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David Leonhardt is an editorial director for New York Times Opinion.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Leonhardt discuss why the left is losing its appeal to the working classes in the United States and in Europe, the flaws in the Democratic Party’s approach to voters, and what U.S. Democrats can learn from the Social Democrats in Denmark.
Note: This interview was recorded on March 18, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I read you all of the time. I have many things I want to talk about, but perhaps one of the things you've been particularly interested in, in various veins for the last months and years, is the transformation of the Democratic Party and of left-wing political parties more broadly. One of the really striking things about them is that historically, many of them were born in social democratic and trade union movements. They naturally were supposed to be the home of the working class, and of the simple guy earning a hard day's living with his hands. These parties represented those people against the bourgeoisie and the professional managerial class, as we might put it today. But that's no longer what many of those parties do. In many cases, they now actually have much more support among the affluent and the highly educated. That is true of the Democratic Party in the United States as well.
Tell us a little bit about this trend and how that holds the key to understanding a lot of contemporary politics.
David Leonhardt: It's a trend that's been going on for decades. It is not a Donald Trump phenomenon, although he accelerated it. It has been going on in the United States since at least the 1960s, although not exactly evenly. We're now at the point where not only do college graduates lean toward the Democratic Party overall, while those without a four-year degree lean Republican—but also, people earning over $100,000 tend to lean Democratic, whereas those earning less lean Republican. The story is a little different in Europe. In Europe, these trends have been seen more in education than in income. So you still often on net have richer people voting for the right in Europe. But in the United States, richer people on net vote for the Democratic Party. I think when a lot of Democrats look at this, they find it befuddling. They ask questions like, how can all these people vote against their economic interests? Why don't they understand what's good for them? I think those are pretty condescending questions.
Mounk: One version of that is this famous book, What's the Matter with Kansas? The idea is that it's in the interests of these people to vote for Democrats, and if they don't, they must be doing something wrong.
Leonhardt: Yes, and they're being fooled by Fox News, or they're being fooled by misinformation, or they're just racist. Look, Fox News airing lies and misinformation is a real thing, and racism is obviously a real thing in American politics. So, I'm not dismissing any of those things. But these are partial explanations, and I don't even think they're the main ones. I think that until the center left and the left more generally grapples honestly with this problem, they're going to have a hard time fixing it. First of all, almost everybody really weighs not just economic issues, but social and cultural issues when they're voting. Why is it that affluent liberals vote for a party that often wants to raise their taxes? It's because they're not simply voting on which party is going to give them the biggest short-term increase to their take-home pay. They care about climate change. They care about reproductive rights. Working-class people feel the same way.
Mounk: By the way, this is a really simple inversion that I've sometimes used when students or members of audiences in talks ask me that question. I say, I'm going to make a wild guess and think if you're a student at a fancy university, you're probably going to earn more than the average American. If you are somebody who came to my talk at a bookstore in a nice neighborhood in an affluent American city, you probably make more than the median American. So, do you feel like you should be voting based on your economic interests for the Republican Party? I'm guessing you don't. It's amazing that a lot of people who think about it in this What's the Matter with Kansas? frame haven’t self-interrogated in that way.
Leonhardt : Yeah, I once wrote a column called “What's the Matter with Scarsdale,” which was basically laying out this argument. Scarsdale is a very wealthy suburb of New York City. I could have done Aspen, or Martha's Vineyard, or Beverly Hills. All those places now skew Democratic. I think the first form of denialism on the left is this idea, why would people vote against their economic interests? They shouldn't do that. This has real consequences for the Democratic Party because you often see that it ignores social issues when campaigning and just tries to talk about economic issues, as if by somehow getting people to ignore everything except taxes, health care, and Social Security they're gonna win everyone over to their side. I think that is a doomed strategy. You have to engage on other issues that people care about.
The second thing is to say that on those social and cultural issues, the working-class people who are voting for center right or right-wing parties are ignorant, bigoted, and just don't understand the way the world works. They're on the wrong side of history. I already said this once and I'll probably say it a third time at some point during our conversation. Racism is a huge and real problem in the United States. I'm not suggesting otherwise, but it isn't the only reason somebody might decide that they don't have a home in a center-left party. I thought that was the case back in 2016 when a lot of liberals, academics and journalists came forward to say that the only reason Donald Trump won was racism. I thought that was wrong, in part because many of the people who had helped elect Trump had voted for Barack Obama four and eight years earlier.
