Sharia Socialism in NYC, or Just Smarter Governance? (Half the Answer #74, with Ryan Cooper)

What's happened in New York City since Zohran Mamdani became mayor in January? Has it become a Marxist-Islamic bastion, ruled by a soviet in the succeeding three months? Trent and Caitlin discuss the Sharia Socialism of NYC Mayor Mamdani, plus the naked vice signaling and stove-touching of the GOP, with author Ryan Cooper.

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Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:00:30]
Happy days are here again. The sky is above our clear again, just kidding, but we'll get there sooner than later. Well, this is I was, do I know all the lyrics? Of course. Am I gonna do that? No, wait till something better happens. Well, you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and this is, of course, half the answer with your hosts, Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green, and you know what we both get up to? I'm writer, editor. I love history, philosophy, boogie, and I'm talking, I'm etymology, I'm all over, but not as all over as Caitlin, she's even more all over her and she is a linguist. She's madre, she's a writer, she's an editor. She has a skeleton in the back. She's got the best wallpaper in town. What's going on? Caitlin, how are you today? And well, who have you brought for us? And what are we talking about?

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:00:39]
I thought you were gonna commit to it. I thought you were gonna commit.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:01:29]
Make me sound like I have, like, invented being a mom, like, I'm like, the only person like is a mom and also has a podcast. But I'm pretty sure there's more of us out there. I'm a cool mom, and so if my six year old is going to drink, I'd rather she do it in the house. So I am excited to welcome our guest, Ryan Cooper, who is senior editor at The American Prospect, co-host and producer of the Left Anchor podcast, author of How Are You Going to Pay for That: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Questions in Politics. Ryan, how are you?

**Ryan Cooper** [00:02:05]
Doing good. Doing good. I'd like to point out that behind me, instead of a skeleton, I have some unpainted drywall that I've neglected to finish the last like, oh, nine months.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:02:07]
So you right? Where are you? Where are very, very secretive location, Ryan, at your apartment, at your house. Well, from what the conservative news tells me, Ryan, all the walls look like that now in New York City, everything is unfinished or being destroyed because Zohran Mamdani, he is the, he's the generalissimo there now, he is in charge of the New York City Soviet. Ryan, how have things been? All jokes aside, we are in towards the end of March. How things been since the mayor has taken over?

**Ryan Cooper** [00:03:07]
Well, I will have to preface by saying I don't live in New York City. I used to. I lived there in 2008 to 2009, about nine months, I lived in a crummy apartment building in Washington Heights. I was a cashier at the Key Food at 187th and Broadway. If listeners have ever been there and you get a chance to go in the basement, don't do it because you won't want to buy any more food from that place. Yeah. I mean, I think so far, you know, Mamdani has only been in office for a few months. I think you have to rate him as like a pretty considerable success. Like this is a guy who seems to have a real aptitude for the job, especially in comparison to the previous guy, Bill de Blasio, the previous sort of lefty guy. You know, Eric Adams was, you know, may have actually had some sort of mental illness or something. He was unbalanced in a way that it was totally, you know, just New York baby. This is no, no place like it in the world. Bill de Blasio, by contrast, was just smart, more of a buffoon, you know, like he had to deal with the Black Lives Matter protests and a totally recalcitrant NYPD, and didn't really seem to know what to do about either thing. Mamdani, you know, it's funny that the New York Times has this incredible just grudge against Mamdani. They hate it. They just despise him. They endorsed Andrew Cuomo after saying we're not doing any more local endorsements. And so they did this sort of passive aggressive endorsement, non-endorsement of Cuomo, saying we're not endorsing anybody. But really he was the only guy that you can. And they recently published this article about this, like, I think they called Mamdani like, ruthless operator. Like, behind the smile, there's a ruthless operator. And he did all the, you know, described all these things that Mamdani has done. One of them, he endorsed Kathy Hochul, who's a fairly centrist Democrat for governor, and he sort of played nice with the police unions, you know, he said he's backtracked on his previous statements about how he wants to reform the police that he issued during, you know, the protests. And it's, you know, making him out to be this, you know, sort of Machiavellian schemer, when really it's just doing politics. That's all he's been doing. He's been placating various constituencies, making compromises where the compromises need to be made, cultivating allies with a lot of power to influence, above all, the governor, because New York City is kind of at the mercy of the state legislature in many ways. And you know, just like doing a pretty good job. It's one thing I thought of, you know, New York City got hit by this blizzard. It's a very difficult thing to manage, massive city, not a lot of space to put, what, like two feet of snow, that especially when it then got very cold, and so it didn't melt for a long time. And one of his ideas was, just like, you want to make 30 bucks an hour, just show up to these locations and we'll pay you, just come shovel snow. That worked really well. That's a lot of money, even in New York City. And you know, folks who's just looking for a little extra cash managed to get it, and that's just something you could do. You know, this is an executive position with a great deal of power. I think I would rate it as equal to or more power than any state level institution, any governor. The really, the only thing that would beat it would be the president, you know, or maybe some like the Secretary of Defense, but he has a lot of discretion, a lot of levers to pull, and especially coming from a guy, you know, he was a State Assemblyman, or however you say that, not someone with tons of executive experience, you know, managing a gigantic bureaucracy, but he's proved relatively equal to the task so far. And, you know, fulfilling my hopes for a return to the sewer socialism of the old days, you know, back in Milwaukee. And, you know, because I think this, if you're talking about any sort of socialism or social democracy, that's really kind of the heart of it. You know, you could have all the learned treatises about Marxism and dialectical materialism or whatever. But if you can't, like, implement it, then it doesn't matter. So, you know, so far so good.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:07:53]
Yeah, but is it worth all of the like mandatory Muslim prayer and like everybody having to wear a veil and everything that like it, that's must be what's happening, right, given like the tone of the coverage we're hearing?

