This red november to serve . Well, i became interested in the left ward drift of the Democratic Party because it seemed to me to be quite radical and bad not just for the Democratic Party but for the country. I had been a democrat in my College Years and shortly thereafter and i became more conservative before becoming a republican and joining breitbart and even then i retained an empathy for the kind of utopian thinking that the left does. Im not a utopian myself, but i do think that Many Democrats with whom i disagree on policy issues, ideological issues are coming from a very good place, they want to make the world better. And what struck me about the direction of the Democratic Party was that it is taking that party in such an extreme direction that it risks falling over the cliff and pulling the country with us. One of the most important things that changed my mind about politics was my experience for 7 years in south africa seeing that leftwing government mismanage the country after apartheid. And i came back to the United States with the lessons of that experience very prominent in my mind and they really guided my thinking about american politics and i see the american left making the same mistakes whether its with regard whether identity politics or statedriven economic policy, radical restructuring of our energy policy, the emphasis on race, all of those things in my mind are not just bad policies but they can actually be extremely destructive of democracy as we know it. I wanted to get into the democratic primary to document the process and examine the candidates, examine the issues and warn people how dangerous this was both to political fortunes of democrats and to the country itself. Now n those primaries the person who won was not the person making the most progressive claims on Economic Management or on race or on everything that you mentioned. The moderate won. So how does that you say pretty provocatively that if joe biden wins in november it would be the first socialist presidency and i think one of the immediate reactions by a lot of people who dont follow politics as closely necessarily as you and i do on a daytoday basis, will be like, joe biden, socialist, hes been around forever and he hasnt been a socialist, so how do you explain how your thesis matches up to biden actually winning those primaries . So lets look at what joe biden has done since securing the nomination. I write about this in the book. The moment where he came in front of National Audience on super tuesday having won victories and he was at that moment the effective nominee of the party. There was no way Bernie Sanders was going to recover and it was a remarkable few days right up until the South Carolina primary on february 29th, Bernie Sanders had completed dominated the early primary states. He won the first 3 popular votes in the first 3 primary caucus states, no candidate from any party had ever done that before and even on the morning of super tuesday, the New York Times and others were saying that Bernie Sanders was the likeliest to come out the winner that night and overall. Joe biden rallied the establishment of the Democratic Party behind him and in an extraordinary 48 hours many of his rivals dropped out and endorsed him and the party swung behind him after winning South Carolina with the help of janes clyburn and he won on super tuesday not just in the south where the predominance of African American voters was always taught to give joe biden an advantage given that he was closely associated with obama and he won in minnesota, he swept, that was partly because democratic voters understood who they were being told to vote for and since the party was signaling to them, this is the party that you want. Now joe biden doesnt call himself a moderate. Its important to note that. He was asked in april 2019 before he got in the campaign and he said words to the effect, i wish i had been called a moderate, it would have been to get elected and reelected in delaware, ive just been an obamabiden democrat. Biden himself does not. Since primary and super tuesday win, instead of following the usual pattern and moving back toward the center and trying to frame his pitch for a general election, joe biden has been moving further and further to the left and hes been saying things that are actually rather extraordinary. He called for, quote, revolutionary institutional changes and thats in podcast with andrew yang and talked about revolution. Interesting a word we saw in the Democratic National convention, some of the pretaped videos as one talked about revolution. If you wanted to send a moderate signal, you wouldnt use a term like that. Biden have spoken several times about fundamentally transforming america over and over again. He said the coronavirus, for example, was an opportunity to fundamentally transforming america. Joe biden has been using that kind of rhetoric and hes been moving further and further to the left. Hes embraced the Green New Deal, for example, the only difference with alexandria ocasiocortez and joe biden is that he gives the country until 2035 and she gives the country until 2030 and so on and so on. Theres almost no difference normal between the platform of joe biden and the platform of Bernie Sanders. In fact, they are calling it the bidensanders unity platform. This extraordinary move to the left as we get closer to a general election, signals that joe biden is moving left but also that his party is moving left. And you dont have to take my word for it. The Washington Post has written several articles, 538. Com, independent polling