Cory Booker showed how it's done

Expressive politics at its best

The most important political news story of last week was Susan Crawford winning the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. We’ve been pushing Crawford hard at Slow Boring, as part of our overall philosophy that resistance should be mostly focused on tangible actions that deliver concrete results.

But I have to admit that the political news story that attracted the most attention among people I know, and that I personally followed most closely, was Cory Booker’s record-breaking talking filibuster.

When it was first announced, I tuned in because I’ve been a Booker fan for a long time, but I thought he made some poor tactical choices during the 2020 primary, and I was intellectually interested in the approach he’d take during his speech. When I woke up the next morning, I tuned in again, impressed that he was still going and by how good he looked up there after talking all night. For a while, I was kind of annoyed that more people weren’t tuning in, because there had been so much demand for Democrats to “do something” demonstrative and gestural and here was a guy doing exactly that and nobody seemed to care very much.

That started to change Tuesday afternoon, though, as it became clear that he was poised to smash Ted Cruz’s modern record and challenge Strom Thurmond for the all-time crown.

Then he did it!

And not only did he beat Thurmond, he did so resoundingly. Booker didn’t limp away from the dais, exhausted the minute he crossed the line. He was cool, composed, and kept on talking for a while to wrap the whole thing up. I don’t want to overstate the share of the public that was following the action, but a lot of people were watching and engaged and excited. It was the symbolic resistance we’d been waiting for.

And I was so glad to see it. I’m not against the large-scale rallies that Bernie Sanders held earlier this year, but I am suspicious of them. I feel like the Sanders movement does a motte-and-bailey, where any time Democrats are flat on their backs they articulate what’s actually a very banal mainstream Democratic Party message, but then whenever it comes to selecting specific candidates, they insist on a kind of hard-left dogmatism.

Booker was actually doing the broad populist message focused on preserving basic public services from Trump’s multi-faceted assault. And while of course, I don’t want to say he was doing it in a totally selfless and ego-denying manner, he was doing it as a mainstream Democrat, not as someone who was making this out to be a unique factional cause. He didn’t throw Biden under the bus (it would have been a bizarre moment for that), but the virtuosic physical performance was a stark contrast to the elderly ex-president in a way that made Democrats feel good and want to hold their heads high.

I don’t think purely emotive, expressive politics is the central need of the moment. But feelings do matter, and it’s a lot better to do smart, effective expressive politics than to just be fuming and angry — people need constructive outlets for their feelings. And Booker really delivered in a way that is worth examining in detail, hopefully laying the path for future opportunities.

Let expressive action be expressive

What Booker’s action had in common with Sanders’ rallies is that while you could critique them as purely performative, the good news is they were genuinely purely performative. The big problem with the pressure on Chuck Schumer to filibuster a government funding bill is that the motivation was expressive, but the action people wanted had genuine real world consequences that would be counterproductive.

Does holding a giant rally accomplish anything tangible? Not really. But there’s no downside.

By the same token, I saw some snark directed Booker’s way that his grand speech didn’t achieve much. Which is true, there is just not that much on a day-to-day basis that can be done. What Booker achieved was to help a segment of the population that has been feeling pretty depressed feel inspired instead. And that’s good! Sadness at what’s happening to the country is in many ways appropriate, but feeling sad doesn’t achieve anything and it tends to be demoralizing. Feeling good about fighting back doesn’t change anything on its own, but it does lay the groundwork for constructive action. If it helps push one more person into running for office or donating to key candidates, that’s pretty good!

And the speech had zero downside. It was, literally, expressive politics — he was just up there talking.

Some of that was him riffing on the talking points he’d worked up with his team over the previous days. But some of it was him reading from letters and notes that his office had received from citizens who were worried about how the Trump administration’s policies were going to impact them. Through Booker, the public heard from teachers and parents of special needs kids worried about gutting the Department of Education. It heard from people who rely on Medicaid benefits and worry about losing their health care.

People ask me sometimes if writing to your member of Congress really makes a difference. The truth is that it does. But writing a letter is sort of like voting: In the aggregate, the sum total of ballots cast is a very big deal, but the odds of any particular vote making a difference are quite low. The letter you write tomorrow about Medicaid probably won’t sway anybody’s votes. But the aggregate quantity of feedback that members hear from their constituents absolutely sways votes. Channeling some of those letters onto a bigger stage helps amplify the voices of letter-writers and hopefully encourages more people to express themselves.

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that Booker is a great public speaker.

Attract interest by being interesting

The most recent time that I saw Booker, he said something kind of platitudinous but pretty charming, and then, when he was asked a question that I found a little surprising, he paused for a second and gave a good answer. Booker’s been around long enough that he’s not a “rising star” anymore, even though he’s also not particularly old. But that was a reminder, to me, of why he first appeared on the political stage as a rising star — he’s compelling at talking about politics and not everyone is.

I think people sometimes underrate, to an extent, how unusual it is that Democrats three times in a row went with nominees — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris — who are not good at extemporaneous on-camera public speaking. On the other hand, this is a skill that I do think has gone into structural abeyance in American politics. The vast majority of seats in Congress and state legislatures are not competitive in general elections. The most important thing is winning primaries, and the most likely way to win primaries is to clear the field by consolidating party insiders rather than appealing to primary voters.

And for winning tough races, the actual most important skill — the one wielded so skillfully by politicians like Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — is picking smart moments to break with party leaders.

But people like a president who’s good at playing President of the United States on television. It’s admittedly a bit odd. The job, fundamentally, does not have that much to do with speaking extemporaneously on camera. Biden was a very effective legislative leader during his first two years without being a compelling media presence. Harris had the broadly correct assessment of where to course-correct from Biden’s governance approach. But none of these people were very good at talking. Booker is, and you saw it as he held the floor for a long time and spoke from the heart extensively.

