This weekend, Congressman Ro Khanna (CA-17) had a lengthy Q&A with the New
York Times where he shared [ [link removed] ]his ideas on how to build a winning
coalition for Democrats in 2024 and beyond. The Times writes:

"He calls his approach 'progressive capitalism' and 'new economic
patriotism,' and he believes it is the key to broadening the progressive
coalition to include the struggling middle of the country and those who
might otherwise associate progressivism with economic redistribution
rather than growth. That shift in emphasis is also what he thinks is
crucial to President Biden’s re-election chances."

[ [link removed] ]Check out what Congressman Ro Khanna says. Then, write him a note
saying whether you agree or disagree. Click here -- we'll deliver your
note to Congressman Khanna.

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Rep. Ro Khanna Has a Reminder for Democrats: Americans Love Money

Where do you see the greatest tension between the two parts of a term like
"progressive capitalism"? The core progressive animating idea has largely
been redistribution: We’ve got to tax the wealthy. There are challenges
that I would pose to that. I’m for taxing the rich more, but there has to
be a focus on economic production -- on how do we grow the pie? Not just
redistribution, but giving more people the opportunity to create wealth.
That has to be part of the progressive vision, and that has to involve the
private sector. You can’t build new steel factories in this country in
Ashtabula, Ohio, or Johnstown, Pa., if you don’t work with the private
sector. So on challenging the progressive side: Have a focus on
production, and be open to a partnership with the private sector. On the
capitalism side: You have to care about place. You can’t just say let’s
have all this macroeconomic growth and not focus on every district in
America. Make sure that you understand that it is a bad thing for America
that my district has $10 trillion of company value and other districts are
totally in despair.

When you talk about manufacturing and economic concerns, do those ideas
resonate for voters who feel culturally alienated from the Democratic
Party? Joe Biden talks about those things, and if you look at polling, it
doesn’t seem like voters give him credit. Where is the disconnect? I’d say
two things: One, we have to start by acknowledging people’s anger, a sense
that the system is not working for them. The president can say: "Look, for
years we’ve had this offshoring globalization debacle. We’ve had
working-class wages decline. We’ve had communities hollowed out." Don’t
try to tell them that they should think that we’re in a great place. The
second thing is: Let’s ask people in these communities what they want. I’m
proud of having co-authored the CHIPS Act, but if you go to Johnstown or
Warren, Ohio, they’re not saying, "We want semiconductor factories."
They’re open to it, but they want steel. Can you imagine if Joe Biden was
in Warren, Ohio, saying, "I’m the president who’s bringing back steel to
America"? So the two things are: recognizing people’s anger, and doing it
on a bigger scale in every district.

And your feeling is that Biden is not doing that? I think he could do
more. He won South Carolina. Why not convene a summit in South Carolina
and invite the H.B.C.U. leaders and every tech leader in America. They’d
all show up! Have an economic summit and say: "Only 1 percent of venture
capital is going to Black business leaders, and Black women and men are
underrepresented in tech. I want you to pledge to have technology jobs
created for this state." Every person in D.C. loves Lyndon Johnson’s
record, right? They’re always like, "He did Medicare, Medicaid; he did the
Voting Rights Act; he did the Immigration Reform Act." But every street in
this country is named after John F. Kennedy, because Kennedy captured the
public imagination. What we have to do as Democrats is not just think
legislatively, but think, How do we capture the public imagination?

I want to stick with the idea of how progressives might capture
imaginations. Your messaging is pretty different from high-profile
progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar. I respect them.

It’s inarguable that they have captured people’s imaginations. How do you
think about what you’re trying to do in the context of what they do? My
aspiration is to inspire not just progressives but a majority of this
country. My argument is that the central concern people have, including
progressives, is that the American dream has slipped away, that people
don’t think that their lives or their kids’ lives are going to be as good
as the lives of their parents. So how do we capture the economic
imagination of the country to believe that their prospects are going to be
better? Having a perpetual economic-development council at the White House
-- which we don’t have -- is important. Then doing things in communities
that have lost steel; say, look, we’re going to put up new steel plants in
these communities. That would go a huge way in capturing the imagination
and getting the working class that has been left out to say, "We’re going
to be part of this economy." The downside is, OK, this is not necessarily
going to speak right away to maybe the emotional sense of the traditional
progressive, the progressive slogans. But it is a way of framing the goals
that we all share in a way that can attract majoritarian support.

