As Zohran Mamdani’s rise reshapes New York politics, is democratic socialism becoming the Democratic Party’s new base? Host Charles Fain Lehman sits down with Reihan Salam, Judge Glock, and John Ketcham to dissect the political and cultural currents pushing the party left—from Instagram primaries and “free stuff” populism to the ideological split between AOC and the Ezra Klein crowd. Along the way, they dig into anti-institutionalism, social media as a news engine, and the strange allure of David Goggins.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are inveterate panel members John Ketcham and Judge Glock. And also, we’re very pleased to have special guest, Reihan Salam, primarily known for his work on The Editors at National Review, but also incidentally president of the Manhattan Institute. Reihan, thank you so much for joining us.
Reihan Salam: It is my great honor, privilege, and joy to be with these three special Manhattan Institute team members.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’re hoping you’ll bring your podcast magic to us. We’re live from an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest. I want to take us right into the news of…
Reihan Salam: Are we deep in an Antifa lair?
Charles Fain Lehman: I can’t comment on who’s holding a gun to us off stage. It’s fine. Our producer Isabella has signed off on any physical threats we may face, so it’s okay.
Yes, I want to take us right into the news. Recent reporting indicates that after their victory in the New York City mayoral primary, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have aimed their sights higher, with CNN reporting that they’re looking to primary among other Democrats, House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, which to me raises the interesting question that I want to kick to the panel. Are they going to be successful? Is democratic socialism the future of the Democratic Party? You know, I think we’ve seen in the rise of Zohran Mamdani, renewed energy around this as sort of an alternative model for the Democrats, do they have the chance to take power? Is AOC the next Speaker of the House? Discuss.
Reihan Salam: Well, I just want to say first that as an aging Gen X middle-aged dad, that Hakeem Jeffries is demonstrating that he’s in it to win it. He’s aggressive. He’s fighting because he photoshopped an image of himself on Instagram to make his waist slimmer. So that shows that he understands that we live in an aesthetic age and that he might have to cut down on carbs, something like that. We’ve all been there. But that shows that this is a fight to the death. And we’ll see how it unfolds.
John Ketcham: I need his program. But this raises an ancillary question of how sui generis is New York City, right? So we have a closed partisan primary in New York City where only about 1.1 million voters participated. Mamdani got about 550,000 or so votes. There are 5 million registered voters in New York City. So that’s about 11-ish percent of all registered voters.
I don’t know if that necessarily translates to a sweeping mandate, even in a expanded general electorate. And that’s the big question heading into November. But then there’s also this question of, is New York unique in the sense that people frequently believe that it’s the place where everybody wants to be, that there’s always going to be demand for it. So it’s this exceptional place that public policy decisions don’t affect in quite the same way as other cities, just because you’re going to have talent that wants to live in New York, and you’re going to have firms that seek that talent.
Reihan Salam: Well, but John, let’s get just very specifically on the political point. One way to understand the New York City electorate is that literally the people who are too left wing for the politics of Colorado or Ohio or Iowa actually collect in New York City. Literally, Brad Lander, one of the Democratic mayoral candidates, who attached himself to the hip of Mamdani, is desperate to become his deputy, his lieutenant, is from the suburbs of St. Louis. And that’s not a crime, and he’s been in New York City for a long time, but he literally moved to New York City to become part of this vast, sprawling, nonprofit, progressive apparatus. Now, that’s not unique to New York, but New York is a concentration not just of the kind of professional talent you’re describing, but literally of a certain kind of political cadre type person who wants to build socialism in one city.
Charles Fain Lehman: So that is another backdrop here. One way to think about this question of what’s the broader trajectory for socialism is you have had those concentrations of deep blue people for a long time. And in some contexts you do get socialists. Kshama Sawant in Seattle is the obvious example, who’s the socialist member of the Seattle City Council, infamous for a variety of reasons. She has not as a general rule been able to translate that into a house seat, for example. Some of that has to do with the drawing of maps.
