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New Republic Mar 30, 2026

Ben Lerner’s Transcription Is a Labyrinth of Allusions

Early on in Transcription, Ben Lerner’s new novel, the narrator finds himself without a cell phone. (Or more precisely, without a working cell phone: He knocked his into a sink full of water just before leaving his hotel.) As he walks through the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, phonelessness becomes a state of extreme presence. He’s “more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk.” He is also returned to his past. Two and a half decades ago, he was at college in Providence; now, unable to contact the world beyond—unable to “swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc.”—he is thrown back on his memories. He sees in a passer-by one of his old professors; he expects his fortysomething wife, back home in New York, to appear as the student she once was.It’s a quintessentially Lerner-like state. In The Topeka School (2019), for example, a married middle-aged man beginning an affair is at the same time the teenage boy he once was, gleeful to have “made it to third base.” On other occasions in Lerner’s fiction, more mysteriously, characters become other people or even other creatures, as well as themselves. The narrator of 10:04 (2014) is entered by the “alien intelligence” of the octopus he has just eaten and takes on its “succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects.” In these moments, Lerner is at his remarkable best, his expanded field of vision making the mundane at once vivid and otherworldly.For the narrator of Transcription, being without a phone is a gateway to the sublime, an experience of almost unpleasant intensity. It’s also extremely inconvenient. The narrator is no longer a responsibility-free college student. It’s evening, and he had promised to call his tween daughter before her bedtime. He’s on his way to interview his 90-year-old mentor, Thomas, a famous historian of technology and culture, for a magazine; he had been planning to record their conversation on his phone. He can’t call to postpone because, of course, he doesn’t know Thomas’s phone number. For reasons he doesn’t articulate to himself, the narrator cannot imagine telling Thomas about his waterlogged phone. Instead, he decides, he’ll frame their conversation tonight as preparatory, laying the groundwork for the real interview, which will take place the following morning—once he’s had a chance to go to the Apple store to buy a replacement phone.His plan doesn’t work. Thomas reasonably points out that rehearsing a conversation they plan to have tomorrow will make them sound like “bad actors.” By now, the narrator is so hemmed in by half-truths and untruths that there seems only one course of action left to him. He takes the dead phone from his pocket and puts it face down on the table between them. “We are recording,” he says.In this moment, the narrator resembles the narrator of Lerner’s 2011 debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, who regularly finds himself telling lies that allow him to escape the awkwardness of the present at the cost of greater awkwardness, or worse, later. Will Thomas, or the magazine, find out about the nonexistent recording? Will the narrator be able to come back tomorrow, new phone in hand, and maneuver his interviewee into having the conversation that he needs to capture? Will he get away with it?The rest of Transcription answers some of these questions, although not through anything that could be regarded as a plot. The novel, which is under 150 pages, is divided into three sections, each oriented around a conversation between the narrator and one other person: first Thomas; then Rosa, a curator at a Spanish museum; then Thomas’s son, Max. There are uncanny correspondences between the events of the different sections: Experiences mirror one another and characters unknowingly mimic each other’s words. Intricate and unsettling, Transcription is a book of echoes and parallels; the connections it draws between individuals, and between life and art, are a signature of Lerner’s refined, allusive fiction. It’s also a compelling exploration of how this hyper-literate sensibility, its intense interest in overlap and resonance, can lead us astray.Transcription reproduces the narrator’s unrecorded conversation with Thomas, but we never find out whether he managed to return the next day with a phone. Not long after, Thomas dies. The second section of Transcription, which unfolds over just 12 pages, takes place in Madrid, at the end of a conference celebrating Thomas’s life and work, organized by Rosa. In the lecture he has just given at the conference, the narrator recounted for the first time the story of the broken phone, the faked recording—a story he sees as an “embarrassing personal anecdote.” Rosa, however, regards it a confession to serious wrongdoing: lying first to Thomas and then, implicitly, to the world, by faking the interview that was the first Thomas had given in decades, and his last before he died. Everyone is shocked and angry, especially Thomas’s son, Rosa tells the narrator. “Trust me,” she says, “Max is furious.”But in Max’s conversation with the narrator, which takes up the entirety of the book’s third section, we see little evidence of this fury. Their conversation is closer to a monologue, with Max dismissing or cutting off the narrator’s occasional responses. He never mentions the narrator’s debacle with his broken phone, or the magazine article it produced. But he does offer a different view of Thomas and his relationships, one that changes the way we see the events of the first section and the narrator’s role in them.The narrator and Max have been friends since college. Now, they live on opposite sides of the country—Max is a lawyer in Los Angeles—and we get the sense that they no longer talk much. Nevertheless, they have had to reckon with the same common problems of midlife: how to be a parent to a struggling child, how to be a child to a declining parent. (For both, that parent is Thomas, Max’s biological father and the narrator’s intellectual one.) The narrator’s daughter is “flirting with what the school counselor called ‘school refusal.’” Max’s daughter, Emmie, stopped eating around the age of eight.The first half of Max’s monologue, one of the most gripping stretches of the book, relates his family’s various attempts to overcome what doctors diagnose as Emmie’s “ARFID—avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder.” Finally, Emmie discovers unboxing videos online, specifically ones in which women gasp and coo and tap the packages with long fingernails before opening them to reveal little stuffed toys. Glued to these, she is suddenly able to eat again. “The screen screened her from our gaze,” Max tells the narrator. The videos “filter out the world and give you these little buzzes and clicks in its place […] ASMR treats ARFID.”Since Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner