Episode 215: “Bipartisanship” as High-Minded Rhetorical Cover for Pushing Rightwing Policies
Citations Needed | January 15, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Clinton seeks common ground with Republicans,” reported the Associated Press in 1994. “Obama hosts dinner, urges bipartisanship,” announced the AP again, this time in 2009. “Resist Trump? On Immigration, Top Democrats See Room for Compromise,” stated The New York Times in late 2024.
Adam: For decades, we’ve heard Democratic policymakers extol the virtues of working with Republicans through a series of stock terms: “bipartisanship,” “finding common ground,” “reaching across the aisle,” “compromising.” They tout their willingness to set aside their political differences with Republicans in order to stop quibbling, quit stalling, work pragmatically, and above all, the holiest of holies, get things done.
Nima: This all might sound well and good, of course. Surely an active government is better than an idle, incapacitated one. But which things, exactly, are to be getting done? Why is it that the act of making decisions or passing legislation is deemed more important to elected officials than the actual content of those decisions in legislation? And how does an incurious, largely compliant media contribute to the harms of a Democratic Party that, in its embrace of Republican ideology under the seemingly noble banner of bipartisanship, continues to move further to the right on key issues?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll discuss the popular appeal for bipartisanship. We’ll examine how folksy calls for Washington to work together, more often than not, serve to promote war, austerity, anti-LGBTQ policies, and crackdowns on vulnerable migrants, and show how this seemingly high-minded formulation serves to launder the Democrats’ increasingly reactionary political agenda.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be speaking with Malaika Jabali, a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, Teen Vogue, The Nation, the New Republic, Jacobin, The Intercept, and Essence, where she previously served as senior news and politics editor. Her debut book, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On, was published by Hachette Algonquin press in 2023.
[Begin clip]
Malaika Jabali: If you go around to the hood or just, you know, just talk to everyday people, like, what’s the problem with America? The first thing they’re not going to say is, We need more civility in Congress. I don’t think most people are saying that. They’re gonna say, Hey, I cannot pay my bills. I cannot afford rent. I have to work too many jobs. My job sucks. You know, people aren’t talking about, Oh, I got along with a segregationist. That is not, I don’t think that’s what people are looking for in their elected leaders.
[End clip]
Adam: So this is part of a broader trope, which is itself a sub-trope of a meta-trope, that we’ve discussed in the show, which is, this isn’t bipartisan fetishizing, especially when it’s divorced from any kind of ideological content, which it usually is, or at least open ideological content versus crypto. We did an episode on anti-populism, on gerontocracy, on nuance trolling, civility politics. This is part of that broader canon of what we call anti-politics, which is people talking about politics but suspiciously avoiding the ideological content of politics, when, of course, politics is all about ideological content. Otherwise what are we doing? It’s just a game. And so this fits squarely within the genre of anti-politics. And this is on the more facile end of it. It’s not even very sophisticated. This is a wholly superficial, but incredibly popular, way of orienting political discussions. That there’s this assumption, whether it be CNN Meet the Press, New York Times Editorial Board, that there’s something inherently virtuous about bipartisanship, that it has this inherent value, this inherent goodness, separate from what the aims of that bipartisanship is. And hyperpartisanship, which we’ve also talked about, or polarization, another episode we did, is seen as inherently bad or inherently radicalizing or inherently dirty. Again, all of this absent what the actual goals of either polarization or bipartisanship actually are. This fits well within that framework of fart-sniffing Beltway political discourse that is kind of when you talk about politics without really talking about politics.
Nima: It’s also fundamental to the idea of liberalism itself, and this has actually been identified for quite some time now. Back in 1969, civil rights leader Kwame Ture, who was born Stokely Carmichael, wrote this, quote,
Whenever articles are written, whenever political speeches are given, or whenever analyses are made about a situation, it is assumed that certain people of one group, either the left or the right, the rich or the poor, the whites or the blacks, are causing polarization. The fact is that conditions cause polarization…
And he continues to add that, quote,
The white liberal acts as a liaison between the oppressed and the oppressor. The liberal tries to become an arbitrator, but he is incapable of solving problems.
Ture writes, and explaining that, quote,
The biggest problem with the white liberal in America, and perhaps the liberal around the world, is that his primary task is to stop confrontation, stop conflicts, not to redress grievances, but to stop confrontation.
End quote. Because, Ture explains that, quote,
The liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor. Confrontation would disrupt the smooth functioning of the society and so the politics of the liberal leads him into a position where he finds himself politically aligned with the oppressor rather than with the oppressed.
End quote.
Adam: Yeah. Calls for bipartisanship, 90% of the time, are demanding the Left go right, not the other way around. Now, again, we’ll discuss this in the top of the show here. Occasionally, it’ll be, Do Republicans acknowledge the existence of climate change? That’s kind of this big bipartisan gesture that some of these Republican bipartisan groups make. That’s pretty much it. I mean, it’s like, do you accept basic reality is the concession the Right makes, because they’re starting from this maximalist position.
Nima: But then there are no actual demands to do anything about it, as if the acknowledgment is itself, the badge of honor, yeah.
Adam: Yeah, it’s like when John McCain acknowledged climate change, it was, like, considered this big win. It’s like, sure, I guess it’s better than the other thing.
Nima: Man, that’s why he was such a maverick.
Adam: Yeah, but it doesn’t really manifest in any way that’s material.
Nima: Now, appeals to bipartisanship have been used to advance reactionary projects for decades during the early 1970s, 1972 to be precise, President Richard Nixon ordered North Vietnam bombed and its harbors mined. In the wake of this Jimmy Carter, then Governor of Georgia, urged that, quote, “We give President Nixon our backing and support, whether or not we agree with his specific decisions.” End quote.
Adam: Yeah. The idea is that, when it comes to certain things, almost always, as we’ll discuss, things like bombing other countries or extreme austerity measures, these things are seen as being post-ideological or existing outside of politics, and therefore bipartisanship.
Nima: That’s where we can all unify.
Adam: Right. You remember this in the invasion of Iraq, this was a popular liberal point, that we can debate the war up until the invasion, but once it happens, we have to support the president.
Nima: That’s right. We’re all neocons now.
Adam: Which has a very long tail, it turns out, and allows other evil things like trying to privatize Social Security or unrelated corporate tax cuts kind of jam through.
Nima: Or thinking that Liz Cheney should be your number one surrogate.
Adam: Well, yeah, we’ll get into that as well. So there’s this idea that there exist politics, and then there exist kind of post-politics, or things that are above politics, and those things, again, are never saving the rainforest or feeding poor people. These things are never considered. These are all the discretionary choices we make. And everything that is bipartisan, or what they even call sometimes a must-pass bill, it’s always just arming the Pentagon and the national security state.
So the concept of, obviously, bipartisanship goes back a long time, but we’re going to start the clock, for the sake of efficiency, during the Clinton administration. “Common ground” rhetoric, as we know it today, really began to take shape in the ’90s, as you will be surprised to learn, as the Democratic Party began to move to the right, ostensibly to combat the stigma and stain of liberalism in the Reagan/Bush years, and to triangulate and co-opt things that were traditionally considered conservative.