But I think the question is, are we at this moment where, not really for the first time in history, there have been socialists in the US House before, mostly from New York City, but are we at a point in our history where there is some opportunity for a socialist alternative in the Democratic Party to look at these safe blue seats and go, okay, we can push them 20, 30 points to the left and still win, so we’re going to do that?
Well, I think the goal of the Democratic Socialist of America is ultimately to work to make themselves obsolete, right? Like any faction in a party, the goal is to eventually take it over and then effectively dissolve because you’ve accumulated enough power to be the party. I mean, to one extent, that’s what the Democratic Study Group did in the late 1950s. They said, hey, we have this conservative coalition of the South and the North. We want the North to win. We want to kick out the Southerners. You know, the class of ‘74 comes into Congress. They change the rules. They kick out four of the old chairmen. They do it. Effectively the Democratic Study Group hums the Democratic Party by the late 1980s. win the battle. To a lesser extent you could say the Democratic Leadership Council does that in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, is the DSA going to take over the party effectively? No, but how much of their program can get incorporated into the general party? I mean, I think a lot. I was looking at a poll from Data for Progress that shows in the Democratic Party you’re going to see about… this is…
Charles Fain Lehman: Who have their own agenda
Who have their own agenda, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily socialism per se. What they show is 35 percent approval rating for socialism about equal plus approval rating over capitalism in the Democratic Party which is nowhere near…
Charles Fain Lehman:
Sorry, there was 35 percent… 35 percent points more sympathetic to socialism?
Judge Glock: Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: In the Democratic Party?
Judge Glock: In the Democratic Party. Than capitalism. Into capitalism.
Charles Fain Lehman: What?
Judge Glock: These actually polls have been going back years. Inside the Democratic Party, capitalism does not have an amazing positive image. Socialism does. Now, what does socialism mean is certainly open to debate, but it’s certainly a broad swath of the party thinks socialism, however defined, is an important part of the future.
Reihan Salam: So I think that this is a really, when you’re looking at the national context, one way to think about this is that, you had this movement emerging before 2024, gained a lot of visibility and prominence of, you know, you can call them new centrists. You know, classically in democratic politics since the Obama era, it’s been a developmental access. It’s been, you know, on the moderate faction they’re saying, we want the same things that the left does, only slower. But then there were some people saying, actually we want something different. We don’t want wokeness. We want a kind of new patriotism. You know, we don’t want subsidizing demand endlessly. We want abundance. And also as a political thesis, let’s not talk about the toxically unpopular things. Let’s talk about popular things, popularism.
When you look at Zohran Mamdani, what he actually did is take the new centrist thesis in a way that was a bizarro version. So just as Donald Trump represented a bizarro version of, you know, whatever folks that say, hey, the party needs to care more about the working class like a decade ago. So the answer to abundance is we’re going to have abundance made by government. It’s going to be public housing, Viennese-style social housing for everyone. Popularism, we’re going to talk about free stuff. People want free stuff. We’re not going to talk about defunding the police. We’re not going to talk about the radical decarceral agenda, you know, that’s going to be for our private meetings.
And then when it comes to the cultural thesis, peak wokeness was about, you know, bashing Karen. But Karen is an upper middle class white woman, and those are your cadres. Those are your voters. Those are your donors. Israel bashing, however, is not about saying that I’m a white person who should apologize for my own horrible collective racial shame and guilt. It’s a different moralistic message that I consider incredibly toxic and dangerous. But it actually, in a weird way, is less radical because it’s less demanding on the person themselves. So I think that that’s the…. The new centrists, they didn’t actually come up with a really compelling unique synthesis and then suddenly these guys come along and like actually yeah that actually works. That resonates.
Charles Fain Lehman: This gets to a point that I think several of us have made about this sort of abundance phenomenon, the new centrist, Ezra Klein movement that says what Democrats need to do is focus on higher quality delivery of services through targeted deregulation and I think the point that several of us have made is like, if your agenda is that we should deregulate things and we should allow the market to do more, congratulations, you should be in the GOP. You’re in the wrong party. And this is not a message that’s going to resonate successfully with the democratic base. From Judge’s point, it seems like you’re making point that think others, including David Shore, have made, which is the Mamdani insight is actually, if you run on economically progressive issues people like that people want free stuff from the government.