**Ryan Cooper** [00:08:08]
Yeah, the, you know, put on my sort of Wilkes-Barre white working class hat and like, well, if I have to pray to Mecca five times a day, and I still get my $30 an hour snow shoveling. You know, we used to make...

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:08:22]
I honestly, praise of all, I guess.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:08:28]
Inshallah, right? And there you go. And again, as you noted, Ryan, this is this one policy, right? This one raising the wages that they were giving volunteer shovelers, right? 30 and then 45 I believe, for like, over time, after a certain amount of money. Any mayor could have done that, right? This is like, this is a layup. This is not like, some secret thing that his team deciphered he could do. This is like, no, like, we'll give them more money, and like, 1,400 people will show up, right? Like, and we'll get it all cleaned up immediately.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:09:07]
Was like kind of a second shot at it that he got right, because there was a storm earlier where things didn't go quite as well, and this represented like him going, oh, there's ways we can do this better. Let's try that this time. And it went so much better.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:09:21]
Yeah, no, exactly like, he's clearly a sharp guy who learns, you know, he's learning on the job, and he doesn't have the sort of, I don't know exactly how you describe it, just the tentativeness, the hesitancy that you see in the previous generation of Democratic Party policymakers. You know, an interesting contrast, I guess a partial contrast, is with the congestion pricing. You know, this has been the, for folks who don't know, by the way, this is like a spot in like lower Manhattan, basically, which now you have to pay $9 like once in a day during the week to drive your car into that area. And this is a policy that has been in the works for like, 60 years, I think, and it was scheduled to be implemented, I believe, in early 2025 something, or maybe it was late 2024. Anyways, it was on track, and Hochul, she just like, she just like, panicked, as heard some pushback from somebody, you know, suburban commuters in Westchester or something. And it's like, oh, I don't think we can do it. And she like, cut the amount of the toll. It was going to be more than $9. Anyway, it finally went in, and it's proving to be like a gigantic success, even in its sort of half baked form. You know, the money goes to the MTA, the subway agency that needs it really badly, and it has drastically cut congestion inside of Manhattan. It is majorly improved commute times, especially from New Jersey, which is funny, like the New Jersey governor and the Democratic representatives from Jersey were complaining about this, like it was some sort of, you know, horrible imposition, but I think it's probably benefited New Jersey commuters the most, because we're talking like 20, 30, 45 minutes. Yeah, and that's time is money. You know, if you're an electrician, you make $75 an hour, or something like that. I mean, you're talking about a lot of time, a lot of money. And, you know, time, the only thing they're not making any more of. You only get so much. But also, crashes are down. You know, pedestrian injuries are down. Pollution is down. Just win, win, win, win, win, all across the board, just the rare no-downside policy. Everything about it is great, and it caused a huge increase in the subway ridership. There are more people, the increase, the delta of the people who are now riding the subway, more, that group, that increase is bigger than the entire ridership of BART in San Francisco. There's really no agency, no transit agency like the MTA in the United States. You know, New York is really in a class by itself. But, you know, I mean, this is just a huge change, and it was something that anybody could have done for 60 years, and it just took that long. And it's like, you know, something I actually learned from watching Joe Biden to some degree with the amount of reforms and changes he made with the Inflation Reduction Act and so on, it was like, you don't have to be so timid and babyish and like hesitant, and have to do 9 million studies about everything and get every affected group to sign off on it, make sure that absolutely nobody will be harmed, and even the slightest way. It's like, you can just like, reach into the, you know, guts of the economy, like, elbow deep, and just kind of mess around with stuff to try to, you know, to make it work, to provide the people with the outcomes they want. It's really, you don't have to be that terrified of it, especially when you're looking at something like, you know, congestion pricing, where we actually have working models of it in other countries. We're like, yeah, this is not rocket surgery.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:10:44]
Right, their commute got shorter.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:13:05]
But you don't need to be timid if you have convictions, right, right? I mean, if you have convictions, if you say, you know what, this policy is going to work, this is going to do the thing that the people want. This is going to provide a positive result. We can do it. And that's sort of what we are looking for more and more, more Zohran Mamdani, more folks like that. Those qualities of conviction, right? The politics are not always going to transition to each different constituency perfectly, but being convicted is something that will push back on what the Republicans have us nailed as, as convictionless, sort of wimpy, you know, mealy mouthed people.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:14:09]
Yeah, right. Well, I heard that. I heard that congestion pricing was really just a way to get us to 15 minute cities, which is actually, like, Maoism, maybe, or North Korea or something, and we're gonna have, like, you know, guys with AR-15s and little berets on their heads, like, stopping us from being able to move around the city. So I don't know. I'm just not sold. And I think the Democrats need to really be able to answer that.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:14:38]
Yeah, it is wild to me how Republicans can simultaneously come up with stuff like that to where the government's going to do Jade Helm, the government's gonna say that we have to have all of our convenience stores and services within 15 minute walking distance. And that's hell, I don't want anything that doesn't require 45 minutes me driving my lift pickup truck across the, you know, exurbia. I want to burn minimum, two gallons of gas, minimum, every time I leave my house. If I don't get to two gallons, I'm going to pour the remainder out on the ground and set it on fire, and then Donald Trump gets into office, and they do exactly that. They have the Gestapo going door to door, papers please, or just like, grabbing random people who look brown and bundling them into, you know, windowless vans. And this, you know, somehow our Second Amendment patriots are not standing up for the freedom of America against the overweening tyrannical federal authority. Color me shocked.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:15:08]
Yeah, well, my milk goes bad in the passenger seat.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:15:50]
Ryan, that turns out they had the guns because they were afraid of high taxes, right? That was the problem. They were afraid we were gonna give education to everybody, and that's what the guns were for, not for anything else. Ryan, come on now.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:16:07]
Yeah, how could I have been so foolish? Don't know how I fell for this, the conservative self-professed belief in liberty and justice for all. I do find it. They're taking the olive branch off the dime, you know.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:16:22]
Well, that's really on you, I guess.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:16:30]
Jesus, it's so petty and so weird and like, also, it's such a symbol, like, why? What's happening?