and statistical analyst website says that joe biden if elected would be the most liberal president in the history of the country, biden himself has said things like that. Barack obama said he would be the most froggive in progressive in history and Bernie Sanders said most progressive since roosevelt. Roosevelt was against Public Sector unions and he was moderate compared to what democrats are proposing now and then barack obama let the cat out of the bag in july when he spoke at the john lewis funeral and he said that when democrats win they are going to eliminate the filibuster and look at statehood for washington, possibly puerto rico, they are going to talk about passing amnesty to illegal aliens according to chuck schumer. The plan to roll ahead with massive changes, joe biden has signed onto that agenda and hes speaking that rhetoric. It doesnt seem that hes quite in control of that agenda. Hes probably being pushed in that direction. Certainly there seems to be a lot of people pulling levers behind the scene. But joe biden it turns out is the most leftwing major nominee that weve ever seen in this country despite a 50year career element of being just being a guy who gets along with everybody, shakes hands, slaps backs in the back room and he has really become the candidate of the most leftwing Democratic Party that seen since 1972 or well before that. I recall the 2016 Democratic Convention. A lot of duck tape on mouths and things like that. Yeah. Bernie sanders and his people spent a whole lot of time working on the platform, big sort of struggles over things to make it a much more bernie platform particularly on economics, more so than on lets say Foreign Policy or Civil Liberties or criminal justice. A lot of bernienomics. Sure, Hillary Clinton might have been seen like a moderate and, she, in fact, is going to be the most we have a flight 93 election in words of the same us essay from the claremont institute, and so like we have to stop this socialist from taking over. My question is given that history, if thats a fair rendering of it. Do conservatives run the risk and you run the risk in this of boy who cried wolf to democrats . Democrats have been hearing conservatives call them socialists forever and do we run the risk of having people tune it out and even precisely at the moment when the actual platform is more leftleaning on economics than it has been . No, i think that every election since 2008 has been existential election for the conservatives and the country in general because since 2008 democrats have offered nominees whose agenda is not to turn the country better, but to change the country, and this is very different from the elections of 1996, 2000, 2004, those were contentious elections and both parties like to point to the extreme wings of the other side and say this is what youre get if you vote for this candidate. Its very nice to have a swell guy like joe biden running but youre really getting Bernie Sanders. There are a couple of differences now that actually make the flight 93 election more flight 93 election this time around, the carnage in the cities. It was one thing to tell americans that democrats believed in tearing down the entire order, the institution, the history of the country. Now we can see it. Its happening. Its happening. They are tearing down not just confederate statutes an confederate flags which had already begun before 2016, but they are tearing down george washington, abraham lincoln, grant, abolitionist statutes are being vandalized, the black civil war soldiers in charge, we are seeing an assault on history itself and the other thing thats different is Bernie Sanders was an outlier in 2016. Now he has established a new norm for the party. The major candidates of the democratic primary and i talk about this, all adopted sanders position, the one exception was biden didnt go all the way in for medicare for all. He wants medicare as a choice, effectively and ive seen this argued quite convincingly, bidens policy is the same because if you lower the medicare eligibility timing to 60 youre effectively going to put private insurance out of business eventually anyway and then you only have one option which is medicare for all and the biden people arent giving up on medicare for all. Their plan is Bernie Sanders said quite openly this week, was once biden wins we will push for medicare for all regardless. But all of the major contenders and some of the front runners included people who adopted these positions, all of them signed on to the Green New Deal and signed onto medicare for all, Elizabeth Warren proposed a wealth tax on americans, Kamala Harris who is now the running mate for joe biden, not only proposed or cosponsored the Green New Deal and medicare for all, but also said that she would do away with the filibuster and all of the radical positions are being staked out openly and you have a supporting cast of members of congress who are openly declaring socialists. The most dominant ideological character in the Democratic Party today is alexandria ocasiocortez. Shes the one who first introduced the Green New Deal and shes a democratic socialist and she has built and expanded a group of candidates, candidates that are openly socialist and believe in tearing down the old system and putting up their new system. And you can see the results of these policies in places like california. This is what ultimately made me more conservative, seeing the result of policies i once believed in but take the Green New Deal, for example, we have an early version of it in california where the state has mandated and