Granted, when Gavin Newsom set out to make a national name for himself— by performing a same sex marriage on the steps of San Francisco’s city hall when he was mayor— it looked “progressive.” Progressive in the identity politics way Democrats have mixed up progressive with. If “progressive” refers to someone who supports policies aimed at reducing income inequality, generally through measures like higher taxes on the wealthy, increased government spending on social programs and regulations to promote fair wealth distribution, no one could have ever mixed up what Gavin Newsom has always been about and what progressive is. But in his essay for the New Yorker over the weekend, Jay Kang did exactly that— defined the neoliberal Newsom as “progressive.” Hopefully, all the lambasting of Newsom’s embarrassing podcast will be a roadblock to his life’s career goal of becoming president.
He’d be better than JD Vance but there’s nothing that would ever get me to do something I’ve never done, b\voting for Gavin Newsom. His podcast, wrote Kang, This Is Gavin Newsom, “is five episodes into its run and, outside of a four-minute emergency update on the Menendez brothers’ trial and a lengthy conversation with Governor Tim Walz, each episode has featured Newsom interviewing right-wing figures, namely Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. The point of all this, Newsom explains in an introductory segment, is ‘tackling tough questions, engaging with people who don’t always agree with me, debating without demeaning.’ Newsom seems to believe that regular Americans have grown tired of polarization and want to see ideological enemies find common ground.
Kang is no fan. He found Newsom’s presidential campaign infomercial to be “the strangest political podcast I had ever heard. And not in a good way. In the first four episodes, Newsom seems incapable of interrogating any right-wing position— whether on tariffs, book bans, trans women in sports, wokeness, or the mess at the border. It feels like a stretch to even describe these episodes as interviews, because Newsom sounds fairly uninterested in what his guests are saying. Bannon, for example, says more than once to Newsom that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And, though Bannon acknowledges in passing that Newsom disagrees with him about the election-fraud claim, Newsom offers zero pushback to the idea and acts almost as if he didn’t hear it. What the episodes really offer is an opportunity for Newsom to say that he agrees with various conservative talking points, including the unfairness of trans women competing in sports, and the weakness of Kamala Harris’ campaign, and the unnecessary vilification of the white male. These may be electoral soft spots for liberals, and might warrant some debate or even a shift in messaging. But Newsom doesn’t offer his own thoughts on these topics so much as nod along with his guests. He makes a few meek objections about marriage equality and tax policy, and says something brief about having compassion for the trans athletes whom he believes should not be allowed to compete. But the impression that the podcast has left so far is that the Democratic governor of a deep-blue state mostly agrees with everything Kirk and Bannon think about this country. Throughout the episodes, he claims to “appreciate” this or that point his guests are making— so much so that Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, later said, on his own podcast, that he thought Newsom had been ‘overly effusive.’ When Newsom offered the occasional rebuttal, he kept saying that he wanted to “stress-test” a claim that Kirk had made, as if Newsom, the fifty-seven-year-old governor of the most populous state in the country, were a McKinsey consultant giving cautious advice to a powerful client who didn’t want to hear any real criticism.”
In his defense, I imagine Newsom didn’t start a podcast in the hope that it would be good. Rather, this is a soft launch for a Presidential run in 2028, like the mostly tepid memoirs published by myriad candidates in the past. With his eyes presumably on that prize, Newsom is distancing himself as much as possible from the progressive wing of his party, and from any unpopular positions that his political allies might have adopted in the past decade. This attempt at reinvention has, so far, failed: the show has been panned by local and national media; Capitol Weekly, a news outlet that mostly covers Sacramento, conducted a poll showing a ten-point negative swing in opinions of Newsom among voters who listened to the podcast. Republicans said he was “pandering,” while many liberals were disgusted that Newsom would bend the knee to someone such as Kirk, particularly with such shameless enthusiasm.
A single opinion survey should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt; it’s at least theoretically possible that swing voters will like Newsom’s pandering, or that Democrats will abandon their beliefs and vote for a Republican apologist in the primary. But it’s unlikely. And it may even reinforce what I believe is still Newsom’s most glaring weakness: not liberalism but the perception that he is slick and hypocritical, an image that was famously solidified when Newsom attended a fancy dinner party sat the French Laundry during the height of the covid-19 lockdowns. Newsom, in his conversation with Kirk, said that dinner was the “dumbest bonehead move of my life,” which may be true. (It helped to fuel a recall election, which he managed to weather.) But I do not think there is any way for him to live that down. People know who Gavin Newsom is: a San Francisco liberal who went to a lobbyist’s birthday party while most of his constituents stayed inside, ordered food delivered by essential workers, feared their neighbors, got sick, and died.
Newsom’s gambit, though ill-fated and embarrassing in practice, does come out of a coherent school of liberal thought, one that I find much more interesting than his Presidential chances. This school of thought seems to take it as a given that Democrats need to actively distance themselves from a whole host of positions that are now associated with the Party. Where does a politics of pure disavowal lead? In a few years’ time, will Newsom get up on a stage in Iowa and offer up a mantra of land-acknowledgment-like apologies? I can picture it: “I, Gavin Newsom, acknowledge and apologize for my party’s past support for trans athletes, open borders, defunding the police, school closures during a pandemic, the word ‘Latinx,’ and the Presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.” Would anyone like that?
