Transcript: Democrats Need a Reconstruction Agenda

Liberal Currents’ Adam Gurri explains why Democrats need a “Reconstruction” agenda if they win the presidency in 2028.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Adam Gurri. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, which is a great publication, a newer publication that writes about politics both in the U.S. and Britain, and a little bit abroad as well, but mainly focuses on the U.S. And we’re going to talk today about a project Liberal Currents is doing called The Reconstruction Papers. So Adam, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Adam Gurri: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So tell people about Liberal Currents a little bit, just because I assume that’s a publication people are not as familiar with as The New York Times or the Washington Post. So tell them about Liberal Currents and what you’re doing, first of all.

Gurri: Sure. It’s an essay publication, mostly—so more commentary than news, though occasionally we’ve done a bit of news. Our focus is obviously through a liberal perspective. One of our inspirations when we started in 2017 was Jacobin magazine, which was created on the idea that socialism had been discredited in the U.S., in its reputation. They wanted to actually say, No, this is a serious intellectual tradition, and we are its number one exponents in the U.S.

We had the reverse situation, which was that liberalism was so successful that actually people didn’t take it very seriously, in the sense that they assumed a lot. We assume that we believe in free speech, we assume that we believe in different things, in human rights and such, but not a lot of thought was actually given to why anymore.

And actually, the enemies of liberalism spent a lot more time thinking about ways to attack it than the defenders thought about how to defend it, both intellectually and otherwise. So we wanted to correct that. We wanted to be one of the foremost exponents of what liberalism is, what it should be, why the world should be more liberal, and how we should go about it.

Bacon: So talk about The Reconstruction Papers and what you’re doing.

Gurri: Yes. From our point of view—the Trump era, liberal resistance to it. The very name “resistance” implies a negative response, right? We’re trying to stop him from doing bad things. And even in talking about the extreme destruction of the second term, it’s often about, It’s bad that he’s breaking this thing. It was so great before. We need to fix it as soon as we can, or stop the destruction as much as we can.

That’s all true, but we shouldn’t fix it to be the way it was before. All of these things had problems before Trump came along. Everyone agreed, for example, that tuition was out of control in colleges and no one could quite identify the cause. That the public funding of science—which was this tremendous accomplishment in the 20th century for the U.S., and still one of the biggest ones worldwide by far, in fact I think the biggest by a wide margin—before Trump it was getting creaky, bureaucratic, sclerotic in a number of ways.

So the Reconstruction Papers is saying, we’re not just going to go back to before Trump. First of all, that’s impossible, because it’s not how things work. If you tried to do that, you would just be doing a kludge that would be worse than what we had before. But second of all, what we had before could be better. Why limit ourselves?

Now that we have this window of opportunity, where the Republicans have shot their shot—they’re trying to destroy the administrative state, the New Deal state, really and truly for the first time—let’s shoot our shot. Let’s make the best version of all of these things that we can.

And The Reconstruction Papers isn’t as comprehensive as we would like it to be in that. There’s more that we could write. We’ll continue publishing new things, obviously, on the main site—potentially a future issue of The Reconstruction Papers as well. But it covers a lot. It covers a lot of different topics.

Bacon: Do you mean to invoke Reconstruction as in the post-Civil War?

Gurri: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a few things, right? Reconstruction, the original one, is both an inspiration and a caution, because they had the right idea. They weren’t just passing amendments to change what legal rights we had, which was obviously one thing they did do. But the whole goal of it, the whole idea of Reconstruction, was the slave power was not just a legal entity. It was an institution that had social and political power, and in order to actually destroy it, you couldn’t just outlaw slavery. You had to actually break the political arrangement, break the economic organization of the South in such a way that it wouldn’t come back.

And the caution is that they failed, right? They did accomplish a lot. But a lot of their gains were reversed, and then we had almost a century of Jim Crow. Some people—including Victor Ray, in our collection, in the Reconstruction Papers—refer to the era of civil rights reforms as the Second Reconstruction. So that would be the successful one.

The Voting Rights Act, even more than the Civil Rights Acts, I would say, being the spine of that, holding the whole thing together. That was fairly successful in actually enfranchising African Americans permanently, and other minorities as well that were disenfranchised elsewhere. And frankly, Southern whites, very disenfranchised as well. It was not just minorities that were disenfranchised there. It was also poor people, anyone that they didn’t really want having a chance at challenging the status quo.

But now we’re seeing the unwinding of that. So we need—if there are two, we need a third.

Bacon: So I read—I don’t think I read all of them, but I read many of the Reconstruction Papers. So what Liberal Currents has done is, there are, I think, dozens of people who’ve written articles—maybe four pages, maybe 15 pages, that range in length—about their subject matter. So there’s foreign policy, there’s trade, there’s higher education, there’s domestic policy. So that’s a broad sense. But give people a sense of two or three ideas that are in the document they might want to think about.

Gurri: Sure. So one to think of, in terms of what has just happened in the Supreme Court, would be Anna Law’s contribution on immigration law. I think probably even more ambitious programs are possible, but our immigration status quo is so bad right now—even before, again, the Trump second term, it was so bad—that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. And her approach essentially was to say, Let’s take the low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit is essentially what she calls normalizing immigration law.

Right now, Congress has failed to pass any kind of bill for 20 years. There’s a lot of things that bipartisanly they have more or less agreed on for most of that time that would make the situation better off, including for people like us who believe that immigration is good. And we should just do it. And it should be reauthorized on a regular basis through Congress, so that it will normalize the process of actually revisiting how many people are here on TPS, just the different levels and numbers of each, and—

Bacon: Just to be clear, and make sure people understand—every year Congress should intentionally think through and pass legislation about how many people are entering the country new, not as a sort of—there should be a global number, right?

Gurri: I forget the exact cadence. I don’t think it’s every single year. But for example, the Voting Rights Act itself was reauthorized multiple times.

Gurri: And each time they reauthorized it, one of the things they would say is, We’ll reauthorize it again in this number of years. So after the Reagan one, I think it was quite a long time. Before that, they did it a couple of times relatively close together. And this is one of those inside-baseball, Congress things that a lot of people don’t know about. Having legislation be reauthorized like that gives Congress a more central role.

I would say a theme across the Reconstruction Papers is many of the problems of our system are downstream of the dysfunction of Congress. So the more you can do to force Congress to actually step up and fill the role it’s supposed to, the more that out-of-control presidencies and out-of-control courts will be reined in, almost just by happenstance. So making Congress regularly reauthorize some basic things about immigration law, according to Anna Law, will help a lot of things.

So that’s one—tied to the TPS, because TPS itself is a kludge, right? It’s like this, Oh, presidents can discretionarily give it to some people. Maybe we don’t make it quite so discretionary for them to revoke it—though it is discretionary for them whether or not they’re going to renew it. It’s just a mess in terms of how it works.

Bacon: What are the Supreme Court reforms in the document? I’ve forgotten now. What are the Supreme Court reforms themselves?

Gurri: Yeah. We actually don’t talk about it that much. One reason being that I actually am pretty optimistic that all the ideas are out there, for the most part. This has been........

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