Live with Heather Cox Richardson

Speaker 1 Welcome, everybody. I'm very pleased to be here today with Representative Roe Cona, who is a California representative of the district that covers Silicon Valley.

Speaker 1 He's had a lot of ideas over the past several years, especially since he took office in 2017, about things that we can do to create

Speaker 1 a more progressive economy that serves all the American people. And today, of all days, that that seemed like a really good thing to have on the table.

Speaker 1 So, welcome, everybody, and welcome, Representative. Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 2 Thank you. I'm an admirer and appreciate the chance.

Speaker 1 So, why don't you start right off talking to us about what you have called progressive capitalism?

Speaker 1 Two words that have a lot of different meanings in the United States and that you took in a very different direction in an earlier book.

Speaker 2 Well, look, I think the challenge in the United States has been a concentration of economic opportunity and economic wealth in a few places.

Speaker 2 And we basically had a view that capital could move wherever it wanted.

Speaker 2 It didn't matter if you were in a small town, in a rural community, you would have to move, and the markets would

Speaker 2 figure out how to create economic opportunity. And my view was place matters, that community matters, that

Speaker 2 the fundamental investments in people's health and education matter, and that while there's a lot to recommend a

Speaker 2 free enterprise because it allows people to have freedom and do things, that we need to be concerned about place and we need to be concerned about people having the basics to develop their capabilities.

Speaker 2 And I said that that means a progressive capitalism, a capitalism that that helps people develop and helps communities flourish.

Speaker 1 All right. So I want to push on that a little bit because you have proposed, especially using technology to make that happen.
And let me tell you, I'm on board with that.

Speaker 1 I live in a rural community and I don't have access to cable in my home. So I actually have to borrow cable somewhere else to do things like this.

Speaker 1 But talk us a little bit through that and then I'm going to push back on that.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 Well, what I have said is that we need a comprehensive economic development strategy for the United States, a White House Economic Development Council, a Marshall Plan for the United States.

Speaker 2 And then that will look different in different communities.

Speaker 2 Some of it should be advanced manufacturing in terms of the new types of factories that we can have. Some of it should be trade schools that we should be having.

Speaker 2 Some of it should be tech certification, tech institutes where people can be in rural communities or in small towns and figuring out how AI applies to their small business or figuring out jobs in data management and cyber without having to move.

Speaker 2 Some of it can do jobs in healthcare and in education. But that for the longest time, the United States has not had an economic development strategy.

Speaker 2 We basically had a consumer welfare strategy, and we've said, let the markets determine where capital and job creation goes.

Speaker 2 And we've got to be intentional now of having an economic development strategy. And of course, technology jobs is one piece of that.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I want to pull back on that because I want to ask you something first. But of course, there was an attempt under the Biden administration to do exactly what you said, and it didn't take off.

Speaker 1 And we have some, I would like to talk about why that might not have happened.

Speaker 1 But before we get there, when you talk about the idea of using tech as a way to support, especially rural areas, one of the things that always jumps out to me is that, in effect, we already have the kind of industry in every small town in this country that we need to have to make those areas thrive.

Speaker 1 And that is services. That is services for elder care, especially in rural areas, because we know they're older than

Speaker 1 urban areas are. And care for children, education.
Those things are already in place. We don't need new plants.

Speaker 1 We do need more education for the people working in those industries. But those things tend not to get invested in largely because they're industries that are dominated by women and immigrants.

Speaker 1 Like, why isn't that central to a vision of what the American future looks like? Because AI ain't going to replace that.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm 100% on board with that. I have a plan of childcare at $10 a day.
It would cost the country about $80 billion a year. It's modeled after what Canada did.

Speaker 2 And you would pay childcare workers $20 to $25 an hour, and it would be flexible in

Speaker 2 how you could do it.

Speaker 2 And if you look at the plan I put forward on

Speaker 2 not in my book, because I'd written the book before that, but on Google, it's one of the most comprehensive childcare plans. And And I have said actually that we may need an AI New Deal as AI is

Speaker 2 displacing particularly entry-level jobs.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that the government could be doing is supporting people in the local communities to be in child care, to be in elder care, to be in wellness, in addition to hiring them for other roles.

Speaker 2 But I don't think a care economy is sufficient. I think you need, in addition to a care economy, also aspects of technology and production to build wealth.

Speaker 2 And a lot of these small towns were deindustrialized. They lost factories, they lost industry, they lost wealth generation.

Speaker 2 In my district, you have five companies over a trillion dollars basically propping up the entire American economy's wealth.

