The Forum with Josh Cowen Podcast

I’ve been wanting to sit down with Neera Tanden for quite awhile now. She’s currently the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress—the premier policy institute in D.C. focused on standing up policy and political strategy from the center-left.

Neera Tanden has a long history in Democratic politics. She served in Joe Biden’s White House in several different roles, was most recently as head of the Domestic Policy Council. She served in the Obama Administration and worked on both Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. She remains a close friend and advisor to the Clintons.

She’s also an attorney, with degrees from UCLA and Yale.

We connected recently to talk about the state of play for the Democratic Party heading into November—and both the politics and the policy of putting forward an alternative vision to leadership in the Trump era.

A Conversation with Neera Tanden

Welcome and thanks for being here. Just to set ourselves up here: I think most of the folks in the policy and politics communities generally have a sense of the work the Center for American Progress does, but tell me a bit about what CAP is up to right now in terms of mission and strategic priorities.

Sure. The Center for American Progress is an action-oriented think tank. We’re really kind of located on the broad center-left. We work a lot on issues that can appeal to what we hope is a broad majority in the country. We have policy teams on almost every major issue, national security, economic policy, domestic policy, climate, you know, healthcare.

Just every significant issue in the country, we have people who are experts in those areas. Right now, we’ve developed ideas to address affordability, so specific ideas to address the cost of living crisis in the country.

Specific ideas to lower health care costs, to address premiums. Premiums have risen 25% in the last five years. I think people are hungry for lower costs in health care. We’ve developed ideas to lower housing costs, food costs, utility costs. Utility costs have risen the sharpest of any major cost over the last decade, other than gas, over the last year.

So I think from our perspective, working class people, middle class people are finding it really hard to make ends meet in this economy. The economy does really feel kind of K-shaped to most people. The top 30, 40% are doing pretty well. The top 1%, obviously, doing really, really well.

The bottom, you know, 60, 70%, are anxious. Anxious about being able to afford things that they used to be able to afford easily. We’ve developed a whole series of ideas for leaders to take up. And I think one thing that we’re very focused on is how you can specifically assure this public through actual policies that you will deliver lower cost for them.

My overarching lesson here is for people who particularly believe in government, you need to ensure that government is working and will solve problems. And it’s not up to us what the problems are. It’s up to the public. And sometimes I think people forget that.—Neera Tanden

We’re about six months out from the midterm. Give me a status check or a landscape analysis from your vantage point on the Democratic Party: where are we, where should we be optimistic, where are some of the dangers?

You know, elections are always a choice, and I think a kind of crucial issue here is that voters are frustrated. Many of them are angry at the direction of the Trump administration. And we’ve seen a lot of polling—we have a research arm—there have been really three shocks, downward shocks to Trump’s approval. One was the tariffs. Two was the murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Goode, and the third has been the Iran War.

And I guess I would say I think the political discourse basically discounts the power of losing a war. You know, Americans don’t lose that many wars, and the fact that the president is in this very weakened position with the Iranians is an element.

I think a crucial part of this is people have been wondering why they’re paying for this war with higher gas prices. So, I think a really big part of this election is how how voters are seeing the incumbents, and they have a pretty negative view of incumbents.

We’re seeing now that Trump has lost the people who voted for him once. The real question is now he’s seeing some losses amongst people who voted for him three times, which is a big change for him. So, that is, like, a central element to what’s gonna happen in these elections.

On the other side of it we have party primaries happening on the Democratic side, and there are a lot of competitive races. When I look at elections I ask is the map expanding or contracting?

The map for Democrats is expanding. Every couple of weeks, you’ll see more people put races on the board. But I have been in election cycles that were supposed to be big sweeps and puttered out, at least in particular races, because they need, you know, people didn’t think they had a credible alternative.

So from my perspective, it’s really important—I say this all the time, I’ve said it on TV, I say it online—the job of the voters in the primary is to select someone who can actually win the general. Now, if you’re in New York City, whoever Democrats pick will win, but if you’re in Wisconsin, or Michigan, or Texas, or Iowa, or Alaska, or maybe Montana, or Mississippi or Missouri, you have to think about putting together a coalition because Democrats aren’t enough.

So I think if we have if there are credible Democrats in all these races, Democrats can take the House and Senate. And crucially, win governor’s races that are going to be very important to 2028 in just being a block to election interference. But that’s a big question going forward.

Now, I feel overly very optimistic if the election were held today, Democrats would take the Senate, which I think is, you know, no one thought that was gonna happen a year ago, so I’m fairly bullish.

But, we have to think about the end result here.

Donald Trump doesn’t speak in policy or four-page policy briefings, but he has policies. He had tariffs. He had building the wall. He had, you know, mass deportation. These are things that communicated policies to people or ideas to people. And the real problem for Donald Trump is his policies have failed.—Neera Tanden

There’s an old joke in some of the political staff communities about what happens in campaigns or for electeds when “comms forgets to check with policy” before rolling out something new. How do you think about the interplay between politics and policy right now for Democrats, when it comes to a path to victory not just in November but further into the future? Do we have an ideas problem? A message problem? All of the above?

I think a lot of people, and a lot of Democrats, look at Donald Trump and say, well, policy doesn’t really matter, because, obviously, this guy’s…Donald Trump.

But I think that is a pretty significant error.

Donald Trump doesn’t speak in policy or four-page policy briefings, but he has policies. He had tariffs. He had building the wall. He had, you know, mass deportation.

These are things that communicated policies to people or ideas to people. And I think a real problem with Trump today: everyone’s always like, “everything’s messaging,” etc, but the real problem for Donald Trump is his policies have failed.

You know, he came in to office, he’s had a pretty radical policy agenda, and it is actually raising costs for people instead of lowering costs. And that is why he’s seeing significant erosion of working-class white voters for the first time in any election that he’s ever faced.

So, I look at reality, I look at America today, and I say, you know, it’s actually good that people are looking at the facts of their lives and deciding they are turned off from this guy.

My own view about policy is…you know, people will go for a bad answer over no answer. And our job is to give people better answers, better solutions. I mean, I’m very scarred by the Biden administration’s work on immigration. I was not in charge of the border, but I was dealing with domestic immigration, so I sat on our, on our immigration council, and I think that’s an issue where we saw a big problem at the border, and we should have tackled it earlier, and we really tackled it only after Trump was a nominee,

I think a lot of people thought, well, if we only did it because of Trump, and if I really care about immigration, I will vote for Trump.

So my overarching lesson here is for people who particularly believe in government, you need to ensure that government is working and will solve problems.

And it’s not up to us what the problems are. It’s up to the public. And sometimes I think people forget that. They think if we talk about an issue a lot, that’s what makes it matter. And actually, voters have their own views on what’s important to I think the fundamental issue the public is interested in: Parents. Community leaders. People who don’t have kids in school. It’s: how are schools improving? How are schools ensuring that students academic performance is increasing. And what is the system in which schools are improving themselves? them.

At the end of the day, I think one of the reasons why our schools in some way feel like they’re standing still is because we don’t have national leaders really pushing the ball forward with ideas of how the whole country benefits from a good education system.—Neera Tanden

I focus a lot here in this series on issues affecting kids and families. I came up in education policy. There’s new polling out there showing Democrats have completely lost an edge on education—including among folks who voted for Kamala in 2024. And since 2020, Democratic candidates have simply stopped talking about schools as often as Republicans. You see guys like Rahm Emanuel making this a big thing but that’s about it right now. How if at all do you think education—K12 specifically but also across the board—should fit into a larger vision for where progressives ought to be and where we’re going?

This is a fantastic question, and I really appreciate it, because I think a lot about education. I hate aging myself like this, but I came up in the 90s, One of my first jobs, I was privileged to work in the Clinton White House. Bill Clinton talked a lot about education. You know, he had a whole theory of what you earn will depend on what you learn.

That’s why we have to make college more affordable to people. We have to give more people access to college. Maybe we overdid it on college, but he had a conversation with the country about education on a regular basis,

As did Barack Obama. Now, I think a real challenge over the last several years is, No Child Left Behind did not deliver the level of school improvement it basically promised.

And then as a result of NCLB not really delivering enough school improvement, we then kind of moved away from it, but didn’t replace it with much. Like, to be totally candid, in the Biden administration, we were focused on mental health, and we did focus on absenteeism in the last few years, because that was a big problem.

But I think the fundamental issue the public is interested in, from parents, to community leaders, to people who don’t have kids in school is: how are schools improving? How are schools ensuring that students academic performance is increasing. And how, what is the system in which schools are improving themselves?

And at CAP, you know, we are evidence-based. We’ve looked at around the country and you do see innovations in places like Mississippi, Alabama. When I was the domestic policy advisor to the president, we had the superintendent of Alabama at the White House. Bipartisan learning from what they did. And fundamentally, what states are doing that are succeeding, these southern states, is they have a pretty state-based, top-down push on accountability.

And the accountability isn’t here’s this cookie-cutter way that you should improve your schools. I mean, they are investing in tutors and other things, but they’re basically trying to drive school systems, and then school systems are driving superintendents, superintendents are driving principals to improve year to year.

And yes we should have a broad based discussion of each policy that works and we should invest in tutoring and we should get make school interesting to people with lots of different kind of experiences and not just, you know, career-connected learning.

But at the end of the day, I think one of the reasons why our schools in some way feel like they’re standing still is because we don’t have national leaders as much really pushing the ball forward with ideas of how the whole country benefits from a good education system.

It should be a national priority, not just a state priority. But I also think when it’s a national priority, that also ends up driving school improvement in a way that is hard to measure but does seem to have a real impact.

What we should really be aiming for is a broad, resilient majority in the country that is so large that Republicans doubt whether MAGAism is a electoral success strategy for them. There’s lots of issues in which I might have a different view from someone, but I think we have to give space to welcome independents and even some Republicans. It’s really crucial. —Neera Tanden

I had Run for Something’s Amanda Litman on a few weeks ago and she’s really pushed this line I’ve been quoting constantly and that’s something like “be flexible with policy, consistent on values.” How do you think about a guidepost like that? Are there some policies on the Democratic side where compromise actually would be a betrayal of values? I think probably reproductive freedom is one. Marriage equality. Where are some places for you where the values are the policy, and where should we be more flexible?

So let me say how I see the next 3 years. I’ll answer this question, but I think it’s really important for people to think about the possibilities and what’s at stake.

So, I think it’s important to win elections, absolutely. But I would like this nightmare of the last 10 years to be over. I would like to wake up days and not think of Trump, or MAGAism. There is a MAGA movement in the country, it’s not just Trump. So, that’s what we have to defeat.

To me, the real problem in our politics is that we are in 50-50 election cycles. Joe Biden’s election, he won seven more million more votes for sure. And he won a bunch of swing states over Trump. But those seven swing states were decided by like 250,000 votes. What got him to over the hump was relatively close.

But it shouldn’t be close. The way I orient my life and our work here is, it’s the job is to win elections, for sure. But what we should really be aiming for is a broad, resilient majority in the country that is so large that Republicans doubt whether MAGAism is a electoral success strategy for them.

And that only happens where you defeat or expand movements with broad election sweeps. So, from our perspective, there’s lots of issues in which I have a different view, but I think we have to give space to welcome independents and even some Republicans. It’s really crucial.

And these issues are debated back and forth in all these primaries. There are Democratic candidates today who are winning, you know, 7, 8, 9% of their vote from Republicans who voted for Trump. Like, last year, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill. This candidate who won in Texas 9 in January: they were able to put together a broad coalition that include liberal Democrats, moderate Democrats, moderates, independent voters, and a sliver of Republicans, non-MAGA Republicans.

Do I know that will defeat MAGAism? I do not. But I do know we will never defeat MAGAism if we are in, like, 50-50 elections. Because if the elections are so close, they will always have a story that they were cheated, not defeated. And that’s my orientation.

I think we should think about issues like: if we want Republicans or moderate Republicans to come into a coalition where they have to be flexible, we have to be flexible, too.

Now, there are some issues, again, like civil rights for people. I think for the Democratic Party, a core value, is basic civil rights for all people. I’m against racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and I’m against anti-Semitism. I don’t find that to be a complicated thought for me,

But I think a big challenge in the Democratic Party that is weaponized by the right, for sure, and unfairly weaponized, is the sense of judgment: you are being judged by this elite who looks down on you. That is, like, a constant message of Republicans.

So, more than just issues, I think we have to have the orientation towards people, which is you’re not stupid for disagreeing with me. We have a disagreement. Let’s talk it out. And I think that’s something we can all measure, we can all work on and none of us are perfect on this.

Politics is about addition, it’s not about subtraction. And, you know, and I will say, I will give credit to Mamdani, who was a pretty, you know, pretty left guy, but had an ethos in his campaign of trying to welcome people who disagree with him: Trump voters, everybody. And I think that, beyond particular issues, is a really important ethos.

Neera Tanden is President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

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Over the past several decades, one of the big developments in the American economy has been the growth of private equity: an investment strategy in which wealthy individuals and managed funds get together to buy out companies, strip them of costs, and sell them for a profit.

It’s a complicated scheme, and it depends on favorable treatment in both state and the federal tax code. It’s also led to untold heartache and—in some cases—local catastrophe, as family businesses and historic firms have shut down, workers lose jobs, and communities are devastated as a result.

The growth of private equity in public service provision—especially health care, education, and services for children like youth sports—is especially troubling.

It’s tough stuff, and I wanted to talk to an expert about it all. So I reached out to the journalist Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.

Megan has written for most of the prestige outlets of American journalism—including the New York Times and the Washington Post, has been an editor at Wired, and is the former editor of Deadspin, the influential sports site that itself fell victim to the private equity model.

We chatted about a variety of topics—what private equity is, what it does, and where it’s all going.

A Conversation with Megan Greenwell

Tell me a bit about your own background. You were editor of the sports site Deadspin for awhile, you’re a journalist and author. What are the kinds of stories that interest you?

I spent a lot of my career as a magazine editor at various places: Deadspin, ESPN, Wired Magazine, New York Magazine, bunch of places. More recently, I’m a freelance writer, so I wrote this book [Bad Company].

And I’m in the early stages of working on another book. I like to define what I do by saying that I write articles and books about how systems affect people, and that was very much my interest in this topic. I had worked for Deadspin, which had a fairly disastrous private equity takeover.

But it really just made me interested in like, okay, how does this affect other people in other industries—industries that are frankly more important to the functioning of our society than snarky sports blogs?

So, yeah, that was really why I got into it. It felt like there was a lot of writing about private equity and not a lot of writing about the people who are affected, so I really wanted to take a narrative nonfiction approach and tell the stories of actual people whose lives were upended after one of these PE acquisitions.

The thing that I think most people don’t really understand about how private equity works, even though it is fundamental, is that when they take out those loans, the debt is assigned only to the portfolio company. That means if you’re the firm, you can drive a company out of business and even if there are billions of dollars in loans, you don’t have to pay those loans back.—Megan Greenwell

I want to ask you about some of those lives in just a second, but just from a level-setting, definitional perspective: a lot of the folks who read me, listen to this type of conversation, have a lot of thoughts about privatization of public services and lots of other different things, but private equity is a pretty specific thing. Can you just give us a working definition for our purposes for the conversation.

This is exactly who I was before I started the reporting for this book. I had never covered business before, and so it felt really important to me to reach an audience who is well-educated enough to know that private equity is big and important in our economy and maybe having some negative effects. But they don’t necessarily know exactly how that works.

So you are my target audience if you are one of those people. The way I define private equity is it is a funding mechanism through which private equity firms bundle together money from all sorts of outside investors to buy companies and the outsized investors can include pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, ultra wealthy individuals, etc. But all of that money put together only makes up 20 to 30% of the average private equity deal.

The rest of it is straight bank loans. And the thing that I think most people don’t really understand about how private equity works, even though it is fundamental to how it works, is that when they take out those loans, the debt is assigned only to the portfolio company.

The private equity firm itself has no responsibility for that debt, which means it screws up the incentive structure, right? It means if you’re the firm, you can drive a company out of business and still not lose very much money, because even if there are billions of dollars in loans, you don’t have to pay those loans back.

That was the piece that really kind of woke me up going back over your book a second time. The fact that the loans stick with the original company seems like that’s the linchpin that makes some of this all work. Now getting back to your book Bad Company: Walk us through the four sets of stories there in the damage private equity can cause and why folks should be alarmed moving ahead.

I think what you see from these four stories is just how many people truly have their lives tossed into chaos, and not just individual people, but entire communities. So I’ll talk about one of the examples from the book.

I love them all, but this one might be my favorite. It’s a rural hospital in Wyoming, and it’s the only hospital for 30 miles, and it had always been a for-profit hospital, right? It’s Wyoming, it’s a very red county in a very red state.

And so, you don’t have a lot of people marching in the streets for Medicare for All. They were perfectly happy to have a for-profit hospital, and it worked! It, like, made a little bit of money, it was a pretty functional system.

Then it got rolled up into a chain of rural hospitals that were taken over by Apollo Global Management.