**Ryan Cooper** [00:16:40]
Yeah, the, even the, you know, largely, sort of, you wouldn't say, over the last, you know, 50, 60 years, that America is like the super, most peace-obsessed country that has ever existed. Certainly, you know, prone to using military force. And yet, even that, even like George W. Bush, is too much of a weak soy lib for these hyper-masculine operators who are not compensating for...

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:17:10]
It's so true. Oh my gosh. Also, I really resent the way that they've made like the phrase "it's Orwellian" pointless, like they, because they pivoted straight from being like, oh, people not really liking it when I say the arc slur is Orwellian. And then now they're out there on their podiums being like, well, you know, war really is peace. You're like, I don't know, man.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:17:35]
It's kind of that, but kind of also like, it's almost the opposite of, or it's kind of some honesty in a way. It's like we're doing, just, we're changing it to the Department of War, and we are going to give no quarter. If people, if soldiers, try to surrender, we will butcher them. Send it without mercy. I will cut their head. It's like, you might as well have, like, put that one guy, Jihadi John, in front of the, in charge of the Fed's department. You know, the ISIS guy used to cut people's heads off on camera. It's really not that different, except we kill way more people because it's with high explosives and not one by one.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:18:15]
Well, I mean, in so many ways, Pete Hegseth is, like, Jihadi John, right, because, like, he has all of these, like, goofy, like, Christian nationalist adjacent tattoos, and he speaks in all of these very, you know, overtly religious ways. And then you hear reports coming out that, you know, soldiers have been told that this is some sort of religious conflict occurring as it concerns Iran. We are in the satire, which I think was a bit of Caitlin's point is that, like, they're like, taking everything from us, even like the things that aren't theirs.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:19:02]
Right? Martyrs are different. It's martyrship, it's martyrdom. It's different.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:19:00]
Yeah, no, it's really kind of unimaginable. And it's, you know, in a very similar way in which these, like, right wing Christian fanatics warp, you know, like Christianity as written down in the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus Christ, like one of maybe the most radical pacifist you could possibly imagine. You know, the ISIS jihadists were doing similar damage to Islam, which does not at all countenance that type of behavior, and especially not like, I can never get over this. I guess the capacity of the human mind to deal with just contradictions is really limitless. But like in Islam, there's a categorical prohibition of suicide. Cannot do it. And yet we just get a cleric guy to sort of write a little, you know, it's not, not really, not, just don't pay attention to that part. And then, yeah, suicide, yeah. Yeah, ridiculous stuff. But maybe to bring us back to Zohran a little bit, you know, I think this is another area in which he has proven to be really exceptionally, had an exceptionally deft touch, is in coalition management and, you know, placating the populations of people who need to be placated and reassured, maybe is a better word. And above all, like Jewish Americans, Jewish New Yorkers, you know, who were a little suspicious of him for some reason, for being like a strident critic of Israel and an anti-Zionist. Explicitly anti-Zionist, thinks that, you know, Israel should be a democratic country. And, yeah, you know, having grown up in New York, he's probably been to more bar mitzvahs than any but a handful of people in the world. And you know, a number of Jewish friends of mine have pointed out that like he is very much like the Jewish mother's like, best possibility for her son, a guy who went to college and got it, got a really good education, and his name, made a name for himself in politics. Like you're telling me this guy some sort of, like, raving anti-Semite, like, come on. But nevertheless, you know, he's done a lot of outreach to Jewish communities. He has a lot of Jewish friends. You know, Brad Lander endorsed him, and has evinced a cultural knowledge of Judaism, and especially American Judaism, that I think is very reassuring for a lot of people, that, and he said over and over again, you know, it's like, I have my criticisms of Israel's foreign policy, but I'm mayor of New York City, that doesn't really have anything to do with Israel, and I view my job as making a good life for everyone who lives here. New York's home for everyone, very much, including Jews. It's like the largest population of Jews anywhere in the world outside of Israel, and that's a very important, and I think, valuable thing. And as Zohran has said, and it's, you know, that's very impressive, how he has, you know, demonstrated his cultural, you know, fluency to so many different types of people, not only Jews, but also, you know, Dominicans, and, you know, everybody else.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:22:16]
No, he's, you kind of don't get that way unless you are able to kind of exist and consider all of those types of people as equal to yourself and be chill with them and be nice to them. Like you can't, you can't talk like that unless you have that.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:22:37]
Yeah, and, you know, I mean, just growing up in New York, there's really hardly anywhere else in the world where you could be exposed to that many different kinds of cultures and to become so, you know, fluent in so many of them really is just the ultimate disproof of all the, you know, silly nonsense from JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and all the rest of them that it's impossible for people to live together and respect each other, and, you know, have mutual harmony and prosperity unless we all look alike and act alike. It's like, no, it's New York, baby. Got more immigrants there than anywhere in the country, maybe even the world, but, you know, certainly up there. And it's fine. You know, people argue sometimes, they're a little brash, but like basically living fine cheek by jowl from everywhere in the world, just about. And so, you know, stop disrespecting America, I say. This is...