Speaker 2 And what I've said is that we've got to democratize also the wealth engines of wealth generation.

Speaker 2 Technology and manufacturing jobs have a wealth multiplier effect, as Enrico Moretti's work, Geography of Jobs, showed between three to four to one.

Speaker 2 And so it's combining those and seeing what that looks like in communities.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that is slightly,

Speaker 1 more than slightly, that is dissimilar to what the Biden administration tried to do.

Speaker 1 But the Biden administration, in fact, did try to insert new kinds of manufacturing in a number of rural communities, primarily in red districts, and it never got traction.

Speaker 1 And I have a theory about that, but I think yours is different. Why do you think that didn't really take off with things like

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 Inflation Reduction Act that in fact did bring the idea of good paying jobs for people who did not have college degrees and that would lower energy costs, things that Americans said they wanted, but then when it came time to re-up those policies under a second Democratic president, they said no.

Speaker 2 Well, first, I don't think we can reject all of what President Biden tried because there were macro forces, I think, at work in that election, COVID, inflation, the president's age.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the fact that he did chips and IRA and infrastructure, in my view,

Speaker 2 were good things. He was also not able, in my view, to be able to articulate and sell them out on the road in the way that

Speaker 2 maybe President Obama would have been able to or others would have at the time that he was president. But I think that there are lessons to be learned as well.
One is it can't just be manufacturing.

Speaker 2 Manufacturing is just 10% of our economy. It also needs to be service jobs.
It also needs to be technology jobs. It needs to be jobs in AI.
It needs to be jobs in health care and education.

Speaker 2 You look at Pittsburgh, they turn themselves around with healthcare and education. Same with Grand Rapids.
So I would say it has to be a comprehensive economic approach.

Speaker 2 Second, there needs to be symbolism to it. I kept saying the president, why don't we put three new steel plants up?

Speaker 2 Because these are jobs that people's great-grandparents have been in and not just their

Speaker 2 It's not just new like chips or electric vehicles. Why don't we put up a modern steel plant in Johnstown in downriver Michigan, which would be hydrogen, which would be good for the climate.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they wouldn't be

Speaker 2 a blast furnace of 2,000 people, but maybe they'd be direct reduction iron of 500 people. So I think we needed to do things also that were more tangible in speaking to communities.

Speaker 2 We told the communities what jobs they wanted as opposed to asking them what jobs they wanted.

Speaker 2 Third, we needed better implementation and doing certain things fast. So Richard Reeves has an idea of a thousand trade schools across America.
You could probably get those built quickly.

Speaker 2 And those aren't gender specific. You can have different types of trades and include child care and nursing in terms of the certification.
So what can we do fast? But look,

Speaker 2 I think that the challenge, Heather, is one is campaigning. It's to say, look, Trump's message was the American dream is dead.
I'm going to bring it back.

Speaker 2 How do the Democrats say we have a better vision for the American dream in the 21st century and that tariffs and land grabs aren't going to do it. But the second is the actual challenge of doing it.

Speaker 2 70% of Americans believe that the American dream has died. You have extraordinary concentration of economic opportunity in Silicon Valley and Seattle.

Speaker 2 You have a lot of places that have been hollowed out.

Speaker 2 And it's not easy

Speaker 2 to figure out what the roadmap back will be for economic revitalization across the country. And anyone thinking it's easy is being naive.

Speaker 2 But I guess I come back to an FDR-like democratic experimentalism where we ought to be trying everything with that economic revival being our top priority.

Speaker 1 Well, so I'm smiling because you said something twice now. You said the American dream twice.

Speaker 1 And today seems like a good day to be talking about the American dream after what seems to have been a very decisive message coming yesterday from the American people about what they would like to see a government do.

Speaker 1 So let's dig into a little bit about what that means for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 This idea, not just of economic revitalization, because I think that that's always on people's minds, but also how the idea of government and what government should do and what government can do is very much on the table right now.

Speaker 1 And it certainly appears as if certain Americans, certain Democrats, are taking that idea and running with it. What do you think of that? And where do you think that's going to take us?

Speaker 2 Well, I believe it was a great night yesterday.

Speaker 2 I mean, we had Abigail Spanberger, Mikey Sherolds, Oran Mamdani, all from sort of different wings of the Democratic Party saying we believe government has a role.

Speaker 2 We believe it has a role to stop increases in utility prices, to stop increases in rent, to help create new jobs. That we don't agree with kind of the intransigence of

Speaker 2 Donald Trump, who doesn't want to negotiate and has shut down government and is laying off federal workers, and that we have a constructive vision going forward.