So after the midterm elections in 1994, where Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time since 1952, in the weeks and months that followed the midterms, then-President Bill Clinton declared the need for Democrats to find, quote, “common ground” with Republicans. On December 30, 1994, the Associated Press ran a report headlined, quote, “Clinton seeks common ground with Republicans.” It opened with this, quote,
A week before the GOP takeover of Congress, President Clinton says he’ll seek compromises with Republicans on tax cuts, health care and welfare reform but cautions, “There will be differences. There will be hard fights.”
Unquote. So what exactly was Clinton looking to so-called compromise on? Per usual, it was things that he just already agreed with, cutting taxes for corporations, welfare reform, he mentions health care reform, but of course, that is not going to be towards the left. That was going to be towards the right in terms of quote-unquote “creating efficiencies” and Medicare and Medicaid, but more importantly, welfare reform, which was, again, a rightwing idea that Clinton adopted because he simply agreed with it. And so again, we had this idea of Democrats always need to compromise, and when they’re compromising, it’s not, this is an important point here, it’s not really compromising, because they mostly, especially the Democratic Leadership Council who elected Clinton, right, corporate-run, a lot of former Republicans, people like Dick Morris just ended up becoming Republicans immediately after. They agree with these so-called compromises. This is not, no one’s really getting their arm twisted. What happens is Republicans winning elections gives them cover and again, what are we seeing right now in January of 2025? Republicans winning gives them cover to carry out conservative or reactionary agendas that they have anyway.
Nima: Because they no longer feel like they need to appeal to so-called special interest groups, which are deemed political, and they get to go post-political by being the party of compromise, of getting things done.
Adam: Yeah, and the argument is, Hey, look, they’re gonna gut this liberal thing, and you can either be at the table and help them do it or not, and that’s the offer you can’t refuse. So the AP story discussing how Clinton was going to reach across the aisle would go on, quote,
In terms of welfare, Republicans are proposing a bill that seeks to discourage illegitimacy by ending cash and housing benefits to single teenage mothers and their children.
Unquote.
Nima: Yeah, the real enemies.
Adam: Well, clearly this is important, you compromise with these people.
Nima: Now during his State of the Union address in January of 1995, so that is now 30 years ago, Clinton made an appeal for the Democratic Party to work together with Republicans, framing it as a response to popular demand. Another AP article dated January 25, 1995 proclaimed, again, quote, “Clinton seeks common ground with Republicans.” End quote.
One excerpt from the article reads as follows, quote,
Drawing his own conclusions about the last two elections. Clinton said: “We didn’t hear America singing. We heard America shouting. Now we must say: We hear you. We will work together to earn your trust.”
End quote. And in that same speech, Clinton offered some superficial objections to GOP policy at the time, yet more decisively, he highlighted the ways he’d be willing to collaborate with Republicans in order to achieve the reactionary goals that they shared. Clinton, for instance, proposed initiatives to, quote, “cut down on illegal immigration,” end quote, as the AP put it, and expressed intentions to work with then Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole on the most minimal of health insurance, quote-unquote “reforms.”
This was after Clinton vetoed a watered-down version of his own healthcare bill for keeping coverage too limited. Rather than defending the cause of expanding healthcare, Clinton would later frame the bill as a failure because of its lack of compromise with Republicans. declaring that. quote “we bit off more than we could chew,” end quote.
Years later, during her senatorial term, Hillary Clinton, who’d been one of the architects of the healthcare bill under the Bill Clinton administration, argued that the bill was too ambitious and left-wing, and that it could have benefited from more Republican influence. A New York Times article from July 13, 2005, applauded Clinton’s shift as a form of growth. Noting this, quote,
Some of [Clinton’s] positions, particularly on health care, reflect a true evolution. She acknowledges the need for attaining bipartisan consensus and has promoted more incremental approaches in dealing with what was once her signature issue.
End quote. The Times would go on to state, quote,
She has deliberately avoided the major mistake she made as first lady, namely trying to sell an ambitious plan to a public with no appetite for radical change. Over the last four and a half years, she has stuck to a host of more modest initiatives, apparently mindful of the political perils of overreaching.
She summed up her approach in the first floor speech she delivered in the Senate about four years ago, when she unveiled a series of relatively modest health care initiatives.
“I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done.”
End quote.
Adam: Which is why I kind of prefer, because Clinton always did this thing where she insisted she wanted to do these bold, progressive measures, but was going to be pragmatic about it. And the only limitation was Republicans. But I like when Biden ran in 2020 they were like, If you had Medicare for All on your desk, and it was passed by Congress, would you sign it? And he’s like, No, I wouldn’t. It’s like, Oh, finally, someone just admits that they just ideologically opposed something. It’s not a, My hands are tied, right? Perpetually, hands are tied.
And so Clinton does this, we talked about in our episode on popularism, where the limitation is not her not wanting it or Democrats not wanting it, but is, in fact, either Republicans or, worse off, the people, the sort of masses don’t want that. But there was public appetite for radical change. The Times itself conducted a survey in September of 1993 showing, quote, “overwhelming majorities support the idea of assuring health coverage to all Americans and guaranteeing that no one ever loses their insurance when they switch jobs or suffer a medical catastrophe.”
Unquote. 61% of respondents said they were willing to pay higher taxes in order to accomplish that, and more than half said they approve of requiring employers to pay most of the premiums to cover their workers, which was, as the New York Times worded it, quote, “a centerpiece of the Clinton plan,” unquote.
Increasingly shady centrist groups embraced this ethos and labeling of bipartisanship. Obviously, groups like Third Way, which was backed by Wall Street, kept pushing this idea that we needed more bipartisanship and that we had a lot of polarization. Again, these things kind of generically poll well, until you ask for details.
Nima: Right, and all they mean is getting away from the so-called radicalism of the ’60s and getting more toward a rightwing Democratic Party position.
Adam: And in 2002, the Bipartisan Policy Center grew out of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a consortium of oil and gas interests. The Bipartisan Policy Center would then later vacuum up other industry money from across corporate America and rebrand it as a think tank designed to, quote, “promote common sense solutions in Washington.” Throughout the years, the Bipartisan Policy Center has been criticized by Public Citizen for taking a lot of banking money while criticizing Dodd Frank. It took Walmart money while defending conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories. And there was a piece in the Harvard University Safra Center for Ethics that accused the Bipartisan Policy Center of supporting expanded oil drilling after receiving donations from oil and gas interests and their main industry trade group America’s Natural Gas Alliance. Its current donors include Amazon, American Express, the conservative Scaife Foundation, Chevron, Citigroup, Eli Lilly, Equifax, the US Chamber of Commerce, Pete Peterson Foundation. We did a whole episode on him. So again, who is drawn to this concept of bipartisanship? It’s corporate interests who want to see Washington, quote, “get things done,” and those things are typically to help out corporate America.
