Transcript: Ross Barkan

An interview with the American journalist, novelist and Substacker

The activist left in America has been very visible in recent years, often dominating the public conversation online and in prominent institutions. But my guest on this week’s program says that the modern left is curious in that it is “largely leaderless” — that no one in particular is “speaking directly for it, or to it” — making this “a singular moment” in the country’s history.

Ross Barkan is an American journalist, novelist, and Substacker, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. His recent piece for that magazine is, “The Activist Left Doesn’t Want a Hero. But Does it Need One?”  

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

---

TH: I first discovered your work through reading Freddie deBoer, another writer who has also been on this podcast, and there's a couple of recent essays of yours that I want to get into today. I find your perspective unique, and your career has been unusual — including publishing two novels, with another one, Glass Century, on the way — and at one point running for office. Like many journalists working now, you have gone to Substack. But you still publish in the mainstream, including as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, which we will get to later. I want to start today just by asking a general question. We are taping in the morning after what looks like the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump. How are you feeling about the state of the country this morning?

RB: A fascinating question: The state of the United States. I am actually an optimist at heart. I would say I take less of a doomer view of the United States than I think perhaps some people on the left. I think the United States has a great many problems, starting with inequality, gun violence, life expectancy now in the post-pandemic era. And many conflicts abroad, that the U.S. has played a direct role in. Of course, also political polarization and the fact that we have a political system that is dysfunctional. I think it can work, but typically it only works if one party is in charge. You saw a lot happen under Biden and a Democratic Senate. Legislating now is not really possible. I think if you have a split Congress next year, which seems very possible, there will be a lot of gridlock and a lot of frustration. Of course, you have the Trump phenomenon and Trump on his third campaign and all that entails — the exhaustion of Trump. All that leads to a pessimistic take.

But I also think the United States is still a very vibrant and dynamic country. I think despite claims to the contrary, we in the U.S. have been very successful in assimilating immigrants. I think the immigrant story is a very positive one. I think the U.S. is set up for long-term success, which I wouldn't say for every large industrialized nation across the world. I just think it's a big, beautiful country if you get out there. So, despite my own many withering criticisms of the United States — its government, its legacy — I can't help but make myself something of an American optimist. And I say this as someone who is very wary of jingoism and overt patriotism.

TH: I do like your optimism; I share it as well. I think it's really important to have a sense of hope for the future, even if we are dealing with multiple crises right now — in Canada as well. I want to turn our attention now to Kamala Harris. As you have pointed out, repeatedly, there was no primary for her. And you note that that hasn't happened since 1952. Your most popular essay on Substack is titled, “What is Kamala Harris Afraid of?” This is about her refusing to do media. You write that the Democrats have become the party of media avoidance. Some 50 people unsubscribed from your Substack when you published this piece, which surprised you. Now, I think the justification from many on the liberal left is that this is smart politics. That by saying very little about policies, she is building a big tent. But you say this impulse is actually anti-democratic. Walk us through your thinking on that.

RB: What was interesting about that piece is it did end up becoming popular and more subscribers came back. But the initial reaction was very furious. It took me aback, because I didn't anticipate it. I'm usually pretty good at knowing when I write something, this is going to alienate some portion of my audience.

I remember I found myself sort of in this heterodox space — I didn't think of it as heterodox — where I was very skeptical of Covid vaccine mandates for employment. I did not think, as a progressive, a leftist, and also a civil libertarian, that it was right to tie employment to this. I didn't think people should be fired over the refusal to be vaccinated. And so, this put me in a very odd bucket for a while. But I knew that going in. Every time I wrote about Covid and Covid policy, I recognized that I was kicking the hornet's nest. I felt it necessary, but I understood. 

I was surprised [with this piece], because I did not think it was controversial to say that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States — and I would say this for the Republican nominee too — should be talking to the media, especially in the home stretch of a campaign. If you look at any other prior presidential campaign, the nominee spoke to media outlets. Plenty. They spoke to major cable television stations, they spoke to newspapers, they spoke to some local media. After I wrote this piece, people were bringing up examples of Hillary Clinton, and Obama, and then Biden when he was the vice presidential candidate with Obama, speaking to local media, even talking to conservative media — and being involved in this give and take. 

