As many of you know, I’m currently expecting my second child. I’m due pretty soon and could go into labour at any moment, even while writing this! If that happens, please know that I will be leaning into the drama. Posting while in labour must be first for Substack… so just think of the clicks!

Here’s what to expect over the next few months

• A short …

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Sir Vince Cable is a British politician, economist and former leader of the Liberal Democrats. He served as MP for Twickenham for over 20 years and was Business Secretary in the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government from 2010 to 2015. Before entering Parliament, he worked as an economist in government, academia and industry, and remains a prominent commentator on economics, global politics and public policy.

Welcome, Vince. The first question I ask everyone is this: if there was a version of the political spectrum where zero means you’re a total centrist, -100 a complete fascist, and +100 a radical leftist, whatever that might look like, where would you put yourself?

Well, I’d evade your question because I tend to be quite left with my heart and quite right with my head.

Can you explain that?

My approach to economic policy is fairly on the right: a belief in fiscal discipline, that markets generally work better and in the value of entrepreneurs.

But at the same time, emotionally, I get very repelled by extreme inequalities. I believe very passionately in dealing with what economists call externalities, like global warming, so I would probably lean quite strongly to the left on those issues.

So I find the left-right thing quite difficult to answer truthfully and meaningfully. If you’re asking me to net it out, I’d probably say +10 or +20, with the qualification I’ve just given.

So do you find the political spectrum quite a limiting idea then?

I do. I wrote a pamphlet about this about 30 years ago, which argued that the traditional left-right divide was still there, but it had been overwritten by something much bigger: the divide between exclusive identity and an outward-looking view of the world, which I think is now the dominant dynamic in politics.

I don’t understand what you mean by that.

On the one hand, you have people who believe we have a single identity: the nation state, whether you’re black or white, whether you’re Christian or not, and so on.

On the other, you have people who are tolerant of a wide variety of identities. They see themselves as English, British and European. They’re inclusive in their approach to immigration, religion and other issues.

Those questions are actually what really matter now, rather than the traditional left-right debates about whether you’re in favour of nationalisation or not. Although Andy Burnham has resurfaced that argument, I don’t think it’s what most people are primarily concerned about.

You’ve been in politics for so long. Would you describe this particular moment as especially chaotic, or do we have a tendency to think the present moment is unusually chaotic?

I’ve been around in politics for a long time: active since just before 1970.

What I think is significant about the present moment is that it really dates back to the 2008 financial crisis. That shook up the system and created massive problems that we still haven’t solved.

Since then, we’ve had a whole series of further shocks, like Brexit, COVID and the wars. All of these have created huge uncertainties and made it much more difficult for democratic systems to cope. So, post-2008, I would say we’ve been living through a fundamentally different era that we’re still struggling to deal with.

Do you think Britain can get out of it, or do you subscribe to the idea that we’re now essentially ungovernable?

I don’t believe that at all. Partly because we’ve got fairly strong institutions, which are much stronger in many ways than those in the US. Things like the rule of law are taken seriously.

I think a good example is the way Britain has handled the Peter Mandelson allegations. Not a single person of any consequence in the US has been held to account over the Epstein scandal.

Well, Ghislaine Maxwell has, but she’s also British and a woman.

Exactly. And she wasn’t a politician.

Whereas here, on the basis of what I think is actually far less concrete evidence, both Mountbatten-Windsor and Mandelson have faced investigation. Whatever happens, there is a process by which people are being held to account, and I think that’s a good example of the way British institutions function.

Another example was during the Brexit debate, when the Supreme Court wasn’t willing to be intimidated by the government. That showed Britain has strong, resilient institutions.

Do you miss being an MP and being right in the thick of it? Part of the drama?

I do miss certain parts of it. I enjoyed being the local MP a great deal.

I should say you were my local MP, as I grew up in Twickenham.

I enjoyed that enormously. Being part of the community and being able to help individuals and local groups is something I genuinely miss. I also miss being a minister because I felt I was actually doing useful things.

What I don’t miss is Parliament itself. I became increasingly exasperated by parliamentary procedure: bells ringing, being summoned to vote on things you hadn’t properly understood. I also don’t miss the party manoeuvring and office politics.

I love hearing you call it office politics, because it is literal politics as well.

It really is. It’s people jockeying for position, lobbying for peerages, all that kind of thing. That’s something you encounter when you’re leading a political party.

What was it like working with the Conservative Party back then?

I was disappointed we couldn’t work with Labour and uncomfortable about working with the Conservatives. Throughout the coalition, I was always aware of the enormous gulf between our attitudes to many problems.

On a personal level, though, I found it reasonably easy to work with them.

I remember asking my dad [who was a parliamentary sketch writer] what he thought of David Cameron and George Osborne. He said they had no sense of how the other half lived and no interest in finding out. He thought they were simply too privileged to understand the life of the average Briton, and that this was a huge failing in a Prime Minister and Chancellor. What do you think of that?

I think that’s probably true. But they were actually very different people. Cameron was extremely polished, charming and meticulously polite, even when you disagreed with him. I didn’t particularly like him, though. Beneath the charm, there was a certain coldness.

Osborne was almost the opposite: his manner didn’t naturally inspire warmth or empathy, but privately, he was very good company. I enjoyed my conversations with him and my respect for him grew over time, whereas with Cameron, it went in the opposite direction.

I wouldn’t have expected you to say that.

Osborne was really the politician. I got the impression he wasn’t terribly interested in economic policy.

But he was Chancellor of the Exchequer after a global economic crash!

Many of the detailed economic decisions were essentially left to the Treasury. Osborne was primarily concerned with the political impact of decisions. He was an extremely shrewd political operator.

Osborne’s legacy is definitely austerity. Are you saying that wasn’t really him?

I’ve never fully understood what people mean when they say “austerity”. We’ve effectively had austerity since 2008, regardless of who has been in power, including under Labour now.

If by “austerity” you simply mean fiscal discipline, then that was the inevitable consequence of the 2008 financial crash. We were, in many ways, implementing the approach that Alistair Darling and the Labour government had already set out.

When people talk about coalition austerity, I think what they usually mean is that the burden of fiscal discipline fell more on spending cuts than on tax rises. But nobody was really arguing for substantial tax increases. The Labour Party wasn’t. Even a couple of years ago, they could have campaigned on higher taxes to protect public services, but they chose not to. They promised not to raise taxes, which is part of the problem they’re facing now.

So when people criticise austerity, I always ask: what was the realistic alternative?

The way I hear the term used now is more as a description of what’s happened to our public institutions. The NHS is struggling and so much has been privatised, so when something like the pandemic arrived, there was simply no resilience in the system.

I know that’s how the term is commonly used. But I think those pressures would have existed under any government after 2008.

Even if Gordon Brown had remained in office?

It might not have fallen on exactly the same departments. But remember, under the coalition, we were told the NHS and schools were protected, so the cuts had to come elsewhere.

The simple truth is that after the financial crisis, the tax base changed dramatically. Every government had to confront the same question: how do you pay for public spending when that revenue has evaporated?

Any government after 2008 would have had to reduce public spending somewhere.

What do you think about the bank bailouts, looking back now? That’s something I hear people talking about much more than they used to.

I was regarded as particularly hawkish on that issue. Before the coalition, I had something of a reputation for saying bankers should be strung up from the lampposts.

Ha ha.

The practical problem was that they hadn’t actually committed criminal offences. There was no legal obligation requiring bankers to behave in a financially responsible way. We discovered the law was much weaker than people assumed, and we subsequently strengthened it and introduced tighter regulation.

What we couldn’t do was punish individual bankers for what they’d done. That was regrettable,

Your job is so intense. Did you sleep during this period? How did you cope with the fact that it was partly your responsibility to sort everything out?

With great difficulty. Certainly, the first six months of the period I was in government were very painful and extremely difficult because it wasn’t just managing the after-effects of the crisis. I also had the student fees issue to manage, and I was involved in a spat with Rupert Murdoch, which you may remember.

I do, as it happens!

Almost got kicked out of the government over that. So there were a whole lot of personal and political things going on that were very difficult. I made mistakes and then you agonise because you’ve made a mistake because you didn’t fully understand what you were doing. But it took me a year or two to really get on top of the job. Then for the remaining three years, I knew enough--knew more than my civil servants in some cases--and could do good and sensible things.

I think Tony Blair had a very good phrase to describe this. He was talking about prime ministers, but he could have been talking about ministers in general. He said that you arrive at your most popular but least competent, and you leave the least popular and most competent. I think that’s a very good characterisation of life as a minister.

What made you want to get into politics in the first place? What was your origin story with it?

The origin story, going back very early, was arguing with my father who was very right-wing and very pro-British Empire. He would have been a Reform voter, I think. My mother was liberal but was not encouraged to express an opinion. She was sent off to the kitchen if she did.

Oh wow.

I was left arguing with my dad about Suez and related things, and I just instinctively argued back. I wasn’t very good at arguing as a 13-year-old, but I learned gradually to express opinions in a more coherent way.

By the time I got to university, I was a bit more articulate and a bit more left-wing. There were people trying to organise social democratic politics and I was in the middle of that.

Then I got married and went off to East Africa. When I came back with Olympia and our children, I got involved in politics in Glasgow. Glasgow is quite a radicalising place. That was a real university-of-life experience. Had I stayed in Scotland or the north of England, I would probably still be in the Labour Party.

The Twickenham Labour Party—which I joined when I came down from Scotland in the late 70s—was almost funny. We passed resolutions to send telegrams to Chairman Mao and Mr Brezhnev, urging them to stop fighting in the interests of world socialism and peace.

I was persuaded this was no longer my scene really, so I went off and worked with the Liberals. I gradually had to learn the Lib Dem culture, grassroots politics and community campaigning and all that kind of thing, which led to my becoming the MP eventually.

I usually ask whether people have any secret conservative views, but you’ve already expressed some open economic ones.

Yes, I think I partly already confessed to being somewhat inclined intellectually anyway to accepting arguments about the power of markets.

One of the things which I’m arguing very strongly in my book ‘Eclipsing the West’ was about the enormous value of globalisation in giving opportunities to people in poorer countries. There’s been an enormous improvement in living standards and opportunities, which is a triumph for humanity in a way. And it was achieved largely through opening up markets.

I dissent very strongly from people on the left who denounce globalisation as some kind of neoliberal evil, as they put it. I do have what would normally be regarded as somewhat right-of-centre views on economic matters quite often.

Are you optimistic about the future?

Yes. Partly because I have a happy life and a happy personal life, family and so on. I think you have to be optimistic. Take a topical issue like artificial intelligence: I spoke at a big conference of innovators and entrepreneurs last week in Brighton, and there were people arguing that artificial intelligence is going to lead to the end of the world and mass unemployment, and other people at the other extreme arguing it’s going to lead to utopia, which is equally nonsensical.

It seems to be possible to construct a positive, optimistic argument that with proper regulation, it can work for us and be positive.

This is a cheeky question and you don’t have to answer, but I should say that everyone has answered. Have you ever knowingly dated or had any romantic connection to a conservative?

I don’t think so, no. I’ve dated all kinds of interesting people at university, but they were very left-wing, much more left-wing than me. No, I can’t think of anybody who was politically conservative. Though that’s an interesting question; I’ve never thought of it that way before.

Clean slate! Do you have any final thoughts about the state of the left?

It’s not in great shape. The one unifying feature is the fact that we all need to stand together against the extreme nationalist, racist right. I urged Lib Dems to vote Labour in those two Manchester by-elections.

Oh, I didn’t know you’d done that.

That’s the kind of thing we ought to be doing. We ought to stand together on all this.

But I’m afraid on wider issues about how you run an economy, there isn’t really any common thread. Going back to our original discussion, I think a fundamental misunderstanding or disagreement about austerity is really at the heart of it. There are people like me who do consider ourselves to be, in many ways, on the left, who do think that two and two equals four, not five. It’s a big split within the progressive left.

Thank you so much, Vince.

Previously on What’s Left?

In our full video conversation, Vince tells me:

• His surprising proudest political accomplishment (which might have saved American lives!)

• His experiences of family disapproval of his mixed-race marriage

• A recent dramatic lunch with the Chinese ambassador and a bunch of British Communists who had a lot to say...

The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

Subscribe now

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If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

Subscribe now

Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer at The Free Press, co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and the author of six novels, including the Edgar-nominated No One Will Miss Her. Her new book, How to Survive in the Woods, was released in March 2026.

Hi Kat!

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

If there was a spectrum where zero means you’re a total centrist, minus 100 an absolute fascist, and plus 100 a complete radical leftist, however that looks, where would you put yourself?

I think I would leap off the spectrum and plummet into space.

Ha.

Partly because the definitions of liberal, conservative, fascist or radical have shifted over the past 10 to 15 years in ways that are unfamiliar to me. I have trouble situating myself because I developed my views and politics in such a different context from the world we now live in.

Growing up and through my twenties, I would have been centre-left liberal. I came of age in the U.S. in the 1990s, which was a very particular moment. We were at the tail end of the satanic panic and right at the start of the teen pregnancy epidemic.

Everything that mattered to me and all the issues that defined my political awakening as a teenager were things like freedom of speech and censorship of artists. I was old enough to be aware of rock stars being hauled in front of Congress because their lyrics were considered satanic. I was aware of the Brooklyn Museum trying to cancel artists whose work offended the sensibilities of Christian conservatives.

No way, I didn’t know that!

I was raised by a fiery second-wave feminist mother who didn’t change her name when she got married, even though that made her unusual at the time. So I was very big on reproductive rights, freedom of choice and bodily autonomy for women.

I also strongly supported comprehensive sex education in schools because, during the teen pregnancy epidemic, the response was often abstinence-only education. The other major issue was marriage equality. I felt strongly that gay people should be able to get married and have their relationships recognised in the same way mine would be one day. Those were the defining issues for me.

The thing is, nobody is really talking about those things anymore. What it means to be a liberal now is very different. Often it’s about being progressive in ways that aren’t particularly liberal-minded. That makes it difficult for me to place myself on the contemporary political spectrum.