…What Newsom and the disavowers out there should remember is that there are still a lot of liberals in America, and that pandering to an aggrieved, mostly imagined group of voters— the sort of people who would supposedly want to vote for a liberal Steve Bannon in linen pants— is not only silly from an electoral standpoint but humiliating on a personal level. A CNN poll published last weekend found that the majority of Democrats and Democrat-aligned independents want their elected officials to “stop the Republican agenda” and to stop working with the GOP That same poll— which was conducted before Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, decided to pass the GOP budget, to a howl of dissent from their colleagues in the House— found a record-low favorability rating of twenty-nine per cent for the Democratic Party. The GOP whips everyone into line and enforces ideological uniformity with insults like “rino.” Democrats in the mold of Newsom, meanwhile, take their base for granted and endlessly triangulate and focus-group their positions until they stand for nothing.
When you’re so concerned with trying to convey that you’re not like the other liberals, you won’t really have the time— even in an hour-long podcast— to explain what you believe in. Listening to Newsom get steamrolled by his right-wing guests for three hours, I wondered where his pride had gone. Why couldn’t he tell Bannon that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election? Why couldn’t he say to Kirk that the Republicans’ effort to turn trans athletes into a national wedge issue was, in fact, an opportunistic attack on an entire group of people? Does he believe in the principles of his party? Could he even name them? Any Democratic politician who’s considering a strategy like Newsom’s might ask themselves these same questions. Because the public is not stupid. Even those who might want “moderation” don’t want it in the form of endless capitulation and cowardice.
Would you call Newsom “old and out of touch,” the way Moira Donegan described today’s Democrats, mostly referring to the Schumer/Jeffries leadership wing, a wing refusing “to take itself seriously as the opposition to a president with authoritarian ambitions.” Instead we have Schumer— still not removed as leader and unlikely to ever be— leading the Democrats’ “bizarre belief that the Republican party— that cabal of increasingly fascist politicians that has spent the past decade calling their opposition pedophiles, attacking the rule of law and eroding democratic self-government— can be reasoned with, cajoled and brought back to their senses. Weak, ineffectual, unburdened by conscience or principle, unwilling to take their own side in an argument, and preferring to lose with dignity than to win at the risk of offending anyone: in the budget fight, Schumer embodied all of his party’s worst impulses, the ones that have allowed Donald Trump to seize control of American politics and turn our constitutional order to dust. In many ways, Schumer is reading from a 30-year-old playbook, the one that brought Bill Clinton to power in 1992. Clinton, a [conservative] tracked to the right, distanced himself from his party on social issues, prized compromise, and touted himself as tough on crime. This formula worked once, and Democratic party conventional wisdom has demanded that the party return to it, over and over again, in spite of changed circumstances and diminishing returns— like the pet dog who continues to lick a greasy spot on the sofa where she once found a piece of dropped cheese. Times have changed since 1992; the people who were infants that year that Clinton’s centrism swept to power are now not only adults, but adults with back pain. There was a moment in the 2024 campaign, after the selection of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate, when it looked like the party might finally abandon this old strategy and take on a more aggressive and affirmative tactic; instead, Walz was muffled, and the party leaders are now mistaking the result of their rightward-tacking strategy as a product of the failure to adhere to it faithfully enough. Politics have changed, but the Democrats haven’t: they are old and out of touch, not just in their gerontocratic leadership, but in their worldview. In the NY Times last month, James Carville, a veteran of the 1992 Clinton campaign, advised his party to ‘roll over and play dead.’ But if the Democrats really were dead, would anyone be able to tell the difference?” Definitely not with Gavin Newsom leading the party.
“But one Democrat,” wrote Donegan, “seems to be showing some refreshing signs of life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young, progressive Democrat from New York, had in recent years seemed eager to show her willingness to cooperate with Democratic leadership, acting as a key vote and public messenger on crucial issues. But her patience with her party seems to have run out. In a CNN interview, she called Schumer’s capitulation to Trump a ‘tremendous mistake’ and a ‘huge slap in the face’ to Democratic voters— and to a major federal workers’ union, which had endorsed a shutdown. ‘There is a huge sense of betrayal’ among voters, she told journalists, at the mainstream Democrats’ unwillingness to fight.”
I don’t want to even imagine what kind of a love-fest a Newsom-Schumer podcast episode would be like. Their corrupt, conservative fringe already have their knives out for AOC. The Senate Democrat with the worst voting record, Elissa Slotkin (MI), was asked by a constituent what she would do to stop Trump’s and Musk’s headlong rush towards authoritarianism. She responded the way anyone from her faction would: by attacking AOC of course.
I didn't tell Nancy Ohanian who to put in or leave out of this Resistance Becomes Duty drawing. Can you name all the figures she included? Is there someone else you'd like to see portrayed?
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