move today Renewable Energy sources like solar and wind, well, what happened during a heat awe wave . Mega watts were unavailable because there wasnt enough wind to keep turbines going. Northern and Central California had to have rolling blackouts for several day and gavin newsom who is as left as they come, its time for us to sobber up about green energy. Hes basically admitted that this doesnt work, he wants to get there eventually. Hes called it the transition to renewable. Look, its just not working for us because we need backup, we need insurance. The Green New Deal policies would take californias failed Energy Policies and apply them nationwide, but for the left the goal is never to produce a better result, cast most important is that you have the right sentiment and we have people in the party proclaiming radical sentiments. When barack obama said he we wanted to fundamentally transform america. He said it in late october 2008, 5 days to go before the election. It was almost a throwaway line. Joe biden is running on that. Hes saying that openly. His campaign ads talk about systematic racism. Hes condemning the society that hes run to go lead and hes doing it so openly. You can say that we have made the same complaint before. I think whats happened is that the left is has only become firmer in conviction that only radical transformation is appropriate for the country and i think that this is a Long Distance away from where the democrats went in the right direction in 1990s where bill clinton moved back toward the center to win elections. When he lost congress in 1994, he won in 96 by moving to the center and had been part of decade long project, the Democratic Leadership Council that moved the party in promarket direction so that democrats were offering americans a better run free market, a betterrun system and that was a winning offer, that was an offer that won and could have probably continue today win had it not been for impeachment, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and made it harder for al gore to win after clinton. I think the democrats who are in control now took the opposite lesson from the clinton years, that they were dissatisfied with welfare reform, dissatisfied with moving back to the center and they want the opportunity to try out radical policies, they are not going to be denied until they do what democrats had to do in the 80s which is consider a series of defeats. I think that democrats could win in november, the polls certainly say that and if they are going to win they will put in radical policies, the question of filibuster, adding new states. When you add puerto rico and washington, d. C. , youre getting four new Democratic Senators because they are not going to elect republican senators. That makes it almost republican for republicans to win a majority in the senate. Youre putting democrats in the majority and republicans in opposition. We are looking at a change in the system itself even before we get to policy. This is a flight 93 election in a much bigger way and we will have a series of elections until democrats decide that this is actually not where they want to lead the country, what works for the country is what worked in the past, and there are some democrats who know it but the ones in control are not in the same page. There have been a number of studies that looked at the ideological composition of different sections of twitter, for example, and they are usually pretty, you know, convincingly i should say that like Democratic Politics twitter, progressive twitter is way the hell more progressive than actual democrats and progressives themselves are. Like twitter is a microsm and makes things seem more left than they are. During the primary which you covered and which is the subject to your book, it seemed at various times that people i would specifically hear name beto orourke, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro and Kirsten Gillibrand who all who had modernness in the past, cory booker i would also add in that who is was a Charter School enthusiast and different things. During primary season they all seemed to be running to win the chapo trap house of vote on twitter. They were running super kind of woke, hitting the cultural notes that seemed like what democrats were clamoring for, if you took clamor from twitter seriously, they all tanked, the strategy objectively failed for all of them. They sat on their moderate pasts and they buried it and went totally in that direction and got squashed like bugging and could it be that when characterizing the left, the Democratic Party we are baffled by aoc but we are overrating that because thats not the general characteristics of the democrats who tipped the house back into democratic favor in 2018. They didnt run an aoc campaign to take back the house. It was a lot of they didnt talk about russia. They didnt hit a lot of things that people who flipped werent all aoc. Is it possible that we are making the twitter mistake when characterizing the Democratic Party now imagining it to be more radical and progressive than it actually is . I dont think so because i think that the institutions of the Democratic Party have also moved left and thats for a number of reasons, but theres another institution outside of the party that also creates a leftwing environment and youre right social media tends to amplify the voices, it does on the right as well, but the mainstream media, the offline media also play a role in moving the Democratic Party to the left and msnbc does so although the difference with msnbc you know youre getting a lef