 Joe Biden has been elected president, but at 77, it's not going to be the party's future. At Navarro, we're hoping that role will fall to the progressive new generation in the Democratic Party and in Congress, figures like AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. And when it comes to progressive Congress people, there was some good news this Tuesday. At least three more progressives were elected. The squad is expanding of the new representatives who've been elected. Cori Bush is probably the most exciting. She's a Black Lives Matter activist. Let's take a look at her acceptance speech. Your Congresswoman, elect, loves you. And I need you to get that, because if I love you, I care that you eat. If I love you, I care that you have shelter and adequate safe housing. If I love you, I care that you have clean water and clean air, and you have a livable wage. If I love you, I care that the police don't murder you. If I love you, I care that you make it home safely. If I love you, I care that you are able to have a dignity and have a quality of life, the same as the next person, the same as those that don't look like you, that didn't grow up the same way you did. Those that don't have the same socioeconomic status as you, I care. And so regardless of whatever was, this is our moment, and this is our time, and that's how it will be. And so when you walk away from here, you walk with your chest poked out, that change has come to this district, and it's come by way of first, we are going to love and respect it. I don't want another to change the face of this district and become who we know we can be to have a safe, loving, welcoming, thriving community. This moment is brought to us by us, by our movement for social, racial, and economic justice. Now our movement is going to Congress, and we will meet the challenges of this moment as a movement side by side, arm in arm with our fists in the air, with our fists in the air, ready to serve each other until every single one of us is free. Thank you for electing me as your first Black Congresswoman here in the state of Missouri. Really amazing speech there. There are other sort of candidates to be excited about who have been recently elected. I think we're going to get the graphics from the Justice Democrats who sort of really got behind this new generation of progressives to go through some of them. So we've got Jamal Bowman. They're saying about him. He's the 11-year-old boy who was beaten by police officers and then started his own public school to take care of his community. He is now officially going to be a congressman. He unseated, but earlier in the year, I think it was the fourth most senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, like a real hawk. So a real positive change there. We can get up Newman. So Marie Newman, I've heard they write Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, reproductive rights, progressive foreign policy, justice reform and ending skyrocketing inequality. The block of mission-driven progressives is growing in Congress. All very exciting stuff. As you can imagine though, unsurprisingly, if anyone's sort of viewed the politics of center-left parties in the West, the moment of new progressives being elected into Congress and the moment of, you know, a Democrat president being elected is also one to have a massive barney between the center-left and the left of the Democratic Party. So apparently there was a three-hour long Zoom call yesterday between representatives or all the existing representatives in Congress and a big battle between the progressives and the right of the party. To explain, I suppose, the disappointing results, especially down ballot, but also Joe Biden didn't do as well as people were expecting in places like Florida, but mainly the disappointment is because the Democrats have lost seats in the House and they haven't gained the Senate. And we can go to a report in the Washington Post to sort of describe the row as it happened. So it says, the explanation laid out by centrists, according to multiple people who are on the call and spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that Republicans were easily able to paint them all as socialists and radical leftists who endorse far-left positions such as defunding the police. We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again. We lost good members because of that. Representative Abigail Spanberger, who narrowly leads in her re-election bid, said heatedly, if we are classifying Tuesday as a success, we will get effing torn apart in 2022. That line, which is blaming any failure on the left, received some pushback from Rashida Tlaib, a self-described democratic socialist. We can get up more copy from the Washington Post. Apparently she grew angry accusing her colleagues of only being interested in appealing to white people in suburbia. To be real, it sounds like you are saying, stop pushing for what Black folks want, she said. To find out about this row, what's going to happen, I spoke earlier to Walid Shaheed. He was a brilliant person to manage the speeches today because he is a spokesperson for Justice Democrats. Exactly that organization, that organized for AOC, Ilan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and now these three very exciting Congress people who have just won their elections. When I spoke to Walid, I started by asking what he makes of the left getting blamed for a disappointing democratic result. Yeah, there's a couple of points