Reihan Salam: Or rather if you’re zeroing in on affordability, I’m going to do something concrete and tangible for you, and the challenge for the kind of call it the kind of pro-market right, you know, kind of “normies for capitalism,” whatever you want to call it. is where is your version of how this is going to concretely translate. And it’s, by the way, you could say that it’s actually correct. It’s actually real. It will actually you know address the underlying problem, but you need something crisp and sharp, as opposed to catastrophizing about, you know, leftist policies that will be a catastrophe, but catastrophizing itself isn’t actually going to do the job. It actually has to be, we’re going to, I mean, and you’ve thought a lot about this, Judge.
Judge Glock: Well, I think one of the overlaps that you were kind of pointing out between the abundance Democrats that kind of claim themselves as the new centrists and this kind of Mamdami movement is that a lot of the abundance Democrats, not all of them, are for deregulating the public sector. What they’re talking about is deregulating transit, whether it’s deregulating renewable energy subsidies, deregulating public infrastructure. They’re not talking about deregulating environmental rules against private factories. They do not care about that and they’re not interested in that. So the Mamdani group is interested in deregulating, unleashing the public sector. What can we do to create more public housing quickly? Now, are they actually willing to do that with the coalition they’ve assembled? Probably not, but I think to Reihan;s point, there’s a lot of overlap here and let’s focus on affordability and let’s focus on how we can make the public sector deliver, but we can do it 10 times more rapidly than the other centrist abundance Democrats think they can do.
John Ketcham: And this is coming to a head in the New York City Charter Revision Commission, which is proposing a number of pro-housing supply initiatives. Many on the left, the institutional Democratic Party, have come out against these proposals. And I’m curious to see whether Mamdani will say, look, if these get in the way of public housing development in a similar way as they’re getting in the way of private housing development, well then I’m going to favor them so that we can actually accomplish our agenda, which remains to be seen.
Reihan Salam: I 100 percent agree that’s going to be really interesting to see how serious they are about this, how much they want to defang. More broadly though about the national point. I’m very… There are a bunch of different experiments going on at once. One thing I was struck by is that Mamdani’s campaign manager was the same person who was the campaign manager for Dan Osborn in the Nebraska Senate race.
Charles Fain Lehman: Who was the independent progressive of the Senate race.
Reihan Salam: Exactly. was kind of, many people saw this. This is the brilliant idea, the brilliant insight people have been talking about for a decade or more. There are parts of the country where either the Republican or the Democratic brand is so toxic that you have totally non-competitive politics. So the idea here was let’s have someone run as an independent, he did not even acknowledge that he would caucus with Democrats. He was emphasizing what they think of as their 70-30 issues. He’s running again. And it was so fascinating because we think of Mamdani as totally sectarian, super ideological, part of this little hive of people who, know, whatever they say in making a popularist campaign, they have like a real ideological formation. However, Osborn is someone who is almost the exact opposite. So to me, it speaks to a group of people who are being very experimental, very aggressive. They will attempt different things in different environments. And that to me is very formidable.
Charles Fain Lehman: Do you think that they’re from the same wing of the party? I don’t have a sense, you know, I think Osborn, the thesis of Osborn was we’re going to pluck somebody as close to the center as we can while still being preferable. As close to the center as we can, while still being preferable to the Democrats so that we can get somebody in the caucus.