Nima: Now let’s fast forward to the Barack Obama administration. During his presidency, Obama seemed to be of the same mind as Hillary Clinton, which news media at the time essentially congratulated him for. An Associated Press article from September 2009 ran this headline, quote, “Obama learns from Clinton missteps.” End quote. The article said this, quote,
President Obama faces the same obstacles that plagued former President Bill Clinton during a health care standoff 15 years ago. But Obama took a strikingly different path around them Wednesday night, using the promise of compromise over Clinton’s sharp-edged veto pen.
The AP continued, quote,
For Obama, his strategy and presidency are intertwined in a gambit where voters who want pragmatism and bipartisanship — or at least the appearance of them — outnumber those, particularly from his liberal political base, who want the instant overhaul of the U.S. health care system Obama promised last year.
“The time for bickering is over,” Obama told a joint session of Congress. “Now is the season for action.”
End quote. Now, the product of this, of course, was the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, or, quote-unquote, “Obamacare,” an improvement within the privatized healthcare system, for sure, but one that still provides people with little to no protection from the whims of the insurance industry, including rising, often exorbitant premiums. But as the AP reported at the time, this is 2009, this is the first year of the Obama presidency. He is hailed for basically ignoring the quote-unquote, “liberal political base,” right, Adam? The idea that, you know, the liberal base wants instant gratification, tear the system down, which is another accusation that is often thrown around, that the radicals in the party clearly far too left, anti-institution, anti-establishment. They just want to burn everything down. They want to actually not think things through, right? Like, there haven’t been enough studies backing them up, but the studies really support this Third Way, all of which is usually untrue. There are pragmatic ways to actually improve people’s lives. You don’t have to call that centrist or bipartisan. It can still be pragmatic, it can still be realistic, while also being on the left, but that is never deemed possible within our political discourse and certainly not in our media, where this idea of bipartisanship always has to tack right and get away from the quote-unquote “idealism” of a liberal Left.
Adam: So both Obama and Biden said all the right bipartisan shibboleths to get the editorial boards of the Washington Post and New York Times to kind of pat them on the back. They were part of that. Because, again, it’s code for like, I’m willing to implement rightwing ideas if the elite consensus lands on that. I have no real ideological commitment.
Nima: While also being the quote-unquote “adults in the room,” right?
Adam: Adults in the room. Again, Obama put a lot of capital into the Bowles-Simpson Commission, which was about raising the retirement age that eventually was so unpopular it went the way of the dinosaur. He consistently indulged austerity scolds, constantly talked about how they were balancing the budget. Biden used a similar formulation when he sunsetted a lot of the Covid aid that was essential to reducing poverty, especially childhood poverty, in 2021 and 2022 talking about the importance of bipartisanship.
So again, it’s never the other way around. It’s never to do something leftwing. You know, if it was, if we looked at this and it was 50/50, we’d say, Well, okay, maybe there’s some virtue to that. But back of the napkin, 95% of the time, it’s to ask, compel the Democratic Party to do rightwing things, or the Democratic Party to do rightwing things they want to do anyway, and now they have an ostensibly statesman-like or high-minded reason to do it.
And we see this rearing its ugly head post-2024 election. Unlike in 2017 where you did see, again, a lot of it was sucked up into a lot of Russiagate lawfare stuff and billionaire-funded democracy preservation claptrap. But there was a legit sense that Trump was going to be opposed. That he was going to be widely loathed. And in 2025, you see a different tune coming from the Democratic Party, both in terms of its leadership and media. I think grassroots is a little different. I think we can sort of talk about why that is.
Nima: It has gone from #Resistance to #CommonGround.
Adam: Right. And the reason why that is, is, this was the impetus of this episode, I believe that in some ways, there’s a belief that Trump and rich liberal donors, they share mutual enemies, and that Trump can be instrumentalized to discipline those mutual enemies. And those mutual enemies include quote-unquote, “woke” nonprofit types, Gaza protesters, very important, increasingly, people seen as too aggressive in supporting trans rights, while they may support gay and trans rights in the abstract, that whole crowd is seen as being too uppity, and also, I think a lot of them just hate trans people, and migrants, that Trump can be used to deport migrants and to solve the migrant problem, which is increasingly a bipartisan national security consensus that as climate change begins to escalate more and more, that climate refugees will become more and more of an issue over the next decade or two, and that we need to have a fully militarized border, and liberals kind of need a reason to support that, or I should say, liberal electeds or leadership, Democratic Party leadership, and that Trump can be used to kind of carry out these unseemly tasks and sort of be a sin eater in this capacity, and that we kind of need to build alliances with him.
So this kind of rhetoric immediately came post-election from Obama himself, the sort of king of bipartisanship. After Trump won his election, in December of 2024, Obama called for, quote, “forging alliances and building coalitions,” unquote, in his first speech since the election, taking a dig at so-called purity politics, naturally. The New York Times dutifully celebrated this calling in a, quote, “road map of sorts for political survival for liberals in a second term for Donald J. Trump,” unquote, without raising questions as to what, exactly, it means to ally with Republicans. Again, people are always vague on the specifics.
Nima: What alliances are going to be forged? What coalitions are going to be built with people who are the authors of, you know, trans destruction, of genocide in Gaza? What are those alliances going to look like?
Adam: Well, yeah, again, it’s not going to be saving the whales, and everybody knows that. That’s why they’re usually very vague on it until much later.
Nima: But of course Obama wasn’t the only prominent democratic voice to make these kinds of high-minded rhetorical recommendations about bipartisanship and seeking common ground. And here we turn to Joe Biden’s favorite morning show, Morning Joe, on MSNBC, in mid-November of 2024, right after the election. Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the hosts of Morning Joe, visited none other than Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, to meet with the incoming president. On their November 18 broadcast, they discussed the meeting and their approach to covering Trump in his second term. Let’s listen to a clip of what they said on their show.
[Begin clip]
Joe Scarborough: So I don’t know. Seems to make sense for leaders of both parties to seek common ground, if it’s possible at all, I will tell you a lot of Democratic leaders we’ve talked to this past week since the election have told Mika and me, It’s time for a new approach. And when I say top Democrats, I mean, top Democrats. They said, We’re open, and this was before we talked to Donald Trump. They said, Listen, we’re open to working with the incoming president, if the incoming president is open to working with us.
[End clip]
Nima: Yes, Adam, Joe Scarborough has been talking to top men, top top men.
Adam: The thing is, I have actually no doubt he was talking to top Democrats, because, as in the weeks following this aired, this was reflected by Hakeem Jeffries, by Nancy Pelosi, by Barack Obama. I mean, this is–
Nima: Yeah. This is the line. This was the line that was fed directly into the veins of Morning Joe. But here, later on the broadcast, Scarborough tried to preemptively address critics of this new approach, let’s say, saying this:
[Begin clip]
Joe Scarborough: Don’t be mistaken. We’re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We’re here to report on him, and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times. And I am reminded of what Marty Baron, legendary editor, told his Washington Post reporters back in the first term: “We’re not going to war. We’re going to work.”
[End clip]
Adam: Now, you’ll notice in all these alleged sort of broad, high-minded proclamations about working with Trump, is that, again, they never actually say in what context or towards what ends. And there’s a reason for that, because the ends are bad and evil, they’re not good, and so they keep that part kind of open-ended. So later on, when they do the evil stuff, they can sort of prime you for it. And this has been the playbook since Trump won the election, is to kind of remain vague. And so when things actually do, when the wave function does collapse, and one needs to sort of specify what they mean by working with Donald Trump, it gets kind of ugly.