There were other reasons to think it was wrong. But now we’re really sure it was wrong because since 2016 we've seen a really meaningful shift of Latino and Asian American voters—and even a noticeable, if still modest, shift of African American voters—away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party. So, to argue that all those people are just racists really defies belief. To me, the shift of working-class people away from center-left parties is a more nuanced and understandable story.
Mounk: I think it's interesting to see how that explanation wasn't particularly convincing in 2016, but was tempting because the demographic pattern of who voted for Trump and who voted for Hillary Clinton at the time was so clear and obvious. But it turns out that the socially moderate or conservative white working class that had voted for Barack Obama and then switched over to Trump was actually a lead indicator for other working-class voters, particularly Latino ones. When you look at the 2024 outcome, it's quite clear that Latinos who were socially very progressive continued unsurprisingly to vote for Kamala Harris, but Latinos who were moderate or conservative on those cultural or social issues went over to vote for Donald Trump. What ultimately drives this?
One of the debates that we keep having between social scientists, but also in journalism and the public sphere more broadly, is about whether this shift is happening because the Democratic Party and other left-wing parties in Europe aren't standing up for the working class sufficiently on economic grounds. For instance, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been making the argument since the election that we just need to take more of what he calls an economically populist line in order to offer voters something bigger on the economy, and that's going to get them back in.
Or is it actually that the cultural message is so alienating to a lot of working-class voters that they're not even going to listen to what Democrats and other left-wing parties have to say on the economy until they feel that those parties come into line with them on those cultural questions?
Leonhardt: To me the best way to answer that question is to look at center-left candidates in the United States and parties in other places that have actually won tough races. How have they gone about this? I don't want to say it's absolutely universal, but there is a very clear pattern. The answer to your question is both. Those that win these tough races—Elissa Slotkin, the new senator from Michigan, Ruben Gallego, the senator from Arizona, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Raphael Warnock in an earlier election in Georgia, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Jared Golden in Maine—are often winning Trump districts. They do sound quite populist. A whole bunch of Democratic House candidates who won this year came out in favor of tariffs, for example. They often talk about big companies being out to get you, and how China competes unfairly. They aren't running some sort of neoliberal centrist campaign. They really sound quite populist. But they also sound very moderate, even conservative on a whole bunch of cultural issues. They were really hawkish about immigration and were critical of the Biden administration. Sometimes, depending on what states they're in, they portray themselves as hunters. They connect themselves to rural life in different ways.
So, I think there's this real desire among a whole lot of progressive Democrats to imagine that if only we get populist enough on economics, we could ignore all those cultural issues. Directionally, they are often right on populism. I think there's also a more centrist, market-friendly version of economics that could work for the Democrats. I'm not saying that's destined to fail. But this notion that you can just go really populist on economics and ignore the cultural stuff—it's really hard to find a single example of a Democrat who's won a tough race by doing that. I think there is a threshold question for many voters: Are you one of those elite liberals who doesn't care about border security, who is in favor of all these changes on gender, for example? When a Democrat comes off as someone who's a little bit more from a faculty lounge than a union hall on some of these cultural issues, they are really going to struggle to win back working-class people of all races.
Mounk: Let's delve a little bit more deeply into the economic part before returning to the cultural one and the question of immigration, which I think is particularly important and interesting. On the economy, the way that I tend to think about it is that we need to distinguish between an anti-crony-capitalist line and an anti-capitalist line. It's interesting to me that the examples you were giving were about things like tariffs being a good idea. I'm not quite sure whether I agree with that or not, but that's not the anti-capitalist line. It's saying, some of these big companies are really unfair. They're out to get you. We've got to protect you against those companies. It's not saying, I'm a socialist and I have worries about the free market in general. So, to me, the distinction is between the popular economic policies where I think Democrats can partially move to the left, and the areas where moving left becomes politically dangerous—for Democrats or other left-leaning parties.
The danger is when you start sounding like you're not in favor of markets, competition, economic growth, or progress. All of those are very popular. If you come across as someone who doesn’t appreciate the entrepreneurialism of small business owners, who lacks ambition to make people more affluent, who sympathizes with the degrowth movement, or who slips into socialist rhetoric—which, outside of certain parts of Latin America or Europe, is extremely off-putting—you risk alienating voters. That kind of language doesn’t connect with people’s real, often aspirational concerns. They want to be more affluent than they are. They’re not just looking for promises about a higher minimum wage—they want to hear how they can thrive, succeed, and build a better life. I think all of that is compatible with saying our economic system is rigged and Wall Street isn't on your side and that too often the regulators are very easy on these big companies.
