: grandes sistemas de vapor que utilizan tanques de propano para calentar el agua.
Históricamente, esta técnica se ha utilizado en Europa y, en ocasiones, en viveros y para la esterilización del suelo, dijo Sanford. “Pero llevarla a nivel de campo es un proyecto mucho más grande,” señaló.
Los productores participantes cultivan principalmente fresas, con la excepción de un campo de frambuesas. Se trata de parcelas pequeñas y el programa se enfocará en zonas donde existe una alta combinación de áreas agrícolas y urbanas. Sanford añadió que algunos de los productores participantes también se encuentran a menos de un cuarto de milla de escuelas.
Grupos como Campaign for Organic Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) y Safe Ag Safe Schools llevan mucho tiempo promoviendo prácticas agrícolas más seguras y han presionado a Driscoll’s —el mayor productor de berries de la región— para que convierta en orgánicos todos sus campos cercanos a escuelas y zonas residenciales.
Los grupos también han exigido que las autoridades locales y estatales establezcan zonas de amortiguamiento más amplias entre áreas sensibles, como escuelas y viviendas, y los campos agrícolas.
Sanford dijo que el programa piloto representa un “avance positivo,” ya que el condado está explorando una técnica agrícola alternativa que no utiliza fumigantes químicos, a diferencia de los métodos más tradicionales.
Sheeting in a strawberry field outside Watsonville. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
Kathleen Kilpatrick, integrante de Safe Ag Safe Schools, dijo en un comunicado de prensa la semana pasada que la organización comunitaria apoya la exploración de alternativas no químicas en campos cercanos a escuelas y espera que programas piloto como este “proporcionen herramientas para reducir el uso de pesticidas y ampliar las zonas de amortiguamiento orgánicas.”
El condado también está colaborando con Jenny Brome, investigadora de UC Santa Cruz que tiene experiencia en el estudio de prácticas agrícolas alternativas, para dirigir el componente de investigación del programa, dijo Sanford. Añadió que Brome está interesada en analizar datos sobre el rendimiento de los cultivos y explorar qué tan viable es este método para controlar las plagas del suelo.
Sanford dijo que su departamento tiene como objetivo comenzar el programa piloto el próximo mes y que la mayor parte de la recopilación de datos se llevará a cabo durante ese primer mes.
Además, la Oficina del Comisionado de Agricultura organizará un par de reuniones informativas para explicar el programa piloto a los miembros de la comunidad y, una vez que haya datos disponibles, analizar qué aspectos han funcionado. La primera reunión está programada para el 18 de agosto a las 5:30 p. m., en la Sala Comunitaria Greg Caput del South County Government Center, ubicada en 500 Westridge Dr., Watsonville.
The post ¿Puede el vapor reemplazar a los fumigantes químicos? Los productores de berries de Watsonville lo pondrán a prueba appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Trump Is Trapped in His YOLO War in Iran
Donald Trump is not worried about Iran—at least, that’s the message he’s trying to send to panicked investors, frustrated voters, and vulnerable congressional Republicans. “We are low-keying it” on Iran, the president told Axios’s Barak Ravid on Sunday. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” he said, noting the country was “in very bad shape” economically. “It will work out. It always works out,” he concluded. “It’s like a chess game.”
“It always works out” is never a reassuring message to receive during a crisis, especially when it comes from someone who has declared multiple bankruptcies and launched a failed coup.
Trump, of course, was elected president for the first time after those bankruptcies and won again after the failed coup (and the dozens of criminal charges that followed it). But just because he got lucky twice doesn’t mean he will again. And if the war with Iran is a “chess game,” then it’s one he and the United States are losing badly, with few available moves left on the board.
Iran announced on Monday that it would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that carries around a fifth of the world’s oil supply, until the U.S. agrees to its demands, which include the lifting of sanctions, the payment of reparations and the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and ending the blockade that Trump believes will ultimately lead to victory. The strait had previously been reopened in response to ceasefire agreements. Now, Iran—not Trump—is playing hardball. And there’s little reason to believe that even the economic chokehold Iran is currently facing will cause its leaders to bend anytime soon, especially since they’re well aware of the damage that the war—in particular its steroidal impact on the price of gas, fertilizer, and other essential goods—is doing to the GOP’s bid to retain control of Congress in the November midterms.