So in November of 2024, the first post-Trump bill to be up in the House was what’s called this nonprofit killer, which was meant to go after Palestinian solidarity groups and Palestinian rights groups and Palestinians as such, right, where they were going to give the Trump administration full discretion to unilaterally determine nonprofits as supporting terrorism. This is a tremendous power to hand over to the Executive Branch without any due process. There’s some kangaroo court they threw out, but not really. And this was supported by 52 Democrats, again, 52 Democrats who vehemently support Israel.
So this is what they mean when they talk about compromise or working with Trump. It is not to save the spotted owl, it is to go after vulnerable groups that rich people in both parties hate. And so this was the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. And this was supported by 52 Democrats, including Colin Allred, Rep. Susan Lee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Kathy Manning, and of course, Adam Schiff, the permanent guy who apparently sleeps at the green room at MSNBC,Mr. Resistance himself, who was newly elected senator of California. Now he was actually pressured by constituents after that vote to change his vote on the upcoming vote, because it was actually killed the first time around. But this is, again Adam Schiff, as someone who presents themselves as the kind of vanguard of Trump resistance, right, constantly going on CNN and MSNBC, talking about he was not scared of Trump, and he’s going to stand up to Trump.
Nima: And naming, again and again, specifically, that Trump is a threat to democracy, and then he goes and literally hands over this, this power where a president can determine whether a nonprofit keeps its nonprofit status or potentially goes bankrupt, just based on whether or not they are supporting any groups or do anything related to Palestine, which is really what this is all about, even though it doesn’t actually say that in the bill.
Adam: Right. And so this, again, this is someone who made his name off anti-Trump resistance, who, the second Trump gets elected, is willing to hand over tremendous unilateral power to the Trump administration because they share a mutual interest. Again, Adam Schiff was a recipient of AIPAC money in the Senate in the 2024 cycle, and so he’s rewarding that campaign donation by going after mutual enemies. The Times then reported on Democrats embracing Trump’s immigration policies. On December 10, they ran an article with a headline, quote, “Resist Trump? On Immigration, Top Democrats See Room for Compromise.” Again, we are not saving the blind salamander. This is something a little more sinister. In the piece, the Times interviewed 11 Democrat electeds and candidates, including Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Kathy Hochul of New York. According to the New York Times, several were willing to, quote, “deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes,” unquote, and wanted, quote, “stricter border control,” unquote. Though the Times didn’t elaborate on that, it presumably means a more militarized and far deadlier US-Mexico border.
The Times commended this embrace of Trump’s fascistic immigration policies as quote, “careful” and quote, “measured,” making sure to add that immigrants had, quote, “strained public services,” unquote, in some cities that Democratic interviewees governed. Buried deep in the piece was a token paragraph about a quote “red line” of quote, “kids in cages” and family separation, yet somehow the times never questioned the cognitive dissonance between this and a willingness to tolerate Trump’s immigration policies, which are centered on family separation. And of course, Biden himself was guilty of family separation, as ProPublica reported last month.
And so there’s this general idea that when it comes to things like cracking down on the border, when it comes to things like cracking down on Gaza protesters, the reason why they’re not opposing Trump is because they agree with Trump. And again, bipartisanship only goes in one direction, and it’s rightwing. But saying Democrats want to embrace Trump’s rightwing policy sounds bad. So what you say is they’re actually embracing common ground, and they’re going to work with Trump. And then you kind of leave this blank space about what exactly, in what context, and then later on, you’re like, Oh, here’s the context. And then you put it in equally anodyne terms about securing the border or stopping terror, promotion of terror or antisemitism on college campuses, right? You sort of need to frame it in a way that sounds liberal or sounds high-minded, but really it’s just reactionary horseshit.
And recently centrists and even unfortunately, some progressives have embraced the so-called DOGE committee headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, these unelected, I guess, wealthy donors and friends of wealthy donors of Trump, just decided to create a so-called, quote-unquote “government waste” and quote-unquote “government efficiency” quote-unquote “commission.” And we’ve seen Democrats again, who supported Bowles-Simpson, who supported other austerity commissions, come out and tepidly endorse this, and unfortunately, some so-called progressives in Congress have indulged this premise to try to do this clever gotcha around defense spending. Bernie Sanders tweeted out on December 1, quote,
Elon Musk is right.
The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions.
Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.
Unquote. And Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna similarly accepted the premise that DOGE was about government efficiency. In a December 10, 2024 opinion piece for MSNBC headlined, “Democrats can work with DOGE. I know exactly where to start,” unquote, Khanna made the same argument as Sanders that DOGE could reduce defense spending, and that Khanna would work with Musk and Ramaswamy, to quote, “reduce waste and fraud at the Pentagon.” Now, of course, this is too clever by half, right? This is kind of the progressive like, gotcha, we’re gonna go to the Pentagon.
Nima: Well, right, because they’re doing a whole like, “by your logic” thing, right? Like, Oh, you mean government efficiency? Here’s where you could really cut down. But obviously that’s not what’s going to happen.
Adam: Right. It’s obviously absurd. And to be fair, though, a lot of centrist Democrats have also embraced elements of the so-called DOGE commission. Tommy Vietor, the Pod Save America guy, former Obama staffer, was criticizing DOGE for cutting cancer research and writes, quote,
I support the @DOGE mission of cutting unnecessary spending, and I understand why people hate the process Congress uses for spending bills, but you have to look at what’s in the bill the Elon just killed. For example, the five hugely important bills to combat childhood cancer.
Unquote.
Again, I think everyone is being too clever here, trying to work with or accept the premise of this government efficiency, but it’s not a government efficiency commission, because that’s not some post-ideological thing, right? And it’s not some abstract thing. Context matters. And the guy worth half a trillion dollars, who posts 4Chan memes all day and basically bought his way into a co-presidency, is not concerned with government waste. He’s concerned with cutting labor protections, environmental protections, food and safety regulations. He wants to go after the post office, education, teachers’ unions. He’s a union-busting racist. He wants to go after racialized federal labor, gendered federal labor, seen as being quote-unquote “wasteful” in his mind. There’s no way, there’s no universe that the Trump administration and Republicans are going to cut the Pentagon because someone did a clever gotcha by showing inefficiencies. They don’t care. So why are we accepting the premise that this has anything to do with government efficiencies? Right?
Pretty soon you’re going to tell me that people who support right-to-work laws don’t actually care about people’s right to work, or people that support pro-life don’t actually care about life. I mean, accepting the premise that any of this has to do with government waste and austerity is fundamentally either credulous or cynical, and you’re already on the defensive because you’re accepting the premise that this has anything to do with government waste. But of course, it doesn’t. It’s an attack on the liberal state. So already you see the Democratic Party and even progressives in Congress being completely unequipped to deal with this moment, because they’re obsessed with this concept of working with Republicans when you’re dealing with the biggest liar, pathological liars, on Earth who obviously are never doing anything in good faith, and just because fucking Donald Trump Jr., you know, Trump’s cokehead failson does something on Twitter about cutting the Pentagon or whatever, it’s not going to happen. Okay? It’s not going to happen. And all you’re doing is you’re accepting the premise that this has anything to do with government waste.