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:23:11]
Right. That's real America, you know?

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:23:38]
Well, Ryan, to your point, and I think this is another thing that Caitlin and I have spoken about before, but obviously would like your opinion. I think another thing that the Democrats have to take from Zohran, no matter what, is his sort of authentic, very accessible outreach that he does. I mean the videos for every holiday, whether it's for Ramadan or for St. Patrick's Day or Eid, these are... no, he went that hard. Like he is flexing. And this is something that I mean, this is like a slap in the face to most of these Democrats. I mean, they're all trying to copy it now to varying degrees because of how successful it's been.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:24:09]
Boy, he did not have to go that hard on St. Patrick's Day. That man.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:24:30]
Yeah, yeah, he's done things with short form video, a medium that I despise, by the way, but he's done things with it that I didn't think was possible. And that St. Patrick's Day video was one of them, you know, I thought was a normal type of politician thing to do on St. Patrick's Day, you know, you make like a leprechaun joke. Talk about green beer.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:24:58]
Drink a green beer. Yeah.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:24:59]
And, yeah, you be kind of little bit racist, I guess, or, you know, make some stereotypical jokes. But, like, he starts with St. Patrick, right, and, like, 600 AD and so talking about, like, detour through, you know, Leopold the Second, the King of Belgium, who occupied the Congo and killed like 10 million people. And I think that, you know, on the one hand, you have, like, he is just an undeniably very charismatic and talented communicator who has a lot of practice being in front of the camera. And so you can see, you know, he has excellent production and presence in that famous like the halalflation video. You know, where it's just so masterfully done, talking about a problem. Halal costs money, it's too expensive. And then points to a, you know, a solution for it, which is to streamline the process by which you get a cart, that you can get a permit. So instead of having to pay $20,000 to some, like, basically, like corrupt insider, you can pay $400 to get it from the city. And that, you know, it's funny that as a socialist, he's basically endorsing, like streamlining the regulatory process for small business owners. But sometimes Mitt Romney is right.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:26:29]
Yes, you know what? That's everything the New York Post was fearing would happen, right, was that the socialist was going to come in and make capitalism better. And, you know, we can just appraise it as we would appraise perhaps making a soup. You don't want to put in all of the salt and none of the pepper, or vice versa. You've got to season it properly, and that requires a bit of this and a bit of that, right? Make some money, but make sure that not a few people are making all of the money. Right?

**Ryan Cooper** [00:27:01]
Yeah. And now when the halal video, you know that, again, massively done. The fact that I can even remember every detail of it suggests how well it was a piece of like political propaganda, basically. But not only that, he is also, like, consistently pushing his, like, broader, sort of, you know, political ideology, his view, about, like, how the world should be organized, his version of socialism, basically. And this is something that Democrats are like, congenitally allergic to, you know, the fad now, in sort of moderate circles, is, like the Matty Glesias popularism thing, and the explicit, like, proposal of that is that you do not ever sort of try to outline a broader vision for how society should be organized. You know, what is your view of the good life, what is right and what is wrong, and how do we change society to achieve that goal? No, what you do is you take some polls, and you find out what polls good, and then you turn back around and you repeat to the people what they supposedly want to hear, and it's just...

