 Now inaugurations are fairly awkward affairs. You get speeches from losing primary candidates interspersed with diamond-clad pop stars singing songs about social justice, but much of the world still tuned in to what Joe Biden be sworn in as U.S. president. I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. do solemnly swear. I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. do solemnly swear. That I will faithfully execute. That I will faithfully execute. The office of president of the United States. Office of president of the United States. And will to the best of my ability. Will to the best of my ability. Preserve, protect, and defend. Preserve, protect, and defend. The Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States. So help you God. So help me God. Congratulations Mr. President. So Nomi, I want to bring you in for the first question. Do you think there's any chance that Joe Biden himself actually intends to be quite a progressive president, potentially more progressive than he has been in his past political career? I don't think he has a choice. I think the speech was almost intentionally vague given the attacks of on the Capitol by white supremacists two weeks ago today. I think that they had an intention to quote unquote unify the country. However you do that, it's, I don't know how you can unify with white supremacists, but perhaps he's trying to pull some of the more reasonable Republicans who were embarrassed by what happened and didn't want to be included in that party. Maybe that was his goal. But I think that the crises of the moment which he did identify, obviously there we have now hit 400,000 deaths due to the COVID in the last year in this country, actually not even in the last year. We have a healthcare system that is basically non-existent unless you have access to money or have money yourself. Not to mention the housing crisis that we're not even aware of yet and the massive evictions that we're just postponing, postponing attached to debt for people who are still going to have to pay their past rents over the last 10 months. And we now have working people that were already underpaid and dealing with this economic system, but I think that we're going to have a lot more working poor people in this country or just non-working, unemployed poor people in this country that he has to deal with. And there's no way out of that unless you come up with bold solutions. I do think there was a way for him to address these crises and also be inclusive of folks who might not be open to more socialist ideas, quote unquote socialist ideas. I think he could have come up with his form of a new deal that talks to working people on whatever side of the aisle, however they want to channel their frustrations due to the economic problems in our country. I think his job is to channel it into something productive that heals the wounds of America that are coming out in the most horrific ways. I didn't see that and that's what disappointed me is that I do think, you know, this is somebody who talked so much about labor, talked so much about being working class Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania, factory town, a former factory town. But I haven't heard other than saying that we should not be focused on the deficit, which was something we haven't heard from neoliberals in the last 35 years. Other than that, I really haven't heard much about how labor can be a part of this project to heal America. And I don't think there's a path without having labor, even if it's a dying labor force. I don't think there's a path because keep in mind, so many workers in this country have been on the front lines and many of them are women and many of them are women of color. In fact, most women have dealt with the worst aspects of this economy. And other than talking about white supremacy, which transformative that he addressed it publicly, just as it was transformative when Corey Bush said white supremacist in chief, it was still very surface level. And I do think that there is a way to unify the country while still healing our economic wounds that just was not dealt with in the speech, unfortunately. There was less concrete promises than I was expecting. The most optimistic takes about Biden is that he could, without really meaning to be forced into the position of a kind of FDR who has to come up with some kind of new deal. And he very much there was just channeling, look, Trump's gone, we can go back to normal, which is very much what I took from everything he said really up on stage. Yeah, and it's strange is because just a few days ago, he did give a speech about his plans for the first hundred days. And while it was imperfect, by far better than we've ever heard from him. I mean, just that deficit line alone, recognizing that we should not frame every single policy from the point of how we're going to pay for it. And will it worse than the deficit? He acknowledged that they made crucial errors in the post-economic collapse of 2008 in the Obama administration, and he didn't want to take that path because they were dealing from a place of, well, the deficit could get worse and how are we going to pay for it? It was almost like Stephanie Kelton or the leaders of MMT were in his ears and said, you know, you can always print more money. There's nothing, don't worry. Especially if you're in the United States, right? Right, especially if you're in the United States. Come to where MMT really works. Exactly, exactly. And unfortunately, this is the speech that history is going to look back on. Most likely it won't be the speech from four days ago. So I almost wish she gave the speech from four days ago today and added in the healing of America and ridding the country of white supremacy. What was actually interesting is the most dangerous terms he could have used that could prevent, you know, partnering with the Republicans was the term white supremacy. That's the trigger for so many Republicans because whether they acknowledge the actions on Capitol Hill last, two weeks ago were forms of white supremacy