As a result, I’m not that political a person anymore. I could tell you what kind of society I want to live in. I want a high-trust society with a strong social safety net for people who need it, where government protects those who need protection and otherwise leaves people alone. I think that’s a kind of Millsian [John Stuart Mill] view of things.

I’m not registered with any party anymore. I’m an independent. I don’t feel much affinity for politicians and I don’t think anyone currently represents the kind of society I’d like to see. The closest thing is probably libertarians because they generally favour giving people the freedom to live as they choose.

Long answer that didn’t really answer your question…

No, it’s so interesting. Most people I speak to aren’t very political until something ignites them: a personal experience or a major event. But your experience is almost the reverse: you had your politics, then society shifted around you, and now you’ve become less political. Unless I’m misinterpreting you, do you feel almost apathetic now, or is it more that you just don’t fit in?

I don’t find politics that interesting. I’ve reached the conclusion that most of the problems we’re trying to address through politics are endemic to any society. In a representative democracy like the U.S., we elect leaders who focus on their priorities for a few years. Because every policy involves trade-offs, new problems emerge elsewhere. Once those problems become large enough to frustrate people, voters elect the opposing side, who then focus on solving those problems while new ones emerge elsewhere.

Although it’s frustrating, it’s actually a relatively stable system. But it also means that for the average person, caring intensely about national politics is often a waste of time.

Is there not a counter-argument that when a party is in power, it can do tangible good? Do you see any examples where party politics has genuinely made Americans’ lives better?

That’s a good question.

I think the U.S. is at its best when people work across party lines to solve problems and improve lives. We achieve the most when we set tribalism aside.

So could you imagine a society where the government does work to improve people’s lives, but without the constant back-and-forth between parties?

That’s an interesting question, and one I’m completely unqualified to answer.

No, and it’s not your job to. You can disapprove of something without having the solution.

My job is to write about culture. That’s about description rather than prescription. I’m not really a solutions person. I’m interested in understanding why things happen, identifying the factors that create them and describing what’s true about the moment we’re living through.

Hopefully, people whose job it is to make laws can take that understanding and use it to develop workable solutions. Nobody’s asking me for my opinions about politics.

Apart from me!

The reality is that our country was intentionally built so that nobody gets exactly what they want. We’re a huge, diverse nation with competing interests and priorities. Government action that benefits one group will almost always impose costs on another group with equal rights and interests.

That’s one reason why my most prescriptive view is probably that we need fewer laws and less regulation. The government should protect people who genuinely need help. In a nation as wealthy as ours, nobody should fall into poverty. But for people who are thriving, building, innovating, creating, and doing well, I think they should have the maximum possible freedom to live how they choose and pursue success without unnecessary government interference.

No, I understand that perspective, and it isn’t mine because I worry about things like climate change. I think if we let big business or entrepreneurs do whatever they want, certain personalities will just take and take and ruin the planet.

I think the thing is that, because of the clunkiness of the government apparatus when it comes to managing a problem like this, you end up creating a mess of red tape where somebody who has an innovative solution to certain aspects of climate change is basically prevented from pursuing it by onerous regulations.

Overall, I believe in the power of markets to solve problems. I’m definitely extremely pro-capitalism. I think that when people are given the freedom to find solutions and do good, and aren’t being asked to check a million boxes, that’s how we achieve success and great things.

It sounds to me like you actually have quite a lot of faith in humanity. It’s a less cynical perspective than me and a lot of my guests have. You’re counting on us to solve problems when we’re given the opportunity.

People are amazing; look what we’ve built in a relatively short amount of time. I think the capacity for human innovation is limitless. We are amazing creatures, and if we have the freedom to do what we do best, we’ll do great things.

This is my anxiety coming through, but do you think we will innovate our way out of the climate catastrophe?

One hundred percent.

Are you serious? I want to believe you!

When I was growing up, there was a hole in the ozone layer. Now there isn’t, and that’s because of human intervention. When I was growing up, pandas were on the verge of extinction, and now they’re not.

But those are isolated problems with clear solutions, while the climate catastrophe is so much more complex. Do you think that if we solve all the smaller problems, it will add up to solving the bigger one?

Of course. Climate is a collection of individual problems. You can get granular on it, and all of those problems have solutions, including some we may not even have conceived of yet.

Pivoting a bit, you’re both an artist and a writer about culture. With your more libertarian perspective, how do you feel about the relationship between art and politics at the moment?

You’ll often hear people say, “All art is political,” which is a phrase I hate.

Why?

Because it’s technically true, but never in the way people mean it. All art is a reflection of the context and the time in which it was created. In that sense, you can discern the elements of a political moment in the art of a given time. You can see what went into it.

But that doesn’t mean art is inherently a political project. One of the things that bothers me about the current cultural landscape, at least in the U.S., is that a lot of artists have decided to stop doing art and start doing politics. They’ve subsumed their art into a political project.

I think that’s a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but the chief one is that it creates cultural impoverishment. We have worse and less compelling stories, artworks, music and theatre because people are so focused on forcing political messaging into their work, often in a way that’s very tribal and partisan.

When you’re writing fiction, are you conscious of that? Do you ever have a censoring voice in your head?

When I’m writing a novel or any fiction, I’m always thinking first and foremost about the story. The person who might read it down the line is the furthest thing from my mind. They don’t really exist for me. I’m in this other world, and all that matters is operating within the confines of that world and allowing the characters to fully inhabit their lives.

After the fact, I’m a culture writer. I’m extremely online, and I know where the discourse pitfalls are. It’s not that I never know when something I’ve written might irritate people who spend their time looking for things to be offended by and reading books as an excavation for offence. But I don’t give that type of person the privilege of having input into my work, even in my own head.

What I try to do in both my fiction writing and my cultural criticism is articulate things that are true. Ideological considerations are not really on the radar at all.

Here’s a question I normally ask people who are more out-and-out on the left. Do you have any secret conservative beliefs?

This does represent a shift from my previous politics: when I was younger, I was very convinced by the arguments against mass incarceration. I thought we were putting too many people in prison for frivolous reasons. I think that may have been true at the time, but I look at the landscape now in the US, especially in big cities, and I’ve concluded that we’ve gone too far in the other direction.

We should probably be putting more people in prison.

For what type of crimes?

Violent offences. Every time there’s some crazy public assault or murder, you’ll hear that the person was already known to polic and had been arrested countless times before for other violent offences or things that approached violence.

They shouldn’t have been on the streets, but they were because they end up being released back into the population by progressive prosecutors or sympathetic judges who individually believe they’re doing the right thing.

It’s not just these individual scenarios where people are harmed by someone who shouldn’t have been out on the streets. It’s also that this makes us feel like we’re not safe, which is very deleterious to social trust. And social trust is the glue that holds us all together.

That is a great answer because it’s very nuanced. I’ve talked to both abolitionists and people who argue we need to prosecute petty crime more because the people affected are often small immigrant business owners. Ok, tone shift now, have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a conservative?

I’m married to a Republican.

So, yes!

When we met in 2006, he was a two-time George W. Bush voter and a big fan of that man, which I was not. I was a liberal Democrat when we met and he was a conservative Republican. Since then, we’ve both defected from our parties. Now I think we’re both registered independents, or he’s maybe a libertarian.

Labels don’t mean everything. This is somebody I’ve built a life with. We’ve been married for almost eighteen years and we did that because we share a value system. That’s a bigger thing than political labels.

You’re the second person I’ve interviewed who’s married a conservative.

Give them a chance. They make great husbands.

I’m trying to get the left to take the piss out of itself more. Can you make up a completely fake marginalised community that you belong to?

We need justice for people whose hair won’t hold a curl. I would like equality of opportunity to have curly hair.

I’ve also got bone-straight hair that won’t curl and my daughter’s got really curly hair which makes me jealous.

She needs to check her privilege.

Ha ha. I’m definitely raising a child more privileged than I’ve been, hair-wise. Ok to anyone reading or watching this, who feels ground down by the problems of the world, what’s some action you would recommend them?

I love this question.

As I said before, people need to care less about national politics. Local politics matter. Plant a garden. Plant a tree. Visit your elderly neighbour. These things are immediate. They’re enriching. They make your environment better and you see the impact every day.

This is not going to solve the world’s problems, but it’s not your job to solve the world’s problems. We elect representatives to do that. I’m very big on recognising the limits of your control and focusing your energy in a place where it’s actually going to be productive.

That’s beautiful. Thank you so much, Kat.

Thank you for having me. This was such a fun conversation.

Check out Kat’s substack and podcast here! And don’t forget her new novel, ‘How to Survive in the Woods’, is out right now! In Kat’s own words:

It’s a sexy wilderness survival thriller. So if you have ever watched ‘Basic Instinct’ and you were like, ‘I love this, but I wish there were bears in it’, I’ve written the book for you and you’re going to love it.

Previously on What’s Left?

In our full conversation, Kat tells me her cancellation story and we discuss fiction and politics much more. Plus, I embarrassingly try and get her to ease my climate anxiety more! The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

Subscribe now

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Last week, I did a live chat with about what the h*ll (hell) is going on in the UK as our incredibly unpopular prime minster dramatically stood down after a (sort of) political coup that I watched play out live at 3 am during a bout of pregnancy insomnia.

Cliff and I go off on a lot of tangents here, so think of it as an explainer for anyone wondering what the U.K. is up to, who’s also interested in the exact heights of all American presidents.

Join me today!

I’m talking to another member of the gang, today! Please join us on the substack app at 8.30 pm BST // 3.30 pm EST. I love doing these interviews while saying hi to you guys and asking some of your questions.

Also, for any die-hards who’ve joined me on lives but wondered why I’m blurry, out of sync and sometimes responding to messages 30 mins late — it was my laptop all along! But I’ve got a new one (congrats, Apple!) and I shall be taking her out for a spin tonight.

(Though honestly, isn’t a bit of blurring kind of flattering? The UK was very sweaty and heat-wavey last week, so maybe not the best time for HD camera quality?)

Coming up!

This Thursday, I’ll be publishing an interview with a guest who used to identify as left-wing, but might now be considered a libertarian! A definite first for What’s Left?, but a good few of you have gotten in touch to ask for interviews with people I don’t agree with, so this one is for you.

At points, you can see me squirm as my “whole thing” (to use the American parlance) is personal, open, non-judgemental chats, and I wasn’t sure whether to push back. But as always: we got on well, I had a great time talking to her and I learned a lot. Stay tuned!

Let me know

Something I’m finding with this project is that it’s the chats with people I’m less aligned with in which I learn the most. Have you guys found this? Or do you prefer hearing from people you already agree with? Please let me know in the comments, I’d be really interested to hear!

Leave a comment

Previously on What’s Left?

If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

Subscribe now

Ellie Leonard is an author, editor and independent journalist who’s spent most of her career working in the documentary film industry. She has written two books and focuses much of her writing on supporting sexual assault survivors and amplifying their stories. Ellie is a mother of four wild kids, and works very hard to raise them in the world they deserve. We cover:

• Why Ellie places herself at +50 on the left. Her reason why will surprise you!

• What industry she’s coming for next (hint: it’s not politics)

• Why the left’s biggest enemy isn’t the right, and who the enemy actually is…

Welcome Ellie.

Hi Amy.

The first question I always ask everyone is this: if there was a version of the political spectrum where 0 means you’re a total centrist, -100 an absolute fascist, and +100 a radical leftist, where would you put yourself?

I would probably be a +50. I’m fairly liberal. I wouldn’t call myself a centrist: more middle of the left.

I stay away from conspiratorial thinking on either side; I try to be grounded in facts, do my homework and verify everything.

Many of my family and friends are very far on the right. In order to have conversations with them instead of shouting at them, I have to be able to listen and speak. I try to be a calm presence in people’s lives: a place where they can get information without feeling attacked or judged.

So I sit very comfortably at that plus-50 mark because I want to be someone who can talk to everyone.

It’s so interesting because I’ve probably done about eighty of these interviews now, and you’re the first person whose response has been, not so much about what you believe in, but keeping channels of communication open with people who don’t agree with you. I’ve not heard that before.

Do you find that you can talk to people on the right easily, and even change minds?

I don’t know. I think as a nation, we’re very prideful in the US. It’s hard to change your mind here. We’ve been taught to be very steadfast in what we believe.

I have had really good conversations with people leaving the MAGA version of the Republican party about where we actually align more than we differ. I think we’re probably more alike than we’ve been led to believe over the last ten years. We’ve been told we can’t think the same thoughts, raise our children the same way, or share the same communities. But we’re not actually that separate.

What made you want to start writing about Epstein originally?

Prior to working on this, I’d worked on stories that covered similar themes, though not on this scale. I worked on the Weinstein story and with some of the women who reported it. I worked on stories involving Woody Allen and others.

When I started writing about Epstein, it was because the story had become so buzzy and so embedded in pop culture, which felt strange because it’s a horrific story.

Right.

It was becoming memes, AI images, and internet content. I wanted to know what was real. I wanted to know what was documented, what existed in court filings, and what could actually be verified.

Because Donald Trump was such a significant figure in discussions around the story, I also wanted to know exactly how he was involved. I started collecting every documented point where Trump and Epstein’s lives intersected—interviews, photographs, testimony, court cases—and built a chronological timeline of their fifteen-year friendship.

You’re a bit like a dog with a bone, which is exactly the skill set that’s needed. Can you tell me about Michael Wolff, because my understanding is that he’s sort of trying to salvage his reputation and you’re not letting him. Is that fair?

In this process, the important thing for me is focusing on bad actors who aren’t living with any kind of consequence in this space. I’m not accusing Michael Wolff of abusing any children, but he helped create a pathway for Jeffrey Epstein to continue doing the things he did, for his own benefit and notoriety.