So, I think you can be quite sharp in your rhetoric on those issues while still making it clear that you share very broadly-felt support for entrepreneurialism, for the free market and economic growth—especially in the American context. Do you think that that distinction makes sense, or do you see some of those candidates going a little bit further than I'm suggesting?
Leonhardt: I think that's precisely right, particularly in the American context. I do think it's important for candidates to signal some version of pro-capitalism even if they don't use the word—I don't know whether the word itself would be effective or not. But voters don't want to vote for a socialist in the United States. Bernie Sanders recognized that. He tried to distance himself from that word when he was running for president. You see that in some of these specific campaigns. I've already mentioned Jared Golden, a House member from Maine, who really has had one of the most impressive performances over the last few elections. He keeps winning this Trump district up in Maine. He sounds very populist, but he also talks about the government being too big. So, this isn't like we're gonna nationalize things and put everything in the hands of the government. It's just what you said, which is the implicit message of: I'm a capitalist, but the version of capitalism we have now is rigged. It's rigged for big businesses. It might be rigged toward big government. China helped rig it. I'm gonna help unrig it so it can be fair to you, to small businesses, and help you make a good living.
Mounk: That is actually the kind of economic populism on which Barack Obama ran in 2008. I know people have understandably mixed feelings about his response to the financial crisis, Wall Street, and so on. But it was always this promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to get ahead. The problem in our system right now is that it doesn't always allow for that. That promise combines very cleverly this appeal to work ethic, to merit, not in the sense of who gets into Harvard, but in the sense of wanting to reward people who work hard and provide for the communities. But we also recognize that there's a big role for the state in making sure that you don't get screwed over.
To switch to the cultural part of this, why do so many voters feel that the Democratic Party doesn't connect with them on cultural issues? Why is that feeling particularly strong in working-class communities that are white, Latino, Asian American, and to some extent African American as well?
Leonhardt: The Democratic Party has gone well to the left of public opinion on several social issues and hasn't really been willing to grapple with that. There was a period of time, roughly from 2015 to 2021, as the Democratic Party tried to figure out its post-Obama future, in which it was quite negative about policing. In Oregon, a Democratic state, you had the decriminalization of even hard drugs. You had all of the discussion around defunding the police.
The notion that we should pull back on policing was not a fringe idea. It was an idea that many Democrats embraced, like the idea of decriminalizing border crossings. So there were just a lot of the Democratic Party sending this message that they were in favor of less policing and that they were not that worried about crime. Voters were never there, including Latino and black voters. That's one example. Gender is another one. I think what the Trump administration is doing about trans people is deeply alarming. This approach of being disrespectful, denying that there are trans people, and preventing them from using the pronoun that they think fits their identity—I find it deeply, deeply alarming. Actually, so do many Americans. If you look at polling on basic civil rights for trans people, there's strong support of it.
Mounk: I haven't seen any polling specifically, for example, on the question that I think has been most shocking—of the Trump administration wanting to boot trans people out of the military. I think on principle the Democrats should oppose this. I think it’s also a winnable cause. I imagine that most Americans also are going to say, you happen to be a trans person. You just want to serve your country. You're in a role in the military, doing good work. You're to be kicked out of that job just because you happen to be trans? I would like to think that a majority of Americans disagree with that.
Leonhardt: Yeah, I would like to think that too. In North Carolina, when Republicans tried to go really far on bathroom issues, there was some blowback against them. So, I think these basic civil rights ideas are winnable. I don't know that every single one is as winnable as I think it should be, but I think some are. Polling is consistent with that. Then, obviously, we get into some more complicated issues, like should people who have gone through male puberty be able to play girls’ and women's sports? Public opinion is incredibly against that—75:25, 80:20, 65:35. It depends on what poll you look at, but every single one shows a huge majority against that.
I get the arguments on both sides. The argument for letting trans girls play girls’ sports is that they should be able to play sports that align with their gender. The argument against it is that people who go through male puberty are taller, faster, stronger, and have advantages that no amount of drugs can change. These are huge advantages. Not only has the Democratic Party lined up so strongly on this subject, it has said that anyone who expresses another view—one that something like 75% of Americans hold—is beyond the pale. That's a really problematic place for the party to be in. So, it's crime, gender, immigration. Or some of the stuff that went on during COVID, where Democratic-run parts of the United States closed their schools for much longer. In retrospect, that clearly seems to have been a bad decision. Republican-run areas were much more comfortable about opening their schools. This was another case where a lot of liberals really tried to chill debate. They said, if you want to reopen schools, you're not only wrong, but you don't care about old people. They threw around words like “eugenicist.” They tried to get people disinvited from conferences. They tried to disallow public debate about things like COVID lockdowns and COVID's origin. A lot of people reacted really badly to that. So, I think the Democrats need to have some more self-reflection on a relatively long list of issues, and just how far they got on the wrong side of public opinion. On others, public opinion might have been closer, but they treated people with whom they disagreed as not just wrong, but evil. That's really alienating to people.
