Latest / Pod Save America / Offline: Ezra Klein on the Democrat’s Echo Chamber

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Offline: Ezra Klein on the Democrat’s Echo Chamber · Pod Save America

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone.
• 0:01
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• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Now onto the show.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: I definitely see the people around me who are really
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: jacked into Twitter becoming worse versions of themselves. I don't
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: see people get on Twitter and it seems to improve
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: them and lead them into a more virtuous life.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: You don't meet anyone and you're like, oh, I follow
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: you on Twitter. You're actually much worse than person.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Totally.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: You never have that experience, right?
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: My guest this week is Ezra Klein, host of The
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Ezra Klein Show, columnist at The New York Times, and
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: author of the book, Why We're Polarized. I could have
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: talked to Ezra about any number of topics related to
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: this show. If you listen to his podcast, and you should,
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: it's excellent. He's talked to a few of the same
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: guests about some of the same issues. But I wanted
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: to talk to him specifically about how social media shapes politics.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: For one thing, we haven't yet done an episode that's
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: focused on politics, even though it's a theme that's been
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: running through most of our conversations. And as I told
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: Ezra when I asked him to be on the show,
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: I wanted to talk to someone who could be more
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: interesting than a politician and more scholarly than a typical
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: hack like me. He also spends time in his book
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: on the role that social media, especially Twitter, has played
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: in making our politics more polarized. Though, interestingly, he doesn't
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: think the effect is as big as you might think.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: We get into why that is, talk about how Ezra's
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: own internet habits have changed over the years, and try
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: to figure out whether a healthy democracy is possible in
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: today's media environment. This was also one of the best
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: discussions I've had in a while about the future of
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: the Democratic Party. and whether it can survive in a
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: country that is way too online. I hope you'll enjoy
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: it too. As always, if you have questions, comments, or
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: complaints about the show, feel free to email us at
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: offline at crooked.com.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Here's Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein, welcome to Offline.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: So I started the show to explore all the ways
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: that being very online has changed us. For good, and mostly,
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: I'd argue, for bad. I want to talk to you
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: specifically about how it's changed politics, since I actually haven't
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: devoted an episode to that yet, since I do that
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: in my normal life all the time.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: But because you have talked to.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: This is more your hobby podcast?
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: This is my hobby podcast, exactly. But because you and
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: I have talked to some of the same guests and
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: covered some of the same topics on your pods, I
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: wanted to start with a more personal question, which is...
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: How has your relationship with the internet changed over the
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: last several years? Because I get a sense from your
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: podcast that it has.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: Ooh, it's not great, I would say. Where, what would
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: be on Facebook, it's complicated. You know my background a bit.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: My whole world was built by coming along at the
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: right moment in the internet.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: I got into journalism because I was an early blogger.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: Back when nobody knew what that was, when the word
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: sounded like a fungus, right? Other things with a blah
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: sound aren't good. I was this shitty student at UC
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: Santa Cruz, and I didn't make the school paper. But
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: the internet had all of a sudden allowed me to
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: sit around obsessively writing about politics for an audience of
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: literally dozens of people. And those dozens became hundreds and
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: those hundreds became thousands. And I got an internship and
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: I got into journalism and my whole life. I mean,
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't have met the woman I married without the internet.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't have my work without the internet. Nothing would
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: be the same for me without the internet. And I
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: loved the internet. And I genuinely don't know on some
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: level how much of how I feel now is just
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: me becoming an old cranky, get off my lawn sort
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: of person. Like the internet was better when I was
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: a kid. But it does feel like it sped up, fractured,
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: that the companies that owned the platforms got too good
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: at what they were doing. They became hyper-efficient at managing
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: our attention in ways even they didn't understand the consequences of.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: And the feeling of the internet certainly to me is
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: not joyous anymore. The feeling of being hooked into smartphones
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: is not good. The longer I've been in it, the
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: more concerned I've become That's kind of a long, rambly answer,
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: but that's the truth of it. And I feel guilty
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: about it because very few people have benefited more from
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: the riches of having access to the digital world than me. Yeah.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've gone through the same thing. I'm interested
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: in you saying that you're worried that it's just you
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: getting older. I have that in my head, whether it's
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: about the internet, whether it's about my political opinions. I'm
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: trying to be very conscious of the fact that when
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: I was in my 20s, I would talk to people