has written about how twenty-first century technology mediates our existence, and there’s no novelist better at it: To read his descriptions of characters’ interactions online is both to recognize one’s own experience and to see new aspects of it. Emmie’s immersion in the unboxing videos appears to be the opposite of the narrator’s experience of being yanked away from his broken phone and into the material world. Yet the intensity the narrator feels is only possible because of how often he, like Emmie, is protected from the world by a screen: Experiencing the world without a phone, having previously had one, is entirely different from never having had a phone at all. Technology makes new modes—and in Emmie’s case, new cures—possible, but there is no way of returning to what it was like to live before that technology existed.The very contemporary cure to Emmie’s disorder is, Max admits, “not untroubling”—especially since he, like the narrator, worries that his daughter’s difficulties are a response to contemporary ills. The narrator wonders aloud to Thomas whether his daughter’s anxiety about going to school is displaced anxiety about “the disasters of the world. Everything with Covid. The sky orange with Canadian wildfire smoke […] the war—the wars—the political—.” Max speculates that Emmie intuits her life of privilege “involves the immiseration of others.” Is refusing to eat a way of refusing such a life? Or perhaps it’s because she’s “registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe—fires, floods, fascism?”Transcription resists such arguments as much as it offers them. Emmie’s distress, and the distress of the narrator’s daughter, may indeed be produced by present-day horrors. On the other hand, being born at a different time might not have been any less destabilizing for them. When the narrator was at college, life was largely offline. Even so, those were not halcyon days: The narrator had a breakdown and spent a period in hospital; Max was “very depressed junior year.” Thomas was born in Germany in 1934, to a father who “joined the party very early.” The narrator recalls one of his professors telling the class that the locket around her neck, which she had worn since the late 1960s, contained a cyanide capsule—“for use in case of nuclear war.” One of the unsettling things about Transcription is how its characters repeatedly draw conclusions that other parts of the book seem to undermine. We are not, it suggests, very good at understanding our place in history. Lerner’s novels have been widely celebrated as autofiction. Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School, which Lerner has described as a trilogy, all center on a character whose biography is very close to his own. But Lerner has always incorporated the stories of other characters, often in something approximating their own voices. In 10:04, we hear complicated episodes from the pasts of the narrator’s father, of his co-worker, of his best friend’s stepfather. Long sections of The Topeka School are narrated by the main character’s parents. This quality of Lerner’s novels isn’t so different from his characters’ sense of being simultaneously their present and past selves, themselves and others.This is as much a moral commitment as a formal one. Lerner’s works are both loved and criticized for their cerebral nature, but at their heart is the belief that our stories—that we ourselves—exist in and through one another. In Leaving the Atocha Station, the main character is self-absorbed and self-deluding; among his delusions is his belief that he can hold himself apart from others. Despite his near-constant lies, feints, and evasions, his two quasi-girlfriends understand him much better than he does himself. 10:04 ends with the narrator imagining himself “in the second person plural” and offering to the reader a reworking of a line from an early version of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.” Lerner, who is also a poet, writes extensively about Whitman in his book-length essay The Hatred of Poetry, and Whitman’s desire to create an “I” capacious enough to hold every American within it.Lerner is too perceptive a writer, and too aware of his own position as a highly educated white male American, not to acknowledge the potential problems of speaking for and as others. In his novels, there are usually reminders that we aren’t hearing other characters’ stories entirely in their own voices, but rather filtered through the consciousness and memory—sometimes even the language—of the Lerner-like writer-protagonist. The Topeka School in particular offers persistent evidence of the violence that can result from boundaries carelessly or willfully blurred. The Hatred of Poetry explores the limits as well as the possibilities of attempting to marry the individual and the collective in poetry.Even so, Lerner’s previous novels suggest, paying attention to our porousness is valuable: It attunes us to the depth of our personal relationships, as well as to the reality of an interconnected, globalized world. It also makes new worlds possible. This attitude is given the most concrete form, in 10:04, by the narrator’s feelings about the Park Slope Food Co-op, “the oldest and largest active food cooperative in the country.” Like many of its members, the narrator enjoys complaining about the co-op. Such complaints are a way of demonstrating that you aren’t “foolish enough to believe that belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a node in a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s population was largely made up of gentrifiers of one sort or another, and so on.” Even so, the narrator tells us, he doesn’t see the co-op as “morally trivial.” It makes labor “shared and visible,” it doesn’t “carry products that [are] the issue of openly evil conglomerates.” It helps run a soup kitchen and donates money to rebuild a destroyed homeless shelter nearby. Collectivity is imperfect, but in the face of untrammeled capitalism, environmental collapse, and rising authoritarianism, it’s our best hope.Transcription pokes holes in this view. Its narrator (a writer, in his forties, lives in New York, went to Brown, etc.) is the obvious stand-in for Lerner, but it’s Thomas who most resembles Lerner’s previous fiction. We are told that Thomas talks in “sudden changes of scale, rapid juxtapositions of images and registers”—an apt description of Lerner’s own narrative style. Like Lerner’s novels, Thomas has a tendency to dissolve boundaries between individuals. When the narrator tells Thomas about a troubling dream he had on the train to Providence, Thomas claims the dream as his own, as being about his son and his dead wife rather than about the narrator’s daughter. The dream “becomes social,” he says—and isn’t this a good definition of “politics,” “when we sit around the fire and make the dream social”?The ability to dissolve boundaries in this way, to make the individual social, is what originally drew the narrator to Thomas. During his breakdown