And so again, the first few months before the Inauguration, which I know is very soon, is not looking good in terms of, they’re already behind the eight ball in terms of messaging, because, again, there’s this obsession with, We need to work with Trump. But I see no reason why a supposed or alleged opposition party needs to indulge any of these premises, other than the fact that some people think they can get things out of it, and those things, Nima, are almost always just going to be rightwing. There’s no sense that the compromise goes the other direction ever.
Nima: Because it never has. And, you know, not to be too kind of hackneyed about it, but it really seems like a fitting time to remind us all, and certainly these common-ground, bipartisan Democrats, of the words of Frederick Douglass, who made clear that, quote, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” and that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” And so the idea that you would just kind of work with the opposition, and not just like a kind of anodyne political opposition, but a virulently and overtly fascistic administration by saying, No, we can, you know what? We can get things done. Let’s not be too confrontational.
Adam: They should be calling DOGE the fucking Cat Food Commission on steroids. They should be talking about taking away Grandma’s Social Security, and pushing workers into workplaces without worker protections, and poisoned baby formula. They need to be talking about what it means to gut the liberal state, not doing this cutesy-wutesy, 12-dimensional, Well, by your logic, we should cut the Pentagon. It doesn’t fucking matter. Okay? They don’t care. Nobody cares.
Nima: Right. The common ground is not going to be found by cutting Pentagon budgets. They’re not going to stop making, you know, F-16s or sending weapons to destroy Gaza. No, it’s actually going to be public schools that get shut down. So the “by your logic,” cutesy bullshit, is definitely not going to work. But to discuss this more, and this obsession with finding bipartisanship, we’re going to speak to Malaika Jabali, a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, Teen Vogue, The Nation, the New Republic, Jacobin, The Intercept, and Essence, where she previously served as senior news and politics editor. Her debut book, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On, was published in 2023 by Hachette Algonquin press. Malaika will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by journalist and author Malaika Jabali. Malaika, so great to have you back on Citations Needed.
Malaika Jabali: Glad to be back with you all as well. It feels like forever ago. It kind of was forever ago, but I feel like the time just warped. It was like right before COVID.
Adam: Yeah, it was like five minutes before COVID, and so
Malaika Jabali: Literally. [Laughs]
Nima: Our interview is what did it.
Adam: So let’s not unleash another horrible event this time around. So I want to begin by talking about, we have a sort of genre of what we call anti-politics. And this was thematically similar to the last time we had you on, a spiritual sequel. We want to talk about this kind of lofty concept of bipartisanship or common ground, as we’ve been discussing at the top of the show, and how it’s sort of asserted as a kind of inherently virtuous thing to overcome quote-unquote “congressional gridlock,” which is to say, like Democratic opposition, to supposedly, quote-unquote, “get things done.” It’s kind of this ideologically neutral thing that’s inherently good, regardless of the context.
Now, you approach this sort of issue from a different perspective in much of your reporting, specifically your pre-election reporting, about the general disaffected nature of many voters, which was manifested in the fact that 6.2 million Democrats stayed home relative to 2020, and of course, those who didn’t vote in 2020, right, who broadly see, and this is a criticism one hears a lot, especially amongst poorer communities or struggling communities or disinvested communities, that the parties are kind of the same, and it doesn’t really matter who they vote for. Now, setting aside whether that’s true, which we can debate later, that is a popular sentiment. And so this is kind of the inverse bizarro world of like, the bipartisanship is this inherently good thing. For many people, the fact that they’re bipartisan is taken for granted and is considered not a good thing. It’s kind of more evidence that the game is rigged.
So I want to begin by talking about this lofty notion of bipartisanship, how it kind of plays in the Beltway press, versus how this idea that the elites kind of mostly agree, manifest for people who are on the periphery of politics.
Malaika Jabali: Yeah. I think for the general public, how a lot of people interpret that is, when they think of DC, I think it’s so easy to call out DC if you’re running on a populist campaign, because they are backed by a lot of elite interests. They’re backed by billionaires. I was doing some casual research of the healthcare lobby, if you can imagine why I’m looking into that, and they’ve been lobbying and spending all this money donating to campaigns, more to Democrats than Republicans, just for instance. And so when people wonder why we cannot get certain legislation passed, both parties are a part of this. So this idea about draining the swamp, you know, it’s not just this rightwing thing that Donald Trump has latched onto. It’s something that a lot of everyday people feel.
And I think the tendency from Democrats is to just say, Oh, it’s just all the far leftists who are trying to say that we’re the same, and look at the ways that we differ, and there are some meaningful ways that they do differ, but on an economic level, a lot of it feels like the same, because people’s lives have not meaningfully changed in a lot of cities. So I do a lot of my reporting in Milwaukee, and they can talk to you about NAFTA. They can tell you about the fact that’s something that Bill Clinton was fully behind. And so when Hillary Clinton ran in the state, she did not do well. She lost to Bernie Sanders. So there’s this underlying populism and working-class consciousness and some of these states where Democrats need the most. And it’s not coming from, you know, Jacobin-reading Bushwick cafe-enjoying coastal elites.
Adam: I feel personally attacked, but go ahead.
Malaika Jabali: I’m one of them. I’m attacking myself. You know, I hung out in Bushwick all the time.
[Laughter]
Adam: I haven’t lived in Bushwick in eight years.
Nima: And you still feel attacked.
Malaika Jabali: I was in Bed-Stuy. I was right across the train tracks. So I love that area. But it is what it is. It’s not just us. I was following some canvassers who are going to the suburban developments, but the suburbs in Milwaukee, it’s a lot of working-class people there. And so some of the earliest public housing developments were in the suburbs, and so I’m following these canvassers who are going to working-class Black neighborhoods. They’re going to public developments. And I did this story for The Nation, and one of the guys just, first of all, people don’t even want to answer the door when they think we’re talking about politics. But then one of the few who answer was like, Oh, this is about the election. There’s this, it’s not even just apathy, it’s antipathy. They are so keenly aware of what’s going on in this public housing development, and this guy just straight up was like, you know, It’s two devils. They’re the same to me. A lot of the criticism comes from, you know, just everyday people who, they’re just not really seeing a lot of necessary substantive economic policy.
Adam: So I want to follow up real quick, because the criticism of that, or the follow-up to that, and because, again, this is something that people have heard a lot who work in professional politics, is obviously voter-scolding or yelling at voters for being stupid or blaming, you know, misinformation or whatever. And maybe to some extent, the latter is true, but on a fundamental level, 2016 and 2024 were both anti-establishment elections. That is borne out by almost all the polling data that says people are sort of mad at the establishment for a variety of reasons, both for temporary issues, which emerged out of the Biden or Obama years, but also these kind of steady-state issues, high cost of housing, high cost of healthcare, high cost of education, all that stuff, right? And the Democrats have been seen as the elite party. In fact, they kind of defend the status quo. They sort of campaign with Liz Cheney, talk about how great the economy is doing, with some token mention of, Oh, we know people are suffering. We’re going to do this, this and this. But broadly speaking, they campaign as the so-called establishment. And I know that establishment and anti-establishment are kind of meaningless distinctions. Right? The fact that Trump, who’s a billionaire and supported by the richest person in the world, almost worth half a trillion dollars, is trying to, you know, present himself as anti-establishment is obviously absurd, but it’s just a matter of branding it. He does, and to a lot of people, it works.