Mounk: This phenomenon is so strong on the left. I just want to give an illustration of it and make a point. I was one of the first people who argued for the cancellation of big mass events, sporting events and so on. We weren’t yet talking about government imposed lockdowns at the time. I wrote an article called “Cancel Everything” in The Atlantic in March 2020. Later on, I was also one of the relatively early people to say, the whole point of getting vaccines was that once everybody has access to a vaccine, we can then return to some semblance of normal life. While it's sad and tragic that some people aren't availing themselves of those vaccines, that is not a reason to keep the country shut down. So, I then wrote an article called “Open Everything.” I went on MSNBC—my mistake—to discuss this and the other panelist was somebody I'd had friendly exchanges with in the past. I believe he literally called me a murderer.
In retrospect, I may have gotten it wrong at the very beginning and at various other points. I think it's a really hard thing to think about. I had a degree of moral certainty that now I'm really unsure I deserved to have. But just because we had a different view about where the trade off was at that particular moment, I was a murderer, somebody who was just gleefully wanting people to die. That’s just an extreme way of overreacting to differences of opinion.
It also speaks to a debate we've had since the election in 2024 in which a lot of progressives, people in the philanthropic space, and people in the media have been saying, the problem is that the right has all of these great media voices. They have Joe Rogan and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem. Kamala Harris lost because she doesn't have that. So, we're going to recreate that. We're going to invest a bunch of money into finding the left-wing Joe Rogan. But, of course, this is a complete misunderstanding of the space, because Joe Rogan is not a particularly political guy—certainly not when he started out. He was not on the right when he started out, either. But he realized that every time he says something that upsets the right, they might argue with him, but they don't expel him. However, every time he said something that upset the left, he was pushed towards the right. At this point, I think he has become part of a very clearly right-wing media ecosystem. But that's an emergent property of how the system creates incentives for people, and how it treats people who have disagreements.
The reason there's no left-wing Joe Rogan is not that there are no left-wing funders willing to pour money into a progressive show. It's that it's very hard to build that kind of organic mass audience when you always have to watch yourself really carefully when you speak, or else your friends, colleagues and the people you're to have dinner with next Friday are going to beat up on you. That is really at the heart of what's going on here.
Feel free to respond to that. I would also love for you to speak a little bit more about the immigration question in the United States. How did somebody like Ruben Gallego, for example, deal with that issue in his Senate race in Arizona?
Leonhardt: COVID was really the first time that I experienced this kind of blowback from the left. My experience had a lot of similarities to yours. I originally wrote about the importance of closing things down. I wore masks and I did all these things. Then, the vaccine started to come out, and I saw that a whole bunch of the other things we were doing weren't actually making a difference. My favorite example of this is that we had mask mandates on planes, and then we took our masks off to eat the stroopwafels that the flight attendant circulated, as if somehow COVID wasn't gonna spread while we were eating our in-flight snacks.
Mounk: The restaurant version of that was that you had to have a mask on while you walked in, and then you sat down for two hours without a mask.
Leonhardt: Right. I went to a play at one point in a very liberal community where we all sat watching the play with our masks on. In the intermission, we went out to the lobby and we took our masks off to have drinks, which is just insane. It really was virtue signaling. The experiences that you and I had of being called terrible things is part of what you sign up for when you're a journalist. But there are a lot of people who have had that in their daily lives. A female friend of mine says, I'm never again going to talk about my nuanced opinion on abortion in a public setting because of the amount of disdain that I experience. I think a lot of people who broadly view themselves either on the center or, frankly, on the left, have had this experience of being told that they're wrong, that they're hateful, that they're doing something bad, maybe even that they're killing people, in the case of COVID.
It is profoundly alienating to feel like you are not allowed to think through these things, not allowed to express doubts, or to talk about nuanced views. There is really a judgmental nature to the modern academic elite left that even people who are sympathetic with it on many things find deeply alienating. That is important to get past, which is a good transition to immigration.