He’s someone I looked up to. I read his books. I was excited when he joined Substack because I felt like he had information about Jeffrey Epstein that we’d never seen. But the reason he was holding onto it became very clear when a large tranche of files was released in January and I started noticing emails from him to Epstein that were really uncomfortable. I found myself asking, ‘Michael Wolff, what are you doing? Why would you be saying this to Jeffrey Epstein?’

So I decided to do a full search of the Epstein files and look for every email between the two men. It became clear pretty quickly that Michael Wolff didn’t believe the survivors. He called the British press gullible for believing Virginia Giuffre’s story about Prince Andrew. He started writing public statements for Epstein to release to the media and provided him with five major PR firms that could help scrub the internet of his sexual history, his Wikipedia page, and other damaging information so he could present himself as a philanthropist and benefactor to science and academia.

Wolff gathered as much information as he could about Epstein and Trump, and now he continues to sit on roughly 100 hours of interviews with Epstein that he’s never made public. His explanation is that nobody wants them, but after seeing these emails, everybody wants them.

Ha absolutely.

I think there’s probably a question of his own reputation. Now that we’ve seen the emails, I’m sure he’s concerned about what was said in those interviews. What I’d love to see him do is give them to the House Oversight Committee. Let investigators listen to them and evaluate them. There’s likely a lot of information in those interviews about their relationship, as well as Epstein’s views on survivors. That material needs to be made public at this point. Why he’s still holding onto it, I honestly don’t know.

It’s so dodgy that he hasn’t released them, but it’s also wild that he’s still writing and telling his story. He’s not shrinking into the background, which is what you might expect. My take is that he’s trying to get what he can out of this situation. Do you agree with that?

I do. At its core, it looks like he’s using information that could have helped survivors who are still fighting their cases and turning it into money that he doesn’t need. The ethics of that feel questionable to me. He has an opportunity to be an absolute hero in this story. He could step forward, release information and genuinely help. But I don’t think that’s how he operates; I think he’s more interested in contracts, book deals and protecting that side of things.

Can I ask where this drive to cover all of this came from? I’d like to know about your background, what got you into this sort of work, and what made you political.

I grew up in a family that was pretty political. I grew up in Washington State on the West Coast, and politics was simply part of life. We were taught from a young age to pay attention, at least to local politics. I remember listening to local election results on the radio with notebooks in hand, tracking the votes as they were counted. We knew people running for the school board and local offices, and that made it exciting.

My own politics have shifted over the years from how I was raised, but the idea of voting and the power of ordinary people shaping the future of the country always fascinated me.

My parents also took us with them every time they voted and showed us how the process worked. I’ve done exactly the same thing with my own children. I have four kids and whenever I vote, they come with me.

Four kids?? I’m struggling with just one and one on the way. That’s so impressive!

Thank you. A lot of what drives me is the fact that this is the world they’re going into.

With Epstein, I think of it as both a past case and a future case. We need to address what happened, seek justice for the women involved and do the right thing. But we also have to ask what we’re doing now to make sure there isn’t another Epstein case in the future. That’s really been my motivation.

I’m very lucky and very blessed not to be a survivor of sexual assault, and I feel like I’m in the minority in that regard.

I’m pleased to hear that, but it’s also such a sad way of framing it.

It is. I’m grateful for it, but I also feel some responsibility because I’m not triggered by this material. I can read it, write about it and investigate it in a way that might be harder for someone who has lived through that experience.

Something that I wanted to ask you a while back is about when I asked you where you were on the political spectrum and you said you didn’t want to veer towards conspiracy theory. I feel like the Epstein files are such a ripe space for conspiracy theory.

Jeffrey Epstein is a terrible person. He did terrible crimes against children. He absolutely should have been in jail for the rest of his life, and he should have been the first time around when he went to jail in 2008.

But there are things that are just not there in the files, and people really want them to be so that he is worse than he already is, or that other people are worse than they already are. I was reading a deposition the other day where Lauren Boebert was asking if Epstein had a fridge full of human jerky, and the girl was like, “No, it’s actually beef jerky.”

Oh god.

You see this all the time online. You’ll see AI images showing Trump and Epstein surrounded by a room full of five-year-olds, and people want to believe it so badly. I remind them that we already have the evidence to convict these people; they are already bad enough. This photo is not real.

There’s a lot of really bad stuff, but you have to prove that things actually happened and not follow these social media waves where people say, “This definitely happened,” and then you go into the files and discover it simply isn’t there.

What really angers me is that his abusing so many young women and girls for so long is already enough for me to know that he’s a monster. You don’t need to embellish that by imagining that he’s also satanic. That suggests to me that you think that what he definitely did to women and girls isn’t that bad, or that it could be worse.

Right. And also, if you’re willing to go off on these satanic ritual angles, then you’re giving less credibility to simply believing women’s stories.

When we hear they’re investigating in England or France, people say, ‘They’re finally investigating.’ They’re not investigating sex crimes. They’re investigating things like shared secrets and information people weren’t supposed to have.

If you were on a soapbox this weekend with a loudspeaker, what’s the one topic that you’re shouting about?

I would probably be shouting about those Michael Wolff interviews because it feels like such a simple thing. And I’d also be talking about the sweetheart deal in 2008 and how corrupt it was. The survivors didn’t know that Epstein was going to get that reduced conviction and be allowed out of jail for work release.

I’d remind people that the only people listed as co-conspirators or sent to jail besides Epstein have been women. I would amplify the things where we’re not doing anything.

And then I would go after the entire modelling industry, but that’s another story.

That’ll be our next conversation. Do you have any secret conservative views?

I grew up very conservative actually and I still consider myself a Christian, I still go to church. But I’m also a loud advocate for the LGBTQ community because people in my life are LGBTQ.

I’m not very conservative at this point, but I always try to understand why somebody who disagrees with me believes what they believe. I try to be open-minded about other people’s views. There are lines I won’t cross: I don’t do racism, homophobia, xenophobia. Those aren’t conversations I’m interested in entertaining. But I do want to understand how people got to where they are.

Have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a conservative?

That’s probably where I am really conservative. My husband and I are high school sweethearts, so no.

Oh, cute!

He was a very liberal boy and he taught me a lot.

I’m trying to get the left to laugh at itself a bit more. Could you make up a completely fake marginalised community that you belong to?

I’m a very free spirit and I feel like people who are willing to be free spirits in public and have a little dance party in the cracker aisle when a good song comes on are misunderstood. Maybe people judge us for that.

But I will always stop and have a dance party whenever I feel it’s necessary.

I love that. Justice for free spirits who stop and dance.

We need it. If people did it more, they would feel better about themselves.

I also need justice for people like me who would like to be that way but think it would be incredibly awkward.

Do you have anything you’d like to say about the state of the left today?

We need to recognise that there’s value in stepping outside our political comfort zones and being willing to disagree with the people we vote alongside. There are broad values we share, but there are specific issues where there is so much infighting. The infighting is what has led us to this moment in political history. We’ve learned how to fight, but we haven’t learned how to make up.

Thank you so much for your time Ellie!

And make sure you subscribe to Ellie’s brilliant substack right now!

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If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

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Jovan Owusu-Nepaul is a political commentator and campaigner. Most notably, he stood for Parliament at the 2024 general election in Clacton, and has since sought to champion a fairer more equal society. We cover:

• “Farage didn’t run against me — I ran against him. I was there first.”

• Why a Sri Lankan asylum seeker told him he’s more scared of Labour than of Reform.

• The reasons he thinks the private school tax is a mistake.

• Why Andy Burnham could change everything!

Hi Jovan, how are you doing?

I’m all good. It’s roasting hot, but it’s nice.

Does the heat make you worry about climate change or do you just enjoy it? Which camp are you in?

If I actually think about climate change, then I get really stressed out and can’t have any fun. So I try not to think about it and just enjoy the sun. I’m in both camps.

Were you enjoying the heat and then I ruined it by reminding you about climate change?

Yep. Thanks for reminding me about the doom we’re now in.

Sorry about that. Okay, I’m going to ask you the question that I ask everyone to kick off: if there was a version of the political spectrum where zero means you’re a total centrist, -100 a full fascist, and +100 a radical leftist, where would you put yourself?

I’ll give myself 7+0.

And what makes you say that?

I do believe in democratic processes to achieve left-wing politics. If I were at 100, maybe that would imply using different means. But I believe in making your case in elections: sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but that’s how it goes.

As much as I think it’s important that we work towards abolishing capitalism, you can’t do that overnight because you’d probably hurt working-class people most immediately if you did.

I always worry about what a revolution would look like: who’s going to step in and what are they going to do with the power?

Yeah. In all honesty, I don’t think British people want a revolution or have the appetite to facilitate one.

Particularly in this heatwave.

Exactly. We’re obviously not like the French. I don’t know where a revolution would come from when most people would rather be sitting in a pub with their mates than taking up arms.

So where did your interest in politics come from? Did you grow up talking about it?

It was always spoken about, but not in the traditional Labour-versus-Conservative way. When you’re from a working-class background, politics is often tied to work. If your parents are struggling at work or not being paid enough to make ends meet, that’s a politicising experience.

I could see my parents working really hard, but it felt as though they weren’t respected for how important their jobs were. My mum works in the NHS and my dad’s a mechanic. These are essential jobs and these people are the backbone of society, but they’re often overlooked.

We actually had to call a mechanic yesterday, so big shout-out.

It’s hard work and highly skilled work and most people couldn’t do it.

The most politicising things for me were probably two specific policies. The first was EMA, the Educational Maintenance Allowance, which I remember looking forward to getting. It wasn’t much money, but for some kids it paid for bus passes or food. Then the Tory government cut it and it felt unfair because there were people who genuinely needed that money.

The second was a Sure Start centre near where I lived. For a lot of families, it was an essential childcare provision that allowed parents to work. When it shut down, I remember thinking: where are all those parents supposed to send their kids now?

Eventually you realise it’s the Tories making these decisions, and that they aren’t really on your side. So I joined the opposite side and realised there had to be a political movement that fought for people like me and represented people like me.

When you say you ‘joined the other side’, do you mean Labour?

Definitely. Up until recently, I’d have said I came from a Labour household. Everyone in my family voted Labour. The rich ones, the poor ones, the Black ones, the white ones—everyone. But now those same people aren’t as Labour as they once were, which I think is sad.

So what happened?

They don’t think Labour represents the interests of working-class people effectively anymore. Life hasn’t really improved under a Labour government. If you’ve spent fourteen years saying you can do better and then you get into power and things don’t improve, people lose faith.

For a significant part of my family, immigration is also an issue. My dad was born in Jamaica and came here as an immigrant, and he still believes immigration should be managed. What they don’t like is the idea that citizenship feels conditional. Some of the things people like Shabana Mahmood or Keir Starmer have said make them feel less welcome in society. I find that really sad because it feels as though we’re repeating what the Conservatives did.

I had a friend who came to Britain from Sri Lanka as an asylum seeker, and he was telling me that he wasn’t worried about what Reform was doing, he was worried about what Labour was doing because Labour is actually in power. That really shocked me and I started to think that maybe we’re the problem.

That’s so galling. Are you still a Labour Party member?

Very much so. The Labour movement is bigger than any individual leader; there are still ideas worth fighting for.

The problem is that Labour has allowed the Greens to take centre stage by creating a situation where many left-wing people no longer feel they have a place in the party. A lot of them want a more active state that tackles poverty and inequality and creates opportunity. If they don’t feel Labour is doing that, they’ll vote elsewhere.

I’d rather stay and try to shape the party into something that reflects my values than leave. Otherwise, I’d be giving up my place in the governing party for a party with only a handful of MPs.

It worries me that Labour is being pulled to the right so I’m happy if you’re trying to pull it back to the left.

The Labour Party has always contained both left and right traditions. If it no longer has people on the left when it’s in power and able to make change, that’s a failure. If Labour is going to survive another hundred years, it needs left-wing people inside it arguing for those ideas. Otherwise it’ll eventually be voted out.

Do you feel optimistic about the party?

I actually do. Looking at Andy Burnham’s campaign has probably given me more hope than anything Labour has done since forming the government.

I’m not pretending he’ll solve every problem, but he seems like a normal person who genuinely cares. He hasn’t done everything perfectly, but no politician has and at least he’s talking about the real issues affecting people.

I live in London, and London has huge wealth and huge poverty. But when you leave London, you realise there are places where poverty is even more severe. For most people, the country isn’t working properly, and I think Burnham understands that because he’s been the mayor of Manchester.

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What made you want to run against Farage?

I always say he ran against me: I was there first.

Ha ha.

Clacton is a fascinating place: it’s the archetypal left-behind seaside town. The government hasn’t looked after it, so people are becoming poorer and, as a result, angrier. And when people feel abandoned, it’s easier to divide them.

Running in Clacton was a way of testing whether my politics actually worked in the real world. Of course you’re there to represent people and do a good job locally, but you’re also trying to win an argument. The campaign taught me so much. It showed me how political theory collides with the realities of people’s lives. And even now, I still find lessons from that campaign every day.

Really?

Yeah because it’s so easy to get caught up in a London view or a metropolitan view and forget that people have aspirations that are completely different to yours. I met some of the most incredible people, honestly. And this is why it annoys me sometimes, because I think decent people shouldn’t be represented by someone like Farage.

But then you also find some really challenging people who will be prejudiced and racist against you and will succumb to some of the cheap narratives that right-wing pundits make against you. So my skin was definitely two inches thicker as a consequence of going down to that campaign.

Bloody hell. Were you going door to door a lot?

We were out door-knocking, speaking to residents, holding street stalls and leafleting. We did everything that you need to do. I was trying to make a case against Farage.

On the doorstep, did you feel that you could convince some people of your argument?

Amazingly, yes.

What I found, even in a place like Clacton, was that people weren’t averse to what I would consider democratic socialist ideas. Most people thought workers should have better rights in the workplace, that we should ban fire and rehire, or begin to address zero-hours contracts because I met so many people affected by them.

People wanted bolder action from the state, and for them, they thought Farage was the person to do that. He probably is. He’s just going to do it in a horribly right-wing way.

Are you saying you believe he’s going to be Prime Minister?