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:28:22]
Right, and if it doesn't poll well, don't mention it. Oh God, never say it. It's not, it, you shouldn't, the phrase "raise the salience" now, like, brings bile up into my mouth, like I can't deal with that phrase anymore. Don't raise the salience of trans rights. Don't raise the salience of immigration. Like you do not know what you're talking about. It turns out...

**Ryan Cooper** [00:28:39]
Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, you know, it's interesting because, like, one of the things the popularists say is that you should not raise the salience of, you know, charged things, and you should always pivot to kitchen table issues. And this is something that in his campaign, Zohran did do that, in a sense, repeatedly, like they would ask him about Israel, and he would be like, what are you talking about Israel? I am not running for secretary of state. What I'm focused on is improving affordability for New Yorkers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he did it in a way in which he had, you know, both he would, sort of, he would tackle the question straight, like he would say, before pivoting, he would answer the question. But he had also done it like, especially with the case with trans rights, where his record of credibility with that community was already so good that people didn't care if he was a little bit squirrely on it with particular questions, because they trusted him. They knew that Zohran is on our side, and he doesn't have to come out and say it, because we're certain. And that he's not going to stab us in the back. And that's exactly what's happened. You know, he's taken steps to protect trans rights, you know, throughout the government, throughout New York City. It's similar. You know, Obama was actually pretty good at this, too. I remember, in the 2008 primary, he endorsed civil unions, not full marriage. But most of the gay rights, you know, the people in the gay marriage community assumed he was lying, and he was lying. Old Joe Biden went out there to sort of take the temperature of everyone after four years, and say, maybe gay marriage is good, and that got a positive response. And then Obama changed his position. And everybody knew, everybody knew at the time what he really thought, and that he was just placating the, you know, lamentably. But he was taking a strategic position because that's what he had to do to win. And that was net better for gay rights. And, yeah, you know, if you take the assumptions, the foundational, you know, part of popularism, where you are just lying to the voters all the time, such that, like the explicit proposition of it is you never tell the truth about what you actually think? Maybe you don't even have any views at all. That's not even possible. But like you could make that argument. All I'm doing is looking at polls and blurting out what polls good, and if the polls change, then I'll completely do a 180 on any subject. And so you cannot build up that type of trust with the communities beforehand that you actually have a core and a certain moral vision. And I think it just is completely ass backwards way of approaching politics in general.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:29:08]
I'm trying to be mayor of New York City.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:31:52]
Right? Because that's not a politician. Like, if you're just there reporting the results of a poll, you're a weatherman. You're not like, what are you proposing? You can't propose anything off of the back of like, well, I've just crunched the numbers. Like, what do you mean?

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:32:09]
People, people, I'm sorry, Ryan, people like people who have convictions, and I don't really know how to explain it to people better than that, right? Like people like people who stand for things and don't, don't ask me, like, you can ask people who disagree with me politically, and they will tell you that they voted for the people that they voted for because they really believed in the things that they said, right? People want that. So we don't need to be allergic to that, like Chuck Schumer or like some of our other long held statesmen, we can be brave, and perhaps that bravery will even reward us, as it has for Zohran Mamdani, and for, I mean, you know, it's still early yet, but we were just talking about James Talarico in our last discussion. Right? You know, people who are taking stances, and turns out, not everyone's fleeing the scene.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:33:13]
Yeah, no, to my, as my buddy Steve Randy Waldman, I think maybe he was on this podcast or a different one.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:33:20]
He was on Neon Liberalism with Sam. Yes, he was a fantastic episode.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:33:25]
Yeah, right? I like Steve a lot. I dedicated my book to him, actually, but yeah, he points out that to do popularism, the poll chasing, you're sort of like committing a crime against the very idea of democracy. It's like, in order for this whole representation system to make any sense or function at all, you need like parties with a consistent, coherent message, at least of you know, some, to some degree, such that the electorate can then be confronted with the consequences of the choice it has made, and be, you know, learn through a process of iteration. You know, we elected the conservatives, and they did this change, and it didn't work out, or it did work out, and so we're going to return them to office, or we're going to vote them out, you know, I mean, that's kind of the idealized form. Obviously, it's much, much more complicated than that, and oftentimes does not sort of happen in the ideal form, but you know, you could see this like going on with, like, the New Deal in the Great Depression. It's like Republicans were in charge and the economy fell to pieces, and they couldn't do anything about it, and here comes FDR, I got a plan. Let's fix the problems. We're going to spend lots of money. We're going to do public works. The public says, all right, let's give that guy a shot. He seems like he might be able to do something. And he, you know, they put him in, and he changes everything. And the growth rate is like 14 percent or something in first couple of years of the New Deal. But if you're just sort of like, you know, reflecting the public's supposed views as constructed by you in a set of polling questions that's vulnerable to manipulation at every level, from the selection and raising of the questions on down. You know, you're just rendering the whole thing just like, nonsensical. You know, it's like an infinite regress. You're preventing the public from having any choice in the, you know, in the guise of giving them what they want. And I think the duty of political parties should be to, like, outline a vision, you know, outline a vision about how the good life is to be achieved, and here's how we do it. And you know, geez, how the whole system is supposed to work.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:35:50]
Well, Ryan, you know, it's interesting that you brought up the New Deal, and sort of, you know, the lead up to that, that, you know, during the later portion of the '20s, obviously, a Great Depression occurred, a great market crash occurred. And voters got to see. But you know what I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand is that from the end of World War One up until that point, there was great issue in the agricultural industry, and farmers had essentially gone through much of the 1920s in a state of continuously losing money and failing. Yes, yes, absolutely, because we fed Europe during that great issue and in the aftermath, and as we built theirs, we didn't change our agricultural policies thanks to the Republicans, right? So we haven't had Republicans like the pre-World War Two Republicans since that, and I think that the public is now getting to see those people, you know, I think that when you hear Republicans, I mean, this is more of a 2016, 2017 situation, right? But when you hear Republicans calling each other RINOs, you know, a lot of pundits, they were like, what are you talking about, John Boehner is a RINO. Paul Ryan's a RINO. Well, if like, Republicans are like they've been since Robert Taft died, then, yeah, that sounds goofy. But if Republicans are actually pre-New Deal, and everybody since has been this sort of like bastardized amalgamation of, like, New Dealism with the Republican Party, then, yeah, they're all incoherent in that degree. And I think that now we're starting to see the population say, wait a minute. None of these policies are benefiting me. None of these policies are putting money back in my pocket. And I think that you're going to see in, you know, this midterm coming up a sort of revolt because of that. What are your thoughts regarding that, Ryan?

