The Phillies baseball team was one run up in the sixth inning when the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna gazed at the crowd, turned to me and said: “I’m American. Americans are optimistic.”
Nihilism, cynicism and fascism are buzzwords in America today. Optimism, less so. But people did look happy. Families knocked their heads together for selfies, squinting through the sunlight at their phones. Young bros munched hotdogs with one hand and slurped Miller Lites with the other.
Predictions of the death of the republic felt far away. For a moment, Saul Bellow seemed to have got it wrong when he wrote, “The human species as a whole has gone into politics.” The Phillie Phanatic, the team’s green, fluffy mascot, the most eminent in America, got off his quad bike, climbed a wall ten feet in front of us and began vigorously humping the air.
Nonetheless, I suggested the country might be a bit stuck, spiritually. “I have perfect confidence in the American spiritual purpose,” the representative for Silicon Valley dutifully replied. “It’s the political class that hasn’t been worthy of the American people.” He looked around the stadium again. “Do people seem like they’re in a dark place? They seem like they’re in a good place here.”
Khanna’s optimism runs deeper than baseball crowds. Where other Democrats think we live in an irredeemably populist age and dismiss voters as indulging demagoguery, he sees an enduring belief in democracy. “People underestimate the spirit, the democratic spirit, and the resilience of our people,” he continued. “Martin Luther King did not decry the spirituality of the American people. He summoned it. Obama didn’t decry it. Kennedy didn’t decry it. Leadership is about finding the register to tap in to it.”
Khanna, 48, has been in Congress since 2016 and co-chaired Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. He has become the leading Democrat opposed to Trump’s campaign in Iran and has co-led a War Powers Resolution, which instructs the president to withdraw unauthorised forces acting against Iran. Like the Maga isolationists, he wants to avoid another Iraq. In 2004, aged 27, he ran against a Democratic congressman who supported Bush’s war.
“I’m not a pacifist,” Khanna told me on the phone last week. “I don’t believe in foreign interventions that are going to make matters worse.” He wants the Democrats to be the party that “stands for peace abroad and good jobs at home – we need to retake the mantle of being the anti-war party that Donald Trump took from us. We need to stand united again.”
Khanna perches on the party’s progressive wing, but skirts around its trademark social justice rhetoric. He avoids questions about whether he’ll run for the 2028 presidency. But ignore that: the signs suggest he will. He’s a constant presence on television and takes pride in often appearing on Fox. As early as March 2022, Sanders’ top aides were telling Khanna to run in 2024 if Joe Biden stood down. A year later, the New York Times reported that he was already being talked about as a candidate for 2028. Last year, the Atlantic said that Khanna refused to rule out a run. “The old guard needs to go” he told me, in his professional, studious manner. The implication was obvious: it’s time for his generation to lead.
A few weeks earlier in north DC, Khanna strolled into a coffee shop with a chai tea. He was wearing a blue tie with a fat Trumpian knot, a congressional pin, and shiny hair gel. He had an impassive air, a rarity in agitated Washington.
He thought his party was “very self-flagellating and introspective for two months” after the election. But now the listing economy meant the president had “committed the cardinal sin in American politics: you can’t destroy wealth. You can’t go after people’s money.” He’s “optimistic” the Democrats will win come 2028.
Khanna thinks the party hasn’t had a truly open primary since Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008. Who are his would-be competitors for the Democratic nomination this cycle? Apart from Kamala Harris, who is slowly rising from her political grave to attend fundraisers, and Chris Murphy, Trump’s bête noire in the Senate, the field is packed with governors.
There’s California’s Gavin Newsom, who has launched a podcast in which he banters with leading Maga figures. The Illinois billionaire and long-time Democrat donor JB Pritzker is being touted by old party hands in Washington. Harris’s 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, is keeping up his public appearances. Bringing up the rear is Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro.
But the only energy in the party since the election has been on Bernie Sanders’ anti-oligarchy tour, featuring his support act, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another frontrunner. At a stop in Pennsylvania in May, a union leader introduced Sanders with the line: “No other politician is able to do it like him.” Which, given that he is 83, is part of the problem.
“The two most consequential Democrats in the modern era [are] Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders,” Khanna said. Khanna’s politics are a mix of Sanders and Obama. His Obama-esque brand of optimism makes Sanders’ progressive policies sound less radical to the establishment. Is he Bernie’s heir?
“No, that would be highly presumptuous. Bernie Sanders is not cloneable. Great leaders like Bernie or Obama have no heirs. Who’s Winston Churchill’s heir? Who’s Gandhi’s heir?”
At the game, we were sitting four rows behind first base. Khanna and his younger brother, an urbane federal attorney, were to my left, with their parents to my right. The brothers were trading notes on whether the pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates was the best in the league. Their mother leaned over and mischievously said baseball had got better once the rules were changed to shorten the time between pitches. She and their father – an aloof, dignified man who prefers cricket – raised the boys in nearby Bucks County, and would bring them to a game once a year. “They’d get all the food!” she reminisced. Nowadays, the family obliges when Khanna shepherds them pitch-side in freshly bought Phillies hats to take a photo for social media.
