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Liberalism’s epistemic crisis enabled Donald Trump’s victories Feb 09, 2025

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Episode Summary Donald Trump is now once again the president of the United States, but his victory in 2024 was more than just a victory for himself or the Republican Party, it actually is part of a larger advancement that is happening across many different countries around the globe for right-wing reactionary parties who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as populist.(These parties are not populist, in fact, because their policies that they pursue have no material benefit to the people who vote for them. But instead they use vulgarian rhetoric to pretend to be populist.)Despite the fact that these far-right parties have policies that are hurtful to their own voters and to their countries that have elected them, they have been able to win because the center-left and the further-left are caught up in a philosophical crisis of liberalism itself. And that's because liberalism as a philosophy has never actually been able to fight successfully against reactionary philosophy in the political realm in the English-speaking world. Instead, the last time that it won was 200 years ago when it defeated monarchism, which was an explicitly king-based approach. But reactionaries like Donald Trump and his henchmen are not explicitly pro-monarch—at least to the public. They certainly are that way in private, as many of their political theorists like Curtis Yarvin and JD Vance have freely admitted. That is why understanding how to defeat a form of monarchism that argues through democratic means is proving to be an incredible challenge for liberalism and socialism.On today's episode, I talk about some of these challenges and the historical origins of them with Matthew McManus. He’s a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, a previous guest on the show, and he’s got a new book out now called The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.The video of our January 21, 2025 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch.Related ContentInside the extremist ideology of JD Vance (McManus’s previous appearance on Theory of Change)The ‘post-left’ is the latest right-wing scamHow Republicans became the party of the John Birch SocietyThe Christian right was a theological rebellion before it became a political causeThe disinformation techniques used by Trump and today’s Republicans were invented by tobacco companies in the 1970sHow 90s libertarian billionaires transmogrified into the neo-reactionary extremists of the 2020sAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction11:30 — How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold War 17:52 — Nietzsche and liberalism's meaning crisis23:21 — Socialist traditions' better understanding of marginalization30:49 — Charles Mills and critical race theory extend rather than reject Western philosophy32:33 — Thomas Paine vs. Edmund Burke36:54 — How socialists failed to build institutions41:37 — Radical leftists haven't realized the necessity of persuasion47:56 — Democrats also refuse to explain or persuade53:12 — Liberalism has never developed the ability to politically defeat reactionismAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I think before we get too far afield into that into the actual contents of the book, let's talk about what do you mean by liberal socialism as distinct from liberalism and as distinct from socialism.MATT McMANUS: Sure. Well, there are a couple of different things to say about that just being very simply.I follow people like Alan Ryan or Michael Friedan or Peter Lam on the socialist end of things who point out that it's very easy to take narrow understandings of what liberalism and socialism entail.And to say that they just are one thing or, you know, whatever flavor of liberalism or socialism I happen to be committed to that's the real flavor. And what all the authors I mentioned stress is that these are big ideologies that have a lot of different permutations, members attitudes that you can see within them.And that's reflective of the fact that they've been around for hundreds of years now. So there are a lot of different people who have identified as liberals and socialists [00:04:00] at event calls. quite different things about that. Now that doesn't mean that just anybody can be a liberal or anybody can be a socialist because they say the odd liberal or they say the odd socialist thing.You know, think about the people's public of North Korea, right? Nobody would exactly call North Korea either a people's republic or any kind of. Republic, really or, you know, National Socialism, right?For example, you know, Fascism is quite a different ideology to certainly Democratic Socialism or even Authoritarian Marxism but these groups have, these different philosophies and ideologies have family resemblances to one another and in the book I point out that, broadly speaking we can say that All different liberals regardless of their specific convictions tend to be beholden to principles like liberty for all, equality for all, certainly formal legal equality for all and certainly in the European tradition solidarity for all would also be another important liberal principle.Now what I point out in the book is that liberals have understood this commitment to liberty and equality and potentially solidarity and fraternity for all in very different ways. Just to give one example Ludwig von Mise, the great Austrian economist fierce defender of capitalism said, look, all that equality should mean is equality under the law.All right. We don't take this kind of old aristocratic approach suggesting that some people should be entitled to more rights, more opportunities More, you know economic advantages than others because that's not exactly conducive to the kind of market society that we want to see instantiated but beyond that, you know von Mises and many more right wing liberals would follow him in this would say once you kind of allow market functions to play themselves out.Obviously you're going to see extraordinary forms of inequality emerge. And that's a okay as long as, you know, we've established this initial respect for each individual by ensuring that they have equality under the law, but, you know, Von Mises perspective is by no means the only one that you see in the liberal tradition and I would say in many ways it's not even particularly representative as a lot of historians of liberalism will tell you. Going all the way back to John Locke, but certainly when you look at people like Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine let alone John Stuart Mill, who I write a lot about in the book [00:06:00] they'd all insist that being a liberal means that you have to be committed to a much deeper kind of equality than just pure formal equality under the law.So And we can get into a lot of the reasons for this but these kinds of liberals, obviously historically and down to the present day have been a lot more friendly to the suggestions or arguments of figures in the socialist tradition who also have stressed that formal equality under the law is restraining for an awful lot of people, not least And then just to move on the other end we can say very similar things about socialism.Socialism is a mature enlightenment doctrine very much like liberalism in that respect. Socialists saw themselves as trying to carry on in many ways the enterprise of liberalism by ensuring that Equality and freedom weren't just formally achieved but were achieved in material practice for all.And socialists understood what that was going to mean in very, very different ways also, right? Obviously some extremely brutal socialists like, say, Stalin understood this to mean, well, we're gonna have a command economy where everyone's behavior is gonna be very tightly restricted because that's gonna be the only way for us to secure a sufficiently high level of economic growth in one country to save socialism from the imperialism and imperialism.Of the Western powers. And we all know how that story ended up, right? Ah, there's absolutely nothing liberal you can really cause to say about the Soviet union or other authoritarian command economies. Ah, but there are other kinds of socialists Democratic socialists Social Democrats, etc.etc. Who are much more insistent that, no, to be a socialist means to be committed to the basic canon of liberal rights, indeed, many socialists would insist that, them. One of the good things about socialism is that they could take liberal rights more seriously than many liberals did, particularly things like the right to freedom of assembly which many socialists emphasize should mean that if you want to form a union, for example you should be able to do so without the state stepping in to crush that and These figures are obviously, of course, much more friendly to liberalism and the institutions of representative democracy than the kind of command economy socialists that [00:08:00] more people are probably more familiar with at least in in the United States.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and as you discuss in the introduction that in the, in the current moment there, there's really neither side of this, you know, dialogue that's now been going on for more than almost 200 years between liberalism and socialism. Neither side really fully understands how to deal with a politicized, non explicitly, know political system. Street violence filled right, you know, so, so reactionism, as we have it today is a different, it's, it's a different flavor compared to how it was from and Hitler. and it's more democratic flavored, or at least, you know, is less overtly you know, violent so far. and it's presented a real challenge because neither side. Seems to understand how to generate meaning in the population or even to be aware that they need to do so. And let's talk about that or how you see that first and then get further.McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So There's a lot of things to be said about that.I think I'll start from a conceptual level and then move to a bit more of a concrete one.So my argument in the book and in my previous book, which you were actually also gracious enough to interview me on the political right and inequality is that the political right is quite different as a tradition from either the liberal or the socialist tradition.And anyone who explores its canonical authors will see this come through very, very, very clearly, I think. Starting with people like Joseph de Maistre moving down through Hayek Heidegger, you know, down to Curtis Yarvin you know, and you name it. And I tend to agree, actually with F. A. Hayek's definition. This is his definition of conservatism, but I think it applies to the broader right which is that to be right wing is to hold that there are recognizably superior people or for that matter, recognizably superior groups in [00:10:00] society and they're entitled to more, right?More agency, more power, more wealth more affluence more opportunities for political participation you name it. And this has given way to a vast array of right wing ideologies all of whom understand recognizable superiority in extremely different ways, right? Some people like Randians think that while recognizable superiority is demonstrated when you prove yourself in this almost quasi Nietzschean way in the testing ground of the market and you demonstrate that you're a John Galt type figure rather than a second hander who, for the most part just benefits from what better men than you have been able to produce.Other people As we see now tend to understand recognizable superiority along much more ethno-chauvinist or even religious lines, right? You know, our religion is superior to others and consequently it should be given more weight in political and social structures than Judaism, than Islam, etc, etc.Our, our country is being Superior to all others so there's nothing wrong with us threatening Panama or Greenland of all places with annexation if it's going to expand our imperial horizons and strengthen our country's hand in the world. And I think that once you understand the right in terms of this commitment to recognizable superiority you can grasp the distance between a lot of versions of right wing thought and the traditions of liberalism and socialism which both in their own respective way emerged out of this enlightenment commitment to the idea that all people are equal and should be treated as free as consequence of this initial moral commitment.How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold WarMcMANUS: Now, in terms of the struggles that liberals and leftists, I mean the left generally now, not just socialists have been facing today, I think there are an awful lot of different reasons for that. But I'm just going to give one that I think is germane to the thesis of the book. So, I was really inspired by Samuel Moyne Yale professor who some people might be familiar with He's written some very interesting books on human rights, international humanitarian law, but he wrote a very good book recently Liberalism Against Itself talking about Cold War liberalism as he frames it.[00:12:00] And what he stresses is that, well, liberalism in its birth was fundamentally a very progressive revolutionary creed and he says there's really no other way to understand it, right? In the European continent liberalism was widely associated with the French Revolution which as the name suggests was a gigantic revolution that upended the Ancien Regimes and tried to establish a relatively egalitarian republic and also inspired sister revolutions in places like Haiti.Important to always foreground the Haitian revolution, which undid slavery on the island, not often appreciated by many or even look at the American revolutionaries, right? There's sometimes been this effort to kind of paint the American revolutionaries as kind of Burkean conservatives in some way.Russell Kirk, for example, tried to do that. But I think that Sheldon Wolin is correct in saying without a doubt, they had many conservative inclinations. But we also need to recognize that they legitimated their revolution on enlightenment principles. They knew that only about a third of the American population at the time supported what they were doing.Another third were loyalists or Tories as they called them or were indifferent And they still thought that what they were doing was right. And not only did they initiate that revolution Wolin points out that they actually initiated a second revolution in America when they dropped the country's first constitution and decided to replace it with an entirely new constitution through deliberative and representative processes.So, these kinds of revolutionary creeds according to Moyn really were quite hopeful and optimistic in their orientation, which is why they're mature Enlightenment doctrines. They felt that it was possible. exercising human reason to build societies that would more integrally instantiate this commitment to freedom of all for all and equality for all.Now, of course,SHEFFIELD: oh, and I'm sorry, just to interrupt a sec but somebody that you do talk about in the book extensively, who does fit into that argument, that it wasn't just a, it wasn't a conservative project, it was obviously Thomas Paine, the guy who, who popularized the idea of revolution against the crown you know, was very, very influential, even [00:14:00] though operationally, he, he wasn't as invol…

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Trump’s looming attack on higher education Feb 03, 2025

