Nina Turner is a former Ohio State Senator, national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, and one of the most forceful advocates for working-class politics in the United States. She’s a longtime champion of economic justice and a leading voice in movements for peace and social uplift, including the new Up in Arms campaign challenging the power of the military-industrial complex. Turner joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss why the Democratic Party keeps failing to meet the needs of ordinary people, why insurgent primary challenges are essential to democracy, and how redirecting our vast military spending could transform the lives of millions.

Nathan J. Robinson

This is the first time we’ve ever talked. Our magazine was founded in 2016 around the time of the first Bernie Sanders campaign, and one of the first articles that we wrote said that if the Democrats didn’t pick Bernie Sanders for president and picked Hillary Clinton, they were destined to lose to Donald Trump. And that’s, in fact, what happened. I feel like there’s a great kinship between the work that we’ve done over the last 10 years and the work that you’ve been doing.

In a way, you’ve been pushing this simple but ignored message, which is that the Democratic Party needs to push a certain  agenda—often called populist, or you might call it revolutionary democratic socialist: the Bernie agenda—and if they don’t, they’re going to continue to slide into irrelevance. It’s interesting, because it must have been frustrating over the last 10 years to be pushing that message and to often go so unheard. And I feel like now there’s more recognition that you and Bernie, what you were saying, have been vindicated a little bit.

Nina Turner

Yes, it’s absolutely frustrating. Not just in the fact that we were right—you were right about the prediction that if Senator Bernie Sanders was not the nominee going into the general election of 2016, Donald J. Trump would become president. That prediction came true. So yes, it is frustrating, both from an individual and on a community level too, because what I care about the most, and certainly in this case I can speak for Senator Sanders, is the change in the material conditions for everyday people. We know that change is happening, but this change is not happening to the benefit of working class people across this country. It is actually happening to their detriment. And neoliberalism, the whole idea of being a neoliberal, births the kind of environment that we see right now, with the neofascism of the Trump administration. None of this started with President Trump.

Nathan, we definitely have been seeing over the last, I would say, 20 to 40 years the erosion of what we call the middle class. But it is very much in our face, from the height of Covid to this moment, that everyday working class people are losing while there’s a very small element in our country, and dare I say, across the world—there’s the ruling class, and there’s everybody else. And unfortunately, the Democratic Party—not just the Democratic Party—both corporatist parties represent the corporate interest in this country and across the world to the detriment of everyday people in this country. So yes, both are frustrating on the individual level, and very frustrating because I care about what happens to everyday people in this country.

Robinson

Yes, it was bad enough when Trump won the first time, and Bernie had been saying, Look, I have an alternative: I have a platform that can build a big, broad base that can animate and excite those voters who’ve been so turned off by the political system. It’s bad enough that happened once, but it happened again, and he’s back in the White House.

Over Thanksgiving, Trump posted his Thanksgiving message on Truth Social. It was borderline illiterate. It was just full of his usual; it didn’t make any sense, and he was just ranting about immigrants. This is his Thanksgiving message, from the President of the United States: Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who’s destroyed our country, all the immigrants who take all the benefits. But my prevailing reaction to that, and I think probably yours too, if you could comment on it, is a lot of Democrats would look at that and go, Oh, this awful man! How could these terrible people vote this man in? I look at it, and I go, how bad is the opposition party that someone like this gets into power?

Turner

That’s exactly it. You hit the nail on the head. And that’s where a type of self-reflection, introspection, is necessary. But to this point, the Democratic Party, not the faithful of the party—because I separate the base of the party and the people who are true believers from those so-called leaders of the party. The so-called leaders of the party lack the intestinal fortitude or the ovarian audacity to have introspection.

Robinson

Yes.

Turner 

It’s their fault.

Robinson

Sorry, I was just enjoying your phraseology there.