there. One, when you lose, you want to blame everyone. So these people spent the past two years saying progressives have no power and suddenly they have all the power in the world to make the moderates lose their seats. The best thing that has been said by some of these conservative Democrats is that they're advising everyone not to run on a Green New Deal and Medicare for All and aligning themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement because they're saying those things are unpopular. Meanwhile, they did not run on those things and still lost their seats. So their advice is a little, internally doesn't make sense. But the Democratic Party establishment, the leadership had one job and they blew it and it was their job in the House and the Senate. I think a big thing is that a lot of these conservative Democrats, their main message tends to be the left is going too far to the left and Trump is going too far and we just want to seek common ground. And that is not really a compelling positive message. There's no substance to that message. It's tactical, it's academic, it's about negotiating. Even if they wanted to run on a more conservative platform, running on this message of just common ground is not necessarily a message to defeat the party of Donald Trump. That was Willie Chahid's take and we can also look at AOC's take. She put out her two cents on Twitter today. I'm about the left getting blamed. So she wrote, there are folks running around on TV blaming progressivism for Dem under performance. I was curious. So I decided to open the hood on struggling campaigns of candidates who were blaming progressives for their problems. Almost all had awful execution on digital during a pandemic. She also points out that some of the best digital companies were actually banned by the Democratic elections campaign because they had worked with progressives who were trying to unseat incumbents. So basically her argument is that the organization was terrible on the part of the Democratic establishment candidates and that's why they haven't done quite so well. I want to go back to Willie Chahid because I also asked him, regardless of who gets the blame for a disappointing set of results, we are going to see a Congress this time around that looks quite different to what it has done for the previous two years. So my question was, who's going to come out empowered by the results from Tuesday? If you look at the Democratic Party in Congress, is it the left or the right? So we're going to come out from this election saying, yes, this is our chance. We're now on top. It's a mixed bag. So because conservative Democrats in swing seats, a lot of them lost their seats, that means there is a much more of a leverage point for progressives to organize the block within the House. That said, if Mitch McConnell takes the Senate and holds on to the Senate, that really does have a major impact on any sort of progressive, even center left legislation passing through because Mitch McConnell has shown over the past 10 years that he is unwilling to do anything Democrats want, whether that Democrat is Barack Obama or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So I really think that where we're heading, if Republicans hold on to the Senate is a crisis of democracy because Democrats will have won the majority of the votes by millions of people. They will have held on to the House, and Mitch McConnell will represent minority rule, essentially, as well as the Supreme Court. If Joe Biden goes through with pursuing deals with Mitch McConnell, he might create toxic compromises and immoral compromises that will create real friction and factions within the Democratic Party about why the hell are we negotiating and compromising with Mitch McConnell when he does not represent... Why is he a co-governing partner? Why and he doesn't represent the majority of Americans who elected us to be here? And so that is like a central question that I think will dominate the next few years of American democracy if he holds on to the Senate. So it's really complicated. So in some ways, progressives do have more leverage in the House, but the Senate is ultimately the roadblock to progressive legislation, as well as the Supreme Court. And so it's not super clear one way or the other. Absolutely. Shahid, talking about the power struggles, which we're now going to see within the Democratic Party. Mike, I want to go to you so much to talk about that. I suppose the issue of the center is now blaming the left. The left, presumably, are going to say the reason you didn't do so well is because your candidate did only just enough to get elected. What I'm hearing is people saying because your campaign was only anti-Trump, then it made sense. The logical conclusion for a vote to say, okay, well, if the problem was Trump, but Republicans are fine, then I'll vote against Trump, but vote Republican. And then the other issue coming out of this is, yeah, who is going to be able to capitalize on this? Do you see centrists trying to use this and succeeding as a chance to sort of vilify the left and say, these people are toxic, you don't want to get near them? Or do you see the fact that the squad is now at least seven? I mean, depending on who you include, there's definitely seven. Could be more. Do you see this as this result as an opportunity for the progressive left within the Democratic Party? Yeah, definitely, especially because we're probably going to see very soon the centrist Democrats not be