**Ryan Cooper** [00:38:15]
Yeah, I mean, obviously we're a ways off, but it sure doesn't look like the problems are going to be fixed between now and November. You know, I would quibble with your characterization, just a little bit in that we definitely are seeing like the old, old Republican, like laissez-faire, you know, liberalism of the 1870s, but I think also we have a direct lineal descendant of like the Southern Democrats, the Bourbon Democrats. Also kind of deregulation, but mainly just intensely racist, an intensely racist form of wanting to maintain a death grip on, like, cheap minority labor. And, yeah, I mean, this is the thing that you read about, like Eisenhower talking about proposals to cut Social Security. And he's like, he said something like, nobody wants to cut Social Security, aside from a few Texas oil millionaires, back in those days, their numbers are few and they are stupid. And this is the thing that you never see during an attempted authoritarian consolidation, or at least most of the time you don't see them cutting health care. You don't see them messing with the economy that much. You don't see them, you know, starting like crazy wars of aggression. That comes after you consolidate your power. When you have a weak democracy that you're trying to push over, you want to keep the people nihilistic, but basically fat, happy, satisfied, or at least apathetic. You don't want to just like, you know, again, before you've consolidated power, you don't want to snatch health care away from tens of millions of people, screw up the economy and get involved in another trackless, like, endless war in the Middle East that also causes an energy shock and gas prices to go up to 5, 6, 7, $8 a gallon. Who knows where the end is going to be.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:40:30]
That kind of shock, like, that wakes people up and makes them go, oh, my God. What's happening around here is, like, truly undesirable. And to JD Vance trying to sell it by saying, like, I know you're hurting, but you know overseas, they're hurting even more. So isn't that fun? Like, that's kind of not gonna, that's a bad band-aid.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:40:49]
I can't sate myself on the tears of, you know, people being poisoned in Iran. No, it's crazy. I mean, it's just madness on a way that is, I think, very rare historically. And, you know, I hope, I pray, that this may be the end of this sort of, like, you know, finely balanced party system, because the way, like, there's an obvious way for conservatives to win under the conditions of having a welfare state, you just kind of pocket the welfare state and say, all right, we're going to do that. We're going to have the taxes, we're going to set up the structures for like, the National Health Service. We'll maybe pick away at the edges of it, but we're not just going to at a stroke like take health care away from tens of millions of people, because that would be very, like Australia. I believe the Conservative Party tried to do that, or the Liberals as they call them there, and it blew up in their faces. They lost the next election. Learned, don't do that no more. And so, you know, hopefully we can consolidate, you know, a new sort of, like, re-put the Humpty Dumpty of the New Deal back together again, only better in the sense that if Trump really suffers a generational wipeout, you know, like, they, you would have to lose maybe five seats because of Fetterman in the Senate. But they might lose the Senate, might lose, you know, 60, 70 seats in the House, and Democrats will have one chance to sort of reconstruct democracy and cement a new social order that, you know, the future Republican conservative party, may they not look at all like they do under Trump, will be too afraid to rip down, as Eisenhower was too afraid, and if I came to believe that it was a good idea. But you know, that part remains to be seen.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:41:53]
So I mean those Texas oil men that he was referencing, right, they would not remain Democrats for many more years after. You know, I mean, John Connally, famously, one of Lyndon Johnson's aides, I believe he won one federal seat as a Republican later on in his career.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:43:04]
No. To make one side point real quick. You know, this, I think, is maybe one of the most underrated potential benefits of the renewable energy transition, which is currently being sort of hastened along, in a sense, unless the whole global economy collapses. But you know, I think the structure of oil and gas as an energy source, it just can't help but be a supplement to reactionary politics. You see it domestically, and you see it internationally. All the oil billionaires here, they're all right wing. I mean, the Koch brothers, I get brother, I guess now. The oil money has been like the fountainhead of right wing politics in this country for, I mean, since oil was discovered. And, you know, look at who sells oil around the world. It's, not invariably, but for the most part, right wing regimes, oftentimes, dictatorships, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Venezuela, you know, dictatorship with a micron-thin coating of socialist paint. And so if we, as we move away from oil, it's going to just structurally and steadily undermine that source of reactionary power and authoritarianism. And yeah, you know, you could be like me. You could be a sort of woke prepper with your solar panels and battery station in the backyard. I don't got to pay no Vladimir Putin or Mohammed bin Salman. I got my own setup. I harvest my own energy. I carry it around my basement by hand to plug it into my electric car. Great.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:44:04]