Reihan Salam: I think it’s the Buckley rule. I think it is. We are going to get the most ideologically aligned person we can given the electorate and we are going to be relentless and they’re going to be
some things that are non-negotiable. I remember Richard Rorty in the 90s wrote an essay for The Nation, and it was about how Democrats need to be a big tent, there need to be three things that we all are for, and everything else does not matter. It’s an argument here from Matt Yglesias and other people as well, but what are the non-negotiables? One of the non-negotiables for them, I gather, is, you know, nationalized healthcare or something like that, right? It’s just kind of like this is a non-negotiable, you can take… That I think is the kind of thing that is potentially powerful. The question is how sectarian are they? Because I actually do think that a lot of these guys are actually, you know, maybe some of them… The hard left folks who want to go after Dan Goldman and anyone. So some of it is the Hakeem Jeffries. Exactly, a slew of Democrats who are trying to be line-straddlers. They’re trying to both be in tune with the rising left while also being acceptable. And what these guys are trying to do is like, you can’t do both. The question is, is it generational? And is it we want people who capture attention? Or is it rigidly ideological? And that’s going to be interesting to see.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, I do think you were going to end up having that ideological dispute, right? If a bigger party is a more fractious party and it seems to me like Dan Osborn and Zohran Mamdani are from very different wings. So there is the common sort of populist agenda, and there is that unifying theme, which is alarming to me, which is, like, you can get voters to get on board with, if not socialism, then anti-big business sentiment, opposition to monopolists, opposition to capitalists. That is a potentially very potent organizing principle. By the way, it’s the organizing principle that was effective for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Reihan Salam: I think the litmus test, I would be very curious to know what Dan Osborn thinks about U.S. support for Israel. Because I honestly think that, you know, the interesting thing, Jamaal Bowman, you know, voted for all sorts of crazy stuff, but also all sorts of like pretty mainstream, normie, democratic stuff. The thing that was costly for AOC, for all of these guys, is whenever you do something that moves an inch off of a rigidly anti-Israel line. I wonder, I mean, John, what do you think about, do you buy the idea that Israel is actually going to be the driving force? That’s going to be the ideological litmus test rather than something, I’ll give you the last word, John.
John Ketcham: Well, it seems to me that the charge of anti-Semitism against Zoram Mamdani did not hurt him at all, and in fact may have helped him. And so, like, that is a worrisome trend within the Democratic Party, especially as many younger Jews and younger voters in general are simply not aligned with Israeli sentiment. They just don’t really look to Israel in the way that older voters and older Democrats did.
Judge Glock: Genocide Jue, you mean?
John Ketcham: Yeah, exactly. There’s an association now of October 7th with Israel’s response to it, not Hamas’s massacre. And that is inverting the emotional sentiment that’s driving out voters. And I think that Mamdani is playing that up in a way that is reinforcing his credibility and his authenticity among these voters in a way that’s deeply disturbing.
Charles Fain Lehman: So, OK, I want to take this out because I’m going get to our next topic. Before I do that, I’m going to ask everybody. It’s 2028, 2027. It’s a hotly contested primary. Zohran Montani isn’t eligible to be president because he’s not a natural born citizen. Who is the standard bearer of the DSA faction of the Democratic Party in the 2028 primary? Reihan, do you want to go first?
Reihan Salam: So one thing I’ll just note is that you have a primary candidate, a Democratic primary candidate for Senate in Michigan who’s running against a swing-state Democrat, moderate Democrat, and that person is running in an incredibly tight race. That is to say that, you know, the natural thing to say is it’ll be AOC, she’ll be ready to do it, she is good at capturing attention, she’s good at, you know, she has built an enormous fundraising machine, but I think it could quite possibly be someone we don’t know yet, you someone who emerges, or it could be someone who is a more mainstream person who decides to rebrand themselves because they’re going to see this as their lane. So I would expect to be surprised.
Charles Fain Lehman: John, who’s your prediction?
John Ketcham: I immediately thought AOC.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yep, a respectable choice.
Judge Glock: Yeah, why not? And just a good reminder about how close Bernie Sanders came to capturing the Democratic nomination in 2016. This is not such a far-fetched idea that a self-declared socialist could win in the next primary. Yeah, I mean, so I think the guy who I’m watching there who is sort of trying to walk the line is Ro Khanna, who simultaneously has identified himself to some extent with the DSA faction, is a California representative, is also interested in the abundance guys, is also interested in trying to present social moderation. I think he’s someone who could try to straddle that line very effectively.
Reihan Salam: I think he might be too cerebral.
Charles Fain Lehman: Maybe, maybe.