And what you saw happen was all of the services were just stripped and stripped and stripped until there was essentially nothing left. They were in no real sense a hospital, so they stripped general surgery, they stripped the ability to give birth at that hospital. At one point, somebody in the community took his little kid in because he was dancing on the coffee table and split his forehead, and they couldn’t give a kid a couple of stitches after 5 o’clock.

So this was in no real sense a hospital. And so what you see there is not only the lost jobs, not only, you know, people getting sicker and more likely to die because of this, but the ripple effects that a hospital plays throughout a community. Right?

So I was talking to the CEO of a small company in town. And he was saying, “I can’t hire anymore because who’s going to move their family here if there’s nowhere to get basic hospital treatment? The nearest hospital is 30 miles away through a very treacherous canyon in the best of circumstances, much less a Wyoming winter.”

So what ended up happening was the number of air ambulance flights out of that county increased over 600%. Air ambulances are very, very expensive for patients—and also a big takeover target for private equity.

So what you see is step by step by step. This community is just devastated. Not only by the disappearance of the actual healthcare, but then by all of the ripple effects that come from it.

The private equity ethos is consolidate at all costs, and do as much as you can with as little as you can. That’s not usually what parents want from education, right? Private equity wants to centralize everything and spend as little money on human people as possible, and that doesn’t work very well with education.—Megan Greenwell

Can we talk a bit about private equity and public services? You wrote about an example with health care. And a big thing right now is private equity getting into the business with universities, especially athletic departments. You’re seeing private equity get into the charter school and the tutoring game. What are the top concerns here, what should we watch for?

As you point out, private equity has become huge in education. And there are a couple of big attractors for private equity in that space. One is just—it’s a captive market, right?

Parents want to spend money getting their children the best education possible, and the more money they have, the more money they’re willing to spend. That dovetails with private equity, which loves a subscription model, right?

Because it’s just like easy recurring revenue. And so if you can have something like a tutoring service like an Ed tech platform that requires a monthly subscription fee: those all just feel like absolute easy money from an audience that’s really willing to pay.

One thing I thought about a lot while writing the book is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman is, you know, his ideology is very much at the heart of the private equity industry.

But even Milton Friedman, in his famous essay about shareholder value theory, specifically carved out exemptions for hospitals and for education. He said those are charitable enterprises. Those should not be something where shareholder value theory is in the market.

So I think what you see is real threat because the private equity ethos is consolidate at all costs, and do as much as you can with as little as you can.

That’s not usually what parents want from education, right? Private equity wants to centralize everything and spend as little money on human people as possible, and that doesn’t work very well with education.

So yes, I certainly think there are like social justice factors at play here. But private equity is by definition a short term game. You know, they’re looking to get in and get out within 5 to 7 years. And so, when they are in a space like education, and profit is the only goal, you just end up with a real mismatch when you’re financializing education to that point.

And cutting and cutting and cutting is the name of the game.

The idea of financializing things that are fundamentally about child development, I think, is just especially worrisome. Anything you can think of that is a service that your kids use, if you are a parent, probably private equity is either in it or coming in.—Megan Greenwell

How about youth sports? Black Bear owns all these leagues. Arenas and rinks now. I think this is a huge source of stress for families and they don’t even know private equity is involved. Can you explain why this is happening in the youth sports space? Any other areas for kids and families we really need to watch for when it comes to private equity?

Yeah, youth sports is a newer area of investment for private equity and it’s very surprising to me that it took so long because once you start thinking about how private equity works and how youth sports works from the perspective of a private equity firm, it does seem really perfect.

So again, there’s like a subscription model thing at play and there are a lot of parents who will pay because they want their kids to be competitive for scholarships, for college admissions, and that now requires year-round training, going to all the travel tournaments, private coaching. And so those are the areas where you’ve seen private equity get really involved.

So you mentioned Black Bear. Their model is on some level, incredibly impressive to me, because they did buy up all the rinks. They bought up a lot of the, like, training programs, online training programs, but also the, like, staffing agencies for private coaches.

I think I read that you now have to pay $37 a month for these video services that mean you can’t just like pull out your iPhone at the youth hockey game and record your kid. It’s a pretty remarkable pipeline that they’ve built.

And you know, there are all sorts of problems here if private equity runs as much of the youth sports industry as it does. The cost escalation is going to continue to get more and more out of hand, right? And there aren’t going to be lower cost alternatives.

And then, of course, you’re pricing out lower income kids. You end up with a situation where the only kids who can afford to play at an elite level and thus compete for those athletic scholarships, etc, are the wealthier ones.

And so the idea of financializing things that are fundamentally about child development, I think, is just especially worrisome. And it’s also one of the biggest areas of investment. Right?

So you see, not only youth sports, not only education, but a lot of, like, autism therapy providers, preschools—private equity is huge in preschools. Anything where private equity firms can kind of take advantage of parents’ deep-seated desire to take good care of their kids.

So basically, anything you can think of that is a service that your kids use, if you are a parent, probably private equity is either in it or coming in.

What can be done about any of this? Let’s say I’m the sort of listener who is alarmed by what you say but also doesn’t use words like “a billionaire shouldn’t exist!” I just want things to be fair. You write about closing the carried interest loophole as one pretty sensible short term fix. Can you explain that and take us into the future here?

So the carried interest loophole basically means that profits in private equity firms and other kinds of big financial firms are taxed as theoretical rather than real profits.

The history of this is super interesting. It comes from actually what you carried on a ship. I got really fascinated by that history, but what it means is that the top tax rate is 22% compared to 37% for ordinary businesses.

The idea of closing the carried interest loophole has been relatively popular with both Democrats and Republicans for years.

George W. Bush proposed closing the loophole. Obama, Trump in his first term proposed closing the loophole. Joe Biden, and Trump has now mentioned it again in his second term. And yet, it has never gone through, in large part because 88% of members of the House and Senate take private equity donations, and they just have no interest in pissing off that industry.

And so the last time it came close to being closed was in 2021 as part of one of the pandemic relief bills and Kristen Sinema, who at the time was a Democrat, and at the time was a Senator almost single-handedly made sure that got stripped from the bill in exchange for her vote.

So [closing] that would be a great start. On the other end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Warren has proposed what she calls the “Stop Wall Street Looting” bill over and over and over again since 2018, and that would fundamentally undermine how the private equity world operates.

That’s never going to get through without a pretty dramatic change in the composition of Congress. And I don’t actually think it has to. If I could wave a magic wand and make one change, I probably wouldn’t even start with the carried interest loophole.

I would just say, if you’re a private equity firm and you take out loans, you have to share responsibility for those loans. I have talked to so many people in private equity land who have never really been able to articulate an objection to that other than that, you know, it would cut into our profits, which is itself not really an objection.

I’ve talked to many people who without reading my book, sort of think that it’s like a socialist screed. My argument would be a change like that would actually get us back much closer to what free market capitalism was supposed to be.

What’s next for you? Like, what are you up to now?

So I’m a contributing writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. I have a brand new story out this week about community health workers and how they save the economy a lot of money, but are being threatened by public health funding cuts.

So I remain interested in these questions of how systems affect people, and I’m canvassing around. I think I might have a next book idea. But I’m still working on it.

Megan Greenwell, the author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, thanks so much for having this conversation today.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

This week I’m talking to Anne Kim, co-editor of a new book called Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This. It’s a compilation of chapters by seasoned policy experts, and longtime policymakers and advisors at senior levels of the federal government. It’s basically a damage assessment that takes a look at where we are midway through Trump’s second term, what’s been done and what’s coming ahead.

Betrayed is published by the bipartisan Common Sense Coalition, of which Anne is also executive director.

Anne Kim is a journalist, lawyer, former senior staffer on Capitol Hill, and veteran of several D.C.-based think tanks. She’s also the author of Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024) and Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection (The New Press, 2020).

A Conversation with Anne Kim

Thanks for being here. Before we get into the questions, tell me a little bit about your own background professionally, and the background you’re bringing to the work we’re about to talk about.

Sure. As you mentioned, I’m a journalist, a lawyer. I worked on the Hill. I worked in a couple of DC think tanks. And I’ve worked in private sector. I was actually a corporate securities lawyer before I went on to public policy. So I feel like I’ve had a little bit of a 360 view from the government side, from the public policy side.

And from the media side. All of these things have come into play in our writing this volume with my co-editor and contributors for the Common Sense Coalition.

The title is a provocation — Betrayed. That’s a strong word. Who exactly does this book argue was betrayed, and is it making a claim about bad outcomes or something more specific — that voters were actively misled about what they were getting?

So the book is, it says on the cover, it’s a damage assessment. And what we are is a coalition of about, you know, 45 policy experts, former government, former military, who all got together to put together a fact-based analysis of what Trump administration policies have done.

And that’s where we get to the concept of betrayal. And you did mention that it’s a strong word. Yeah, it’s a strong word. It’s an emotional word, it’s an evocative word, it’s also a deliberate word. And I think it has different meanings for different audiences. For those who may have supported Trump in the past, it really could be kind of a personal betrayal. He did promise that he would bring down prices on day one.

He also promised that he would not take the U.S. into unnecessary wars. That promise has been broken too. I mean, for those who have had this very personal relationship, loyalty to Trump, it really may be a visceral reaction to them that does qualify as betrayal.

For others, some of us who kind of knew what might be happening with the second Trump administration, the betrayal is a little bit different. It’s about this administration’s betrayal of the values and the foundational principles of our democracy. And we go into that with 12 chapters in our book. The rule of law, the collapse of civil discourse, an economy that’s become unaffordable.

You know, there are a lot of things upon about which the things that we have counted on for generations have been eroded.

The Common Sense Coalition isn’t a progressive outfit — this is a centrist, cross-aisle project. How do you get people from different political traditions to agree on what a betrayal even looks like, when they may disagree about what the promise was in the first place?

Betrayal, I guess, you could argue is in the eye of the beholder. You know, as I mentioned, it means different things to different people. What we try to do in this book, though, is just to make the argument about the depth and the breadth of the destruction.

And we have chosen to do so with facts, and we have synthesized these facts into an argument. You know, I mentioned that we have footnotes, 643 footnotes, so this is not conjecture, it’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact-filled synthesis, and it’s 12 chapters.

We’re not trying to do this, like, florid rhetorical exercise. You know, we try to make it as accessible and readable as possible. In that way, we’re kind of inspired by the original Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine, because that was a 47-page pamphlet that was really intended for regular people, you know, to make the case against the monarchy, to make the case that here’s the stakes of a revolution.

That’s not what we’re calling for in this case, but Paine laid out in a very accessible way the damage that’d been done by the king at that time, and the political stakes if regular people didn’t act. And that was an inspiration for both the name of the coalition, but also for the argument that we try to make within the book.

Future generations have no reason at this point to believe what their government is telling them, because there is active misinformation being pumped out by multiple agencies on multiple platforms.—Anne Kim

My work and writing is mostly focused on the politics of schools, kids and families. Your previous book Abandoned was really about what happens when systems fail young people who have already fallen through the cracks. How does the damage you document in Betrayed land on kids specifically — whether that’s schools, nutrition programs, health coverage, or something else — and is any of it reversible before a generation gets lost?

Thank you for that question. My 2020 book, Abandoned, was about youth disconnection. It’s about the 4.5 million, probably more now after the COVID pandemic, of young adults who are neither in school nor working and how they had been abandoned by the various government systems.

They’re supposed to be helping them, whether it’s foster care, justice system, or education. With this book, Betrayed, if you read the introduction to the book, there is a reference to kids and grandkids. You know, that was, future generations were very much on the minds of all of us who contributed to this volume.

And the argument in the book is not only that this Trump administration has just kind of wrecked our present, but they’ve really destroyed our future, too. And to your point, I do think some of this could be irreversible, because in the space of 16 months this administration has managed to destroy institutions and structures that have taken decades to build, and there are a few specific impacts like right now that are going to have, you know, long-term implications for kids.

For instance, I just saw, I think, Kaiser—KFF—put out a stat the other day that more than 1.7 million low-income kids have lost Medicaid as a result of various cutbacks that are taking place. I mean, these kids growing up without access to health care now are going to be suffering immense long-term health consequences as a result of not getting preventive care, not getting acute things taken care of, not getting vaccinations, you name it. So there’s that.

The Department of Education, you know well what’s happened there. And then, next month, we’re going to be seeing huge changes in access to higher ed, because of enormous changes in higher ed financing, right? So, people who are getting nursing degrees can no longer finance their education if they can’t afford to do so, thanks to the changes in the Graduate Plus program for graduate loans.

So yeah, that’s going to have an enormous impact on careers, on economic mobility of future generations.

We have a chapter on climate change. You know, this administration has completely walked back prior administration’s commitment to a clean energy future, allowing China to leap ahead. So not only are we putting climate at risk for future future generations, but our ability to compete in the clean energy space as a result of that. And then, kind of the big picture view is faith in government.

Future generations have no reason at this point to believe what their government is telling them, because there is active misinformation being pumped out by multiple agencies on multiple platforms.

And a lot of what this government has done right now has been against the interests of children and the families, and it’s going to be very, very, very hard to rebuild that trust.

Irreversible? Possibly.

Where in this book did the evidence or argument genuinely surprise you — where did what voters actually wanted diverge most sharply from what the political conversation suggested they wanted?

Well, if you mean, you know, where did the nation and voters get way more than they bargained for, it probably would have to be immigration enforcement. I mean, it really has been much more destructive than I think anyone would have predicted.

That chapter lays out in very stark terms the actual hazards to public safety that have resulted as a result of these immigration crackdowns, and I think the scale of that is much more than anyone anticipated.

And, you know, nobody expected that U.S. citizens would also be at risk of death. You know, it’s bad enough what’s happening to people generally, but the level of violation of civil rights, human rights, the deaths and the injuries that are happening in detention centers. The economic impact, also, of the immigration enforcement surge has probably much starker than anyone expected as well.

There’s a great Brookings report that just came out this week estimating that the United States has lost 688,000 jobs as a result of the 2025 immigration surge. Their analysis found that for every “excess arrest,” 13 jobs were affected.

And so, I mean…it has been catastrophic.

This hijacking of government to serve the profit interests of companies that make their living from government money is a huge theme of the Trump Administration.—Anne Kim

You’ve written extensively about how corporations profit off poverty — the poverty industry, as you’ve called it. Does Betrayed connect that thread to the current moment? Is what we’re seeing in this administration just more of that, or is there something structurally different happening?

There’s definitely some commonality in themes. The book you’re referring to is Poverty for Profit, and that really looked at the privatization of public services and how for-profit actors have really taken advantage of government programs that were intended to help the poor, but instead are profiting from themselves. And that is definitely happening today in real time.

I’ll just give you a couple of instances. First of all, we’ve had this long-going privatization of criminal justice, private prisons. So, who is running the immigration detention camps? Well, it’s GEO Group, it’s CoreCivic, it’s these companies that have been running private prisons for decades now.

If you just look up GEO Group and look at their stock price, they’re profiting from the $80 billion that’s expected to be coming their way from the One Big Beautiful Bill on immigration enforcement. So these contractors are being hired at enormous expense, often without competitive bids to carry out the administration’s agenda.

So that is one way in which there is this group of corporate middlemen. And another example of that is the Medicaid work reporting requirements. So there’s been a lot of reporting lately, actually, by contractors who have been hired by the states to actually stand up the compliance regimes that will have to be in place for people to report their work effort in order to qualify for Medicaid.

Now, I have to clarify that most working age people who are on Medicaid are working already, you know. In fact, like Walmart, McDonald’s—these employers have huge numbers of people on their payrolls who get Medicaid because their wages are not high enough to qualify for any kinds of other kinds of insurance. They’re working. These are the folks who are going to have to be logging every hour that they’re working at Walmart in order to qualify.

Who is going to be monitoring those benefits? The contractors that the states have brought in at enormous expense, and millions of people are going to lose their Medicaid rolls. And that’s something that I talk about in Poverty for Profit too, like just a really human impact of having these companies in there administering programs, profiting from the programs, and taking advantage, triaging or arbitraging little inefficiencies in their programs to profit for themselves.

And this hijacking of government to serve the profit interests of companies that make their living from government money is a huge theme of the Trump Administration. Right? I mean you can count multiple ways every day covered in news of the ways in which the Trump administration has tipped the scales in favor of friends and allies, and using the government as an instrument of corruption.

Even small things like, you know, repainting the reflecting pool in front of the monument. That was a no-bid contract that cost way more than it’s supposed to, and it looks bad too.

We have to drag ourselves back into a space where we can try to find common ground. As well as common sense, and rebuild the republic that we are in danger of losing. And we have to do so in as measured a way as possible, to reach out to those who may have been in a different space from us.—Anne Kim

You and I can both write about what went wrong. But I think about this a lot with my own readers — the question isn’t just “what happened” but “what do we do.” Given the political environment, what does meaningful accountability look like, and is “common sense” — the thing your coalition is named for — actually available to us right now as a political resource?

That’s a tough question. It’s not an easy question. I think it really is up to each one of us, you and I, and anyone listening to this to make common sense available as a resource to themselves.

To their friends and family, you know, and that’s kind of the purpose of the book, to take down the temperature, go back to facts.