Speaker 2 I think that there's two lessons to be drawn. One is

Speaker 2 a favorite, famous biography of

Speaker 2 Stalin once said that the biggest thing that authoritarian leaders fear is the alternative. It's why they go after the universities and why they go after intellectuals.

Speaker 2 What we did, these candidates did, is they offered an alternative. They didn't just spend their time talking about the lawlessness of Trump, though, it needs to be addressed.

Speaker 2 They said, here's a different vision of what we can do. And I think the Democratic Party needs to be addressing that central issue of the decline of economic hope in America and what the vision is.

Speaker 2 Mamdani, Spanberger, and Mikey Sheryl gave their answers to that question. And the second thing is that

Speaker 2 we don't need to imitate Donald Trump. We don't need to meme him back.
We don't need to imitate the worst president since Andrew Johnson in American history in appealing to

Speaker 2 division and villainization. Everyone keeps saying, oh, well, who are our villains? Who are our villains? Well, John F.
Kennedy and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton didn't all run on villains.

Speaker 2 They ran on a vision. They ran on inspiration.
They ran on hope for the nation. And one of the things I was just campaigning, I campaigned for all the candidates, but I was campaigning for Mamdani.

Speaker 2 And I said, if you had asked me when I was growing up in Pennsylvania that you'd had an Indian American of Hindu faith representing Silicon Valley, introducing an African-born Indian American of Muslim faith to be the mayor of New York, that people would have said, that's crazy.

Speaker 2 But that's a sign of an American dream being possible and celebrating a multiracial America. And we shouldn't shy away from that.
I think deep in our bones, we believe America is a land for everyone.

Speaker 1 100%. And, you know, I'm not going to,

Speaker 1 unfortunately, I'm not going to derail this into a discussion of American history.

Speaker 1 But of course, that is the centerpiece, the true centerpiece of American history is the idea of people being able to create their own destinies. And that's what makes our history so exciting.

Speaker 1 But to go back to where I'm really trying to push you here is a link between your vision of what you have called progressive capitalism and this larger vision, because in many ways you are recovering, you and people like Mom Dani and the other people who are speaking nowadays about a vision for the United States that is beyond partisanship and back to the idea of creating your own destiny.

Speaker 1 What you are doing in many ways is reminiscent of FDR, whom you have mentioned today, but also of people like Theodore Roosevelt, who called for universal health care, or for somebody like Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 1 And I'd like to hear more about why you chose the word progressive capitalism for what you're thinking about, and how you think that that intersects with the idea of populism.

Speaker 1 Both, all those words are very loaded, of course, but a lot of people nowadays are talking about what they see as a difference between progressivism and populism.

Speaker 1 And this is really problematic for me because to me, they seem very much like the same thing.

Speaker 2 Well, look, populism seems to me

Speaker 2 to say

Speaker 2 that we have

Speaker 2 an inequality in a system that hasn't worked.

Speaker 2 And then the system has worked for quote-unquote elites, whether those are people who've had degrees or whether they're people who have had professional careers or economic success.

Speaker 2 And it really hasn't worked for many Americans. And it's an anger.
It's a movement.

Speaker 2 that says we've got to change that.

Speaker 2 What I would argue is progressive capitalism

Speaker 2 is a roadmap to how we change that.

Speaker 2 And the goal being what I call economic patriotism, meaning every community, every family should have the opportunity to have economic success in a modern economy. Now, that roadmap, in my view,

Speaker 2 does not have to be invented new. It's what Hamilton did.
It's what Lincoln did. It's what FDR did.
And that is the combination of

Speaker 2 the state with the private sector and local communities to think about how we are going to have an economic strategy that is going to allow every community to thrive and people to live their destiny within that community.

Speaker 2 And it means both the pie being fair and the pie growing. And so what I've tried to do as a student somewhat of Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR is to say, look, that

Speaker 2 their ideas can be translated. in a modern context with the correction of Dr.

Speaker 2 King, who said it shouldn't exclude the Black South, and that we can actually build that kind of a robust economic development strategy in the 21st century.

Speaker 2 And by the way, that is the real solution to what

Speaker 2 populism, including Trump's populism, is railing against, which is this sense that the American dream has slipped away.

Speaker 1 I'm going to suggest, I agree. I'm going to push you and suggest that going forward, which is where I would like to end this discussion between the two of us,

Speaker 1 the Democrats and these visions of economic prosperity and self-determination really must focus more than they have.