I think if the Labour Party doesn’t change, then yes. I don’t think we’re taking it as seriously as we ought to be.

Do you think you’re optimistic about the future?

It depends. In the near future, I fear that if things don’t change quickly, they will get worse. We’re staring down potential international crises. People are going to struggle more and there may be a greater sense of hostility.

But I do believe human beings will get it right. After the Second World War, with bombed houses, soldiers returning home and enormous hardship, people still managed to build something better. The country isn’t in as bad a situation as it was back the and we still managed it.

So in the long term, I think it’s entirely possible that we get it right.

If you were at Speaker’s Corner this weekend with a loudspeaker on a soapbox, what would be the one thing you’d shout about?

Poverty. Poverty is the greatest sin. It’s the sign of a sick society.

Poverty robs people of their health, their dignity and their sense of self. The idea that people can effectively be sentenced to a life of destitution because they happened to be born into the wrong circumstances, as though it were their choice, is criminal. I think it’s wrong. I really do.

I totally agree and it’s especially horrendous that poverty is getting worse while billionaires [and now trillionaires!] exist. We created all of this.

Exactly. I think Labour would do well to campaign on the fact that it’s not only people in poverty who detest poverty. A sizeable portion of the British public find poverty offensive.

Even if capitalism remains the operating system, it should be more ethical, more competitive than exploitative, more dignified. People should be paid properly for their work. Businesses should be regulated rather than allowed to ride roughshod over governments and local authorities. A balance can be struck.

I’d listen to your soapbox speech. Do you have any secret conservative beliefs, Jovan?

It’s an odd hill to die on, but I don’t think the tax on private schools is a very good idea.

No way! Why?

Because I don’t think it changes the outcome for genuinely wealthy families; rich parents will just pay it anyway, while families who aren’t ultra-wealthy but who prioritise education are squeezed out.

If you really wanted to address the issue, I’d rather either abolish private schools altogether…

Yes!

…or dramatically widen access.

Ha ok..

Those schools have centuries of endowments and resources. Why not use them to widen opportunity and provide scholarships so working-class children could attend elite schools through bursaries?

I know middle-class people who are still left-wing, who don’t have huge amounts of money, but who place enormous value on education. I think of many immigrant families, for whom education is absolutely sacrosanct.

I know it’s a bit of a right-wing opinion to have.

It’s a nuanced one. Okay, this is a cheeky question: have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a Conservative?

Yes.

Maybe because I’m quite fervent in my own views, I quite enjoy being with someone who sees things differently. It gives me the opportunity to argue my case and explain why I think I’m right.

Good for you.

And it wasn’t just once either.

That’s a very honest answer, thank you! Could you invent a totally fictional marginalised community that you belong to?

People with holes in their jumpers. The moths get to them all. After a while I think the holes start to add character: you patch them up with bits of wool and keep wearing them.

Justice for people with moth-eaten jumpers. I’m definitely also part of that community. You got quite a lot of press for being a stylish dresser during the campaign, didn’t you?

That was one of the biggest surprises of the election. Someone told me before the election that I needed a proper suit and I was worried because suits are expensive and I didn’t want to spend that kind of money. So I just threw clothes on in the morning before running for a train and people seemed to like it. There was no grand plan. If anything, it reinforced the idea that you should just be yourself.

Thank you so much, Jovan!

No worries. Thank you. This has been fun.

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The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

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Do subscribe to for lots more great political content and I’ll be posting my interview with Jovan Owusu-Nepaul on Thursday. Considering the huge UK by-election that day, I’m happy to be talking to the guy who ran against Farage in Clapton and knows a thing or two about elections!

Amy x

Amy gets into why she’s raising her kids in England (one word: healthcare), why MAGA rallies are winning the one fight the left forgot to show up for, and an old sketch of hers calling out the billionaire space-king class years before the rest of the press caught up. It’s a very funny hour about very unfunny things—which, lately, is the only way through.

Don’t read about it. Hit play above—and stick around for her line about what actually pulls lonely people toward Trump. That’s the one we can’t stop thinking about.

• Show off about having worked in LA

• Worry unnecessarily about Adam’s social life

And Adam (less embarrassingly):

• Rails against the wealthy white takeover of Hollywood that he watched first-hand

• Admits his nickname for these types

• Reveals the famous sitcoms they all got started on (not what I expected!)

• Tells us exactly what he thinks of rich people over 40 who don’t speak out about the climate and Gaza

• An unexpected upside of all this! What he thinks will happen to the film industry going forward… A high! Some optimism! A genuinely positive take-away!

The video is behind a paywall, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

Subscribe now

Read more

If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get bonus material, video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

Subscribe now

Adam McKay is an Academy Award-winning writer, director and producer best known for films including Don’t Look Up, Vice and The Big Short, for which he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He first made his name as head writer at Saturday Night Live before co-creating comedy classics such as Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers and The Other Guys with Will Ferrell. He has also executive produced and directed acclaimed television and documentary projects including Succession, Winning Time and Q: Into the Storm. In 2023, McKay founded Yellow Dot Studios, a non-profit media organisation dedicated to challenging climate misinformation through film, television, digital media and live events, reflecting his long-standing commitment to climate action and social justice. In our conversation, we cover:

• Why Adam believes centrist liberals protect the system more effectively than the right.

• The moment he realised ‘electoral politics’ might already be over.

• Why ruining dinner conversations is now a civic duty. Remember this one as you go into the weekend!

• The one ‘conservative’ belief he admits he suddenly understands.

Welcome, Adam.

Thank you for having me.

If there was a version of the political spectrum where 0 means you’re a total centrist, -100 a complete fascist, and +100 a radical leftist, where would you put yourself?

I appreciate you doing minus for extreme fascists.

At one point, I’d have been maybe +50. Now I am +90. I’m definitely a democratic socialist and almost a democratic communist.

I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase ‘democratic communist’ before.

I haven’t either, but I think it’s useful.

Really all it would mean is you nationalise the airlines, oil, banks and communications systems. Plus radically restructure the tax system.

Would you ever run for political office? Especially in California, people seem to love a TV or film person running.

That brings up what I think is the central driving force of the moment we’re in right now. We have passed the window for action on climate breakdown and we are now in climate breakdown. In the United States, the news media has blacked it out so effectively that most people have no idea. They know it in their bones, but they don’t know it consciously.

There’s an El Niño building in the central Pacific that looks like it could be the biggest ever. If we had a functioning news media, and if our elected officials weren’t corrupt or empty suits, any sane adult would be saying: ‘We need to get ready for this. Here’s what’s coming.’ Instead, that’s not happening.

So when people talk about electoral politics, I think that age is over. It ended a year or two ago. You ask whether I’d run for mayor? Well I’m not sure running for office does anything. I would have given a completely different answer three, four or five years ago when we could have been building green energy and reducing fossil fuels. But that window is over.

I’ve gone from being a left-wing activist focused on change and grassroots organising—which I still believe in—to feeling that the changes are coming whether we’re ready or not. The most important thing is that people understand why it’s happening. If they don’t, they’ll swing hard to the right. We’ve already seen that after disasters like the floods in Valencia.

The political calculus is changing rapidly, whether we realise it or not.

I need you to know that it’s evening here and I usually have a climate-change chat curfew of 7 pm, which I’ve broken to talk to you today. I know you’re right, but I also don’t want to know that. How do you cope with this information? And as a dad as well!

I am in a privileged position. The only reason I became aware of this is because I have a strange job.

Even when I was writing broad comedy and working on Saturday Night Live thirty years ago, the whole point was finding what the mainstream conversation was missing. As a comedy writer—and later in drama—your job is to find that hidden thing. So I stumbled into the real climate science.

When I first started taking it seriously six or seven years ago, I lost sleep over it. I’d say, ‘This can’t be true. There’s no way we’ve been lied to on this scale.’ For a couple of years, I really struggled with it.

One advantage of being in Hollywood was that I could call scientists directly and ask questions. I’d say to them, ‘This can’t be right. There’s no way the acceleration is this fast and these tipping points are already in play.’

And I was lucky because I got to process those feelings by making a movie, Don’t Look Up.

Which I’m a big fan of. Though again, I did have to break my curfew to watch it.

That film pretty much captures how I saw the situation then and how I still see it now. We’re living inside a ridiculous farcical comedy with very real, tragic consequences.

When I started researching, people would tell me, ‘Net zero by 205!,’ or, ‘I bought a Prius!’ And I’d say, ‘No, you don’t understand...’ By the way, through no fault of their own, once again, the news is blacking this out the same way the BBC and The New York Times covered up for Gaza inequality. These places are utterly corrupted.

It’s hard, but I’m lucky in the sense that I work with a lot of amazing activists, thinkers, climate journalists and scientists. I’ve really been able to process this, so when it fully hits, I’m not going to be blindsided. I know what’s coming. I know what it means.

It’s funny because when you’re talking about your privilege, so many people in your position would think, Well, I have money and I can get an eco house somewhere and build a bunker. And you’re like, Oh, I have privilege, so I’m going to talk to scientists and make a movie about what I learn. It’s definitely a better use of the position you’re in and the resources that you have.

Probably. I come from a background of non-privilege.

I do want to hear about your origin story.

I had a single mom who was a waitress. Millions of other people have gone through it. We were, to use the UK terminology, on the dole. We had food stamps and I was going to public schools in the seventies.

Where was this?

Worcester, Massachusetts, a tough old industrial town. All of my friends had a parent who was in jail. So we were broke, but America wasn’t broken at that time. We had support. I grew up with food on the table and friends. When I left college in my senior year, I owed $2,000 in student debt. It was a different world.

That’s mad.

I would be the biggest asshole in the world now that I’m in Hollywood and have had movies that made money if I were to say, ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’

But people are like that, aren’t they? No names, but...

Are they? I don’t know anyone who grew up working class or poor and then got money. I guess maybe [name redacted!] who I’m friendly with, grew up poor. He’s pretty right-wing, but that’s different from the centrist liberal thing.

So are you more critical of centrist liberals than conservatives from working-class backgrounds?

Oh yes. Here’s the calculus I use: if you live in a broken system, a system that favours the 1%, my number one question, if I were an alien visiting, would be: what is this crazy system that destroys the 99%?

That’s never going to work. Who is benefiting from this? Inequality, by some studies, is greater than at the time of slavery in the United States. It’s greater than at the time of slavery in the Roman Empire.

Oh my god.

And overwhelmingly, it’s centrists who are benefiting; it’s the professional class. They used to call it the ‘bourgeoisie’. It’s people with privilege who don’t want to be the villain because it’s uncomfortable for their lifestyle.

You’ll see a lot of performative language about equality and representation. Yet at the end of the day, they can never let real change happen because it will threaten their privilege.

These people have much more institutional power than working-class people, people who have been destroyed by the neoliberal economic age. Those people are so destroyed and squeezed that they’re very easy to pull into anti-immigrant, racist politics. You’re giving them a little piece of power, which is: you’re white. So of course they’re going to grab it.

The white liberals are so involved in their own privilege and lifestyle that they’re just like, ‘Those people are morons. They deny science and they’re racist.’

So at a certain point, because of the increasingly small window for climate action, I was just like: screw it. I don’t care. I’m going to start saying it publicly, even though I know a bunch of creepy white rich liberals are going to get pissed off at me. Who cares when civilisation as we know it has so little time left? That’s game over. So fuck it.

Same with the Labour Party in the UK. If you’re supporting Labour at this point, you suck. You must be doing so well and be so caught up in your own neuroses, privilege and who’s dating who.

No one here supports Labour at the moment, if that makes you feel any better.

Good.

I ask everyone this question, and I wasn’t going to ask you because I’m nervous about your answer, but here we go: are you optimistic about the future?

I reject the optimistic-versus-pessimistic framework. I believe in realism and action.

Take Britain during World War II. Nazi Germany was expanding across Europe and Britain knew an invasion was coming. For a brief period, political divisions largely disappeared because there was one overriding goal: survival. Everything became about the threat, the timeline, and action. And if you read accounts from many of the people who were working and organising during that period, they often describe it as the most meaningful time of their lives.

I’ve heard that before: the sense of community people feel during those moments.

Exactly. Though not necessarily the soldiers experiencing the horrors directly.

Ha no. They were probably less into it.

My grandfathers fought in World War II, and they wouldn’t describe it that way.

But for our purposes, think about climate. Someone whose house is destroyed by a disaster isn’t going to call that the greatest time of their life. But the people who recognise what’s coming and work together to respond? There’s power in that.

Human beings are extraordinary when we cooperate--logic, science, determination--what we’re capable of is astonishing. That power has been suppressed by fossil fuel companies, banks, corrupt politicians and corrupt media.

But reality and physics are going to win. With the climate changes already underway, I think that collective power is going to activate within the next few years. It will be frightening, but also exhilarating.

It’s painful watching people get distracted: blaming immigrants, blaming each other, defending privilege. But that’s going to end sooner than people think. The data is clear.

That’s exciting and does make me feel positive. But I always worry that’s a privileged perspective too, because so many more vulnerable people are going to suffer and die first.

People say that a lot. And it’s true that the Global South and equatorial regions will be hit extremely hard. But I saw the fires in Los Angeles. I know a dozen people who lost their homes who were agents, producers and actors; wealthy people. If privileged people think they’re escaping this, they’re not.

Make sure you have a go-bag.

Oh god. Do you have a go-bag?

I do yes. And make sure you have somewhere to go. Because it’s coming. Oh, yeah. It’s coming.

Do you have any secret conservative beliefs?

Oh, that’s good. You know, it’s crazy. I’ve spent my whole adult life working for sane gun-control laws in the U.S.: I’ve given money, I’ve been part of organisations, I’ve been in marches. And the other day I said to my wife, ‘Should we get a shotgun?’

Ha ha. Seriously?

My wife had exactly the reaction you just had: ‘What?’

We know the El Niño peaks in December against the background of a crazy warming world to begin with. If we suffer massive crop failure—and even meat and fruit failure—and the supermarkets are empty...