What we don’t want to see, I think is really dangerous, is numbness, is apathy. A lot of people are in this “I just can’t tune in right now” kind of space, even as kind of democracy is crumbling before our eyes.

And I for one worry that this kind of willful blindness is going to enable everything we hold dear as Americans slip away.

But let’s take down the temperature a little bit, and try to rebuild those bridges that others out there are trying so hard to tear apart. And in terms of practical things to do. The conversations have to happen.

Voting has to happen.

You know, civic engagement has to happen. And I think even volunteering within the community will happen, you know, and rebuild some of that civic engagement that we’ve seen dissolve as a result of what’s been happening over the last decade.

Hear, hear. Well, let’s let that be the last word.

Anne Kim is the co-editor of this new book, Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This, and executive director of the Common Sense Coalition.

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I’ve wanted to talk here about immigration policy for awhile now. But I’ve been waiting to connect with an expert on the topic who could offer some insights into both the policy and politics.

Andrea R. Flores is an attorney, policy expert, and media commentator with more than 15 years of experience trying to reform U.S. immigration law and domestic policy at the highest levels of government. She has served at the White House, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and in the U.S. Senate, where she advanced legislation and executive actions to modernize the immigration system, strengthen border security, and implement judicial reforms.

Beyond government, Flores has led national immigration policy teams at the ACLU and FWD.us, advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and began her career in New Mexico working on border security issues. She regularly comments on immigration and national security on outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books. She is also co-author of the New York Times bestseller Yes She Can.

The issue of immigration is obviously critically important in its own right. But for those of you who are regular readers or listeners, see if you can spot some parallels between what Andrea’s saying about immigration—particularly with respect to the way Democrats have to offer an alternative—and some of the conversations we’ve had here about education policy.

A Conversation with Andrea Flores

Welcome to The Forum. I’m Josh Cowen, and I am happy today to have Andrea Flores here as an immigration expert, an attorney, a media commentator. I have been wanting to do a conversation or a newsletter on immigration policy for a while now. I was just sort of waiting for the right chance to have the right conversation. I think this is it, so I’m really, really glad to have Andrea here.

Thank you so much.

You have served at the White House, the National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security, the Senate staff. You’ve done a whole bunch of different things on this issue. Just before we get into the conversation, just tell us a little bit about yourself that’s sort of not in the top line bio.

Absolutely. So one, thank you for having me. I am an attorney. I live in Washington, DC. But I actually got into this issue for both kind of personal reasons and academic interests. I grew up on the southwest border, so I’m from southern New Mexico, a city called Las Cruces.

And I really sort of grew up at a time when border security and the question of immigration reform was a big national issue right after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And really, ever since 2006 when I went off to college, I have been studying immigration and thinking a lot about how our country approaches that. I’m really interested in questions of reform, what it means to our future, both economically and politically.

So I have been working in the immigration space since 2010, and really love to talk about it and help explain to people why they should also get excited and interested in it as well.

The Republican Party has come away from thinking of immigration as something good for the country. With the rise of President Trump, we’ve seen a period where Republicans have really adopted the idea that immigration is actually bad for the country.—Andrea Flores

Immigration reform keeps failing, in my view, even though parts of it poll well. Do you think maybe both parties kind of misunderstand about how ordinary voters actually think about immigration? What kinds of arguments have reformers overused, or underused?

I have a Substack called Securing America’s Promise, and the entire premise is to explore why Washington keeps failing on this issue. I do really look at both parties. And if you just look at what has happened since 2010 is that prior to that point, you did have both parties at least say that immigration reform was a priority for them. They thought it was good for the economy, they thought it was good for national security, and you saw both President George W. Bush and President Obama actually put forth very similar big immigration reform proposals.

And one of the things I’ve been exploring is, well, if you hear those facts, you think, why didn’t it work? And what has been an interesting phenomenon for the Republican Party is how they’ve come away from thinking of immigration reform as something good for the country

With the rise of President Trump, we’ve seen a period where Republicans have really adopted the idea that immigration is actually bad for the country. And what I don’t think many people maybe appreciate is just what a break from past Republican politics that was

So when you’ve had a party now since, I would say, 2015, saying immigration is bad, what you’ve had on the Democratic side is an inability to adjust to that new political reality. They don’t have another party that wants to really work with them on this issue, but they have also not offered a reason why they still think it’s really important to reform the immigration system.

So I think one of the reasons it keeps failing is I don’t think any party is making the case for why immigration reform benefits your average American right now.

Neither party is making the case for why immigration reform benefits your average American right now.—Andrea Flores

To this point about benefits: you’ve argued that immigration is not just a border issue, it’s a pocketbook issue. Can you walk us through that a little bit more about just kind of the everyday ways that immigration shows up in family budgets and housing and elder care, child care, food prices, you name it. Like, how are these things showing up in the economy that, like, really does land at the kitchen table?

Historically, in times of growth for the American economy, we have really relied on immigrants for that growth, right? So you could even think in the COVID economy, like when we were recovering from COVID, an influx in immigration—we can get to why that was complicated—actually helped us recover faster than other nations because more people wanted to work us jobs than not.

So take it to today. President Trump has argued, and many voters, understandably, kind of believed him: which is that fewer immigrants mean that my life gets better because it’ll be easier to get a job, or housing will be more affordable, but what you’ve seen is that when you disrupt how our economy has always worked, which has always had about 13% immigrant sort of population in the country, what it means that there’s fewer construction workers to make affordable housing.

It means that there are fewer caregivers in rural states to help with elder care and child care, it means that food gets more expensive, because so many of our critical industries say dairy, say your milk prices, right? Almost half of the workforce in Wisconsin dairy farms are undocumented immigrants.

So this has always been a fact of our economy, and I like to say, like, immigration has always made us richer and more prosperous. And when you reduce it really drastically, you have hospitals closing, schools closing, population shrinking, and that makes life more expensive for everyone. It’s not actually creating more jobs or creating more consumer demand.

But once again, we need a party to actually explain those facts. And I understand why people may think immigration is just a public safety issue, a border issue, because that’s the only way they ever hear about it.

A lot of my work and the focal point for this series here is on schools and kids and families. I want to ask about the immigration issue in the school space. The 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, which says that public schools basically can’t deny services based on immigration status. How important do you think that decision is today? We know that conservatives are actually targeting this right now. It’s a big priority for the Heritage Foundation. I want to ask broadly about serving immigrants who are children, but also the political or the legal coalition behind that. Is it weaker now? Is this just another target for some of the same sort of Trump-era party politics that you’re describing?

I think I’m very scared of that case being revisited, especially because Chief Justice John Roberts has written in the past about how he believes Plyler was wrongly decided. And it’s really not just the Heritage Foundation. I think people question: when immigrants come here, what services and benefits should they have? So once again, if you’re missing a party that could make an argument as to why Plyler was decided and why it’s important that we don’t ostracize immigrant children, that undocumented kids actually they create numbers in school that impact funding for American kids.

There’s all these reasons why you don’t want to discriminate against children in the education system. But my fear is that we don’t even have an argument on immigration in the Democratic Party side right now. And so you can imagine Plyler coming up and people simply thinking, you know, that’s just taking resources away from kids. And so it’s why I think it’s so important that even saying the words “immigration reform” I’m not attached to. It’s just talking about: this is a way that our communities already function—you’re not losing a lot.

But I want to raise one issue because I think it’s important, which was when you had what I have argued is a very mismanaged border under President Biden, then you saw what happened when kids were coming into schools very quickly, and there were real resource questions. And integration questions.

And because that administration couldn’t meet and, you know, get emergency funding out, and call it a crisis, all these things. We’re going to have a harder time arguing some of the benefits we’ve seen from a decision like Plyler. So I want to be honest with viewers that it got more complicated after the Biden border crisis.

They are sending the message globally that immigrants will be treated horribly here.—Andrea Flores

If immigration levels keep falling, or enforcement chills migration even without formal legal changes like Plyler or whatever else, what sectors or communities do you think feel it first, especially with respect to the argument you’re making about the economic issue, like, is this just a big city issue? Is this a rural issue? Is this just a southern border issue? How do you think about—I don’t want to say message targeting geographically, but—who feels this kind of thing first?

Well, we can even just unpack this current administration and one of the first impacts everyone will really see is the World Cup. We’ve seen that that should be a major economic event for the cities hosting games. And what is happening right now is they have empty hotel rooms, right?

That is a chilling effect from foreign travel, because this administration is sharing that if you come here just even on a tourist visa, you could end up in detention for 20 days. And so they are sending the message globally that immigrants will be treated horribly here.

And we’ll see that in the World Cup, and that’ll be less of an economic driver. Look at Nevada: Las Vegas tourism rates are down. That is always an early economic warning sign that we have or we’re losing our competitive edge, bringing tourists into the country. But then let’s go further.

When you have states like Texas, they’re attacking in-state tuition for undocumented students. They’re trying to criminalize going to the hospital for immigrants. I mean, that chills everything from small businesses. People stop leaving their houses. We’ve seen where there have been big deployments. Businesses are starting to close because people don’t leave their houses anymore. I think for every state, they will start to feel the impact at a different time, which sometimes makes it hard for a national argument.

I grew up in a border community where people were coming from Mexico just to shop as part of our, you know, daily economy. And those numbers are starting to be impacted as well.

It’s about changing the policy tools and telling a story with those changes, because that is what Trump is so good at doing. Every policy he pursues tells a story to Americans about why they should either be afraid of immigrants or why they may benefit from what he’s doing. And on the Democratic side, there’s none of that. It’s just “this is a human rights issue and it’s right to do and therefore support it.”—Andrea Flores

What would a better pro-immigration argument sound like, that’s comprehensive in, say, 2026, or moving ahead? Not just the moral argument alone, not just the Chamber of Commerce argument alone, but integrating all these things together, connecting immigration reform to families’ lives?

I think it’s being honest with exactly how immigration impacts the lives of American citizens. And that’s going to be a switch for the immigrant rights movement, right? Where I’ve worked in it for a long time, and our audience is generally immigrants who are impacted by the very broken system, or it’s been an audience in Washington, right? Because it’s a federal issue, you have to change it on the federal level. You can’t really go to a state and fix immigration and fix the visa system. It has to be a game in Congress.

But a way that you could start to change that is being really honest and saying, all right, so Congress just passed a big bipartisan housing bill. It’s going to be signed into law. It’s supposed to build a certain amount of housing in the next few years. It won’t be able to, right? Because it has no provision to make sure that the immigrant workers who would normally build those houses will be here.

So I think we have to be…we don’t have to talk about it in the same way. I always think about [for example] a path to citizenship. You mentioned polling. That always polls really well with Americans. But where we get stuck is, we often say, “well, we want to pass something that legalizes 11 million people.” And then people get really lost, right?

Why don’t we say “we have a caregiver visa, why can’t undocumented workers who are already caregiving qualify for that instead?” That’s a path to citizenship, potentially.

It’s about changing the policy tools and telling a story with those changes, because that is what Trump is so good at doing. Every policy he pursues tells a story to Americans about why they should either be afraid of immigrants or why they may benefit from what he’s doing. And on the Democratic side, there’s none of that. It’s just “this is a human rights issue and it’s right to do and therefore support it.” You’re never going to build a coalition.

Alright, last question. So building off of this point about Trump. The Trump enforcement politics are built around fear, spectacle, deterrence. I think that’s maybe even giving too much credit. I’m not sure they’re as organized to even deserve the word deterrent, honestly. But do you think that these kind of general tactics are still effective, even in the last few months? We obviously saw what happened in Minneapolis. Just yesterday a sitting senator, Andy Kim, got tear gassed outside of an ICE facility. Do you think this is still politically effective? Is immigration going to be a Teflon issue for Trump, even as the economy and everything just goes into the toilet? Or is it starting to create a backlash, especially kind of when voters see all this, when people see on their televisions and screens now. What’s it going to kind of take to move this issue into a more positive space moving forward?

I think it’s going to take Democrats offering an alternative vision. So let’s take Minneapolis, right? That was the most extreme [anti-immigration] deployment I’ve ever seen. That was something we’ve never seen before, but everything that comes after that looks like a de-escalation because that was so extreme.

Or take birthright citizenship, right? That was a fringe view that had been in the legal community treated as completely absurd, right?

And yet it’s at the Supreme Court. Trump probably will lose that case. But then that same week, he’ll probably win a case to terminate legal status for like 1.3 million people who have temporary protected status. So they kind of pair really big spectacle moves with things that are actually going to have even a bigger impact many times.

So yeah, stay at the overreach moments like a US senator should not be tear gassed when he’s just doing his oversight duty. But you need, to your point, candidates who can talk about that in real time and say, this is what mass deportation is. This is why it’s extreme. This is why it’s not good for the country, and here’s what we’ll do instead.

There’s so many other issues competing for Americans time, right? I think cost of living, the war, and for Trump, I always point out immigration is still the strongest of his low issues, right? His approval rating may be going down, but he’s still seen as having some advantage on it. And you can tell he feels that way based on the announcements and how they use it to distract.

Andrea Flores is the author of the Securing America’s Promise Substack. She’s widely read and cited across the board on this issue. Andrea, thanks so much for giving me a little bit of your time today. And let’s stay in touch and revisit this soon.

Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Of course. Take care.

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Late last year, and early into this year, I began sitting down with a number of congressional candidates and candidates for governor in battleground races across the country. I wanted to talk to them about their campaigns, but also—because of our focus here at The Forum— how they saw policy issues related to kids and families.

And especially schools—pre-K through higher education.

So this week I’m particularly happy to sit down with Congresswoman Haley Stevens from Michigan’s 11th District, who serves on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Haley was first elected to the U.S. House in 2018 at the age of 35, and won tough re-election races in 2020, 2022, and 2024. Before running for office, she had a variety of roles in policy and political staff positions—most notably serving as Chief-of-Staff to Steven Rattner for President Obama’s Auto Rescue Task Force.

Haley Stevens is now running against Abdul El-Sayed and State Senator Mallory McMorrow in a hotly contested primary for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. She’s been endorsed by a number of unions, several fellow members of Congress, former Governor Jennifer Granholm, and the state’s legendary former Senator Debbie Stabenow.

We were supposed to talk last week, but we had to reschedule for the House Education Committee meeting that featured U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. During the hearing, Haley Stevens grilled McMahon on a variety of issues, especially the growing teacher shortage in Michigan and beyond.

Here’s Our Conversation

JOSH: I’m happy today to have Congresswoman Haley Stevens from Michigan’s 11th District on talk about a couple of different things here. Congresswoman Stevens is running for the Senate right now, but also serves in the House Education Committee. So we’re going to talk a little bit about all of that. What’s going on, Haley Stevens?

HALEY: Hey, it’s great to be talking with you. I’m glad to be doing this. Obviously, it’s a pretty serious time out there right now. It’s a time of uncertainty and a lot of that and all of it, frankly, is coming down from Donald Trump’s chaos and abuses of power.

JOSH: Before we get to your current campaign, tell us a bit about your background. I’m interested in what you did both before getting to Congress and even before that--what was your first job out of college?

HALEY: Well, look, I was born here in Michigan—in Southeast Michigan. My dad was actually born in the city of Detroit, grew up in Detroit till he was about 10 years old, and moved to Warren.

My parents, when I was growing up, had a small business. It was a landscaping business. My dad was also a public school teacher, though, too. So I just grew up around really hardworking parents who wanted to give us the best, you know, late- 20th century life that they could.

I grew up just seeing all that and that kind of motivated my approach to public service and how I started getting involved in, you know, government and political campaigns. It was just about working really hard.

But you did ask about one of my first jobs, I think it was out of college, but I had a really, really good first job when I was in high school. I worked at Blockbuster Video. I didn’t last too long. It was like a late summer job, but I went through their training program. That Blockbuster video is long gone now.

JOSH: I actually really wanted a job at Blockbuster. They wouldn’t have me. I applied all over to, like, 7 different Blockbusters, so you’re one up on me there.

HALEY: I bet if I looked hard enough, I could probably find one of their old pieces of paraphernalia or something like the card or whatnot for you.

But look, I would say this. I graduated college right before the Great Recession hit. And when the Great Recession hit, that obviously whacked the place that we call home here in Michigan hardest. So the question for me became, how can I help Michigan?

You know, I thought about going and working at a car dealership, but I had also been working on the Obama campaign, and was kind of right there as he was getting ready to transition into office, and I heard that they were going to do something with the auto industry.

And so I put up my hand, you know, just kind of right place, right time. Steve Ratner was going to be tapped for that, and Steve needed a chief of staff. I’m pretty sure my thick Midwestern accent just convinced him that I would do a great job.

And I was the person from Michigan on that team, you know, taking those phone calls, getting everything set up, making the wheels turn. And it was unbelievable. And obviously we made it through that tough time. But man, oh man, was that an example of good federal policy making, meeting the moment for who we are as Michiganders.

Now is not the time in Michigan to be comfortable and to have comfortable leadership. Now is the time to step up and to fight back.—Rep. Haley Stevens

JOSH: You’re leaving a House seat you’d be heavily favored to win in, to run for the Senate. Walk me through that process: tell me one reason why you might have stayed in that House seat, and one reason that really determined that you’d make the Senate run.