or anti-Semitism or misogyny or not. I think we're not at the stage yet where enough Republicans recognize that's not the party that they signed up for. Maybe they just don't want to pay more taxes, whatever. There are plenty of Republicans who become Republicans for different reasons but may not be able to connect the dots between economic systems built off of slavery, misogyny and those lower taxes. But we have to get them there. And I think the pathway through that is really tapping into the economic divides and the crises of health care and wages and housing that the majority of Americans are facing right now. I suppose what's remarkable when you listen to American politicians is they all sound ridiculous in the way they talk about the USA, you know, even as the last great hope or the leading force for good in the world. And, you know, whilst they think they're sounding internationalist, when they say that for many people across the world, they're actually clenching their teeth because like, oh, maybe the one redeeming factor about Donald Trump was his isolationism. Now you've got a liberal or Democrat in office who's going to try and regain the mantle of world leadership. Is that something we should be really worried about? It's a super interesting question. I think I want to sort of say at the beginning of this, I think actually the situation right now in the United States is incredibly volatile and that's not really captured by what you're seeing with the State of the Union address. And Aristotle in the politics talks about the need for majesty and he says you don't have political authority without majesty. And so what you're seeing with people who's basically, their takes on Biden and the renewal of America on the basis of Lady Gaga singing a song is basically the power of majesty. It makes people into babbling idiots who are talking complete nonsense. And the same problems which confront America before Donald Trump, during Donald Trump will remain. One of them is, like you say, relative foreign policy. Can America remain the world's policeman? No. Does Joe Biden have the sort of political legitimacy, the social base whereby you can see wars abroad to maintain American imperialism? No. Is there a clearly now a massive isolationist sort of bent within both the Republican Party but also the sort of Democratic Party on the left? Yes. That's probably a social majority actually against American misadventures abroad. So he has major problems there. And finally, in sort of replying to something that Miki said about he has no choice, Joe Biden wins in November last year. I mean, he was always going to win the popular vote, but he wins the presidency fundamentally because of African Americans. Now, people might think, well, how's that possible? Trump increased his share of African Americans and Latinos on four years earlier. But it's because we see record numbers of people participating. You know, the turnout by one measure in this election was, I think, the highest in more than 100 years. And you see this particularly after the murder of George Floyd. I think in Georgia, Republicans actually, the state of Georgia, Republicans were actually registering people to a greater extent than Democrats were until the death of George Floyd. And so that's an inflection point. That's a turning point. Now, it's not to say that sort of BLM can tell Joe Biden what to do because it's not that kind of a movement. It's not that organized. But the people that voted for Joe Biden and actually didn't tend to vote for the Democrats as much down ballot, those people don't want American wars abroad. They don't believe in American exceptionalism sort of overtly. They might sort of believe it as a kind of background variable. But they're not like, we need to police the world. They don't think that. And so I do think there's a huge conflict here between the people that voted Biden into office and the kind of self-conception of the Democratic Party elite. And that's going to cause major problems. And I do think now in US politics, you have sort of three bases. And you do. You have a very conspicuous strong left, which isn't really reflected in the Democratic Party. It's not really reflected in the media. But it's clearly there when you see opinion poll data on various policies. It's there in Florida where Trump wins. You can be backing up a $15 minimum wage. Then you've got the center. It's kind of desiccated. We don't know how weak it is. Right now, it feels like a sort of necromanced corpse. It's the undead, right? We don't know how big or how small it is. But it's definitely in charge for now. And then you've got the Republican right. And again, that's in a process of kind of splintering. And you can see a situation in four years' time where you have a sort of Trump party going for the White House. Would it win? No, almost certainly not. That would cause huge risks within the Republican Party. But then, of course, you have your own fractures within the Democrats as well. So it is very volatile. And I think America could be a profoundly different country by 2030 than the one it is today. And I do think it's a morbid symptom of the post-2008 crisis that the very man who was the vice president in the teeth of the Golden Financial Crisis of 2008, the very same man has now been elected president, which tells you there's a dramatic shortcoming in the path of the American political class to solve the country's problems. This is the definition of a sticking plaster. So it's great Trump has gone. It's fantastic that, I don't think it was a coup attempt, but it was kind of similar to the beer hall in the 20s in Barberia. It's great that failed. And it's clear that there are anti-Trump sort of forces in American society, which are number pro-Trump forces. That's great. It's very welcome. But it's most certainly not the final word. I want to go to another Biden clip now, which is not so much about what he wants to do, but how he's planning to do it. So once again, this has been a sort of unifying theme of Biden and Biden's candidacy and since he's