My wife said ‘no’, so I let it go.

But then I was like, ‘Maybe a crossbow?’

Ha ha.

I was joking.

That’s not at all what I expected you to say. Great answer. Ok, are you ready for my cheeky question?

Please.

Have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a conservative?

Oh yeah. In my late teens, early twenties? Of course.

I remember getting into a really early-twenties political argument with this girl who was really pretty but very conservative. I eventually lost my patience and was like, ‘Look, it’s this, this, this, and this.’ And like two minutes later, she was coming over next to me. And I was like, ‘Why not?’

Wow. So she liked it.

She dug it.

And you were just like, ‘Well, she’s pretty.’

I was 23. I’d say the chemicals flowing through my body were like, ‘Yes.’

Share

Ok, if someone’s watching or reading this or listening to it and they want to get involved in politics or just take action, what would you recommend?

I would say first and foremost: find your local chapter of the Democratic Socialists, the Socialist Party, or the Communist Party if you’re in America. If you’re in the UK, I would say: Green Party, Green Party, Green Party. Go get involved. A lot of power happens in smaller local meetings and gatherings. That’s where your voice can be loud and your voice can join with your neighbours.

The second thing I would say is that because we live in this crazy consumer society that has never really existed before, go through all of your brand and consumer loyalties. For instance, my family loves three brands which are gross. I have a daughter who loves Starbucks. So that’s something you can do in an hour. Just go through that list and mentally cancel the subscriptions. No more Starbucks, no more this, no more that. That really has weight and power.

And then the third thing I’d say is: talk to other people. If you stop going to Starbucks, mention it. You don’t have to pressure someone else and say, ‘Hey, you should stop going.’ Just say, ‘That company got so gross and evil I had to stop.’ Because all of marketing, advertising, and influence media is predicated on replicating our social networks. But nothing is more powerful than our actual social networks.

Oh interesting, I’ve never thought of it like that before.

So with climate, if you’re thinking, ‘This is so big,’ just talk to people. Say, ‘Have you heard about this El Niño? They say it’s going to be bigger than the one in 1877.’

Voice-to-voice, eye-to-eye communication is the most powerful form of communication. And you don’t have to do it through an argument, you can put your hands up and say, ‘Sorry, but this is really important.’ At dinner, at parties, people just need to hear this stuff. Because there’s a lot of energy around, ‘Well, I didn’t want to ruin family dinner.’

That’s how I feel.

Then you’re not doing it right.

My mom and her husband are super right-wing. But if we have dinner together, I can say something like, ‘Both parties take so much dirty money. We need a third party.’ And my mom’s husband actually likes that.

That idea crosses both sides of the spectrum, doesn’t it?

Exactly. Or: ‘How crazy is it that every industrialised country in the world has nationalised healthcare except the U.S.?’ You can say that to a Republican.

They might say, ‘Yeah, but we don’t want communism.’ And you can just say, ‘Yeah, I’m just saying it’s crazy.’ Stay away from arguments, because that’s where all the marketing and manipulation lives. Arguments turn a brand into part of your identity, and then you defend it.

Thank you so much Adam. It’s been really great talking to you.

Such a pleasure.

Previously on What’s Left?

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George Eaton is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Arguably, a new Substack for progressive ideas and debate. He previously worked at the New Statesman for 17 years where he held positions including political editor and online editor and wrote the daily Morning Call newsletter. In our conversation, we cover:

• Radiohead as a gateway into politics

• The left’s biggest weaknesses and the right’s comparative strengths

• Why Marx would have been obsessed with AI

Welcome George, nice to see you there in your conference room at your new headquarters.

Thank you, Amy. Indeed.

The first question I always ask everyone is this: if there was a version of the political spectrum where 0 means you’re a total centrist, -100 a complete fascist and +100 as radically left as you could get, where would you put yourself?

I’d say +65. I’m a social democrat.

And how long have you identified as a social democrat?

I probably started to describe myself as a social democrat in my mid-teens. Like a lot of young people, I was very attracted to egalitarian ideals. But looking around the world and seeing the failure of things like the Soviet experiment, I quite quickly came to the conclusion that you also need a degree of pragmatism. You need a dynamic economy and a good society working in harness with each other.

I remember being struck very early on by the achievements of the Nordic countries in having both some of the world’s highest living standards and some of the world’s lowest levels of inequality.

And then I was also reading titles like ‘NME’ at a time when there were bands like Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers and Massive Attack were releasing albums that almost resembled mini manifestos. That was quite a gateway into politics.

Ok that was a turn I didn’t expect. I was thinking, ‘NME? He can’t mean the music magazine!’ But you totally did.

These bands brought politics into music. You often hear people say that politics is downstream of culture now, and in some ways that was true for me.

I don’t come from a particularly political family, but on my mother’s side my grandparents were Polish. They lived through the Second World War and came to the UK to escape the Stalinisation of Poland. Hearing those stories was an early example of how politics can change people’s lives in quite fundamental ways. That focused my mind a lot as well.

You’re one of many guests who have ancestors who were immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers, and whose family stories are an early impetus into left-wing politics. When you say you weren’t a particularly political family, did you talk about politics at home?

Certainly. What I mean is that I didn’t come from a family where your parents were activists or members of a political party. But if you take the broader definition, then yes, we talked about history, politics and the interaction between them a lot.

I was surprised that you put yourself at +65 because I think of you—and I suppose the New Statesman which is how I know your work—as quite sympathetic to the current Labour government. I suppose I expected you to identify more in the centre. What do you think of the incessant labelling and warring factions within the left?

This is where the new title, Arguably, comes in. I founded it because I think ideas are the lifeblood of politics. We have a hyperactive media environment at the moment that can crowd out space for discussing ideas.

I want us to be a broad church. That phrase gets used a lot, and sometimes it means simply picking people from different parts of the spectrum to tick boxes. There’s a more interesting version of it: what are the interesting ideas? Where are the examples of creative, counterintuitive thinking? How can we bring those people together in a way that is non-factional?

To come back to your question, people need to organise around what they believe in, and you can’t be naïve about that. But factionalism becomes a danger when it acts as an impediment to independent thought.

If your politics is primarily led by factionalism rather than ideas, you too often find yourself in conflict with people who could actually be allies. I always think it’s important for people on the centre-left to seek converts, not traitors.

The right are often better at seeking converts, while the left can become over-obsessed with doctrinal purity rather than looking for common ground and areas of possible synthesis.

That’s such a good way of putting it. It’s good to have standards, but they can also end up intimidating people or pushing them away.

For a young person interested in progressive politics, places like think tank conferences or party meetings often aren’t particularly welcoming environments. People can find themselves bamboozled by acronyms, committees, working groups and motions, with very few people helping them make sense of it all.

The right can sometimes feel more welcoming to young people because it’s often more entrepreneurial and focused on what people have to offer. Rather than seeing people through a factional lens, it values their individual potential.

I’m thinking about America where conservatives really harnessed youth culture, courting younger people by embracing technology in a way that the left didn’t replicate until much later. Is that the kind of thing you mean?

Definitely. You’ve got to make politics attractive to people who have multiple demands on their attention.

It’s good that you mentioned technology, because part of my mission is challenging a certain conservatism on the left about technology: an overly reactive attitude that sees technology primarily as a threat, or as something to be taxed or regulated.

Of course, we need to think seriously about regulating new technologies like AI, but we also need to be enthusiastic about their potential for economic growth and a better society.

The greatest thinkers on the left, from Marx to Keynes to Crosland, understood the need for progressives to be enthusiasts for technology and its dynamic potential, rather than standing athwart history yelling stop.

It’s hard to imagine what Marx would have made of AI or ChatGPT.

I think he would have been obsessed with it.

What!

I think he would have had quite a utopian view of it, provided it was used for the common good.

Which is the big worry, isn’t it?

There are many great histories of technology, and they all make the point that technology doesn’t automatically improve society.

During the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people saw no improvement in their everyday lives despite huge technological progress. It took trade unions, legislation against child labour, better workers’ rights and public sanitation.

That’s how we should understand the history of technology. We shouldn’t forget the dynamic potential of the technology itself and become solely obsessed with controlling it.

Arguably

The new home of progressive ideas and debate.

By George Eaton

What’s the reader you’re imagining for Arguably?

We’re putting ideas and policy front and centre, which I think you’ve seen less of in recent years. As media business models have developed, there’s been a greater emphasis on rapid reaction, news and analysis. There’s clearly an audience for that, and for the 24-hour cycle of who’s up and who’s down in Westminster.

But I also think there’s a readership that wants to step back and reckon with hard policy questions and trade-offs. It’s important for the centre-left to engage with those questions and also return to first principles.

People shouldn’t be afraid to discuss political philosophy. If you look at the post-war administrations that shaped Britain, they all understood the power of ideas. Attlee drew on Keynes and Beveridge. Thatcher drew on Hayek and Milton Friedman. New Labour, which receives a lot of criticism today, drew on influences ranging from Christian socialism to Charter 88 and thinkers like Will Hutton, who wrote about stakeholder capitalism.

Future political projects will also need ideas at their heart if they’re going to succeed. You have to think seriously about what it means to build a good society and which values should guide it. A purely technocratic approach doesn’t give you a map of where to go; it just leaves you constantly reacting to events.

Share

This is a really hard question, but could you summarise your views in a sentence?

I prefer that to simply saying “social democrat,” because that term means different things to different people. Economically, I’d say the market is a good servant but a bad master.

On society and culture, I’m Rawlsian and liberal. Freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of worship and freedom of conscience are fundamental rights and the basis of a good politics. Those values feel more relevant now than they did in the 1990s or early 2000s because of democratic backsliding around the world: Trump in America, Xi in China, Putin in Russia, and the rise of ethnonationalist politics. Rights and freedoms that liberals thought were secure now feel contested again.

That’s quite depressing. Some anti-capitalists would argue that that only happened because capitalism was left intact and would always win in the end. Do you agree?

My view is that attempts to replace capitalism entirely are ultimately doomed, and the left has to be clear-eyed about that. I’d go further and say that economic dynamism—what some economists call creative destruction—can be a positive force for living standards. It just needs to be managed.

That’s why I’m attracted to the Danish model of flexicurity. It combines a flexible labour market with strong protections. Companies have relatively loose hiring and firing rules, but workers also receive generous unemployment support and active retraining. The idea is that if you lose your job, the system helps you get back into work quickly. It’s been successful, and it’s attracting renewed interest because technologies like AI, quantum computing and robotics have enormous potential but also create disruption. The challenge is capturing the benefits while managing the risks.

Are you optimistic about the future, George?

I don’t know about optimistic. Optimism is often proven wrong, especially at the moment, so I think hopeful is a better word. The future isn’t fixed, so you can still shape it.

What gives me hope are thinkers, writers and entrepreneurs who are trying to work out how technologies like AI can be harnessed for the common good. They recognise the challenges but are willing to grapple with them.

So would you describe yourself as a techno-optimist?

Techno-hopeful.

Ha ok, I should have seen that coming.

Techno-optimism can imply a boosterish attitude. But I’m not a techno-pessimist either. There’s a rich middle ground between those positions.

Everyone gets asked this: have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a Conservative?

Yes, I think I have.

That surprises me!

Rather than making it about individuals, I’d frame it as a mindset. Seek converts, not traitors: that principle should apply to relationships as well as politics.

But have you ever converted anyone?

Not in a literal sense because people rarely change their minds instantly. But there have definitely been people who’ve told me that an article I wrote or a conversation we had made them see an issue differently. That’s usually more effective than shouting at people.

I’m trying to get the left to take itself less seriously. Can you invent a marginalised community you belong to?

People who are still obsessed with the Manic Street Preachers.

They’re still around?

They are. Though maybe I need an even more obscure example. The Manics have had several different eras. Early on they were a raucous, almost punk band. Then came ‘The Holy Bible’, which I think is their masterpiece. Later they became loosely associated with Britpop, even though I wouldn’t call them a Britpop band.

Because they never fitted neatly into one scene, they often get left out of the documentaries and retrospectives in a way that bands like Oasis and Blur don’t.

So your marginalised group is fans of bands that don’t fit neatly into genres?

Justice for forgotten bands.

That’s perfect. My last question before the reading recommendation: if someone listens to this and wants to get involved politically, where should they start?

It depends on what motivates them. For some people it’s a particular cause. It could be the environment, international development, homelessness or something happening in their local community. For others it’s a political tradition or philosophy they connect with.

Take the time to work out what fits you best. That might be a political party, a think tank, a campaign group, or simply reading and supporting publications you care about. Be imaginative, be creative, and don’t be afraid to change your mind. The practical details of politics will change, but it’s important to have a clear sense of your core values.

Thank you so much, George. Is there anything you’d like to add about the state of the left today?

A lot of people are asking what the purpose of the centre-left is now. I think its purpose is clearer than ever: combining a dynamic economy with a good society. Take a technology like AI: which political tradition has historically asked how technological progress can be used for the common good? The centre-left is best placed to answer that question.

Parts of the right would be too laissez-faire. Parts of the left would be too statist and controlling. The centre-left can find the balance between the dynamism of capitalism and the ethical goals of social democracy.

Brilliant. Thank you so much, George!

That was really fun.

Previously on What’s Left?

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If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

Subscribe now

Sooz Kempner is an award-winning comedian, writer, actor and singer who has performed eleven solo shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, including the near sell-out ‘Sooz Kempner is Ugly’. She is known for her political comedy videos and podcast work, including QueenPod, and has collaborated regularly with Richard Thomas. Her recent screen and stage work includes leading Doctor Who spin-off Doom’s Day, appearing in Amazon sitcom Dinner With the Parents, and starring in the stage adaptation of Withnail & I, with a new musical about Grayson Perry’s life coming in 2026.

We cover:

• Is the Left’s Self-Flagellation Useful?

• ⁠Who Among Us Can Actually Fix Things?

• Lessons Gleaned from the Trump Administration

• Why Trump Accidentally Doesn’t Misgender People

Welcome, Sooz.