Ever since the war began, Iranian leaders have insisted that they are prepared to withstand crippling economic sanctions and devastating airstrikes in large part because they believe that Trump and congressional Republicans are far less willing to face the rising prices that have accompanied the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. So far, it’s hard to argue with that read. Trump is historically unpopular on the economy; his net approval on inflation is 50 points underwater. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are facing an electoral bloodbath that could equal the 2006 wipeout. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, seem more than willing to withstand a blockade until the midterms and to use those elections to their benefit. The only question now is if Trump folds before the midterms or if allows the war to continue indefinitely—an eventuality that would almost certainly hand the White House to Democrats in 2028.
The war in Iran is already, strategically speaking, one of the biggest foreign-policy blunders in American history. Iran will likely emerge from the conflict, whenever it ends, stronger than before. The U.S., meanwhile, has lost much of what was left of its global credibility, along with the majority of its supply of munitions. But the war is also the capstone of one of the biggest political blunders in American history. Less than two years ago, voters elected Trump because they were frustrated about the state of the economy. Since retaking office, he has done seemingly everything he can to make that economy even worse—and make an ever-increasing number of those voters hate him.
The frenetic nature of Trump’s presidency makes it hard, if not impossible, to tell one overarching story about it. Every week, it seems, features at least three middle-of-the-night tweetstorms, two historic corruption scandals, and one other news-generating disgrace that eats up several days of media coverage. In just a year and a half, his administration has launched a global trade war, decimated much of the U.S. government, kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation, launched a war against another, all while deploying masked paramilitary goons to snatch people off of the street in our communities and trying (usually without success) to prosecute its critics. In this time, Trump has also survived two historic scandals, one relating to his long-time friendship with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the other involving ongoing self-dealing and corruption that has netted he and his family billions—and that would make a politician in the Gilded Age blush. There’s a lot going on, in other words.
But the biggest story of Trump’s second term is arguably its simplest. Voters returned Trump to power because prices were high, even though the incumbent administration was not really at fault. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation was rampant everywhere in the world. Indeed, by most macroeconomic indicators, the Biden administration had done a comparably stellar job. That didn’t matter. Voters were pissed off about paying too much—so pissed off, in fact, that they re-elected the person who had failed to responsibly manage the pandemic and then tried to cling to power after he lost in 2020, notably by ginning up a mob that intended to hang his vice president.
Trump got lucky. A normal administration would have recognized as much on some level. At the very least, it would have made the most important issue of the recent presidential election a focal point: to do everything possible to bring prices down and take other steps to alleviate the affordability crisis. Trump didn’t. He and his advisers decided a narrow, fluky election was a historic mandate that gave them clearance to do whatever they wanted. Many of those moves—the massive cuts driven by Elon Musk’s “D.O.G.E.” project, Trump’s global trade war, the war in Iran—sabotaged the economic recovery that had begun under Joe Biden. They did nothing to address the things that people hated about the economy under Biden—and in fact, they all made those things worse to varying degrees.
And so here we are. Even Trump’s voters are fed up. Dean Rosenbrook, a farmer who recently attended a Trump rally in Wisconsin, said he planned on voting for Republican Congressman Dean Van Orden, who is backed by Trump, but that he wants the Iran war to end because fuel and fertilizer prices are “killing us.” The economy, meanwhile, is sputtering. July’s jobs report, released last week, unexpectedly showed that the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs that month, while totals from May and June were revised down by 100,000. For the first time in over a decade, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a plurality of voters say they prefer Democratic stewardship over the economy. Trump’s overall economic numbers are historically bad and have fallen 31 points since he returned to office.
Congressional Republicans, particularly those in vulnerable seats, are campaigning in the constant shadow of these political storm clouds. But Iran’s leaders can see them, too, and that’s why they’re playing hardball over the Strait of Hormuz. All Trump can offer, meanwhile, is hollow reassurance that “it always works out.” That adage may be true for him, but it rarely works out for the people caught in his blast radius.
The DSA College Students Who Are Taking Local Politics by Storm
In the fall of 2024, Jorge DeFendini, a democratic socialist who had served on Ithaca, New York’s city council as a Cornell undergraduate and was now running again as an alumnus, spotted an opportunity to boost a like-minded politician. A council seat in Ward 5, which includes parts of the university’s campus and is made up of 70 percent students, had just opened up—the incumbent announced he would not be running for reelection. So DeFendini called up Sara Almosawi, who was the co-chair of Cornell’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA’s youth arm), and after weeks of exploratory discussions a candidate emerged: Hannah Shvets was a sophomore at the university, an Ithacan since 2016, and had helped reestablish Cornell YDSA the year before.
