Transcript: Are Dems Still A “Professional Class” Party?

This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, and I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Lily Geismer. She’s a historian at Claremont McKenna College, and she’s written a few books that have been very influential on my thinking, and a lot of other people’s thinking, about the Democratic Party. There’s one about the Boston suburbs. There’s one about the Clinton administration and kind of neoliberalism. The title of it is Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. She has a recent anthology called Master in Drift: Professional Liberals Since the 1960s. So Lily, thanks for joining me. Welcome.Lily Geismer: Oh, thanks so much for inviting me on.Bacon: And so what I want to talk about is, you’ve had what I would say is—I don’t know if it’s an analysis or a critique. There’s a through line about how you talk about the Democratic Party. So explain to people this sort of professional-classization of it. Give people your general sense of where liberalism and the Democratic Party have gone since the 1960s.Geismer: Yeah. So one of the kind of through lines or focuses of my research has been the class-based transformation of the Democratic Party, in terms of the composition of its base, moving away from union members in the Northeast to professional knowledge workers in the suburbs. And so that was the focus of my first book, and what that did to the priorities of the party. I’ve then increasingly looked at professional classes as the leaders of the party. So how this group of people who were professionals, who went to Ivy League schools, who often are trained in professional schools, like law and various other arenas, became the leaders of the party, and what that has done to its policy priorities. And so that was one of the focuses of the last two books that you have brought up. And just what that shift has meant for priorities, but then also who’s been left behind from it. And I think then another big question is how that focus has created a lot of animosity, actually, among voters on both the left and the right.Bacon: Define professional class. I assume you mean college graduates, but when I read the books, I think it probably also means—you mentioned Ivy League in the middle here. So talk about professional class. I don’t want to broaden it too much, so what are you talking about when you say professional class?Geismer: Yeah. So when I use it—there’s been this interesting question beginning in the 1970s. I can really bore you on this if you want me to go on. But there was a big question of this new class of people that had come to the forefront, who were college educated is another way of thinking about it. Often actually gone to graduate school, so even beyond just a basic college education. And how to define them. And the famous version of this is what is now used as shorthand, the PMC, which came out of Barbara and John Ehrenreich. They had an article, and they used the idea of the professional-managerial class, this group of people who weren’t the full kind of capitalist leaders, like the millionaire, billionaire class, but they weren’t really part of the working class either. So how to characterize them. And one of the core ideas about this group is that they used their knowledge. They were in knowledge-based professions.So I looked at it in my first book, primarily people who worked in law or academia, but also a lot of engineers, like the tech industry figures—not the Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but the actual engineers. So that’s a version of the professional class. And then oftentimes it’s very Ivy League educated, very committed to ideas of meritocracy. And also an idea that this works for them, so this should be reproduced by other people. So that’s who I’m thinking of.And I think, in shorthand for the Democratic Party, you can see the leadership increasingly really taking hold in this group of people who were known first as the Watergate Babies, then as the Atari Democrats, but their embodiment is really in people like Bill Clinton. And then I actually think even more so Obama. To me, the ultimate professional class figures are Obama and the figures around him in the Obama administration. So a lot of their politics emerge from that. And a lot of it is ideas of using rationality. So faith in meritocracy is a huge part of this. For the Clintons in particular, I looked at their uses of market-based solutions, so that you’d use the market. You can see that with Obama too. And then also things like really using tech-based ideas and data-driven solutions. I always think of this as a really powerful one. It came from somebody else, but my co-author Brett Siebel and I found that Obama used the word smart to describe his own policies 900 times.So it’s like, what we’re doing is smart. My favorite of all of them is that there was a program for school snacks called, like, Smart Snacks or something. I looked if it was sponsored by Smartfood, which it was not. But they’re obsessed with this idea of using intelligence, and that will create the best kinds of policies.Bacon: OK, so, professional class: Perry Bacon, graduate of Yale, writer at The New Republic; Lily, graduate of Brown. We’re in this ourselves. Does this—Geismer: Oh, 1,000 percent. I think that’s actually one of the things. I always joke that my kids ask me, and I think I got to, like, the 24th grade or something. If you think