I've read every platform that the Democratic Party has had in the 21st century on immigration. It's a really useful exercise because in the early part of the 21st century, and very much in the Obama era, you hear this mixed moderate message, which is a celebration of the United States as a nation of immigrants, a desire to defend people who came to this country even without legal permission, but who've lived here and lived stable lives and the idea to create a better, fairer immigration system. But also, the platform says, we're gonna have a secure border and deport criminals. Barack Obama in his 2008 convention speech said, illegal workers undermine wages. He said that in his speech and used the phrase “illegal workers.”
Then you see, in 2016 and in 2020, the party gets uncomfortable with any form of immigration law enforcement. It calls for admitting more and more people, both through legal channels, and—although it doesn't totally acknowledge it—through illegal ones by talking about avoiding deportations and making it easier for people to claim asylum. You then end up with the Biden administration, which puts these policies into effect. We have, over a four year period, the most rapid immigration in our country's history, both in raw numbers—by a wide margin—and in percentage terms. There is no four-year period in the late 1800s or early 1900s that matches Biden-era immigration. That is a major reason Biden ends up being so unpopular and Harris couldn’t beat Donald Trump. It really was a signature example to me of the Democratic Party moving away not only from the views of working class people, but from the interests of working class people.
Mounk: By the way, one of the interesting things here is that there's a slightly cynical approach to politics at the moment, which is that governing doesn't matter. There are some strains of research in political science that say that, when there's an economic downturn, you're going to be blamed for it even if it really doesn't come as a result of your government's policies. To some extent, that's true. If you happen to have economic boom times, perhaps as a result of the administration’s policies, or for reasons that really have nothing to do with it, you are very likely to be reelected. If you're in the middle of a deep recession, you're going to struggle to win an election, even if it isn't obvious that it's your fault. But that point is often overplayed regarding some of the key vulnerabilities of the Biden administration, including inflation, which was a global phenomenon, but which was in various ways accelerated by the well-named Inflation Reduction Act, and other things that the administration passed. On immigration, where it really is a set of very specific measures that the Biden administration took that led to the surge, I think there was a response to actual policies.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the next administration is not going to be worse. I personally wasn't happy with the outcome of the 2024 result. But, I think it is a good check to that cynicism to see that there is a quite clear cause and effect here. There was a change in how the Democratic Party fought about a lot of those issues that drove Biden’s policies, particularly ones that might have been less visible at first, that weren't debated on the front page of The New York Times every day, but that actually drove what was happening at the border. It was the search at the border that helped turn public opinion in a way that then made it very hard for Kamala Harris to win the election. Now, you're saying that that was a drag on how Democrats did in the fall of 2024. What's the evidence for the claim that this actually mattered to voters? How is it that some politicians like Gallego himself, a Latino in Arizona, were able to distance themselves to some extent from the Democratic Party brand on this issue, at least enough for them to win in states that Donald Trump carried for the presidency?
Leonhardt: The evidence that immigration was important is that polls consistently showed voters were very unhappy with Biden's immigration policy. When you see long running general questions, like a question Gallup asks, “Do you think the country should be admitting more or fewer immigrants?” during Biden's presidency, there was this enormous surge in anti-immigration sentiment. Really tragic, given how important immigration is to our country. I've watched a lot of town halls on video in places like Denver, Chicago, and New York. You see people coming forward and saying, our communities are bearing a really big burden from this surge of migration. There's more homelessness. Our schools are taxed. There's more chaos. You look at the counties along the border, including the single most Latino county in the United States, and those counties in Texas swung very hard to Trump. When you look at the Democrats who managed to win tough races, all of them included in their ads that they were worried about the border. Sometimes, they talked about fentanyl coming over the border and how they worked with police. Republicans ran very strongly against the Biden and Harris' administration’s immigration policy, and Democrats who won managed to do so in part by sometimes outwardly criticizing the Biden policy. I am sure some of your listeners are saying, wait a second, Kamala Harris also said she was going to be really tough on immigration if she won, and it didn't help her. I think that if you're going to actually do what she tried to do, you can't do it as cutely as she tried to do it. She never acknowledged that she was changing her position. She never explained why she changed her mind. She never talked about what the Biden administration had gotten wrong. She never gave voters the respect of saying to them, I used to say something else, but now I've changed my mind and let me tell you why I've done it.
