David Remnick on the Democratic Party’s “identity crisis”

**Brian Lehrer** (0:05)
From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast. It's Wednesday, June 3rd.
David Remnick is with us, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, which the magazine and we here at WNYC produce together. We'll talk about this morning's midterm elections news, some media news, including CBS firing Scott Peli after he criticized their new boss Barry Weiss. That broke last night. We'll preview a live taping David will be doing for The New Yorker Radio Hour next week as part of the Tribeca Film Festival with former Obama speechwriter and now podcast host, John Lovett. David, I did the event plug at the top instead of just at the end of our conversation. Wasn't that nice of me?

**David Remnick** (0:53)
You're a total mensch. At the cost of stretching your patience then, I'll be at the Y tomorrow night with my colleagues, Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer.
The 92nd Street Y to talk politics is a lot to talk about.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:10)
Yes, tomorrow night at the 92nd Street Y. In fact, we had Susan and Evan on together Monday for what was a great conversation about politics. So I'm sure that'll be awesome.

**David Remnick** (1:22)
I just thank God that it's occurring on a non-NIC game night. Because I would have wriggled out of that baby really fast.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:30)
Yeah. You scheduled it back when the NBA schedule came out in October. Okay. I'm kidding.
But I do want to preview your Tribeca event a little bit. So we'll totally upstage it. No, I'm kidding. But maybe the biggest thought about the event in all seriousness, actually very seriousness, is that it's part of the Tribeca Festival's 25th anniversary season, because it was created to help bring Lower Manhattan back and New York City as a whole back after 9-11, which was 25 years ago this September. You were already editor of The New Yorker at that time. Do you ever stop and think how remarkable the city's comeback has been after that devastating attack, which could have scared people and businesses off from coming or staying here?

**David Remnick** (2:17)
Well, I think about it all day long. I mean, I'm sitting here and talking to you from One World Trade Center. And the view out my window, if I look down, chillingly, is the imprint of those two towers, the memorial and the museum there. And yet, the resilience of the city in every sense has been extraordinary.
My love for this city is unbounded. And I remember that day as if it's yesterday. I was in my office and could see out our window even from Midtown, what was happening, and slept in my office for days thereafter, working on what would become known as the black issue, the Art Spiegelman, Francois's Moulin cover, those ghostly towers missing from the skyline. So I think about this, or at least it's a presence in my head as it is for so many New Yorkers of a certain age, every day.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:16)
And I forgot that the New Yorker offices are there in the World Trade Center itself.
And that so many businesses have run back there. I have a family member who works for the Met's cable channel, SNY, New York Met's, and they're in the World Trade Center. So just two media examples there of how people didn't get spooked, business owners didn't get spooked, from even going right back there to what we called for a while ground zero.

**David Remnick** (3:48)
You know, it's funny, well, not so funny, but people would, once we moved down here, people would come and visit me at the office, and for the first year, I could see them looking out the window, and like a feeling of anxiety or dread would come over them, because they knew, you know, just a few years earlier what had happened here. And that just doesn't happen anymore. Life has this, whether you like it or not, way of just speeding along.
And in a positive sense, I'm just very proud of New York and New Yorkers for the resilience they've shown.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:31)
And there's even a larger picture thought there, I think, in a historical context, which is that New York's demise has been predicted so many times from the Great Depression, from crime in the 70s through its peak around 1990, from 9-11, from deindustrialization, from white flight, from the pandemic, now from Zeran Mamdani as his political opponents would like people to believe at least. And yet it never actually happens, right?

**David Remnick** (5:01)
I think the city is blessed with so much energy and so much talent and centrality.