about how much education—but yes. And I think actually that’s been an issue, going back even to the 1970s, when they were trying to figure this out. Most journalists and academics are part of this group, and so it’s an interesting phenomenon. That’s actually its own question, that those jobs in the 1980s and ‘90s were far more secure jobs than they are today. And so that’s actually an interesting question of the class-based group. But yes, I’ve been obsessively interrogating my own class position, I think. It’s complicated.Bacon: I think you’re describing the politics of this class, right? We’ll come into your politics in a bit. But the politics of this class as a group—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, maybe you’d say Jake Sullivan at the staffer level. These people have a lot of degrees from the fanciest schools, and their politics are this technocratic—you use smart. They would say themselves they’re non-ideological, or they’d say their ideology is what works, in a certain sense, right?Geismer: Yes. And I would say actually, Clinton was slightly more ideological in his orientation. He had a kind of set of beliefs. I think for Obama, the ideology was pragmatism. That’s how they describe themselves, that this is deeply pragmatic. That’s what we’re doing. We’re finding the best solutions. We’re finding the tweaks. We’re finding the ways around it. And so one of the things I’ve looked at, at the policy level, is the ways in which it’s led to these very incremental sets of changes and small-bore policies, away from the Democratic Party and liberalism’s commitment to a more redistributive approach to politics.And the other side of it, actually, is a real narrowing of government. There’s been all this attention to DOGE as what has hollowed out government. But I actually think much of this comes from having 50 years of Democrats saying—it’s a bipartisan effort—that government is inefficient. The famous Clinton line, “The era of big government is over.” You try to make government as small as possible and look to the private sector to do a lot of the work of what government once did. So that’s part of their politics, and that feeds an idea of technocratic—this is the best approach, we’re doing the best thing, we’re being the most efficient.Bacon: So the professional class leading a sort of—I’m going to avoid that word for now, neoliberalism. But the professional class leading this kind of technocratic pragmatism. The contrast is with the New Deal, led by unions. Is that the contrast, implicitly?Geismer: Yeah. The New Deal, Great Society—you can get into the nuances, because those were also technocratic in their own way. But yeah, so you have a big social welfare state, and your policies are redistributive. These are policies that are much more focused on a small approach. And I think one of the things that I’ve looked at is that there are actually policies that have benefited, or stand to benefit, certain other aspects of the professional class. Especially economic policies that are much more weighted towards certain sectors, like tech, finance, and trade, and those can lead the economy in various different ways.Bacon: I want to distinguish. There’s a whole literature, particularly after 2024, about the downfall of the Democratic Party, and I don’t think you’re doing exactly the same thing as that group. So you’re saying college graduates have more power in the Democratic Party than in the 1940s. I think that’s true. Talk about the sort of, the wokesters have killed the Democratic Party. How do you view that?Geismer: There’s a couple of different things going on with that kind of approach. My first book was about the ‘60s and ‘70s, and that was a period where you saw a really vibrant left. In my second book, I looked at the ‘80s and ‘90s, and one thing that was interesting is you have a real silencing of the left during that moment, the left critiquing the center, so there’s no real tension. That has reemerged. But I think one thing that’s fascinating about this group—and I’ll use Clinton as the example—was combining that with a politics—it was a somewhat distinctive moment—of a belief in broad affirmative action. So on the question of racial equity or racial equality, if that’s wokeism, and LGBTQ rights, tolerance and things like that. But then there’s the question of who you’re actually trying to appeal to. So the other piece of the Democrats during this period, and the particular group that I look at, is that they believed the party had become too beholden to special interest groups, primarily to labor, but also to people of color, and also made a calculation. And if I’m getting too inside baseball, I can go back.Bacon: Let me ask the question differently. So there’s a group of people whose critique is that there are too many college graduates having too much power, and their critique is also that the Democratic Party is too left, and they want to move it to the center on economics and on race. And I think you’re saying the Democratic Party is controlled by college graduates, but you’re not calling for moving to the right. And I think that’s an important distinction—Geismer: No, totally.Bacon: —between the sort of Matt Yglesias crowd and you. That’s what I’m trying to get at here. Go ahead.Geismer: Yeah. When you think about it, if we’re parsing it out, there are different types of college-educated people. So I think the Matt Yglesias argument is, all the people like me have too much