Thank you for having me.

I’m the type of interviewer who needs the guest to help me with the tech, so Sooz is on watch to figure out if there’s a delay. Ok, so the first question I always ask everyone is this: if there was a version of the political spectrum where zero means you’re a total centrist, -100 a complete fascist, and +100 as radically left as you could get, where would you put yourself?

I would go for +79.

So specific!

I get called ‘far-left’ and ‘extreme left’ so often, but there’s nothing extreme about my politics, so it would be crazy for me to say +95 or something. I put it at +79 because I feel like I’m on a par with your average socialist politician in a Scandinavian country.

Which opinions of yours get called extreme that you would say are just normal socialist, non-extreme views?

I’m a firm believer that neoliberalism is a big threat to everything in the world at the moment. That sounds extreme to a lot of people because it’s not a mainstream opinion, but I’d say it’s affecting climate change more than fascism, because I don’t think fascism can exist in the form we know it without neoliberalism.

Also neoliberalism is so insidious around the globe, whereas fascism might be on the rise, but it’s not everywhere. I also feel like we don’t talk about neoliberalism enough.

People also don’t see it historically. The downfall of the Soviet Union came directly alongside the rise of neoliberalism under Reagan and Thatcher. From that point on, public services deteriorated. Blair came in and made a few tweaks under a strong economy, and people remember things like Sure Start and think public services were fantastic. But privatisation was still happening. It’s been a net bad for our country, and now I think it’s a net bad for the world.

If neolibralism continues unchecked, we will be consumed by the ocean.

And, would that be good or bad? Would we all get carried away gently together? Or would it be more of a tsunami?

I can’t get too upset because I think, ‘At least it’s all of us.’ But unfortunately, it’s going to be decades of food shortages and conflict.

But I’m breezy about it because there’s still time to change things. Neoliberalism has to fail, and it is failing.

It’s failing, but I don’t know if it’s getting the blame?

Amy, I don’t know if this is very funny, sorry.

It’s hard interviewing comedians about this sort of thing because so much just isn’t funny. But comedians want to have serious conversations too because they do care about this stuff.

I think it’s to my detriment. I go on podcasts where people expect a light chat, and within five minutes, I’m talking about sea levels since 1961.

When did you start caring about politics? Did you grow up talking about it?

I came from quite a political family, on my mum’s side, especially. My nana supported the miners and wore a [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] CND pin. She was very anti-war and pro-justice. One of her earliest political memories was watching news reports celebrating the bombs dropped on Japan and being angry to the point of tears with her father.

She was always incredibly left-wing, even if she probably wouldn’t have described herself that way. I doubt she would have liked the label.

Really?

She probably wouldn’t have, but she was very into the environment, very anti-war, and very pro-social justice without giving any of those things a name. She had no homophobia.

I remember watching a documentary when I was about fourteen, so this was the late 90s. It was a BBC documentary about a trans woman, and she was the first trans woman I’d ever seen on screen. She was just talking about what it was like to live as a trans woman, going down Tesco and doing everyday things.

I watched it with my mum and my Nana, and we all just thought, ‘Oh, how interesting.’ Nobody was saying, ‘That’s weird,’ or asking invasive questions about her body. I was fourteen, and I just took that with me.

So much has changed since then. I remember hearing occasional jokes about trans people on TV shows like Friends, but it wasn’t a cultural lightning rod until really recently.

I genuinely feel it’s gone backwards. It became a culture-war issue. I remember first noticing it around 2016, though obviously if I were trans I’d probably have noticed earlier. Trump got asked during his first campaign which bathroom Caitlyn Jenner should use, and he basically said, ‘I’m not going to stop her using any bathroom.’

What’s funny is that Trump always accidentally gets pronouns right. He’s fully jumped on anti-trans politics, but he consistently genders trans people correctly.

That’s so funny because I don’t want to ever use the wrong pronouns, so I’m super careful, while this guy is actively taking away trans people’s rights and just casually gets it right by accident.

I fully believe Donald Trump is less transphobic than Keir Starmer.

Ha ha.

It’s like Rishi Sunak. I can’t stand him, and I think he was terrible for the country, but I don’t think he had any actual opinions about trans women. His only obsession was money.

He probably wouldn’t even disagree with that.

I always say this about Jeff Bezos. This isn’t a compliment, but at least with Bezos, I understand the motivation. He just wants endless money. Whereas with Elon Musk, there’s something weirder going on.

He desperately wants to be seen as cool. He wants people to think he’s funny.

That’s the funniest part, because he’s so deeply unfunny.

Some men just aren’t funny and can’t cope with it.

This is a really hard question: can you summarise your politics in one sentence?

I’d say I’m a strident socialist who’s open to the concept of communism. Not in a ‘The Soviet Union was amazing!’ way, but because capitalism gets presented as this totally natural and inevitable thing when actually we’ve just been taught to think of it that way. If communism were treated as a legitimate alternative instead of a taboo idea, I think society would probably settle somewhere closer to socialism.

That definitely wasn’t one sentence.

It’s never a sentence. So what’s stopping you from saying you’re a communist then?

I honestly don’t know. I wonder if there’s a self-protection element, that it’s been hammered into me so much that if you say you’re a socialist, people are already put off.

But also I’m probably not a full communist because I don’t mind if someone wants to be a massive success with their self-started business, I’m like, ‘Yeah, go for it, as long as you pay your fucking taxes. And the tax should be really high if you’re really rich.’

If you were at Speaker’s Corner this weekend with a loudspeaker and a soapbox, what would you be shouting about?

I’d go into some great long monologue about how we have to understand there’s not some magic guy who can fix this. It’s not a matter of ‘We just need Andy Burnham running the Labour Party,’ or ‘If we just had a woman in charge of Labour.’

It’s not even a case of ‘We’ve just got to get the Greens in charge.’ I’m a Green Party member and I like what Zack Polanski has been doing very much, but there’s not one special guy who can fix all this.

This system is fucking garbage, and it’s running exactly as it was intended to. It keeps the rich as rich as they are and richer, and it keeps everyone below that getting a little bit poorer all the time.

I hate the fact that I’m now at a stage where I’m going, ‘I need to make shitloads more money so that I can literally live my life.’ That shouldn’t be the case. We shouldn’t be living in a country where we feel we have to aspire to make six figures or we’re fucked.

I’d just drum into people that the system is fucking garbage and needs taking down, and there’s not a guy who can do that. It’s a collective activity for all of us to get behind.

So how do we do that?

That’s why I think political leaders like Polanski are a very good thing. In America, you’ve got Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and the Squad. I have some disagreements with AOC, but I think she’s a net good. They’re all great people to have in positions of power because it makes all of us look at it and go, ‘Oh, that’s a bit possible.’

You have to know there are people out there fighting for something better, and not just fighting to tweak the system a little bit.

Here’s one good thing I’ll say about Trump: he has gone out there and laid bare just what a mess everything is.

And how you can actually take a sledgehammer to the system.

Yes.

I’m conscious of your time, and this delay is driving me crazy. Is it bad on your end, too?

I think we’ve got the same delay. I once recorded a podcast where the delay was nearly twenty seconds. In the end I had to tell the guy, ‘When you finish your question, just wait. Don’t start talking again.’ We might as well have been sending voice notes.

Technology is advancing so fast and everyone’s like, ‘AI is going to take your job!’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t even record a chat properly.’ Why is the money not being allocated correctly?

Exactly.

Are you optimistic about the future, Sooz?

I’m always optimistic about the future. I’m not optimistic about this government or the political system as it is, but I have this firm belief that the human race is fundamentally good. I don’t think everyone’s evil or purely out for themselves.

I think there will be a future for us as a society, and I think the last fifty years will end up as this weird footnote where people go, ‘Can you believe the way we used to live?’ I think I’ll be in my seventies going, ‘It was a nightmare and I’m so glad it all came crashing down.’

I love to hear this. Often people who are really critical of the government become really pessimistic. But you’re super critical and as well as optimistic that everything will change.

There isn’t another option. You can look at Keir Starmer’s face and see the man is desperate. He’s flailing because he’s the endpoint of this whole thing. We started with Thatcher, put everything that followed through the fucking cunt-o-tron, and ended up with this guy going, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

That’s so harsh and so funny.

He’s a symbol more than he is a man.

Have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a conservative?

I don’t think so? I haven’t had many boyfriends or slept with many men because I’m such a nerd. But my first boyfriend when I was 17 is probably right-wing now. I can absolutely imagine him growing up to be transphobic and I bet he identifies as libertarian.

Do you have any secret conservative views?

I really love horses. I love them so much. I love a county show too. Seeing a prize cow competition, some show jumping and a van selling quiche? I’m in heaven. That’s my conservative thing.

A sort of Tory lifestyle quirk.

Yep.

That’s lovely, I also love horses. Ok, final question: I’m trying to get the left to take the piss out of itself more. Could you invent a marginalised community you belong to?

The short, weird-looking community. My face is fucking crazy.

What are you on about?

It’s true, whenever I’m on camera it’s like a lava lamp. No one can keep track of what’s happening with it.

Ha, ok I hate hearing that, but I do think it’s a good answer. Justice for the short weird-looking community, who I think I’m also a member of. Though to be fair, nobody likes looking at themselves on camera.

Other people don’t like looking at me either, though.

That’s just misogyny!

True.

Final, final question: do you have any recommendations for someone who wants to get more politically involved?

Join something local. It’s not expensive and you’ll immediately find people who are like-minded. It feels intimidating until you actually go. Then you realise you’re just around normal people who care about the same things you do. They’ll give you something manageable to do: like canvassing, leaflet drops or helping at events.

People always say ‘Organise, organise, organise!’ and that can feel overwhelming. But it’s like comedy: if someone said ‘Write a feature film!’, you’d panic. So instead, you start with one sketch.

That’s such a good way of putting it.

Going to meetings is genuinely nice. We went to a local Green Party fundraiser pub quiz and had a lovely time.

Before I let you go [final, final, final question] any thoughts on the state of the left right now?

I’m not interested in this constant thing where the left has to ‘Sort itself out.’ Nobody ever says that about the right, and they’re constantly a mess. MAGA is split into multiple factions that hate each other and they still keep winning. You’ve got the antisemitic pro-Israel MAGA and you’ve got the antisemitic anti-Israel MAGA and they hate each other and they’re still in charge!

I don’t think left-wing people need to spend all day self-flagellating about our conduct.

We do hold ourselves to such a high standard.

As we should! We should hold ourselves and our leaders to high standards, but not impossible ones. I don’t think we need to be constantly punishing ourselves for our conduct when we’re all just doing our best.

That’s such a lovely answer. Sooz, this has been so good. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I think we handled the delay really well.

Good luck to me editing it!

The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

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If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

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Ahmed Baba is an independent journalist, political analyst, civic technologist, and founder of the bestselling Substack publication Ahmed Baba News. His pro-democracy content reaches millions. He's been cited in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and makes frequent appearances on MS NOW, CNN and NewsNation.

We cover:

• How Trump’s overreach is already backfiring

• The message Democrats keep getting wrong

• Why redistricting could backfire on the GOP

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Welcome, Ahmed! Imagine a version of the political spectrum where 0 means you’re an absolute centrist, -100, a fascist, and +100 means you’re as radically left as you could get. Where would you put yourself?

I’d describe myself as a classic liberal who’s inherently pro-democracy. Maybe somewhere around +50 to +75? I’m centre-left and progressive on a lot of issues.

I don’t consider myself a far-leftist because some parts of the far left don’t seem interested in winning.

Ha ha.

The people who attack someone like Mamdani or AOC after they’re already in office? That kind of politics doesn’t appeal to me. But people who push progressive issues and action do.

Someone in the chat [we did a live interview!] said that I’m a ‘pragmatic progressive,’ and honestly, that’s a better answer. I have a bias toward action. I’m also a journalist and I think journalists should see themselves as part of a pro-democracy coalition. Journalism should function as democracy’s immune system. In the current moment, when the right is assaulting democracy, that naturally puts you more on the left. So I have my personal politics and then my journalistic ethics, if that makes sense.

That definitely makes sense. So what’s your political origin story, Ahmed? Did you grow up in a family which talked about politics?

My parents were born in Sierra Leone, so I’m first-generation. They always had the news on when I was growing up. I had MSNBC parents, so you can imagine how happy they were when I first appeared on there.

They must have been!

I was about seven when Bush won, so my earliest political memories are the Clinton impeachment aftermath and the Florida election recount. Then 9/11 happened. When your name is Ahmed Hassan Baba, that shapes your politics pretty quickly. You learn what xenophobia is at a young age.

I grew up in Virginia. Being Black already gives you an understanding of racism, but after 9/11 it became even more personal. Then Obama won when I was 14, and that was huge for Black kids with Arab-sounding names. Obama’s victory and Zohran Mamdani’s rise are probably the best things to happen culturally for people with names like ours.

Oh wow I’d never thought of that before.

Later, when Trayvon Martin was killed, it hit me personally because he was my age and I resembled him. That’s when I went to my first Black Lives Matter protest and started developing an interest in social justice, even though I didn’t yet know I’d end up in journalism.

That’s a lot to carry around internally. So how did you figure out how to channel your interest in social justice and get into journalism?

Around the time Trayvon Martin was killed, I was working at a tech help desk while putting myself through college. I started hearing coworkers repeating right-wing talking points. A lot of them were good people, but they were absorbing nonsense online. Around then, Facebook and social media were really taking off, and because I worked in tech, I understood how the algorithms worked. I realised the information space was becoming deeply broken.

At the same time, mainstream media was still heavily into false equivalence and ‘both sides’ framing, especially before Trump. I started feeling this itch to do something. My friend Zach and I started our first startup together. Then Trump ran for office, and we pivoted into a media company, and that’s really where my journalism career began in 2016.

Do you think the media landscape has changed since then, or do you still see the same problems with ‘both sides’ framing?