in college, he started hearing voices. Thomas’s insistence that “we all hear phantom voices […] hallucination, too, is social” was one of the many things he said and did, the narrator tells us, that “might have saved me.” Yes, there are numerous moments in their unrecorded interview that are unpleasantly destabilizing—but aren’t those just the disorientations of Thomas’s nonagenarian memory loss? Or perhaps the narrator’s own twitchiness about being separated from his phone?Max’s depiction of Thomas suggests otherwise. “There was no point, none, in telling him about [Emmie’s] struggles,” he says to the narrator. “Just as there was no point, there had never been any point, in telling him about my own personal problems.” Some time ago, he recalls, his partner had a biopsy to test for cancer; when Max confided his fears, Thomas’s response—at least, in Max’s memory—was “Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed.” As a parody of Lerner’s own tendencies, it’s a darkly funny moment—but the concern it betrays is real. Max’s description of his father calls attention to how often Thomas’s words to the narrator in the book’s first section were dismissive or coercive, rerouting their conversation to Thomas’s own preoccupations. The details of the narrator’s dream are unimportant, Thomas insists; the narrator’s desire to establish the facts of Thomas’s upbringing is “silly.”Max’s monologue sharpens our attention to the cruelties of Thomas’s approach, but his own approach is not much better. His conversational style is direct and focused, strikingly different to Thomas’s. But he, too, seems uninterested in the narrator’s experiences of the world, unless they happen to match exactly Max’s own. In his conversations with both father and son, the narrator is bullied into disavowing his memories when they don’t conform to those of his interlocutors. Thomas and Max only want to see correspondences, real or imagined, between themselves and others, between their own interests and the interests of other people. They turn away from the particularity—the reality—of the person in front of them.Transcription seems to warn against a focus on correspondence at the expense of particularity. Yet the novel is itself full of strange patterns and repetitions. Thomas and Max, separately, refer to Thomas’s final conversation as an “exit interview”; the narrator and Max use exactly the same phrase to describe the experience of sudden fear (“It was as though someone had placed an ice pack against the back of my neck”). The narrator produces his phone and tells Thomas that it’s recording; a couple of years previously, Max had pressed record on his phone and hidden it away, secretly capturing his father’s stories. What are we to make of such connections, given the novel’s critique of Thomas and Max’s insistent connection-seeking? A work of fiction—of any art—always asks us to make connections between its different parts. By doing so more explicitly than most, Transcription reminds us of the difference between interpreting art and interpreting that messier business, life.

New Republic Mar 30, 2026

Transcript: What the Democratic Moderation Debate Gets Wrong

This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 27 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. This is Perry Bacon—I’m the host of Right Now, a show from The New Republic. I’m joined today by Jake Grumbach. He’s a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and he’s been a guest once before. Jake, welcome.Jake Grumbach: Thanks for having me back on, Perry.Bacon: Good to see you. So I want to talk about something you’ve written a lot about—this Democratic Party debate about so-called moderation. There were two pieces this week that I thought were really telling. One is from The New York Times: “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?” And the second is from a site called The Liberal Patriot, titled “No Learning Please, We’re Democrats.” Both pieces are different in some ways, but they share the same basic thesis: that after the 2024 election there was a lot of talk about the Democratic Party needing to move—to become more so-called moderate, particularly on so-called social or cultural issues. And both authors are now lamenting that the Democratic Party has not moved to the right as much as they had hoped.I think they’re correct that the Democratic Party has not necessarily become more anti-immigration or moved on trans rights. I think they’re right. I might feel differently about why this has happened, but I want to unpack a little bit why this has happened. Let’s start with the Liberal Patriot piece because it goes through some specific issues. I’m going to ask you two questions about each one: First, do you think this is an actual problem with the Democratic Party? And two, would moderating help—would moderating in a policy sense help? And alternatively, what would?The first issue the Liberal Patriot raises is what it calls the culture problem: There’s a yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working-class voter. So: the culture problem. Do you think that’s a real problem, and is it solved by ideological moderation?Grumbach: I think political parties—both the Democratic and Republican parties—represent different groups within society, and therefore always struggle to combine sets of committed activists, party stalwarts, groups in society they’ve represented for a long time: Black voters in the Democratic Party, rural whites and evangelical whites in the Republican Party. This is a known thing for political parties around the world, in democracies or partial democracies like the U.S. But the thing that strategists and pundits have really locked in on the past couple of years is this very simple answer: The Democratic Party needs to moderate, get more centrist on this left-right dimension—typically with an emphasis on the culture-war issues.Ruy Teixeira is the writer of this Liberal Patriot blog, and he is a fascinating character. Back in the Obama era, he was writing about the permanent Democratic majority on the basis of young people and voters of color as this new multicultural coalition that couldn’t lose. Then the Trump era comes, and suddenly it’s about the white working class that’s been lost. The point here is that there are a lot of moving parts here, and moving in a centrist way is not something that can just be done easily.So we saw Kamala Harris—a California mainstream liberal, I would say, in the middle of the Democratic Party—really try a moderate campaign in the 2024 presidential election. Most lethal military. Not—saying I’m speaking to the Gaza activist kids, no, you are not part of this coalition; tough-on-crime prosecutor, the toughest cop on the beat, very much not Defund the police. And that didn’t work. There were other structural reasons—things like inflation and the way voters who don’t pay a ton of attention to the news reacted to it. And it’s actually really hard to lab-make yourself look more moderate; you