power. That like all the history professors, the American studies professors, journalists all somehow found our place and were able to ram this through. I think that’s the shorthand of that argument.What I’m saying is—and this is another thing that I find really interesting—the Democratic Party itself has moved much more to college-educated people as its base, but that in and of itself has a lot of different variations of who that category actually entails. So the group that I’ve looked at, this question of who’s historically had power: they saw the future of the party in moderate, college-educated suburbanites. And really, at that point in the ‘80s, they said, we have to move away from—I use the shorthand that this is when Jesse Jackson had his moment, but that’s not the future of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party lies with these college-educated voters, who are more centrist leaning. Our message should be, we can say we support racial equality, but we’re not doing anything beyond that.And I think what you saw happen in the last decade has been a pushback from certain groups against those kinds of ideals. But that’s not saying we have moved to woke and that’s the problem. Actually, in so many ways, it’s the opposite—that we actually have not stood for these values for generations.Bacon: OK, so you’ve talked about Clinton. I think everyone agrees Clinton embodies a certain kind of—I’m going to use the word neoliberalism now. Obama: meritocratic, pragmatic. OK, but was Biden—because Biden gave some speeches where he didn’t quite say, I’m done with neoliberalism, but his speeches implied we are trying to do something different. So was Biden a break with this, or a continuation, or something in between?Geismer: I think a combination, actually, which is really interesting. It’s fascinating to me what Biden himself believed.Bacon: I’m not sure if he knows either.Geismer: No, I don’t think he knows. But I actually think what he knows is that he believes he’s a Democrat. And he wanted to be a vessel for what the Democratic Party’s politics were in that moment. And so I think he did see this idea that this veneration of the market, and the various different approaches that come out of it, and the kind of techno-utopianism that you see under the Obama years—that was not what people were responding to. And because there had been a quite contentious primary, where you had these different visions out on the table, he actually seemed to embody and imbibe a lot of those kinds of things. And then bringing in the more progressive or left side of the party, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, actually getting their counsel on who his advisers should be. I think because they had a say over that, it actually did lead to a certain kind of moving away from the overtly neoliberal policies. I think you’re right in saying—Jake Sullivan still had a huge amount of power. So it’s not like it was entirely—I think you still see a lot of continuation. But I think in terms of some of those top lines, this is not actually our approach.Bacon: So the reason I wanted to talk to you is, in part, because it feels like we’re in a moment of debate about these visions and about where things are. So I’m going to go through different groups of the Democratic Party. So if you say from 1980 to 2016—I hate “neoliberalism,” but we’ll call it that for now. So how do you see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer? Are they continuations? Are they changes? How do you see them?Geismer: I find them fascinating, actually. I think there are continuations in certain things. I don’t think that they were ideologically committed to neoliberal policies in the same way as the Clinton-era people. My theory is they want power and they want to maintain power in some meaningful way. That’s what it seems to be. But the idea is that how you maintain power is by this kind of message of certain kinds of continuity, and this has worked for a really long time. This is what the party and the country need, and so we need to keep that going. That’s my understanding. Schumer, probably a little bit more than Hakeem Jeffries, seems to be actually committed to Wall Street and its perpetuation, and finding policies that will pursue that. But I think that seems to be their major focus.Bacon: In other words, they’re less pragmatic—they’re less smart, in Obama’s words, or neoliberal—and they’re probably just more status quo. Is that sort of what you’re hinting at?Geismer: Yes. I think they’re like, the status quo has worked, we need to keep the status quo going. Both in terms of politics—this is how you win elections. And there’s been so much pushback to Schumer’s famous comment in 2016 that as many working-class voters as we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll just pick them up in the suburbs of Philadelphia.But they have not seemed to change that as their approach. It wasn’t like there was a lesson there. And so I think that’s the continuation. Another thing that’s interesting about that group is that they come out of Congress, so they think about things in terms of how you create coalitions in Congress. But I think their policies too are such that we continue the status quo. We are broadly committed to ideas of government, and the Democratic Party should be there to help people, but in its broadest strokes.Bacon: So they’re still doing professional class liberalism, on some level.Geismer: Yeah, I