Turner

I know, I’m going to give you some—that’s why I kind of pulled back. But another very salient point I want to make: it is their fault. It’s not necessarily their fault that President Trump comports himself the way that he does. He’s being who he is, and it’s unfortunate because he has a lot of audacity. I wish he were using that to the positive. He’s bold, and he will take the risk and the chances and let the chips fall where they may. The problem with that is that all the chips are bludgeoning working class people in this country. Now, let me go back to the neoliberals. If the neoliberals were not so arrogant, if they understood the plight of working class people from all backgrounds, no matter who they wanted to vote for, working class people were letting Democrats know when they held the trifecta that they were suffering.

But instead of the Democrats listening to the people, they kept saying, "We’re building back better, and there’s nothing wrong with the economy; your egg prices are too high, or your groceries or your gas—no, no, no, don’t worry about any of that. Just vote the Democrats in." You absolutely cannot ignore the pain points of working class people and think that there would not be a consequence for that. So the Democratic Party leadership—the Chuck Schumers, the Hakeem Jeffries, the Nancy Pelosis—fill in the blanks—even President Joseph R. Biden himself and Vice President Kamala Harris—all of them are intimately responsible for President Donald J. Trump winning the popular vote, which had not been won by a Republican in about 20 years, and also winning the electoral college. Michael Jackson once had a song about looking at the man in the mirror. Let me throw in women. We should be looking at the men and women in the mirror. And when they look in the mirror, the Democratic leadership should see themselves. It is absolutely their fault that President Donald J. Trump won a second term.

Robinson

It’s extraordinary. I think if people go back to newspaper op-ed pages from 2022 and 2023, senior Democrats were using language that essentially—and this was true in 2016 too when the concept of economic anxiety was mocked—they’re not feeling economic anxiety; they’re just bigots. Or in 2022-23 there was this idea it was a vibecession. The economy is objectively good, but people don’t understand, and we just need to explain to them that actually Joe Biden is a good president, and they’re insufficiently appreciative. And you think, what levels of arrogance do you have to have to say people are just insufficiently appreciative of how good Democrats are? But that’s literally how they were talking.

Turner

That is. I am about to jump out of my skin right now. I hope your viewers understand that, because you hit all the nails on the head. It is a type of arrogance. They messed around, and they found out.

And the problem with that is people like President Biden or Vice President Harris or Pelosi, all of those who breathe that kind of rare air, when the stuff hits the fan—when healthcare is unaffordable and working class people do not have enough money to provide for themselves and/or their families; when you have somebody like President Donald J. Trump in office, who abuses power to such an extent, who ran as a populist but has governed like an elitist...

The fact that Trump refuses to use his incredible ability to say, I'm going to do it because I want to do it. Can you imagine, Nathan, if he were operating on behalf of working class people with that kind of bravado? What could he get done if he were willing to cancel student debt, if he wasn't willing to allow Americans to starve to death by refusing to use the contingency funds for SNAP? If he were able just to tilt that "me, me, me" complex just a little bit, how much better off we would be.

Now, meanwhile, we go back to your observation of the Democrats, the arrogance to say, "You can't afford your groceries? You just don't understand. The groceries and gas prices are not really too high. You're not sufficiently grateful." Nathan, listen, you hit that nail on the head, because that is exactly it. And they totally underestimated and disregarded the Uncommitted Movement.

Robinson

Right. That’s another important point. In the back half of Biden’s presidency, we saw all of these young people, especially—

Turner

And young adjacent.

Robinson

Yes, a broad swath of people were very upset over an unfolding genocide that was being supported by the United States government. But let me ask you, you must have watched the unfolding Kamala Harris campaign and thought to yourself, Please just ask me what to do here, because I could tell you how to run a better campaign. And I assume you watched in great pain as the campaign unfolded and went towards this kind of inevitable loss. What do you think went so wrong about the Kamala Harris campaign? And what would you have advised them if indeed they had come to you and said, Senator Turner, help us salvage this thing?

Turner

Yes, thank you for that question, Nathan. I would have advised them to answer the cries of the people. First, they should have had a full primary. Can we just start there? They should not have stopped that, because primaries are good. And even as someone who has run for office, you often think, why would somebody run against me? We’re a representative democracy, so that’s how it’s supposed to go. But the fact that the so-called leadership of the Democratic Party thwarted a primary was part of the problem, because had the Democrats had a full-throated primary, then the deficiencies of President Biden would have been caught a lot earlier. That’s one.