John Ketcham: This is the campaign season that, you know, three to five word what’s, right? Like the, what are you going to do? Well, we’re going to freeze the rent. That is just appealing. To me, I don’t know how to separate out the appeal of that incredibly direct message from the appeal of socialism. Like what’s doing the heavy lifting there? And what will the establishment Democratic Party do in response? Will they come up with a series of what’s? I don’t know if their policies are amenable to that kind of condensation.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think they’ll just fold. As I’ve been saying frequently the past several months, a liberal is someone who says to a socialist, I agree with you, but not yet. Eventually you have to say yes.
Reihan Salam: A lot of it depends on how the end of the second term president samples.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to move us from the young left to the young right and the important news pertaining to that hot spot of the young right, X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, most recently, Linda Yaccarino, who was a long-time high-up executive, second commander to Elon Musk, has departed X. This is following some alarming controversy where they changed something about X’s built-in AI, Grok, and it started declaring that the Jews were out to get Americans society, and also issuing all sorts of death threats. It’s a little unusual. But I think that this has resurfaced a long-standing debate about, you know, the pros and cons of X both for American society and the right generally.
Where on the one hand, I think the great virtue, Elon Musk’s purchase of X, I think is a strong argument, is the most impactful event in the 2024 election in terms of determining Donald Trump’s win. His ability to create a platform that gets information out there that the Democrats and the media does not like seems good. And on the other hand, it is kind of a cesspool. So I’m curious for the panel how you think about how the right should be thinking about its X problem, its X benefits. What do we do with that as a platform?
Reihan Salam: Judge, do you buy the premise that X is a problem?
Judge Glock: Only in the sense that it’s a problem that doesn’t have a clear remedy. Like the old legal claim that there’s no harm without a remedy. Here, there’s an issue that X can radicalize people. It can fraction people off into small groups that are generally not aligned with a broad-based movement that you want to create in the right or the left. But what can you do about it? There’s only so much that anyone in a party center, in a headquarters can actually change. Now, I mean, I think everyone’s still wrestling with the fact that this is now America’s number one source for news. And there was literally just a poll, or a survey, think a week or two ago that says social media is the number one source of news now, above TV, which is a mind-boggling event. Like this is changing 70 years of American politics and we’re all still trying to figure that out now. Now, X is still behind Twitter, or sorry, behind Facebook and say YouTube, if you consider that a social media channel, but it is still the main news source of all those. It’s very newsy.
And like what can we do about that when people are forming their own groups? I mean you can try to be as convincing as possible, like about a broad-based kind of right-popularist movement about how to make life more affordable etc. Can you convince a lot of the wild cards that are going to be on X that are also going to be screaming about Israel occasionally they’re also going to be doing some pretty far you know wild-eyed things? I don’t know.
John Ketcham: We’re approaching our lives in different ways, in ways that we’re building up from different premises, such that we don’t even agree on what is reality at this point, right? So without that shared understanding of what we can agree on as objective fact, it becomes more and more difficult to find any kind of common ground, even within the right.
And what do you do about that? We’ll let’s say have a more censorious regime on X, where do people go? Do they go to more extreme or less mainstream platforms and potentially have more of an echo chamber effect such that you can see some real-life consequences?
Reihan Salam: So there’s so many thoughts that come to mind. One is that I would be curious to hear from you guys about your interpretation of bluesky, because bluesky, weirdly at the same time that X is in crisis, at the same time that X is in crisis, blue sky actually seems to be thinning out. I think that there are people on the left who are kind of feeling the wind at their back and who are kind of coming back to X, so that’s kind of one thing.