HALEY: I will tell you this because I have a feeling that some of your viewers are younger people who are looking forward to a life of making big decisions. One piece of advice I have on that front is when you make a decision, don’t look back. Don’t talk about the alternative, because it doesn’t exist anymore, and you’re just spinning your wheels. And so I’ll say this to what you’re asking me, which is a really great question. I love the work I do for Michigan.

I am so grateful and honored and humbled to be in my fourth term in the United States House of Representatives, you know, fighting for us, being recognized as the most effective Democrat for Michigan in the Congress. The most effective Democrat for science and tech issues, actually, alongside Gary Peters in the Senate.

Not clear what the California folks are doing, but, you know, Gary and I are writing bills and getting them passed. So, you know, that works. When I ran for Congress, I flipped a seat. And very similarly to when I worked on the auto rescue, I saw Michigan needing something and I wanted to run at it.

So I held Michigan’s 11th district in 2018 and 2020. The district now is redrawn. It is a different district. And you’re right, it tends to be, you know, more of what they call a safer seat for Democrats.

And I love the work that I do on the Science committee and on the Education Committee, which I know we’re going to talk about. But last year, when a fully paralyzed veteran reached out to me through a mutual friend asking if he was still going to get his benefit check because he saw Elon Musk prancing around a stage with a chainsaw—that really broke me and it just jarred me.

And I thought, you know, now is not the time in Michigan to be comfortable and to have comfortable leadership. Now is the time to step up and to fight back.

And I can tell you that I am doing more today, you know, serving in the House of Representatives, running for a statewide role to serve Michigan in the United States Senate and to offer ideas and solutions to some of these challenges that we are facing.

Mike Rogers [the GOP nominee], who, you know, I know you’re familiar with him, but he’s made it really clear what his priorities are. And I… I’m writing a love letter to Michigan. Mike Rogers, he wants to rubber stamp Donald Trump. I’m out here saying I want to work to lower your costs. Mike Rogers is saying, hey, let’s keep the Gordie Howe Bridge permanently closed, like, and go along with these erratic tariffs at every turn. I mean, give me a break.

This isn’t working for Michigan and our manufacturing sector is paying a price.

And as someone who is in a big race that’s still going to be playing out, and there’s a lot of different polls, you know, given the day of the week that it is, but every single poll shows the same thing.

Which is that I am in the best and strongest position to go and beat Mike Rogers and continue to stand up for Michigan at the law-making table. To continue to make sure that we have, you know, a good, strong auto industry with good federal policies around it, that we have an enshrined 21st century labor movement, and that consumers are getting relief around these gas prices, these utility bills, the health care costs, and of course the cost of food.

We don’t even know who’s running for Senate Democratic leadership right now. And I’m not even in the Senate right now. And my deal is just, let’s get there, let’s see who’s going to be running, and my goodness, let me just do the work for Michigan, right?—Rep. Haley Stevens

JOSH: I've had quite a number of different candidates on. Different Members of Congress, a couple of your colleagues. I'll be honest—and I'm not trying to sub-tweet anyone or troll anyone—but I am losing track of all of the litmus tests Democratic candidates are getting to run for office these days. Who you would vote for, for caucus leader. Which campaign funds are “okay” to accept, which aren’t, and which pledges you’re supposed to take or make. Let me just ask you a broad question: How do you think about all of these problems and questions when it comes to campaign donations, when it comes to potential leadership votes down the line? Just in terms of your own values and what you want to watch out for when you make decisions?

HALEY: So look, next year we’re going to reorganize government. We’re going to see, you know, elections happen and a new legislative session of Congress. And there is a lot of speculation about Democratic leadership

But the thing is, is we don’t even know who’s running right now. And I’m not even in that role right now. And I’ve had a little bit of experience with this, because when I came into the house, you know, there was a lot of question and pushback around the speaker, and who was going to be speaker.

And Nancy Pelosi ended up running unopposed, right? And I don’t know if something like that’s going to be the case in the Senate. I really don’t. And my deal is just, let’s get there, let’s see who’s going to be running, and my goodness, let me just do the work for Michigan, right?

I am a lawmaker’s lawmaker. I love to write bills and move them to the floor and see them get passed. I am going to continue to, you know, maintain my good relationships in the House of Representatives because we need those relationships to pass the bills, right?

And then I think in terms of campaign finance reform. Yeah, look, we’re at a boiling point. We haven’t had reform in decades now, and we’re paying the price for it. I have proudly co-sponsored and voted for comprehensive campaign finance reform every single chance I have gotten.

I’m in my fourth year in the minority party, and I will tell you, Republicans aren’t lifting a finger on this front. They do not care about dark money or transparency or, you know, just this, you know, spend a bunch of money on Meta to raise a bunch of money.

Look. Mike Rogers will block campaign finance reform in the United States Senate.

I saw that when I was in the house. We voted for it in the House, and, you know, the Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell crew didn’t lift a finger on this front. We’ve got to reform, and so this is why, you know, I’ve got an A grading from the leading campaign finance reform organization End Citizens United.

I fundraise very similarly to how Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow have. I’m really proud to have Debbie Stabenow’s endorsement in this race, which came a couple of weeks ago and has been really quite transformative

And I remain very deeply committed to my non-millionaire status, you know, in this race right now and getting campaign finance reform done and, you know, being of the people for the people and by the people.

After decades and decades and decades of not funding special education at the federal level, we’re leaving school districts and families holding the bag.—Rep. Haley Stevens

JOSH: I have many followers from the education community here. You serve on the House Education committee right now--you grilled Linda McMahon last week. What’s one big issue that’s come up in your time on that committee that you’d like folks to know about--that maybe we wouldn’t know or know less about had I not asked?

HALEY: One issue that I’ve really taken up and have led around has been the full funding for special education. There’s a member of Congress who has the pen on the bill. His name is Jared Huffman. He came into Congress before me, so I co-sponsor Jared’s bill to fully fund special education

But what I’ve also done has been very deep back here in Michigan, working with Bob McCann, who runs the K-12 Alliance. You know, working very closely with our heads of county school-wide systems, you know, our head of Oakland schools, Wayne RESA [the intermediate school district surrounding Detroit]. I know my superintendents very well. I got to know them really well during COVID, of course, school principals and educators and alike.

And the reason why I’ve really taken up the statewide mantle to achieve the full funding for this unfunded mandate is it is just squeezing us dry. It has been 50 years of, you know, the requirement, thankfully, to say that every child, no matter the ability, can go and get a public education.

In my district, we’ve got Wing Lake, which is a special needs school. I know some of the families who send their children there with very, very severe medically complex challenges. And thank goodness they’ve got that school and that they have Medicaid, even though Donald Trump has slashed it, because again, you know, if your kid doesn’t have full walking abilities or language abilities, you’re relying on that good public school. You’re relying on that Medicaid too.

[ed. note: a portion of Medicaid can be used to fund children’s health expenses specifically at schools. Roughly $8 billion in Medicaid funding went to kids for school-based services last year, around $200 million to Michigan]

But what has happened is it’s been kind of a robbing Peter to pay Paul. And in talking with some of the families, I know that, you know, they have to really, you know, look within the budget systems, make sure that their schools, you know, are getting, you know, the full funding, even students with, you know, some reading comprehension challenges, you know, IEPs and having the right educators around that.

And after decades and decades and decades of not funding special education at the federal level, we’re leaving school districts and families holding the bag.

This isn’t just one issue for me. It is my North Star. You know, Josh, 2020 hit, okay, the beginning of 2020. I said, this is going to be the year. I’m going to beat the drum on special ed. I had literally in January, a big community event. It was kind of like a town hall type of forum. I had community leaders, special education leaders, families talking. I was going to make that whole year for this push to do special ed.

Obviously, then Covid hit. But I think when you, you know, mirror good policymaking with the political, which sometimes ties into how we campaign or how we communicate with voters: I’m out here talking about this. I have made this a part of what I do because I really believe in these children and their parents, and we owe it to them. We really do.

So I’ll stop because I could go on and on, and there’s other things I’ve worked on, particularly around the Addressing Teacher Shortages Act, you know, the very frustrating reality that they have completely gutted the Department of Education.

We don’t have an Office of Civil Rights—and on and on. I mentioned my dad briefly. He taught public school in Detroit. For the last 15 years of his career, he was first grade. He was at Bethune Elementary School in Pontiac the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. He was a student teacher. He was part of the Jonathan Kozol desegregation, equal access movement on education.

So this has just been a policy issue that I just all around want to take up and continue to lead on education in the United States Senate. And you better believe me when I say I’m going to do that, I will.

We need good, effective partnership to meet goals and to meet national priorities.—Rep. Haley Stevens.

JOSH: Last week I had Amanda Litman on from Run for Something. We talked a little bit about federal education and all this stuff. You mentioned the Department of Ed. And one of the things Amanda said was, you know, Trump wrecked this thing, and I think those of us who’ve been in this space for a long time know that there’s a major change coming in sort of the federal approach to education moving forward. How do you think about this as somebody actually in Congress right now thinking about the future? How do you see the federal role changing when it comes to kids and families?

HALEY: We’ve got to fully support families with an equitable and fair tax code. You know, we’ve got to look at who’s paying what marginal tax rate and why the middle class family is oftentimes paying more than the big corporations or the billionaires.

We’ve got to stand up for the earned benefits and guarantee those earned benefits for Social Security and Medicare. And here in Michigan, and with regard to our Department of Education: We need partnership.

You know, a lot of times Republicans shape this as bureaucracy or the need for limited government. We need good, effective partnership to meet goals and to meet national priorities.

JOSH: I want to ask one final question about being a person. You put out a tweet a little while ago about all the attacks that have come your way. Being a person is hard even when you’re not in the public eye and I want to know how you take care of yourself, what’s one thing you do just for you that keeps you grounded and gets you up in the morning.

HALEY: Well, this morning I got up and went for a nice jog. Time outside is really a blessing, even in those cold winter days, you know, just taking a couple round walks around the block, you know, stopping to smell the flowers, as they say.

But also, you know, I mentioned my parents had the landscape business. So we always take time to send each other pictures of cool trees that we see, which I know sounds kind of dorky, but it’s just really, you know, being in awe of Mother Nature. And we all know that the science is right around that, you know, when you’re in Mother Nature, your blood pressure is lowering, your stress levels are going down, and that’s an easy reset for anybody, right?

Because, gosh, you know, whether you’re single or raising a family, you know, you’re working full time, finishing off your degree or your apprenticeship training program: we all need just to find the pleasure in little things. The easy and accessible things like going outside, getting a walk in or a jog. And that’s certainly what I do.

Haley Stevens is the Congresswoman from the 11th District in Michigan running for the US Senate in a really crucial race. Congresswoman, thanks so much for giving me a little bit of time today. Thanks for putting your hand up. We’ll talk soon, okay?

HALEY: Yes, we will. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been looking forward to chatting with Amanda Litman for a few weeks now. She’s the co-founder and president of Run for Something—the wildly successful grassroots organizing group that helps recruit and train thousands of progressive political candidates across the country.

If you admire a progressive state or local leader in your community, there’s a good chance they’ve worked with Run for Something.

A year ago yesterday, Amanda published When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership. It’s a highly readable approach to building out personal and professional values for decision-making, managing an organization, and seeing it all through for results.

Amanda Litman has also worked at the highest levels of American politics—presidential and major statewide campaigns—and appears regularly across the country to weigh in current political events.

JOSH: Amanda Litman thanks for being here. So let’s get started with some basics. I have a pretty politically engaged following here and I know you’re going to be familiar to some of those folks, but walk me through Run for Something and how you got started with that work.

AMANDA: So I’m Amanda Litman, born and raised in Northern Virginia, went to Northwestern for college, and I was a senior in college, I started interning on the Obama campaign. I was hired before I graduated. And we won. That was so fun. I was doing online fundraising and volunteer recruitment. And I stayed working in Chicago for Organizing for Action for a year.

I moved down to Florida to work on the governor’s race in 2014, where I was the digital director for the Democrat running for governor that year. And then I moved to New York, where I now live, to work for Secretary Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2015. I was her email director, so again, online fundraising and volunteer recruitment. And then we lost, and that was really sad.

About a week after election day, I started hearing from people I’d gone to high school and college with who are like, “Hey, Amanda, I’m a public school teacher in Chicago. I’m thinking about running for office because if Trump can do this, seems like anybody can do this. What do I do? Who do I call? You’re the only person I know that works in politics. I don’t know where to go.”

And at the time, if you were young and newly excited about politics, you wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was no way you could go that would answer your call. And that, to me felt like a symptom of really big problems, both in our democracy, but also in the Democratic Party.

So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea. What if we started an organization to solve this problem? One of those folks became my co-founder, Ross Morales Rocketto, and we wrote a plan, and we built a website, and then we launched Run for Something on Trump’s first inauguration day back in 2017.

I thought it’d be really small. We’d get a hundred people in the first year. We had a thousand people sign up in the first week, and as of today, we have more than 260,000 young people all across the country who’ve raised their hands to run for office. We’ve endorsed more than 4,000. We’ve helped elect more than 1,653 across 49 states plus DC, and we’re the largest candidate pipeline in politics.

“Policies as a candidate are less important than what they reflect about your values and who you’re fighting for.”—Amanda Litman

JOSH: So a year ago this week your book comes out: When We’re in Charge. It’s more a book about leadership than politics per se. But obviously you started that work during Biden years. Then Trump wins. Tell me what you were trying to do with the book at first, and now how it feels a year out.

AMANDA: It’s an interesting question. So I started working on the book really at some point throughout 2023, because I started hearing from a bunch of reporters who were like, “Hey, seems like all of your candidates,” Mallory McMorrow, Zooey Zephyr in Montana, even the Justins in Tennessee who—while they were not our candidates—were part of the broader conversation around, in particular, millennial and Gen Z politicians who kept like making national headlines.

And these reporters asked me, like, “what do these people have in common? Besides, you know, a bunch of them work with you all.” And I realized actually there was something really interesting going on, which is Millennial and Gen Z leaders were entering systems and structures not built for people like us and doing things differently.

And that wasn’t just in politics, it was something I’d experienced running a company for most of the last decade. It was something I was hearing from my peers, from my colleagues. I was seeing it in, you know, on my TikTok or over on Instagram: people talking about Millennial bosses doing things a little bit differently.

So I thought maybe there’s something here. The more that I read, the more that I talked to folks, the more I realized maybe there’s a book here. So we sold the book actually on my daughter’s 1st birthday, which is very monumental for me, because I was like, “Oh, right, motherhood doesn’t actually have to kill who I am as a professional,” which is really nice.

And I wrote it throughout 2024. I ended up doing interviews with more than 130 leaders across a bunch of different sectors. You know, yes, members of Congress and politicians, but also the CEO of Snapchat and rabbis, and teachers, and doctors, and, you know, corporate executives.

I kept hearing the same echoes of themes across all those conversations.

So the book came out in last May, and I’ve been thinking back about what that moment was like. It was a month before Mamdani won the mayoral primary here in New York. It was a couple of weeks before these stories started coming out, a survey that Glassdoor did that said Millennials now make up a majority of all managers and Gen Z make up about one in 10.

It was a conversation about generational change, about a need for a new group of leaders to take over in politics, in business, in media.

I’m hearing from people over the last year who’ve read the book or listened to the book or skimmed it at the library. They’ve said, “this gave me a language to talk about a thing I didn’t know I was struggling with.”

Or “it gave me this really hopeful, concrete advice,” or from Gen Xers were pissed that they were entirely left out of the book, which…Classic Gen X response.

It’s just been so cool to hear and to feel really gratified that I was really speaking to something people were challenged by.

“Be very clear about what your values are as an individual or as a leader, and then what your organization’s values are. And what is the difference between the two?”—Amanda Litman

JOSH: Well I think I’m on the tail end of Gen X. I turn 48 in August, and actually saw a lot of folks in my half generation above mid-Millennial in this book, so I appreciated it. Switching gears: put me down as some who thinks we’re in uncharted territory in American politics—and that includes in the ways expect the business community and the legal community interact with government. What’s your advice to people trying to build out a career—maybe not directly in politics necessarily but at least in politics- adjacent work like policy advocacy, consulting, and so on—in this really volatile and difficult-to-predict moment?

AMANDA: I think there’s a couple ways to think about it. One is personally, like, make sure that your job is not your political home.

Which is a really hard thing to do, especially if you work even quasi-related or mission-related work. If you have a job that feels like a calling, like you’re in education, or, you know, if you’re in media, where it feels like this is the thing you’re meant to do, and it’s how you want to make a difference in the world, that’s important.

It’s good, but don’t make that the only place you do your politics, because if you expect your job to fulfill both your political and sort of like moral obligations, as well as your actual economic ones, you’re going to be screwed. You need to have a political home outside of your job, and that’s really important.

Now, professionally, you know, I think, and related to this: Be really clear about what are your values as an individual or as a leader, and then what are the organization’s values? And what is the difference between the two? Because often, even if you’re starting your own thing, there is some distinction between the two.

And then: where are the places where you can push the organization or the team or the company’s activity to be a little bit more values-forward?