able to deliver on very much in the coming years. And the agenda that the squad and the rest of the resurgent left in America has been running on is wildly popular in America. It's funny to hear people like Representative Spanburger, who you quoted, who, by the way, is literally a former CIA agent. So I'm not sure anybody should be shocked that an actual former CIA agent would be denouncing socialism on a call. That sort of was her bread and butter in her former career. But the ideas that socialists are pushing right now, like Medicare for All, repeatedly being shown in polls that overwhelmingly popular among Americans, the Democrats in this election, certainly Joe Biden himself did not run on socialism. They ran on being anti-socialists, and yet they were called socialists anyway, which they should be familiar with from all of the history of American politics in the last half-century. This is standard stuff. Biden was the vice president into Barack Obama, who was constantly called a socialist. The Republicans are going to call them socialists no matter what they do. Maybe they should try embracing the policies that are associated with socialism that are actually quite popular among the American people. There were also some exit polls on election day, weren't they, that were going viral on Twitter because it showed that I think 60% of the population wanted Medicare for All. All of these progressive policies were coming out as very popular. Also, you saw the 15-pound minimum wage passing in a referendum within the same electorate who voted Trump by quite a decent margin. You are obviously seeing people who are inclined to vote Republican, who are also in favor of what we'd call progressive policies that aren't actually part of the Democratic platform. Dali, I want to go to you, because an interesting thing about the Justice Democrats, and it's something that, I mean, we don't necessarily have a comparative organization, and it's not necessarily something that would fit even within our political system, is they have sort of handpicked these really inspiring candidates. I think you can nominate candidates to be sort of promoted by the Justice Democrats to enter into Congress. And it does in a way, you know, what happened in the UK is by accident, someone won the leadership of the Labour Party and were not really in a position to make it work. I mean, obviously it worked for a while, but you know, it wasn't, there wasn't the groundwork that had been done because it was a complete surprise. Whereas on the Democratic left, it kind of feels like they've actually had quite a lot of time to sort of grow and nurture their roots and build up these candidates from the bottom and they haven't been put forward yet to a sort of national election where they could just get completely destroyed by the establishment. And in a way, it seems like, you know, they've got kind of, I sort of look at it and think, yeah, I want what they've got. It seems so much more coherent and less messy than what's happening in the UK right now. Yeah, and that is a fundamental strategic difference is that the insurgent progressives in America identified that they are not going up against the Republicans, they're going up against the states, they're going up against the establishment. And that involves changing the fabric of the party, right? Whereas here, I think you're right that part of it was that there was a kind of surprise election, there was a surprise leadership change, and that kind of groundwork had not been done to actually change the party. But I also think that that is kind of letting off, letting the sort of labor left off the hook and that there was a significant amount that could have been done to change the party and to change the fabric of the party. And that didn't happen for multiple reasons. But I think that it's just absolutely enraging. And, Mika was right there in that, Barack Obama, before the squad, there was no squad when Barack Obama ran for president, and yet he was routinely called a socialist. You are going to be called this no matter what. So you may as well go for the things that actually make you popular rather than constantly being scared. And what makes me so frustrated is that Chuck Schumer is the epitome of conservative Democrats, the epitome of that wing. And he failed. His Senate bid failed when it should have won. And there was this reliance that the combination of economic crisis of a pandemic of sort of Trump being a general chaos would be enough for the Democrats to simply win down ballot that they didn't actually have to offer anything. There was a deviation from the pre-Trump norm that they just had to sort of sit there and stay still while sort of Trump delivered them a victory. And clearly, that didn't work. That was a wrong call. And that those who actually had the boldness to offer an alternative vision were much more effective. And so much money was poured into right-wing Democrats like Amy McGrath and all these people. And they lost. And that alongside with the fact that the actual policies such as universal health care, such as around policing are actually quite and around a Green New Deal are actually very popular. There really is no data whatsoever to support this assertion by centrists and right-wing Democrats that the tarring of the term socialist or it's because of the squad, it's because of people like Ilhan Omar and AOC that are the reason that they failed in the Senate. The data is actually very much suggesting the opposite.