won, which is that he wants to bring people together and work across political divides. We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we're willing to stand in the other person's shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment, stand in their shoes. I mean, there he's talking about wider society. That's a message to America, but it also kind of encapsulates his sort of ideas about the partisan divides at the elite level. So he's often suggesting, I think I can win over Republicans. And my question for you, Nomi, is because this might see, some have argued, and I think it's quite persuasive, because of the skewed nature of the American electoral system, especially the Senate, this might be one of the last chances the Democrats have to actually change the rules of the game to make them more fair. So there'll be Senate elections in two years time in many states which are expected to flip Republican, not because of the popularity of the Republican party, but because of the skewed electoral geography of the United States. And do you think that instead of sort of saying, let's work together, Biden should say, look, we've got two years now, the Democrats control all the houses and the presidency. I'm going to have an iron discipline for every Democrat lawmaker, and we are going to make DC into a state, make Puerto Rico into a state, and make sure that we never have a president like Donald Trump who hasn't won the popular vote and sort of a minoritarian Republican party who still gets a veto in the Senate. Should he be saying, let's play hardball now, screw the Republicans? Oh, he should absolutely be saying, let's play hardball. It's interesting that that part of the clip reminded me so much of the, there's no red America, there's no blue America, there's one America speech. I'm not accurate quote, but the Obama speech, of course, about unifying America and that speech came out of a convention a few years before President Obama who was then not even the nominee at the time. I mean, he was a senator out of Illinois. So we have these divides for a long time. And it is because exactly what you said, we have these institutional issues that have exacerbated over time as gerrymandering, as has been the tool for Republicans, as Republicans have taken over state legislatures and carved congressional districts. And frankly, Democrats have worked with them to protect their districts as well as the filibuster has been used to ad nauseam by Republicans to hold up everything that could potentially be put on the floor. I think there is real movement to end the filibuster. I think Senator Schumer probably is more willing to play hardball even though there's this supposed partnership deal that they're gonna do. I think that might, I'm hoping that that's just a maneuver to get Mitch McConnell to work with him because the alternative is they just shove through everything that they possibly can. The good side of this is when it comes to the big issues that are gonna solve the core crises right now that we're facing, the immediate and core crises, the economic inequality, the healthcare crises, the housing crises in our country, that can come from the executive level, much of that can come from the executive level. So Biden has declared that he is going to immediately sign today over 100 executive actions, which is pretty bold, but also this is the moment to do so. Simultaneously, this is where Senator Schumer needs to play hardball because there are some things that he can do and he can push for like taking on the filibuster, but there are other things that, whether it's ending the Electoral College, unfortunately, that's not unanimous in the Democratic Party. It was built off of a racist mindset to disempower because we're a country that came out of slavery. Our entire, we are a capitalist country that was built off the backs of slaves where slaves came in through the port right in front of Wall Street and New York City still had slaves while the rest of the North didn't. So we are a country's, our model was built off of that and as a result, so are forms of government. D.C. statehood I think is a go. I think Puerto Rico is a little bit more complicated. It's traditionally a more conservative issue on the island. So sometimes Democrats lump that in, but Puerto Rico is treated as if it's a colony, but I think having done a lot of work in Puerto Rico, there is a real movement in a growing independence movement that was killed 50 years ago by the state, meaning the American state, the federal state. So we'll see. It would help to have more senators. I think that we could probably keep the Senate. That Congress is what we have to worry about. We lost so many seats this cycle, which is not great when you have a presidential year. And usually whoever is a sitting president will lose seats in the off year. Hopefully it's not a shellacking like it was under Obama. And hopefully simultaneously, President Biden really pushes for the DNC to put the money back into state parties because how can you take on gerrymandering when you're not winning state legislatures? There are plenty of state legislatures that we could be winning. And if we just had Democrats putting money into parties to recruit talent, to recruit candidates, to recruit staff, to actually be strategic and fight these Republicans, instead of every Democratic candidate for themselves, which is really not how you win and it's not how you play the long game. Because right now what Republicans are trying to do is through the state legislatures that they control, even with Democratic governors, they're trying to ram through electoral reforms, retroactive reforms, I should say, from their minds that it's a reform, to make it so that they hold control for another 10, 15, 20 years, even though, as Erin said, demographics are against them. They're playing the long game. Democrats are playing the short game, partly because the Democratic Party is so deeply invested in making money off of presidential elections and these big Senate races and not on winning for the long, long term.