Nima: And especially because both of those elections, ’16 and ’24, the incumbent administration was Democratic, so the Democratic presidential candidate decided not to run against the previous establishment, right? So there was no break. It was about kind of bolstering what had already been the case to continue this pro-establishment administration.
Adam: Yeah. So talk, if you could, about this general sentiment of establishment vs. anti-establishment, and how Democrats, again, I think for reasons we can get into, and reasons that you’ve written about, still cling on to this fundamentally conservative image and refuse to even go in any other direction, while letting someone, a huckster like Trump, kind of take that mantle through this kind of slippery, faux-populist rhetoric.
Malaika Jabali: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of tradition and the culture and perhaps nature of Democratic Party leadership to not admit your own fault. So we were told that this Third Way in Democratic Party politics was the way to move forward after you had the white working class, for the most part, realign towards the Republican Party in the ’60s. So they said, We want to make sure we focus on white professionals, the Black middle class, or just Black people in general, and then cobble together some kind of coalition. And it had, at least on a presidential level, it had mixed results. So Bill Clinton won as a Third Way Democrat. Joe Biden won, I would say, not because he was a Third Way Democrat, just but because people were tired of Donald Trump. But Hillary Clinton lost both of her races. Kamala Harris lost both of her races, or, excuse me, her race, and we could, well, she did campaign the first time, and she just dropped out. So I guess you could say she was not successful in either, and we could talk about sexism and all of that. But I believe that so much of this is just because the Democratic Party does not want to say that this theory that they’ve held on to has mixed results. It might work sometimes with suburban voters who do want the establishment, but for a lot of other people, they need more than that. It’s almost like a political theory, bipartisanship. Or the way that they even talk about democracy. That connects with a certain segment of people. If you go around to the hood or just, you know, just talk to everyday people, like, What’s the problem with America? The first thing they’re not going to say is, We need more civility in Congress. I don’t think most people are saying that. They’re going to say, Hey, I cannot pay my bills. I cannot afford rent. I have to work too many jobs. My job sucks. You know, people aren’t talking about, Oh, I got along with a segregationist. That is not, I don’t think that’s what people are looking for in their elected leaders.
Nima: Yeah, I think that’s such a great point. I kind of want to drill down a little bit into that conceptual level of this, like the terms “bipartisanship” and “common ground,” tend to poll well because they mean nothing. You can just project whatever you want. Readers of those terms or respondents to polls, can just decide what they mean for themselves and be like, Yeah, I guess you know, common ground is good, and obviously bipartisanship, to say save the whales or feed poor people is great, but bipartisanship as a term, as a concept, it’s almost always used in reality as something that exists on the right. That common ground that is found is always on the right. Bipartisanship funds more weapon systems. It keeps genocides going. It, quote-unquote, “reforms” Social Security to privatize it. It’s basically a reactionary state, this idea of bipartisanship, how it plays out in real life.
And as we detailed at the top of the show, recently, Democrats supporting Trump’s upcoming crackdown on campus protests, slashing social programs, anti-immigrant policies and escalating very jingoistic rhetoric about Iran and China, those Democrats who are definitely supporting what is coming are framing the support as, what else, a gesture of bipartisanship. So, Malaika, I would love to hear you talk about how this rhetoric of whether it’s, you know, this kind of finding common ground with the new administration or bipartisan compromise, how is that always used to really obscure rightwing political aims, and the support that those aims get from Democrats, and kind of reframing that support for these violent, violent policies as magnanimous gestures of professional statesmanship? ‘This is what real politicians should do.’ What is the purpose of this bullshit?
Malaika Jabali: Well, it serves a few purposes. I think when you think about the history of both of these parties, the way that they’ve interacted, they’ve been pretty rightwing in a lot of ways, and so it serves rightwing purposes, because the Democratic Party is on the right. I mean, if you think globally in terms of where we are, in terms of political alignments, favoring the sort of liberalism where you have all these means-tested programs, those are center-right ideas. Having austerity, deregulation, being neoliberal, and cutting out a lot of public goods so that they’re privatized. Those are right and center-right policies, which the Democratic Party has been all about over the last 50 or so years. So it’s a rightwing party, you know, if you think about it internationally, so it serves their purposes. You know, they align with capitalists. They align with these ideas, even if you want to look at the more cultural liberal ideas that the Democratic Party at least tries to distinguish themselves from, even that they compromised, they threw a lot of Black people under the bus.
So just take Joe Biden, for instance. He was criticized for this, I think, not nearly enough. But he was criticized because, during his campaign in 2020, or leading into the 2020 presidential race, he was hyping up this relationship he had with a literal plantation owner, James Eastland, a southern senator who was a Dixiecrat, who left the party in 1948 when the Democratic Party started to incorporate more civil rights goals into its convention, and Joe Biden was like, Hey, I was able to reach across the aisle, and we don’t have the same kind of civility anymore. So this idea of seeking compromise, not only compromise the working class in general, but it compromises a key base that the Democratic Party has considered their blue wall, which are Black folks. And we can take it even before that, I got a couple quotes for y’all I wanted to share.
Nima: Citations brought.
Malaika Jabali: Citations are needed, and we gonna bring them. But I wrote a piece about Joe Biden during this era because it reminded me so much of Malcolm X’s Ballot or the Bullet speech. And what he said in 1964 was that going between, this first part is a paraphrase, but he said going between Democrats and Republicans is like, and I quote, “It’s like running from the wolf to the fox. They’re all in cahoots together.” So this was in 1964 so this isn’t a new idea. And he was referring to the fact that Lyndon B. Johnson was making these concessions with James Eastland, the same person who basically mentored Joe Biden. So Joe Biden comes from this school of thought. And then just a few years before that, we had somebody who said,
I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
This was W.E.B. DuBois, who was considered, you know, a part of this talented tenth, about as mainstream as you could get when he was with the NAACP, but later on, he was more radicalized and all of that. But this is like a 60-, 70- year-old complaint that Black people have had because they’ve seen the way that both parties have used Black folks in this way, and the civility that they’re talking about, the compromise that they’re talking about is compromising their own base.