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: who are in politics in their 30s and 40s and
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: 50s and be like, well, they seem just very out
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: of touch because they're older. So like, there's like a
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: natural life cycle to these things. I think for me,
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: like the internet seemed, social media particularly, seemed pretty bad,
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: you know, from 2016 on during the Trump years. But
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: I kind of attributed it to Trump and the Trump
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: emergency that we were all in. I think once we
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: moved from the Trump years to just being in a
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: pandemic and being stuck at home, that's when I first realized,
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: or I really start to realize more that all the
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: time I was spending on my phone was just making
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: me feel bad. And just doing what I do for
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: a living, which is talking about politics and advocating for
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: candidates and whatever else like that started feeling really bad.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: And it didn't feel as bad when We used to
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: do live shows and meet people in person, or we
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: were on the road, or we were seeing campaigns, or
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: we were knocking on doors. But just being in front
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: of your phone or in front of your screen, just scrolling,
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: it makes you feel pretty bad.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: So you know I'm an economist-y kind of person. Yeah.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: And I'm more comfortable with those kinds of explanations. So
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: let me give you my actual model of it, not
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: just how it feels. But what economists are always seeking
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: is efficiency, right? Markets are supposed to become more efficient. corporations, businesses,
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: economies more efficient. You match the skills people have to
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: the jobs you've got. You get the prices exactly right.
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: And something that can happen in a lot of areas
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: of life is that you can become too efficient, by
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: which I mean you've overly optimized across a small number
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: of areas in the economy. Let's call it prices or
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: you know, a company trying to cut wages or whatever
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: it might be, or GDP for a country. And you're
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: missing all these other things. Your GDP is growing, but
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: you're destroying the environment, right? You've become overly efficient from
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: one perspective. And what I think changed between the iterations
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: of digital life that we're talking about is that it
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: got too efficient. So you think back to early blogging,
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: the great innovation was, hey, you can put words up
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: on a webpage and people can read them for no money.
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: That was what happened. And that was an amazing innovation.
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: And it allowed all these people to participate who hadn't before.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: But there was nobody really mediating between the writer and
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: the audience, trying to jack in to the audience's attention
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: and serve up to them at any given moment what
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: would be most alluring. And changing the writer's incentives. I mean,
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: we knew a little bit. I think it was a
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: site meter back then. I knew how many people visited.
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  Speaker 3: It was nothing like having what we have now. I
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  Speaker 3: know literally at what point in my article you click off.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: I know.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, the things I can know about how you're
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: reading me are extraordinary. I can test 10 headlines. So
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: I can jack that headline up to 11. And this
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: is true, I think, across a lot of things. So
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: to your point about getting off my lawn, I think
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: a lot about my views on TikTok and where you
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: have a lot of teenagers who spend an hour and
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: a half on TikTok a day. And I think that's bad.
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: But obviously, they think I'm a boomer, even if I'm
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: not quite. But in the same way that I feel
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: this way about Twitter, I just don't know that optimizing
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: our attention that tightly is ultimately good for our ability
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: to pay attention to anything fundamental, that it is just
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: more diverting because I'm like a being who evolved to
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: scan my immediate environment for threat, interest, and food, that
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: things changing quickly is more interesting to me. And the
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: more power corporations develop to make things in my immediate
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: environment change very quickly to me, such that they get
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: my attention, they keep doing it. So, you know, blogs
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: seem shorter than newspapers, and then, you know, Facebook seemed
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: even quicker than that, and then Twitter, oh my God,
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: and then TikTok, and it just keeps going. And at
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: some point, you know, It works, but I think that
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: we are playing with forces in the human mind we
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: don't really understand. And I think the thing that's driving
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: it is not... any kind of view about what the
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: good life is or what a good politics is, but
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: is meta's share price is bite dances, desire for market share,
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: or possibly depending on how you look at it, the
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: Chinese communist party's desire for global influence and they're destroying
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: our attentional environment.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: And it's, certainly bad for us individually. I think a
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: lot about what happens when an entire society is unable
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: to focus or pay attention or make collective decisions or
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: take collective action and how the internet is contributing to that.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, most political elites, people who work in politics,
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: cover politics, spend a huge amount of time on social media,
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: particularly Twitter. What effects do you think that's having on
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: our politics, particularly because that's obviously a big question, but
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: what are some of the most pernicious effects on our politics?