think they’re still part of it. And both of them represent New York, which is the epicenter of this, so they have to respond to their constituents too.Bacon: Now, how the two leaders of the Democratic Party end up being from New York might reflect what you’re getting at, right?Geismer: Absolutely.Bacon: OK. So talk about AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani. They’re all different people, but I do feel like the Fighting Oligarchy tour and the Zohran campaign, and now Abdul El-Sayed—I think we’re all talking about the same drift in the party. So is that a break from professional class liberalism?Geismer: I think there are aspects of—but actually, none of them have a full Ivy League pedigree background, if you look at where they come from. That’s not the kind of world they emerged through. I don’t think any of them went to graduate school and were trained as lawyers, if that’s the baseline. So I think there’s a different mentality. I think they come out of a much more socially democratic tradition within the Democratic Party. So I see their roots actually in certain aspects of what liberals and Democrats have stood for going back to the New Deal. But it’s an emergence of a different thing. And Bernie Sanders is interesting, because he was like the lone voice in the ‘90s and 2000s coming out against a lot of this, but now has more people there. And then I think the other major thing that they embody is a populist tradition too. This idea of really challenging, and doing that on economic terms as well.Bacon: You said it’s a different thing—different than the professional class liberals, or different than the New Deal, or different than both?Geismer: I think they’re definitely different than the professional class kind of liberal approach.Bacon: And they would define themselves as running in the New Deal way. Zohran talks about the New Deal a lot. Bernie talks about the New Deal a lot.Geismer: Oh, totally. I think that’s the fascinating thing. I think they see themselves as carrying on a New Deal tradition, and actually see groups like DSA as a mechanism to do that, or that’s where the policies come from. But I think they’re actually deeply committed to some of these core things that the Democratic Party or liberals have long stood for.Bacon: How are they different than the sort of New Deal liberals?Geismer: On a couple of different levels. I think one is their own backgrounds, in composition. The New Deal was run by white men. Maybe Bernie Sanders is the most of that, but he’s probably the oldest. I think that they also combine that with what I would say is a kind of post-’60s, more left-leaning politics, especially on social issues, that the New Deal did not stand for. The New Deal has a lot of different pieces, but that was not a core part of its tradition. So I think they combine the most left aspects of the New Deal’s economic liberalism with a different social orientation.Bacon: We’ve bounced between defining the professional class in terms of the leaders, activists, and the voters. But talk about the voters here. What we’re seeing in these primaries is that the sort of more populist left candidate often wins postgraduates, college graduates, and the sort of non-college people, the sort of lower income, what I would define as the working class, often votes for the Haley Stevens, Joe Biden type. So talk about why the candidates trying to do the New Deal are not winning the sort of electorate of the New Deal.Geismer: Yeah, that’s been this fascinating question. I think there is a component of the ways in which certain candidates have been painted as too far to the left on social matters. And to certain constituencies, that is a fundamental challenge, even if you actually look at their policies and they’re doing different kinds of things. I think there’s also, frankly—and I’m struck with this—still a lot of animosity to government. And also a lot of people who haven’t actually seen the benefits of that. And so I think that’s one of the problems.This might be a little bit of a tangent, but you asked about Biden’s economic policies. They went away from neoliberalism, but they were still really technocratic. And if you think about something like industrial policy, it’s not saying, We’re giving you this check tomorrow. It’s saying, In 10, in 20 years, this is going to pan out and everything’s going to be great. And I think there’s still hostility to that approach, probably with the voters who have leaned towards the Republican Party and Trump. So I don’t know. That’s not a great answer to the question.Bacon: That’s OK.Geismer: I think there’s a lot going on with those kinds of Haley Stevens voters. One of the things that I have been struck by is the assumption that those kinds of swing voters who would support her can carry the whole race. And that would be the Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries theory of politics: if we run exactly the same campaign we’ve been running for 30 years, we can win over those voters. Some of them are there, but they’re not responding enough.I think the other issue, and this is where the taxonomy gets a little complicated, is there’s a lot of college-educated people who are not affluent. And so that’s an important question and distinction.Bacon: That’s what I was trying to press you on in the beginning. Professional class, to me, might be useful distinguishing between lawyers at law firms and people with a BA who can’t get a job that has