Robinson

Yes, right. 

Turner

And then number two, even if he didn’t have any deficiencies that came out during that first debate—let’s say he didn’t have any of that. Voters are supposed to be given a choice. So you have people like Congressman Dean Phillips, who was the only actively elected person who had the courage to challenge Biden that Democrats shut out—not Republicans. You had people like Marianne Williamson and Dr. Cornell West. You have people who had the conviction of their hearts to run and challenge, and the Democratic Party apparatus across the country attempted to stop them. So my first piece of advice, before it came down to them selecting Vice President Harris—

Robinson

To have some democracy.

Turner

Right. Democracy would have been to have a full-throated primary. Now, my advice, and you mentioned it before we came on air, is the op-eds that I’ve written in Newsweek. I wrote one, and the question was, is the country ready for a Black woman or a woman of color to be president? Well, no, they’re not ready. They weren’t ready for President Obama, but we got to make them ready. We’ve got to get people ready for that. And part of that is not just her racial identity, for the sake of throwing up racial identity; it is, what are the value systems that she is operating from? What type of vision does she have to provide—provision for the people? Harris stayed so close to President Biden. She was stuck between a rock and a hard place. She’s the vice president, trying not to totally throw the president under the bus.

But at the same time, baby, you’ve got to read the environment. The environment was very clear that the Biden vision was not working for the American people. So it would have been to say, Hey, she would have had to separate herself a lot more. And when she got the question of, would you do anything differently?, she bombed. She said she wouldn’t do anything differently.

Robinson

You were talking there about the importance of primary challenges, and the fact that a lot of the progress that we have seen has come from a willingness of insurgents to challenge establishment candidates in primaries, whether it’s Mamdani taking on Cuomo, whether it’s Bernie taking on Hillary, AOC taking on Joe Crowley. I wondered if you had thoughts on the recent kind of intra-left debate about whether to launch a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries. Mamdani kind of came out on the side of saying this is a bad idea right now—we don’t want to go after this guy; maybe we can work with him. And then there were others who said, No, Hakeem Jeffries really represents the establishment. And you are someone who, I think, is known for having a fairly—I don’t want to say the fighting stance, but your instinct tends to be to take them on. But you’re also a strategic thinker, so I wonder what your thoughts are on when to launch primary challenges.

Turner

Whenever strategy is at cross purposes with what is right, I’m going to go with what is right. So strategically, those who are saying this is not the time strategically, they might be right. But from "What does democracy have to say about this?" they are wrong. So even if I sub out the fact that Hakeem Jeffries is a neoliberal that thinks that genocide is okay—okay, let’s be honest. He takes millions of dollars from AIPAC, just like most of the Congressional Black Caucus, just like most of the people in Congress. He’s not an outlier in that. Even if we solve for all of that, the question becomes, if in fact we live in a representative democracy, if in fact we pride ourselves in saying that people should have a choice, and if in fact progressives are claiming to be different from neoliberals, well, Nathan, the question has already been called and answered: is it the right time to have a primary? Absolutely yes, because voters should always have a choice. I am disappointed.

Now, I want to see Mayor-elect Mamdani be successful. Don’t get me wrong. But as you know, our audience knows, and anybody who has studied me just a little bit knows, I’m not wedded to one individual. I’m going to call it like I see it. And the fact that Mayor-elect Mamdani has already put his body on the scale against a primary of leader Hakeem Jeffries for his own practical needs, no matter if those needs are for the greater good of the people in terms of governing—if his ability to govern is linked to Hakeem Jeffries winning, then we already have a problem. He is wrong on this, and I’m calling him out on it. I already have on my social media. And then there’s a racial element to this too that I don’t think that they understand, that you are saying to a younger Black man and framing it about a caricature—I think he said something about a caricature of the movement, or something that I would want Mayor-elect Mamdani to explain what he meant by that.