Another thing more broadly about this kind of cultural environment… You know, one debate is, hey, how do feel about social media censorship as such? Another thing is about the fact that X was experimenting with a set of creator incentives in order to reward engagement. And, you know, so you could argue that there is rage monetization. You know, there is an attack that to some extent you could characterize it as ideological. However, to some extent you can characterize it as we are literally trying to attract engagement because we are monetizing that engagement and it happens that those are forms of engagement-seeking that wind up being extremely toxic for a larger political brand. And how do you think about the incentives of those individuals who are seeking to, they don’t need to win a 51 percent majority, they don’t need to build a majority coalition, they literally are, you have a business that is seeking attention and revenue.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to respond to both of those, and I’ll do the first one briefly first. The first one is, I think one of the interesting things about the early days, the predictions in the early days of the internet that turned out to be wrong. So we thought of the internet as a thing that would break down communicative barriers, that we’d all be able to talk to each other and we’d have one big public square. As it turns out, social media actually, the returns are greater to homogenization than to diversification, which is not what you would have expected. It’s like, why is it that you know what Reddit is like? Reddit can take anything on Reddit. Why is Reddit like that? Well, because there is some dominating return to providing people with like-mindedness. So there’s some intrinsic incentive to do that.
John Ketcham: Human beings are sort of tribal animals, right?
Charles Fain Lehman: We thought the internet would fix that, and they didn’t.
John Ketcham: Well, human nature is what it is. We’re given different tools to communicate.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think the point about rage monetization, I was saying this earlier, but I think I’m, yeah, I think I’m the person who posts the most frequently on X here, and so I actually get paid by X. And I know which posts are going to generate engagement. And it’s always the crappiest posts. I mean, it’s always just sort the lowest brow, like, let me dunk on somebody that I think is dumb. That’s always what gets it.
I think though, in both cases, you can’t necessarily override the structural features of human cognition that are driving that. People are just going to engage in level… To go back to John’s point from earlier, the question becomes not, can you take us back to the televisual age? Can you undo social media? It’s how do you engage with that as a political reality? What is your three-word statement? What is your “free buses”? What is your “defund the police”? What is your “freeze the rent”? Because that is the language in which you have to communicate now. This is just the reality of the playing field of being persuasive.
Reihan Salam: I mean, this is totally plainly inadequate to the scale of the challenge we’re talking about, is interrelated. There’s an X challenge. There’s also kind of a larger whatever crisis of young adulthood, masculinity, yada yada. You know, the things that I’m heartened by, David Goggins is just a figure who is just incredibly inspiring. you know, there’s kind of like a-
Charles Fain Lehman: Who’s that for the audience?
Reihan Salam: So David Goggins is, as I understand it, a former Navy SEAL who is just someone who is devoted to kind of psychotic self-improvement. And it is just an ethic that I think that in 2024, I think the Trump campaign and the right and this kind unusual big-tent coalition that emerged on the right was partly a coalition that was about, you know, be healthy, achieve things, have a kind of, you know, just actually do your own research. You know what I mean? And I think that all these things that are ridiculed by some, but you basically had a kind of censorious, you know, whatever call it progressive establishment, whatever you want that was, you know, ridiculing and demeaning the idea of self-improvement and self-help. And I think that are there excesses and are there things that are cringe0inducing about that world? Of course there are. But I think that that is an interesting culture. How does that intersect with these other currents? How does it intersect with politics in an interesting, durable way? I’m not sure, but I think that the answer lies somewhere there.
John Ketcham: Well, it connects to what we were talking about with democratic socialism. If you freeze the rent, you’re basically saying, do not want to have people live in better living conditions. You’re going to keep the same apartment that you have in the same material conditions potentially indefinitely.
Reihan Salam: Mamdani said this explicitly. He said the American dream is about stability, which was striking.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s very socialist.
John Ketcham: But it’s totally at odds with the idea of actualizing one’s potential with human flourishing, with the idea that we want to do better individually and generationally too. So there’s just a clear dividing line.
Judge Glock: I would say it’s very, you know, even FDR too. FDR famously in, I believe 1937 in the second inaugural talked about the number one goal of the New Deal and the Democratic Party is security. Social security was formulated on that basis. He said something even pretty wild to the extent of, if the Great Depression needs to go on longer in order to achieve our goal of security, that will be a good thing. Like the worse, the better was always part of this movement for a long time. And it is appealing. Like people do want to achieve, but they also want security and there’s never going to be an easy balance in that. The problem with Mamdani and the others is security uber alles.
