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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, Joshua Green, national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, with his new book, called The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for American Politics. Of course, we talk about these politicians a lot because of how prominent they are, and they've all been on the show, but what's especially interesting about this book, coming from Joshua Green, is that some of you may remember he wrote the bestseller from a few years ago called Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.

As Joni Mitchell might sing at the Grammys this weekend, he's looked at American populism from both sides now. Let's talk to Joshua Green, author now of The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for American Politics. Joshua, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC today.

Joshua Green: Thanks so much for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start right in with the connection between the two books on these right-wing and left-wing populist figures? Maybe, define the word populism the way you use it and say why the same word applies to those camps with such different worldviews.

Joshua Green: I'm so glad you brought up this comparison because the two books weren't really written this way, but they really are a-- You could think of them as a two-volume series. Devil's Bargain, I wrote in 2016, 2017. I was embedded at the time with Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. What I'd noticed was just this brand of backlash politics to the effects of the financial crisis, to the rise of immigration, and that sort of thing. That was the theme of the last book that carried Trump to the White House.

I come out of the political world of the left. I've always been interested in left-wing populism in particular. This book, as you said in the intro, it was about Warren, Bernie, AOC, and the rise of left-wing populism since the 2008 financial crisis, the sea change we've seen in the Democratic Party since then, and ultimately, how it took a moderate Democratic president in Joe Biden to, first of all, to thwart Trump's right-wing populism but also to begin putting big parts of that left agenda into place.

Brian Lehrer: Left-wing populism is, tell me if you agree with this rough characterization, traditionally about, say, organizing workers and other large groups of grassroots citizens against an economic overclass who keep them down. Right-wing populist movements are traditionally about suspicion of the other, immigrants, African Americans, sexual minorities, and much more open to authoritarianism, at least domestically, or wouldn't you frame it like that?

Joshua Green: No, I would. I would say there are areas of overlap, though, especially on economics. People forget this now, but Trump, when he first ran in 2016, spent as much time talking about the Wall Street banks and how they were ripping off workers as he did immigrants and Muslims. That stuff all fell away once he became president. I think, in general, that right-wing populism tends to be more culturally inflected, whereas the left-wing populism that I write about in The Rebels really is more focused on economics.

I would even broaden out the list of things you mentioned. My book is bookended by two financial crises, the '08 one but also the crash that followed the COVID pandemic. I would also fold in things like the big middle-class focus stimulus that we got both from Donald Trump when he was still president but also from Joe Biden, and then things like small business loans, student debt relief, eviction freezes. Basically, action by the government on behalf of workers in the middle class.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to play a clip of AOC in a minute from just this past Sunday on Meet the Press that I think exemplifies what you were just saying. Talk a little bit more about the history first because I think I hear you saying the 2008-era financial crisis unleashed a new wave of right-wing populism and a new wave of left-wing populism, the same problems that inspired activists to very different solutions.

Joshua Green: That's right. I've been a reporter in Washington for about 25 years, a political reporter. To my mind, the 2008 financial crisis was the great disruption in American politics in my adult lifetime. In the aftermath of that, it just changed the course of politics. On the right, we saw an immediate backlash with the rise of the Tea Party movement and eventually places like Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump. There was also a reaction on the left. That's really the subject of my new book and that history, which gave rise to a brand, in particular, of economic populism from Warren, Bernie, and AOC that had existed in the past in America in the 1940s and '50s.

It'd really become dormant in the '60s, '70s, and '80s as liberalism changed its focus to things like civil rights, women's rights, the environment. In the early 2000s, a lot of energy was focused on the Iraq war and foreign policy. The old brand of economic populism really came roaring back in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and gave rise to this new strain of Democratic politicians. I tell this history through the successive stories of Warren, Bernie, and AOC, and how that's changed the Democratic Party and Joe Biden's presidency.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think my memory would be right if I said the populist responses against the banking bailouts of post-2008 were different in that Republicans objected to it because they don't like government spending, and they thought a lot more government spending to bail out the banks might result in higher taxes? The left-wing populists didn't like it because only the banks got bailed out, and there were all these homeowners left to be foreclosed, and they weren't bailed out.