end up looking like a flip-flopper who doesn’t believe in anything. There’s this uncanny valley for Democratic candidates, as Chris Hayes recently mentioned in an interview I liked, where you are seen by the base of the Democratic Party as a centrist sellout, and seen by the Republican Party as the ultimate partisan lib—capital-D Democrat. That was the Hillary Clinton problem. Hillary Clinton actually governed as a New York senator as a moderate Democrat—she’s part of the Clinton family, a historically 1990s-moderate part of the Democratic coalition, with Sister Souljah moments, and so forth—and that doesn’t help.What my co-author, Adam, and I have been advocating is breaking out of this left-right dimension—particularly in this age of authoritarianism. We actually don’t know—elections are hugely uncertain, and there are some things we know, but most things we don’t, and polls are very volatile right now. So anybody selling you this “just moderate, and we’ll save democracy” [idea] is selling you something. That’s the short answer, but I’d love to rant more on this.Bacon: So let me ask: Are Democratic Party leaders culturally out of step with voters? You’re saying, on some level, all politicians are.Grumbach: Yes. Politicians themselves have incredibly huge egos—the U.S. set of federal politicians is the oldest around the world. These are people who don’t want to retire, people who really believe in their own importance. And politicians, by definition, are not like the rest of society. At the same time, it’s really crucial for parties to recruit candidates that are authentic and relatable because voters don’t think all that much about policy and politics all the time—at least those swing voters, who often determine elections. That’s why you sometimes see candidates with credible messaging. I think James Talarico is a new example of trying to sidestep the trans rights issue through an authentically liberal Christian ethos. You can’t design this in a lab—you need to allow candidates to be themselves because otherwise they come off as pandering lab rats attempting to craft messaging directly for the audience, and voters can really see through that.Trump and the Republican Party are out of step on many issues. The Democratic Party has sometimes been out of step too, although its policy platform at the national level is much more popular than the Republican platform—especially economically. But here’s another example. The Biden administration from 2021 through 2023 did have a more liberal asylum policy on immigration—for people showing up and claiming asylum fleeing violence, especially from Central America, they basically granted a large number of asylum-seekers stays. That did provoke some backlash, but the Biden administration and Kamala Harris got much more conservative in 2023 and locked it down. They became more centrist on the issue—but the damage was done in some ways, and when they shifted, nobody really believed it was credible. They thought the old policy was still in place. That’s an example where everybody at the Democratic elite level knows that story, and nobody is doing that asylum policy anymore. It’s done.So these pieces that keep coming out: “Get more moderate on these issue areas”—it’s already baked in. And when you hear “moderate on immigration” now, the new agenda is what the Trump administration is doing: internal mass deportation, secret police, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, it’s killed American citizens. For the Democratic Party to take its foot off the gas on immigration right now would be very foolish. The point is there is no simple moderate recipe to capture these ostensibly white working-class median voters. You have to be authentic. There are times the Democratic Party has taken policy stances that are out of touch, but it’s not a one-to-one thing you can pander on. This debate has just totally jumped the shark at this point.Bacon: So I think what the Liberal Patriot piece is saying—and I think this part is well taken—is that if you do a poll, what you’d find is that college-educated Democrats are probably to the left on these issues: more pro-choice, more pro-trans rights—more willing to say there’s racism in America than non-college Democrats. My guess is that the people who [marched] in Selma were to the so-called left of the people who stayed home in Selma. So I’m not sure what we’re capturing here. But what are we saying here?Grumbach: Excellent point. So over time, mass opinion on cultural, racial, gender, and sexuality issues has gotten more liberal—that’s a fact. Interracial marriage: My own parents’ marriage was very unpopular back in the day. Now—over 90 percent support for the legalization of interracial marriage, for example.Pro-choice attitudes, especially gay rights and LGBT rights, in general—when we think about the early, ’90s Will & Grace era versus nationally legal gay marriage and the cultural impact of LGBT individuals. The point here, though, is that there’s a trade-off in the positions you take on these social issues. On the one hand, leadership through activism—political leaders and so forth—can move public opinion and help bring it into the future. At the same time, in the present snapshot in time, you may, by pulling people into the future, be out of step with where they are right now. That’s a trade-off that needs to be acknowledged. You get maybe a short-term loss for a long-term gain. There are various trade-offs that parties and activist groups do on these issues.When you listen to the moderation punditry, there is no trade-off. There is a snapshot in time where voters are frozen with fixed opinions in time, and that’s why G. Elliott Morris, the pollster, writes about opinion trajectories, for example. Leaders basically knew that internal ICE enforcement—the secret police—would end up being unpopular once implemented. Leaders knew that. Like Chris Van Hollen, the senator who went to El Salvador: When this issue was changing, he effectively moved public opinion through leadership. And there was already opinion movement just from people seeing ICE and Customs and Border Patrol breaking up families and doing violence by itself. What the moderation brigade really wants is poll reacting. We have to treat public opinion as fixed, and only be reactive after the fact.That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs—there sometimes are. The Civil Rights Movement pushed, and as Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, the white moderate was saying slow down. But King was dragging those Northern white moderates along, to the point where opinion shifted over time on civil rights. To say, “Martin Luther King, please stay home because you’re out of step with the median voter right now” is absurd. At the same time, it would be unwise to say that movement on civil rights didn’t turn off some voters. So these are real trade-offs, and in an authoritarian moment they are very clear—where, for example, abortion bans happen and women who have miscarriages