This weekend, Congressman Ro Khanna (CA-17) had a lengthy Q&A with the New York Times where he shared 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."
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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.
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
-- The PCCC Team
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