I think it has improved. I’m an independent journalist, but I’m not someone who blindly attacks all mainstream or corporate media just to get subscriptions. There’s nuance. The New York Times does a lot of incredible journalism and CNN International does too. I’m not going to pretend everything mainstream is terrible just to promote myself.

That said, cable news especially improved after Trump’s first term. Before that, there was a lot more of the false equivalency, which creates a fake reality. It’s like putting a flat-earther next to an astronaut who’s been around the moon and telling them to debate. What’s the point when the science is already settled?

Trump’s foundation was committing illegal acts, while the Clinton Foundation was surrounded by vague insinuations and suspicion. The media really smeared Hillary Clinton. I say all this because I know a lot of people, especially my readers, are angry at corporate media. But it used to be much worse. There has been improvement, though there’s still plenty of that behaviour around now.

With the New York Times, I get so angry with it so regularly that I unsubscribe, write a passionate explanation about why I’m leaving, and then they offer me the subscription for 50c a week and I accept it because the recipes are so good.

There’s that joke where you try to unsubscribe and they keep lowering the price until offering to pay you to stay.

That’s basically the deal I’m on now.

On the New York Times specifically, the political desk and a lot of the headlines can be terrible, but there’s also genuinely excellent reporting there. It’s such a massive organization. Some of their reporting from places like Iran is indispensable, while other coverage really misses the mark.

I totally agree. Sometimes when I’m furious with the BBC, I remind myself there are brilliant journalists inside that huge corporation. Usually, the issue is higher up. It’s a definitely a strange media moment.

I do think independent media has pushed traditional outlets to improve. There are so many good journalists outside the big institutions now, doing serious work and attracting audiences, that corporate media has had to respond to that pressure.

That’s interesting. I’d always thought people were leaving traditional media mostly because there weren’t enough opportunities there anymore. But your framing is nicer: independent media holding them to higher standards.

If you were standing on a soapbox this weekend with a loudspeaker, what’s the one thing you’d want to shout about?

I think there’s really one central story right now: a corrupt authoritarian movement built around a billionaire grifter enriching himself and his family while openly telling Americans he doesn’t care about their financial struggles. At the same time, he’s profiting from stock trades, crypto schemes and consolidating power while raising costs for ordinary people.

So it’s all one story: corruption, authoritarianism and self-enrichment. Some Democrats are telling that story effectively, but more of them need to.

I used to go to Trump rallies and talk to supporters directly, so I had a sense of the mood, which I don’t anymore. What’s your read on it now? Do you feel like the tide is changing at all?

The vibe shift is absolutely real. I’ve been saying that for a long time. Back when Elon Musk was waving that chainsaw around, I wrote that the administration was overreaching and that it would backfire. That was while people were still terrified and assuming Trump’s movement was unstoppable.

But they moved too fast. The tariffs, the Epstein files, the rising prices, the Iran situation, it’s all backfired spectacularly. The only person competing with Trump for ‘most unpopular president’ is Trump himself from his first term.

I also think the redistricting efforts happening now come from fear. They know they’re heading toward a brutal midterm cycle.

Do the redrawn maps worry you?

They do, especially looking ahead to 2028. What’s happening to Black political representation is deeply alarming. They moved incredibly quickly to dismantle Black-majority districts.

So, so quickly!

And which completely validates why the Voting Rights Act was necessary in the first place.

A lot of Black members of Congress could lose their seats. But I also think this could backfire politically. More Black voters may turn out because of it. And when Republicans redraw maps to create more districts for themselves, they often weaken their own margins in the process.

That hadn’t occurred to me at all. Do you think this could become a rallying issue for Black voters? Something organisers go door to door talking about, reminding people that their ancestors fought and bled for voting rights?

Absolutely. People alive today were beaten for those rights. I’ve met people in Selma who marched across the bridge and suffered through that violence themselves.

And right now, Black Americans are seeing direct attacks not just on political power but on economic power too. Black workers made up a significant share of the federal workforce before the purges, and Black unemployment rose alongside attacks on DEI and federal jobs. So now the argument is very simple: why support a president who is targeting both your political representation and your economic opportunities?

Some of them voted for him because at Trump rallies—and you’ll know from having been there—you heard all the racism and all the other stuff, but you also heard him spend 10, 15 minutes talking about success and money and achieving your dreams. That’s a message that wasn’t on the Democratic side.

Democrats always talk about getting by or getting what you need, when they need to talk more about personal fulfillment.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how the Dems and the left in general seem wary of over-promising. This is realistic, but it can also lead to such negativity. We have a very centre-left prime minister here in the UK, and when he came into office, he basically said, ‘This is going to hurt, the situation is really bad and will stay bad for ages while we tinker around doing incrementalism.’ On the populist right, they are more likely to lie and promise to deliver everything. But at least that is actually positive? People do want to hear that they’re going to get wealthier and that life will be better!

I agree. You can level with people and tell them it’s going to be challenging, but you can’t say it’s going to be terrible for ages. It’s not going to be a winning message.

Why not say, ‘We want to create policies and give you tools that help you achieve your goals and your personal greatness.’ Why does it have to be ‘folks just want to make a living’? Because that’s not the case.

You’re also describing the American dream, aren’t you? Which is so baked into the psyche of the country.

Exactly.

Would you describe yourself as optimistic about the future?

Yeah, definitely.

Love to hear it!

I’m sometimes unreasonably optimistic, is what I’m told.

Tell me about this.

I’m always thinking things are going to work out in the end and that a lot of the stuff that we go through is to try to make us stronger or mold us better. I think the moral arc is bent towards justice, but I also think that’s because a lot of us push the arc.

Also, I actually believe people are fundamentally good, but that they turn bad through circumstance. For example, I think if Donald’s dad loved him, he wouldn’t be here, frankly.

I’ve also thought that before! Bloody Fred Trump. Ok, time for a couple more lighthearted questions… Do you have any secret conservative views?

Because of my entrepreneurship and things like that, I actually don’t hate wealth. I don’t know if that’s conservative, but I think if you are a good person and are able to do good with it, then I don’t think having billions of dollars makes you a bad person. You should be taxed enough though.

I think that the left should give people the tools to start their own businesses and stuff like that.

Ok I just don’t think billionaires should exist at all, but if they do exist, I appreciate that some are better than others.

But my thing is that they do exist. I think there should have been tax structures to mean they shouldn’t have. But they’re here.

That makes sense. Okay, this is a really rude question and you don’t have to answer it, n but everyone I’ve asked has always answered it, so the pressure is on. Have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a conservative?

I wouldn’t say knowingly. But I grew up in Virginia, all right guys? Cut me some slack.

But I will say my wife is incredibly progressive. You think you’re progressive until you marry into a woke Jewish family, I’ll tell you that. I thought I had these progressive ideals and then was like, ‘Oh wait, hold up. Y’all teaching me some things.’

Amazing. I’m trying to get the left to laugh at itself more. Could you make up a totally fake marginalized community that you belong to?

That’s funny. I think I’ve got one. I’m a part of the marginalised and totally oppressed bald Black bearded community. We are a tight-knit clan. We try our best to unite. When we see each other in public, we give each other salutes. But we are oppressed in some very systematic ways.

Great example. Justice for bald Black bearded men. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to get more politically engaged and do some good, but doesn’t know where to start?

I would definitely say get involved with your local politics. Look at local races and court races, and see who you can volunteer for in your area. State legislatures are key right now. And volunteering is one of the best ways to engage because you get to talk to real voters and it really bursts your online bubble. It might give you some hope. Oh and volunteer at the polls.

Great advice, thank you, Ahmed!

Thank you so much. Great talking to you.

Time to subscribe to Ahmed Baba News if you haven’t already! And thanks to Ahmend and his subscribers for being so fun and so engaged on our live chat.

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V Spehar is an American journalist, political commentator and creator best known for hosting the news platform Under the Desk News, which breaks down U.S. politics and current events in an accessible, conversational style. V’s work often focuses on media literacy, LGBTQ+ rights, labor issues, and progressive politics, combining reporting with personal storytelling and community engagement. They also recently the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Journalism. Subscribe to their own substack here!

Welcome V! I’m going to start with the question I always ask everyone. If there were a political spectrum where 0 meant you’re a total centrist, -100, a fascist, and +100, really radically left, where would you place yourself?

It depends on the issue. There are some things I’m completely militant and radical about, and others where I’d place myself closer to the middle because I’m not the expert in that area.

On issues like bodily autonomy and gay rights, I’m at +100,000.

Off the scale!

I’m talking full radical abortion-on-demand territory: free, taxpayer-supported healthcare with proper aftercare, treated like any other medical service.

But then there are issues like homesteading where I’m more neutral. If someone wants chickens in their apartment complex, sure, sounds fine to me, but I’m not exactly marching in the streets for chicken ownership rights. I support the people who care deeply about those issues, though.

That’s the first time someone’s mentioned chickens in their answer to that question. So are you saying that when you know a lot about something, you’re comfortable being radical, but when you don’t, you’re more neutral?

Exactly. I don’t want to claim expertise where I don’t have it. If someone educated me more about an issue and there was a local ballot initiative about chickens, I’d probably support it, but I’m not going to pretend I’m a leading voice on the matter.

I think people in journalism and politics often feel pressure to be experts on everything, and I don’t want that. I want to be fair and accurate, but I don’t need to be the person at the front of the classroom all the time.

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Can I ask where your interest in politics came from? Did you grow up in a political household?

My parents weren’t particularly political or news-obsessed. But my first real journalistic influence was my mom. When we were kids, she stayed home with us for a while, and she’d spend the day listening to the police scanner with her friends while smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

We’d come home from school and ask, ‘What happened on the scanner today?’ and she’d launch into these dramatic retellings. She managed to make horrible events sound engaging without making us feel terrified. Looking back, that absolutely shaped the tone I use now. Even when I’m covering difficult news, I approach it almost like storytelling or gossip between friends because I don’t want people flooded with cortisol and panic. You can’t think clearly from that place.

Your mom is such a legend.

She’s a total legend.

I love how she trained you in a way that might technically be illegal?

It probably would be now!

But she was also a very impatient woman, and I got in trouble constantly as a kid. I had a real vigilante justice streak and absolutely did not care for authority. I’d argue with teachers because so much of the history we were taught in American textbooks felt whitewashed or inaccurate. I’d challenge them on it and end up in the principal’s office.

My mom’s rule was always: tell me exactly what happened. Don’t add to it and don’t take away from it. If you tell me the truth, I’ll be on your side and I’ll deal with the principal. So I developed this instinct to communicate a very specific truth quickly and clearly, and I think that absolutely shaped the way I work now.

You do so much political content online and are so exposed. Do you ever feel criticized by the “left” itself?

Absolutely. I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in now if I didn’t genuinely want people to feel informed, safe and cared for. But sometimes you get things wrong, and the internet can move very quickly to destroy you.

Within the left, you have people who think being a liberal is worse than being a Republican, and on the other side, you have centrist Democrats who think the hard left is intolerable. But we all still have to live in the same neighborhood. So the question becomes: where can we collaborate, where should we stay out of each other’s way, and where can we disagree without trying to annihilate each other?

The problem is that I’m still building that resilience. When people come for me online, it genuinely hurts.

Could you try to summarise your politics in a sentence?

I’d say: optimistic and human-centered.

I want to remain optimistic about what we can do as a country, as communities, and as a society. And I want politics to focus on what’s best for the most people and on how policies actually affect people’s lives.

Honestly, some of that probably comes from not having money. If I were super wealthy, maybe I’d be one of those ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ people. But I’m not. I’m socially liberal and fiscally liberal.

If I pay taxes, I want to see things get done. One of my favorite things about the town I live in now is that every fall, they do leaf pickup. I live in Rochester, NY, so there are leaves everywhere. Every year, I’m like, There are my tax dollars at work. I just want to physically see that society is functioning sometimes.

If you were standing on a soapbox with a loudspeaker this weekend, what issue would you want to talk about?

Gerrymandering and redistricting. What Republicans are doing right now is fundamentally about taking power away from voters. And while Democrats have spent years trying to be the ‘better’ side, I think we’ve reached a point where refusing to fight back just hands Republicans more power.

I know people hate hearing this, but I think Democrats need to fight fire with fire right now. Gerrymander back. Be just as aggressive. You can fix the system later, but first you have to survive long enough to have the power to fix it.

So you’re saying: fight back now, then later create legal protections to stop everyone from doing this in the future?

Exactly. Do you have siblings?

Yes, I have a brother.

Then you know that sometimes when you’re kids, you fight and fight and fight until eventually you’re exhausted and someone says, ‘Do you want to go get McDonald’s?’ That’s what this feels like to me. Everyone is bruised, nobody really won and eventually you realise you need to stop. But accountability has to come before reconciliation.

Well my brother is now a lawyer, and childhood fights tended to end with him just winning the argument. But I do take your point.

Basically, a lot of establishment Democrats and very sort of centrist Democrats want us to be at reconciliation and forgiveness all the time. And we can’t be at forgiveness when somebody’s not sorry because they’re going to sucker punch us again. So to me, it’s time to fight and tussle. And then there will be a period of accountability. And then maybe there will be reconciliation, and maybe we’ll go get milkshakes.

But we’re not there yet, we’ve got a ways to go. Somebody asked me the other day, ‘How does this end?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know because we’re not that close to the end.’ When we’re close to the end, we’ll know how it ends. But right now we’re in the fight.

So you need to be making short-term decisions right now that help you survive to the next moment. We’re dealing right now with robber barons, with cronyism, with rampant corruption, with all of that. And that is an immediate problem. That’s a bleeding-out problem, not a potential-rash-that-could-develop-into-something-bad problem.

So how do you feel the Democrats doing in general right now?

Asking about the Democrats is like when people ask me, ‘How are the gays?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know! There are lot of gays. There are so many different types of gays. I’m one type of gay. I don’t know that other gay.’ It’s like that with the Democrats.

Ha ha.

I think there’s good in a lot of the party, but I also think that some Democrats are deeply seated in their own power and in their own legacy.