Mounk: Perhaps this is a good moment to go over to Europe. We mentioned earlier that some of the same debates are playing out in Europe. First of all, I would love for you to tell me a little bit more about something you hinted at earlier, which is this rise of what Thomas Piketty called the Brahmin Left. It's not just an American phenomenon. It seems to be happening in Europe as well. You seem to also be having, in particular, the most traditional electorate of left-wing parties move over to far-right populists. I believe, in the last German election, the Social Democrats in Germany were possibly fifth, according to some of the exit polls, among the working class, with many other parties more favored, particularly the Alternative for Germany. You see the same thing in France with the National Front, in Italy with right-wing populist parties, where they actually do particularly well among the working class. But, you were saying that there's some difference there perhaps because it's a multi-party system. In many European countries, you still get more affluent people more likely to vote for certain center-right parties. I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about what is similar and what is different to the situation we've described so far, in Europe in general.
Leonhardt: I was describing some results from a paper by three co-authors, one of whom is Thomas Piketty. This is the paper in which they use the phrase Brahmin Left, which I find to be a very useful phrase. It refers both to the idea of Brahmins being the highest-caste in India, and the idea of Boston Brahmins in the United States as being the elites. The notion is that the left has become more elite, more intellectual, and more affluent since the 1950s and 60s in both Europe and the United States. Piketty and his co-authors look at this both by education and by income. In the United States, we've had it flip both by education and income. It obviously matters where you draw the line. If you go high enough, I think billionaires still tilt Republican. But if you're thinking about drawing the line at $100,000, then in the United States, you have richer people voting Democrat. You also have college graduates voting Democratic. In Europe, you have had this inversion by education. You've had less of it. In many countries, it's still the case that most affluent people vote right of center. How could those both be true? Maybe teachers are voting left. But people who have less education—in the United States we often talk about someone who owns a car dealership who might not have a college degree but makes a lot of money—they're still voting right. The trends in both the United States and Europe are the same, which is, the left is becoming more Brahmin.
Mounk: You see the same kind of erosion of appeal to the working class and, from my knowledge of Europe, I would say that has some of the same underlying reasons. Both those parties have become less adapted to making a certain kind of economic appeal to working class voters. For example, some of the parties are very responsible for weakening social protections. They don't seem to have an aspirational vision for how working class voters can actually move ahead. But, also very clearly, many of those parties have moved clearly to the left on cultural issues as well. That is, in part, because of the fact that they've changed the personnel. In the German Social Democratic Party, it used to be that you had a lot of senior leaders who were workers from local towns, who'd made their way up through trade unions, who didn't go to university, and then were representing the party at the highest levels. Nowadays, virtually every person in any leadership position in any of those parties has studied literature or politics at a university in one of the big towns and has probably worked nearly all of their lives in politics. Few of them have even worked in the private economy. That creates some of that cultural distance as well, I think.
But the issue that is, I think, perhaps even more important in Europe than it is in the United States is immigration. You recently had a very interesting long article in The New York Times Magazine about one outlier here, which is Denmark: one of the few countries in Europe where the far-right populists have actually been stagnating or declining rather than increasing in their share of the vote, ne of the few countries in Western Europe where the Social Democrats have held on recently in the midst of an anti-incumbent wave. As you point out, this is a government led by Mette Frederiksen, a prime minister who comes from the Social Democratic Party, which has been in power for a lot of the last hundred years in Denmark. In some ways, it is straightforwardly progressive about expanding the social safety net in some important ways and even pursuing some environmental goals, but it really has distinguished itself from other left-wing parties in Europe and the United States by its stance on immigration. Tell us a little bit about what you found when you spent time speaking to Mette in Copenhagen, reporting on these changes.
Leonhardt: Denmark really does stand out. Across Europe and the United States, one of the things you notice in this COVID and post-COVID era is that incumbent parties in the rich world have really struggled. They've had a hard time winning re-election. That's been true for center-right and center-left parties. But, I think in a lot of ways the left has had more problems than the right. The far right is ascendant, the far left is not ascendant. In some of the cases where the left has won, like Britain, it didn't win because it got a huge landslide or mandate. The Labour Party barely increased its vote share in this most recent election. It won a landslide victory because so many of the people who voted Tory in the past went to other parties, including the far right, so Labour managed to win without actually increasing their vote share very much. For the most part, it's very hard to find a single country where the center left has had a really good run over the last several years, except Denmark. The Social Democrats won power in 2019, Mette Frederiksen became the prime minister, and then won re-election in 2022. She's still the prime minister there. She's compiled a really progressive record. They have expanded abortion access. They've passed a really aggressive climate bill. They've cracked down on private equity in ways that would bother the laissez-faire crowd and would cause populists to cheer. They've changed the pension rules to be more favorable to lower-income workers. When I went there and talked to the senior figures in the government there, including the prime minister, the thing they say is the most important is they changed their party's policy on immigration. Although they don't admit it, I think politics played a role. They developed this diagnosis that very high levels of immigration are bad for working class people. It's working class communities where a large number of immigrants tend to move and tax things like social services and schools, and compete for jobs. One of the things that the prime minister said to me is, We are a welfare society. If you are going to be a welfare society, you can't just let in everybody who wants to come into your country. You will undermine support for the kind of taxes that you need to pay for welfare programs.