healthcare. College educated is the thing that—Geismer: Totally. I think we have this category. Many more people are going to college than ever in the past, and actually are emerging from it with a tremendous amount of debt. So there’s the professional class, the lawyers and the private equity people. But there’s also college educated as this different kind of category, who are professionally trained but are not in jobs where they’re making a huge amount of money. I think, frankly, unless you are working at a corporate law firm making half a million dollars a year or more, even if you’re in a job that would be considered at the top, there’s still a sense of profound insecurity around fundamental issues.I will use our two sectors as examples of this. They’re in a state of tremendous turmoil. Wages have declined. I think journalism is actually a case study in these kinds of questions—jobs that were once somewhat—if you worked at The Washington Post, that was a stable job. And now there’s so much sense of insecurity. So I think that’s really appealing to a lot of people. There’s the joke—I think Abdul El-Sayed won Ann Arbor, and there were, like, three voters in Ann Arbor who didn’t vote for him. But that’s not just, oh, all these fancy professors who are sitting around and don’t actually know what’s going on. I can say this—I went to grad school there, and I lived in Ann Arbor. There’s a lot of contingent faculty and grad students who are in really insecure positions, who are college educated but are not seeing their job prospects in a particularly rosy place, and are very much responsive to a lot of the things around universal healthcare, universal childcare, that have been critical to that group of Democrats’ politics.Bacon: So unions are a big anchor for the New Deal. So how do you see unions today? Because we’ve mentioned the sort of New Deal group, and you mentioned DSA in your answer, but we haven’t even brought up unions yet. I don’t perceive unions to be a big part of politics the way they were then, or even a big part of politics, period. How do you see unions where we are today?Geismer: One thing that’s fascinating, looking at the relationship over the course of the ‘80s and beyond between the Democrats and unions, is that in terms of donations, it actually goes up. But unions were long essentially why Democrats felt like they didn’t need a lot of things that Republicans were going after, because they had this really strong union support that was doing a lot of their grassroots work. Union density in the United States dropped precipitously over the course of the ‘70s onward. And I think there was this idea of Democrats moving away from that as their core voter. Or, the other side of it is, I think they thought union rank and file would always vote for them, even though that was not true. That was not true with Reagan. You can see this interesting long-term trend.And then I think a lot of the actual policies of the Democratic Party moved towards promoting sectors that were historically quite non-union, especially when you look at tech and finance, and promoting globalization. So all of these things have actually come to harm unions. I do think unions have had a resurgence over the last decade, as a mechanism for forms of collective action. We’ve seen a lot of big union drives, actually, among a lot of college-educated workers. Journalism especially—white-collar sectors are unionizing. I read Noam Scheiber’s book Mutiny, which is really fascinating about the college-educated drive of the Starbucks workers and various different things. So I think that has been a really powerful force, and I think it’s still one for Democrats, certain efforts to support unions. Biden famously said he was the most pro-union president ever.But it is interesting that in this election cycle, unions have not had the kind of cultural hold that groups like DSA seem to be having. Even though, comparatively, there are many more people in the United States who are members of a union than are members of DSA. DSA is still a really small organization numerically, compared to the amount of attention that it is getting in this particular moment. But I think also none of those people I just mentioned—Mamdani, Sanders, or AOC—are from a union background. That’s not their origin story, so that also affects this kind of composition.Bacon: How do you see—I hate to use the term “the groups,” to reward the people who I think are doing harm—but the sort of NARALs and the Planned Parenthoods and the NDL place. The people who are demeaned as moving the party too far left, both in the ‘80s and now. But I think there’s a legitimate critique—I don’t know how big the SCLC membership was in 1962, so I’ve always found the groups thing to be a little weird. But I think it’s fair to say a lot of the groups do not necessarily have huge on-the-ground numbers they can mobilize today. So how do you see the groups working in the party?Geismer: Yeah, I think that is a really interesting question. They themselves have their own money bases, so that’s probably how they’re operating. And then they’re able to have an influence over policy, in shorthand, as if they represent—I think for a long time it was like NOW and NARAL represent all women, and that’s not actually the state. That doesn’t have the same kind of hold that it once did. And I think frankly that’s probably the question of not delivering the same kind of voters.This isn’t my expertise, but