Because some of the frustration that people have with their workplaces is when they talk about believing in one thing and then behave differently. So when as much as possible, you can sort of close the distance between those, knowing that they’re never going to mesh perfectly with where you are as an individual.

I think that can help deal with some of the cognitive dissonance people feel and the frustration they feel with their employer.

“What are we actually trying to build in our public education system that meets the moment and is sustainable for the next 100 years?”—Amanda Litman

JOSH: I reached out to you because of two messages I’ve seen you drive in your public engagement. The first is on family policy and politics. You’ve posted about family leave and other priorities Democrats need to embrace. I got involved sort of accidentally in politics as maybe the most visible critic of school vouchers short of Randi Weingarten, who’s a friend of mine. But everywhere I go—23 states now—I hear the same thing. Voter don’t like right-wing plans like vouchers, but what the hell is the Dem plan for schools? What’s the message for kids and families? I don’t mean a policy one-off—I mean the message. Since 2020, Republicans have been talking more about kids and families. Democrats have been talking less. What’s your take on all this?

AMANDA: I think you got to get back to—not to be all like techie on you—what are the first principles here? What are we actually trying to accomplish and trying to solve for?

And I think we’re at a moment where we get to really reimagine things or imagine anew. It’s not even going backwards but looking forwards. Trump has done in some ways the hard part, which is tearing everything down. I think one of the challenges that Democrats have had, honestly, the last couple of decades, is that because we helped build these institutions and these establishments.

We have a hard time sort of thinking. Like, what could it look like if we were starting fresh? It’s why so many of our policies are like nipping around the edges, where it’s like, you know, the 300% increase of this kind of deduction. It’s because we don’t necessarily want to do the hard, scary thing of just starting over.

Trump destroyed the Department of Education. Like he did it. He did the hard part. It was terrible. It’s horrible. Huge consequences. Okay, what is a new version of that look like? Like, what are we actually trying to build in our public education system that meets the moment and that could build sustainably for the next 100 years?

What are we trying to build with, like our foreign aid, with our family policies? I think this is where you see candidates who can really succeed are ones who have a strong set of values and maybe aren’t as committed to any particular tactic so much as they know what they want to do.

Like, you want to build a society where people can live where they want to live, can get their kids a good education, can have, like, fulfilling lives, can spend time with their family and friends, they don’t feel overly burdened by government, but also feel like government is there to support them and enable their ambitions and their dreams.

That’s a really hard thing to navigate through, but what would we build if we were doing that? I think that is the question. There’s much smarter policy thinkers. I mean, I am not a policy wonk in the slightest.

What I do think is that we have a chance in this moment to start fresh and start from first principles, from what is the thing we’re trying to build? And then work from there. I think that’s where Democrats often get lost is it’s they get stuck in reality and we stop being able to dream, which is really sad.

JOSH: On this point. The second thing I’ve seen you talk about is the idea that we need to be flexible on policy but consistent on values. I think you nailed it. This is extremely important and stands out to me as someone deeply engaged in a particular policy space but is also trying to push candidates and electeds into more engagement on the why as much as the what. Can you give me some examples of folks who are good on this—flexible policy, strong on values—and, or, how you to try to drive that framing in the work you do at Run for Something?

AMANDA: You know, we think about this in terms of: people have to reflect the place they’re in and be committed to community first and foremost. So in 2025. Good example here. Same night, same election year, same cycle, same team. We were able to elect Kelsea Bond, a DSA candidate union organizer, renter who was running on really aggressive tenant reform, climate justice, workers justice. She was connecting on the idea that housing and transportation issues are working family issues, because if you can’t get to your job, how are you going to make a living? If you don’t have green space to spend, like, to enjoy time with your kids, how are you going to enjoy your family?

The same night we helped elect Andrew Harbaugh, who’s a former Republican who left the party on January 6th. So he was all in for Trump I. But the the insurrection was a step too far, which I appreciate. He’s a sports journalist, parent of two, for whom the Department of Education cuts really affected his kid with special needs in the public school system.

He was like, you know what? Screw this, I’m gonna run for office as a Democrat. He was running in a deep red rural county in Pennsylvania that Trump won 70-30. He flipped a seat red to blue. Do he and Kelsea talk about the issues in the same way? No. Do they think about the issues in the same way? Kind of. Are they generally rowing in the same direction, and do they reflect the communities they’re in? 100%.

And that’s what matters. When we think about how we’re going to win in the future and how we’re going to be able to win in deep red places and purple ones and give people leaders in blue ones who can actually govern. That’s how you do it. It’s making sure that you, you know, we talk about building a big tent.

A tent still has a temple in the middle. It also still has walls. That means there are still boundaries, and to a certain extent where you draw the line. I think that’s part of the metaphor that people forget when they’re talking about it like the values are the tent pole borders where we draw the line, and how to make sure that to be inclusive.

But still a little bit of the bigots and the hatefulness out.

“Everyone of every age is feeling frustrated. Everyone of every age feels like things are harder than they should be.”—Amanda Litman

JOSH: Last question, kind of a wrap-up and wrap-around. All three of my children will be voting in the next presidential election. Two are voting this fall. My own parents are still alive and have opinions and values—and needs. You’ve got kids and you write and talk a lot about parenthood. With the caveat that candidates and political leaders can’t be all things to everyone, what’s your advice for folks trying to speak to voters at different stages in the life cycle? Maybe go harder than advice. What you do want new progressive leaders to be talking about to reach as broad a section of American families as possible—both from the standpoint of winning damn elections but also in terms of what’s the right thing to do?

AMANDA: I think sometimes Democrats have a tendency to focus on facts over feelings.

And, you know, the Republican Party notoriously over the last couple years has been like, your feelings, you little snowflakes, whatever.

It’s like: One, feelings are really important, because people do not engage with politics on an intellectual level. Most people, if you have like an intellectual conversation or a framework for how you engage in politics, you are much more engaged than 90% of the American electorate, 95% electorate. Most people are thinking about it in terms of feelings.

I think this is one of the challenges of Biden in 2024, and one of the things that Trump is going to struggle with in 2026 is you can’t tell people the economy is good when they don’t feel like it’s good. Whether or not the numbers are there, and with Biden, maybe they were with Trump, they are absolutely not.

If it feels hard, you’ve got to speak to that feeling, and then give people a path out of it. Honestly, it’s very much like parenting. You know, I have a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, and my 3-year-old had a massive meltdown this morning. We were getting ready to leave for school, and she was upset because her little sister got her shoes on first, and she felt like she was losing, and how could we let the baby win?

It’s like one? That’s insane. It’s objectively insane. It doesn’t matter who wins and who loses in putting their shoes on first. But for me to say that to her—and I was because I’m exhausted—that doesn’t help her. That doesn’t help to you got to speak to how people are feeling and then give them permission to feel that way, and then a path to the next feeling.

I think that’s where what Democrats are talking about. How do you, like, speak to so many generations right now? You know, everyone of every age is feeling frustrated. Everyone of every age feels like things are harder than they should be.

And everyone feels like they can’t have the life that they want. Like whether that life that they want is being able to retire and spend time with their family—but they can’t afford to live near their kids, or their kids can’t afford to live near them. Or if you’re younger, you maybe can’t afford to have the kind of family that you want.

Of if you’re younger still it’s like, “screw you. I’m not gonna have a family. I’m going to be gambling, because the future is totally unreliable. Who knows what it could look like? I’m spending it all on Kalshi in the prediction markets.”

I think speaking to that anxiety and to that uncertainty, there’s lots of different ways in which policies can speak to that. But those policies as a candidate are less important than what they reflect about your values and who you’re fighting for, and how you understand how people are feeling.

So that’s what I would recommend to candidates and to leaders at large now is like, understand how people are feeling. And the way that you understand them is by talking to them and actually listening and then repeating it back to them. Honestly, it’s it’s parenting, but in politics.

Amanda Litman is the co-founder of Run for Something, author of the book When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership. It's a year old now, but more relevant today than ever before.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

This week, my conversation is with author and Harvard law professor Leah Plunkett. She is also a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Leah’s book Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online (MIT Press) was released a couple years ago, and since then she’s been one of the country’s leading experts on children and families when it comes to internet privacy, screen time, and the legal and policy questions involved in both.

States across the country are setting limits on screen time in public schools. New reporting on the prevalence of YouTube and Chromebooks in the classroom has helped spur these changes, as have concerns that academic declines may be driven in part by over-reliance on digital devices.

But Leah Plunkett’s concerns go further, wrapping parent choices into the larger discussion of digital and online behavior. She has worked on court cases involving kid influencers—including kids whose parents make substantial money on their child’s internet exposure—and her book Sharenthood outlines some of the downsides that we all have to be honest about in the way we talk about our kids and our families in the social media world.

Leah’s got some good advice—both practical and philosophical—for how to make sense of all this, how much online exposure is too much exposure, and what’s coming next. This was a very, very timely conversation and I hope you’ll give it a read or a listen.

Leah Plunkett thanks for being here. Tell us a little bit about your legal background, the types of work that you’re engaged in, and some of the big ideas or themes of that work.

Thank you so much for having me, Josh. It’s such a pleasure and privilege to talk with you and your community of listeners.

I am trained as a lawyer. I’m a graduate of Harvard Law School. I got my start in practice as a legal aid lawyer when I founded something called the Youth Law Project at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, where I represented kids and teens and sometimes parents in civil proceedings, mostly special education and school discipline.

So that was kind of, like, one eagle arm in yoga, if I can do eagle arms in yoga, this early in the morning. Then when I became a consumer rights lawyer, and then when I became a legal academic, that sort of second arm in the eagle arms came together, and I became incredibly interested in how the everyday lives of kids and teens and families and their broader communities intersected with the internet in school, initially—that was my focus.

I got started looking at educational technologies and student privacy. From there, Josh, I broadened out, and I now teach and research and write on kids, families, communities across the United States, and the way that our daily lives intersect or fail to intersect with the American justice system.

You wrote this book Sharenthood, it’s a couple years old now but I think maybe getting more relevant by the day. What’s the overall message of the book?

The overall message of this book is that parents, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches, and other trusted adults should be very, very careful and very purposeful if and when we choose to share any information about any of the kiddos—I use kiddo here as a general term to mean minor, so really anyone kind of up through 18—before we transmit any of their information via the internet.

And my reason for that—I’ve got a lot of reasons—but my biggest reason for that is a philosophical and kind of practical commitment to thinking that childhood, again, including adolescence, should be a protected space to play, to make mischief, make a few mistakes, and grow up better for having made them.

And if we are raising our kids in a surveillance-type environment where we are chronicling all or most or even some of their experiences figuring out who they are and who they’re going to become, we are actually impeding that process of self-discovery and growth, and actually making it harder for them to figure out who they are and who they’re going to be.

If we are raising our kids in a surveillance-type environment where we are chronicling all or most or even some of their experiences figuring out who they are and who they’re going to become, we are actually impeding that process of self-discovery and growth, and actually making it harder for them to figure out who they are and who they’re going to be.—Leah Plunkett

Just playing devil’s advocate here. What’s wrong with just having a little fun? Everybody shares everything. Some would say it’s community—just digitalized. We’re all stressed about everything. What would you say to someone who doesn’t want to exclude themselves from what everyone else is doing and doesn’t want to take on a new worry about this kind of stuff?

I would say first, I love fun, and I recognize that a lot of what I have to say about the internet may seem to run counter to that, but I promise it doesn’t for the following reasons. I would say to the person who’s like, but I want to have fun! I would say, absolutely.

And you will ultimately have more fun if you are mindful and purposeful and thoughtful about the arenas in which you have fun whether the activities you’re engaging in in those arenas, especially online, are actually allowing you and your kids and your family and your community to have fun.

And you’ll free up more brain space, emotional space, psychological space, and all the things if you are a little bit less reflexive about, oh, I’m really proud of the piano recital, I gotta put it in the Facebook mom group, or super excited, the kiddos look beautiful at prom. You know, it’s my next Instagram story!

It may well be that for who you are and who your family is, a really deep-seeded, genuine part of having fun is sharing that with whoever might be following you online. If so, I respect it, I get it, and I’m old school about my belief in the First Amendment, free expression, and also individual freedom and liberty, especially parental liberty.

But I think I will be the devil’s devil’s advocate and say: How much more fun is it really bringing into your experience of prom? If you’re like, oh my gosh, the kids look beautiful, it’s up on Insta, and all of a sudden, you’re like, ooh, who commented? Who liked it? How many views? And then the kids are getting into the limo for prom, and you’re like, oh my gosh, somebody DM’d me!

Like chasing a dopamine hit or something?

It is. And look, you know, I say this with a mug filled with coffee, and it’s like my third cup of the day. So, again, I get it, but the coffee in my cup is not actually creating a digital trail for my kids that strangers or potential bad actors, even within my network, could see and repurpose.

So what are some of basic, practical guidelines for parents or grandparents who do want be proactive about what they put online, but also don’t want to isolate either?

So a couple of guidelines. One is kind of an old school thought experiment. You and I are the tail end of Gen X, so we remember growing up without the internet, and we remember when news was shared in local newspapers or holiday cards or that type of thing.

I would say to adults who either remember those analog days or who can sort of do a thought experiment about them: think about whether if you had to take out an ad in the local newspaper or write this up in a hard copy holiday card and send it to hundreds of people from your great aunt to your boss, would you still be sharing it, right? And if the answer is no, I’d feel a little icky [putting it online now].

Or maybe even, like, think about your 13-year-old self, and sort of think, would I have felt weird if my parents had taken out an ad in the local newspaper to, like, talk about how my tryouts for softball went? Yes, we all would have.

So then just maybe think, is there a way of sharing this that still creates community, still sparks fun, still sparks the dopamine hit, but isn’t quite as public? And there are ways of doing that, right? End-to-end encrypted messaging, group chats in those kinds of more secure messaging apps.

People will often say, what about my social media settings if they’re set to private? To which I will say, I think it’s a little bit better, but truly, even social media settings set to private are kind of the equivalent of putting something on a billboard by the side of every highway everywhere in the world, now and forever.

And so maybe just think a little bit about whether you want to do that.

I don’t like what I’m seeing in terms of research or just common sense about how much time kids in primary and secondary schools in this country are spending on devices. I think we are setting up kids to have to master their own ability to pay attention in a way that is completely unreasonable for people who still have maturing brains.—Leah Plunkett

It’s a bit outside your specific focus here but a big theme right now in education is reclaiming kids’ attention from screens. YouTube has taken over. Chromebooks in classes. iPhones, everything. How do you think about the specific problem of kids on screens and online—beyond what their parents put up online about those kids?

This is actually going back to my original research with the Berkman Klein Center, starting back in 2013. I was part of a team that we had then called the Student Privacy Initiative.

And we spent a lot of time looking at the privacy policies and practices and norms, as well as some of the adjacent spaces to privacy, so things like safety and well-being for kids in K-12 in public schools across the U.S. So this is a bit of a return to that research, as well as the class I teach every fall at the Harvard Law School, which is on youth privacy and digital citizenship.

And definitely that digital citizenship part of it encompasses the choices that adults are making about whether, when, how, and why to give kids screens. So adults are involved, certainly, in the YouTube in schools phenomenon. Kids are not making the decisions about whether they’re using Chromebooks or, you know, pen and paper.

But I certainly agree once you give a kiddo a device—particularly a kiddo, honestly, over, like, the age of 3 at this point—they’re exercising a fair amount of autonomy over what they’re doing on it, whether we adults like it or not.

So when we started researching the real wave, maybe even onslaught of educational technologies in schools, really kind of going back—I would date this era to the early 2010s—we as researchers were much more focused on privacy, data gathering, data aggregation, whether kids were seeing advertising and marketing, whether they were being targeted with surveys.

We were not using, at least at the Berkman Klein Center, as a focus, we were not using the word “attention” or “focus.” That was not something that was front and center of our minds, but we were very aware, even going back to that initial push that Google and other providers were making to have one-to-one device classrooms, right?

That was the big thing back then—and still is. We were very aware that children’s time and their education could be disrupted. Again, we were thinking a lot about things like marketing and advertising.

So how I think about devices in schools now is actually pretty much the same as how I think about them in homes and sports and houses of worship and all those other places is the following. First, of course, always looking for, is there a law, is there a binding regulation, etc? Okay.

Once we’ve done that, why are we using the device? Who is using it? For what purposes? And quick gut check: could we accomplish more or less the same thing, or possibly even a better thing, if we didn’t use the technology?

And I don’t like what I’m seeing in terms of research or anecdotic data, or just common sense about how much time kids in primary and secondary schools in this country are spending on devices. I think we are setting up kids to have to master their own ability to pay attention in a way that is completely unreasonable for people who still have maturing brains.

Honestly, it can be hard enough as a full-grown adult to be like, oh, right, I really can’t just, you know, pop over to, you know, my New York Times or Wall Street Journal app and see what’s happening in the world when I’m supposed to be paying attention and such and such a thing.

I think it is a Herculean task to ask kids to do that. I also think we’re setting up an incredibly unfortunate dynamic, and this now, Josh, goes back even before my Berkman Klein days to my legal aid lawyer days, where even in that 2007-2009 range, when I was a legal aid lawyer and I was representing kids in school discipline cases.