Adam: If one party constantly fetishizes and talks about great, grand, and important bipartisanship, and the other party, especially over the last, you know, 10 years, doesn’t even pay lip service to it, then naturally, the compromise is only going to go one way, right? I mean, and this is, I think, where it’s like, Who do you represent, who do you stand for? And you mentioned throwing people under the bus. And I want to talk about that, if you will indulge me, because I think that even if, on a short term, some triangulation polls well, kind of makes sense in some kind of super savvy, strategic way. I think that even if you accept that premise, which I think is somewhat dubious, that over time, if you have a party that’s seen as constantly triangulating, like, what’s the biggest knock of Democrats? They’re inauthentic. And yes, I think a lot of that is through the lens of gender with respect to Harris and Clinton, but it’s a broad critique that does apply to non-women as well, which is that they’re seen as kind of phony. And I think that when you’re constantly throwing constituents under the bus or changing policies, where you go from you know, ‘kids in cages’ to ‘Biden supports family separation, but it’s less than Trump supported,’ Biden supports obviously, they, in February of 2024 they adopted what they called, explicitly, a Republican plan for the border, a border security. And obviously you have some anti-trans comments coming out post-election.
And among other examples we can list where it’s like, if your scene is constantly triangulating, there’s a broader impression people get that they’re next on the list, like, if I work at a place and my boss is capriciously firing people, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do? You’re gonna go home and update your resume, right? And it leads to this kind of anti-solidaristic framework around party politics, and that, I think, is what leads to all the voter-scolding, because it’s not incumbent upon those in power to represent you or to have solidarity with you. You are constantly being yelled at for not doing your role of pulling the lever for them. And the kind of transactional nature, the kind of mercenary nature takes hold in the entire culture, and I think where people think they’re clever, you know, kind of selling out this constituent or this cause. ‘We’re gonna deprioritize climate.’ ‘We’re gonna talk about fracking and fossil fuels and extraction,’ all the above, whatever you wanna frame it as. I mean, they’re constantly sort of, they’re constantly sort of throwing these supposed sacred constituents and causes under the bus for some supposed short-term game. I do think it leads to a broader impression that, Oh, they’re full of shit, because, again, maybe I’m next on the list. So comment, if you could about when we do talk about compromise or triangulation, that it has to have some broad deleterious effect where it seems like nothing is sacred and everybody’s up for grabs.
Malaika Jabali: I mean, I feel like that’s been the premise of my reporting over the last seven or eight years, is the fact that it does have an impact in terms of the number of independents and non-voters we’re seeing in a lot of elections. As you mentioned, fewer people voted for Democrats in 2024. In 2016, there was a precipitous decline in Black voter turnout in Wisconsin and throughout the country. There were levels of low voter turnout for Hillary Clinton that really cost her the race. I would say it cost her more than whatever votes Donald Trump got because he performed marginally better than Mitt Romney, really not much. I think he got like, 1% higher of voters, while Hillary Clinton, especially in some swing states in Wisconsin, she had, like, I don’t know, like 300,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama. So people do see that. And then when you look at how people are identifying, more and more people are identifying as Independents, and it’s costing both Democrats and Republicans, but Democrats are the folks aligning with them. It is dropping even a little bit more than the Republican Party. So I think people tend to assume that Independents are just, for whatever reason, it’s such a weird calculus, they think just because it’s Independent that people are automatically centrist or Midwestern centrist. A lot of people are actually a little bit more progressive. So 43% of at least respondents to this Gallup survey, I think it came out a year ago. 43% of people consider themselves to be Independent, and that is the larger, that’s the plurality, of the way that people identify. So I think between the ways that folks are showing up or not showing up at the polls should tell us something, and if it doesn’t, at least give us something conclusive. I do believe that there should be some questions, at least some kind of reflection, something for the Democratic Party leadership to home in on it and say, Okay, well, what is going on here? But when you hear a lot of the responses to this election, it’s like, Well, we were actually too woke. We talked about defunding. Like, no, you didn’t. Nobody did that. So you guys are choosing to go this path because you either are choosing to look at the data wrong, or you ultimately also believe in these things, and you just don’t want to have to defend it.
Adam: Well, they don’t want to be out of work.
Nima: Right, exactly.
Adam: They raised $1.8 billion and a lot of people made a lot of money. So obviously, you know, if I’m working somewhere and someone’s like, did you screw up? I’m gonna blame literally anyone but myself, and I’m a stumbling coward, which I think represents most people who work for the Democratic Party.
[Laughter]
Nima: So I kind of want to talk about power and what it means to wield power, and politics is largely, especially at the kind of party politics and federal level, about who can wield power, obviously local as well. But if we’re looking kind of nationally, and kind of dovetailing with this idea of authenticity and consistency, it really does seem like there is one party that is a party of opposition when they are not wielding as much power as they want, and they use that opposition to then take power back, and another party that, even when it has so-called power, is looking for compromise and bipartisanship, as if that is the highest ideal of a two-party system, or that’s what real democracy or republicanism, small r, means. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what it means to actually build power to win politically, but also not just in the politics, but in the policies, and even across pop culture, right? To kind of move larger cultural ideas to wield power that way. How do you view power dynamics in this notion of who seeks to be bipartisan, who seeks to find common ground, and who is just interested in power?
Malaika Jabali: I think in terms of how, let’s just say the Democratic party thinks about power, I think it is largely in the sense of keeping their friends in their club in office. So that’s separate from people power, which I think part of the conversation here is about, how can we have a working-class electorate that has power and where their voices are actually in their policy preferences are represented? I don’t think we have any major political party that exists for that. I don’t want to discount the independent and third parties. There’s a Green Party, there’s a Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Working Families Party, which is kind of its own party, but kind of not, you know, they tend to align with the Democrats in some way. But I think for Democrats, there’s a tendency to say, Hey, these are the people in our club, and we’re going to, we’re going to ride with them, like, regardless of what happens, you know, I think they would have been perfectly fine running Joe Biden, who I think would have lost even worse than Kamala Harris, because there isn’t a lot of forward thinking at that level from what I see.
Even when you think about some insurgent candidates that probably would have helped the Democratic party win. We go back to Bernie Sanders. I think the Democratic Party would have maintained power if Bernie Sanders had two terms, but they want their guy or their gal to be in office. Barack Obama, he had to kind of go against the grain. He had some allies within the Democratic Party. I don’t think he would have succeeded if he did not, but he at least had this aura, as the kids would say, he had this aura where it was just like, he’s not exactly indigenous to the Democratic Party. He’s a community organizer. He’s going against the grain. We kind of haven’t really heard from him before. He’s this new guy who’s actually talking about universal healthcare, things that the Democratic Party hadn’t really talked about for a long time, or single-payer health care. So being able to trust outsiders, I mean, the Republican Party just kind of had to do it, because Donald Trump just became so popular, so a lot of them relented, but the Democratic Party doesn’t really seem open to doing that. The Intercept has done so much reporting about how they have undermined insurgent candidates who likely would have won their races, except the Democratic party wanted to back the most right wing within their party, because that’s who they know, that’s who they trust, in a way, and so it kind of goes back to what you guys are saying. I mean, they’re sticking out for their friends.
