The Scene
Texas Rep. Greg Casar took over the Congressional Progressive Caucus last month and instantly picked a fight. Democrats, said Casar, might have won the election had they governed more like the CPC and less like Joe Manchin. The retiring West Virginia senator hit right back — Casar was “completely insane,” he said — but Casar thought both Manchin and the media had missed his point.
“I don’t mean that someone campaigning in Nebraska or West Virginia should campaign the way that somebody campaigns in Seattle,” Casar said this week in his House office, shortly before all but two Democrats voted against a Republican bill to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports. “I said, we need to have actually passed the housing plan that the Progressive Caucus championed. We need to actually have passed the plan that would have reduced child care costs that the Progressive Caucus championed. If we’d done all that, I think we would have had a much better shot at winning.”
Casar talked about his agenda for the caucus, and the 2024 elections, after a cycle when some of the party’s most high-profile progressives were targeted by pro-Israel groups and lost. “My goal this cycle is that we add Progressive Caucus members and not lose a single Progressive Caucus member,” he said.
The View From Greg Casar
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
David Weigel: Four years ago, Democrats weren’t really worried about inflation. When I talk to Manchin’s defenders, they say that his resistance stopped Democrats from spending even more and making inflation even worse. How has inflation changed the ambitions of progressives, or what they can do?
Greg Casar: There always seems to be an infinite amount of spending for war without concern about inflation — and then, suddenly, everybody gets very concerned once we’re spending on kids and moms and workers. We need to not let the weapon of fiscal responsibility be used so selectively by people who hate every penny that we’re spending on kids’ healthcare. That’s what you’re about to see in the Republican Department of Government Efficiency. The Republican caucus is going to keep on trying to jack up Pentagon spending that doesn’t go to our troops while picking on Social Security and Medicare. And then, I assume that Trump is going to then say — no, don’t touch them, just touch Medicaid.
But how significant is it, for progressives, when Trump does that? He’s dumped the old Paul Ryan approach to Social Security and Medicare. Republicans don’t talk that way about entitlement reform anymore.
They’re still going to talk about raising that retirement age. There’ll still be plenty of them that can’t help themselves, and we should call them out for it. Voters should know there’s a significant part of the Republican Party that still wants Paul Ryan cuts to Medicare and George W. Bush privatization of Social Security. And meanwhile, we can’t allow them to cut Medicaid for children and call it a win that they didn’t cut Medicare for their grandparents. We need to defend programs like Medicaid that help struggling Americans — but we also need to point out that if it weren’t for Republican attacks on those programs for struggling Americans, we could be helping people who don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford it if they need treatment for a serious health condition, right? There’s a lot of working class Americans that don’t qualify for Medicaid.
Texas Republicans never expanded Medicaid. Why didn’t that cause a political backlash? If you look at where votes moved last year, there were a lot of working class Latinos in Texas who’d have coverage if they moved to a blue state, and they voted for Republicans and Trump.
It’s an insane policy on [Gov. Greg] Abbott’s part, and Abbott’s main reasoning is that it had something to do with Obama. What was that — four presidents ago? Texas regularly ranks 49th or 50th out of 50 states in voter turnout. So many of the people that are getting screwed over have just called it quits on politics. And I do think that the Texas Democratic Party’s real challenge is to reengage those hundreds of thousands of people that can’t stand Greg Abbott’s selfish, loathsome, cynical policies, and get them involved.
Do you know many people who voted for Trump this time and didn’t last time? Why did they switch?
I mean, my district is a majority Latino working class district. I have Greg Abbott/Greg Casar voters! But I’ll give you an anecdote from outside of my district. I went to Nevada for a week with the Harris campaign, and met with a lot of working class and Latino voters. At one roundtable, I met a worker in the building trades who told me that he voted for Hillary, then voted for Joe, but he was going to vote for Trump this time.
I asked him, respectfully: Why? He said, well, I think that Trump is going to make sure that there is still building and construction. I don’t like the way that Democrats were focused too much on other stuff.
Did you ask what stuff he was thinking about?Of course. When you say “other stuff,” do you mean things like gay rights? He said, yeah. I asked, what gives you that impression?
I have a clear position on LGBT rights, which is, I want equal rights for all people, and I’m not going to change that about myself. But when I come into this office, and when I go to Democratic caucus meetings, what we’re talking about all day, every day, is making sure that there’s infrastructure that construction workers are out and building, making sure that there’s better wages for people, making sure that people’s housing costs go down. So what gives you the impression that the other stuff is what Democratic Party stands for? And he said, that’s just my impression of where the two parties are right now.
The Republican Party is going to continue spending gobs of money lying about who the Democrats are. We’re not going to be able to change that anytime soon. That’s a message question, and it’s a substance question. When I asked this guy, if the agenda was what I just described to you, even if we might disagree on some LGBT issues, would you vote for us? He said, of course.
How do you thread that together?
We have to do that differently than we did in the first Trump era. We have to say we are going to defend LGBT rights, and we’re going to make clear that we are defending those rights from Republicans who want to pick your pocket. I didn’t always make that connection eight years ago. I was very clear about him wanting to separate families in my district and attack Latino communities. But this time, progressives need to talk about the millions of dollars in corporate sponsorships that Trump is taking, too. We can’t miss a chance to point out the level of corporate shills and liars and fraudsters and grifters that are about to occupy the White House and the cabinet.
Aren’t a lot of voters okay with the richest man on earth playing this role? If I look at the vote in Brownsville, around SpaceX, lots of people switched from Democrat to Republican last year.
My theory of the case is: That’s not going to hold for very long. It just won’t. In Americans’ hearts, they know that the richest man in the history of the planet — this weirdo who’s addicted his phone, who thinks he’s a superhero but is a lot more like an evil scientist genius — should not be running the government, and shouldn’t be telling their elected representatives when to jump and how high. I don’t think any of us need a poll to know that that is a huge loser for the Republicans. They might be having fun with it online right now, while Musk’s algorithms tell them that they’re cool. In the long run, it’s a loser.
How should progressives think about communicating on social networks that are owned, or skewed, by pro-Trump owners?
I believe we’ve got to communicate everywhere that we can, but we also can’t have a monopoly. We have to be committed to antitrust and anti-monopoly tenets at every level, especially when it comes to news and information. Yes, we’ve got to play the game, but the rules are headed in the wrong direction. We have to figure out how we can better support independent media and local newspapers and deal with the increasing monopolization of social media.
I don’t pretend to have the immediate answer to that. But as progressives, we can’t survive on asking oligarchs to play nice. Fundamentally, our policy is that the world shouldn’t be run by oligarchs. It used to be that the oligarchs would quietly ask for favors and gain favor from presidents. Now some of these oligarchs are so brazen and so attention-hungry that they want to do it in public. I think that presents a real opportunity for the progressive movement to reshape the Democratic Party and reshape the country’s politics, because now the alliance between oligarchs and the right-wing is so public.
Not that many Democrats were willing to call out Elon Musk in the past. My first action after getting elected in November of 2022 was to ask for the Department of Labor to go investigate the workplace injuries and workplace death that occurred at Musk’s Tesla plant in my district. We’re losing when we’re asking oligarchs for favors. I don’t want to ask Jamie Dimon for diversity hiring. I want the banks to treat my diverse constituents better. I don’t want to ask Zuckerberg to have fact-checkers when I’m in power. I want there to be so many channels of information that Zuckerberg doesn’t get to control what we see. Why do three or four guys whose names we know, whose net worth is so insane we can’t even fathom it, have that level of power and influence? Nobody should.