Shvets eked by in the Democratic primary, winning 40 percent of the vote against two more moderate candidates who likely split the vote. But when one of those candidates then ran as an independent in the general election—psychotherapist Gepe Zurenda, who graduated from Cornell in 1988—Shvets drubbed him by nearly 30 points. Her win caught national attention, albeit unfavorably, from The New York Post: “Upstate NY city one-ups Zohran Mamdani by electing Communist student, 20.” (It’s true: Shvets is a member of the Communist Party USA, though she told me, “I identify as a democratic socialist, and my work is most closely aligned with the priorities of the DSA.”)
“We sort of thought we were the first ones to have done this,” Sam Poole, a rising Cornell junior who served as Shvets’s campaign manager, told me. It wasn’t until Poole began having conversations with other chapters that he discovered there were at least three YDSA chapters since 2024 that had successfully put students up for city council seats: Marek Broderick at the University of Vermont in Burlington; Adrian Stancil-Martin at Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wisconsin; and UC Berkeley’s Cecilia Lunaparra. There was, it seemed, a well of student-majority districts across the country that the YDSA might compete in.
Since then, Almosawi, who now serves as a YDSA national co-chair, has fielded interest from dozens of YDSA chapters. Poole authored a resolution to revive the organization’s Youth Electoral Committee to target city council seats, and it passed with 68 percent of the vote at the YDSA national convention on August 1 (the committee was formed in 2024 to focus on student government elections, then went dormant last year). What emerged as a series of uncoordinated, campus-level ambitions has now become, as Almosawi put it, a “very new and unique organizing strategy” for the organization nationally—one that could play an important role in the 2028 presidential election.
In their time in office, these YDSAers have taken on a range of issues, but most frequently tenant protections and housing policy. Lunaparra co-drafted the 2024 Berkeley Tenant Protection and Right to Organize Act and authored an update to Berkeley’s demolition ordinance. Broderick is part of a progressive caucus pushing a property transfer tax to grow Burlington’s housing trust fund and authored legislation that led to the creation of a standardized complaint form allowing students to report dorm issues directly to both their schools and the city. Shvets said she helped the city create a reporting page for tenants to flag poorly maintained apartments and is working with DeFendini to push the state to pass the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act. Stancil-Martin, who was elected in April and was the first undergraduate to do so in Appleton, introduced a resolution urging Wisconsin lawmakers to amend state law to allow municipalities to adopt ranked-choice voting; it came up one vote short.
These students have been met with mixed opinions from their older city council peers.
“In a college town like Burlington, a good amount of our small city population is made up of students ... so it’s important they have representation on the council,” said Ben Traverse, a Burlington city council member. He said the “only downside historically of students who have served on the council” is that they often aren’t long-term residents and subsequently create turnover. He noted that one of Broderick’s predecessors seemingly moved out of town during their term.
Ithaca council member Pat Sewell suggested that students aren’t interested in the “unsexy” work of local government. “There’s confusion about the purpose a city alderperson plays that has people running for the wrong reason,” he said. “A couple years ago we had a student come in and create a human rights thing, to make Ithaca a sanctuary city for LGBTQ folks, and that had already been done at the state level and we had bigger things to work on, like we had audits to do.”
Margaret Fabrizio, who represents Ithaca’s Ward 5 with Shvets, was similarly harsh. “I applaud anyone who has the impulse, the stamina, the tough skin that it takes to strive to be in government these days,” Fabrizio said. “I think that’s awesome, but I do think that we need people who have some experience, like more life experience than people who are college students.” She added, “I mean, you’re having people who are voting on a budget who have never even seen a tax bill, let alone paid taxes.”
Meanwhile, YDSA’s Youth Electoral Committee is working to elect more students to city councils around the country. Almosawi and Poole have begun identifying student-majority districts where YDSA might be able to field a candidate, and dozens of YDSA chapters—together representing more than 50 districts—have already expressed interest in doing so. Three campaigns are now being set up for 2027 (though Almosawi and Poole declined to say exactly where). Many YDSAers seemed to have been waiting for permission to pursue such seats, Almosawi said. “A lot of people just don’t realize that this is an option. It’s like oh, ‘We can run,’” she said.
In addition to advising interested chapters, the Youth Electoral Committee will focus on district research, analyzing maps and voter history to identify a minimum of five chapters that might be suited to put up candidates in local elections over the next year. Poole is aiming for districts “in key Democratic primary states for the 2028 presidential election,” the resolution reads. The door knocking and voter registration efforts that Shvets, Broderick, Stancil-Martin, and Lunaparra relied on to get elected, if scaled across the country, could provide serious leg work for a potential DSA candidate—Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps?—in the next presidential election.
“DSA chapters have this whole demographic that [the chapters] don’t necessarily have the skills to reach most effectively,” Poole said. “Young people are a huge part of the Democratic Party’s base, a huge part of DSA’s base, and a huge part of the future of the progressive movement.”
