Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine, and I am joined today by Alex Bronsini vendor.

He is a contributor to the excellent Current Affairs magazine, and he is the author most recently

of a new article for our latest print edition, which is entitled in its online version.

Moderates, not leftists, have created the crises in democratic cities. Before that,

he wrote another excellent piece for us called Progressors Aren't Harding the Democratic Party.

In fact, they're the only thing saving it. Alex Brozini-Vendor. Thank you so much for joining us on

Current Affairs today. Thanks for having me on. I'm super excited.

Okay. So the two articles that you have written for us, they're different, and they're about different things, but they're in some ways about the same thing.

Because as I was thinking about this, I thought, well, there's a kind of underlying point that runs between both of these articles, which is that both of these

articles, in a way, are responding to a certain narrative about what it means to be pragmatic

in politics, about what is the source of the trouble that we are in, whether that is the left

ruining everything, or whether, in fact, it is centrists and neoliberals who are ruining

everything. Why don't you... I mean, I assume that you pitched these articles in part out of

irritation with a certain narrative.

And so why don't we start with you explaining to us what this pair of articles, and they go very well together,

is kind of a response to.

All right.

So I guess I'll begin with the first one chronologically, which was the one about progressives in the York state. Part of that, the frustration there

was that the New York Democratic Party has just been very, very hostile towards progressives.

You know, I think that many people around the states saw when Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the

New York Democratic Party compared India Walton, who was a DSA candidate for mayor of Buffalo, to David Duke, those sorts of fairly grotesque moments.

And I was just watching this sort of, I guess this sort of narrative that progressives aren't, you know, we have to fight progressives so hard because they just can't win.

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