Denmark has really gotten tougher on immigration. They haven't totally reversed it. Immigration is still increasing. About 12.5% of its population is foreign-born. The two countries that Denmark borders, Sweden and Germany, are both at about 20%. So, it's been a really meaningful difference. One of the things that really stood out to me is when I read the articles that other journalists, often from Britain or other countries, had written about Denmark. They were withering and disdainful. They had much of the same tone as the Brahmin Left that you and I have been talking about: how could these terrible Social Democrats in Denmark abandon the principles of progressivism and crack down on immigration? They basically said they're no different from the far right, even though I gave you the long list of ways in which the Social Democrats are very progressive. What's interesting, however, is, as immigration has continued to dominate politics in other parts of Europe, as the far right is much stronger in Sweden, Germany, and Italy than it is in Denmark where it's really been marginalized, there are now more center-left people in other countries who are looking at Denmark and saying that maybe they have this right.
Mounk: I think it's helpful to take the wider lens here. There has been a fundamental transformation in what some of those European societies look like. This is true in Germany, the neighbor to Denmark's south, but I think it's even more extreme in Sweden to Denmark's north. Sweden used to be a place that was always admired for not just its strong welfare state, but its economic success, its very low crime rates, and its strong social cohesion. A lot of those things are now on the rocks. In particular, Sweden is now, I believe, the country in the European Union, certainly in Western Europe, with the biggest homicide rate. You have daily bombings in Sweden in which members of rival criminal clans are trying to kill and assassinate each other with these small bombs placed in apartments. You have no-go areas in which ambulances won't go without police protection, like many of the suburbs in cities like Stockholm and Malmö. I think even countries that have always prided themselves on social liberalism, and openness to the world, like Sweden and the Netherlands, have seen a radical shift in public opinion as a result of this.
Perhaps the second wider-lens thing is to contrast opinion about these issues in Europe today with 10 years ago. We're now coming up to the 10th anniversary of that famous line that you quote in your article by Angela Merkel. Wir schaffen das—we'll figure it out. When a lot of immigrants and refugees came to Germany and other European countries in 2015-2016, there was this huge wave of popular enthusiasm for it. There were hundreds and thousands of people going to the train stations of German cities with signs saying, refugees welcome. There were civil society organizations who were helping to house the refugees and to provide German classes. My own mother was volunteering for a little while in a refugee center close to where she lives in Berlin. It was really a mass movement.
But I think the public opinion on this has shifted radically across Europe. As you're saying, it is notable that a lot of European political parties on the left are continuing to look at the Danish Social Democrats with deep skepticism and saying sort of bad words about them. But in practice, virtually every European government today is vowing that they are not going to let 2015, 2016 happen again. I heard once that the mayor of Woodstock, New York, won forty years of elections after the 60s, vowing no more Woodstock. This may be apocryphal. But I think, in a weird way, that moment of openness in 2015 has really turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for pro-immigration voices in Europe. At the moment every new European government seems to be vowing no more Woodstock, no more wir schaffen das, no more return to 2015.
Leonhardt: I think there are two important things to say about that. One is, if you believe in the promise of immigration, because it can help people transform their lives and make the societies they're coming to more dynamic, both economically and culturally, I think it's very important to understand that the best, most sustainable way to be pro-immigration is to be pro-moderate levels of immigration. If immigration becomes too fast, rapid, and large, it is just going to lead to destabilization that causes support for immigration to plummet. We've seen that in the United States during the Biden administration and in Europe over the last decade as well. To have a society go from 6 or 7% foreign born to 20% in just a couple decades is a pace of change that is deeply uncomfortable for most people. It doesn't make them bigoted people to think about it that way.