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Episode Summary The second term of Donald Trump has officially begun, but despite all the things he’s unveiled in the past several weeks, we don’t know fully what his policies are going to be over the next four years.That is in part because Trump himself is a very erratic figure who says things that are nonsensical, even by his own standards. While there are documents such as Project 2025 which were created by Trump's ideological allies in the reactionary movement, that document itself is not particularly detailed in a number of ways.But one thing we can be sure is going to happen in the second Trump administration is that he will conduct a full-scale assault on America's colleges and universities. As a candidate, he promised repeatedly to create taxes on private university endowments. And he also talked about removing the funding for universities that don't bow to his various censorship demands, which are already being imposed on federal government agencies such as the National Institute of Health.Unlike a number of other Trumpian boasts and threats, he is very likely to follow through on his promised attacks on higher education because Republicans in a number of states and localities have enacted many of the policies that Trump talked about on the campaign trail.Joining me today to talk about all this is Nils Gilman, a friend of the show who is the chief operating officer at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank in Southern California that publishes Noema Magazine. He is also the former associate chancellor at the University of California-Berkeley, where he saw first-hand just what the [00:02:00] Republican vision for education in the United States is. He’s also the co-author of a new book called Children of a Modest Star, which we discuss at the end of the episode.The video of our December 18, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch.Related Content—The forgotten history of how Republican college students invented “canceling” people—Inside the right-wing plan to ‘seize control of the administrative state’—Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are building a reactionary cult for young people, does anyone on the center-left care?—MAGA media figures previewed Trump’s extreme priorities for his second term—Inspired by Trump, reactionary comedians are the most popular media figures in the Republican party—Jordan Peterson and the far-right’s war on education and sound epistemologyAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:31 — The Milo Yiannopoulos incident at Berkeley13:34 — Trump has learned from other authoritarians' playbooks22:36 — The crisis of legitimacy in higher education32:24 — The role of sports in universities34:55 — DeSantis's attack on Florida universities will be Trump's model39:52 — Historical parallels: Germany in the 1930s and the rise of the American university43:39 — Despite the right's wholesale assault on education, many academics still don't take it seriously46:43 — The deadly myth of "non-partisanship" in an era where the far-right is assaulting all knowledge51:17 — Liberalism's epistemic inability to use power politics55:24 — 'Children of a Modest Star' and a future-oriented liberalismAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So before we get too far into the topic of discussion for today, let's just briefly talk about your own personal direct experience with some of these issues and some of the ideas and people that are surely going to be a factor in what Trump is going to do with education.NILS GILMAN: Sure, well the last seven years, I've been working at a. Research center and think tank in Los Angeles called the Berggruen Institute. But my previous job to this was working as the associate chancellor and chief of staff to the chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, where obviously I dealt with a lot of local issues. But I also saw and had conversations with many people across the higher education landscape in the United States. So I have a lot of experience knowing the way in which universities operate as well as some of the ways in which they've been targeted. As you can imagine, Berkeley is kind of a symbolic lightning rod for a lot of opinions that people have about higher education, particularly on the right, has been that way since at least the 1960s. And so I've seen the way in which Berkeley has been targeted, particularly, but I think it's just emblematic of the way in which, you know, the right regards higher education more broadly.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And specifically, like, some of the things that you encountered, can you talk about a couple of, well,The Milo Yiannopoulos incident at BerkeleyGILMAN: One of the first real encounters I had with this was actually just 10 days after, maybe 12 days after Trump was inaugurated in 2017 for his first term. At that time the, I think it's fair to say provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos was doing a kind of and the previous stop and he had, he'd been scheduled by the young Republicans at Berkeley to give a talk on February 2nd, 2017, and that had been scheduled before the [00:04:00] election had been scheduled back in September, I think, of 2016, and this proved to be an extremely controversial episode on on numerous different levels.First, there were quite a number of faculty and especially students who. Wanted him to be banned from campus, and I have to say the administration was adamant that he be allowed to speak. Berkeley has a long tradition of free speech and any accredited student group or faculty member is allowed to invite anybody they want to speak on campus.And that's been a, you know, a standing policy on the part of the University of California, Berkeley, since the free speech movement back in 60 years ago in 1964 now. You know, there are some limits on free speech, the so called time, place, and manner restrictions. You can't, you know, bring a bullhorn into class and start yelling at a professor that way.Obviously, that's disruptive. But these are all sort of established. The limits on free speech are well established by Supreme Court jurisprudence, and particularly University of California, because it's a public university is required to have a you know, an open an open posture towards any political opinion that might that might be expressed 1 of the political opinions that got expressed.Of course, it was many people on campus wanted Milo not to be allowed to speak. And we said, no, he will be allowed to speak. And and then what unfolded on the evening of February 2nd, 2017 was really quite quite a striking episode because You know, we tickets have been sold for the main auditorium in the student in the brand new student union.I think there were about 500 people who were planning on attending this thing. Berkeley, as you know, with protocols for this kind of thing, we'd set up a line for people to line up to get into the venue. And there was also a separate space that had been cordoned off for people to protest. You know, we had about, I think, maybe 100 police officers University police officers who were there to make sure that good order would be would be maintained at 1st, you know, up until nightfall.The talk was set to go on. I think it's 30 or something like that. So, you know, it was in it was in [00:06:00] February. It was quite dark. And everything was going fine. You know, there were people lining up to go listen to Milo talk. And then there were people who were in the Kordendorff area that were protesting, and it was all sort of going according to protocol.And then right as it became completely dark, an unexpected, an unprecedented event in the history of Berkeley took place, which was About 150, that's an estimate anarchists from Oakland came and arrived using black block tactics to shut the event down. They came on the campus from, you know, it's an open campus in an urban setting.They just. Float onto campus from the south side of campus and basically started attacking the building in order to disrupt the event. And by the way, there were thousands, literally thousands of people who had gathered around Sproul Plaza, which is the main square at the center of Berkeley to see what was going to happen.And with that many people, there were not enough cops to do crowd control and to make a long story short, the cops decided for the safety of Milo himself. That they had to, they had to pull the plug on the event. Milo was whisked out of the building in an unmarked vehicle, and he drove off immediately to the Fox News studios in San Jose.By the way, you know, a riot broke out that were. Television television helicopters—SHEFFIELD: Wasn't there also dumpster fire ?GILMAN: There was a fire that was set in the middle of campus right next to our brand new student union. I was really worried. I was in Spall Plaza observing this this all unfold. I mean, the scene, Matt, I have to tell you, is the closest approximation I've ever seen to what I imagined hell would be like.You know, there was fire burning. There's helicopter music. People had like plugged in and were Playing death metal. There's a riot breaking out. It was really it was a terrible scene. You know, this made national news. It was a huge embarrassment for the university that we had failed to properly prepare for to be to be fair and unprecedented event.But we, you know, in the event, we were not able to pull that event off. But what happened next, I think, is really characteristic and telling and really gave me a clue right at the very beginning of the [00:08:00] first Trump administration, what things were likely to be like. So Milo you know, this makes him more of a celebrity than he's ever been.He drives off to San Jose, goes immediately on Fox News, talks about all those terrible liberals at Berkeley who won't let him speak, and makes national news. He gets invited onto a bunch of more talk shows the next day. And meanwhile, the riots sort of continued for several hours, and then eventually it died down.And I went home around midnight that night, and about five, four o'clock in the morning, my phone starts buzzing, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. And, you know, I was a little bit sleepy, having barely gotten any sleep. And I look at my phone and my phone is blowing up because Lots of friends are texting me. Hey, have you seen what Trump tweeted?Have you seen what Trump tweeted? And I had not seen it, so I walked on, saw what real Donald Trump had to say, and I'm going to paraphrase. I don't remember the exact phrase, but he said something to the effect of, if Berkeley won't let conservatives speak, we're going to yank Federal funding. And I thought, okay, this is nonsense.I just put it down. I went to work. And at this point, like when I by the time I got to work at about 8 30 in the morning, the PR and crisis communications team was all up in a lather because phone calls were coming in from local media and national media asking things like how much federal funding does Berkeley get?So if he yanks it, I happen to know that the approximate number was something like seven or eight hundred million dollars, if you count all the various contracts and, you know, NIH money and NSF money and, you know, large amount of money goes to Berkeley from various federal sources. But I also knew that there was actually no way that Trump could unilaterally yank funding from us.And so I said, let's just ignore that. And the PR people were like, oh, my God, we have to. You know, we have to, we have to respond to the New York Times. We can't just ignore them. Like, ignore them. It's a silly, it's a silly question. Trump's just bullshitting and trying to jit us up and troll us, and we should just ignore that.Don't feed the troll, even if he's president. Even if it's the New York Times responding to the troll, we don't have to [00:10:00] do that. But the PR people just wouldn't, you know, they start calling around different departments to figure out how much money it is and and I just was like, okay, forget it. If you guys insist on doing this, go ahead.But what unfolded over the next two days was actually really, really interesting because What the media kind of realized is actually, if the federal government wanted to yank funding from Berkeley, they probably couldn't do that. They'd have to yank it from the whole UC system. So then calls started going into all of the other nine campuses at the UC system asking them, how much money do you get from the federal government?And then people realized, well, actually, they probably couldn't target just the UC system. They'd have to target Like all federal systems, because the money runs through these, you know, things like the NSF grant making process, which is, you know, it's not it's controlled by scientists and so on. So if they want to yank money, they have to make money from all the universities.And all of a sudden, all the universities in the country were being called by local and national media, asking them how much money they get from the federal government. And this took up 2 days of Executive time that was basically completely disrupted the operations of all the universities in the country based on one tweet that Donald Trump types, you know, with his thumbs in 30 seconds over breakfast.The ROI in terms of disruption of what he regards as adversary institutions was just incredible, right? I mean, 30 seconds of tweeting. Two days and lost productivity for the executive for executives at universities across the country. It really gave me a sense of two things. One is what Trump's methods are for kind of trying to throw the you know what he regards as opposition institutions offline and also the inability of those institutions to see what he's doing and realize they're being played for suckers.And that includes both the media institutions who were being his useful idiot and propagating his his trollishness into these universities and the inability of university to say we're just not going to play that game. And I think of that to me has become a microcosm that I personally experienced of the way in which Trump has just outplayed both the mainstream media and many of the institutions in the country over the last, you know, now going on, going on eight years.SHEFFIELD: [00:12:00] Yeah, well, that certainly has been the case and, and it was an episode also that, I mean, it was one of many of. Of that, those early years of his political career that did illustrate not only that the institutions didn't know how to respond to them, but also there were no countervailing institutions or individuals.To really push back adequately and actually explain this is what he's doing you know, and, and that, and he's continued this, you know, this, this litigious or, and trollish threatening approach ever since. And, you know, like, just most recently, he was in the news for launching a lawsuit against the Des Moines register for a poll that was done that showed him losing the state of Iowa.And of course that was not. It was way off by Ann Selzer. But obviously this is not a real lawsuit. It's designed to intimidate and to make things costly for people. And, you know, this is, it's just not for some reason. People who have these institutional positions, they don't want to say that that's what's happening.And they don…

Full show notes at the publisher

Trump won’t deliver for voters, but do Democrats actually want to defeat him? Jan 23, 2025