Charles Fain Lehman: And so I think the to talk about the David Goggins thing for a second and the sort of, you know, Trump health nexus. There is some degree of vitalism, unapologetic endorsement of what you would, the majority would refer to as inequality or excellence in the affirmative sense. But there’s also this concept of doing your own research. I think this is a core feature of the social media age. The administration has done a bunch of stuff to lean into conspiracy theory. And I’m of two minds about it. A friend just sent me, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, formerly representative from New York, just tweeted something out about how Americans have legitimate questions about chemtrails and we need to answer their questions. And I’m like, on the one hand, Americans actually don’t have legitimate questions about chemtrails, they’re very silly. But on the other hand, I’m like In the age in which information can diffuse so quickly, it’s not obvious to me that you can just continue to dismiss people’s crazy ideas as a solution. You do kind of have to lean into transparency. Whether that is what they’ve done with this chemtrail thing, whether that is what they’re doing with Jeffrey Epstein, whether that is the identification of mRNA vaccines for COVID as causing heart problems. They’ve sort of taken a posture of we are going to… We’re going to provide you information. We’re going to entertain these conversations.
Judge Glock: Because we often know that you’ve come out right recently. I mean, this is the wild thing, right? Things like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This was a wild conspiracy theory for a while. And we should be encouraged that places like…
Charles Fain Lehman: It was never a wild conspiracy theory. It was true.
Judge Glock: It was always true, of course. Most likely. But now the fact that people can do their own research online or something, this is a good thing. There were gatekeepers that I think were the value of were vastly overestimated at the time and their absence today is over decried.
Reihan Salam: I do think this speaks to the role that we play and that we ought to play and that is very fraught but necessary. The Manhattan Institute, City Journal, is, you know, there is an anti-institutional sensibility. That anti-institutional sensibility is grounded, as Judge notes, in something real. However, you need institutions. You need institutions that are credible, that honor the fact that their credibility needs to be earned. And I think what you’ve seen is a generation of people inherit really important knowledge-creating institutions that have torched the credibility of the institutions. As that credibility has been undermined, they become incredibly defensive and their orientation has been, how dare you question this credibility? And I think that to some degree, our role is to keep institutions honest with an eye towards the idea that actually they are immensely important. And yeah, the challenge for any aspiring gatekeeper is exceptionally difficult in this moment and you kind of need to think about how you earn that credibility over time.
John Ketcham: What happens when the conspiratorial set gets an answer from a trusted authority that they don’t want to hear? What’s happening with them?
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s exactly what’s happening.
John Ketcham: Do they double down and say like we can’t even trust this authority and they just go for anti-establishment, that’s the new establishment, or do they accept it? I don’t know, time will tell, but I think it does behoove us to lend credibility to those institutions and authorities that are saying the truth and are objective and factual and so forth.
Reihan Salam: I think in a subtly different way about two things. One, I think that it’s about just not like we’re going to lend our credibility to you. It’s more like let’s think about how one earns credibility over time and you kind of demonstrate that. The other thing I’ll say is that this also relates to kind of elites and masses because when you think about vitalism for example or whatever else, know, is security ultimately going to be more appealing to more people than seeking excellence? Perhaps. However, I think that a lot of what matters in discourse is are you winning over people who are influential elites whom others want to imitate and who have a sense of momentum and I think that that cannot be underestimated when you look at how much our cultural conversation has changed in response to dynamic elites that command attention and authority, and I think that a lot of what we do as coalition merchants, as kind of, you know, ideological entrepreneurs whatever is actually thinking about like can you build a kind of meaningful elite coalition? Are there smart, capable people who want to get behind an idea? And I think that that’s really important.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right, so I’m going take this out. And John has given me my exit question. So I put this to the panel. Without, you don’t have to tell me what you thought beforehand if you don’t want to. But did the revelation that FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino believe, or assert that they believe that Epstein did kill himself, did that change your view of the case at all? You don’t have to tell me what you thought beforehand, but did it change your view?
John Ketcham: No.