I went to Japan last summer for the first time, and, as people who've been to Japan know, there are a whole bunch of different cultural mores in Japan than in the United States. One that's hard for an American is, you're not supposed to eat in public. You don't walk down the street eating a bag of pretzels or an ice cream cone. When I think about it, I completely get that. You'd be dropping crumbs on the ground. It doesn't look very attractive. Just imagine that there was a Japanese town of 60,000 people that suddenly had 10 or 20,000 Americans move in and everyone walked around eating in public. The Japanese people didn't like that and they wanted to change rules to have fewer Americans or have Americans not do that or change their immigration policies. Would it be racist of those Japanese people to have that view? I don't think it would be. I think it would be a completely understandable version of saying, we had certain ways that we did things here and we expect newcomers to respect it. You've had that in Europe.
The second thing is that, while there are a lot of similarities between immigration politics and policy in Europe and the United States, there are also some important differences. The United States is much better at integrating and assimilating people, or people who come to the United States are better at integrating themselves and assimilating themselves. There's economic research on this showing that immigrants to the United States in recent decades have continued to climb the ladder at very similar rates to the immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Europe is just not as good at integrating people for whatever mix of reasons. So, Donald Trump lies when he says that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans. But in Europe, it's true that immigrants commit crimes at much higher rates than native-born people. That's part of what we're seeing in Sweden and Germany. In the last year, there have been four fatal attacks in which someone who has been denied asylum but nonetheless remained in Germany then committed a fatal attack, whether it was terrorism or just a random crime. Think about the anger and the sense of lawlessness that breeds. I think there is nothing driving people toward the far right the way immigration does. If the center left, and for that matter the center right, wants to win these voters back, they have to engage seriously on immigration. I think Germany's going to be a big test of that. Can this new center right–center left government meaningfully crack down on immigration? Or will they continue to say to voters that if they want less immigration, and are worried about crime, their only option is the far right? It would be incredibly damaging given how extreme the German far right is.
Mounk: A few thoughts on this. The first is that I completely agree about Germany. Trump had the right line about this a number of years ago. This is unfortunate, because I think it's just an inescapable political reality that if moderates don't enforce borders, extremists will. The new German government is helmed by Friedrich Merz, who put a lot of rhetorical emphasis in the election campaign about how tough he's going to be on the border. But it is a grand coalition with the Social Democrats who are very unlike their Social Democratic comrades to the north and they have, in negotiations for this grand coalition, so far put a very tough line about what they're unwilling to accept. Basically all of the demands that Merz was making in the election campaign are red lines for them. Now we'll see exactly how that works out. But, I do worry that the resulting coalition is likely not going to do what Merz promised in the campaign and that the result of that is the Alternative for Germany, which as you say is one of the most extreme right-wing populist parties in Europe—much more extreme than Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National for example—that might be at 30% of the vote, rather than 20% of the vote in the next elections for Bundestag. Then, Germany is going to get close to being ungovernable.
I think the broader sense here is that there is just a rebellion against the lack of alternatives. The name of that party is Alternative for Germany because Merkel said there is no alternative. One of the things you see is a lot of countries in Europe saying, because of human rights law, the European Court of Human Rights, various legal constraints and because of the difficulties of deporting people, there's just nothing we can do. The rule of law won't allow us to do anything about any of this. If you make people choose between the sense that they have no effective control of the border and the rule of law, they're going to choose sacrificing the rule of law. I don't think that the right conception of a rule of law requires countries to be unable to actually control the borders.
Leonhardt: I think a lot of people on the left view themselves as defenders of democracy today. In many ways that is correct. Donald Trump is doing a lot of alarming things to roll back some basic democratic standards and even rules in the United States. But if the left is going to stand up for democracy, it has to take public opinion seriously. To say that you refuse to heed what is clearly public opinion about enforcing a nation's borders, which is a position that many people on the left take, is a fundamentally anti-democratic position. You are saying, I don't care what the citizens of my country want. I don't care what the voters want. I don't care what they keep voting for. I'm going to ignore that. So, in a way, what they're doing is they're claiming to defend the rule of law, and, at the same time, they are rejecting the basic ideas of democracy. I agree with you that when voters are asked to choose between what they actually want and some treaty that we signed decades ago or some law that comes from Brussels, they're going to choose what they actually want. It's hard to fault them for that. The people I fault are the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, particularly the center left, that aren't willing to give voters enough respect to say that they are going to do what voters want. Not only that, they aren't willing to be clear-eyed enough about how much of a threat the far right poses. If you actually think the far right poses a threat, you have to try to take away their most successful issue. That's not just a theoretical idea. That's part of why I went to Denmark. They've actually done it in Denmark.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and David ask whether current immigration policies in the United States and Europe are moral, and what a fair immigration system would look like. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