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Episode SummaryAs Donald Trump’s second presidential administration takes shape with a host of controversial and unpopular executive orders and numerous unqualified and bizarre nominees like Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, it raises the question, is this what his voters asked for?That question is actually a lot more difficult to answer than it may seem, because people voted for Trump for a variety of different reasons, some of which were even contradictory.We'll get into that on today’s episode and also discuss why Democrats have been unwilling and unable to offer a different alternative to the politics of credentialism that they've been creating for the past several decades. My guest on today's episode is Chris Lehmann, the Washington bureau chief for The Nation magazine. He's also the author of the 2016 book, “The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream.”The video of our December 17, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Related Content--Centrist elites stalling necessary change made room for the reactionary right--Why January 6th was the inevitable product of the Christian Right’s hatred of America--How Pentecostal Christianity is taking over the world of religion, and why it matters--Ezra Taft Benson and the tangled history of Mormon and evangelical extremism--Lehmann article: Trump’s inauguration revealed whom he really serves: the billionaires and the crypto bros--Lehmann article: A guide to the lesser-known movers and shakers of Trump’s administration--Lehmann article: What happened to the Democratic Party?Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:09 — Ultra-libertarians and religious zealots think the same way09:09 — Friedrich Nietzsche is the ultimate inspiration for today's tech oligarchs15:51 — Democrats don't know how to advocate against religious zealotry19:55 — Far-right people lost in the marketplace of ideas, so they're trying to overthrow the marketplace24:38 — Hypocrisy isn't a vice to rightwingers, and the left should stop using it as an argument27:58 — Democrats refuse to retire failed leaders31:01 — Despite Democrats' problems, progressives have not learned to persuade36:03 — Democrats want to win at politics, but hate actually engaging in it40:25 — Democrats' dilemma with working class representation41:56 — Have wealthy Democrats reduced race and class advocacy into symbolic gestures?48:46 — Adlai Stevenson as a Democratic archetype49:53 — Will the new Democratic National Committee chair shake things up in the party?55:49 — The role of employers in immigration issues58:42 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Your book, I believe, kind of prefigured the final form of Trumpism which is what we're seeing now, a cabinet of oligarchs, despite the fact that he ran on being a populist supposedly, and this is not at all what people thought they were getting. So, just give us a little synopsis overall of the book if you could, and then we can go from there.CHRIS LEHMANN: The Money Cult is a sort of reinterpretation of American religious history. I won't bore you with the full sweep of the argument, but it's an argument that basically what we now see as the prosperity gospel, which is a Pentecostal tendency to equate wealth with Christian virtue is actually, it's long been sort of dismissed as a Huxley's grift, and the Elmer Gantry kind of, mode of fast [00:03:00] talking revivalists who take everyone's money, get embroiled in a sex scandal and then disappear.And my view it's much more central to religious and political history in America. And we've seen over time very pronounced movement of first sort of ambivalence about market capitalism in the early settlement of the country. And then starting basically with the second great awakening, this massive drive to imbue the market with mystical properties. We see it in the revival work of Charles Finney. We see it actually in the rise of Mormonism, which is a story you know well.And there's this tight equation of worldly success with divine favor. And there's also this tremendous imaginative effort to put America sort of at the forefront of Protestant virtue and success, to make it a prophetic nation, even though there obviously is no [00:04:00] mention of America in the scriptures.That involves, again, Mormonism is a big, plays a big role in shifting the scenery around here. So by, the sort of later phase of American capitalism, The most popular preacher in the country is, Joel Osteen who significantly, has no theological training was a communications major at the Oral Roberts University and is a pure exponent of this, kind of model of faith where divine favor rains down on you In the form of wealth.So Joel Osteen has actually written that God has found him great parking spots, and God engineered a deal in 2007 so he could flip his house and make a significant cash return on that and it's also a sort of. Healing [00:05:00] ministry, Osteen comes out of this seed faith tradition in Pentecostalism that involves sort of a mind cure model of spiritual healing. And yeah, we have, my book came out in 2016 ahead of the election and we've seen All of these forces converge around the figure of Donald Trump, and it's often a mystery to the secular sort of pundit class, which I live in the center of here in Washington.Why Does Trump why is the most ardent faction behind Trump white evangelicals, he is, womanizer of serial sexual assaulter. A very erratic church.SHEFFIELD: Nonbeliever.LEHMANN: Yeah. And I do think, this larger story of how American Protestantism merged with American capitalism is that story how, people who are absolutely convinced they are four square true believing Christians can line up behind a figure like Donald Trump. [00:06:00] Capitalism is ultimately what explains that and the peculiar spiritualized version of capitalism we live among here in the U SUltra-libertarians and religious zealots think the same waySHEFFIELD: Well, and so, and you don't talk about this in the book, but obviously Ayn Rand was a big figure in the present day cult of capitalism the money cult, but in a different form in, some ways, while she obviously was not a religious believer what she was doing was creating a religion of capitalism.And I think ultimately that's what these more non religious people like Mark Andreessen have decided to join up with the religious cult aspect because, hey, it's a cult, they're both a cult, so might as well team up.LEHMANN: And they, feed off each other symbiotically and in a way that, I mean, Silicon Valley is all about synergy. So, yeah, and I do think That figure like round is, quite pivotal and it. She's a reminder not to sort of [00:07:00] get bogged down and, conventional categories of secular and observant Christianity, because this is a much more fluid kind of popular faith that is very syncretic and absorbs all kinds of influences because, the one consistent through line and, Iron Man grew up in the Soviet Union and she was a devout atheist throughout her life, there is no hint of religious belief in her work.And yet, yeah, she herself is the object of a cult. And she created this sort of imaginative cult of heroic, mogul driven capitalism. The Howard Rourke figures, like, The hero, of the fountainhead, her first breakout novel who are also, rapists. So, there's a lot going on there that does again fit in neatly with, the Trump moment.And I think Rand is this kind of I don't know, you could say she's a John the Baptist figure [00:08:00] in the Trump prosperity faith. She's certainly prophetic in, putting forward this model of, kind of the Caesar businessman who is a solitary genius who, no social convention or conventional morality applies to him.He, as Howard work does, he blows up his building at the climax of the fountain head. He's just that kind of a guy and all of these. People in Silicon Valley. I mean, I shouldn't say all, but a pronounced segment of them, the Elon Musk's and the Mark Andreessen's, the Peter Thiel's, they are steeped in this kind of fiercely anti statist, fiercely libertarian ideology where any, the end always justifies the means.I think that's, the Randian morality that we, are seeing. Run rampant right now. As you mentioned, and in Trump's cabinet and, the oligarchic cast of Silicon [00:09:00] Valley and a media that is already sort of capitulating to a second Trump administration. It's it's a worrying time.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. It is.Friedrich Nietzsche is the ultimate inspiration for today's tech oligarchsSHEFFIELD: And, I, the other kind of, uh, let's say pre history person of this moment, I think also is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche um, as well,LEHMANN: We're really playing all day.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's where I mean, that's cause, and he's also interesting though, because not only does he sort of pre figure Trump ism and Randism.But also, his innate reactionary authoritarianism because it was unbounded by, bourgeois morality or religion. It also explains why we've had this recent cast of characters who had for many decades, such as Matt Taibbi for instance, identified as leftists have now ended up jumping on the [00:10:00] Trump train because in fact they were, Nietzschean leftists is what they were.And they just hated, they hated America. They hated bourgeois morality. And in some ways Trump is who they are.LEHMANN: Yeah, I think there is a lot of overlap there. That hadn't occurred to me. And it's interesting because, Taibbi did, sort of come up journalistic age in post Soviet Russia, which was a playground of Russian oligarchs. And he was very cynical about all that, but yeah, it does seem, I was just reading today, he issued some statement or may have been a recirculated statement, why he doesn't cover Republicans as critically as Democrats.And it's because. Democrats have this chokehold on all the cultural, it's the old refrain. I've been, on the left my entire adult life and I have, I must be very bad at my job because I have gotten none of these perquisites that people keep [00:11:00] talking about. I don't run a university. I don't, dictate coverage at the New York Times.I'm just, here with my pet obsessions about American religion. Politics, but but yeah, I think the Nietzschean there's certainly a strong through line from Nietzsche to Ayn Rand, they're, both these kind of self styled iconoclasts who are, profaning the sacred, and both, dedicated foes of bourgeois morality.And I do think, yeah, certainly again, if you go back to Silicon Valley, where a lot of the trouble in our world. starts. There, there are lots of aspiring and, failed Nietzscheans there. And they're, and what's, what's been, over at The Baffler, which was founded in the late eighties, we were constantly, um, shredding all the kind of social mythology that grew up around the Internet and saying, like, there's nothing [00:12:00] democratic about this.This is going to end up, creating a accelerating all the inequalities in our lives. It's going to create a populist weaned on terrible information. I mean, The Baffler was actually much more prophetic than the money calls. I think if you go back And look at our coverage of, this particular phenomenon.And, these are people again and again, you see it like, it's, not, the benign form, I guess, is like the Steve jobs, Bill Gates, people who are eventually guilted into doing some sort of giving back as they say, but the more representative type is Peter Thiel, who is, Just a a rank ideologue who has said, has written that democracy and capitalism are in incompatible and therefore democracy must go.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.LEHMANN: and that is the hard stuff that is, yeah, I mean, I'm, not even sure Ayn Rand would probably go that far. I'm not sure Nietzsche would, he [00:13:00] went crazy at the end, so it's hard to surmise, but But yeah, these are people who do, they've been treated by a, kind of prostrate, prostrate.federal government and by a whole culture industry that regards them as, sort of, Dionysian geniuses, right? To speak of Nietzsche, who can just sort of do their will and, markets will cower and obey and, the state will follow in their path. And And now we're reaping, the whirlwind from all, the three decades of propaganda about Silicon Valley.And you wind up with Elon Musk, who is, I mean, I think he's too intellectually immature to be considered a fascist, but he has a fascist, he has an authoritarian personality, let's say.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I think that's a good a good description. And that's also true of Trump. I think that [00:14:00] a lot of the criticisms that were made of, Trump as a person, saying that he was fascist or things like that. Like this guy has never read a book.LEHMANN: No, I know. I mean, well, he did reportedly have a copy of Mein Kampf at his bedside during his first marriage. So, I mean, there are,SHEFFIELD: but overall, youLEHMANN: we get into this problem, especially, I've gotten into spats with various left intellectuals who say, Trump can't be fascist because he's too undisciplined.And, fascists have always been buffoons, likeSHEFFIELD: well, that part is yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I guess the reason I'm saying that isn't that I don't think the label is appropriate because he doesn't have the characteristics. But why it's problematic isn't because it's not true. It's because his buffoonery makes it difficult for people, many people, to take him seriously.And I, and that, and so, [00:15:00] and one, one crucial distinction in the 2024 election is that if you looked at people who had voted previously, Trump did actually not, so, so the exit poll asked people, did you vote before? And it was tied among the percentage. So Trump actually won among new voters who had never voted before, who didn't really know anything.LEHMANN: A low propensity people, his campaign smartly targeted. So yeah. But yeah, there'sSHEFFIELD: oh, sorry. And, like, but those new, those low propensity voters, like that's the kind of people who do, who have kind of bought into this sort of mystical capitalism and his celebrity, that, you kind of do talk about in your book.LEHMANN: no, it's, absolutely true. And it is, it's a striking moment.Democrats don't know how to advocate against religious zealotryLEHMANN: I, there are all kinds of election postmortem still swirling around in the air, but, you contrast, That [00:16:00] appeal that Trump was able to put forward, which is, just rooted largely in the power of his person, like Trump will fix it.That was again, the refrain he is this kind of object of cultic worship and then you have the Democrats who are saying, think things first of all, that are largely contradictory. They're saying, they're going to stand up for the ordinary American worker and they have, Mark Cuban as a campaign surrogate, it's, and it's a very donor, both major parties are incredibly reliant on big donors.So it's not a message that comes across super strongly and then you have the democracy message, which is, a very urgent concern and yet you're again addressing voters to whom the idea of democracy is either abstract or kind of a ship that sailed like they don't experience democratic control over their working lives over the…

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One of the biggest reasons there is no left-wing Joe Rogan: Democrats lost interest in debate and persuasion Dec 19, 2024

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Episode Summary Following her recent electoral defeat, many people have questioned why Kamala Harris didn't go on to the podcast of Joe Rogan, the standup comedian and sports commentator who has the number-one podcast in the world.For the record, Harris’s former advisers have said that they tried to coordinate a time with Rogan, but they very obviously did not make it a priority.The more interesting related question that other people have been asking post election is why is there no left-wing Joe Rogan?The immediate answer is that there is not a full-service Democratic ecosystem that includes media, legal, and local components. There are also some larger reasons why Rogan and other libertarian-oriented people have signed up with the Republican Party, after having hated it in the 1990s and 2000s when party was less radical.But there are some more specific reasons for why Rogan and people like him have become de facto Republicans that are especially relevant since Rogan himself once supported the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders—and they involve how the Democratic Party communicates, or rather, doesn’t, to the public. In recent decades, Democrats and the American left as a whole have moved to a communication strategy which focuses more on controlling the message in every possible way rather than trying to forcefully advocate and explain its ideas to people who have never heard them. On issues of science, economics, race, climate, gender, and regulation, Democrats have, by and large, resorted to blindly pointing to expert consensus rather than making the case to the uninformed.Joining me to discuss on this episode is Lisa Corrigan, she’s a professor of communications and gender studies at the University of Arkansas. She’s also the author of several different books, including Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation.The video of our December 9, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Related Content—How podcasts became a key source of news and entertainment for millions of Americans—Right-wing comedy isn’t particularly funny, but it’s extremely effective at persuading low-information voters—Joe Rogan and the epidemic of pseudo-expertise—Former establishment Republican have made the Democratic party more conservative, and less electorally successful—As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism—Why Christian authoritarians and atheistic libertarians decided to meet in the middle—The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing rebranding—How the Donald Trump fandom completely reshaped the Republican media ecosystemAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:24 — Democratic leaders' excessive desire to control all media encounters08:42 — Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, and the rise to dominance of casual infotainment14:05 — Democrats have lost the urge and the ability to debate23:11 — Democrats' post-graduate economic bubble27:06 — Republicans overthrew their obsolete party establishment, can Democrats?31:38 — How "The West Wing" encouraged Democrats to adopt a fictional communications strategy35:08 — Kamala Harris's initial media interview strategy and Democrats' total risk aversion39:56 — Trump targeted disengaged Americans with media appearances, Harris with advertisements42:39 — Why did Democrats lose ground with women despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade?46:49 — The Democratic Party doesn't want to talk to low-information voters54:40 — As Democrats have won more prosperous voters, they've become less interested in economic populism59:20 — The ALEC behemoth outside the Beltway01:03:19 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Lisa Corrigan. Welcome to Theory of Change, Lisa.LISA CORRIGAN: Thanks for having me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I think one of the questions that is almost inescapable in the 2024 election post mortems is, is why is there no left wing Joe Rogan?But it's a very strange and weird question to ask because Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders.CORRIGAN: He certainly was. Yeah.I think there's no tolerance in the Democratic Party for class analysis, and I think that there is. a class [00:03:00] politics that really chafes at someone like Rogan's style,And also that he's not controllable. So they prefer to control, highly control their own media, such as it is. And so I think we can read that as a sort of intolerance and lack of curiosity, not just about Rogan, but also his audience.SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Well, okay.Democratic leaders' excessive desire to control all media encountersSHEFFIELD: So, but when you say, I think, I agree with you when you say that the, that the Democratic elites want kind of controlled media. What do you mean by that?CORRIGAN: think they're going to Move almost exclusively to position their own influencers to just about the party line rather than turning to organic media spaces to actually take the temperature of communities across the country. I think they would much rather control all of the messaging all of the time, and that's gonna in the long term continued [00:04:00] to diminish their effectiveness as communicators.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's a, it is a really good point because when you do look at the few, media operations that have been funded, by the Democratic donor class or party elites. they tend to be 100 percent partisan. So everything that they say is in agreement with whatever the Democrats are saying in any given moment.And then they also don't have, have even a discussion about what those points are. So like, they'll just say, well, this is the message. And then they'll just repeat it over and over and they won't talk about, well, why do you believe the message? What is this message even mean? It's just no, here's what we're talking about.CORRIGAN: But it's because I mean, in some ways they have a very low threshold for conflict. So somebody like Nancy Pelosi has never had a debate for her seat in all of the decades that she's held it. She [00:05:00] refuses to debate any challenger,right? So, so they don't want to actually move the conversation forward. They've chosen their lane and they want everybody to get on the lane and there's no tolerance for people who have alternative perspectives about where that lane should go. So they don't want to refine their ideas. And they're not capacious thinkers. And in some ways they're anti intellectual in ways that are similar, though, in some ways different from the Republican party, right? There's just not the tolerance for rigorous debate and they don't want to be dislodged from their donor class. So they're loathe to upset them. I mean, I think about the sidelining of Tim Walz. As total evidence of that, arguably the best decision of the campaign was to choose him as a vice presidential candidate. And then they sidelined all of his vigor and all of [00:06:00] his successes in Minnesota and his, in some ways, temperament, right? Which is more combative than certainly anybody else in the party during the campaign. What little of it we were able to have. They didn't want to have an open primary. There was no conversation about Biden's efficacy, right, before the fall. All of that, I think, is evidence that they can't really tolerate. dissent or conversation about what they've done wrong.SHEFFIELD: no, I, and that's a good point. And, and obviously, we do want to say. In this regard, though, that you're not endorsing Joe Rogan's ideas by saying that he should have been engaged with, you're saying you have to engage with people.CORRIGAN: I mean, look, my PhD is in communication. If you want to talk to people, you actually have to meet them where they are. Even if you don't like where they are. Like I don't have a classroom of students [00:07:00] who are all exactly where I'm at in terms of how much they've read or kind of life experiences that they've had or what their parents even know about.Right. I mean, if you want to. Really have a close consideration of ideas, though you actually have to meet people where they're at and not where you're at. And the Democratic Party refuses to do that. If no interest in it whatsoever.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, they don't. And and yeah, I mean, there's this weird paradox, though, because the, the critique that they often make of the right is that they're anti intellectual, which they are. Right. But at the same time, if you don't want to have any kind of debate, and you don't want to have a discussion, and you won't even explain your viewpoints, let alone debate them, if you don't tell people, well, this is why we want something, that's also anti intellectual.And it's not satisfying to a lot of people.CORRIGAN: Yes. And I think at least in for the very online class of mega [00:08:00] voters, right? People were really upset that Harris didn't want to talk about policy until the last month of the campaign. And even though presidents have minimal influence over a lot of forms of U. S. policy making, especially domestically, hearing them talk about their vision About policy is actually quite important to huge segments of the population.If you refuse to do it, I don't know why you think that they're going to turn out and vote for you, right? If you dismiss them out of hand, if you scold them, then they're not going to show up for you. And so I think a more robust engagement with even members of the establishment who are critical of the democratic party would really be of.Benefit.Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, and the rise to dominance of casual infotainmentSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think one of the other significant, even fundamental flaws of this Rogin analysis is that it misses who the audience of Joe Rogin is. Like, the [00:09:00] stereotype on the left is that it's just a bunch of 20 something white men. But in reality the men who are younger are majority not white.And that's when you look at the polls. That's where the gains that Republicans had among men came from. They didn't come from white men. They came from black men. They came from Hispanic men where Trump got the majority of them. And they came from Asian men. And so it's not, it's about something much bigger than Joe Rogan.So,CORRIGAN: Yeah. I mean, as a demographic fact, white men are not going to be where either party make gains. Right. I mean, this is just a fundamental fact of the demographicsof the country. Yeah, but I do think that those listeners of the Joe Rogan program are also looking for connection. And they're looking for community and they're looking for information. And so if the Democrats don't want to go there, their only option is to create something else, which is why, right? Why isn't there a Democratic [00:10:00] Joe Rogan? Why isn't there something like that? And in The outside in the info spear where people can go, and that's by design. I think it's a problem though, right?Because the people who are listening to Joe Rogan, they want novelty and they want community and they want knowledge. They're seeking connection. If you don't build a place for them to come to their knot. I will also say that alongside of the Joe Rogan was also called for like Kamala Harris to go on hot wings. And I'm sure that the establishment just dismissed that as like, I don't know, absurd, but also it's sort of humanizing and playful and people want play. And I'll tell you that Joe Rogan can doplay.SHEFFIELD: no,CORRIGAN: says are totally ridiculous, he can do play. And that's what shock radio has always been about. Stern has always been very good at that. And the Democratic party doesn't do play. I will also say that walls should have gone on all of the sports shows and done [00:11:00] coachy coach talk and fishing and hunting and whatever men do with dogs that kind of stuff because people also want to talk about that and he has that capability and he didn't move.They would not let him move through those spaces either and that could have been a place to make up some of those white male voters, but they didn't explore it at all and this was the one chance they had to do. That it's not like they could have deposed Joe Biden to do that for a bot for Obama. He's not that guy. He's the elite guy. He's the banking guy. He's the law guy.SHEFFIELD: Yeah and what's interesting though is that there is an understanding from kind of old fashioned retail politics that you have to show up at events and kiss the babies and shake the hands, so Democrats understand that in some limited sense of physical space, but they don't understand that in the media space.That especially in this, in this era of thousands and tens of thousands of [00:12:00] YouTube channels and, hundreds of thousands of social media posters that you, that's the only way that you can find these people. So, like showing up at the county fair or something that can not, that gets you much less now than it would to do.An interview with, with someone. And, and, and, and, but that, that's also the, the lack of control. Like, I think that's, to go back to that, that I think is also a probably the fundamental problem with democratic elite messaging is that they don't understand that we're, we're so far removed from the age of five television channels and two major national newspapers.Controlling all of the information. Now we're in this ocean of media. And the only thing that you can do is surf the waves. You can never control anything. You'll never have control ever, but they don't get [00:13:00] that.CORRIGAN: don't get it, but also they're, they're too risk averse. And probably because it's just like regurgitating like the Obama campaigns with the same like media strategies as the Obama campaigns. I'm also not super convinced that Harris would have done well on like Normie shows Like some candidates can move through playful spaces.Clinton, Bill Clinton can do this very well. Right. Where you can talk to anybody, anytime and be interested in them and be curious about their life story and connect with them. But that's a pretty rare quality in DC. I don't know that she would have, she would have done well. Walls would have been fine. It didn't wonderful.And they should have deployed him in that way. But I think there's a, an aversion to like, I don't know, actually talking with and to. the plebes, like the gen pop, the normies. And I think that that will only continue to undermine, candidates, especially at the [00:14:00] national level because of exactly the media ecology that you're describing.Democrats have lost the urge and the ability to debateSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, now, so let's, let's talk about where do you, where do you think a lot of this attitude derives from?CORRIGAN: I think elitism, I really think that the Democratic party elites got cashed out really hardcore. And I think that they have built their own ecosystem of particular oligarchs, right? Some of them are info bros, a bunch of them are tech guys, right? Certainly a bunch of them are holdovers from the Obama administration.And some of that is because the campaign had to by necessity be so short. It's not like they could totally vet and assemble and massive new comms te…