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: This is so hard for me, this one. So I
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: just did a show on my own podcast with Johan
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: Hari about his new book, Stolen Focus About Attention. And
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: it's one of his big arguments that we are seeing
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: crises of democracy, ecological crises, because our attentional ecosystem has
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: become so degraded, our societal attention has become so degraded
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: that we can't focus on anything. And I struggle with
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: that argument because obviously some part of me, given everything
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: I've said to you, wants to believe it is true.
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: But a tremendous amount of destroying the environment happened in
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: the pre-social media era. Politics, when I look back on
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: it over the course of American, or for that matter,
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: global history, looks pretty bad. And so this all feels
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: pretty bad. And on the other hand, I'm not sure
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: I can say with as much certainty as this argument
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: needs that i think the overall trends are bad because
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: for instance basically what twitter does to politics is it
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: radically increases the power of highly intense niche ideological or
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: interest groups and some of them are groups i really
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: like uh you know the sunrise movement uh which you
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: know i have some tactical differences with but overall i
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: think getting people to care about climate change is the
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: right thing to do they've used twitter very effectively um
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: Black Lives Matter used Twitter extraordinarily effectively. Trumpists used Twitter
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: quite effectively. And so there's good and bad from it.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: But basically, it is a profound expansion of the power
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: of views that at other times were suppressed in American
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: politics by stronger parties. And so the question, I think,
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: in the long run of whether it'll be good or
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: bad for politics is whether you think our politics should
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: be I don't even exactly want to say the extremes,
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: but should travel further out to more intense, narrowly held
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: views from the kind of consensus-making efforts that stronger institutions
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: and stronger parties default to. And I know that even
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: the language I use on that sounds like I'm stacking
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: the deck because when we talk about consensus-making efforts in
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: American politics, that's coded as good. But a huge part
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: of why we're polarized in my book is about how
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: that was often bad. A consensus-making effort was bottling up
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: civil rights legislation for the first half of the 20th century.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: So I just don't know on some level. I definitely
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: see the people around me who are really jacked into
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: Twitter becoming worse versions of themselves. I don't see people
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: get on Twitter... And it seems to improve them and
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: lead them into a more virtuous life. And at the
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: same time.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: No, you don't meet anyone and you're like, oh, I
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: follow you on Twitter. You're actually much worse in person. Totally.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: You never have that experience, right?
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: That never happens.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: I don't know if you feel this way, but as
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: a podcaster who relies on interviews with people who are
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: often on Twitter, I actually... It is a continuous discipline
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: for me to remind myself that I can't let my
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: feelings about people on Twitter... drive how I feel about
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: them or their ideas in any broader way.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: I do this all the time.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: I think about it when I'm about to interview someone
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: who might be controversial online. And then almost always after
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: the conversation, I come away thinking, I really like that person,
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: or I still disagree with a whole bunch of stuff
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: that they say, but I understand them more. And I
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: don't have that same feeling I have when I see
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: one of their tweets or some fight that they're getting
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: in on Twitter, which then makes me reflect on myself,
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: which is why I'm like, don't get in Twitter fights
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: anymore or just don't tweet as much anymore, you know,
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: because I do think it brings out the worst in us.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: Although, and here you can tell I'm just going to
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: be relentlessly both sides-y today. It's, I can't help it.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: It's the New York Times in you.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: It's the New York Times in me. So I've had
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: this thought that maybe it goes the other way too,
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: that I have really often had the experience of bringing
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: on people who either I really disagree with, who I
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: know from other mediums. We'll use Twitter as an example here,
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: but they could be a blogger, they could be whatever.