Joshua Green: I think at a macro level, that's correct. It's worth remembering both of these crises started under Republican presidents. George W. Bush, younger Bush, was president when the '08 financial crisis hit. Let me tell you because I was covering Congress at the time, Republicans in Congress were fine with spending government money to bail out the banks. Mitch McConnell said at the time that passing TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was the big Wall Street bailout was his proudest accomplishment as a senator.

It was only after a Democratic president got elected in Barack Obama that he changed his tune. I think broadly speaking, what happened in the wake of the crisis was a mass dissatisfaction with the narrowness of the recovery, both among Republican and Democratic voters. You can see that reflected in a lot of poll numbers at the time. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, Gallup always asks people, historically, a very useful question, "What's the biggest problem the country is facing?"

In '09 and '10, it was the banks. Then a few years later, it became the government. Then, the backlash broadened even further, until the point that it became establishment figures and institutions in general. That was about 2013, 2014, which was right before Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders came on the scene and became important national figures. I do think that there's a partisan component to the various strains of populism, the way that they manifested themselves. In both of those directions, I think they upset Democratic and Republican politics, created an earthquake that we're still feeling aftershocks from today.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Joshua Green, national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek with his new book called The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for American Politics. He had also written a few years ago, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the American Presidency.

One of the main premises of the book is that this wing of the Democratic Party has had a lot of influence on the Biden presidency that he has governed more as a progressive than the earlier phases of his career in politics might have suggested he would. Here's a clip of AOC on NBC's Meet the Press just this past Sunday, saying Biden's been pretty good, but she wants him to go further.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I think we need to be talking more about health care. Of course, me as a progressive, I want to see the age of Medicare drop, whether it's to 50, as the President has discussed earlier, or to 0, as is my preference, to extend Medicare to all people in the United States of America. I believe that we can be doing more. We can talk even more about the fact that public colleges and universities should be tuition-free or reduced.

The president has advanced student loan forgiveness just this month. For people who have taken out save loans under $12,000, they will see their loans wiped out. I do believe that advancing that affirmative vision is going to be very, very important, as well as, really laying out and showing between now and November through our governing decisions when we have that power in the White House, what we are willing to do with it.

Brian Lehrer: AOC on NBC MTP, Meet the Press on Sunday. I should have said before the clip, we can also take some phone calls for Joshua Green, if anybody has thoughts or questions based on what he's been saying. 212-433-WNYC, call or text 212-433-9692. Does that clip exemplify the relationship between Biden and the progressive wing today?

Joshua Green: Well, I think what it exemplifies is the pressure that this newly emergent progressive wing has put on the mainstream of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden in particular, and done so, I want to say, and I argue in the book, with a great deal of success more I think than progressives tend to realize. When I first got to Washington in 2000, Biden was jokingly known as the senator from corporate America and one of Wall Street's best friends because he represented Delaware, which is home to so many corporations.

Early in the book, I write the narrative of how he emerged. He was really viewed as a villainous figure. There was a famous showdown that Biden had with Elizabeth Warren in 2005 over bankruptcy bill. Warren was then an important Harvard law professor. You can see as president that Biden has really embraced the brand of economic populism that my three characters believe in, and nowhere was that clear in my mind than in his reaction to the pandemic crash, the multiple rounds of stimulus, the focus on reshoring manufacturing jobs, building factories.

You'd mentioned earlier that labor is really an important part of Leftwing populism. Biden became the first president to march on a union picket line when he joined the UAW strike a few months ago. If you could rock it back in time 25 years and tell people that Joe Biden would be marching on a picket line and embracing a billionaire's wealth tax as he did in last year's State of the Union Address, I think it would blow people's minds. I think it's a good measure of how much the party has changed in a left direction based in large part because of the pressure from folks like AOC who you just played in that clip. They've won an internal argument, or they're winning an internal argument inside the Democratic Party.