But bottom line, let me just surmise this, and I would love to come back and get deeper: he is wrong. And anybody who is saying that they believe in democracy would then have to say, even if they don’t support a primary run, that they would not stand in the way. And Mayor-elect Mamdani is already comporting himself like a neoliberal in this case and standing in the way of a primary run. Did he not run in a primary? Or am I wrong? Did Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez not run right in a primary? Or am I wrong?

Robinson

I haven’t actually heard people making the point that you’re making there, which I think is a really important one. The way that debate was had was as if we all get together in organizations and on the left, in the DSA and in the left media, and we decide whether the voters are going to have a choice. But what you say is, in every election, voters should get to have a choice. And there are many races in red states where Democrats don’t even run candidates because they don’t think the candidates will win. And what I take you to be saying there is, separate from whether we think the candidates will win, there should be a right to have your voice heard and have someone on the ballot that embodies your values. Even if we anticipated that person running against Jeffries would get, I don’t know, 30 percent of the vote, well, that’s 30 percent of the people. That’s thousands upon thousands of people who deserve to be heard.

Turner

That’s exactly right. We have to have these kinds of conversations. Democracy is inconvenient sometimes. And so even though it might be a little inconvenient, it’s right, and you cannot then rail against—and that’s what makes this so raw. It makes it even more raw that it’s coming from so-called progressives that bemoan neoliberals, rightfully so. But now that you have some power, you’re comporting yourself just like them. I’m telling you, Nathan, another similar question is, again, if his governance as mayor of New York City is contingent on leader Hakeem Jeffries, then he already has a problem. We need to have that conversation. If that’s the case, then you have a problem, sir, and you need to deal with it.

Robinson  

I want to talk to you about the Up in Arms campaign, but I’ve got one more thing I wanted to talk to you about that’s related to Mamdani. One of the recent pieces that you did in Newsweek was after Mamdani won the primary, talking about how the message of that campaign, separate from his strategic calculations about governance, kind of followed the model that you and Bernie had been advocating for many years, which is this relentless focus on affordability. You made an argument that is contrary to some of the conventional wisdom among pundits, which is, Mamdani’s democratic socialist ideas might work in New York City, but you can’t run that playbook elsewhere in the country—that won’t fly. We don’t want that kind of radicalism over here. You’ve got to run to the center in these kinds of places. Interestingly, I feel like James Carville just had an op-ed in the New York Times where, after Mamdani’s general election victory, he ended up sounding a lot like Nina Turner. He had gone from saying the Democrats should roll over and play dead a couple of months ago to saying, No, we need the fiery economic populism.

Turner

I saw that.

Robinson

I want to ask you, though, particularly as someone who is in Cleveland, Ohio—you’re coming to us from a state that voted for Donald Trump—how do you think about that issue? Because what you’re saying here in this op-ed is, no, we should learn from Mamdani even in Ohio.

Turner

Yes. Because people in Ohio got to eat. People in Ohio need shelter; they need good-paying jobs. There’s some universality. Now, how one comes to it, how you tell the story, may be a little different in Ohio in terms of trying to get the greater number of people in Ohio to receive it. But just as you said, Nathan, that President Donald J. Trump won my state twice, so did President Obama. Now President Obama is certainly not a progressive, but I’m old enough to remember that he ran on hope and change. See, that’s different. He didn’t run against McCain, even though they were competitors; he ran on hope and change, where you have the neoliberal Democrats constantly running against Donald Trump instead of running on a vision. And sometimes the vision you have may point out the deficiencies of the other person.

You see where I’m going with it? It’s different. And so let me give you and your audience a very real recent example. You may recall that Norfolk Southern, the train  company, had a train derail in East Palestine, Ohio. Biden was the president at the time when it derailed. We had the Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg; the Biden administration failed the residents of East Palestine, Ohio. Nathan, I went to East Palestine, Ohio, which is about an hour and 30 minutes away from Cleveland. They overwhelmingly voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020, and suffice it to say they did the same thing in 2024, but here’s my point. It’s a majority working class white community. I went to check on the residents there, out of pure concern—it didn’t matter to me that in 2020 they overwhelmingly voted for President Donald J. Trump.