are literally under criminal prosecution sometimes, in some states. Those sorts of situations demand creative responses, and sometimes that involves trading off distance from the median voter now in order to bring people along into the future.The point is: None of this stuff is simple. At the same time, sometimes moderating on some issues helps, and sometimes it hurts in the long run. These things are just nuanced, and we actually don’t know. We need all hands on deck—creative experimentation in terms of running candidates and in terms of institutional responses to authoritarianism.Bacon: So the next problem, he says, is the working-class and rural voter problem. Those are obviously different things, but talk about this: Is there a real working-class and rural problem with the Democrats? And would moderation fix it?Grumbach: So structurally, over time, center-left parties in democracies around the world have all become more college-educated in their bases. This is class realignment around the world. And in the U.S., it is very predicted by what public opinion researchers call the racial resentment index. Racial resentment essentially measures this: Who do you blame for racial inequality? Do you think Black-white inequality is due to laziness on the part of Black people or to discrimination and institutional racism? How you answer those questions really predicts how you vote, and it’s really correlated with going to college, as well. So a lot of analysts call this educational realignment—where college-educated voters have become part of the Democratic Party, and working-class, especially rural and evangelical, voters have become part of the Republican Party, particularly white, and to some extent Latino voters in 2024, although that’s shifting back very quickly. People call it educational polarization, or we could call it racial-resentment polarization. This is very clear around the world.Bacon: And it’s important to emphasize that this is happening around the world—it may not be the U.S. Democratic Party alone. It’s happening to Labour [in Britain] and the French liberal party, and so on, right?Grumbach: And I have to say, incumbent parties in general are struggling to deal with globalization and rapid change. We’re now in the AI moment, but when you think about globalized markets, global travel, integrated markets, and immigration [they] really [do] change people’s sense of life. Manufacturing declines, and it’s just a huge amount of change, even if it’s sometimes positive. It does involve change, and incumbent parties have struggled to sell a credible mission with response to those changes. That’s why we see incumbent parties struggle around the world—there’s just a lot of “throw the bastards out,” revolving-door elections. This was also true in 2024, with incumbent parties being punished because of global inflation related to Covid.The U.S. two-party system really struggles with this. But I’ll mention, there is a point of: Rural voters are more impactful in Senate elections, and across the board in the Electoral College and U.S. House elections to some extent, as well. That’s become more unequal over time. Senate malapportionment is actually at record levels, where a tiny percentage of the U.S. population can set at least 40 senators to block anything through the filibuster, or even a Senate majority. So this is a constitutional deep problem of political inequality in the U.S. And there is some logic to the fact that it hugely benefits more rural white voters, and to some extent rural Latino voters, who have fluctuated in recent elections and now seem to be quite turning against the Trump administration.Bacon: Let me move to the other piece [the New York Times article], and there was a big focus on—. There was a vote in the Senate on banning trans women from women’s sports, and all the Democrats voted against it. So despite the rhetoric from Gavin Newsom and others, when there’s a vote on Capitol Hill, Democrats tend to take the pro-transgender position, almost no matter what. And this is being criticized in the New York Times article because: Why don’t more Democrats explicitly moderate their stands on transgender rights, immigration, and other issues—why do they maintain positions far to the left of the electorate and the median voter? So there’s a real critique on trans rights, you see everywhere, throughout this moderation discourse. If Democrats moderate on trans rights, would that have a big electoral impact?Grumbach: So it’s an important thing to note that in polling, trans participation in NCAA sports polls incredibly unpopularly. This is true—affirmative action on the basis of race itself, has polled poorly for 60 years. And in a lot of those 60 years, it was implemented with gusto—with much more teeth than—There’s a set of anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives in states and national policies against it starting in the ’90s and onward. But prior to that, there were actual quotas in hiring and preferred contracting—that my research with Abena Asiamah, a law professor, quantitatively looks at court-ordered affirmative action on local governments. And it’s actually a great example of, there was not backlash where affirmative action was implemented. Local whites don’t go—Oh, I’m so mad at this affirmative action at police department or something. Instead, the whole country of moderates and conservatives says: We don’t like this in general. It doesn’t matter whether their own area has any affirmative action, in that symbolic politics story. With trans rights, that is quite similar: where people cannot name a trans athlete. There’s a couple dozen NCAA trans athletes or something like that. But it is a symbolic issue that polls poorly. That said, what should Democrats do about it? One thing to note is that things that come up to congressional votes—like this particular one—are often especially extreme policies that are targeted, and Andy Beshear, the very moderate Democratic governor of Kentucky, vetoed an anti-trans sports bill in Kentucky and came away popular because he said: It’s not that I’m a trans rights activist obsessed with this, but this is a bill done with specifically hate-based targeting, and I’m not going to entertain this as governor—it’s not a relevant policy.And we’ve seen even Graham Platner, running in the primary in Maine, doing a similar, like: I’m this white guy populist, and I’m gonna say, on my men’s wrestling team in high school there was a girl on the team and nobody cared. You can’t convince me this is a real problem or issue.Overall, it’s hard to know, if the Democrats did go along with a Republican-sponsored bill on banning trans athletes in sports, would they get any credit for it? That’s the key question here. It’s both because voters don’t like flip-floppers. They don’t like feeling like they’re being pandered to—that they’re taking this, wink-wink, We’re doing this for you, median voter! They don’t love that thing. So, while polling does show this is quite unpopular, it’s unclear if the Democratic Party would get credit, and then it does trade off, as I mentioned, on the long-term trans rights issue. If you believe in trans rights overall, then taking that vote could potentially get you some moderate voters right now but reduce overall opinion change on trans rights, which over time has gotten more liberal, just like every other social issue.Bacon: So I think the sub-question here is that a lot of coverage implies that.