The internet was coming up a lot. I still remember going into a client meeting, maybe 8th, 9th grade girl, getting in a lot of trouble at school, undiagnosed and not properly provided for what we call educational disability. Anyway, I walk in, vice principal comes in, puts a huge stack of papers on the conference room table, and it was a printout of a MySpace exchange—if anyone remembers MySpace—that my client had allegedly had with some classmates.

Anyway, point being, we really are asking too much of our teachers, as well as other frontline administrators, because so many of them wind up essentially having to be the police of the internet.

And it’s not okay for the hardworking men, women, and people who are trying to teach our kids what they need to know for the next standardized test to be a good member of a community, to get what they want to go in college or career to also be playing whack-a-mole with not just YouTube, but with other apps and programs that the kids are inevitably sneaking onto, even when the device is ostensibly locked down. We’re never gonna win that tech cat and mouse game.

I would love to see a federal privacy law for all individuals with heightened protections for kids. I don’t think it’s going to happen soon. So I am looking to the states. To school boards at the district or local level. To communities coming together to say there are common sense, everyday norms that we should be able to agree on.—Leah Plunkett

Last question. Bring the law and the digital, online concerns together. What are going to be some of the big legal and policy fights over the next five years? Ten years? Where are we going for all this—feel free to tell us we have to wait till your next book!

So my crystal ball is the following. With all due respect to our federal government—and I’m agnostic on administrations when I say this—the federal government has not done, on the legislative side the kind of leadership work we need it to do on privacy and online safety law reform for any of us in this country, particularly our kids.

I would love to see Congress and the U.S. Senate pass and have the president of any administration sign an ethical, practical, of course, constitutional federal privacy law for all individuals with heightened protections for kids. Or I would settle for a comprehensive federal law just for kids.

I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years. So, brings me to my next point. I am looking to the states. I’m looking to state legislatures, I’m looking to state agencies, I’m looking to state attorneys general, I’m looking to state boards of education, school boards at the district or local level.

I’m looking to leadership in individual schools, as well as broader communities in which schools are embedded, so unions, athletic associations, and all of that, to continue the trend that I’m seeing of blue, purple, and red states and communities coming together in this kind of center of the Venn diagram to say, there are common sense, everyday norms that we should be able to agree on.

Those include that kids in schools should be learning not watching goodness knows what on YouTube. Those also include, Josh, an area that’s very near and dear to my heart that I’ve been working hard on, so I’ll plug this now, which is state law reform for protections for kids and teens who go to work as child and teen influencers.

I’m very involved with work that the Uniform Law Commission is doing. It’s available online, Child Digital Entertainer Act is what it’s called. We are in the process of drafting a potential model law.

Uniform Law Commission has not made a decision on whether or not to adopt it, so I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but there are a number of states, including California, Utah, Minnesota—so again, we have states kind of all over the map—that actually have already passed basic financial protections, and in some instances, privacy protections for kids whose parents or other adults are making money off of having those kids perform on social media platforms.

That’s an area I’m watching a lot. Another area I’m watching a lot is what will happen with AI, particularly character-based AI. There’s a lot of litigation that’s already started. There’s more to come, and you cannot have AI bots or whatever other AI is coming our way that will tell a minor things like, go ahead and murder your parents for taking away or limiting your internet time.

I should say that’s still an allegation. But that is a paraphrase of an allegation that is playing out right now in a court in Texas. So the AI companies either need to figure out yesterday how to, with a high degree of certainty, keep their bots and other AI tools from saying things to kids that are dangerous, if not illegal or criminal, or please, ideally federal government—but again, not holding my breath—states figure out whether it’s a matter of legislation, lawsuits, private plaintiffs lawsuits, or some combination, how to keep our kids safe from the real dangers that that kind of AI poses.

I should say by that kind of AI, I mean character AI that really kind of gets to know you. Last, but certainly not least, we are seeing a lot happening with outright device bans in schools here in the great state of New Hampshire, where I live with my family. We have a state law that bans kids from having their personal devices out during the day. I am in favor of it.

I think that I’d like to see New Hampshire and all other states go further, and from a top-down level at the state level, I don’t think this is a federal government purview, but at the state level, actually come up with top-down, common sense constitutional guidance, and in some instances, binding rules that takes these whack-a-mole decisions out of the hands of principals, vice principals, teachers, individual kids, and says: from the time you say the Pledge of Allegiance to the final bell you’re here to learn. If there’s an emergency, go to the office and call your mom.

Once again, Leah Plunkett is a law professor and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and the author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online

I also want to give a special shout-out to Brian Goldstone, who in April joined me here in this space for conversation about his book There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America. On Monday, May 4th, Brian won the Pulitzer for this work—a tremendous achievement for a remarkable piece of journalism.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

This week I’m going out of order a bit on Forum postings. Normally I’d do a Monday newsletter, with a conversation/interview scheduled for release Thursday. But I’m flipping the schedule to post my recent chat with Eli Savit, who last weekend became the de facto Democratic nominee for Michigan Attorney General.

The Michigan Democratic Party convention that ultimately endorsed Savit’s bid made national news for an apparent progressive swing—and for the terrible behavior of some attendees, who booed certain candidates and speakers. A faction at the convention was also able to nominate a candidate for Regent of the University of Michigan who had made statements supporting Hezbollah in the past, raising charges of anti-Semitism from both Republicans and some Democrats.

Many observers considered Eli Savit the more progressive of the two party nominees for Attorney General—although both are currently county prosecutors. Savit is the chief law enforcement official in Washtenaw County, which includes Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.

Before his election to that job in 2021, Savit served as chief legal counsel for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who is himself running this cycle as an independent for the Michigan governorship. Savit also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

While at the mayor’s office, Eli Savit helped negotiate a settlement in the Gary B. v. Whitmer case (originally called Gary B. v. Snyder, because the case was filed during Governor Rick Snyder’s term and settled during Gretchen Whitmer’s first term). The Gary B case stemmed from a complaint that the state had failed to provide children in Detroit a constitutional right to basic education when it failed to meet conditions necessary for basic levels of reading comprehension.

Given this background, the broader news coming out of Michigan, and the implications of both for major legal and political questions moving forward, I wanted to chat with Eli Savit about it all. Here’s what went down.

A Conversation with Eli Savit

Alright, Eli Savit, thanks for being here. Let’s start with some basics. Tell us a bit about your background, who you are, and why this race you’re in now matters. I have a lot of readers and listeners who live in Michigan—but many don’t. Why do state attorneys general right now matter so much and why is Michigan so important?

I’ll start with my background, just so people can get acquainted with me a little bit. My name is Eli Savit. I’m currently in my second term as the elected Washtenaw County prosecutor. For those who aren’t as familiar with Michigan: that’s Michigan’s 6th biggest county, biggest city is Ann Arbor. We also go out to Ypsilanti, Ypsilanti Township and we have a lot of rural communities as well. So it’s a pretty good cross-section of Michigan.

Like I said, I’m in my second term there. That’s where I’m born and raised. I grew up in Ann Arbor, but as I like to tell our Spartan friends, which you are one of, Josh: don’t worry, you can vote for me anyway, because I did not go to the University of Michigan for undergrad.

It’s not that I didn’t want to go. See, the only school that would allow a 6’4 center that can’t jump to play college basketball was not the University of Michigan. It was Kalamazoo College over on the west side of the state: tiny, tiny school, but I had a great time there. I started my career as a public school teacher. I taught eighth grade special education, general education classes.

I then did go to the University of Michigan for law school. Early in my career, I had the tremendous opportunity to clerk under the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court.

And I’ve had a variety of experiences throughout my legal career that I think situate me well for this position at this moment. I have done civil rights and voting rights cases. I worked for the city of Detroit and led its public interest litigation program, including suing the opioid industry and being the first city in the state to do that.

I went up against slumlords and land speculators, and also led the city’s efforts in the right-to-literacy lawsuit, which I know we’re going to talk about in a bit here. I’ve also been a practicing environmental lawyer and have sued corporate polluters on behalf of states and have, in fact, been part of case teams that have won the single site recovery that is the largest in the nation’s history for water pollution.

So I bring all that to the table: the criminal law background, the civil rights background, the environmental background, the voting rights background, the public interest background. And this is all tremendously important for the state attorney general right now.

We’re seeing a lot come out of the Trump administration in terms of violations of our civil rights and our voting rights and funding cuts to states, and the state attorney general is the one position that can go into court on behalf of the people of the state of Michigan and sue this administration or any other when they violate the law and harm the people of the state of Michigan.

It’s also important, though, that we have an AG who’s going to be the backstop and enforce our state-level civil rights, and voting rights, and environmental and worker and consumer protection laws, when especially the federal government has effectively laid down its sword on so many of those issues.

And if you are somebody from out of state, and you say to yourself, Why should I care about who the Michigan Attorney General is?

I want you to imagine that it’s election night of 2028. And there is a challenge to the vote in Detroit, in Flint, in Saginaw on college campuses in Michigan. And the outcome of that challenge could determine who the next president of the United States is.

That is a very plausible scenario. And it is really going to matter who’s in the AG’s role at that moment, because whether we fight back and how hard we fight back against attempts to disenfranchise Michiganders could literally shape the next presidential election and the future of this nation for generations to come. So, it’s an important job.

There were some things that happened at the state Democratic convention that, to my mind, didn’t live up to our party’s standards.—Eli Savit

You were effectively nominated at the endorsement convention for the Michigan Democratic Party last week. There’s been some reporting that the convention “went left” with its endorsements, and concern about crowd behavior, and some really awful elements of anti-Semitism among some party activists. How do you view what happened at the convention both for who you are as a nominee and also the Democratic Party more broadly?

Sure. I’m somebody that believes that we should have vehement and passionate political disagreement, but we should always be civil about it, and certainly nobody should ever feel as though they’re not welcome in our party because of who we are.

And there were some things that happened at the convention that, to my mind, didn’t live up to those standards. I am never in support of booing somebody offstage when they’re trying to talk, when they’re trying to explain their positions.

You know, certainly I’ve heard folks in the Jewish community which, by the way, is my community, say that they felt unsafe, they felt unwelcomed in the party, and we’ve got to make sure that we are keeping everybody in our tent, everybody in our party listening to voices from across not just the political spectrum, but voices that encompass the diversity of our party: Jewish and Muslim and Christian and Hindu, black and white, gay, straight, trans.

Everyone, right? Everybody needs to feel welcome in our party, because it’s only through solidarity that we are going to move forward as a party and as a state, and as a nation.

So, my focus right now, of course, is on winning in November, but also doing what I can to try to bring our party together to try to heal some of those wounds that I know are very real that people are feeling from convention last Sunday. We’ve all got to come together right now.

That is the most important thing, and I take the concern seriously. Like I said, certainly don’t condone some of what happened at convention. But now it’s time to unite, and I’m going to do everything in my power to bring people together.

I’ve always thought of you as a pretty pragmatic guy. Progressive, yes, but working in spaces where you have to handle a lot of different and sometimes competing priorities. You’re the Washtenaw County prosecutor but you’re running for statewide office. How will your approach change as the state’s top lawyer rather than in the county prosecutor’s office or, say, your older work as Mike Duggan’s chief legal counsel?

I appreciate the description, because I do view myself as a pragmatic person, and I know folks tend to ascribe progressive views to me, and you know, fair enough. But frankly, I don’t think there’s anything particularly ideological about what I stand for right?

I stand for Michiganders being able to have clean air and clean water, and I believe in preserving our natural resources.

I believe that workers are entitled to be paid what they are owed, and believe in fighting back and standing up to corporations that engage in wage theft.

I believe in standing up to corporations that are price gouging consumers and jacking up prices at this time of economic instability—even higher than they should be. I believe in basic civil rights and voting rights.

And yeah, I believe that we need to stand up to this administration or any other—and I mean this—Democratic or Republican, that is going to harm the people of the state of Michigan in an unlawful way.

I don’t think that that’s all that ideological, actually. I believe that’s what Michiganders want generally, and you know, in terms of running for statewide office, I’ve always said what I believed. I don’t anticipate having to change my message too much on to November.

Because what I’ve been talking about throughout my campaign is just those basic things. Yeah, corporate polluters should be held accountable. Yes, bosses who steal from their workers should be held accountable. Yes, we shouldn’t allow corporations to price gouge us, and yes, when this administration or any other is violating our civil rights or our voting rights.

We need to stand up to protect the people of the State of Michigan. I mean, that doesn’t sound too out there to me. And I really think that that’s functionally the AG’s role as the people’s lawyer.

I hope to see the day that ultimately the right to a basic education is recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the interim, there are real kids, real teachers, real school administrators on the ground doing the hard work and desperately needing more resources.—Eli Savit

Let’s talk about education law for a minute. You’ve mentioned your work on the Gary B lawsuit on behalf of kids struggling to read in Detroit. Walk us through that case and how your work on that gives folks—especially parents and educators—a sense of your priorities as Michigan’s attorney general.

So this was a case that made the really novel constitutional claim that under the Federal Constitution: children have a fundamental right to learn how to read.

And it may surprise some more casual observers of education law to know that that’s not something that’s ever been recognized by the US Supreme Court. We certainly think of education and the right to an at least minimally adequate education as being fundamentals—something that the state is obligated to provide.

But the truth of the matter is, the Supreme Court has never blessed that theory. Things had gotten so bad in Detroit as a result of state-initiated policies like emergency management, state takeovers, the totally unregulated for-profit charter school space in Detroit that had caused so much chaos that Detroit’s reading levels were not just low. I mean, they were well below any major American city that was comparable by a long shot.

The fact in this case that has so frequently stuck out in my mind as a former 8th grade teacher is that there was an 8th grade class in Detroit where they couldn’t attract a math teacher because things had gotten so bad. Couldn’t even find a long-term sub. And so they tapped the kid that they thought was the smartest 8th grader. And they said, you’re the math teacher now, right? You teach your peers math.

And if there was ever a case to be made that, you know, that’s a school in name only, and that’s an education in name only, and kids are constitutionally entitled to more, it was Detroit. It was Detroit at the time that this lawsuit was brought. So it was brought on behalf of Detroit schoolchildren, and the city was supporting the kids, and I led the city’s efforts on that.

Initially this was filed in, I believe, October of 2016, and frankly, the belief was that Hillary Clinton was going to win the presidency and fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. And there might be a 5-4 liberal majority on the court. It of course didn’t happen that way. But nevertheless, ultimately, we were able to get a good decision out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which recognized that there is such a thing as a fundamental right to read under the United States Constitution.

And at that point it was really time to come to the table and work to settle the case. I participated alongside David Hecker [then president of] AFT Michigan and Tonya Allen, [then-president of the Detroit philanthropy] Skillman Foundation, and negotiations with the governor’s team and the attorney general’s office to secure a settlement, which ultimately has resulted in nearly $100 million going back into the Detroit Public School District.

And I’m tremendously proud of that work and the role that I played in that case. It wasn’t—trust me—I’ll never take credit where it’s not due. There were so many great lawyers and community advocates and folks who have been working on this for years. But it’s something that’s really, really important to me. I have always believed that there is a fundamental right to an adequate education, at the very least, under the U.S. Constitution. There’s nothing that could be more fundamental.

I hope to see the day that ultimately that right is recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the interim, there were real kids, real teachers, real school administrators on the ground that were doing the hard work and desperately needed more resources.

We got them some of that, and I’m proud of the work that we’ve done on that case. And I hope when we look back, you know, maybe in a few decades here, we’ll recognize it just as the first step to the ultimate recognition by the US Supreme Court of a fundamental right to an education.

There are so many issues with the federal government right now. One of them, specifically in education, is the rise of taxpayer-funded religious schools: religious charters, perhaps. There’s a new case the Supreme Court just agreed to hear out of Colorado, which would limit states’ ability to stop tax-funded religious education providers from discriminating against LGBTQ families. How are you thinking about cases like this in the growing religious freedom/school law nexus?

A couple of things. One is that here in Michigan, of course, we have actually a constitutional provision which under our state constitution prohibits public money from being used for things like religious schools, right? And religious institutions.

And that’s fully consistent, in my view, with the establishment clause of the First Amendment, right? Which says that, you know, I’m paraphrasing here, but the government shall not establish a state religion, alright? And that’s been interpreted, of course, to mean that the government needs to be secular and neutral as to religion, right?

I think that’s really important because we are fundamentally a country that is founded on religious freedom. And once you have the government getting involved in religion, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away from what, honestly, the founders of this country fled Europe from, right? Which is discrimination on the basis of your religious belief.

So I believe very firmly in the Establishment Clause. I believe in protecting Michigan’s constitutional provision, which prohibits public funds from going to religious institutions. I think that’s really important to preserve religious liberty. With respect to these questions about the intersection between religious freedom and anti-discrimination laws.

You know, my old boss, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was fond of a quote which I’ve always found very helpful in this space. It said: your right to raise your arm ends just where the other man’s nose begins.

I am fully, fully prepared to defend everybody’s religious freedom and religious liberty. I am never going to be somebody that suggests that I or the government has any right to tell you what to believe, to tell you how to worship, to tell you what to say.