[See also: Oliver Eagleton: Imperial calculations]
Khanna’s parents came over from the Punjab in 1968. His maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, spent time in prison for supporting civil disobedience during Ghandi’s campaign for India’s independence from British rule. He went on to become an MP and lead the Punjabi branch of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. “He was my inspiration,” Khanna said. “He really stood for the ideals of non-violence, pluralism, self-determination.” What does he take from his grandfather’s story? “The importance of courage in politics, the importance of a willingness to stand up for what you believe.”
That Martin Luther King drew deeply from Gandhi’s satyagraha philosophy means the American civil rights leader looms large in Khanna’s politics. “In his book on non-violence King said that we must be angry and reform a system – not obsess over the players in the system.” For Khanna, King is the bridge between the seemingly disparate worlds of the Punjab and the United States, between the activism his grandfather championed and the country Khanna now wants to lead.
The morning of the baseball game, Khanna was on ABC News telling his fellow Democrats to admit they were wrong to let a senile 81-year-old run for president. In our seats, he flicked through emails on his phone, triaging the fall-out. The party is still writhing over its part in Trump’s comeback. Khanna thinks voters can only trust the Democrats again once they own up to that mistake.
His politics, too, cuts against the party’s progressive grain. He pushes what he’s light-heartedly called “Blue Maga”, a coinage ill-suited for a Democrat popularity contest. Ditto the fact that the Maga guru Steve Bannon told me Khanna is one of his favourite Democrats.
Whatever the optics, Khanna wants to beat Trump by spreading the bounty of economic growth. His main idea – what he calls economic patriotism – is to reindustrialise the US with a Marshall Plan for America. He wants Medicare for all. He fights for more taxes on the wealthy, getting big money out of politics and a higher minimum wage. But he is no Luddite: he sees technology as America’s saviour.
At Yale Law School in the late 1990s Professor Lawrence Lessig told him all the interesting law would be in Silicon Valley. He heeded the advice, joined a firm and represented “tech start-ups, tech companies, venture capital”. He got the call from the Obama administration in 2009 to become a deputy assistant secretary in the Commerce Department. Elon Musk called him a “leading thinker” for a blurb quote for his 2012 book Entrepreneurial Nation. And then, after a few false starts, he was elected to the House of Representatives for California’s 17th Congressional District, located in Silicon Valley, in 2016.
Venture capitalists backed Khanna’s run, and so his call for wealth taxes presents a puzzle: why did capital’s traffic wardens support this union-backing progressive? “They still support me,” he said, “because I’m pro-innovation.”
“They believe I’m a technology optimist, and I believe that technology has to be part of the solution of the American renewal.” Technology itself, in Khanna’s world, sits on a different moral plane to those technologists who use “their wealth to distort politics”. “I’m very opposed to this vision that innovation is incompatible with democracy.”
Khanna is intensely relaxed about artificial intelligence. He thinks robots will replace workers at a slower rate than the doomsters suggest. “We need to have strong labour protection, so there’s collective bargaining, so workers get to decide and control machines, not be displaced by machines.” Again, something for both the technologists and the progressives.
Compare that language to a recent tweet from Sanders: “AI is coming for YOUR job.” Khanna’s ecumenical approach to politics means he shuns this populist division of us and them – and yet retains the policy.
Labour protections are fine. But what if workers aren’t around to feel the benefits of a trade union? Might AI be a meteor that wipes us out? “No, no, it’s like any technology: we need to have a humanistic frame for it.”
There’s a proprietary pride in the way Khanna touts the supremacy of Silicon Valley. It’s an area in which his “progressive capitalism” fuses with his conviction that America is exceptional and unique. His usually decorous tone takes on a nationalistic pitch.
“The EU has no credibility [on tech],” he said. “They haven’t produced a single consequential tech company other than [the Dutch supplier for semiconductors] ASML,” he said.
“America will lead. America will make a decision. We have failed in having the proper sense of regulation. But people laugh at the EU’s regulations because it’d be like if I tried to regulate [American] football, never having played football.”
And what of that famed “special relationship” with the UK? Does the UK have any standing on technology?
“It’s a yawn. I care more about what some random congressperson thought about AI than when Rishi Sunak said he was going to do an AI summit. I kind of laughed.”
And why is that?
“Because it’d be like if I said I wanted to do a summit of what it’s like to live in the developing world. It’s like, what the hell do you know about what’s going on about innovation and technology?”
The UK does have a trillion-dollar tech industry, I pointed out. “I have a $14trn tech district,” Khanna replied.
His thoughts on Sunak were delivered with brevity: “Fine. Technocrat. Proud of his story.”
Khanna sees little resemblance between himself and Sunak because his newly minted Silicon Valley neighbour (Sunak’s now a fellow at Stanford) lacks a “humanistic side”. “I mean, I’m proud of him as someone who overcame being Indian and Hindu and was proud of his whole heritage, but I think it was not transformational an ideology. I respect him on a personal basis.”