So, the fact that Harris did one sit-down interview and it was a joint interview with Tim Walz, between the end of July and early to mid-September — she did a few recently, post-debate — was very shocking to me. Actually when I was following this, I didn't even think to write this so much in August because the election had been so unusual. She'd been anointed in this unprecedented way, where Joe Biden drops out after a disastrous performance. Biden tries to hang on. He realizes he cannot. The pressure is too great. He reluctantly leaves on July 21st. He endorses Harris. Harris, without competing in any primary, collects all the delegates.

And yes, 1952, I was doing some research. Even in the pre-primary era, if you go back to 1960 and 1964, there were a few select primaries and the nominees, whether it's John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson, did win some amount of the popular vote in a primary process. It was not many but some. Whereas Harris literally did not. So you take all that together. I actually felt I was being quite lenient in those first few weeks of August, understanding that she's trying to get this campaign machine up to speed. Perhaps she's not yet going to do the full media tour.

But at some point it gets to be September, it's been well over a month. And you're wondering, “Why isn't she talking to the media?” Now, a lot of Democrats, liberals, some progressives as well, would argue things like, “This election is so important. We have to defeat the fascist Trump. She must focus on campaigning. You and the media live in your own bubble. How dare you demand she come and talk to the press?” And then I'm sitting here thinking, “We live in a republic, a democracy. We have a first amendment. We have traditions too.” I mean, democracy isn't just the laws — as I think anyone would say in any country, not just the United States. There are these traditions built in that create for, I think, a healthier republic. And it is unhealthy to me that Harris won't talk to the media. That she's insulated herself entirely.

I think strategically it's bad, too. That's the other point I would make — and I didn't even lean so hard into that — which is that you have got to sell yourself to the country. Yes, we are a massive, fragmented country. Yes, it's true that you no longer go on a cable television station and know that you're going to reach 100 million people or 50 million people. But that's why you do a lot of different media. Obama spoke to Matt Yglesias at Vox, he did a sit-down interview when he was president. He would go on some podcasts. He obviously did traditional media as well. You get around, right?

In my piece, I was even arguing this, anticipating the pushback when I would hear from many on the left now who hate mainstream and corporate media — in some ways the way the Trump right does. I think the Trump right is more extreme, but the liberal left is getting there. Which is also interesting to me.

I would say, “Okay, you hate CNN, you think CNN is bad for some reason. You don't want Harris on MSNBC, which is a liberal cable network, I don't know why. Do you want to go on Ezra Klein's podcast? Ezra Klein, the very well-known New York Times columnist and pundit, who certainly leans left? He's very thoughtful, but it would be, I think, a sympathetic audience. You can go on his podcast.

I suggested Joe Rogan. Of course they would say no to Rogan. I'd say if you want to do just alternative media altogether, there are popular podcasts, like Alex Cooper, who is very well known with Gen Z women and just signed a 100 million dollar deal with Sirius XM Radio. You can go talk to her. I'm not saying that's ideal, or that Alex Cooper would ask the toughest questions. She usually does celebrity interviews. But it's something right?

And meanwhile, JD Vance is doing media constantly. I don't think JD Vance is a great candidate by any means. But you're ceding the field. And Kamala Harris is barely winning. If you want to come back to strategy — and put aside the highfalutin arguments about democracy, the free exchange of ideas, tradition, fine, I believe in that but put it aside — she is plus 2 maybe in the popular vote in most polls, maybe plus 3. She has to win by that at the very minimum. Probably plus 4 to win the electoral college. Biden won it by 4 points and he barely won the electoral college. So my argument too is, “Okay, you think this is smart somehow to insulate and hide your candidate?” I would say, “You have got to campaign like you're behind, and actually be out there more.” And rallies aren't enough.

That's the other pushback: “Well, she's doing a rally. She's doing a rally!” A rally is a scripted event in front of a very select audience. The vast majority of Americans will never attend a political rally. It's a few soundbites on the local or national news the day after. Each rally doesn't even get covered that much. So, what are you talking about when you're saying, “Oh, she went to Atlanta last night and spoke in front of a crowd of 10,000 people?” Okay. What about the rest of the people? What about those not at the rally? What about those who didn't watch rally coverage? What about those — I know I'm going on and on, I'll finish in a second — who want to hear what she's going to do when she is president? 

Kamala Harris is trying to become the most powerful person on earth.