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Local political ecosystems are vital to protecting democracy nationally Dec 09, 2024

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Episode Summary Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump came as a huge surprise to many Democratic Party loyalists, especially since Republicans had a number of serious defeats in elections in 2018 and in 2022, and abortion rights ballot initiatives prevailed in every state where the public had voted on them since the Republican Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. So what happened? We've talked on this program at length in several episodes about how Democrats have failed enormously to invest in advocacy media to the degree that Republicans have. But a political ecosystem isn’t just about national media, it’s also about how things work at the local level as well. And in that regard, the Republican Party is also very superior to Democrats. Working together and individually in cities and towns across America, fundamentalist religious organizations and local talk radio hosts are constantly explaining Republican viewpoints to the public, taking the message to Americans who don’t follow politics closely.While they may not understand all the particulars, these citizens believe that there are people in their communities who are looking out for them. They can see and talk to people who explain the world and tell them what they can do about it.Within the Democratic Party, however, these types of local political institutions are sometimes regarded as antiquated or absurd. This was not always so. In the past, labor union halls and liberal religious communities were places where people were able to learn that progress isn’t something that happens, it’s something that’s made.The right’s huge advantage at the local level has been in place for a long time, as sociologist Theda Skocpol documented in 1995:“The Democratic party no longer has a national, locally rooted infrastructure of loyal local organizations and allied groups (such as labor unions) through which concerted grass-roots political campaigns can be run. The conservatives right now have such an infrastructure, in the form of grass-roots Christian fundamentalist groups and Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio. But Democrats depend on pollsters, media consultants, and television to get messages out to the citizenry. Yet pollsters and political consultants tend to think in terms of appealing labels (‘Health Security’) and advertising slogans (‘security that can never be taken away’) rather than in terms of explanatory discussions.”One person who understands how all of this worked in days of yore is our guest on today’s episode. His name is Eric Loomis, and he's a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island. He’s written several different books, including A History of America in Ten Strikes. And he’s also a writer at the blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money. The video of this discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe to stay in touch.Related ContentHow the decline of the Black church is helping Republicans make inroads with young peopleThe middle class is being destroyed, Democrats need to stop saying everything is greatThe 2024 election was decided by people who disliked both Harris and TrumpDemocrats must do more than attack Donald Trump to winRepublicans took over the judiciary while liberals were pretending that jurisprudence was a scienceAmericans want progressive change, but to be able to deliver it, progressives will need to change firstThe science behind why Donald Trump loves the ‘poorly educated’Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction05:58 — Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years10:28 — How local organizations preserve collective memory and protect democracy13:50 — The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party29:02 — Why reproductive freedom didn't save Democrats in 202432:38 — The rise of AOC-Trump voters36:15 — Biden's communication failures made it so no one knew about his policies41:59 — Operationally, Democrats are more conservative than Republicans45:36 — Economic and social justice need each other to succeed52:13 — Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win01:02:06 — Conclusion Audio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Eric Loomis. Welcome to the show, Eric.ERIK LOOMIS: Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: So you and your co-bloggers have been tackling this idea of there's something wrong with Democrats, even before the election, you guys were kind of been edging around this point for a while, it seems [00:04:00] like.LOOMIS: Well, yeah, I mean, if you look at the election, right? In a lot of ways, and I should say up front, I think that there are so many election hot takes out there, and I think a lot of them are flawed. I think we do have to everything into a kind of global context about, about governing parties and the post pandemic inflation generally doing quite poorly in elections, and that's all very important, and I think we have to keep that as part of our focus and not just engage in a kind of contextless blame game, but I also think that we're facing an opponent here that's not like an opponent that we faced with even Reagan, right? Even George W. Bush, who were, genuinely terrible people and terrible presidents.This particular iteration of the Republican Party is effectively a fascist party. And it's very important to be thinking about broader ways to resist that. And the Democratic Party's model of anything has not really adjusted itself in 15 to 20 years. But what does a Democratic campaign look [00:05:00] like today? It's this post Citizens United endless fundraising effort, right? And that's really all it is. You get inundated with endless emails and texts and maybe suggestions to engage in a get-out-the-vote campaign or something of this nature. And that's really kind of it.And eventually you start tuning this out because it gets annoying to get this many text messages and this many emails. There's a certain effectiveness in it. I mean, Kamala Harris had an ungodly amount of money, but as we've seen over the last, it's really several cycles, including congressional and Senate campaigns, you can have an endless amount of money, and you run out of ways to spend it, and it doesn't actually help you win. The campaign to defeat Susan Collins in Maine in 2020 was a perfect example of this, right? And so I think Democrats have to figure out new ways to conduct campaigns and new ways to think of themselves as Democrats in order to engage a kind of broader populace who is very unhappy about the way things are going and clearly is not responding to the kinds of campaigns that Democrats put together.Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two yearsSHEFFIELD: They're trying to, and [00:06:00] I forget who said this, but I liked the idea, that they're trying to activate people rather than engage with them.LOOMIS: And there's room for activation. I mean, that's part of is, that can be part of a campaign, but that can't be all of the campaign. And so often, that's become all of the campaign-- is a short-term activation of people. And then it's like: 'Okay, now we win, it's all good. Go back to your regular lives.' And nothing really happens until the next campaign.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it comes off as very insincere to people, because this message, I mean, I don't know, to some degree, is it fair to say that the Democratic Party has been crying wolf about the Republicans being fascist? Because they were saying things like Mitt Romney is trying to create fascism.I've heard people say things like that, or that George W. Bush, what wanted to be Hitler. And Donald Trump, as you said is a completely different candidate than these people. [00:07:00] And so to some degree, I think people are, might be put off by that, but also just the fact that there's this tremendous urgency that exists for three months of the year, and then there's no urgency at any other time.LOOMIS: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that regardless of the accuracy of such depictions, which are obviously less accurate under Romney and Bush than they are under Trump and Vance and these sorts of people, regular voters, everyday folks don't respond to this. And that's the bigger issue, they don't respond to this. They tune it out. And I think that, you saw this in the, with the Harris campaign's choice to go all in on people like Liz Cheney, which I don't have, I wouldn't have had such a problem with if it was going to move any voters at all. But it moved nobody, like, like nobody cared.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.LOOMIS: Regardless, it's ineffective. And then to me, the issue is it's totally ineffective.SHEFFIELD: Well, it is and it's ineffective because [00:08:00] basically it was premised on the idea that, well, we can get some, people who don't like either candidate to vote for Kamala Harris. But the problem is they also didn't, hadn't created a gigantic media machine to 24/7 push their case.And so, Basically now, if, as I said in an essay last month that the election was decided by people who didn't like both candidates. And it was really, it, but it came down to the people disliked Harris more. That was it. And it was evenly divided between the people who like each one, and then there were 2 percent of people in the exit polls who said they liked both of them.I want to hear from those people. Uh, But ultimately, they didn't create the infrastructure to run a negative partisanship campaign, it seems like.LOOMIS: I mean, you were right in that essay, you don't have a media infrastructure at [00:09:00] all. People were like, oh, we need to create the Democratic Joe Rogan. And it's like, well, that doesn't really it doesn't I mean, yes, in a sense, but that doesn't quite get it. Like the people saying that don't understand what Joe Rogan does or what's history or any of this sort of thing. I think that the broader takeaway there is kind of going back to what you said is that the Democrats don't have an ecosystem at all, right? There's just no ecosystem. It's all about activating voters at a very particular time. And that's very effective for base kind of vote, but it's not very effective for lower information voters it's not very effective for people who have pretty short term memories about things people who don't pay attention to what Donald trump is saying or doing don't pay attention to who he's naming to the know naming cash Patel to the FBI, the headSHEFFIELD: they don't even know his policies. Yeah.LOOMIS: and it's thatSHEFFIELD: Yeah.LOOMIS: isSHEFFIELD: Yeah.LOOMIS: You need a kind of a media network That allows your [00:10:00] candidates and your ideas to reach into a different kind of voter. Right? And MSNBC does simply does not do that, right? That is that they are, I mean, I'm mixed on various MSNBC shows, but and regardless of its future, it's totally ineffective at touching those kind of voters too.Right, right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's only one channel, whereas Fox, there are seven alternatives to Fox that are, all of them are even further right.How unions and local organizations preserve collective memorySHEFFIELD: but even aside from media though, like infrastructure means an ecosystem mean more than just that. So, and that was something that you had mentioned, written recently about that there were these local organizations that used to be very common and were driving people into the Democratic party and the understanding sort of the shared theory of the case for voting being on the left and can you talk about that?LOOMIS: I mean, if you look at the 1930s, for instance, and the aftermath of that going through the 60s and [00:11:00] 70s, so a long period of time and I understand the nation is different today and people have different activities that they do. But what it meant to be a Democrat was something that was actually central to your entire life.I mean, the first thing there was in large parts of the country was the union hall, right? And the reality is part of what we're dealing with right now, is the wages of an entire generation of Democrats that turn their back on the labor movement.And, here, I'm not talking about Joe Biden, who was older and, did what he could and, it was very good for unions with the limited power they actually had to create policy that could get through courts and such things. But here we're talking about not only, but very much talking about Jimmy Carter, very much talking about Bill Clinton, to an extent talking about Barack Obama, but even generations of, a whole generation of Democrats did not actually get to the White House.Like, Michael Dukakis was horrible on unions, right? Michael Dukakis actually lost his first term reelection campaign to governor of Massachusetts because he had angered the union so much, right? Gary [00:12:00] Hart is extraordinarily anti-union. Jerry Brown is incredibly anti-union. So you had a whole generation of Democrats coming up in the 70s and 80s at the same time that these manufacturing jobs are disappearing.They're actually fine with basically gutting the labor movement. And what that did is Was to undermine the tight connections between large swaths of the American working class, the labor movement and the Democratic party, the kind of thing that had been tied in by people like Walter Reuther, people like Sidney Hillman, but also by politicians, but people like, FDR, of course, but even the Harry Truman, who was not explosively pro union or anything, but understood coalitional politics. So that's just totally gone. But you also have the other kinds of social organizations that were big through much of the 20th century that tie people together, and they're also gone. I mean, you have these, like, Americans, and I'm hardly the first person to make this point. I mean, the sociologist Robert Putman famously wrote about this [00:13:00] in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone.But Americans are incredibly atomized, and we don't get together to talk about things, talk about politics, talk about life. We're in our tiny little communities and these communities don't really meet. so you have what that ends up leading to is in part this incredibly fractured kind of media environment that Democrats have not understood and have not been able to make any connections with well Also just really having no ideas about how to engage voters or just engage even base democrats on a Day to day month to month kind of basis and I think we suffer for that, right?We suffer for not having something that we can actually go out and do on a daily or monthly basis, other than like register people to vote and the kind of same old, but actually building community and pride as democrat this really is totally gone in much of this country now.The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic partySHEFFIELD: It is. And it's, and it's not just about, community, although that's obviously very important, but it's also about understanding why we're doing this like [00:14:00] the sense of a collective story.And I think it's illustrative to look at because as you said, the unions were the local roots for the Democratic Party, democratic activism historically. But that wasn't true in black American communities and where…