Do you think the majoritarian aspirations that you have are possible if
the more fiery members of the progressive caucus remain its face? You have
a way of asking very provocative questions in a very sober -- like, "What
did you eat for breakfast?" [Laughs.] I think you can’t have a
majoritarian progressive coalition without the fire and without some of
the extraordinary members of Congress who are reaching young people and
mobilizing them. But it has to be broader than that.

You got your start in politics on Obama’s State Senate campaign. From
Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders: That’s a path that moves left. Have your
fundamental ideas about politics also moved? I think that Barack Obama is
the greatest modern political figure. He changed the definition of
political leadership in this country and what the face of leadership looks
like. That said, I have become increasingly aware of the challenges of
wealth disparity, income inequality, the sense that we need much stronger
progressive policies. We need higher taxes on the very wealthy. We need
Medicare for All and free public college. These are ideas that are much
more progressive than where President Obama was. I believe that we now
have a mobilized constituency in this country that makes those things much
more plausible to achieve than when Obama was president. So I’d say my
politics are probably in between Obama’s and Bernie Sanders’s. 

Is that just sophisticated triangulation? When you look at my record, it
is deeply progressive, but I also believe that we have to understand the
importance of the multiracial coalition that President Obama built and
have humility as we are talking to Black and brown voters. Too often they
have not been sufficiently part of the progressive coalition. There’s not
going to be anyone who’s going to articulate the blueprint of a
multiracial, multiethnic democracy better than Obama, but to get there
maybe we start with the economics. Say we can build things together:
immigrants and people who trace their heritage back to the Mayflower,
people of color and people of the white working class. Americans love
money. They love economic opportunity. Maybe economics is one way of
starting to unify this country.

You said that Black and brown voters have not sufficiently been part of
the progressive coalition. People have noted minorities moving to the
right. What needs to change about the progressive message to those voters?
We can’t have people going down to the Black South and telling them what
it means to be progressive. So one is to pay appropriate deference and
understand where those communities are coming from, and not just go there
with our message and say, "We figured it out." We need to have more of an
effort to listen organically to the Black community, to the members of the
Congressional Black Caucus. There’s got to be a humility about it. Going
to the right? There I think we need an economic message. OK, wonderful,
we’ve appointed one of the best Supreme Court justices, Ketanji Brown
Jackson. What are we doing for the economic empowerment of these
communities? Are we funding small businesses? Are we providing tangible
relief on student loans? We have to deliver on the economics.

When people have asked you recently about the lack of a Democratic
challenger to Biden, you’ve pointed to the power of incumbency and the
fact that no challenger is going to have the name recognition that he has.
I don’t hear you making arguments that have to do with enthusiasm for
Biden’s ideas or achievements. Is that telling? The president has done a
good job. It’s a challenge, because we have to say he has done a good job
while acknowledging that people don’t feel good about the economy. That’s
hard. But when you look at what he promised when he ran, he has delivered
a lot of that. On foreign policy, I think he has restored the NATO
alliance; he stood up to Putin. He has, in my view, gotten China policy
pretty right. I would push a little heavier on reducing trade deficits,
but he is standing up to China while not pushing us into a cold war. He
has a lot of experience for the volatile times we’re in. I guess there’s
no one in our party right now -- in the absence of Barack Obama -- who I
would say, "Put that person in," and they would do a better job to lead
this nation.

I was reading your first book and saw a blurb from Elon Musk. I suspect
that you didn’t send him your most recent book for a blurb. What do you
make of his political turn? Well, I still keep in touch with Elon, so
here’s what I say: As an entrepreneur and innovator, he is unparalleled in
genius. The fact is, he thought about electric vehicles and made that
work. He figured out how to get rocket launches to be far cheaper. He
figured out how to get Starlink into places of conflict. If you spend 15
minutes talking to him, you’ll realize his brilliance. But I wish he would
pay more attention to issues of the role of the government that enabled
him, and I wish we had insisted, when the government gave the loan to Elon
for Tesla, that it have labor neutrality for unionization. I wish he
realized that there has to be a more inclusive benefit to innovation.
That’s where we have philosophical differences. He can be schizophrenic,
as a lot of entrepreneurs are. I had an hourlong conversation with him,
with Mike Gallagher, chairman of the China committee, on A.I., and he was
incredibly thoughtful. Then you see his tweet that’s like a seventh
grader. It’s a lot that you can’t defend.