just watching this, I think unlike after 2016, where you had this large surge in—to save democracy, we have to give money to the ACLU and to Planned Parenthood. That’s not happening in the same way. I think there’s a sense that didn’t actually—not to say—I think those are amazing organizations, and full disclosure, my husband is a former ACLU lawyer. I think it’s an incredible place. But I don’t think there’s the same sense that that’s the route to protect all these different things. So I think that’s actually lessened their influence in certain ways, as far as I can see.And I do think it’s important to acknowledge that this is a really complicated political moment on all fronts, with certain kinds of attacks from the right and from the Trump administration, where I think there’s also fear of attaching or aligning with certain kinds of groups who stand for certain types of politics. And so that’s lessened their power in certain ways as well.Bacon: Let me talk about the Democratic electorate. Is part of the case that you’ve been making that the actual Democratic electorate has become more professionalized, or just a group of them has? Americans are becoming more college-educated. I think that’s just broadly true. But are we saying that the Democratic Party voter him- or herself has become more of a professional class liberal in their views and ideology?Geismer: I think there’s a couple things. And I was going to say too, actually, to go back to my very underdeveloped, half-baked theory of different moments and where people are—I was struck by, post-2017, we had so much attention for these kinds of organizations. And that has gone away. But I also think there’s a question about economic matters actually coming to the forefront at a different moment. And so groups like DSA stand for a different kind of economic message that has taken precedence right now, in a way that some of these other groups haven’t.But yeah, I think one of the things is, you’ve seen the parties—and this is just at the presidential level, which is not always the best marker—but voters have become more college-educated. That doesn’t mean necessarily all of them share this kind of—it’s not like there are millions of little Obamas out there who are like, “All I want is—” No, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think that is a particular group. One thing I’ve always said, and this goes back to my long-standing look at suburban liberals and other kinds of groups, is they’re actually a really small part of the population, but they hold disproportionate cultural capital. So I think they still hold a particular kind of cultural capital. If you read a lot of The Atlantic, that is who seems to run the world.Bacon: So the elites have power. That’s obvious. When you say this group has a lot of power, do you mean the sort of small cohort of voters, because these people give money? They go to rallies and that kind of thing?Geismer: Yes. They follow the news. So I think because of that. But I think it’s also the question of the Democratic voter. That’s been one of the issues, is who is actually—because there’s a lot of people who are not voting in every single election and showing up. And one thing that has been happening is more voter turnout among certain kinds of groups and constituencies. So I think those constituencies are very much out there, of a more working class, lower middle class voter.Bacon: If you follow the Senate race in Florida, that makes me think of it, where I assume Vindman is the MSNBC hero. He’s probably getting the professional liberal suburban vote, but Dixon is winning regular Democrats, the New Deal Democrats, in a certain sense.Geismer: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great example. And I know there’s been so much attention to Mamdani, and especially for both of us who don’t live in New York, it becomes a little bit exhausting. But I do think there’s a question there, that he was able to win over those groups in a way that Cuomo was not. And so that’s also really interesting to see play out. But yeah, I think that’s a great example of it. Vindman very much stood for that anti-Trump thing.And I think the other thing I will say, to go back to the Schumer, Jeffries component, is that I think there was a sense that just running against Trump would be enough. And I think the other piece of these candidates—the candidate in Florida, El-Sayed, I think Mondaire—is they’re not just saying Trump’s the problem. It’s actually about having some sort of a formative vision too, and that’s also where you can see certain constituencies responding to it.Bacon: I think affordability is a way to bridge these things. My sense of it is, for Schumer and Jeffries, it functions like kitchen table, and you can come out with your bland expand-Medicaid-by-4-percent plan. But it also functions as, if you want free buses, that’s an affordable—it allows both wings of the party to sound like they’re proposing something, and sound like they’re proposing something similar, I think.Geismer: Yeah, I think that has been really interesting to see. Now that you have some of these more progressive candidates who’ve won, and because the races are so tight right now, the party has to go support the candidate in some way. And that has been a way to bring things together, which I think is a positive. I think that’s actually a really positive thing. But the question is how that’s actually panning out, and is that just actually