That does not, however, give you license to discriminate, to harm others, right? If you voluntarily enter a space where you’re providing services, I do believe you should be subject to basic anti-discrimination laws. And you know, this is something that harkens back to the civil rights era as well, right? There were institutions that discriminated against black people in this country that grounded their discrimination in religious beliefs.

And look, you can believe what you want. When you start actually discriminating against people, that’s where the other man’s nose begins, and that’s where your right to raise your arm ends.

Wrapping up. You mentioned you clerked for Justice Ginsburg. What do you think she, if she were alive today, would make of the Supreme Court’s last couple years, especially with presidential immunity and the more recent Trump rulings? How do you think about the role of state attorneys general in a judicial system that ultimately stops up at the steps of the Supreme Court?

Look, I don’t think that there is any real surprise when I say that I think Justice Ginsburg would be aghast at what has happened in the past several years at the United States Supreme Court. And certainly that’s true in terms of substance, right?

I mean, you look at something like Roe v. Wade being overturned, you look at the real efforts by the Supreme Court to cut back on basic civil rights protections, environmental protections, constitutional protections that Justice Ginsburg dedicated her career to—I think she’d be aghast on substance.

And I also think she’d be aghast on procedure. So many of these cases right now are being decided on what’s called the shadow docket. Which gets up there in an emergency posture and the Supreme Court has been just green-lighting a lot of the actions by the Trump administration, in many cases, without even providing an explanation as to why.

In the case that really has just stuck out to me that they decided on this shadow docket without explanation was a case that allowed ICE to engage in what can only be described as overt racial profiling.

There was a memo which said ICE could stop and detain people if they were dark-skinned, spoke English with an accent, and worked a low-wage job. I mean, that’s just racial profiling. It’s racial profiling spelled out in a government memo and on paper.

The Supreme Court green-lit it and did not provide any explanation.

I think that RBG would have been very troubled not only in the substance of that, but the fact that there was no explanation, no opportunity for us to understand why the Supreme Court was doing what it was doing, where the limits are.

It’s just a fundamental change in the U.S. Supreme Court. Because for the entire time, almost, that Justice Ginsburg was on the Court, whether you agreed with the Court’s decision or not, you at least got an explanation. You at least got guidance as to what the law was, and you got the opportunity as a dissenter to respond to the majority’s arguments, so that maybe one day Congress could change what the law said.

One of Justice Ginsburg’s famous dissents was the Lilly Ledbetter case, in which the majority held that women weren’t entitled to back pay after being subject to sex-based discrimination in their wages. And Congress read RBG’s dissent in that case and rectified that law so they would be able to do so. So her dissent played an important role.

And the lack of explanation now is, I think, is something that troubles me about today’s Court and I know would have troubled her as well.

As for the second part of your question, in terms of the importance of states at the Supreme Court. One of the things that I think often gets overlooked is that there are legal doctrines which provide that states have special litigation privileges in the United States Supreme Court and in federal courts.

States are the entities able to sue on behalf of their people. And that’s not just against the federal government, it’s against things like corporate polluters, the opioid industry, the tobacco industry, all of these major cases that have gotten relief for the people of certain states were because states could sue on behalf of their people—and are the only entities that can do that.

It’s also true that states have special privileges to go into court in a challenge with what the federal government is doing. And so it really matters, especially when we’re seeing so much coming out of Washington, D.C, and so many ways in which not just government actors at the federal level, but private actors at the corporate level are harming real people in the States.

It matters whether you have a state AG who’s prepared to wield their authority to protect the people of their state. And that’s one of the reasons that I think this rule is so important right now and why everybody should care deeply about who their attorney general is.

Eli Savit is the presumptive Democratic nominee for Attorney General of Michigan. You can read more about him here.

On Thursday, I’ll be doing a deeper dive on one issue Eli Savit and I discussed here: the new SCOTUS case on child care and other providers that use a religious justification to turn kids away from public services.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

Something I’ve been writing and speaking about all over the country—culminating in my book The Privateers—is the right-wing effort to create a “counter-intelligentsia” of “soldier-scholars” to push far-right policy priorities.

They’ve do so with almost unlimited cash from a handful of billionaires and a larger group of wealthy conservative patrons over time.

Until 2016, most of that effort came with the formation of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, masquerading as vehicles for serious conservative scholarship. That also included some investment in a handful of colleges and universities, the most famous of which is Hillsdale College in my own state of Michigan.

More recently, and especially in Trump’s second term, the American Right has been waging a non-stop effort to undermine and destabilize higher education itself. That’s come not only through well-covered efforts to force political concessions from elite institutions like Harvard, Penn, and Columbia, but also a more quiet but perhaps more threatening attack on the accreditation processes that thousands of institutions use to train students and raise resources.

I wanted to talk about all of this with someone on the front-line warning about those threats—and what’s being done about it.

So today’s conversation is with Dr. Isaac Kamola from the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the Association for American University Professors.

A Conversation with Isaac Kamola

Let’s level set, tell me a bit about AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and the work you guys are doing over there right now.

So the AAUP is the organization in the United States that has really established the principles and standards around academic freedom. The very basic ways that universities have run since the founding of the AAUP in 1915, things that we take for granted like the institution of tenure, the principles of shared governance, the definition of academic freedom, the practice of faculty and committees and hiring and all of that stuff is laid out by the AAUP.

It has a very extensive record developing policies and standards. However, in the last few decades, as we know, the attacks on academic freedom aren’t coming only from universities and administrators, which is what the AAUP was created to defend against—professors being fired by their institutions—we now know that the attack on a higher education is coming from legislatures, a governor’s Twitter feed, online trolls, foreign governments, et cetera.

So the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is really designed to help faculty understand what academic freedom is so that they can better defend it publicly, but to also explain to the broad audience, to the broad public what academic freedom is, why it’s important, and why it’s the heartbeat of American higher education.

So that’s part of why I’m here today.

So there’s this new project called the Commission for Public Higher Education which is basically being pushed by some of the right-wing think tanks I’ve done some battle with in recent years. You guys are trying to raise some alarms about this. Tell us what’s going on and why we should care about it.

The Commission for Public Higher Education, the CPHE, is an effort to create a accrediting agency. And accreditation is a highly wonky thing to discuss. But the real takeaway is that it’s an effort to lock in a right-wing MAGA attack on higher education. The attacks that are coming out of the legislatures in states like Florida and Texas, as well as out of the federal government, those efforts to redefine and capture and ideologically transform what higher education is. What the CPHE would do would be to tie those into the accreditation process itself, to create it part of the bureaucracy of American higher education that will outlast Governor Abbott, will outlast Trump, will outlast DeSantis, and really bake in these MAGA attacks on higher education into the way that academic institutions are accredited.

On the dollars and cents side of this particularly: I know academics want to talk about what’s at stake for our various liberties and the role educationon—including higher education—plays in democracy. But this is also about dollars and cents. My institution MSU employs 12,000 people. It’s a huge part of Michigan’s economy. What do you want folks to know about the impact of right-wing attacks on universities as they relate to economic and community impacts?

That’s really important. So historically, accreditation has served as the guardrails to make sure that the federal funding of higher education goes to institutions. So student loan money: federal grants go to institutions that are deemed creditable, that provide quality education: that they are doing so without political interference, that are doing so based on clear academic standards and principles.

And accrediting agencies are historically significant. They’re nonprofit organizations created primarily of educators and people in the education field and engage in peer review. So in the same way that a scholar writes an article and then their peers examine that article to see if it meets the standards of quality scholarship, the accreditation system is a similar thing where there’s a peer review process whereby the academic institution is itself evaluated to make sure that it’s providing a quality product.

What the CPHE does is instead it takes that out of a nonprofit independent entity and puts it in the hands of states. So right now there’s six states that are interested or six states and state systems that are interested in being part of the CPHE. The CPHE was proposed by the DeSantis administration, and he called it an effort to combat woke in higher education.

The principles behind the CPHE were laid out in Project 2025 and basically a way to impose preferred MAGA ideas onto higher education institutions. And what this would mean is that the states that have done the most to attack higher education—states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee that have some of the most repressive laws—will create an accrediting agency that will then accredit their own state institution.

So this is just akin to the fox guarding the hen house.

We know that outside of accreditation, the American Right is going after higher education in a number of ways. You’ve got the big attacks on elite institutions, Trump trying to bully different kinds of complicity along a pretty vague goal related at different times to “woke,” “DEI,” their claims of anti-Semitism and so on. I have my own thoughts on this but what do you think the goal here really is for these people?

So I think that there are a number of goals. One of them is an ideological capture of institutions of higher education. As universities become more central to public life, to cultural life, to the economy, then it becomes more important for those who seek political power to capture those institutions. And also, I think that there’s just also a massive grift issue at work.

I think that in terms of these attacks on schools, for example, “forcing critical race theory on students” or having “indoctrinating students” through their DEI office— these absurd claims that MAGA politicians are making. I think it’s important to first recognize that higher education has been in crisis, right?

It’s too expensive. It’s underfunded. More people want higher education that can afford it. There’s a real crisis of higher education. The crisis that is definitively not taking place is that conservative students take my class in which we talk about race and then they feel guilty or I “brainwash them.”

But in order to address the real crises in higher education, that would require an incredible amount of resources, an incredible amount of investment in infrastructure, an incredible investment in making society more equitable and inclusive to broad populations of people that are increasingly demanding that they be part of American society as full citizens.

And that’s what happened in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, right? These are some the largest protests in American history. And students demanding, parents, and citizens from all walks of life demanding that their institutions, higher education, K-12, libraries, city governments, state governments, federal governments, corporations, et cetera, be more representative and recognize the great diversity in America.

And what’s happened is that those ideas of a more inclusive and equitable society are deeply threatening to people. And so weaponizing things like critical race theory or DEI becomes a way to deal and to kind of distract the American public from what’s actually going on, which is a real crisis of higher education that needs to be addressed through a concerted effort for democracy, equality, and justice, and a redistribution of resources at a massive scale.

And instead, we’re being told that the big threat to higher education is that students are forced to take a training in which they feel guilty about themselves,

A, it’s not happening, and B, it’s not the issue that is actually concerning American citizens.

Just sticking with anti-Semitism for a moment. We need to acknowledge anti-Semitism is real—including on college campuses—as is Islamophobia and any other number of issues. Frankly, there’s some anti-Semitism on the left that I’m not comfortable with and needs to be called out. How is your center balancing out and trying to find the right line between freedom of speech on the one hand and hate speech on the other?

I think this is a really important question. I think it is the question of higher education, right? Because academic institutions are required both in terms of what those institutions are and what their mission is, but also in terms of the laws that surround academic institutions to be spaces of free expression where people can express their viewpoints.

They’re also required by law and by their mission to be places that all people feel welcome in and can participate in as equals and that they are spaces that are inclusive, and are free from discrimination, right?

And so you have this tension, which is a real serious tension, and one that is really the heart and soul of what higher education is, is thinking through exactly where that line is.

I think it’s important to start there. Like how you find that correct balance is just impossible. So the best thing that institutions can do is try to answer that as best as possible. So in thinking about academic freedom, it’s really important that there’s clear policies in place, that institutions have clear policies. And those policies are designed to help the institution as a community find that middle ground.

So the way that this pertains according to AAUP standards around academic freedom as they pertain to faculty in particular, for example, if a faculty member said something in their teaching or in their research that was deemed to be anti-Semitic, then there could be a complaint that was brought against them and there should be a procedure on campus. And there is a hearing that has due process and that the AAUP does a lot of work to lay out exactly what that hearing should entail.

It should include a lot of fact-finding and a scholarly discussion. So for example, I’m coming today from a Palestinian Prisoner Day event, where people read poems and letters from prisoners in Palestinian prisons that were deeply—some of those letters were deeply critical of the state of Israel, deeply critical of Zionism as a political project—and according to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism may be considered anti-Semitic. evaluates kind of what that where that line is.

And that that’s not something that the governor of Florida or the governor of Texas gets to decide. Like “oh that chant or that piece of writing or that law review article is anti-Semitic or is not.” But instead that there’s a process that’s put in place. And that process involves the community figuring out where that line is based on its clearly designed policies.

And this is exactly what went wrong during the encampments and the protests in recent years, is that there was lots of college campuses do have these policies in place. And yet there is so much external pressure, so much accusation, in a really complex situation.

Sometimes an anti-Semitic thing was said at a protest, but condemned by the protesters. It took place. It happened. But it wasn’t what the people who are convening the protest endorsed and they in many instances, explicitly condemned it.

So how is it that you evaluate where that line is, is something that you need those clear policies for?

It should be part of the education and pedagogical process, right? That a community figures out using its own policies, using its own peer assessment to find out where that line is. But when you get a bunch of external actors piling on, especially those who may not have the best interest in the institution who are continuing a culture war attack on higher education, who have very partisan reasons to attack and delegitimize the university and are taking instances of anti-Semitism or instances that may be anti-Semitic that in another day would have been handled at the campus level and weaponizing them into a national story, that’s when you get into a lot of problems.

I think that the issue of questions of speech, it really should come down to campus policies and the enforcement of those policies and the fundamental recognition that this is a complicated issue.

JD Vance famously said “the professors are the enemy.” There is this new Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa that hard-launched with Chris Rufo as a guest. I know a number of law faculty and political science faculty nationally where loudest clamors for “academic freedom” come from the Right. These guys claim “academic freedom” too and what it really means is an excuse to push right-wing priorities and—in the language of universities and research—fast-track and even invent research literatures to use in court cases and to push conservative litigation. That’s the playbook. How do you think about a kind of non-partisan concept or definition of academic freedom that exists apart from and above capture by the Right.

It’s a great question. I mean, I think of the creation of the new academic centers, such as the Center for Intellectual Freedom at University of Iowa, as kind of a massive welfare project to prop up claims and arguments that have been widely discredited within higher education.

And so I think that, for example, there is a narrative on the MAGA Right that basically says there’s a bunch of woke professors who are trying to indoctrinate students.

And they’re teaching feminism and they’re teaching, you know, about structural racism and critical race theory.

There is not a professor waking up one day saying: “you know what? I’m a feminist. I’m going to shove it down my students’ throats,” right? But it’s instead the product of decades and decades and decades of very, very serious research.

Critical race theory, as you know, is, a multi-decades long intellectual project carried out primarily by scholars of color that doesn’t agree with itself entirely, has lots of its own debates and disagreements, and has produced a very, very robust understanding of how the law works.

Another example, that came from decades and decades and decades of work, similarly, a lot of ideas that we kind of take for granted now were minoritarian positions not so long ago.

In the 1950s, the claim that you needed to study women in history to understand American history would have seemed laughable at institutions where it was just primarily white male historians who were talking about the great white men who made American history.

But scholars work for decades, right? Writing the papers, doing archival work, writing the books, teaching the classes, creating the journals, creating the centers, creating the program, doing all of that to make a set of arguments that are now incredibly relevant.

And so what these “centers of civic life” are doing is they’re basically saying certain revanchist ideas about the way American greatness is are widely discredited. And we don’t like that because we prefer those ideas. Those are the ideas that we were inspired by when we were 20 and kids aren’t exposed to those now.

Those are the ideas that prop up a kind of vision of meritocracy where the poor are poor because they don’t work hard—that’s a very useful myth to tell—but a story of structural racism deeply undermines that. Demonstrating that lifetime wealth and lifetime life expectancy is based on the arbitrariness of one’s skin color is now a robust finding not just in the humanities and in the social sciences but in the medical sciences and across the academy.

And so those ideas are deeply threatening and because they can’t be or they haven’t been or people don’t want to do the work of discrediting them through scholarly venues, they instead put the thumb on it on the scale and basically say, “no, we prefer that these discredited ideas were mainstream.”

And this is not quiet, right? So if you look at the 1776 Commission, a report that came out right at the last days of the first Trump administration, they say this explicitly. This whole notion that it’s an interesting thought experiment to think about American history through the arrival of slaves on the continent—i.e. The 1619 Project—the whole idea that that might be an interesting way to think about American history, they say in the 1776 Commission: “no, what we need to do is teach that great white male history and that there’s no other way. And anybody else who teaches other kinds of history hates America, et cetera, et cetera.”

That’s that’s the kind of worldview that they’re pushing. And I think is deeply, deeply scary.

Victor Ray calls what’s happening at the University of Iowa the Right’s attempted authoritarian takeover of higher education. And I think that’s right, is that certain ideas are threatening to certain people with incredible wealth and privilege and who benefit under the status quo. There’s other ideas that have been produced through free exchange, deliberation, hard work, scholarship, teaching, pedagogy, that have developed ways of seeing the world in which that doesn’t have to be the case, right? And that’s deeply threatening to those who are committed to maintaining the hierarchies in the society that we live in now.

Isaac Kamola is director of the Center for Defense of Academic Freedom at AAUP.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s conversation is with the author and journalist Brian Goldstone, whose book There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America was first released last year and is now out in paperback.

There is No Place for Us was one of the best-reviewed nonfiction books of the past year, and landed in the top ten lists for both The New York Times and The Atlantic. The book tells the story of five families in the Atlanta area, struggling to make ends meet, hold down jobs, and remain in stable housing—all while raising children, navigating health care, and dealing with other life challenges.