Did you read "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," by Marc Andreessen? I did. I
know Marc.

He and guys like him have a pretty unadulterated belief that government
has to get out of the way. What are the counterarguments that you can
discuss with him, or thinkers like him, that suggest common ground? I make
two arguments to tech leaders. The first one is that Silicon Valley
emerged because of government investment in ARPA, in DARPA, in the N.S.F.
Thoughtful folks realize the role that government investment had in making
Silicon Valley possible. They realize it today in defense technology, how
much the decisions of the Pentagon are going to matter in terms of the
adoption of some of the new technology. So as a base line, I say, "Look,
government investment was critical." The second point I make is, I know
everyone in Silicon Valley thinks they’re self-made. But most of them
didn’t have to worry about health care. Most of them never had to worry
about massive credit-card debt. They got to go to the dentist. They had
enormous advantages. I say, "Why can’t we have that for everyone?" The
third point I make, which is probably the most compelling to them, is:
"You don’t need me to make more money. You need me to tell a story of
America so there is not a massive populist backlash in this country. It is
not sustainable in this country for my district to have $10 trillion and
places in the rest of America saying, ‘What’s going on with the American
dream?’ If we don’t solve this, the tech backlash is only going to
increase."

Is it possible that a little more populist backlash in that regard might
be helpful? If you look at the polling on Amazon, on Google, on Apple,
they’re much more popular than Congress.

It doesn’t take much. It doesn’t take much, no. But they’re actually
pretty high approval brands. I think that there needs to be pushback on
technology in terms of taxing the wealth, in terms of requiring labor
standards, in terms of making sure they aren’t violating antitrust law.
But I don’t think a reflexive "We hate everything about tech" is going to
create the economic opportunities in places that are left out.

How do you understand the aggrieved sense that seems to emanate from
people like Musk or Andreessen? Society’s winners railing against how
broken everything is. It seems profoundly blindered. It can be offensive
to people in the working class who are actually struggling. I have no
patience or tolerance for it, but I explain it by saying that a lot of
these folks had a chip on their shoulder. They weren’t accepted by the San
Francisco bankers and the lawyers and the standard finance companies.
These folks were outsiders and underdogs in the ’80s and ’90s, and they
took huge risks, and some of them don’t realize that they’ve won. The
introspection that needs to happen is to say: "OK, now you’ve become the
system. You’re no longer fighting the system. Look at the people who are
really struggling in this country. It’s not you."

If Andreessen is a supporter, if you’re able to have conversations in
Silicon Valley, if you keep getting re-elected in Silicon Valley, might
that suggest that people see you as fundamentally nonthreatening or
malleable? Look, I’ve taken them on with the Internet Bill of Rights. I
supported Senator Amy Klobuchar’s antitrust legislation that some of them
had issues with. I would point to my labor record. Then you start adding
it up, and you say, "Why are they supporting you?" I think one of the
reasons they’re supporting me is that I am a technology optimist. I do
believe that we can use technology in ways that are important to
reindustrialize the country and create economic opportunities. So they
like the work I’ve done in co-authoring the CHIPS and Science Act. They
like the fact that I understand and take the effort to be curious about
technology.

The notion of you as someone willing and even eager to find compromises is
notable. We’re in this political moment where compromising is seen as
weakness. I mean, there are two different frames for me. The more positive
frame is: I’m very consistent in my progressive values, but I want to
build a majoritarian coalition for these progressive values, and I want to
do so with a hopeful, unifying vision and the recognition that I don’t
have a monopoly on the truth. We need this temperament to make
progressivism not just 20 to 30 percent of the party but a majoritarian
part. The negative spin would be: This is opportunistic or not pure
enough. I may end up upsetting both the progressives and the moderates, or
I may succeed. That remains to be seen.

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Khanna letting him know whether you agree or disagree. Click here. We'll
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-- The PCCC Team

 

 

 


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