Adam: I guess the strategy is to keep torturing the same 15 Panera Bread white people and haranguing them. I mean, again, the Liz Cheney strategy certainly had diminishing returns at a certain point. Again, this constituency is not that, I remember in September and October, I would, on Twitter, I was like, Is there any evidence there’s a meaningful Liz Cheney constituency? Like, I’m open to the idea, clearly I have ideological reasons to be skeptical of it, but let’s hash this out. And then people would be like, you know, The campaign has some secret, kind of Nixon’s secret plan to bring down inflation. Like, there’s some secret plan. I’m like, Well, okay, well, I guess it’ll be revealed after the election. Of course, it never was, because there really wasn’t a plan. It was just other rich people I know, and other people that watch Morning Joe, was the Alpha and Omega of their strategy.
Nima: Yeah, speaking of Morning Joe, actually, considering this is a show that talks about media a lot, why do you think there’s this appeal, not just in our party politics and kind of pollsterism, but also in our press, that kind of gloms on to this idea bipartisanship as the highest order of quote-unquote “politics,” and how does that continue to infect how people perceive Washington writ large as kind of a, you know, singular entity, the swamp, as it were, but also how that then affects how people think about like, how democracy actually can happen, which kind of comes back to this idea of of wielding power to change people’s lives, hopefully for the better?
Malaika Jabali: Yeah, that’s a good question, and I wish I knew why this was so attractive to so many people who consider themselves, you know, kind of center or center-left or even center-right, like why it’s so appealing to them. I don’t you know where, where is the data? I mean, when you look at, again, yes, it might pull well in a vacuum. But when you ask people, when you look at surveys. For instance, there’s this ongoing survey of Black women, who are, you know, Democratic Party hails as their ardent base. ‘We gotta listen to Black women, trust Black women.’ But when you look at Black voters, I think it was last year, this was the least faith they had in the Democratic Party in history, or, you know, the history of when this has been recorded. So I’m not sure what they’re looking at. So that was one survey. But then, Essence, they do this kind of annual election survey. And the top concerns that Black women had, regardless of generation, they were all based in economics. It was the cost of living, housing affordability, bipartisanship does not even show up as something where people would immediately say is a concern of theirs. It might, if they’re being asked about it specifically. But I think the media and elected officials have the power to shape narratives.
You know, there’s all this, just thinking about healthcare again, nobody was really talking about it substantively in this election cycle. But that doesn’t mean that people weren’t thinking about it. But because it was not a part of our media narrative, I don’t even think it was something that was asked in the exit polls. But as we are seeing, in the last couple of weeks, people have a lot of thoughts about it. So we have these corporate media outlets who do have the power to shape the conversations.
You know, even something this is kind of going off on a tangent a little bit, but there’s so much energy behind for even on a municipal level, just making sure the resources that are allocated towards police departments actually go to communities on the ground. But you know that idea about investing in communities and divesting from police, no one’s talking about that anymore, because it’s not a media conversation. But it’s happening on the ground. So the fact that these outlets can sort of pick and choose what we decide is important should be factored in here. I don’t know if anyone really care about this, if it was not something that was talked about in these circles, and it’s not entirely, unless somebody can show me differently, it’s not entirely supported by data that you saying you are bipartisan is what helps you get elected. I remember Barack Obama winning in 2012 it wasn’t because he was saying he could get along with Mitt Romney. He was saying that Mitt Romney was elite and out of touch and, you know, we’ve got these really rich guys who are not looking out for the little people. And that’s what a lot of people respond to.
Nima: Yeah, it’s almost this idea that, like corporate media finds it very weird when people feel strongly about things and so like, either way, it’s like, oh, that’s just weird you actually feel a certain way, which is why this idea of finding common ground seems to be the highest order. But, Malaika, before we let you go, please tell our listeners what you are up to these days, what we can look out for, where folks can find your writing.
Malaika Jabali: You can read my work about how we have this capitalist system, and both of these parties align with it. I wrote It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On. That came out in 2023. But I’ve also been in Wisconsin for the better of three years, I moved here in 2020. I’ve kind of been back and forth a little bit, but I’m working on a second book about the Black working class and how a lot of people have become non-voters, and how non-voters, people who do not feel like their economic needs are being met by either party, people who are either becoming Independent or dealigning from the Democratic Party in other ways, how that is shaping our elections. So that book is forthcoming. It should be out, probably around the midterms. And if you want to hear me rant about all this stuff, I’m on “X,” quote-unquote, Twitter @malaikajabali.
Nima: Amazing. Well, we will absolutely look out for that book. And of course, you are always welcome back here. We will make sure that it does not take an entire pandemic-plus for you to come back. But it has been great to talk to you. We’ve been speaking with journalist and author Malaika Jabali. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Teen Vogue, The Nation, the New Republic, Jacobin, The Intercept, and Essence, where she previously served as senior news and politics editor. As she just mentioned, her first book, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On, was published in 2023, and look out for her new book coming soon. Malaika, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Malaika Jabali: Thank you all for having me.
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Adam: Yeah, I mean, again, I think it’s just one of those things you say when you’re about to upset your constituents or contradict your nominal ideological preferences, right?
Nima: Right. You say, I’m doing this because I want to get back to work. I want to get things done. It’s not because I am continuing to do things that are destructive.
Adam: It also plays into this kind of, like, meretricious, corporate, like, We’re gonna roll up our sleeves and get to work. And it’s like, Well, get to work doing what? Cutting WIC? I mean, what? You know, raising the retirement age?
Nima: Well, yeah, because it basically frames a different kind of ideological commitment, a commitment to principled opposition to the worst political ideologies, to terrible, destructive, harmful, violent policies, to literal violence being conducted either by the state here in the US or by a military abroad. It kind of assigns whatever demands are made to change those things to kind of an unrealistic radicalism, and that, Because that’s so unrealistic, you know, what we have to do? We have to just get back to work, do the hard work of real politics, Adam. And that means finding common ground, which, of course, always means just going closer to the position that’s already in power.
Adam: Well, because we have a recurring theme in the show, which is, everyone’s powerless, and nobody wants to commit to doing bad things. No one just wants to kind of openly, just support a genocide or openly support austerity cuts, right? So there’s this elaborate regime that’s built around, kind of giving an excuse or making people seem like they’re powerless, or that they’re kind of plankton in the ocean, kind of floating around trying to avoid the whale. No one has any agency, nor has any power. No one has any real ideology. They’re kind of just floating around. And bipartisanship, again, just provides this lofty, seemingly lofty sounding, noble posture to do things that are almost always unpopular with one’s base, but even just unpopular in general, and in direct contradiction to the sort of nominal reason they were elected. I mean, supposedly, you know, you’re supposed to get these compromises in return, but it’s not quite clear what any of those are. They don’t even bother running through the motions about what those are here.
Nima: Right. It’s like, well, if we give this, then you give nothing.
Adam: I mean, what, exactly, has Trump given anyone here? I mean, find it. For me, I can’t find it. And if you find it, by all means, let me know. With all these compromising Democrats since his election and with the actual inauguration, what was, what was conceded? I mean, I don’t see anything.
Nima: Right, and I’m glad that we started off the year, new episodes in 2025, and looking at a new administration in office, and the way that not only politicians, but also the media, is kind of preparing for all of this. I’m glad that we started the year off, Adam, with this topic, because I think we’re gonna see a lot more of it to come.
Thank you all for joining us. You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and, of course, you can support the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, January 15, 2025.