And when you are worried about your legacy, you are not worried about the masses of people. You’re worried about facing your own mortality, or retirement, or not being treated the way they have been for the last 40 years. Or about someone younger coming in and noticing—or even exposing—all the mistakes that you’ve made.

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Do you feel optimistic about the future?

So here on Under the Desk, we call ourselves ‘defiant optimists’, meaning that no matter what, we will remain defiantly optimistic even when it’s really hard.

I love that. But is ‘defiant optimism’ easy to generate?

I remember that when women won the right to vote, there wasn’t even one woman in the House. So the fact that there’s even one means we’re just that little bit ahead than we were before.

People like to think that this is the worst time in history. And it’s not. We have immense privilege now, despite how many problems we have. And so I always think to myself that it would have been harder before than it is now. And so it’s my responsibility to not give up.

I love being reminded of previous times being worse. When I’m interviewing an older guest and they say something like, ‘It was worse than the 80s!’ I’m always like, ‘Tell me more!’

Oh yeah. I mean, if I were this way 50 or 60 years ago, they would have lobotomized me and put me in an institution. I wouldn’t have been allowed to do any of this stuff. Even just being able to have my hair cut like this is a privilege. So I always start from that place of gratitude and privilege. And then I think of how to attack the problem.

But what you have described is such a low bar. I’m happy that you can have your hair the way you want to wear it and to live the way you want to. It’s just that it should always have been ok.

But you know what? It wasn’t. When my mom was born, schools were segregated and she couldn’t have her own credit card. Our civil rights are not that far away; they are very, very precious and new.

Ok, quicker, cheekier questions now. Do you have any secret conservative views?

I have some secret conservative friends? I’ve maintained a friendship with Meghan McCain for quite a while.

Yikes!

I disagree with so many things that she says and she disagrees with so many things that I say. But there is value in trying to understand where the perspectives on the right are coming from.

So sometimes I might say to her, ‘Is this really a thing?’ And she’d be able to help me understand that. And there are other times when I’m like, ‘Bitch, why did you say that about trans people? You don’t feel that way. Why do you talk like that? You’re pissing me off.’ And we can talk like that.

Have you ever knowingly dated or slept with a conservative?

No. I’ve always dated very justice-driven, left-wing people.

You’ve got a type.

Yes. And my wife now is a classical music cellist and has an even stronger vigilante justice streak than I do. So she’s great.

A vigilante cellist! Between the bow and the end pin, you could really hurt someone with a cello. Ok, I’m trying to get the left to take the piss of itself more. Could you make up a marginalized community that you belong to?

I feel deeply discriminated against for my lack of interest in going outside the home. I don’t think that I should be forced to attend events in major cities. I think I should get to stay in.

Justice for homebodies!

Please.

Is there anything that you’d like to add about your personal politics? Or the state of the left in general?

So I think the thing I want people to realise is to not let other people define for you what the left is or what a Democrat is or a liberal is. Define for yourself where you politically align, what your values are and work on that locally.

We don’t have to let it be that MAGA or Chuck Schumer defines what a ‘Democrat’ or a ‘liberal’ is. We define it. And it might be a different definition in your town than it is at the federal level.

But at the end of the day, I’m not going to let anyone else define the way that I feel and what my values are, and I’m going to remain defiantly optimistic. And that’s what I hope people take.

That’s so perfect and so uplifting. Thank you, V!

Make sure you subscribe to V at Under The Desk News! I love their calm, considered takes which keep me informed without stressing me out.

Previously on What’s Left?

If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-intensive project, and I’ve kept the costs low to be accessible. Upgrading means you’ll get video and audio versions of the interviews every week, access to the whole archive of past interviews and the knowledge that you’re supporting my work 🧡.

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Simon Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic strategist and political commentator who has worked in national politics since the early 1990s, including serving as communications director for the Democratic National Committee after Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory. He later founded the New Democrat Network, which he led for nearly three decades, and has advised campaigns, elected officials and party leaders throughout his career. Today, he writes and organises through his Substack, Hopium, where he shares political analysis and mobilises a grassroots community focused on strengthening democracy and electing Democratic candidates.

Welcome, Simon! If there were a version of the political spectrum where 0 means you’re a total centrist, -100, a complete fascist, and +100, a radical, where would you put yourself?

I probably fall somewhere in a band, because I don’t think it’s that simple: it really depends on the issue. We all have our own unique take on the world.

But if = is centrist, then I’d say I’m somewhere between -5 and -10 on one end, and maybe +30 and +40 on the other. Ideologically, I’m probably more of a liberal than a progressive, which comes from being a “child of Clinton” back in 1992.

That said, one of the reasons I was excited to do this conversation is that I think that, right now, our personal ideology is less important than building a strong, unified community that can take power away from MAGA.

It’s actually been refreshing for me not to feel like I’m constantly a combatant in ideological wars. I’ve enjoyed working with people across the spectrum.

I also try to ground my work in data, which I don’t see as ideological. In a moment full of misinformation, gaslighting and manipulation, staying anchored in what’s actually true is incredibly important.

That makes sense and I appreciate your love of data. Like a lot of people, I found your work through “Election Twitter” in 2022. You were one of the only people offering optimism with numbers to back it up, and you turned out to be right!

What people saw from me on “Election Twitter” in 2022 was really just that: sharing basic data, trying to push back against all the noise and bluster in the discourse. That’s still what I try to do every day. I give people a sense of where things actually stand, because it’s very hard to stay grounded in the current information environment.

So yes, I have my own views, but I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m comfortable working with people of all ideological stripes. And I think that coalition mindset is essential, because one of the main tactics of leaders like Trump or Orbán is to divide the opposition so they can hold power without majority support.

If we don’t hang together, we hang separately. That’s the reality.

I think you’re my 70th guest, and you’re the first person to ever give a minus number, which is interesting. That really is quite a broad ideological range. When I started these interviews after the 2024 election, it felt like the infighting between the centre and the far left was out of control. What do you think about that infighting? And how do you deal with it while still trying to bring people together?

I think we have to adopt a mindset where we remember that our real opponent is Trump and MAGA. We’re all playing different positions on the same team, that’s how I see it. I don’t have to agree with someone to respect them, work with them or be part of a shared effort to take back power from authoritarian forces.

Because of how the American system works—we’re not a parliamentary democracy—we have to build our coalition before the election. We need to reach 50% of the vote, which means bringing together a wide range of people.

And I actually think internal debate is healthy. It’s a sign of a functioning party. I often say we should aim for consensus, not unity. Unity is static; consensus is dynamic. It evolves and adapts, and it allows for differences.

In a democracy, reconciling those differences is the whole point. Congress itself was designed for that purpose: to bring together people with different views and work toward common solutions. Where it becomes a problem is when debate turns into factionalism, when people dig in and start treating each other as the enemy. That’s what we have to avoid.

That’s why I like the term “pro-democracy movement.” It’s inclusive and not overly ideological. It allows people like Stuart Stevens, AOC and me to all be part of the same effort. Politics is about addition, not subtraction. We need a majority, and that requires bringing people in, not pushing them out.

And look, I get it, this is easier said than done. It’s like any relationship; people get frustrated, annoyed, emotional. But we don’t really have the luxury of that right now. We need to argue, make our case and stay passionate. But ultimately, we also need to come together and win.

So I guess my follow-up question would be this: if the Democrats become a very broad church, then what do they actually stand for? Is it just being pro-democracy? Because I remember in the run-up to the 2024 election when Harris was campaigning with Liz Cheney, and it really upset a lot of people on the left. I worry that it lost her votes. I guess I’m saying that I still want to know what a party is and what you’re actually voting for, rather than just “we’re not those guys.” What would you say to that?

Well, I think there are two founding principles of the modern Democratic Party, and those are opportunity and freedom.

Freedom, to me, is really the foundational value. It goes back to FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech in January 1941, where he articulated a vision of a world based on freedom rather than dominion, autocracy, or oligarchy. That vision shaped not just America but much of the world for decades.

In my view, that vision carried us forward until very recently—until Donald Trump’s second term—when America is no longer as committed to that same global agenda. Trump represents something very different. He’s a man of dominion, not freedom. He seeks control over people, institutions, and even other countries, rather than expanding liberty.

The second core value is opportunity: the idea that everyone should have a chance to get ahead, not just a select few. That’s a deeply universal value.

And I would say, in defence of the party, that the system built on those principles over the past 80 years has created more opportunity for more people than any other system in human history. If you look at the data, it’s remarkable: extreme poverty has fallen dramatically even as the global population has grown; literacy rates have tripled since 1945; life expectancy has increased by more than 20 years; and more people have lived under democratic systems than ever before.

There has never been a better time to be alive, broadly speaking, than in this modern era shaped by those values. When I think about the Democratic Party, that legacy is what inspires me. I genuinely believe that no political force in history has done more good for more people. And I think that’s something we should be proud of and willing to defend.

It’s really refreshing talking to someone so optimistic. I always ask people whether or not they’re optimistic, but I don’t think I need to bother asking you! Is your optimism natural or do you have to cultivate it for your work?

I don’t think there’s any other way to be in politics full-time other than to be optimistic. Because what you’re trying to do in politics is you’re trying to make things better and to improve people’s lives. And that requires hope and optimism, right? It means that if I do the work, I can make things better. And that’s a very optimistic faith, which I think the centre-left or liberalism is.

My very first kind of major political boss was the man from Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton, which is kind of the most ridiculous thing. But he believed that optimism was a superpower and I agree with him.

But the second thing I would say is that there is also something strategic about hope. In this time in history, it’s very easy to get down, it’s very easy to recoil and be disgusted and angry. But I don’t think we can win that way.

I have come to believe in my professional work that part of the whole strategy of MAGA is to pump negative sentiment into our discourse every day. It’s a negative sentiment machine. They want us to feel bad about our leaders, our country, our institutions and each other. And so one of the ways that we defeat MAGA is by putting positive sentiment into the world.

In the 2028 election, we’re going to need to articulate our own version of greatness. And our understanding about what makes America great is very, very different from theirs.

Sorry in advance because this is such a British question, but do you worry about America’s reputation? Because my end, it really has taken quite a battering lately.

Oh yeah. And for good reason, by the way.

I feel like in Europe, there’s a real wariness now. We’ve been totally dependent on America for so long and now we’re going to have to figure out how not to be. So your allies are essentially tiptoeing away. Do you think those relationships can be repaired? And how fussed are you about that?

I think it’s a new reality that we have to manage and understand. The relationship that Europe and the UK had with the United States may never be the same. And that’s okay if we acknowledge that and then forge a new, different relationship. One where Europe and the UK are more independent of the United States.

This is going to be costly for the U.S. It’s going to cost us prosperity and money because people in Europe and around the world will probably be less excited about buying American products and things.

So we have a lot of work to do to get to the other side of this. But I think what’s exciting about all of that—and this gets back to Simon the Optimist—is that it means that something new has to be built. And that’s exciting both for Europe and the UK and for the United States. That rather than feeling that instead of maintaining an old order that was built under very different circumstances 80 years ago, we get to go build a new thing together.

Hopefully that new thing will be better than what we had, and certainly, it will be different.

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You mentioned that you’re sometimes slightly on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Do you have any secret conservative beliefs?

I think that sometimes, on national security issues, I perhaps end up slightly more conservative. I see myself as a muscular liberal in sort of the FDR tradition. I’m probably a little bit more pro-market and I’m also a globalist, which these days puts me even more to the right.

I think that historically, I’ve perhaps been a raging centrist on economic and national security issues and probably much more left on social issues.

When I ran for chair of the Democratic Party in 2005, I was the most pro-choice candidate on the whole stage. And in terms of policy work, I’ve been a leading advocate for immigration reform in America. In some circles, that pushes me very far to the left.

And that’s why I sort of presented to you a very broad spectrum, because I think some of my beliefs probably fall right in the centre, and then some of them fall—in current understanding of the Democratic Party—far more left than that.

The next two years of the Democratic Party is going to be one of just incredibly vigorous debate about everything we’re talking about today: about our future, our role in the world, how we all get along, opportunity--all these things. And I welcome it. It’s going to be exciting and a lot of fun.

You’re the most optimistic person I’ve ever interviewed. It feels a bit like therapy, but I guess in reverse because I’m asking the questions and you’re answering.

You know, Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic referred to me as the therapist of the Democratic Party.

I totally agree with him there. I’m trying to get the left to pick the piss out of itself a bit more. Could you make up a marginalised community that you belong to?

Baseball nerds.

Are you guys discriminated against?

Probably not. I don’t think so.

Wait, I actually think you are.

You think I am?

Yes, because the costumes the players wear are so silly.

Yeah, I guess people think baseball players are not athletic and they just sit around and it’s boring. I get it.

Sorry that you said you weren’t discriminated against and so I stepped in and suggested that you are. Ok, here’s my last question: what action would you recommend to someone who wants to get more involved?

The most important thing is to do the thing that you enjoy the most, because then you’ll do more of it. Some people like to phone bank. Some people like to canvass. Some people like to hold signs. Some people like to go on the internet and fight with people, or give money or write postcards.

Everyone has their own way in. The most important thing is that you have to do something. Because one person doing something is ok, but 10 million people taking action every day starts to become a very big movement that can change the future.

We have a country to save and elections to win together.

Thank you so much for your time, Simon.

No, thank you for just being open to platforming different voices, because, as we discussed, learning how to be in community with others who are not like us is really kind of the core activity of a democracy.

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Previously on What’s Left?

The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

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In this longer version, we talk more about Starmer, Reeves, Labour at the moment and Liverpool past and present. I had a great time talking to Matt!

The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

Subscribe now

Read more

If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also a time-inte…

Read more

The video and audio are behind paywalls, but I’ve kept paid subscriptions low to make this as accessible as possible for everyone. If you want to watch or listen but don’t feel like that’s financially viable for you right now, get in touch and I’ll gift you one. 🧡

Subscribe now

Read more

If you’re enjoying these conversations, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! This is a beautiful but also …

Read more