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Democrats can’t keep telling voters that everything is fine Dec 02, 2024

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Episode Summary Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was a triumph of political ecosystems and how much better the right has been in the United States at creating a full-scale ecosystem to funnel people into their party, but it also took place within a larger political environment in which many Americans are unsatisfied with the way things are. For a decades, most Americans have felt that the country is headed in the wrong direction and that the economy is getting worse. But instead of realizing this and doing something about it, rhetorically and in terms of policy, many Democratic leaders have not responded to the discontent. As I’ve discussed repeatedly over the years, right-wing propaganda plays a huge role in gaslighting Americans for the benefit of Trump and his fellow Republicans, but the situation here is more than that. While Kamala Harris was able to motivate voters in the 7 main swing states through spending over a billion dollars, outside of those states, Democrats lost millions of voters compared to 2020. In many ways, the election was decided by people who stayed home. We’re going to talk about all of this and a lot more with our guest Maura Ugarte in this episode. She is a filmmaker and professor of film at George Mason University and is the co-director of a 2012 film called Divide, which told the story of a West Virginia Democrat who was campaigning for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack.The video of this discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Related Content— The 2024 election was decided by people who disliked both Harris and Trump— Americans want progressive change, but to be able to deliver it, progressives will need to change first— Harris’s loss has permanently discredited timid Democratic approaches to the MAGA threat— Religious fundamentalism’s intellectual collapse powers Trump’s politics of despair— Bureaucratic obsessions are ruining America’s educational system— The science behind why Donald Trump loves the ‘poorly educated’— Elon Musk and his fellow reactionary oligarchs are much more radical than people realizeAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction04:55 — Divide, Maura’s film about building left solidarity07:54 — How left elites fell for JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” fraud13:21 — Biden’s failure to inform the public of his popular policies16:12 — Trump’s new voters strategy and the limits of a “protect democracy” message19:56 — How Democrats missed real suffering 23:26 — The decline of public trust and Trump’s con artist pitch29:55 — How Ross Perot foreshadowed Trump’s appeal31:08 — Fascism’s critique of capitalism must be countered36:51 — The power of solidarity to beat divide and conquer45:09 — Blaming voters never works to win elections49:22 — Hopeful messages for the futureAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So in this podcast and my writing at Flux, I've been trying to focus on the idea of ecosystems a lot in the response to the election outcome. But one thing I want to make clear. That it's easy to say, and it is absolutely true that right wing media was a huge part of why Donald Trump won.And also, some people's thoughts about the economy are a huge part as well. Now whether that was because of propaganda, that's another thing. But it's a mistake. It's overly simplistic to think that it was just. Only those two things or, her failure to, do this or that smaller thing, there were some other [00:04:00] bigger dynamics and well, and one of them is that besides the fact that Democrats don't talk to the public, they also don't listen to the public or know what to say, even if they were talking.MAURA UGARTE: It's, it's funny though, like, in some ways, I felt like Harris was responding to political consultants who were telling her to message in a particular kind of way, which wasn't actually listening either, but like, it was just sort of this This very sort of bulleted point, if I talk about this and that and the other thing, and not talk about this, that, and the other thing, it's a winning message.SHEFFIELD: And your, you've been kind of thinking about how Democrats could listen and speak better irrespective of platforms to the public for a while. So with the the film that you co-directed as well, let's talk about that just a little bit before we get further into this particular election.UGARTE: It's funny because the thing came out in like 2012, but it seems to, and it's short. It's like 21 minutes long, and it seems to unfortunately continually be politically relevant. It was about a retired white coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia, which is right at the Southern-- it's right, right in the most southern county of West Virginia.It is one of the poorest counties in all of West Virginia. And this man was organizing for Barack Obama.Film trailer: If we don't do something in this country, the middle class will be eliminated. There'll be two types of people again. There'll be the rich and the poor. Which it's going that way real quick now the way I see it.[00:06:00]This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen. Senator Obama's support among hardworking Americans white Americans is weakening again. It's a challenge to try to elect a black man that's named Barack Obama. It is. It's a challenge. Two out of ten West Virginia white voters said that race was a factor.These are Democrats, white working class Democrats who say in a general election, we're not going to go for you. If we're not careful, we're going to be in the back of the bus and they're going to be in the front. Divide and conquer is of course that's an old saying I know and everybody's heard it, but there's a whole lot of truth in that.UGARTE: And the, the film, we can talk about how the film came about, which I think is actually kind of important, but the film just sort of tracks his organizing efforts, media the mainstream media messages, both from the right wing and also a little bit from liberal media, mainstream media. and then also integrating that with the labor history of the area and try to tell this broader story of why we're, why we're seeing what we're seeing. And the sort of mechanisms of that, think that's what is important. continuing to be relevant.And I, I have, I, I've unfortunately encountered a lot of liberals who have very retrograde ideas of what it to be from West Virginia or from Appalachia to be a white working class person, I think.How the center-left fell for JD Vance's "Hillbilly" fraudSHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and that's, ironically, that is those, those, uh, [00:08:00] hottie perspectives and opinions. That was actually when Howard, the success of JD Vance's Heelbilly Elegy book because that book, it was It was marketed as being, well, this is an explanation of why these people did this, but actually what it was, it was just this protracted harangue against, these dumb idiots.They, they they've thrown their lives away on drugs and they're lazy and they won't move away. They should just leave. But instead they want to stay home and be on drugs. And that's why they voted for Trump,which is not true at all.UGARTE: I would remind everyone, I was given this book by several people at the time, people that I loved, people that I cared about liberals, right? People of the left, even people to the left of liberals were giving me this book. He was a darling of it was on the New York times bestseller list.And if you read it, I only made it a partial way through to be, to to be honest, but he's basically blaming white working class people. He's blaming them for their situation. And,and basically saying the reason why you can't give welfare to these folks is because they will spend it on drugs. doesn't mention the Sacklers. He doesn't mention any kind of structural problems, right? but he was a way for people to somehow understand the Tea Party. I, I, I, it's a bit absurd.SHEFFIELD: It was, yeah, and, but it, it, it did, it fit, his narrative fit very nicely into the neoliberal conception of, of what being working class in America. And, and like the other thing also is that they, the people who were touting this book, most of whom I assume never read it, uh, [00:10:00] but if they had they clearly didn't understand what the point of it was.But, but, from. The other, it also perpetuated another problem that really pervades a lot of elite left discourse about people who are blue collar is that they, they, they racialize so much of it when, and what this election in 2024 really showed is that, All these issues are not racial in a lot of ways.So Donald Trump won Latino men for the first time of Republican had done that in a very long time and did very well with Latino women. And, and got higher margins among black men. And interestingly enough, did not. Do any better among white men. SoUGARTE: I didSHEFFIELD: that was you know, and you can say well, maybe he's maxed himself out there, but but what that shows is that he actually, he gained some support from these new voters but he also lost a lot of white men supporters, but it didn't matter because he had these other new people MmUGARTE: the reason why Michael the co director, Michael Miller, the co director of the film may like we, we decided to make the film was that during the Dem primary in 2008, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and their surrogates were saying that the reason why you have to vote for Hillary Clinton was because white. Working class people would never vote for a black man, which is an inherently racist argument and it like the also working class people are not all It's a big diverse group and it What we've we Felt we were watching was a whole, but once once won the primary, it felt like mainstream senior news editors were sending reporters specifically to Appalachia, but, but also very, very [00:12:00] much to West Virginia, because it, it, it has such a tradition of being blue to find the white. Dem voter who voted Dem for all of their entire lives, who wouldn't vote for Barack Obama because he's a black man, as if all of the racists who are low information and vote against their own interests are located in this one particular state. And that is, that is. It's so upsetting and so offensive and not and I think that thinking is what, what, where, why we find ourselves where we find ourselves.I should have mentioned prior about McDowell County, West Virginia, is that unlike the rest of West Virginia, it has a 16 year history. least at the time when we were there, I don't know what it's looking like quite now, but like 16 to 17 percent of the population of McDowell County was African American for, for coal mining reasons, like for very specific reasons. And now it is, it, it went they voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and now it is not only red.It is quite red, thatcounty.SHEFFIELD: hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah.Biden's failure to inform the public of his popular policiesSHEFFIELD: And, and one thing about this though, is that with the presidency of Joe Biden, I mean, I think it is, we have to say that it is true that he. Did, do put in a lot of progressive policies. But those policies were, and this is where media does, was a factor, but it wasn't only media.It's that, so these policies that he put in, a lot of people don't know that they happened. Either they haven't gotten into effect or, like Biden as the president. did the fewest number of press conferences of any recent president by far. So he wasn't out there, telling people what this is, what I have done for you, this is what I did.And Harris [00:14:00] didn't really do that either. And so to a large extent, it was like they expected, and I kept seeing all these complaints about, well, the mainstream media, they won't report all these things that Biden did. And it's like, well, If the very least she should be saying you're going to expect them to do your, her work for her.UGARTE: NoSHEFFIELD: that doesn't seem right. Oh, in,UGARTE: were, like, asking people, like, what messages are they going to respond to, what they're not going to respond to. And clearly, whomever they're paying of dollars and, and I, personally, I'm quite frustrated and probably will be to the end of my days that that the Clintons in 2016 and Hillary and that whole establishment around forced her through because I'm relative, I counterfactuals, whatever, but like, I'm relatively certain that Biden would have won. Easily, basedon the same, yes,SHEFFIELD: in, in 2016.UGARTE: stuff that he was talking about in 2020. Yep.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I, I think so. And it definitely would have been better from an energy level, But you know, the other thing also though, is that so this, it was like, they they really did believe that, policies speak for themselves. And so like there was this, this idea and people started calling it deliver, deliver ism or delivery ism the idea that if we deliver policies that are good and helpful to people, they will appreciate that and they will vote for Democrats.AndUGARTE: Especially because of 2016, right? It's veryfrustrating. Well, that,SHEFFIELD: what do you mean?UGARTE: that, the denial, like, that because they are, they will receive votes.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it is. It's, it's [00:16:00] very, I mean, frankly, astonishingly naive that people who call themselves political professionals would advance these beliefs quite frankly, and, and I just to look at the numbers here. So,Trump's new voter strategy and the limits of a "protect democracy" messageSHEFFIELD: I think Democrats haven't figured out that a lot of people are not paying a lot of attention to politics and it makes sense that people decide things on what they see.And so if you're not there speaking up for yourself. Then then why would they, make up your justifications for themselves? They're not going to do that. And that's especially true with, with, younger people and, and newer voters. And just looking at the, the exit poll data. So, of the 8 percent of people who said that this was the first year they had ever voted, Trump won 56 percent of them and Harris won only 43%.So That you could argue that was the election right there they were new to the system and Democrats were not there for them in one way or the other. And then of course, now we're going to have to the one, the biggest wild card, of course, in the election is that not all the votes are counted at this juncture, but about 7 million people who voted for Biden did not vote at all and Trump got about the same margin that he earned vote total that he had last timeAnd so the question is, why? What what's on the minds of those people who stayed home? We don't know that yet but we definitely need to know. But you know if I had to guess I would say that I mean, this was a, a huge record turnout in 2020.And a lot of that was probably people who were just really mad at how messed up things were under Trump. And they were coming out to be against him. But notably Trump himself also, it massively increased his total from 2016 and 2020, and then he kept it. He had [00:18:00] badly messed up in 2020 and in his presidency, the, the number one task that he was assigned, by fate to accompl…

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How the Republican political ecosystem took over America’s courts Nov 20, 2024