Brian Lehrer: Your focus in the book, which I'm sure was finished before October 7th, was economics and how that topic has divided the wings of the Democratic Party, and the left-wing economic populists have risen up over the last 15 years to really influence somebody like Joe Biden. Of course, a big issue now dividing the Biden wing from the progressive wing is the war in Gaza. Here is Bernie Sanders, one of the three you focus on in the book recently supporting a bill that failed and that Biden did not support that would've put more human rights conditions regarding civilian casualties on the way Israel is fighting Hamas.

Bernie Sanders: My view has been from the beginning, Israel has a right to respond to this horrific terrorist attack from Hamas, but you do not have a right to go to war against an entire people, women, and children. The United States Congress has got to act because a lot of this destruction is being done with military weapons supplied by the United States of America.

What the resolution that I'm introducing is about, it's consistent with the Foreign Assistance Act. It says that if American military assistance is given to any country, Saudi Arabia, Israel, any other country, it has got to be used consistent with human rights, international human rights standards, and American law. In my opinion, that is certainly not the case.

Brian Lehrer: Bernie Sanders on CNN State of the Union on January 14th, I guess the Sunday Talk Show still matter a little bit. We had AOC on Meet the Press and Bernie there on CNN State of the Union. How do you see this issue? I don't know if it's in the book, but new as a big political force only since October interacting with or redefining the more left versus more center wings of the Democratic Party.

Joshua Green: Well, this happened after the book went to press, but unquestionably, I think that Israel and Hamas is the new fissure inside the Democratic party. You can see it everywhere you look. I think the most recent polls I've seen show that younger Democrats by three or four to one support Palestinians over Israelis. I was out in Iowa for the caucuses, for the Republican caucuses, and then New Hampshire for the primary. Speaking to voters on the ground, young people in particular, a lot of young Democrats and progressives were out, some of them crossing over to support Nikki Haley.

I always asked for what's your number one issue. Israel, I think by far was the biggest issue for most of the people that I spoke to that were under the age of, say, 40 and quite a few who were older too. I think that this has become the new fissure in the Democratic Party. The danger for, Joe Biden, I write in The Rebels about how he unified the party around a series of economic messages to such an extent that even characters like Sanders and AOC, who don't really line up with Joe Biden's politics, have been really happy with what he's done economically and decided not to challenge him in the '24 Democratic primaries.

While he's temporarily put out that fire, I think Israel is a new one. The White House is really having a hard time grappling with what to do, how to message it, and how to not to lose these vital, younger, progressive voters that Biden is going to need if he's going to win re-election in the fall.

Brian Lehrer: Since you also wrote that book about Steve Bannon and the populist right, I'm confused by the America First Wing, including Trump on foreign policy. They run on no more foreign adventurism costing US blood and money that should be spent on Americans, that money, but then they also run on the US needing to be the big behemoth force in the world.

As it relates to the Middle East right now, we just had our first US deaths since October 7th in the region. The left is saying, we talked about this yesterday, it's a result of Biden supporting Netanyahu way too much, and that's why the Americans in Jordan became a target. If the right is for saving American blood, except where there are real American interests, what do they argue about American interests in the region?

Joshua Green: Well, I think if you talk to the right-wing populists that I've written about, people like Steve Bannon, their argument is that America's focus needs to be on China. That's our big enemy. It's not Russia, it's not Ukraine, it's not in the Middle East. That ought to be the focus. I think if we're being honest, the real focus for a lot of these folks is being anti-Democrat, anti-Joe Biden, and making any argument they can to undermine Biden's standing and his presidency. This isn't necessarily pure disagreements about policy. A lot of this is political and the criticisms that you hear coming from- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Nikki Haley is taking a fairly Biden-esque position, or even more hawkish, just support Israel in destroying Hamas. You might think Bannon and Trump would be more conflicted, but all I see is Trump campaigning on if he was president, October 7th never would've happened, which is a dodge. It doesn't tell us anything about what the US should do now, in his opinion.