All of the other YDSAers I talked to emphasized the critical role these seats could play in helping YDSA pursue higher offices. “You show people in your town or your city that socialists can get elected and can succeed in government, of meeting the needs of people, and so you’re more likely to believe in that vision when we run people for state legislature and then for Congress,” Broderick said.
These electoral ambitions have been made possible by DSA and YDSA’s increasing membership amid the rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Following years of steady decline, DSA membership increased from around 50,000 in October 2024 to nearly 130,000 as of July 2026. Similarly, over the past year, the number of YDSA chapters has increased from 100 to 150, and membership from 2,000 to 3,600, according to Almosawi.
The YDSAers currently in office have set the precedent for the efforts of the Youth Electoral Committee; as such, it seems critical that they show they can serve their terms in full. Lunaparra, who was the first undergraduate student to win a seat on the Berkeley City Council, is the only one of the four YDSAers in this story who has graduated since being elected. While she’s stuck around to finish her term, she said she’s not running for reelection: “I don’t want to be a politician.”
Shvets, who is on track to graduate from Cornell in May, said she is committed to seeing out her term through December 2029. “There have been Cornell students in the past who have run for office and left partway through their term, or not really shown up to meetings, and it just showed that they didn’t really care about the position or saw it as something to put on their resume,” she said, citing a council member who recently vacated his seat to attend graduate school.
Stancil-Martin, whose term will end before he graduates, said he is “probably not” going to run again since his “goal is to go to graduate school right after undergrad, and I wouldn’t want to leave my seat vacated.” Broderick, who is currently serving his second term, is on a leave of absence from UVM; he did not specify why or whether he’ll be returning to school.
All four say they intend to coordinate with their YDSA chapters to help a fellow YDSAer succeed them. That process has already started in Berkeley, where Lunaparra has endorsed YDSAer Syrak Micael, who will be running for the seat in November. “I wanted a young, passionate socialist,” said Lunaparra, explaining that her district, which has a median age of 19, “deserves a representative as close to their experiences as possible.”
Such continuity is critical to YDSA’s newly ambitious national goals. After all, recruiting new candidates to win seats won’t increase YDSA’s overall footprint if the group can’t retain the seats it has already won.
“All DSA and YDSA candidates see themselves as a part of a political project, and that’s why they’re also invested in leadership development and identifying ‘who is the person who’s going to replace me,’” Almosawi said. “Your job is to replace yourself.”
Some Republicans Are Finally Realizing They Wrecked the Middle Class
The headlines following JD Vance’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast were the sort of red meat you’d expect to come out of a Rogan sit-down: Vance admitted the Trump administration botched the Epstein files, he humored Rogan’s extraterrestrial fixation, tried a few hacky culture war jabs, and suggested (before directly denying) that Israel is influencing America’s behavior in the Iran war. It was all destined to be largely unsurprising stuff—that is, until Rogan made a boilerplate attack on socialism. Vance picked that moment to offer a complaint that decades of Republican economic policy has left Americans suffering and that (most horrifyingly for Vance) the policies of his own party have “created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism.”
Unlike his boss, President Donald Trump, who these days lives almost entirely within the safe confines of his own self-delusions (among them his belief that “the word affordability is a con job”), Vance senses that most of us aren’t doing great and that—while the Republican donor class is enjoying the spoils of America’s ever-more-pronounced economic inequality—your average American is taking it on the chin. In a striking moment of honesty, Vance made a direct attack on his own party’s longstanding supply-side economic doctrine, telling Rogan that “we ran the experiment of ... allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable line-goes-up asset.” It’s this experiment, based on a longtime Republican measurement of economic success, Vance says, that’s turning our youths onto socialism.
It’s not just Vance. In increasing numbers, Republican politicians are waking up to the reality that their economic policies have screwed just about all of us out of their fabled “American dream.” Consider Trump’s executive order from January, aimed at keeping investors out of single-family home markets. Senator Bernie Moreno helped make it law in the recent housing bill. It’s a sensible policy, but telling American consumers what they can and can’t buy, well, that’s anathema to the free market economics of the GOP. Or, in a similar moment of realization, Senator Josh Hawley lodged complaints last year that accomplishing the Republican dream of slashing the social safety net in the Big Beautiful Bill was “politically suicidal” and demonstrative of the GOP’s longstanding fealty to what Hawley called his party’s “old-time religion: corporate giveaways, preferences for capital, and deep cuts to social insurance.” Even Marco Rubio during his Senate confirmation hearing last year admitted that “free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy has shrunk the middle class and left the working class in crisis” —a remark that sounded eerily similar to the Marxian theory that free trade accelerates inequality.