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Episode SummaryThe Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson ending a national right to terminate a pregnancy came as an abrupt shock to millions of Americans. But if you had been paying attention beforehand, the verdict was no surprise at all. In fact, the repeal of Roe v. Wade was the culmination of a successful strategy that began in the 1970s to flood the American legal system with activist judges who would impose their viewpoints that were so radical that congressional Republicans didn’t even dare to try to enact them legislatively.As outrageous as the court’s recent rulings have been, what is perhaps even more outrageous is that the right-wing takeover of the judicial system took place almost entirely in full public view, as organizations like the Federalist Society and other deceptively named groups worked together to launder extremist viewpoints and disperse millions of dollars to everyone from law students to Supreme Court justices. It’s yet another instance where the sprawling Republican political ecosystem has overpowered neutral institutions with little resistance.David Brock, founder of Media Matters, is our guest in today’s episode and he lays out how this all happened in his new book, Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America.Can anything be done about this dreadful situation? We discussed that as well. I hope you’ll enjoy. And if you get a chance, please do share this episode on social media to help spread the word. The video of this discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Related Content—Democrats failed to create an advocacy ecosystem, Kamala Harris suffered for it—Trump’s re-election has permanently discredited timid Democrats’ approach to MAGA threat—Liberal law professors created a ludicrous cult of constitutional law while far-right Republicans were seizing control of the judiciary—Former Trump lawyer John Eastman says Satan is behind legal attempts to hold him accountable—Christian supremacists openly speaking about how they’ll use Supreme Court to install theocracy—The judicial system is rigged and it’s time Democrats told the public about itAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:55 — The role of money in judicial campaigns04:48 — The Powell memo and its impact08:23 — The rise of false balance in media18:55 — The Christian Right legal movement's overwhelming Roman Catholic dominance26:24 — How the 1987 failed Robert Bork nomination was the catalyst for the Federalist Society33:33 — Why the current SCOTUS is “the Clarence Thomas Court”37:46 — Liberal leaders and donors have done very little to counteract the right's legal juggernaut44:47 — Brock’s personal relationship to the right-wing judicial takeover50:49 — Proposals for Supreme Court reform54:13 — The importance of media and institutions01:00:01 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I was saying before we recorded that it's a bit surreal for us to be talking [00:02:00] because the old me and the old you would have never imagined talking to evil apostates from the right that we both ended up being. But your book that we're going to be talking about here today, it is a really good illustration of how the right uses institutions to change politics, whereas the left uses institutions to make change, and the right is so focused on doing that from an institutional level and financial level. And your book just lays it all out there.DAVID BROCK: Yeah, absolutely. Beginning with a memo that Lewis Powell wrote before he went on the Supreme Court laying out what they want to achieve and then money moved.And you had a group like the Federalist Society, which was founded by three conservative law students that was founded as basically a debating society that over time became incredibly [00:03:00] powerful validator for-- essentially you needed their imprimatur to get a federal judicial nomination or in the George W. Bush administration, certainly any high-level executive branch positions. And they were able to do this having a sort of public facade of debating society, and then a kind of stealth operation where they were highly ideological, but people could be, appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a confirmation hearing and say that the parallel society, they didn't even know it had an ideology and so they could deny it and get away with it.And so this was a very persistent group of people that, from the outside, if you don't admire the results, you can admire the steadfastness. And the focus and the money. Money was critical. Once Citizens United came down, the Federalist [00:04:00] Society coffers on the dark money side exploded. Leonard Leo, who runs the Federalist Society formed additional groups adjunct adjacent to the Federalist Society that took in tens of millions of dollars in dark money for these judicial campaigns. I calculated that in the last 10 years, The Federalist Society and its affiliates spent 750 million on these campaigns.But when you look at it, that's a lot of money, but when you look at it, when you look at the benefit they've gotten, not only on the social conservative side, but on the big business side, the decisions that have been favorable to corporate interests, which fund the Federalist Society groups that's got to be in the billions of dollars.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it really is. these amounts that they put in were just down payments. That's really what they were. And yeah, but I guess before we get too far into that, though, let's, [00:05:00] can we circle back, though, just to the Lewis Powell memo and who he was for people. So for people who are not aware of who he was and the critical role that he played in cementing both this information as the Republican political strategy and then also their interest in the court.BROCK: Yes. So he was a member of the chamber of commerce assigned essentially by the chamber to write a memo about how the Republican right could organize itself to fight what they saw as liberal dominance across the institutions of the country, which included universities media and the judiciary.And Powell. Basically put into writing that they needed a concerted effort over many years and devote many millions of dollars to thwarting [00:06:00] this liberal threat. And it would be done by building institutions of their own that would eventually. Change the political discussion in the country and to the favor of the right.And so this was, the theory was you could fund think tanks, you could fund academic institutions scholarships you could fund alternative media and you could fund, Organizations like the Federalist Society, which didn't exist at the time, but came to exist to exert pressure on the judiciary and to put their own folks into the positions of power.And so this was a long-term plan. He warned that it was going to require years of work. And shortly after writing the memo. He was appointed by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court where he was basically a pragmatic pro-business [00:07:00] conservative. But for my story and in my book, what matters is he was a trailblazer in loosening the campaign finance rules.And on the court, he was essentially able to through the, through their decisions to enable a lot of money to flow into these conservative outfits.SHEFFIELD: and you mentioned it only slightly, but he also Powell was a lawyer for big tobacco for tobacco companies. And they were the originators of this idea of, so there's a debate between two sides here. We have to end that the media have to cover it. These claims made by any side. Even if they're, there's no evidence for them. And the research for tobacco causing cancer, that was, pretty definitive very early on, but it took decades to overcome. This this sort of both sides framework that had been built up [00:08:00] by Powell and in many ways, I think it was like a hack of the liberal epistemology, the idea of, there's that saying that sometimes attributed to Will Rogers that a liberal is someone so broad minded that he won't take his own side in an argument and I think that's what the both sides, it's a hack of that mindset.I don't know. What do you think?BROCK: Yeah. No, I think that's right.The rise of false balance in mediaBROCK: And certainly this notion of false or phony balance that the right Has successfully perpetrated, has done an awful lot of damage to the discourse. And but it's been a very effective tool for them to inject what essentially is conservative or right-wing propaganda into the debate where you've got.99 percent of scientific consensus on an issue and 1 percent funded by the coal industry, and then you've got them on cable television, you've got a climate scientist, and then you've got a right wing [00:09:00] spokesperson and they're presented as. There are arguments having equal weight.And that that is consistent through a lot of different issues that the media deals with. And we're still dealing with that today.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And with these institutions, though, It was an interesting, the palomino was interesting to see in retrospect because I think it does capture the right wing sensibility that, you know, that they are this sort of aggrieved minority or silent majority, depending on how they, who's talking and who they're talking to. But they have this sense that everyone's out to get them, that nobody agrees with them, but their ideas are still true, even though they're not provable and not demonstrable. And so they create these institutions because they feel like their ideas are not taken seriously. And of course, the reason they're not taken seriously is that they're not very good ideas. They're not, [00:10:00] if you want to say that let's say, That that there's no genetic component to homosexuality or, that it's all, Satan. If you want to believe that you're obviously free to, but it's nonsense. And, you're going to say the earth is 6, 000 years old or that just any of these variety of things, that was really what they're trying to do in many ways.And where the tax cuts increase revenue, like there's just, it's complete nonsense what they're saying. But to a large degree, I think that, so they weren't wrong that these, that, let's societal neutral institutions were against them. But people on the left never adequately understood that if you've got people who have created this network dedicated to destroying institutions, maybe you should do something to save them and to, or at least, get them to defend themselves. [00:11:00]BROCK: there are some ideas that are valid and there are some that are not. And you get equal time for the ones that are not in this, this paradigm that comes largely out of if you look back on it was intentional effort really to the, right use the argument of balance to get a foothold into the mainstream media.It's how they first got for example, right when calmness published in mainstream publications and then Further to that into the mainstream cable conversations. And so it's been it was effective argument, and it was the, obviously the first iteration of Fox was fair and balanced, which, played on this notion.They've [00:12:00] shed that now as more and more people, I think, have, come to the conclusion that at least. People who are not watching it that it's right wing, Republican PartySHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah, they've decided to embrace that. Especially as they face more competition from the even further right. pretending that you're a centrist. When you're just bleeding viewers to Newsmax or Right Side Broadcasting or any of these other ones, like that's not a good business proposition anymore.BROCK: Yeah, no, it's been, it's, demonstrable that there have been times now where you can definitely chart. That Fox takes out one position and Newsmax is further to the right and then Fox changes its programming to be in concert with Newsmax, so they don't lose a rating share. Absolutely true.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And obviously most [00:13:00] prominently with the 2020 election that, they had originally stood by their, accurate projection that Joe Biden was going to win Arizona. And then and that the election wasn't stolen, that there was no evidence where they actually said that for, some time, or at the very least we're not promoting. Most of their people were not promoting these absurd things that Sean Hannity or something that we're talking about as the court record showed also, they didn't believe it. They didn't think it was real. and it's, but this is this whole idea of pushing this truth through power rather than knowledge that's ultimately. What I think this book and a lot of your other books are about is that if you don't have to be able to prove what you believe as long as you can force society to be governed by it.BROCK: Yeah. and it's a very results-oriented approach. And this was [00:14:00] one of the fundamental reasons that I broke with the right was not over an issue like supply side economics doesn't work. It was real more about the integrity of the work and the conversation and the complicity that I felt for my own self being involved with what was basically even then what it took to succeed was lying. And that you did that for ratings, and you did that for an audience. And of course it’s far worse today because of the internet. But yeah, no, I agree that they have no they have disregard for any sense of truth in what they're saying.And in fact, the opposite, that it gets rewarded.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why Trump, I, [00:15:00] even now, nine years after the guy came onto the scene, you're still seeing essays from, clueless liberals and centrists saying, gosh, I can't believe. That, that these evangelicals and, hardcore Christians like someone who's such a liar. And it's actually the whole movement was built on lies long before Trump, like he's just, he just does it better.BROCK: Yeah, there's still a really fairly large body of commentators in the middle and on the left. You still can't, still haven't come to terms with Trump. And that's the group that can't believe that the election is as close as it is because they just can't fathom that there's 48 percent or so of the country that is that is enthralled by Trump or because of tribal loyalty is just [00:16:00] following along the Republican line.But yeah, and it's, inhibited a response to Trump because a lack of understanding, understanding it as the first. The first step toward trying to work against it. And so I think that some of the some of the never Trump groups are a little somewhat better at this, I think, because they understand the right somewhat more than, the mainstream or liberal commentators do.But yeah, there's definitely a, there's definitely a deficit of, the appreciation for how much. That how much groundwork was already laid and how much of a foundation there was already built for what Trump brought along and brought out certain segment of the electorate.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and there, there's a, there's an essay from George Orwell where he talks about his [00:17:00] fellow, midcentury, or I guess early 20th century author H. G. Wells. Did you ever, have you ever seen that? It's a really fascinating piece. I can send it to you if you have it.BROCK: Sure.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so basically, what, HG Wells was a pacifist…

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Politics has changed drastically in the social media age, Democrats have not Nov 12, 2024