I mean, it does sound ideal. Honestly, I'm in.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:45:22]
Unfortunately, I'm getting sidetracked here, but my car was involved in a hit and run recently. Somebody smashed me as I was turning into the driveway. So my EV is in the shop. For how long is unknown. We still don't have the parts, and so for the moment, I have a loaner car from Enterprise that is a, like, it's not actually that big, but it's a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon with like, 20 inches of ground clearance, and it gets less than 17 miles per gallon. And I just like, dang it.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:45:55]
Yeah, I've always been a tiny car driver myself, because I feel better in them personally, like I feel more nimble, or something I don't know, but anytime I have to rent a car and they give me some monstrosity, it's like, it's so stressful to me, because I'm not used to being that huge on the road.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:46:05]
Yeah, yeah, this one's not even that big. So my previous car was a Kona, a Hyundai Kona, and this one is probably about the same size, like a sort of medium sized hatchback or crossover. It's just so big and boxy and so far above the ground with such huge tires that it's just a nightmare to drive around. And yeah, I mean, I can't believe it's that inefficient. That's like, you know, you could get cars in the 1950s that got better mileage than that, land yachts from Chrysler, or whatever.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:46:53]
I mean, I'm doing school drop-offs and pickups every day. I do not want to be in a parking lot that could potentially have children just like running across it and like something with no visibility, like being so high up off the ground, it's scary. Anyway, that digression complete.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:47:09]
So, Ryan, well, it's an important digression. We get all over here on Half the Answer. Ryan Cooper, you're also all over, and we appreciate that so much. In the 2000s we had George Bush, and he was so popular by the time that 2008 rolled around that Obama and Democrats, well, they just got a whole bunch of seats all over and we got some policies passed, but we did not remake democracy in probably some meaningful and important ways which have come back to bite us to varying degrees. I think of abortion as one of them, to be sure, but there are others. You just mentioned that if there is a generational wipeout coming, that this would be our one shot, our Eight Mile moment. Perhaps you might call it, and Ryan, will we lose ourself in the music? Or are we going to have spaghetti all over us? I'm done, I'm done. I got it all out of me.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:48:14]
I knew it was coming. I knew it. You can't not.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:48:22]
Just let me know when this part's over.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:48:15]
I'm searching my aging brain for more Eminem references.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:48:36]
Give me one more line from that song. Give me one more. One more song title. There we go.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:48:41]
So Empty Without Me. Yeah, it really was a squandered opportunity in 2008. You know, I think it was, in some senses, even more squandered under Biden in 2020, you know, 2021 to '24, and above all, in a law enforcement capacity. You know, they had four years to get Trump, and they didn't, more or less, on purpose. And you know, I don't really blame like Harris for losing the election. It was just such a devastatingly bad year for incumbents around the world. But I do blame them for losing to Trump, specifically, when he should have been in jail and off the ballot. And so, yeah, you know, you're looking at what needs to happen, and the list is so much longer than it was in 2021. You know, I mean, Elon Musk and DOGE have done just catastrophic damage to America, the American institutions, to the government, and around the world. I mean, they killed like 700,000 people and counting at this point by getting rid of USAID. You know, you could be looking at the return of, like, super tuberculosis or something, from all the people who got cut off halfway through their treatment cycle. And so, you know, some major changes need to happen. We need to shore up democracy. We need to unrig the Senate, which is currently biased, something like three to seven points to the right. And you know, we need, there needs to be some kind of reckoning with all the criminality that's happened under Trump. And I think, you know, you could sketch out a list of what should happen. I think number one, you need to reform the court system, above all, the Supreme Court, because their jurisprudence is, if a Democrat does it, it's unconstitutional. Republicans are kings and can rule by decree, unless they threaten the value of my stock portfolio or that of the billionaires who are constantly giving me undisclosed gifts. And so you know, that was another thing that Biden just straight up refused to do. He assigned it to a blue ribbon commission that, like, shrugged their shoulders, and you know, as a result, they just, like, tore down half his legacy. They stopped him from fighting the pandemic. They stopped him from canceling student loan debt. That was just one thing after another, and