Charles Fain Lehman: It didn’t change your view? Interesting, Judge?
Judge Glock: I guess I’m going go with a strong no here, too.
Charles Fain Lehman: Interesting.
Reihan Salam: No.
Charles Fain Lehman: I would say yes. I’m the one who says yes.
Judge Glock: Wait, why? Explain quickly.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean it is it is plausibly the case that they got on the inside and learned something they weren’t supposed to know but also these are guys who have like retailed this concept for years and years and they got on the inside and looked at all the facts and willing to come out and be like no, actually we were completely wrong. Like there are plausible explanations where you know they learned he was a secret agent or whatever or they’re worried about who was going to be impacted by this but like this would have been a huge win for them and they were willing to take the L and like catch a bunch of flak. That at least shifts my prior probability towards, no actually there isn’t a conspiracy on this front.
Judge Glock: Oh, I guess we were working off the baseline, or I was, that he did kill himself.
Charles Fain Lehman: Wait, you thought that? Okay, Judge’s out. Judge is out of the know. Alright, that’s… Judge is more credulous than I am, that’s fine. He’s, he’s not, he’s at the televisual age, I’m at the digital age.
Before we go, I want to take us to slightly lighter news. In a couple of days, I think tomorrow. I’m not sure, the new Superman movie is coming out. James Gunn attracted some both praise and criticism, the director attracted some praise and criticism over the weekend for saying it’s a movie about America accepting immigrants. You can think what you want about that. Pros and cons, I’m still going to go see the movie, but I want to ask our panelists before we go, who is your favorite superhero, if any? John, I feel like you have so many answers to this question.
John Ketcham: It’s an easy one. Batman. Yeah. In Gotham?
Charles Fain Lehman: I knew you would say that.
John Ketcham: Absolutely.
Charles Fain Lehman: Batman is in my mind the, like, the MI superhero. Oh, definitely. Yeah, he represents…
Reihan Salam: I just think that’s outrageous that John, as a son of Queens, would not choose Peter Parker, your friendly… That is, you have a lot of, you have a lot to answer for.
Charles Fain Lehman: Wait, what’s your answer?
Reihan Salam: I’m going to wait for Judge to give his answer and I’m going to a little.
Charles Fain Lehman: He’s just… presidential privilege.
Judge Glock: I’m so tired of superhero movies. I hate them now. Fine, Batman. Batman was the best. They did it perfectly in the whatever 91 with Buton. Just knock it off. Just knock it off.
Charles Fain Lehman: What? You like the Tim Burton Batman? Okay.
Reihan Salam: This is not a great answer just because I for many years as a teen was so deep from like the age of like nine to, you know, deep into my teen years, so deep into comic books that it would, you know, kind of make your eyes bleed and it will have to be someone Marvel. What I really intended to do is go for something highly obscure but I’m going to go with Wolverine because Wolverine canonically is 5’3″, ferocious, Canadian, as a Canada-phile this fits. You know, immortal, beautiful, beautiful hair, and just an absolute killer, brooding into things East Asian. You know, I just respect him. I respect him a lot.
Charles Fain Lehman: We cannot confirm or deny that Reihan has adamantium implants. My answer, I’ll reveal my comic book nerd self, is the Green Lantern. I’m the exact opposite disposition. Like I find Marvel comics just sort of like brooding, angsty, teenage nonsense. I think that comic books are a clash of good and evil, and good triumphs and that’s what I’m in favor of. It’s my view.
John Ketcham: Justice wins out.
Reihan Salam: Which Green Lantern now?
Charles Fain Lehman: Hal Jordan. Obviously.
Reihan Salam: Traditionalism.
Charles Fain Lehman: Of course. None of this Kyle Rayner nonsense. Alright, on that extremely nerdy note, that is about all the time that we have. Thank you, as always, to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, or even if you haven’t, don’t forget to like, comment, rate, subscribe. Recommend us to your friends. Recommend us to your neighbors. Recommend us to your dogs. All the good things. Anyone who listens to our podcast, even if they don’t, please leave us comments and questions on our YouTube channel. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
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