Democrats have been in a kind of years-long panic over the question of how to be more interesting and more viral on social media.

What Booker reminded us is there’s no shortcut to this. People took an interest in his performance because it was interesting. My kid was very curious about the urination situation. And it turns out so were a lot of other people, and once it was wrapped up, he addressed his fasting protocol. Breaking a record is inherently interesting. Impressive physical feats are interesting. Booker attracted interest by being interesting!

Obviously, most people are not going to be able to attract interest by speaking for 25 hours straight. But the vast majority of Democratic Party politicians could make their engagement with the public more interesting by being more willing to do what Trump did in 2015-2016 and speak more from the heart and less from a standpoint of dogmatic coalition-management. Many members of Congress have expressed interesting opinions to me off the record that they decline to share in public for fear of provoking controversy or alienating allies. But nothing interesting happens if you’re not willing to take risks or stir the pot!

Happy progressive populism

In terms of issue focus, Booker was naturally all over the map across the course of his more than 25 hours of speaking.

But he mostly zeroed in on what I think most people would characterize as a “populist” suite of issues for contemporary Democrats — discussing material concerns, condemning the immorality of tax cuts for the rich financed by rollbacks of critical social services, and largely eschewing “woke” topics or encomia to NATO. These ideas are connected by the fact that they are the Democratic Party’s strongest pillars, rather than the subjects of factional controversy. They are values that all kinds of Democrats share but that cleave many grassroots Republicans from the leadership of their party.

Booker did it in an interesting way, though. In one section of the speech that I caught, he was talking about how he doesn’t have any problem with rich people… except he called them “successful people,” which is the more flattering way to put it. He said he likes successful people and he likes success and he respects their work. He just does not think it makes sense to cut their taxes in a way that raises the budget deficit, especially after big cuts to programs for the poor.

This is in contrast to the notion that Democrats’ path to power is to name enemies and essentially be meaner about the people whose tax rates they want to raise.

I think that Booker is on the right side of this. I think that leftists who favor the name-calling strategy believe that their harder-edged, zero-sum approach to left populism will appeal more to working class people. But I think the actual center of gravity for this approach is not the people who benefit from the social safety net, but precisely the kind of progressives who went to good colleges and have nonprofit or academic or government jobs and are too affluent to be on Medicaid but not rich enough to be targeted by Democratic tax hikes. To those people, taking businesspeople down a peg in terms of prestige and social esteem is a really big deal. People working normal private sector jobs would like to be paid more, but also recognize that they are not in a zero-sum relationship with their bosses — they all have upside if the business thrives and downside if it fails.

It also seems to me that if you look at well-liked Democratic Party presidents — Obama, Clinton, JFK — they have mostly stood on the sunnier and more optimistic side of things. These are also all people who are unusually charismatic and good at public speaking, because I think it’s genuinely difficult to sell people on a positive-sum view of the world. But the effort to deploy zero-sum rhetoric to progressive ends seems to typically end in failure.

You just can’t credibly sell people on a politics that is committed to helping poor kids or disabled people or caring about the environment within an atavistic zero-sum framework. It’s good to try to co-opt the anti-establishment aspects of right-populism and people’s sense that they’ve gotten a raw deal. But the idea that nastiness and negative affect are going to win the day strikes me as a lazy tactic that people reach for because they lack creativity and skill.

Mindful resistance

Way back in the spring of 2018, Booker previewed a potential presidential campaign message that I thought was really good — a message that tried to leverage his Blackness into a permission structure to support an inclusive, deracializing vision for America.

Instead, under the influence of Steve Philips, he pivoted his actual run in a different direction and a great opportunity was blown. The talking filibuster, I thought, was in many ways a return to his earlier, more deft handling of identity issues.

Booker opened by quoting John Lewis, and he closed by lapping Strom Thurmond.

Thurmond was not only a notorious segregationist, his record-setting filibuster was in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. For an African-American senator to break it was particularly resonant.

But when Booker acknowledged the moment, he said it would be wrong to hate Thurmond. Is it fair that pragmatic Black public figures have traditionally borne the burden of bending over backwards and being nice about racists? It is not. At the same time, Booker personally is a very successful guy and a prominent United States Senator and even while conducting expressive politics, the point is not to make himself feel good, it’s to participate in the strong and slow boring of hard boards. The conjunction of race and history made the moment interesting, but if the goal is to beat Donald Trump, then dwelling on racial division is not constructive. So Booker acknowledged it in the most conciliatory way possible and moved on to his best talking points.

Part of what politicians do when they speak is signal to their constituents a good way to talk. I saw a focus group recently of ballot-splitting voters who backed Trump in 2024 and also voted for a moderate House Democrat. At one point, they started complaining that Democrats, more so than Republicans, are intolerant and will cast you out over differences of opinion about minor issues. They attributed this less to Democratic leaders than to actual individual rank-and-file Democrats, who they assessed as simply less chill and hospitable.

Is this a rational basis for a voting decision? Not really.

But what people hear matters. Nobody is under any obligation to talk about politics with friends or family or to post about it on social media. But to the extent that you do this, you should be hoping to be persuasive to persuadable people. Booker’s stunt was attention-grabbing and expressive and captured the imaginations of many who’ve been yearning to see Democrats fight harder. But huge stretches of it were models of humility that probably won’t directly reach a ton of persuadable voters (they are very unlikely to tune into something like this) but are worth trying to copy if you’re the kind of person who was inclined to be thrilled by an extended anti-Trump protest.