Joshua Green: Yes, that's right. Look, Trump isn't articulating a policy position. This is just the old Trump impulse about, "If you elect me, I can fix anything," whether it's the economy or foreign policy. Haley is interesting in that she's representative of the older Reaganite strain of Republicans who really do have firm policy positions on foreign policy and do support Israel over Palestinians generally. There is a division there, but I think of it as being more division on the right than it isn't on the left. That division between Trump, Bannon, MAGA wing of the party, and the older Neo-conservative Nikki Haley wing.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get a couple of calls in here. David in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, David.

David: Yes. Thanks very much. I'd like to understand your interpretation of the recent Gallup polls, which show across the board an erosion of citizen trust in our institutions, including the media, but in terms of our elected officials, our appointed officials, the agencies, et cetera, and how that plays into your thesis about the rebels.

Joshua Green: That's a great question. I think the clearest way we can see the erosion of trust in politicians and institutions is if you look at the economic numbers, the condition of the country, and what people's mood is like when you look at Joe Biden's political standing. My day job is at Bloomberg, so I'm inundated with financial data all day long. If you look at the results of Joe Biden's response to the COVID crash, a response very much shaped by politicians like Warren, Bernie, and Ocasio-Cortez, it has been remarkably good in the sense that we have low gas prices, record-high stock market, record-low unemployment, consumer sentiment has turned around, is now shooting up.

All the economic numbers say that it's about to be morning in America again, as Reagan famously put it in 1984. Yet, if you look at Joe Biden's political standing, he is in the upper 30s. Voters just are not connecting these improved economic conditions with Joe Biden. I think that's partly because voters have become so sour on all politicians. Donald Trump is not much more popular than Joe Biden when it comes to favorability ratings with all voters. I think that people have soured so much on politicians and institutions that they're just not willing to give credit. You see this permanent condition of anger and dissatisfaction.

If you layer on top of that things like the war in the Middle East, the recent bout with inflation, the fact that Donald Trump is now coming back. For a long time, voters told pollsters they didn't think he would be back, but having won the first two contests in the Republican primary, he's pretty clearly going to be the Republican nominee. I think all of those realizations combined just create a very grim mood about the public generally, which explains a lot of the negative numbers that we're seeing.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes in response to something I said earlier about government's response to the financial crisis, listener writes, "Brian, love your show, but don't simplify by saying only the banks got bailed out. What about GM and Chrysler? Government action was necessary to keep jobs and the financial system functioning, watch your assumptions."

Joshua Green: That's a great point.

Brian Lehrer: The homeowners did not get bailed out, but remember Obama's re-election slogan, one of them in 2012, "General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead."

Joshua Green: That's a great point. The one real success in the '08 crisis response was saving Detroit. Mitt Romney, Obama's opponent in that election had famously written an op-ed titled "Let Detroit go bankrupt." I don't think it's any accident that Barack Obama chose to run as an economic populist in 2011 and 2012 when he was running for re-election, and the fact that he had saved the auto industry and was able to put that front and center.

The fact that he was running against a wealthy private equity baron in Mitt Romney, I think, helped to highlight those themes and shaped the election, but to my mind, it's yet another example of the power of economic populism as a political message. We see it on the left, we see it on the right with Trump. I think in a lot of ways the 2024 election is going to shape up as a battle between Trump's vision of right-wing populism and Joe Biden's vision of a more left-leaning populism.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with Joshua Green, national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek with his new book called The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for American Politics. Joshua, thank you so much for sharing it with our listeners.

Joshua Green: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

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