She's going to control a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the rest of the world 100 times over. She's going to be in the midst of at least three major wars that I can think of, off the top of my head. The war in Ukraine, Sudan, and Israel and Gaza. She is going to oversee the richest and maybe most unwieldy domestic economy anywhere. I want to know what she's going to do! I think Americans, to their credit, want to know. If you look at voters, and you look at polls, they say, “We want to know more about Kamala Harris.” She's not telling us. And I think that's very curious.

TH: I do think it's astonishing as well. I think it does say something about where the left is at right now, this strain of wariness towards the media. When the legacy media is, I would say, fairly sympathetic to the left at this stage. So it's a bit strange to me. I do want to also talk about the state of the left as a whole. It’s something I have covered a lot at Lean Out. You wrote a fascinating piece recently for The New York Times Magazine. I want to read a quote from that story now: “The new left is largely leaderless. This is not to say that it is bereft of organizational talent or influential ideas — just that it has no one of any great fame or notoriety speaking directly for it, or to it. And for that alone, this is a singular moment in American history.” Walk us through the trend that you have been observing, and that you write about in this piece. Let's start by talking about what you define as the left in America.

RB: It's a great question. I would say the left in America, on one hand it's quite broad. And one could use it to describe the Democratic Party. One could use it to describe factions within the party. When I was talking with the left in this piece, I was really thinking of the progressive left, as well as the activist left. Not necessarily those who are in the Biden orbit, or in what we think of as the traditional establishment. I was thinking of those who came out of the insurgencies of the last number of years, like Bernie Sanders or Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez. I was thinking, too, of the activist organizations beyond electoral politics and those who engage in protests, whether it is over Israel and Palestine, whether it is over Black Lives Matter, whether it was over Occupy Wall Street — all these various grassroots upsurges over the last decade and change.

Something I saw, and I think others saw as well, is that absent a few particular examples — politicians in particular, and I mentioned Bernie and AOC — you are not seeing the activist class mint well-defined leaders. And you are not seeing them necessarily create long-term, durable organizations that could carry their cause forward indefinitely.

You saw this with Black Lives Matter, where there were some leaders in the 2010s of the movement. It largely petered out after 2016 and had its 2020 resurgence with George Floyd, and has petered out again. There is no single Black Lives Matter headquarters I can think of, where I could pick up a phone and call up staff or call up a well organized, well oiled machine of volunteers.

Then, in terms of the activist class in general, and I was thinking a lot on the pro-Palestinian protests and the anti-Israel protests, which surged after the October 7th attacks. What struck me is that there were no equivalents of Stokely Carmichael, or certainly King, or X, or even Ralph Abernathy or — you can name so many — Rustin. You could go on and on in naming major Civil Rights figures out of the 1960s. The feminist movement had many, from Betty Friedan to Germaine Greer to politicians like Bella Abzug. You could go on and on. You pick a cause in the 1960s and 70s. Socialism had Michael Harrington. These were identifiable figures. They were fairly famous. They had platforms. They were a shorthand for something; I spoke with some historians who made that point. One helpful facet of having defined leadership is you could say, “I'm a Eugene Debs leftist,” or, “I'm a Michael Harrington socialist.” Or “I'm a Malcolm X Civil Rights activist. I believe in Black Power.” Or, “I am not necessarily out of the King tradition.”

With these current movements, I was not seeing any of that. What also struck me was that when Biden was running for reelection, there was a large movement called the Uncommitted movement, which was an effort among the pro-Palestinian side to get people in certain states to vote uncommitted against Biden. So delegates could be accumulated at the Democratic National Convention that wouldn't be beholden to Joe Biden and would be explicitly committed to the pro-Palestinian cause. I thought this was well and good. I don't blame anyone seeing the carnage in Gaza and wanting to put pressure on the United States government to alleviate it. I think there is a lot of logic to it. What struck me is that no candidate ran. The Uncommitted movement was literally leaderless, in the sense that you had these primaries in various states and there would be organizations coming in locally that would say, “Vote Uncommitted, don't vote Joe Biden, but vote Uncommitted.”