… Electability and winning elections, in this age, people would say, is important—I think they’re correct about that. So I think the conceit is that moderation equals electability. You’re saying moderation doesn’t necessarily equal that—so if you were asked what does equal electability, what would you say? We don’t know, or what?Grumbach: I would say there are some limits. On the left-right spectrum, of course you can go to some far extreme in any direction and lose a lot of voters—that’s an absolute truth. But for the most part, these candidates are already pretty strategically trying to position themselves. What Adam and I find is that the gains come from other things. For example: candidate quality and charisma, populism and running against the establishment and the status quo. There are other issues outside the left-right dimension—are you seen as corrupt, engaged in insider dealing or insider trading like some members of Congress, or are you seen as authentically yourself? All of these things … plus, at the presidential level, I think it’s pretty clear there’s like a gender penalty. There are all sorts of things that go into elections.My point is not that it’s never good to moderate on some issues. I do think we have some experience—the asylum policy of 2021 to 2023: a little out of step. There are some areas where … potentially even on these trans rights issues we’re talking about. But what I’m saying is, it’s not simple. There are ways through this, and in this era of authoritarianism, even more importantly, is what politicians do with their institutional power when they’re in office.As a scholar of democracy and democratic backsliding and threats to democracy, you cannot save democracy by saying the nonauthoritarian party must win every election. That is not a viable strategy to protect the rule of law and democracy. For that reason, you need real elite strategies about holding transgressors accountable who violate the Constitution. And we’ve seen the Democratic Party be quite poor at that over the last decade of authoritarian threats. That is much more important [than moderation]. I actually got a repost from moderate Senator Ruben Gallego on this point, when I said: Actually, effectively holding elites accountable for trying a coup—on January 6, 2021, or more recently, the constitutional violations of DOGE of Article 1 of the Constitution, or the ignoring of judicial orders around deportations by the Department of Homeland Security—holding them accountable through the rule of law is ten million billion gajillion times more important than some after-the-fact poll-following tweak to your messaging or your policy agenda. So the obsession with this moderation-electability question is, in a sense, an impotent rage at the fact that you have to find some way to block authoritarian pushes—and the elite strategies have been quite weak.Bacon: And I guess that framing feels like you’re in control of things—if only we moderate, we’ll win every election. That gives you a sense of agency. Whereas if you say 2024 was a product of random inflation and anti-incumbency forces, we have no agency. So instead we ask: What did Kamala Harris say in 2019? Because she, in theory, had agency over that.Grumbach: That’s right. And to the extent Kamala Harris was held liable for earlier statements that were mainstream liberal points and then moved to moderation, it hit that uncanny valley. But we also have to think about Amanda Litman, of Run for Something—she is really focused on candidate recruitment: Rather than take the existing Democratic Party that’s quite geriatric in its leadership, you have to find and recruit candidates who represent their communities authentically. The Democratic Party has struggled to do that because with the way fundraising and primary elections work, it’s mostly going to be lawyers in their fifties deciding they want to run for office now—rather than a diverse set of candidates who come from different parts of the Democratic constituencies, whether that’s the labor movement or, you see this in Black representation right now, where many of the oldest Democrats running for reelection in 2026 are Black and have not cultivated the next generation of Black leadership—outside of some important exceptions.All of this is more than just this idea of tweaking messaging and policy positions. You actually have a long-term, genuine belief in these sets of issues that gives you credibility over time—because you actually care about them. I think that is more crucial than your position; that you actually care about it. Voters can see through that type of bullshit.Bacon: So we’re about to have a bunch of people run for president, and I think there’s going to be one camp that says: So-and-so in 1997 voted for this, or they said this immoderate thing, or they may have said the Green New Deal was good—they cannot win. There’s going to be a big focus on ... people with some ideological moderation. That’s one camp. On the other, I don’t think we can find a completely fresh face that no one’s ever heard of—it would be good to have some qualifications, having served in some kind of government. So what will you be looking for, in terms of candidates in this next cycle?Jake Grumbach: You can’t always predict it. In 2020, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were both running, and it was not clear early on that Bernie Sanders would do better in the primary. You actually have to see where energy goes.The Democratic Party is still a party of young people, despite some discussion of a youth realignment toward the GOP among young men—that has been dramatically overstated. Young people are very much against the Republican Party right now.Bacon: Let me stop you for a second, though, because I think what you’re saying is we should evaluate how candidates are going to perform based on how they’re performing. But I think the problem is that in some ways, these articles are hinting that if the Democratic base likes someone too much, we should oppose them—the implication is, because we’re out of touch with regular people, so if a candidate is too enthusiastically supported by the base, that becomes a bug for the moderate group.Grumbach: I think that’s right. But we saw how this worked with the Gaza protester kids who were protesting as of late 2023. Huge amount of energy. And I’ll say again, essentially all social movements that have blocked authoritarian takeovers and coups involve some sort of student protest movement. Liberals joining in with conservatives and crushing that