The particularly inconvenient thing about Republicans realizing they’ve caught the car at this moment is that they’re presently in lockstep behind Donald Trump who, as a dedicated transactionalist, has stacked up a jenga tower of economic policies that are largely short-sighted. Not the sort of ideas you would use to rebuild a party platform that has failed, let alone revive a crumbling economy.
The president’s zany economic policies (as much as they can be coherently understood) are best characterized as nationalist, sharp reversals of decades of Republican doctrine. When, in 1987, Ronald Reagan implemented tariffs against Japan over a semiconductor tiff, he complained that “imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take.”
When Trump unveiled his widespread tariffs in April 2025, he did so gleefully, cradling an infographic in a Rose Garden ceremony. Trump, already sinking into his self-delusions, saw the tariffs as a quick fix, declaring that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” But reversing half a century of Republican economic blunders isn’t as simple as slapping tariffs on the rest of the word.
We are still fighting the semiconductor fight that Reagan was fighting half a century ago, though we’ve pretty much lost the war. In 1990, we were making around 37 percent of the world’s semiconductors; we’re now making about 10 percent, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Biden tried to reverse this trend with the CHIPS Act, but Trump took a step further to the left, recently doling out $870 million to domestic semiconductor manufacturers in exchange for a government stake in the companies. The acquisition led one policy analyst at the Cato Institute to complain that “Republicans warning that Communists are taking over the Democratic Party might first ask why their own administration is so eager to have the government acquire pieces of private companies.”
Cato scholars are exactly the kind of people that are likely to be left bereft in this new era of Republican economics heralded by Vance and others. They’re the critics the vice president was referring to on Rogan when he said some accuse him of “being too pro-labor for Republicans.” That remark came after another stunning admission from Vance: When asked about AI and how it might reshape the economy, he responded that “what really worries me about AI is the fact that private sector unions have largely disappeared from the United States of America.”
Which leads us to the second problem for Republicans, who have managed to catch the proverbial economic car at this moment; it’s a familiar one: their billionaire donors. Strong labor unions in the private sector aren’t the sort of thing that go over well with the oligarchs who have managed to amass almost all of America’s capital and expect to continue their role as the guiding hand of conservative policies.
Contrast Vance’s desire for more worker autonomy with the future Elon Musk recently outlined in an Economist interview. Musk said he believes that, after the AI revolution, “work is going to be optional” and that “the treasury should just issue people checks.” In Musk’s future, there will be an explosion of goods and services to theoretically keep inflation in check. But it stands to reason that if all the goods and services are the products of these AI companies, oligarchs like Musk will also reap the capital produced by those goods and services, private sector unions be damned. Musk imagines a world in which, to quote JD Vance, an industry comes in and turns every aspect of our lives into a “line-goes-up asset.”
There’s a good argument to be made that Musk is (at least occasionally) delusional in his predictions, but there are two hard truths with which to contend. AI really is coming for the exact sort of private sector jobs that Vance worries are in jeopardy. Additionally, Elon Musk was, in 2024, the largest single-cycle political donor in American history. He was so influential that they gave him an agency within the White House. Now he’s poised to throw his money around in a similar fashion this cycle.
Musk’s idealized future presents the final problem for Republicans realizing at this moment that their longstanding policies are hurting Americans: The AI future is on the march. Absent some sector-wide uproar or sweeping regulations, it’s going to change the economy and drastically reconfigure the role of labor, probably subjugating it even more, and thus driving wealth inequality further into the intolerable zone. This is where the oligarchs and the politicians agree. Musk says that human labor will be irrelevant. Vance told Rogan “the real analogy is the industrial revolution,” noting that, the last time this happened, “the inequality in the country got completely out of wack.” Taken as a whole, it’s a grim sight indeed—we’re staring down a new industrial revolution with the industrialists already driving the car, and Republicans are slowly realizing their policies have made this dire future possible.
Santa Cruz’s Pacific Avenue is starting to look like Everywhere Else
Pacific Avenue once embodied Santa Cruz’s quirky, community-driven spirit, writes UC Santa Cruz student and aspiring writer Carly Pavlin. As chain retailers, including Anthropologie, replace longtime local institutions, she fears that identity is beginning to fade. Here, Pavlin reflects on the downtown she fell in love with four years ago — and asks what kind of city Santa Cruz is becoming. Is Pacific Avenue still Santa Cruz, or is it starting to look like everywhere else?