Forget Sunak. There’s another young politician in Washington who courts Big Tech and preaches reindustrialisation, who can thrive in the Valley and the Rust Belt – and who hopes one day to lead their party.
In February, JD Vance defended an employee on Musk’s cost-cutting team who had once tweeted, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and, “Normalise Indian hate.” Khanna took issue with that, and tweeted at Vance: “Are you going to tell him to apologise for saying ‘Normalise Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Vance, whose wife’s parents are also Indian immigrants, replied: “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up… You know what I do worry about, Ro? That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressmen [sic] who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts. You disgust me.”
Internet spats are one way in which Khanna has made himself the Democrats’ loudest critic of the vice-president. On 5 May, Khanna gave a speech, pointedly at their shared alma mater Yale Law School, in which he criticised Vance for the administration’s attacks on free speech and universities, calling the vice-president’s time at Yale a “stain on the degree of every Yale graduate”.
Though Khanna comes from an immigrant family, and Vance from a broken one, they have similar careers.
“But very different values,” Khanna said. “I’m not for getting rid of due process. I believe that our multi-racial democracy is a strength, not a weakness.”
In his convention speech last year, Vance argued that America is not an idea, but a nation state, a group of people living between two oceans, whose interests come above those ideals debated in Independence Hall – where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were signed – three miles from the stadium.
“It is a nation state,” Khanna said, but “we also have the dedication to the idea, where we’re conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition of equality.” Vance is “making us less exceptional” he added. “He’s making us another ordinary nation.”
He worries America might become a place where humans are ordinary, not one where their brutishness is alloyed with a higher purpose. “[Trump and Vance] made America so much about transaction and survival of the jungle and doing what’s in your self-interest, or you’re a sucker and you’re weak. And that’s a very impoverished vision of America. That’s every other nation.
“What makes America the spark of vitality, of inspiration is that we seek to ennoble that. We seek to inspire beyond that. That’s our exceptional nature.” American exceptionalism is not in vogue much nowadays. Large factions of the left and right see American imperialism as a sinful enterprise. In many ways, they think it’s time the US became more like every other nation.
Might Trump be the archetypal American leader, the apogee of… “the American id,” Khanna jumped in. “Kennedy or Obama is the embodiment of the American ideal.”
We walked up the stadium steps after the game and Khanna asked me to sum up his perspective in two sentences. “Progressivism mixed with American exceptionalism,” I offered. “American progressivism,” he said, smiling, “I’d never thought about it like that before.”
We drove 40 minutes north to a village hall in Bucks County, the part of Pennsylvania where Khanna grew up. The changeable sign on the lawn outside read: “MEI CATERING BUCKS BEST WEDDING – 215 364 2130”. Inside, around 100 people sat beneath leftover wedding decorations. One organiser told me the local Republican representative, Brian Fitzpatrick, has not held in-person town halls for the district in years. On the stage, Khanna promised to stay until all their questions were answered. (When I left, he was fielding questions by the stage.)
The first questioner told Khanna he should call Trump voters “white supremacists”. Khanna demurred. He would never label half the country like that. These are fellow Americans, endowed with exceptionalism. He doesn’t believe it, anyway.
Three other questioners (at least one a self-identifying millennial) were worried about the party’s language and messaging: “We need to stop using this weak language – this is Nazi crap. This is eugenics.” I spied two surgical masks in the room. Khanna said Trump voters do not like what the president is doing and can be won over. “That’s because they’re stupid,” one woman muttered behind me.
Noticeably, he did not mention trans people in one of his answers: “gay, lesbian…” he paused, listing those under threat from the administration. “Trans!” an audience member shouted out. “… or whatever your sexuality,” Khanna continued. He strangely still thinks “woke” only means respecting minorities’ history but his condemnation of cancel culture to me (he called himself a “free-speech absolutist”) suggests he knows the political toll wokeness has taken on the Democratic Party.
The night before, Khanna got talking to Trump voters who were protesting outside his town hall in Allentown. They had recognised him from his appearances on Fox News. Khanna invited them in to listen to his speech. When he said he was trying to pass a bill supporting Trump’s plan to lower prescription drugs, “they clapped. I talked about not cutting Medicaid. They clapped. They love the economic patriotism of building new industry and how we’re going to build manufacturing. And this is what we need to do: engage these Trump supporters.”
Ro Khanna is an American optimist. In one sense, he pans Trumpland sewage for nuggets of hope. In another, he sees through crises to an irrepressible American spirit. Trump’s marauding power cannot crush his conviction that democracy will endure.
He has no time for the idea that politicians have become sad stars in a reality television show. He once said Trump will be a footnote in American history. That seems complacent, even innocent. But Khanna’s Sanders-esque policies lend his politics of optimism an edge of reality, a confidence to turn and face the reasons we live in a Trumpian age.
[See also: Labour is losing its mind]
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This article appears in the 25 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, State of Emergency