protest movement was a huge unforced error. That is youth energy that can be channeled; that is crucial. The Democratic Party has won when it’s carried energy with the youth, going back to Obama in 2008—I was in college, and I remember that hype. So one signal I take is: What is the authentic youth energy getting behind? That’s one signal here. But I think you’re right that the moderation crew wants to say, Go the opp—.Bacon: Yeah. If a person polled high with young people, I think that would almost be a sign—we should oppose that person. That’s what happened with Zohran on some level, right?Grumbach: That’s exactly it. So Zohran is also such a great example of cutting through this left-right dimension. Zohran is a more left candidate, but there are other moderates that are doing well too. My point is not that you should move left on every issue but rather that Zohran is somebody who is incredibly compelling and effective and cut through that—and is now seen as someone who brought energy from key constituencies in New York City: immigrant groups and young people. He also now has a reputation for competence, as well, and he uses new media in a very skilled way to cut through narratives and build authenticity.All of that can happen among moderates too. So my point is exactly that: I’m going to be open to a bunch of different kinds of candidates. Of course I have my policy agenda that I hope gets in, but I’m going to see where energy goes and follow that authentic energy. And it’s not going to be based on exactly which combination of policy issues poll best.Bacon: Someone might say there’s a genocide happening—and it’s possible that person is not inspiring in other ways and creates no energy. And it’s possible someone who ducks the genocide question might still in other ways be a more appealing candidate to people. So the litmus test on policy, and energy, are somewhat separate things?Grumbach: I think that’s right. It matters—you can’t have a bad policy agenda. The fact that Zohran Mamdani has this populist affordability platform that was very popular is not totally unrelated. Economic populism and running against the establishment and the status quo really matters. But it’s not a perfect predictor. There are all types of candidates that generate energy, and it’s tough to predict—especially in this volatile era of social media and virality. Issues are also changing a lot. There’s new polling on how candidates’ policy responses to AI, and highly populist jobs programs and blocking AI implementation and data centers are now incredibly popular—to an extent that even surprised me.These things change in real time. And it’s a “if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready” type of logic—see where this goes, and be open to it. I would say this, though: The centrist moderation thing is essentially; just pick somebody who’s conservative on culture-war issues. If that were true, then Biden and Harris’s position on Israel-Gaza would have been a huge winner—that’s the centrist move, appearing bipartisan by building a coalition with the Republican Party. Instead, that reduced youth energy was a huge liability. We know this. The DNC spiked an internal autopsy that made that clear. And on other issues, going the other way matters. The point is, it’s not just “moderate, that’s it.” And I think: Why is that argument so popular when the statistics are so not there for the idea that moderation always helps?Bacon: It seems intuitive, right? If you move to the right, you’ll win more people on the right. That seems intuitive. It just happens not to be true.Grumbach: Yeah. And a lot of times mass opinion is outside of the elite consensus. Trump did that with respect to immigration, where there was this Bush and Democratic Party consensus on low-wage immigration—he broke out of that. There are other things around war and foreign policy, and now AI. If you break out of the constraints that both parties are [operating under], you can gain. In other ones, the Democratic Party taking something more like the Republican position might help. The point is this is issue by issue—you can’t just think about polling as a snapshot.The other thing about this polling stuff that’s hilarious is how much poll wording really matters. This is such a crucial point. For example, if you change the wording around the trade-offs of policies—the moderate crew likes to say Democrats shouldn’t run on Medicare for All, because if you just poll on “Medicare for All” or “universal health care” it’s very popular. But when you say it’ll cost trillions—Bacon: —it’ll abolish private insurance—because nobody wants to abolish anything, is the subtext here.Grumbach: Exactly. When you give those more negative details, particularly out of context, it becomes less popular. But we see that sometimes polling firms strategically don’t do that on culture-war issues. Have you seen many polling questions on trans sports that say: Do you want to ban trans people from participating in NCAA sports? Very big “yes.” But then if you say that involves somebody looking at a child’s genitals, suddenly it’s incredibly unpopular. So the point is that groups will try to sell you this set of issue polls, and you need to take them with a massive grain of salt. It’s really hard in this day and age—I’m an academic, so it’s part of my job. The point here is it doesn’t sell the big pundit bucks or consultant contracts to say it’s very uncertain; we actually don’t know who will be the candidate that captures energy on AI as an issue. I could not predict some of the ways these primary elections are going and how energy in the parties is moving. We need to actually—this is a time for experimentation and seeing how energy builds.Bacon: I like what you’re saying, which is essentially: We don’t need to, in January 2027, pre-decide who the best candidates are. We can just wait—by December it’ll be clear who has energy and who doesn’t, and we can talk about that, but there’s no need to pre-assign. I think that’s helpful, because I know a lot of average voters I talk to are very nervous: Am I allowed to support this person? And “Let’s just find out” is a better answer than “they have these positions” or “they’re a white man,” or whatever. I covered the 2007–08 cycle and it was clear Obama drove energy. If you had told me in 2004 that we’d elect a Black man named Barack to anything—of course not. But there we are. And in some ways, if you’d told me Minnesota would be the place where all the energy to oppose ICE is, I would have said: Why Minnesota? Isn’t Minnesota just nice, boring people? But something happened there.Grumbach: Maybe they cleanse themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka—but I totally agree with that. Barack Hussein Obama—the idea that there wouldn’t be a massive race issue, and potentially a connection to Islam, at the time. And it takes this moment in the primaries where there’s a critical mass, and of course the Ted Kennedy endorsement was huge. But the point here—there’s some