preventing the debate—Medicare for All, or this tiny incremental change? How are we going to find some common ground here?Bacon: I’ll finish with looking forward a little bit, to this next year. So Buttigieg is the most in the mold of Obama and Clinton. Is that fair to say? The most technically—this is the thing you’re talking about, literally McKinsey.Geismer: Yeah. And he embodies all of it. He’s the representation.Bacon: Newsom and Harris, to some extent, represent those same kinds of voters you’re talking about, I assume.Geismer: Yeah.Bacon: Anybody beyond AOC, who we’ve mentioned, anybody else who obviously represents something different?Geismer: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I would’ve said Ossoff a couple months ago, but I feel like he’s not a traditional sort of professional class person. But I can’t figure out if that’s actually its own strand or not. There seems to be a kind of alignment. I think the other fascinating question, at a pure politics level, and maybe not to the question around the policies or ideologies—I think one of the problems with Democrats is they’ve waited for these once-in-a-generation talents. That’s also Clinton. So I was probably giving the worst of Clinton and Obama, but they were also both really gifted politicians, and able, at least rhetorically, to speak to multiple different audiences. So that’s its own kind of power. And I think a lot of people look to Ossoff as standing in for that, that he can speak to a lot of different people. I think there’s actually a question of what’s the policy landscape behind that.So those would be other people. I think there’s a question of whether AOC is going to run or not. That would be its own distinctive version. And one of the things I think happened in 2020 is that because there was no primary—or 2024, I’m sorry.Bacon: 2024.Geismer: 2024. I think a lot of these tensions are things that often get worked out in primaries. And because that didn’t happen, that is happening right now. But I think a primary is actually an important time to work out some of these kinds of tensions, for them to come to the forefront, so that could very well happen.Bacon: We didn’t talk about Gaza in this conversation, and I’m not sure the most recent book you all did, the anthology, talked about it either. How do you see Gaza in this story about professional class liberalism, and whether that’s changing in the party or not?Geismer: Oh, I think that’s a huge piece of it. That is another main fault line. I think if you go back to the question of both the status quo and technocratic, pragmatic solutions as the way you navigate these situations, there’s been a real frustration with that kind of approach. And I think it actually has been a place where you’ve seen Democrats responding to their constituencies in really important ways. Because for so long, the Democrats took a very straight line, and I think there has been some important variation. So I think it’s a huge component of it, and it’s worth considering how it will fundamentally change this.The other piece is, when people talk about neoliberalism, a huge part of what neoliberalism is, is foreign policy. That’s not the piece that I’ve looked at as much, but it is a really core piece of it. And so I think we’re also actually at a fundamental place of reimagining—what I have to go do after this is teach my class, Cold War America, which is all about the United States’ place in the world, and how it understands its place in the world. And this is a moment of actual transformation for that too. So I do think that will be a major component of the 2028 presidential primaries, understanding what actually is the Democrats’ foreign policy vision. I haven’t looked at the polls of how voters perceive Democrats on some of those issues, but I think that’s an important question too.Bacon: So let’s close with just broadly: the Democrats were this party of professional class liberalism for a few decades. Are they now? Are they drifting out of that? Are they still mostly in it? Is 80 percent of the party that, 20 percent of the party that? How would you rank it now? Because Obama’s been the most popular person in the Democratic Party by far, I think.Geismer: I know. I think this is the question. I think there’s a really important move. I’m also really reluctant to make big sweeping claims. I’ve been really struck that after every primary vote, it’s been like, DSA is on the ascent, DSA is over. So I think these hot takes have not been all that useful. I think it’s really interesting. I think they don’t hold the same power they once did, but I still think it’s a very dominant component of the party. And it’ll be interesting to see in the next several years how much that changes.Bacon: OK. What are you working on now? Anything you can tell us about?Geismer: Yeah, I’m working on a project about school politics. I’m looking at professional class anxiety around education. It’s a case study of DC. I’m looking at the professional class both as parents and policymakers, so how they are both making decisions about their own children, but then also making major kinds of education reforms. And so I’ve been doing a lot of research into DC and looking at school politics. So it’s still about Democrats. I can’t seem to get away from them. But the focus is on schools.Bacon: Interesting. Lily Geismer, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Good to see you.Geismer: Thank you so much.Bacon: Bye-bye.