Speaker 1 And I'm not talking necessarily now about the language

Speaker 1 of Democratic leaders, but the concepts, the ideology behind them needs to focus more on children, especially, but also on women. And that shift in focus in

Speaker 1 that ideology to go beyond the idea of families, for example, usually that are led by a heteronormative man.

Speaker 1 To go beyond that and to look to center instead children and families seems to me to be a direction that the Democrats appear anyway to be flirting with.

Speaker 2 What do you think of that?

Speaker 2 Well, first of all, I think you're right on the economics.

Speaker 2 I mean, James Heckman won the Nobel Prize at University of Chicago for showing that the single biggest investment that we could be making as a federal government is not in infrastructure or manufacturing or even college.

Speaker 2 It's between the time a kid is born to the time someone is in kindergarten, and that making sure that they have the emotional educational support is the most determinative of outcomes.

Speaker 2 And this is why Head Start was so successful, and that a universal child care preschool vision

Speaker 2 is, in the long run, what ultimately is the best probably investment in making the American dream possible. And

Speaker 2 the underinvestment in that in communities is really putting people at a disadvantage.

Speaker 2 Even Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate who was a University of Chicago more free market thinker, said in a technology age, the single biggest investments one could be making are in the education and health of people and at a young age.

Speaker 2 Now, I think Elizabeth Warren tried to make this argument

Speaker 2 in the most robust forms and

Speaker 2 probably the best. But I absolutely think that has to be part of the democratic agenda.

Speaker 2 And one thing I totally reject, which I was rejected last night, is this idea that, oh, because Vice President Harris lost, that somehow this country isn't ready for women to lead.

Speaker 2 I could not disagree with that more. I mean, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger proved that they were winning governors

Speaker 2 in Virginia and New Jersey. After John Kerry lost, we had this sense that Democrats needed to find their John Tester to run.
And then we had Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 2 So I think that this party party should lean in to building

Speaker 2 a cohesive multiracial coalition. It should lean into investing

Speaker 2 in young people. It should lean into our diversity of talent being a strength.

Speaker 2 And we should not try to mimic the Donald Trump playbook for America, not just because I don't think that's what will win, but who wants to govern in a way that's been so destructive.

Speaker 1 What do you,

Speaker 1 I think that's a really valuable thing to have on the table right now. When you think about what comes next for the next year,

Speaker 1 and I'm not talking about the minutiae of whatever the Trump administration is going to do, but

Speaker 1 the reason I'm interested in talking to you is because of the ideological currents, the economic ideological currents behind the kind of work you were doing.

Speaker 1 Where do you see that political slash economic ideology going?

Speaker 1 And I guess I'm going to say to focus solely on the Democratic side, or at least largely on the Democratic side, because the Republicans right now have a Nazi problem, which is a completely different kettle of fish.

Speaker 1 Where do you think that intellectual strand that we saw emerging last night is going to go in the next year before the midterms and longer, if you want, for the Democrats?

Speaker 2 I think the central

Speaker 2 point of Trump that he tried to make with no solutions was you've lost the sense of you're having pride in America. I'm going to bring it back.

Speaker 2 And his solution to that was, we're going to put these tariffs. We're going to stop immigrants from coming in and taking your jobs.
We're going to bash other countries.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this is going to restore

Speaker 2 your sense of having the life that your grandparents had and that your parents had.

Speaker 2 And by selling nostalgia, if you really believed that America was better in the 1960s and 1970s, well, America also was a less diverse place.

Speaker 2 America also was a place where we didn't have the kind of diverse leadership we have today. The Democratic Party, I think, has to say, no, the future is actually the better way

Speaker 2 of restoring the American dream for your kids.

Speaker 2 That, you know, if Donald Trump was born in the 19th century and if you could have an illegal Canadian-American war like we had the illegal Mexican-American war, maybe that's how he would build power.

Speaker 2 But you know what? That's not how you build modern wealth. That's not how you you build the modern American dream.

Speaker 2 And you may not see it firsthand, but you know deep in your hearts in an AI technology world that the stuff Trump's talking about is not going to create new economic opportunity for your families.

Speaker 2 So here is the way. that we're actually going to build economic opportunity for your families.
And it's hard because for 30, 40 years, all the wealth has been piling up in certain places.

Speaker 2 And we understand the costs of going up for owning a home and for childcare.

Speaker 2 But here are our ideas, substantive ideas for what's actually going to give your kids, your families, your communities a shot in the 21st century.