What matters to me is their air, their water, and their food being poisoned. They’re in pain. When I went to go check on them, of course, they assumed, because I’m a Black woman in America, that I was a Democrat. Their assumption, in this case, was right. But what surprised them more than anything was not that I, a Black woman, came. It was that a Democrat came. Where I’m going with this is that the residents in East Palestine, Ohio, weren’t saying they wanted less government. They wanted the government to force Norfolk Southern to pay for their suffering.

They wanted to know, where are their elected leaders? Who’s going to stand up for them? What they wanted was the antithesis of what Republicans say. They weren’t saying less government. They wanted more government. The point is this: working class people across the spectrum, even though they may vote differently, and in conversation, they may comport themselves a little differently—when you get down to the heart of the matter, do you want to make enough money to live, not just to survive? Do you want a better future for yourself and for your children and your children’s children if you have them? Absolutely. Do you want corporations to be able to run roughshod and poison all that you have worked for? Absolutely not. Do you want the government to come in and save you from a natural disaster or a man-made disaster, which that train derailment was? The answer is an unequivocal yes. So yes, can populism, which President Trump ran on—now he’s not governed that way—touch the hearts and minds and souls of working class people from all identities in the United States of America? The answer is absolutely yes.

Robinson

And of course, your state gave us JD Vance, who is one of these pseudo-populists who is able to take advantage of people’s discontent and say, Well, the problem is that Haitians are coming and eating your cats. 

Turner

Which was just a lie.

Robinson

Which he just made up and basically admitted was a lie too. Just this really, really nasty racist demagoguery, but also a kind of pseudo-populism. Even though he was a Silicon Valley-backed guy coming along, I think he used the issue of East Palestine, pretended that he cared, and rode this kind of—

Turner

And he did nothing. He did nothing when he was the senator. Sorry for cutting you off. 

Robinson

Yes, I’m sure you have thoughts on this. 

Turner

He had power in his hands as a senator from the state of Ohio to not just talk the talk, but to walk the walk, to be able to force and put out policies to hold Norfolk accountable. And he did none of that.

Robinson

Yes. And we really do hope that you can slowly turn the tide of Ohio politics so that it stops producing JD Vances and Vivek Ramaswamys and more Nina Turners. But I wanted to conclude here. We’ve talked a lot about domestic politics, but you are now involved with the Up in Arms campaign, and I want to talk a little bit about why it’s important to turn as well to issues of war and peace. Just to read a little bit from the Up in Arms website, 

"which is a plea to the common sense of everyday American, saying Congress has sold us out to weapons manufacturers, war profiteers and endless wars. The Pentagon gets way more money than it needs to defend the territory of the US, and we don’t get great schools, good affordable housing, reasonably priced daycare, top notch healthcare that we need. That is crazy."

A lot of ex-military people are involved. Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s is involved, who we love. Tell us a little bit about why you think at this moment it is also important to focus on these issues of war and peace and the Pentagon budget.

Turner

Because they’re all connected. And just really so much love to Ben Cohen. For those who don’t necessarily follow his work, beyond being one of the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s, there’s another separate campaign that I want viewers to understand.

Ben Cohen and Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s are really trying to reclaim the social heart of Ben & Jerry’s that has been snuffed out because a major corporation purchased them and is not allowing the company to be the socially conscious company that it was at its founding. And so there’s a campaign going on right now called #FreeBenandJerry. I encourage your listeners to go there, but let me go back to Up in Arms. So Ben has been a pro-peace, anti-war activist for a very long time. Just as making tremendous flavors of ice cream is near and dear to his heart and part of his passion, making sure that peace abounds is part of his passion, too. So Up in Arms is a play on words to get the American people to be up in arms about us being taken advantage of by the military-industrial complex. For us to understand that part of the reason why we can’t have nice things—when people ask, how are you going to pay for it?—is because we have a bipartisan commitment to continuing to increase the Pentagon budget and to feed the war machine, but we do not have a bipartisan commitment to ensuring that the everyday people of this nation get the types of things that they need and they deserve, like Medicare for All, like increasing the federal minimum wage, like canceling student debt. And so we want to drive an awakening in this country that people should know that America really has all that it needs right now to be able to protect itself from foreign enemies. What we don’t have is domestic tranquility.