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Episode SummaryThe 2024 presidential election is over, and the results are not what many of us hoped for. Despite engaging in treason against the United States on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump will become president once again. While there are plenty of things that Kamala Harris could have done better, she was up against several larger obstacles, chief among them the price inflation that has troubled every country in the world after the Covid-19 pandemic and also the gigantic far-right media apparatus that relentlessly tells more than 100 million Americans that Democrats are controlled by Satan and falsely claims that the United States is currently in a recession. Undoubtedly, her being an Asian and Black woman was an obstacle as well.Despite all of these difficulties, however, Harris made a number of solid choices, including speaking clearly about the threat of Trump’s fascistic politics, proudly articulating why reproductive rights matter, picking populist Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, refusing to get dragged into the mud with Donald Trump’s bigotry, and running an incredible social media presence.But none of these tactical successes were sufficient to overcome Democrats’ refusal to invest in advocacy media or to ensure that social gains by one group do not negatively impact those of others. During their administration, Harris and President Joe Biden rolled out a number of policies that undeniably helped millions of regular Americans but instead of frequently and coherently explaining what these policies were and why they mattered, both seemed to think that good ideas would speak for themselves. They did not.Even if they had spoken about them earlier, whatever advantage Harris might have enjoyed from these policies was squandered, when she reoriented her campaign to prioritize outreach to Republicans over pressing the case against income inequality and social stagnation.Joining us to talk about what went wrong is Jim Carroll. He’s an associate editor at Flux and also has his own site, The Hot Screen. The video of this discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Flux is a community-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please stay in touch.Related Content* Trump’s victory isn’t a mandate for his authoritarian agenda, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise* Democrats failed to create an advocacy ecosystem, Kamala Harris suffered for it* The science of why the ‘poorly educated’ prefer Republicans* Unlikely voters decided the 2024 election, Trump bet his campaign that he could reach them* Searchable 2024 exit poll survey results* Compare the 2016, 2020, and 2024 exit polls* The mainstream media has been ‘sanewashing’ Republicans long before Trump came along* How Republican elites created a new, politicized version of the ‘Satanic Panic’Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:04 — Pro-democracy arguments and their effectiveness04:52 — Economic conditions and their influence11:08 — The role of media in shaping public opinion14:22 — Trump’s fake economic proposals sounded more ambitious than Harris's at first glance16:47 — Democrats cannot campaign on policy alone19:32 — How media shape public opinion of the economy22:24 — The right’s “regime” narrative is a powerful response to concerns about protecting democracy30:44 — Why social justice needs economic justice to survive32:39 — Kamala Harris's failed pivot toward disaffected Republicans36:26 — The impact of non-voters and younger voters38:00 — Surfing the media wave rather than trying vainly to control it42:31 — Many lessons of Obama and Clinton victories are not relevant to today46:40 — Mainstream media’s failure to tell the full truth about Republicans48:20 — Democrats cannot rely on the mainstream media53:01 — Cause for hope: There’s plenty of money to create a progressive media infrastructureAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: People are floating lots of different ideas about what happened and [00:01:00] and I think we should say perhaps at the outset that, judging the total, the complete vote totals at this point.As we're recording on the 11th of November, it's perhaps a bit premature because there are still a lot of provisional ballots and overseas ballots that haven't been counted yet. But at this point it does seem like that Donald Trump's going to have a very narrow popular vote. When the first time since 2004 for a Republican and, again, well, the totals are going to fluctuate a bit, but it looks like the Trump kept roughly the same amount of voters that he had last time in 2020, whereas Kamala Harris lost a significant percentage of the people who had voted for Joe Biden or couldn't retain them, or they stayed home or they switched to Trump or somebody else who knows.Um, We will find that out later. But yeah, whatever the case may be, she's definitely going to have a lot fewer votes than Biden. So, I mean, there's a lot of different theories out there, but let's you wrote, wrote a piece over on [00:02:00] Flux for us, but let's maybe get, talk to some of the ideas Your initial thoughts of what, what happened do you think?JIM CARROLL: Yeah, well, I'll back up one step and just to give context of what kind of what my perspective has been on the election and kind of how it's definitely influenced how I'm thinking about it initially. And basically, a lot of the concentration of my writing has been around the kind of the authoritarianism of Trump and the MAGA movement.And to me, this has been just like a glaring fact about Donald Trump and then his candidacy. Going into 2024. And so that was really the perspective I've kind of tended to look at the campaign and I would say my heart would thrill when I would hear Kamala Harris, bringing up those arguments on the democracy front against, against Donald And I, despite her loss, I feel pretty strongly that those are the right points to make among others. Those had to be part of her [00:03:00] campaign because that side of Trump and the MAGA movement is just such a threat to democracy in the United States and something that I think this election had to foreground, the Democrats had to foreground and make that into one of the clear stakes of the election.And I think one of my sort of more pessimistic points was like, in the event that Harris lost, at least the Democrats would have set this as one of the things that we're talking about and that we need to keep talking about. So obviously to see Donald Trump win to me was, probably the most gutting part of it was this is a guy who tried to overthrow the election in 2020. This is a really bad sign for American democracy that this was not a disqualifying factor for a sufficient number of voters.And so that was kind of my, I'd say, like, after election night and the day after, I was like, this is just, really needed to get a handle on this, I think, going forward. How did the pro-democracy [00:04:00] arguments not resonate? So that's definitely a perspective and I, I think I kind of start there like one reason Harris lost is because these pro-democracy arguments didn't have the sway that I think the Democrats were hoping and I think they, I think, the 2022 midterms had definitely given I think a lot of people on the democratic side hope that the pro democracy arguments actually do have a lot of sway.And, and I think there's a case to be made there, and I think, when you get down to the nitty gritty of like what swing states did in 2022 and 2024 I there is, definitely nothing about this election that's made me think that this is not an issue that the Democrats need to keep hammering but coming out of it, I would say that that's at the top of my list of like, what in the way that Democrats were talking about this, what in the way that people were thinking about their lives, why did this not resonate?Economic conditions and their influenceSo I think that's kind of kind of the first thing I'd say that the second thing that I'm thinking and seeing a lot of and it's really [00:05:00] holding a lot of water for me is just the basic economic conditions that people are perceiving their lives. I think particularly inflationI think was A generational phenomenon. We haven't had this much inflation since the seventies, early eighties. And I think it's, I think it's pretty well documented that inflation is uniquely corrosive things to the incumbents in office to societal bonds in terms of, and people's attitude towards the economy, a lot of psychological things going on.So, and then we cited, I think, at least in the exit polls that are, I know there's still kind of going to be a second guest and, there'll be more, more research for sure, but. Definitely seeing the economy being so high in a lot of people's decisions is particularly on the side that have voted for Trump.So that's kind of, to kind of start us off. Those are, that's kind of what I've been thinking about. And I, I was telling you before we started also kind of did a kind of big download of what people are talking about. And definitely, there are many, many other factors [00:06:00] that are being discussed, but those are, I would say those are the two that right off the bat I was, I was thinking about preoccupied with.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the, the democracy question is interesting also because so, so when you look at the exit poll that actually was a question that they asked people. They said. Democracy in the U S is colon threatened or et cetera. And among the people who said it was very threatened, 51 percent went for Trump actually.hmm. 47 percent went for Harris. And then people who said somewhat threatened, it was 50 percent Trump, 49 percent Harris. So that to me, I thought that was a very interesting point. Because I, I absolutely agree that the. Pointing out what it is that Trump and the more importantly, the people who control him want, like people needed to understand that.And I, I do think generally speaking, Harris and her surrogates did a good job of that. But [00:07:00] at the same time, it's very clear that the public did not receive that message. And, let's Let's maybe talk about that. And cause I, obviously, I've written and you touch it on your piece as well, that, the idea of media, I mean, ultimately, I think that that's where, what this means is that, what was in many ways, the core argument of Kamala Harris, the majority of people didn't believe it seems like,CARROLL: hmm. I think, I think that's true. I think one thing that popped out to me when you were mentioning that statistic is actually, a couple of months ago, I had seen a poll talking about, who do you think is a greater threat to democracy and, or who, I think it was actually phrased as who would be a greater defender of democracy.And Trump was definitely, at least five or 10 points ahead of Harris. And I think for me, that was like a major moment about how the election was going to go, because I found that shocking, but I think if we think about it in terms of you've got people on the Republican side who [00:08:00] feel that the Democrats are a threat to democracy and that Trump is redeeming our democracy and, and what does democracy mean anyway to people when they say democracy, which I think is.a huge subterranean aspect of, of where things have kind of gotten screwy with, with, with our politics. I think, yeah, I, I, I think it starts getting in some, some interesting territory in terms of, yeah, what, what people really are, are saying that they want or what they're scared of happening when they say, when they're asked that democracy question.And like, to me, it it's, and I, while I always felt it was an important message I, I definitely did see warning signs on this.SHEFFIELD: A lot of people, they didn't understand the question or they saw it, saw it differently or they, or from an economic standpoint, they felt like their lives are terrible.So if the system is broken for, and you ask someone, well, we, should we protect our democracy? Do we need, or is it under threat? [00:09:00] They'll answer it in the current stance from where they're at, or at least from, what they've been exposed to from a media standpoint. And so, like, and Democrats have, I think, a very real problem that they have created a kind of this sort of society of science, if you will, is what I'm calling that people who have a multiple degrees and, live in an urban area, their lives are generally pretty good.Whereas the vast majority of people are not like that. And and while Joe Biden did a lot of, good things for them, most of them never heard about it. And a lot of these things that he did like prescription drug negotiations and things like that they haven't started yet, but more importantly, they'd rarely talked about it, like Kamala Harris had all, she could have picked all kinds of policies and, talked about them on the trail that she and Biden had put in but they never heard it.CARROLL: think there was if you think about it [00:10:00] in terms of like people, let's just take people, the responses at face value here and, a huge reason people voted for Trump was the economy, a sense of economic malaise, a sense that, you know, particularly with people on the lower end of the income spectrum that, they're living pretty precariously.Trump, I think, is perceived as. Having a solution slash being aware of the issue. I think that Harris's proposals. Well, a, I kind of agree. Like, I didn't really hear too much and I was paying quite a bit of attention, but it felt like at bottom there was no there was no sense of like, a, A really broad based aggressive plan to be like, what our societies are on equal on equal.People are very precarious. Let's like, have an aggressive economic program to really like, let's just dig in. Let's just do this. And so I feel like she had some, some really great ideas like [00:11:00] the, the first time home buying credit. I mean, that's that's awesome. And but they just like, wasn't. Wasn't enough.The role of media in shaping public opinionCARROLL: I think to counter what I think in some ways is Trump just kind of has more than anything, like a reputation. And I think it's it may be based on the fact that he was like a reality star on a show where he was a successful businessman. And part of me just feels like there's just this. Almost this on a reality to his sort of like hold on people's imaginations in the economic department.It's just like he presided over like a crashing of the U. S. economy at the end of this term. So, like. The reality is like, he really didn't do great stuff for the economy. But and then you look at his plans and after bashing the Republican or started bashing the Democrats for inflation and blaming on Biden his solution is to impose tariffs that pretty much any credible economist says is kind of.Lift inflation. Ditto with the mass deportations that he has planned. We're [00:12:00] going to like remove so many people from the workforce. Housing construction costs are going to go up because a lot of undocumented laborers work in, in, in that area of the economy. So, I just feel like on the one hand, you had Trump pretending to provide a solution very aggressively, which okay.And then the other hand, I think Harris was very specific about what you do, but it, I think with the benefit of hindsight, A week, a week after this defeat it really feels like it did n…

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As Harris and Trump head to the finish, does the VP have an edge? Nov 05, 2024

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Transcript

Election Day is upon us, and as you surely know, the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is looking excruciatingly close. After Harris jumped to a small lead once she became the Democratic standard-bearer, Trump has tightened things up, primarily with the assistance of crazed former Democrat Robert Kennedy Junior.

How much support each candidate is receiving is truly difficult to say. Normally, public opinion surveys could provide some useful information in this regard but with pretty much every pollster showing the race within their studies’ sampling margins of error, the polls cannot be a reliable guide, especially since many of them seem to be engaging in “herding,” i.e. modifying their results to be similar to previous surveys.

With Trump and Harris each getting about 48 percent of the vote, the winner is going to be determined by how many of each candidate’s solid supporters actually turn in their ballots and also by what people who currently say they are undecided end up doing. Oftentimes, these undecided people end up not voting at all or leaving the presidential line blank.

Given Trump’s historically tyrannical, corrupt, and incompetent leadership, this race should not be a close one. It is nonetheless. And yet, despite some significant advantages that Trump has on the economy and the approval rating of President Joe Biden, it is my belief that Harris is poised to win a small victory tomorrow.

The primary reason I believe this is that Donald Trump is facing the classic celebrity problem: He’s overexposed.

After dominating the political landscape for nearly a decade, Donald Trump seems to be losing his grip on some Americans’ minds. At long last, Trump’s never-ending stream of corruption scandals, his non-stop offensive remarks, his ever-expanding retinue of controversial advisers, and his constant grifting have made some of his fans tired of it all.

As it has since the beginning of his political career, Trump’s strategy hinges on mobilizing his core supporters. However, the size of his base is not sufficient to secure victory. Realizing this, Trump has focused on attracting low-propensity voters who agree with him on certain issues but lack strong enthusiasm for his candidacy.

But the disgraced ex-president is likely drawing on a depleting well. That’s because Trump’s strategy this year is the exact same one that he employed in 2020. While it wasn’t sufficient to get him the victory against Joe Biden, Trump was remarkably successful. After receiving 63 million votes in 2016, Trump juiced his total to 74 million in his re-election bid.

But is it possible that Trump reached his ceiling in 2020? We can’t know at this juncture, but it’s possible that he may not have any more “unlikely voters” aside from young adults who have never voted before. The biggest indicator that his might be true is that Trump’s small-dollar donations are significantly lower than they were in 2020. As the Associated Press and Bloomberg reported last month, Trump has raised $260 million in donations of less than $200 each this year compared to $476 million in 2020. After nearly a decade of spamming his followers with endless (and even fraudulent) money requests, Donald Trump may have bled MAGA dry financially.

We’ll know soon whether the decrease in donations correlates to Trump receiving fewer votes, but one indication that it might is that Democratic enthusiasm to vote has been consistently higher since Kamala Harris entered the presidential race. According to Gallup, in March of 2024, 57 percent of registered Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said they were “more enthusiastic than usual” about casting a ballot this year. That jumped to 79 percent in August after Harris jumped in and was at 77 percent in a late October survey, a number even higher than the previous record for Democrats set during the groundbreaking candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008. Republicans, meanwhile are stuck at 67 percent.

There might be millions of hidden Trump voters out there who have not been brought into the fold, but if you were to judge by the final campaign rallies he’s holding, the crowds are not indicating this either. Reporters have been filling up social media with video footage showing that the disgraced ex-president is no longer able to pack an arena in swing states, and that many of his supporters are leaving well before the programs are over.

While hardcore Republicans agree with the reactionary policies that Trump is promising to enact and pushed through during his single term, his appeal to nonpolitical people is based on his showmanship. He knows how to improvise, he can be funny, and he sometimes say truths that other Republicans are afraid to admit because he doesn’t fully buy into their ideology.

But after 9 years, the Trump show has gotten old. He never plays anything new and yet the act keeps getting longer and more boring. If you’ve seen one Trump rally, you’ve seen them all. At this point, attending one is more about meeting with friends than to hear the old guy yack for hours about nothing.

Aside from activating potentially sympathetic citizens, the other major way that campaigns can pick up more votes is to reconcile with former supporters or persuade new ones. As he makes his third run for the White House, Trump is trying to reconcile with his former supporters—without really changing anything at all about his larger policies, platform, or persona.