Goldstone’s book is a clarion call to rethink and respond to the real conditions underlying homelessness: that in the wealthiest nation on the planet, working hard and playing by the rules doesn’t even guarantee some people a place to live.

As a policy expert, I first got interested in homelessness through writing and studying the link between where children live and where they go to school. A decade ago, I wrote a well-received academic paper arguing that the same tools—and the same data—economists and other policy analysts use to study big-think questions in education could be brought to bear to study homeless students.

That was just one small piece of a much larger conversation about a much larger problem, and—hard as it is—I was thrilled to be able to sit down with Brian Goldstone to talk through it together.

A Conversation with Brian Goldstone

Brian Goldstone, so glad that you could join us here. Serious topic, important topic, but happy to dig in with it with you. Tell me a bit about your background and, for folks who haven’t read the book, how your own experience brought you into a place where you take this project on and tell this story to a wide audience.

It's really great to be with you.

Before I became a journalist, I actually studied anthropology. I have a PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke, and I thought that I would be in academia for the rest of my career. I had a postdoc for about 3 or 4 years at Columbia after finishing my PhD. And as the years went on, I kind of became disillusioned with academia for different reasons, and without turning this into a therapy session, I just decided that I wanted to take the plunge into writing for kind of a wider public.

I was also teaching at Sing Sing Prison during that last year at Columbia, and that was a really transformative experience for me. It just showed me that pedagogy, the teaching and learning, could take so many different forms outside of the university, per se. I had been wanting to do this kind of long-form narrative, non-fiction and journalism for years, and anthropology was already kind of a natural fit with this kind of work.

And I began to bring it into my work as a journalist. I began writing for places like Harper’s Magazine, the California Sunday Magazine, and The New Republic. And I reported on a really wide range of subjects: everything from psychiatry and Pentecostalism in West Africa, to Israel’s secretive campaign to deport Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers, to the plight of chronic pain sufferers during the opioid crisis.

I had also been wanting to write something closer to home. I had recently moved to Atlanta with my family from New York. And the way I came to this particular book and this particular topic is actually through my wife. She’s a nurse practitioner, and she was working in a community health center in Atlanta called MercyCare. We share a car, so every day we would kind of debrief our days, and she started to tell me about this trend she was noticing among her patients, where people were working full-time hours at places like Amazon warehouses, or Walmart, or McDonald’s, or driving for Uber and Lyft.

And what they all had in common is they didn’t have a home. They were sleeping in their cars, or in the overcrowded apartments of others, or were in these extended stay hotels. One guy was even working on film sets for Atlanta’s burgeoning film industry, and was then sleeping in an encampment.

So she told me about that, I was pretty stunned. Like many people, I sort of harbored this assumption that work was an exit from homelessness, not an accompaniment to it.

That led me to write a New Republic story reported over about 7 months on one family in Atlanta. I think the key argument of that piece—which was that we are as a country seeing a dramatic rise in the working homeless—that phrase, “working homeless,” really struck a nerve with people. I realized at the end of that piece that I had only scratched the surface, and I ended up expanding it to five families in Atlanta, and I reported this book over close to 6 years.

“I tried to show very clearly in the book that families are not falling, they’re not just stumbling into homelessness, they’re being pushed into homelessness.”—Brian Goldstone

Language is important. There’s a big push in some progressive policy circles to use “housing insecure” instead of “homeless,” both because the details are different but also because “homeless” kind of carries a different kind of cultural baggage or meaning. I want to ask in a minute about housing insecurity as a definition, but can we unpack that word homeless for a minute. How do you think about these basic descriptors and the meaning of language when we talk about social conditions?

I really appreciate that question. There is both an implicit and at times explicit argument about language in this book. For instance, it drives me nuts when there are newspaper headlines that talk about such and such number of people, you know, falling into homelessness this year.

I tried to show very clearly in the book that not only in the families that I follow, but the millions of people like them are not falling, they’re not just stumbling into homelessness, they’re being pushed into homelessness.

So even the shift in language there, the disciplining of my own speech around not talking about, like, the “invisible homeless” in this abstract way, but a kind of manufactured invisibility. These are people whose lives have been rendered invisible.

Showing that as an active production and not just this passive state has been important for me. As far as the word homeless goes versus, like, housing insecure: there’s other words like unhoused, houseless, that some advocates prefer. I try to not, take a hard line on any of that. I want to have a humility and just be like: if there are people who would prefer one term over another. I have no problem with that.

On principle it’s important to remember that the word homeless itself was a kind of innovation that we used to have words like vagrant, or hobo, or other words like tramps, that were used to describe people who didn’t have stable shelter. Homeless was seen as a more humane and even more moral advance on that.

I do think I would push back against substituting housing insecure for homeless, because—I mean, I get the impulse—but it’s important, I think, for us to retain the brutal fact that there are people in the wealthiest nation on the planet who don’t have homes. It’s not just that they’re at risk of losing their homes, it’s not that they’re at risk of losing a roof overhead. They don’t have a stable home. They don’t have stable shelter, and I think that’s a really important distinction.

Housing insecure suggests that they could lose it, that they’re on the precipice, and indeed a big argument in the book is that there’s this entire world of homelessness that we’re not seeing. That there’s an entire world of homelessness that is not only written out of the story that we as a nation tell ourselves about homelessness, but is made up of people whose lives, whose experiences literally don’t count. Like, they’re written out of the official statistics.

One way that those official statistics account for these people’s experiences is saying, well, they’re precariously housed. These folks in extended stay hotels, these folks doubled up, they’re just precariously housed.

And I disagree with that. And the Department of Education disagrees with that. They consider these folks homeless. So, I think it is important to retain that word, even if, as I think you were implying in your question, there is a stigma attached to the word homeless that many of the people in the book themselves are acutely aware of, they don’t want that label for themselves.

But they end up taking it on because they see that it’s necessary to even try to get assistance. These categories matter. I think the project is not to get rid of the word, but to get rid of the reality and the condition.

I’ll just leave it at this: I think there are a lot of people even in my little progressive neighborhood that I live in, who will push back very stridently against saying homeless, and they’ll say “you mean houseless,” and yet they will also resist the construction of low-income housing in their neighborhood.

I wish people would be a little less concerned about getting the words right, and more concerned that people aren’t living in this state to begin with.

“It’s important, I think, for us to retain the brutal fact that there are people in the wealthiest nation on the planet who don’t have homes.”—Brian Goldstone

My last conversation here was with the historian Helen Zoe Veit, whose new book Picky is about the history of American children and their fussiness over food. And I asked Helen how her book was different from one, say, a nutritionist would write. She specifically called out her background as a historian and thought an anthropologist might also write a similar book. So I’m going to ask you specifically about anthropology and ask: how is this book different than one, say, a journalist who hadn’t been trained as an anthropologist might write?

In some ways, I’m still trying to figure that out myself. Because I’ve been so deeply, deeply in the weeds with this, and it’s only more recently that I’m beginning to try to figure that out, you know, how has my training, my unique kind of trajectory, informed this work.

There are many journalists who have written books who don’t have that kind of academic training, like Andrea Elliott, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Katherine Boo, Alex Kotlowicz—the list goes on—who have done the kind of work that I have aspired to do even though I do have a background in anthropology.

Having said that, I think, there’s two ways that I have thought about the difference that anthropology makes for this kind of ethnographic sensibility makes for this kind of work.

The first is: I did an event shortly after the book came out with a hero of mine, Sara Nelson, who’s the head of the flight attendants union. And she said that in reading the book, it occurred to her that before we can fix this crisis, we first have to feel the crisis.

And she felt like that’s what the book was doing. It was allowing readers to feel it in a visceral way. I think that’s very much what my methodology was aimed at: this attempt to kind of just immerse myself as much as humanly possible in the day-to-day lives of these five families; to capture moments of intimacy that wouldn’t necessarily be on the radar if we were just talking about the issue of housing precarity, or the issue of homelessness.

I was just making myself as radically available as possible. At 1 in the morning [for example] for phone calls where Celeste wants to just cry and vent, maybe not about her housing situation, but about her relationship with her daughter—any number of things. Just being available in that way to capture life in all of its fullness.

So the attempt to allow readers to feel this crisis, for it to not be an abstraction, was really important, and I think my training contributed to that.

The second quick thing I’ll say is that it’s important that we not just feel this crisis, we also have to understand it. We have to know it, and I felt like it was incumbent upon me as a scholar, as an anthropologist, to not just portray these scenes and these moments, but to connect the dots and say, you know, the reason why Celeste is going through this right now: yes, she made certain choices, but those choices were already boxed in by a whole set of systems and structures, and it was my job to connect those dots and to piece those things together, even when it wasn’t immediately apparent to her.

I hate getting to the end of a beautifully written work of reportage—especially about these kinds of issues, about poverty, about this kind of precarity—and you’re like, well, who’s to say what caused all this suffering?

I wanted to be very clear. And I think my training allowed it to be clear that this was produced by very particular forces.

You’re telling the story of these families. And obviously there’s so much humanity in these stories but I wonder how as a journalist—and as anthropologist—you avoided a trap (and I think you avoid it very well) to just reduce them to “homeless people” instead of people first, who happen to be housing insecure. Tell me about the approach you took that seems to have really balanced the social phenomenon you’re writing about with the fact that this is the only life these folks get and they matter beyond their housing status? I mean, this is the one life they get, right? And you’re telling their story.

We could talk for hours just about that. It’s really, really fraught. There’s a lot to say. I think that one thing that a lot of academic research in particular, but also journalism falls prey to, is turning people into human arguments. Like, they are only there, and their lives are only important insofar as they are furthering advancing a particular point, a particular argument, and that is just really dangerous.

I also think it’s not interesting to read. For a lot of my fellow anthropologists, there’s this almost formulaic approach in a lot of ethnographies, where you open with this short vignette that’s supposed to introduce people and real-life situations, and then the rest of the chapter is just using that tiny vignette to prove a big point. And the question of what is being left out of that person’s existence for the reader is always present.

Another pitfall, I think, that a lot of well-intentioned social justice writing, journalism, we also see this a lot in the sort of non-profit world, as well as among academics, is in the attempt to make a certain argument, you portray people as, like, these angelic figures that can do no wrong, you know? All of their flaws, all of the stuff that they themselves might regret is stripped away, and you just get these, like, hard-working, virtuous people.

I have come to believe that it’s just as dehumanizing to deny people their flaws as it is to present them as purely pathological, or purely, you know, the sort of nightmare conservative pictures might paint.

I think it felt really important to show people in their fullness. Not just bad decisions and good decisions, but, moments of joy, moments of laughter, moments of…like…a married couple in the book, Maurice and Natalia, trying to figure out how do we have physical intimacy when we’re sharing this tiny hotel room with our kids?

It’s important to show people as people, and I think that’s not just a moral case for presenting people in that way—it’s also more convincing. Who believes I’m this angelic, virtuous person? It is also on me as the writer, as the scholar, as the journalist, to show that what people themselves might regret there are things in the mix, forces in the mix, that they might not even be aware of, and I need to show the reader that, not just show people how, like, this other person blew it in this moment.

Because otherwise that’s really, like, poverty porn. Poverty porn is when you’re just given people’s misery, you’re just given their flaws, the ways that poverty acts on individuals in this way without showing the structures that produce these lives to begin with.

“We have to reckon with the naked exploitation, the naked predation, the naked capitalizing on people’s suffering—and with how much profit is being made because of homelessness”—Brian Goldstone

One of the really important things in this book is its expansive understanding and documentation of housing insecurity. I first got interested in homelessness in the education world, where through McKinney-Vento [the federal law requiring services for homeless students] homelessness for students is defined as lack of regular access to fixed, regular, and adequate housing—especially at night. That means campgrounds may have homeless people. That means families living with other family members—some examples in your book. That means living month-to-month in different places. What do you think folks should know about this condition of chronic housing insecurity that’s different from the pervasive stereotypes of people literally on the street?

A big part of the book is trying to show that what we see on the street really is just the tip of the iceberg, that there’s this whole world that is out of sight and invisible, and as I said earlier, is a kind of engineered invisibility.

This didn’t just happen by accident. And in some ways, my book is preoccupied with that vast iceberg under the water surface that we’re not seeing. People who are inhabiting what I refer to as the shadow realm of homelessness, in cars, in campers, in these extended stay hotels and motels, doubled up with others, living in parking lots in their vehicles.

And, you know, even as I’m arguing that by accounting for that shadow realm it makes the scale of homelessness exponentially larger in America—when you bring in this invisible population, we’re looking at a homeless population in this country that’s roughly six times larger than the official figure.

But at the same time, I really want to push back against an idea that these are separate populations or separate worlds. There are a lot of unique things about homelessness when children are involved, absolutely. Homelessness does look different phenomenologically even, you know, when you are in a hotel room versus in a tent.

I’m really trying to get beyond this idea of these discrete populations, and that homelessness is this fixed state. I argue that it’s really more a spectrum of insecurity. Where you could be in your car today, you could be in a hotel room tomorrow with your kids, you could be in an encampment a year from now, and now your kids have been taken away by child welfare, and you’re seen as a single adult who is literally homeless by HUD’s definition of being on the street, and so it’s a very fluid state.

Even the idea of the working homeless—people who don’t have homes who are part of the labor force—that isn’t just those who are in this invisible world. Researchers at Yale and the University of Chicago showed that about 40% of the literal homeless population, again, those in shelters or on the street, had formal employment.

This is a very fluid condition, it’s not a fixed state, and I think that thinking of it in terms of a spectrum, is far more honest to the reality.

There were two biggest revelations for me.

One: just how many people are part of the low-wage workforce. I argue in the book that in America today, especially in high-rent cities, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen. That certainly hasn’t been named in the myths that we harbor about homelessness in this country: that homelessness is caused by addiction, it’s caused by mental illness. On the contrary, I tried to show and argue that mental illness and addiction is just as often a consequence of homelessness as its cause.

But we don’t see that when we just pass by someone. We don’t see the million tiny steps that pushed people into that state.

The second big revelation was just how vast this hidden world is, and how in speaking of it as a kind of engineered invisibility, how much of a concerted effort it was on the part of those in power in this country, beginning in the 1980s with the Reagan administration, to really shape public perception, and to narrow the lens and sort of distort the focus as much as possible.

Even as in the 1980s, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population in America were children under the age of 6. We didn’t get that in the newspaper accounts. We didn’t get that in the political stereotypes and narratives that were perpetuated.

Last question. You make the point that preventing homelessness is critical, and so is getting homeless families into housing. These are two different policy problems—though obviously related and sequential. What are some of the policy levers we could pull here? And how if at all has reporting on families in this space changed how you might think about which potential solutions are more or less appealing?

I think what joins those two buckets of solutions together is an argument that the cause of homelessness is people not having homes. Like, people not having housing that they can afford. That’s what causes homelessness.

That has been clarifying for me, to sort of keep constantly in mind, because it is easy go in these different directions. It is true that people’s lives are complicated, and people do need different services and different supports. There isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution beyond housing itself. Housing does come first, because the reason people became homeless is because they lost housing. They lost access to it.

I think in terms of keeping people in the homes they don’t yet have, preventing homelessness has been missing from a lot of the national discourse about ending homelessness. I’ve gone to homelessness conferences where there’s virtually no talk of prevention alongside eviction defense or housing justice, or tenant organizing, or tenant unions, or all the things that can make it easier for people to remain in their homes.

The reason why I’m at such pains to talk about the true scale and the true severity of homelessness, and not just to catastrophize but to say—once we look at the true scale—how much bigger it is than even the horrific official numbers, we can no longer convince ourselves that these nibbling-around-the-edges solutions are coming anywhere close to tackling this at scale.

This isn’t just a matter of getting more units online and figuring out the supply and demand mismatch. We have to reckon with the naked exploitation, the naked predation, the naked capitalizing on people’s suffering, with how much profit is being made because of homelessness. And with how much profit is being made amid a national housing crisis, and the ways in which homelessness is becoming big business with private equity moving into the extended stay hotel world, and all of that.

We have to reckon with that, and at the heart of all of this for me is really an argument that we need a kind of paradigm shift around how we are even thinking about housing. We need to stop settling for scraps from the table where housing is concerned. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post had a headline that said the Pentagon was struggling to figure out how to spend the extra $500 billion the Trump administration wants to give it for the next fiscal year.

And that is America today: the Pentagon struggling with how to spend an extra $500 billion while millions of families and individuals in this country are struggling to figure out do I pay my rent this month, or do I pay my kids medication? That is America today, and I think we need to awaken to the cruelty—not just the inefficiency or the lack of not having our priorities in order—but the cruelty of both how we’ve allowed homelessness to escalate and skyrocket, and at the same time criminalizing and vilifying those who do lose their housing.

We need a different approach, we need a paradigm shift. I think that the most important. It’s at the foundation of any policy lever that could then be pulled.

This has been a conversation with author Brian Goldstone. The transcript is lightly edited for clarity and length, with the full conversation available in the video. Once again the book is There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, it’s out now in paperback after a big debut last year.

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