And so I invite people to go to upinarms.life—that’s where you were reading a bit from—and look into this and join the movement. And one of the things that they will see, which I’m sure that you see, is a graph that shows the US spends more on war and war preparation than the next nine countries combined. And there’s a graphic there that shows the almost trillion dollars that we spend, and this needs to be understood: we spend more than the next nine countries combined, and that would be Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, the UK, India, Germany, Russia, and China. We spend more than them combined on war-making.

Robinson  

You’re talking there about spending, and I think that’s one of the important contributions of the Up in Arms campaign. It’s certainly something that Ben Cohen emphasizes a lot. When we look at, for example, Donald Trump’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean or his menacing and threatening to overthrow the government of Venezuela, we may look at it from a moral angle, as in, it’s wrong to murder people on the high seas.

We may look at it from a legal angle, that is to say, the United States has no legal right to strike these boats or to overthrow foreign governments. But there’s also the angle, as Eisenhower has the famous quote about, that every bullet and every missile is a theft from hungry children. Everything that we spend on arms is something that we’re not spending on schools and hospitals. And I was reminded of your campaign when the Wall Street Journal just had a piece two days ago called "Trump’s Focus on Drug War Means Big Business for Defense Startups", and it’s all about how Trump’s supposed anti-narco-terror campaign is a huge boon for Silicon Valley companies who are making tons of money off selling the United States dubiously effective tools. So you’re really drawing attention to the fact that in addition to the moral and legal problems with US war-making, it is also this horrible squandered opportunity to address all of these other social problems.

Turner

That’s exactly right, and the more that we can get people to connect the two—because people’s eyes gloss over, and I get it. They’re thinking, I’m just trying to survive every day. What does being anti-war have to do with it? We have to be able to connect the dots for them, that for every dollar that is given in excess to the war machine itself, not the protection of the United States of America—we got all those tools—that is $1 taken out of our coffers to be able to cancel student debt, cancel medical debt, have universal health care, and invest in our infrastructure. I would love for us to make more of an investment, by way of example, in high-speed rail. Why can’t that money that you are spending to make war in other places be used to uplift the everyday conditions and create jobs here for the good of the American people? And so what Up in Arms is bringing is that common sense. How do I connect it for the big mamas and the big papas in this country so that they see that being pro-peace and anti-war has a material component to whether their lives are edified, both now and into the future? And I’m so glad you brought up President Eisenhower; that is one of my favorite quotes. And also on the speaking quotes, because I love quotes, very poetically, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the three evils in this country before he was assassinated. Militarism was one of those evils that Doctor King cautioned us about. And one of his quotes is

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual [doom]."

And I think that anybody who thinks about these things with an open mind would agree with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others that we are, in my opinion, not only approaching a spiritual death, we are there.

Robinson 

It does often feel as if the United States is approaching a spiritual death, especially when I read Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts. I see so much cruelty and brutality. But the one thing that gives me a little bit of faith and hope that we’re not approaching a spiritual death is that this country is still home to many wonderful, truth-telling, and decent people, and that we still have voices like Bernie Sanders, Zorhan Mamdani, Dr. Cornell West, and yourself, Senator Nina Turner. It has been our great privilege to have you on the program today. I do think that if people look, they’re going to see more and more of these kinds of things—David Brooks had an op-ed saying it turns out Bernie Sanders was right the whole time. James Carville said it turned out Bernie Sanders was right the whole time. I think if you look back over the last 10 years and see what was on the op-ed page of the New York Times, and then you look at what Nina Turner was saying at the same time, you will also find that Nina Turner has said a lot of prescient and prophetic things that should have been listened to earlier. So we’re so glad to get to talk to you. Thank you for coming on the program.

Turner

Oh, my absolute pleasure, and I hope you will have me back into the Current Affairs family. Thank you all. And if I don’t get to talk to you before the New Year, I just want to say that I hope that everybody has a happy holiday, and maybe those of you who have the means can help make somebody else’s holiday season happier and have a very happy new year. We have so much work to do, and I can’t wait to come back and join you and the team again.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.