This is an option, by the way, that only existed in certain states. I'm in New York. One could not vote Uncommitted in New York. But you could do it in Michigan and Minnesota and some other states. So the Uncommitted vote share in a few states was fairly high, considering there's no candidate. But I thought to myself, “Wait, why wasn't there a candidate?” When Bernie Sanders ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he did not anticipate building this major national movement and winning 46% of the available delegates. It was meant to be this insurgent factional campaign that brought attention to Clinton's failures, to some of the dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party. And of course, it mushroomed from there. Why was there no Bernie equivalence for pro-Palestine? Why not run an activist of some sort? Why not run an individual and raise some money and try to win some votes that way?

It wasn't done. And something I found from researching my piece in the Times Magazine was that, on one hand, there was a great wariness of leaders and individuals. There is an excellent writer I follow named Moe Diggs, who coined this term “personality exhaustion.” What I found, too, is that some were afraid of being doxxed and some didn't want to put themselves out there. And then I found, for others, it just wasn't a priority. I think that certain facets of the progressive left are wary of hierarchy. I think this goes back to Occupy Wall Street. They are wary of having bosses. They are wary of doing things in a top-down manner. I think there is strength to being sometimes amorphous in that if a leader fails, it can undermine an organization. You saw this with the Women's March. If you have no defined leaders, you can't be held captive by someone caught up in scandal. I get that. But there also are a lot of drawbacks to being leaderless. I do think it becomes harder to build durable organizations and to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.

TH: It is really interesting and you wonder about what it means for the politics as a whole. There is this moment that you reference in 2011, when John Lewis visited an Occupy event in Atlanta and wanted to speak. Just a very straightforward message of, “I support you, I support your cause.” And they decided not to have him speak. That's pretty significant, in terms of an inability to build bridges, and to build on the legacy and strengths of the past generations. But it's also significant in terms of when you get to crisis points in culture — like the one I would argue we're at right now — that you need someone who is capable of turning the temperature down on the politics. I'm thinking about the moment we're in today, as we're taping, and this assassination attempt, potentially. Do you think there is any living leader on the left right now who has enough influence to pull off a mass message of calming tempers?

RB: I don't think so, and I think the right has the same problem. Absent Donald Trump. He has so captured the Republican Party, he is the only figure who could speak out and have millions of Republicans fall in line. But the catch is he's Donald Trump, and of course he's not going to do that. Whereas on the left, there is no single figure. You could look at someone like Bernie Sanders. But Bernie Sanders is now 83. He's still in the Senate, he's running for reelection. He still has influence. But it's not the same influence he had when he was running for president. Certainly not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I don't think there is anyone. And if you think about the non-politicians — the activists on the outside, the movement leaders — there aren't any of that stature. I can't think of a single one. No one of Martin Luther King's stature, we know that. But even just going down the list of secondary and tertiary Civil Rights figures who still had followings and ran organizations and were known to a decent number of Americans, they aren't existing either. So, I don't think either side has it.

I think by virtue of his dominance of the Republican Party, Trump is the closest thing on the right. There's certainly no Trump equivalent on the left — a single politician who is so dominant that he or she can determine the course of primaries and really actively and effectively cancel members of the party. I mean, Donald Trump has cancelled many Republicans now, whether it's Jeff Sessions or Mike Pence.

One could maybe say Barack Obama. But Obama has this very funny, I'd say, relationship to politics today. Where he prefers to work behind the scenes and have a degree of influence, but he's also not a very vocal and active figure, I would say, within the party on a day-to-day level. I would say his influence more resides in some of these select situations. Like in 2020, when Joe Biden was running for president and there was a split Democratic field and there were fears that Bernie Sanders could overtake him. Obama helped to pressure several candidates to endorse Biden, and that helped Biden win. Or even now, with Harris overtaking Biden, there were reports Obama played some role in that. It seemed like it was more Nancy Pelosi, but Obama was hovering there.

But again, the answer to your question is that there is no one I can think of who can turn the temperature down, or who would give an address that perhaps millions of people would listen to — or be willing to give that kind of address. There aren't those people. I don't think they are on the left and I'm not convinced they are really on the right either.

TH: It's striking to me listening to you speak, Ross. And this also struck me when I was reading a lot of your writing, preparing for our conversation. You criticize the left and you criticize the right. This would have been a given for a journalist in a different era, but it is now somewhat remarkable. I think this is one of the harder things to do in the current media environment — to stand in the centre, to try to be critical of all sides, to not get pulled to extremes. This is actually really difficult work. How do you resist tribalization in your own work?