While he does seem to have picked off some conspiracy-loving Democrats by teaming up with Robert Kennedy and former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump has not been willing to cast aside his mostly unpopular policy positions like repealing the Affordable Care Act or executing drug dealers. He has also refused to rescind his blatant lies about the 2020 election or even apologize for trying to overturn the congressional certification and doing nothing as his supporters raided the U.S. Capitol. Instead of tamping down on his dictatorial rhetoric, Trump has only increased it, saying recently that he “shouldn’t have left” the presidency and that he wanted to execute former general Mark Milley.

Instead of dropping his unpopular stances, Trump has resorted to smaller gimmick proposals like ending federal income taxes on service tips and wild-eyed claims that he will magically replace income taxes with tariffs. These aren’t likely to win him new voters, especially since Trump has added new controversial stances like letting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “do what you have to do” in Gaza and also encouraging him to bomb Iran, even though it could set off a massive regional conflict.

Let’s go back to those former Trump voters for a second though.

Although Trump got more votes numerically in his second presidential bid, millions of the people who had supported him in 2016 declined to do so in 2020. That’s a sizable group of potential votes he could get in 2024.

There are multiple ways to slice this demographic, but the biggest group he lost support among in 2020 was among White men. (He lost a smaller amount among White women, stayed the same among Black voters, and gained significantly among Latinos, according to an internal Trump campaign memorandum.)

We don’t know how Trump will do among different demographic groups this time. This is largely because most public opinion surveys do not have sufficiently large enough sample sizes of smaller minority groups to be statistically meaningful. Given the continuing rapid growth of Hispanic evangelicalism, he is likely to pick up more support among Hispanics. Among Black voters, indications are unclear, especially since Black Americans who disagree with Democrats are less likely to vote. This is also true of the younger White men that Trump is trying to entice by appearing on the podcasts of bro-conservatives like Joe Rogan.

Trump has inadvertently made his task even more difficult since he keeps sending conflicting messages about early and mail-in voting. He frequently tells rally attendees to vote early, but then also derides methods of doing so as “stupid” and “terrible.”

“It’s sad when you have to go months early, it’s crazy,” Trump said in June. “What are they doing with all these votes?”

If you ask me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bet your entire campaign on getting low-propensity voters to show up on one particular day for a guy who they don’t even like that much. But that does appear to be what Trump is doing. The fact that he has almost completely outsourced his get-out-the-vote operation to the political newbie Elon Musk is not helping his situation either.

Given all of the above, I think it’s fair to say that Harris has a slight edge going into Election Day tomorrow, despite some larger traditional metrics that Trump has in his favor.

I could be wrong though so please make sure you get out the vote, especially if you are in a swing state!

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Far-right conferences are radicalizing millions, with almost no mainstream media coverage Oct 22, 2024

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Episode SummaryJD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is a newcomer on the political scene, and as such, a lot of people don’t know very much about his ideas. That’s concerning because Vance identifies with a reactionary far-right tradition that is explicitly and fundamentally at odds with American democracy. Donald Trump, by contrast, has no core ideology and no core beliefs. His main goal at all times and all places is to advance his own personal interests, and that is literally it. Vance isn’t like that. He comes from an authoritarian, reactionary tradition that explicitly rejects conservatism, liberalism, and democracy. Trump wants absolute power, and Vance wants him to have it to destroy what he believes to be a decadent and corrupt society.On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about some of the core ideas of this very old tradition (which both predates and includes fascism) and what it has in store for the United States, regardless of the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.Our guest on today’s episode is Matt McManus, he is the author of a book called The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back The Tide of Egalitarian Modernity, and a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan.The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.Flux is a community-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please stay in touch.Related Content▪ Arguing with hardcore Trumpers is impossible, because reactionaries do not actually believe in logic▪ Libertarian oligarchs are trying to take over San Francisco — and the country▪ The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing re-branding▪ How a little-known cable channel for Roman Catholics is radicalizing the faithful▪ Ronna McDaniel and the twilight of fictitious Republicans▪ Democrats became more conservative as Republican became reactionary authoritarians, will Kamala Harris reverse this?▪ ‘Post left’ content creators are getting massively wealthy by promoting far-right ideologiesAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction02:29 — Distinguishing between conservatism and reactionism06:34 — Why telling the difference between conservatism and reactionism can be difficult10:53 — How the Cold War kept reactionaries in check within the Republican party18:06 — How neoconservatives prepared Republicans for Trumpism22:40 — Opposing "decadence" unites right-of-center philosophies26:08 — Redefining "elite" is core to the reactionary project33:41 — Why epistemic nihilism collapses into totalitarianism40:17 — Anti-intellectualism and right-wing philosophy46:45 — The paradoxes of left- and right-wing intellectualism53:29 — JD Vance's deep connections to reactionary philosophers59:14 — Why there are atheist and Jewish Christian nationalists01:04:44 — As the right overtly embraces authoritarianism, the left can reclaim freedom01:12:50 — The rise of the Nietzchean rightAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So we have a lot to talk about here today. The political philosophy episodes are always one of my favorites, I have to confess, as my audience may already realize. But nonetheless, so JD Vance, we're kind of organizing the discussion here of reactionism and reactionary politics around him because I think he is very obviously the most prominent reactionary figure now in the United States.So, but most people don't know a lot about what he thinks because I mean, he's a poor public speaker and, he's mostly known for kind of his bizarre interactions with people and writing a book.That's kind of the framework that I want to put this in. And then we'll come back to Vance later.But the idea first I want to explore is that conservatism and reactionism are not the same political philosophies. They're very obviously adjacent and contiguous but they're very different from each other. And you have written quite a bit about reactionism and conservatism.So let's maybe start the discussion off with that. What, what are the fundamental differences between conservatism and reaction in your opinion?MATT McMANUS: Sure, well I think the important thing to note right from the get go, is that the political right broadly, is a vast and extremely diverse area of political ideologies. It includes everything from, fascists to moderate conservatives like Mitt Romney and arguably quite a few liberals would identify on the political right as well, people like F.A. Hayek, et cetera, et cetera. So at the core of being right wing, I think is Hayek's idea that you believe that there are recognizably superior persons within society and that those recognizably superior persons are entitled to more. Right? More wealth, more power, more status on generally aligned with.This is a kind of moral view that we have recognizably superior persons in positions of authority on positions of status. Everything will go better for everyone else because you want power and you want status and you want wealth to accrue in the hands of those who are best exercised, wielded. But Who happens to be a recognizably superior person, how you make these kind of determinations.That's where a lot of the enormous nuance and variation on the political right comes from. Now, one of the things that [00:04:00] distinguishes conservatives from reactionaries is generally speaking, conservatives tend to think that the traditional hierarchies and authority structures that have been present in society for a very long period of times are the ones that we should put our faith in.For a variety of different reasons, but let's just point to, like, the Burkean tradition, right? A good Burkean would say, and this is putting it a bit simply, the reason we should put our faith in authority structures and hierarchies that have endured over a long period of time is because if they've endured for a long period of time, then they seem to be working reasonably well.Right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Now, that doesn't mean we can't tinker around the edges with things, but the main goal of a conservative is to change what must be changed in order to conserve what we can. And in the contemporary American scene right now, you still see a variety of different people on the right who hold this view.George Will comes to mind. He wrote a big book called The Conservative Sensibility, where He kind of fused Burkean and more classical liberal ideas to say, look, in the United States, we're fundamentally a classical liberal country. The founders were classical liberals. So the job of a kind of conservative in the America is to conserve and to advance classical liberal principles and institutions like those that the founders created.But that's not the outlook that many of America's reactionaries hold today. Many American reactionaries are fundamentally opposed to the liberal worldview for Again, a wide variety of different reasons, and this includes people like Vance, who's drank deep of the well of post liberal and anti liberal thought, and the goal of these figures is, in the words of Glenn Elmer's, to not conserve anything, right?Conservatism is no longer enough, as the title of one of Elmer's essays went, because fundamentally, liberalism has been a destructive force, it's wiped out everything that's of value in the United States, and so what we need to do If you're a reactionary, of course is to advance a much more militant and even revolutionary or counter revolutionary program to try to set things right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there, there are significant [00:06:00] differences and you've described them well that yeah, conservatives, a conservative in the American sense. And, broadly speaking, maybe the.Global sense at this point now is, is somebody who wants to conserve liberalism as it is, or maybe perhaps just recently was that's what a conservative is. And a reactionary is somebody who says, liberalism is wrong, and in many cases, democracy is wrong as well. And and we'll get further into that in the discussion here today. But so with with Vance he has a lot of connections to all of these emergent reactionaries.Why telling the difference between conservatism and reactionism can be difficultSHEFFIELD: And it's been kind of just both fascinating and dispiriting how a lot of political professionals, including people who are Democratic Party strategists and communicators and professional national journalists, they don't seem to understand this difference between conservatism and reactionism. Now, why, why, why do you think that is?McMANUS: Well, I think there are a number of different reasons, right? One is that the American right for a very long time has presented itself as fundamentally a conservative movement. Right. Committed to at least market liberalism a fair degree of individual freedom and certainly the promotion of democracy around the globe.Think back to the advent of Reaganism, right, where a lot of those kinds of tropes were put together. Now, if you're a critic of the American, right, that's more longstanding. Like myself, you might question the sincerity of a lot of those convictions, but that's at least the way that it's been presented.And this kind of overtly reactionary, anti-liberal kind of muscularly counter revolutionary outlook. Comes quite a shock to a variety of different pundits, including many right wing pundits, people like Jonah Goldberg who were surprised, by what seems to have come out of the Republican party.Now I would argue again, that if you look deeper into the history of American conservatism, people like Rick Perlstein would say All these kinds of ingredients for a counter revolutionary program were always [00:08:00] there, right? If you go back to something like Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964, right?Goldwater probably lost that election in no small part, not just because he was soft on civil rights and even opposed to civil rights but because he said things like, radicalism in defense of liberty or extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, right? It's not really a very conservative attitude endorsing these kinds of extremist views.But, generally speaking this tended to be a rhetorically quiescent element of the right until comparatively recently, definitely it was less transparent before 2016 when Trump gave license to a lot of these people to become a lot more vocal.SHEFFIELD: Yeah well, and, and it was both rebranding exercise as well on the part of the people that were saying, well, we're in favor of liberalism. I mean, for instance, obviously William F. Buckley, he presented as, That being his brand of, well, I'm just trying to conserve what we have in this country.And but at the same time he was saying that he was also being in favor of segregation writing editorials saying that, well, actually segregation is good because black people are just not capable of governing themselves and, and being part of the economy. So this is for their own good.Sorry, guys, you just, you're just SJWs are wrong. You need to leave it as it is. And, and, and he wrote aMcMANUS: to give another example during the, at the height of the AIDS epidemic William F. Buckley recommended that homosexuals, his term be tattooed above the buttocks, right? With a big warning label, right? And that kind of humor, let's call it that wouldn't be out of place in something like the contemporary Trump movement with this kind of vulgarity and it's just rote and callous dismissal of human life.So again, I think if you look back, further and look more carefully at some of these figures we kind of view the past of American conservatism with rose colored glasses if we don't recognize that a lot of the seeds of Trumpism were very firmly planted well before he came onto the scenes.SHEFFIELD: yeah. [00:10:00] And, and then also the fact that, I mean, the, the entire movement, which began calling itself conservatism. I mean, they, they didn't call themselves conservative. Like, that's an important point, which, because most political professionals, journalistic professionals don't know anything about it.History they don't realize that Buckley and these other people, I mean, they were the point of what they were doing was to stop. The new deal was to roll back social security was to roll back, labor unions and minimum wage. Like that was always the goal, like, and they've never stopped having those goals.And so, Yeah, it's just, it's pretty disgraceful, frankly, that a lot of, of people who pretend to be experts and put themselves forward as experts don't know any of this stuff. Pretty disgraceful, I think.McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely, right?How the Cold War kept reactionaries in check within the Republican partyMcMANUS: So, once upon a time the American right, certainly the intellectual American right, used to be described as a three legged stool, right? So, One leg of that stool was militant anti communism which eventually transformed into this idea that America should have a kind of militant and muscular international relations policy in the 1990s and early 2000s when communism for the most part disappeared.The second leg of the stool was the, evangelical Christian movement which always had a very, very, very pronounced kind of white nationalist undercurrent to it with its opposition to things like civil rights alongside, of course, more conventional kinds of oppositions to things like abortion or gay marriage.And then the third leg of that stool were American libertarians, certainly right libertarians at the very least who, as you mentioned, were committed to rolling back the new deal or even going further than rolling back the new deal, going all the way back to invert something like The criticisms of the Lochner precedent from early in the 20th century, and as a lot of people have pointed out, the three legs of the stool were never exactly the same size, and the stool itself was always kind of shaky since it's not immediately clear.What economic libertarianism or economic liberalism [00:12:00] has to do with support for white evangelism let alone the idea that America should use its military and cultural might to try to impose its value system, whatever that happens to be around the globe. Again, what I would argue is that the Shared through line of all these doctrines or all these elements of the classical American right was this conviction that there are superior people and superior countries for that matter on their entitled to greater status, greater agency, and they were hostile to a liberalism, which suggested otherwise.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I think that probably one of the other reasons that this distinction is harder for a lot of people to grasp is that these early branders and influencers for, for reactionism like Buckley they, they did explicitly market their ideas in the language of liberalism Because Nazism had so, overwhelmingly discredited fascism and authoritarianism as political philosophies in the recent memory of the people they were trying to convict.McMANUS: Absolutely. Right. So David Austin Walsh has written a very good book about this, so I'm going to draw pretty heavily from that. So arguably the kind of unifying philosophy that was characteristic of the National Review crowd for a long time was Frank Reier's fusionism, right? For those in your audience who aren't familiar with it fusionism refers to this idea that we should combine a commitment to classical liberal liberties certainly economic liberties with t…

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