Speaker 2 You've seen this experiment of sort of nostalgia, and that's not the way forward.

Speaker 2 And I think that what last night shows is people who are grappling with those issues of how to offer a way forward and appreciating the struggles of the American experience are the ones that are succeeding.

Speaker 2 And I think we should do it.

Speaker 2 I guess the last point is we should do it with some humility because the forces that we're up against, I think the American people, we should say, look, we're not going to magically transform America.

Speaker 2 The one thing I would often joke with Biden, President Biden's team, is I said, FDR was saying in his fourth term that the country was terrible, that we had too much inequality, and it was all Herbert Hoover's fault.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, we shouldn't have a

Speaker 2 premature triumphalism.

Speaker 2 We should say that the structural challenges this country have are very difficult, but we are going to spend every moment trying to figure out how we can make the future possible for people's families and kids.

Speaker 1 So, you said something to build on that. You said something in 2017, which of course was a lifetime ago in modern American terms, but that really jumped out to me.

Speaker 1 You talked about how when you talked to the billionaires in Silicon Valley and said that they were going to have to face a world in which they were going to have to face higher taxes, one of the three arguments and the one that was most effective, I believe you said, was that they were going to have to create a fairer society or face, essentially face pitchforks.

Speaker 1 I thought that was, you know, it was reminiscent of FDR and

Speaker 1 quite accurate, really.

Speaker 1 Would you agree with that?

Speaker 2 Well, I'm glad you picked something I said that I still agree with. You know, 10 years back is a long time.
I jokingly refer to it as the anti-revolution tax

Speaker 2 to my billionaire friends. And that is,

Speaker 2 I believe, look, the guy who represents more billionaires than anywhere in the world is saying tax them more. I really don't understand how this is a hard platform for the Democratic Party to adopt.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you have more billionaires in your district, we can talk. But the reality is you have an extraordinary amount of wealth.
Someone said, What do you think of trillionaires?

Speaker 2 I said, If you had a 5% trillionaire tax, you would fund universal child care in this country at $10 a day and $20 an hour.

Speaker 2 The problem right now is people see the wealth concentration as not helping them, as just being divorced from their life.

Speaker 2 And I think that

Speaker 2 the central task of this country has to be how do we convince people that the economic future is going to be for them. And the taxation of that wealth

Speaker 2 is an important step in that direction.

Speaker 1 So I want to thank you for being here with me. And I want to ask you the final question that I like to ask everybody.

Speaker 1 And that is one of the things that really jumps out to me about this moment in American history and certainly about what happened last night is the degree to which it has been shaped by ordinary Americans recognizing that they do have agency to shape their future.

Speaker 1 If you were going to advise people what they should be doing to create a more just economic system or anything that you think is important, what would you suggest that they do?

Speaker 2 I think they've been advising us in Congress to

Speaker 2 fight harder and speak more boldly. I mean, they're the ones out marching people in the No Kings rallies.
They're the ones who are coming to the town halls.

Speaker 2 They're the ones who are organizing in congressional districts. They're the ones who are speaking out on social media.
You know,

Speaker 2 the part that I thought was the most discouraging of the Democratic Party was after we lost a close election,

Speaker 2 we went into this mode of defeatism and doom, where initially the idea was: well, let's just

Speaker 2 acquiesce to the Lake and Raleigh Act and deportation deportation without due process and throw the trans community under the bus and uh

Speaker 2 and morph ourselves into a in a trumpism-like but our base of citizens said no that's not america we are going to march we are going to push forward uh and i think the democratic party has to to say uh you know we are going to get to the other side of a multiracial democracy that the challenges we face are tough but they're not as tough as scaling the cliffs of normandy or being beaten on the edmund pettis Bridge or facing what my grandfather did, which was four years in a British prison fighting colonialism.

Speaker 2 That we have an inheritance of freedom movements, perhaps more than any generation, and that building a multiracial democracy is never going to be easy.

Speaker 2 But we're on the march and we're going to do it, and our generation is going to do it, and we're going to do it together on our values. And it always is darkest in American history before the dawn.

Speaker 2 After civil rights, you know, after Jim Crow, we had civil rights. After the Hoover collapse, we had the New Deal.
After the Civil War, we had the 13, 14th, 15th Amendment.

Speaker 2 I fundamentally believe after Trumpism, we're going to have a progressive era in this country.

Speaker 1 Cannot thank you enough for that final statement there, Representative, and for being here today. Thank you so much, and I hope we do this again soon.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Really enjoyed it.
Take care.