8:38 AM ET

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Let’s bring into the conversation Boston Globe columnist and co-host of the #Sisters-in-Law podcast, Kimberly Atkins, she’s an MSNBC contributor. And author of Winners Take All, MSNBC political analyst and publisher of the newsletter entitled The Ink, Anand Giridharadas. Mike Barnicle and Kasie Hunt are back with us as well. And Anand, we want to start with your new piece for The Atlantic, entitled, Welcome to the New Progressive Era. And you write in part this, “The conversation I’ve had in recent weeks have painted a portrait of an improbable coming-together of people and forces: a moderate president, with an ascendant progressive movement at his back and at his throat, facing a once-in-a-generation window of opportunity. It’s still early. It remains to be seen if this momentum will continue, if the infrastructure plan musters the votes, if the ungainly Sanders-to-Manchin coalition holds. But for now, a capital that has been defined in recent years by the absence of useful action bubbles with generative possibility. And many of us who thought we knew what a Biden presidency would look like, and didn’t expect much from it, are suddenly asking ourselves: How did we get him so wrong?”

Anand, it seems like Biden’s experience over the past 30, 40, 50 years has led to a lot of stories and sort of stereotypes of what a Biden presidency might look like, but the man who is president now is a whole lot different than the Biden we knew 20, 30, 40 years ago. And perhaps that’s why there is this window of opportunity.

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Absolutely. You know, I decided to – you know, homebound as I am – decided to just spend a lot of time on the phone in recent weeks, talking to the campers in this big tent. And talked to everybody from, you know, Manchin to Larry Summers to progressives, Congresswoman Jayapal and other progressives, and the thing that I heard again and again was surprise, all manner of surprise. And I think what you’re seeing is a strange marriage of man and movement and moment.

So the man is, as you said, a historically moderate person, someone associated with the centrist wing of the party, more corporate friendly wing of the party. He ran and won despite a second thing going on, which is a progressive movement that increasingly has set the terms of the conversation and won a battle of ideas in the party, as many moderates told me for this piece, even though they didn’t win the primary.

And so you got the man and the movement in somewhat tension but also, as I said in the piece, at his back and at his throat, the movement is.

And then finally the moment, and there’s kind of two components of the moment. There’s the acute moment we’re in of COVID, the plague, this kind of once-in-a-generation political opportunity to do something big because of how bad things are, but also the accumulation of chronic crises, the death of the American dream frankly over the last generation, and without COVID, perhaps there wouldn’t be the political will to do big things.

And so ultimately, the kind of picture I found of Joe Biden throw all these conversations was someone who is a coalitional politician, not a star. Someone who is actually willing to kind of be the sum of the parts of his coalition, someone who’s making progressives, moderates, business folks, others feel heard and seen and listened to in ways that, you know, Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO told me, “Other administrations used to call us and tell us a decision. This administration calls us to ask us what the decision should be.” And it amounts, in my view, to potentially – potentially 2021 being a break not just from 2017 and Trumpism, not just from 2009 and the kind of limited response to a previous crisis, but really a break from 1981 and the dawn of the age of Reagan with its fundamental assumption that government is the problem. Government – the idea of government as a redemptive force to make people’s lives better is back.

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8:44 AM ET

WILLIE GEIST: Anand, as you say, one of the criticisms of Joe Biden in the primary season was that he was going to be too centrist, that he wouldn’t be the vessel for progressive ideas that the progressive wing of the party had hoped for and that most Democrats had hoped for. And in fact, when he was criticized by Donald Trump as being too progressive or a part of the “radical left,” to use his term, I think voters sort of shrugged that off looking at Joe Biden’s long record as not being ultra-progressive. So does that contribute to the surprise, the fact that he was seen as the guy in that big field of candidates as the one who may not, in fact, be most representative of the modern Democratic Party?

GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah, and I think there’s a funny dynamic where, first of all, to his credit, I think Biden is something incredibly counter-cultural in the age of polarization and certitude, which is he’s persuadable, right? So as someone who worked for him for a long time told me, you know, he was in Iowa back in the primary, and although he ended up winning the overall race, he saw that it was the Sanders and Warren camps in Iowa that had big boisterous crowds, and his, as the media reported at the time, were quite thin. So he saw, like a stand-up comic in a room noticing when you’re getting the laughs, he saw where the energy was, he prevailed, and then he was willing, through the unity task forces that he had with the Sanders folks onward, to incorporate a lot of those ideas and certainly a lot of those people.

And the other thing is, there is a – I think a kind of practice of something I’ve heard so much in this administration, this idea that, you know, apocryphally FDR said to A. Phillip Randolph, labor activist, “Make me do it. If you want me to do a big thing, make me do it.” I think a lot of the attitude of this administration is, “Go make me do it. I’m willing to do it, but I’m not willing to be three miles ahead of public opinion. I’m willing to do it if you can push and pressure public opinion to a place where, you know, it’s ready for me to do.” And I think that ends up being an incredibly powerful combination that could spell a transformational presidency and a presidency against all odds, given Biden’s record, that ends up shattering the age of Reagan, the consensus of the Reagan era in a way that the Obama and Clinton presidencies ended up not.

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8:49 AM ET

WILLIE GEIST: Anand, Mike Barnicle’s got a question for you. Mike?  

MIKE BARNICLE: Welcome, Anand, to old guy question time here, and the questions are –

GIRIDHARADAS: That could be its own show.

BARNICLE: Yeah, yeah. What’s the difference, if there is one, between being a liberal and being a progressive? And the second question is, when you write, “How did we get him so wrong,” in terms of speaking about Joe Biden, please identify the “We.”

GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah, it’s a great double question, I’m looking forward to the old-time old-guy question show hour. Look, I think one way to understand that difference between progressives and liberals, at least in the modern era, is how seriously you push back against corporate power as a principal threat in American life. I think there’s other definitions around – you know, there’s kind of versions of that around race. You can talk about – you know, I think, a more progressive view on race would really talk about white supremacy and structural racism with more comfort than the kind of more moderate liberals, who are more comfortable with kind of the language of colorblindness and things like that. So on issue after issue it is, I think, a view that looks at structures and power and frankly, not tweaking the engine, but you know, changing the engine.

In terms of the “We,” I was very much writing, you know, as someone of the progressive persuasion who did not anticipate a presidency and a level of policy that would be as bold as some of the things we’ve seen. I mean, Kimberly’s exactly right. You know, the infrastructure plan is not just an infrastructure plan. It has embedded in it a kind of effort to dismantle systemic racism over a generation and deal with climate. You know, just the amount of spending that we saw in the rescue plan, the child benefit, a lot of this I didn’t see coming and most of the progressives I talked to, from Ilhan Omar to Congresswoman Jayapal and others, just did not see it coming. It doesn’t mean everybody’s thrilled, everybody’s getting everything they want.

I think the important thing that emerged in a lot of the conversations I had for The Atlantic is policy is one thing, but there are cultural directions of the country, and for 40 years, from 1981 to 2021, the cultural wave of the country has been an anti-government wave. There’s been liberals within that, progressives within it, Republicans, there’s been different parties in power, but the fundamental set of assumptions is government is kind of regrettable at best and evil at worst and we should rein it in or not rely on it that much. For my book, Bill Clinton told me, “It’s always better if you can solve problems in the private sector.” Right? That’s what that era was, when even Democrats were saying that.

I think the fundamental thing that has happened right now, actually more significant than any policy, is that ship is turning. I think this administration – and Mike Donilon from the White House, on the record, said to me, “I think this is the moment where we finally break out of how government has operated since Reagan.” Pretty significant statement from a Democratic administration and a break from the past two Democratic administrations.

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