on Mamdani, young men & the middle class

Last week, I spoke with Carine Hajjar, a Boston Globe opinion writer, for the paper’s podcast Say More. Here are excerpts:

Q: I want to pivot to the kind of voters that Democrats have really started to struggle with, particularly young men.

You’re seeing Democrats try to make up for that in the past few months. For example, Pete Buttigieg trying to replicate what worked for Trump, like going on bro-ey podcasts like Flagrant, which is comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast. But when Trump won, you said something really interesting, which is that Democrats shouldn’t just give voters a different flavor of what worked for Trump.

I think you called it the Diet Coke approach, right? They should offer something different. So I’m curious, is Buttigieg approaching a diet Coke strategy, and if so, can Democrats find a different way to resonate with young men?

A: I think going into new and uncomfortable formats to have conversations is a good thing and we need more Democrats doing it.

And I do it on Fox News. I do it on various podcasts or YouTube channels. I’ll continue to do it. When it comes to reaching young men, my concern is there’s this very Beltway mindset of like, “Oh, we need to hire some consultants and test some messages that young men like.” And it ain’t gonna work.

Because you know what? I was a 16-year-old man once, and I can tell you that we don’t want to meet them where they’re at. What you want to do is challenge them to be and build something bigger than themselves. That’s what young men are looking for, is a mission that they can be a part of together.

They want to be challenged, not patronized. This is what I wanted when I joined the Marines. I wanted to feel like I was with others, with a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps, and working on something that was more important than me.

And I think MAGA is giving a very empty-calorie version of that.

One that I think is overly oriented towards rolling back the clock and making a zero-sum equation is, “You can only be a man if we roll back rights for women.” And I just fundamentally disagree with that.

My approach would be, “Hey, this country has to build 5 million units of housing. We have to build more ships than the Chinese Navy. We have to build five Hoover dams worth of nuclear power. We have to start more small businesses than the rest of the world combined over the next decade if we want to achieve a 21st century that is the American century.”

And you know what? “Young men, we need your help doing that.”

“We’re going to build a thousand trade schools across this country. Trade schools that are at the cutting edge of biotechnology, that are at the cutting edge of electrical work, and nuclear work.”

“And we want you enlisted in this mission. We want you to be able to get the work, the wages, the wealth that allows you to be a provider and a protector for your family. And we’re going to empower you to help build this next American century.”

But give them a mission and challenge them. Don’t kind of talk down to them or think that if you make enough dumb jokes, it’s going to win them over.

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Q: So earlier this month, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in the race for New York City mayor. He’s a new voice in the Democratic Party who has advocated for narrowing the scope of policing, for example.

Just days before that, you had a really interesting Substack post about shoplifting and quality of life. You argued that Democrats have to pay more attention to these quality of life issues, shoplifting being an example.

Was the timing just a coincidence, and did Democratic Socialists like Mamdani who want to steer the party further to the left, make your job harder?

A: Make my job harder? Let me put it this way.

I think it is good for us to have a vigorous exchange of ideas as a party. For the last 10 years, Democrats have been in an ideological straitjacket. There used to be an old saw that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, and that has flipped in the last decade. What happened is Republicans fell in love with this very stable genius that we have in the White House.

And Democrats fell in line to oppose him and to protect democracy. As we should, we needed to be disciplined, and still do need to be disciplined to beat him back. But what that has done is it has stifled some intellectual dynamism within the party. And that’s not a good thing because we need bigger and bolder ideas.

So, I think this should be an opportunity, not to reflexively shut down new voices, but to counter them with our own points of view.

So Mamdani is talking about making housing cheaper in New York City. 100 percent that needs to be a focus of effort. Housing is taking up somewhere between a third to 40 percent of most people’s take-home pay. It is asphyxiating the middle class, and it’s denying the younger generation that first rung on the economic ladder.

I think a better way to do that is to build 5 million units of housing across this country over the next 10 years. And in particular, to make legal by right, that missing middle housing that is the workhorse of affordability: two units to 20 unit apartment buildings and making it so that they have no parking minimums, that they have one staircase — not two — required and by making the construction financing more affordable so that more small-time developers rather than only big ones can get involved.

These are all things, by the way, that Massachusetts has been exploring. And these are much better ways to lower the price of housing because ultimately, what makes your landlord have to lower the rent is when your landlord has competition from other people building housing.

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Q: So I’m hearing some of the issues that you want to move towards: healthcare, law, housing, and corruption. But what issues do Democrats have to move away from — political, social, and economic?

A: It’s encapsulated in the school closures. I took office in the fall of 2020, and my day one issue was reopening the schools. In May of 2020, Ashish Jha, who’s a constituent of mine and would go on to become the COVID coordinator for Joe Biden, was saying that the schools not only could, but should reopen fully May of 2020.

Well, the amount of time it took from when Ashish Jha said that, to the schools actually reopening across blue cities and blue states is about 18 months. The damage, both academic and socioemotional, to American children is profound. There’s 50 million public school children in this country, about half are behind on reading, writing, or arithmetic.

At this point, teachers tell me that their behavior and social skills have atrophied and have still not fully recovered. Democrats have to be plain that we own some of that. We kept the schools closed for too long, and the way that we did it, I think, exemplifies where we have divorced ourselves from the median voter.

Instead of focusing on the outcomes that mattered to Americans at that time, which was, “Get my children back into the classroom,” we became fixated on process, particularly process that was oriented around different demands from interest groups. “Process, process, process,” not actual outcomes. And we see that pattern too many times.

And the second thing is when parents came to these school committee hearings or to other platforms to voice their real fear and frustration, what you heard from too many elected officials was condescension, patronizing, even mockery, that toxic mix of condescending to voters, while focusing on process for groups rather than outcomes for everybody, that is what we have to get away from.

We need to be a party that delivers for the middle class. The middle class doesn’t have a corporate political action committee (PAC) or a Super PAC or a lobbyist as Senator [Elissa] Slotkin has said. But, they should have the Democratic Party.