it's intolerable. You know, I mean, Trump v. United States, I think, is the worst Supreme Court decision in history, even worse than Dred Scott [...] whatever it was. And, you know, it is tantamount to treason, in my view. You know, to set the president up to say that the Constitution says the president is a king is so just blatantly at odds with the legal structure and writing and intention of the document and the words of every one of the founding fathers that I think it is tantamount to treason. And so you got to do that, and then to be able to do anything else, not just to, you know, stop them from, like, doing student loan reform or something, but anything else you try to do, they're going to, you have to assume they're going to block it. And so you got to block them first, and then we need, you know, two more states, at least, I would say, just as a matter of justice as well, for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. You could throw Guam in there or two if you wanted to. Maybe US Virgin Islands, make them part of the Puerto Rico extended universe. We need expanded voting rights. And you know, the one that was maybe hardest to imagine, but I think would be most effective, would be to just have, like, confiscatory taxation on ultra billionaires to say, like, well, you can't have more than, you know, $10 billion, $1 billion, whatever, set the level at somewhere where people no longer can control like nation-state-size pots of resources. Or you could just take like the GDP of Botswana and buy Twitter and turn it into a Nazi sewer. And you know, specifically, there's a number of people who I think are a grave threat to national security, and like the health and safety and functioning of all people on this planet, above all Elon Musk. And so one thing, an idea I've heard that makes a lot of sense, is you take all of these tech bro military contractors, you put them in a room and say, all right, pee test for everyone, and anyone who pees hot is losing all their contracts. And, you know, sorry, or, you know, you cut, if you really need their company, like SpaceX or something, you could just nationalize it under the Defense Production Act or something like that. There's certain, a handful of personalities, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, where really pushing the envelope, I think would be entirely warranted. Anyway. You could go on and on with this, but what they won't do.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:52:42]
No, I, well, I, for one, look forward to life under the dictatorship of glorious leader Ryan Cooper. I think it's gonna be good.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:54:20]
Can we nationalize Amazon too? Our H-1B visas and all them? So much. No.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:54:26]
Yeah, I mean, he's not even running that place anymore. You could, I mean, that would be another approach. You could take a real aggressive regime of antitrust. I mean, just break up these conglomerates, like, what, what even would be the downside, theoretically, if Meta no longer owned Instagram and WhatsApp, you know, like they're just separate companies. Like, what is the supposed consequence? Like, Mark Zuckerberg becomes marginally less wealthy. You know, that's good. These, yeah, the businesses are too big. People got way too much money, and they're boiling their brains on Twitter, which should be destroyed by hook or by crook. Pay some Ukrainian scuba bombers to come over and take the servers out.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:54:54]
So. Well, okay, well, every day on HTA we get new standards, and that's one of them. Now. Ryan Cooper, you are supreme. You'll have to come back and talk more. We got more about, but unfortunately, we can't keep you forever. You've got stuff to do, prepping and drywall and the like. Well, before we let you go, will you please remind our listeners and our viewers where they can read your work, where they can read other marvelous individuals' work, where they can listen to your work, where they can hear you yell, what say you?

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:55:17]
You heard it here first, folks, that's our policy proposal.

**Ryan Cooper** [00:55:40]
Well, you can find my writing at The American Prospect, prospect.org. I'm not on Twitter anymore, but I am on Bluesky. You can find me at ryanlcooper.com and you can find my podcast at Left Anchor. We got bonus shows, but there's free ones too, so you could check it out there. And, yeah, that's probably as much as you'd really realistically be interested in hearing from me. But...

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:56:27]
Excellent. Well, we'll link to all of that in the show notes. Despite your hatred for short form video, some clips of this will be on TikTok. Apologies in advance.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:56:40]
Yes, we have to bother all of the cranky people who leave horrendous comments. Yeah, I'm talking to you. I'm talking to you people.

**Caitlin M. Green** [00:56:47]
My God, you gotta calm down, you guys. Adam is cool. Stop yelling at him about whatever it is that you're yelling about. You gotta go upstairs and read some of those comments to your mom before you post them and see what she thinks, because this is not cool.

**Trent R. Nelson** [00:57:07]
Yeah, and if she agrees, you don't send them. Okay, don't send them. All right. In any event, you know that understanding the question is half of an answer, and this has been Half the Answer with Caitlin M. Green and Trent R. Nelson, and we'll catch you real soon.