great research on this—people try to strategically discriminate: to say, I would love to have a woman president, but I know the median voter won’t. What that logic does is just empower the less strategic, more discriminatory voters even more.But the thing that I think, sadly, in the Democratic Party—because it’s so hard in the U.S. constitutional system to change national policy, plus right-wing authoritarianism—the Democratic Party base has become pundits themselves, obsessed with electability. And political systems really struggle when large numbers of people are strategic actors rather than authentically voting their conscience. When everyone votes their conscience, we can actually take stock of the legitimate desires of society and try to aggregate them and produce representative outcomes. So I would encourage everybody: Don’t try to do the second-order strateg-ery. Instead, just see what candidates you like, try to convince others to vote for the candidates you like on the basis of their vision, platform, and likability—not on the basis of how you think other people will react to them. That is part of why there’s so much writing and punditry about electoral strategy rather than the issues and policies themselves. We know much more about how trans rights play to the soccer mom demographic than we know about trans policy. I’m not an expert—Bacon: Me neither, on how sports policy should work, and so on. I think that’s a good point. And my worry is that pundits focus too much on ideology moderation. And my friends are obsessed with race and gender. I think we can discuss a gender penalty, but I’m not sure it applies the way people think—like Gretchen Whitmer against JD Vance: I would say Gretchen has a huge advantage right now because Trump is so unpopular. And so I think that sort of reductive—if this person is a woman or a minority, they can’t win—is its own problem. That’s what regular voters express to me too. Two women have lost presidential elections, therefore women can’t win? Let’s increase the sample size a little bit first.Grumbach: I think that’s right. At the same time, qualitatively looking—we can’t statistically detect this, I’ll say the research is clear, at the congressional level there is no gender or race penalty anymore. It’s a real triumph of American civil rights era politics. That was not true for such a long time. And now we see in many state legislatures—like here in California—racial parity: there is the same percentage of Latinos in the legislature as in the California population as a whole. Real triumphs of representation. Women lag in all these respects compared to their 50 percent of the population but have grown hugely in representation since the civil rights era. I will say qualitatively, despite the fact that we see no penalty statistically in congressional or state-level elections, at the presidential level it does seem hard for me to not see that gender seems a more powerful factor than even race.Bacon: What should I do with that information?Grumbach: Nothing. Like I said, don’t be a strategerist. Vote.Bacon: That’s hard to do. You’ve told me two things that are hard to do at once. You’ve told me a woman might have a hard time winning, and also that I should ignore that. But you’re saying this election is going to decide—anyway, sorry.Grumbach: It’s not that a woman will have a hard time winning. I think it’s just pretty clear there is a greater challenge. And a lot of the congressional findings about women running for office show that women had to be better than the men, on average, just to win—there’s gender discrimination throughout your rise in politics, to the point where once you get to Congress, women are much more productive legislators than men on average, because of that filter of discrimination. It’s similar … you know there was the joke that came up when DEI was really being talked about in executive orders early in 2025, and people would say: Oh, if you see a Black pilot or a woman pilot, you should go “uh-oh.” But it’s actually the opposite—Perry Bacon: —that person probably had to do a lot to get that job.Grumbach: It’s just clear how powerful gender has become. When we think about the economy, the right-wing movement and MAGA economics itself, tariffs—it’s hugely gendered. The message is that the economy is too feminized and gay, and it needs to return to “trad” economics: blue-collar, underclass jobs, trad wives, and conservative family structure. I’ll just say gender has come out as quite important. And we also see over time, across generations, Gen Z is more racially progressive than any generation, as with most social issues—but gender attitudes, because of the small number young men, have plateaued a bit more. So I’ll just say, this is not a slam dunk, and you should vote your conscience. But I do think it’s hard to argue against a gender dynamic occurring right now.Bacon: Let’s end on a positive note—and the positive note might be that we don’t know. And I think that’s empowering, in a certain sense.Grumbach: That’s exactly right. We do those phrases: What would you have done in the 1930s?, and things like that. There are all sorts of strategies for fighting authoritarianism. There are strategies at the organizational level in civil society—so why did law firms and universities fold to authoritarian pressure, and why are some now not folding? Businesses and labor unions are caught in this crossfire, with some very progressive unions resisting ICE and others endorsing Markwayne Mullin for DHS secretary. So that’s just the organizational side. Then in politics, thinking about legal and institutional leadership. And then finally there’s peaceful protest—another round of “No Kings” protests on Saturday. All of these go beyond just voting in primary and general elections.Bacon: I think you’re saying all the ways we’ve made elections too central to fighting authoritarianism. Is that part of what you’re getting at?Grumbach: And those things have effects on elections too. Quantitatively, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—while there was all sorts of hand-wringing from the same moderation brigade about, for example, Kenosha, Wisconsin, having more property damage than other places, or in the L.A. ICE protests where people burned a Waymo and things like that—we hear a lot about this potentially turning off the median voter. But we actually know pretty consistently that those protest movements, while sometimes diminished in efficacy by property damage, are incredibly effective on mobilizing voters. So these things all go together.Settle in. Politics is a lifelong struggle, and the struggle for democracy is one that has played out over hundreds of years in American politics. We have a new, acute authoritarian crisis that’s distinct from political inequality as a crisis—but it’s very uncertain, and the point is not to go for easy answers, that you can just tweak agendas left and right and we’re done.Bacon: Thank you for joining me. Bye bye.Grumbach: Thanks Perry.