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: Or people who have been incredibly shitty to me personally
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: on Twitter. And I'm like, all right, we're going to
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: have this debate. We're going to have it out. And
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: human beings are very social animals. And you get around
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: a table or on a Zoom call with somebody, and
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: the tendency to be a more reasonable version of yourself
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: is quite powerful. And one problem with that that I've
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: noticed in my interviews is that sometimes I cannot get
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: people to say what they're really saying because they know
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: it would cause a lot of friction in the moment.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: And so they begin to sanitize. They sanitize their disagreement
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: with me, or they sanitize what their political opinions really are.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: And I think this is actually a pretty profound cognitive
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: bias that that drives people in Congress completely insane in
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: their view of what's about to happen. Because Joe Manchin's
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: every experience sitting down and having dinner with his Republican
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: colleagues is so much more reasonable, I assure you, than
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: how they end up voting in the end, right? His
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: experience when he talks to them in the back rooms,
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: I mean, you hear this all the time, right? That,
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: you know, Democratic presidents say it all the time, that
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: all these Republicans who they told me privately they'd support me,
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: but they just can't. And so one thing I sometimes
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: think about is that It is 100% true that in person,
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: we're all much more agreeable, or at least most of us.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: I think we have the view that maybe that's our truer,
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: better political self. But I wonder, sort of watching what
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: happens actually in politics, if sometimes that causes you to
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: miss how unreasonable people are ultimately going to be or
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: how they're going to be when it becomes the binary,
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: which side am I on, vote on legislation or whatever.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: Because I don't know, when I look at how things
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: actually play out oftentimes, they don't play out like the
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: most reasonable versions of these actors that I can summon.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: They play out like the less reasonable versions of them
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: that I see. And so I sometimes wonder if I'm
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: actually fooling people by getting folks around a table and
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: then creating my highly reasonable chill vibe that elicits a
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: fun conversation.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: You have to, this is the, you know, now cliche
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Obama line, but you have to be able to disagree
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: without being disagreeable, but that requires actual disagreement. Like, look,
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: I'm very non-confrontational to a fault. I don't love confrontation.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: It's a problem in my own personal life too. So
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: I have to push myself towards the other direction if
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: I'm talking to someone to actually get into the disagreement.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: But I think like back to the Twitter thing, look,
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: I think there's two problems for me with the platform
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: and all of people in politics and media being on it.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: One is what you were just talking about, which is like,
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: in order to have a functioning democracy, we all need
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: a space where we can debate and disagree in ostensibly
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: a productive way that ends with then, you know, all
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: of us voting or members of Congress voting, and then
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: we move on to the next thing. Obviously, we don't
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: have that right now. And Twitter does not make that possible.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: So just the ability to have a public political debate
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: is important. And I don't know that we have a
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: lot of spaces to do that right now. So that
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: seems to be a problem. Number two, and I'd love
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: for you to talk about this because you write about
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: this in Why We're Polarized, which how the most fundamental
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: divide in political media isn't necessarily left versus right, but
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: interested versus uninterested.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is so crucial. So we are very,
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: as you say, we are very used to talking about
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: what we call media polarization or media bias. And it's left, right.
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: Do we have a liberal media? Fox News is so conservative.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: That is all real and difficult and a problem. But
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: the much more fundamental divide is whether or not you're
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: interested in political media in the first place. And so
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: to back this up, there's an interesting puzzle in political
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: media studies going back about 30 or 40 years, which
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: is it used to be understood that the constraint on
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: small d democratic knowledge was that people didn't have enough information.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: It was just hard to know anything, right? I mean,
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: you think back 60 years, like you get a paper
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: once a day, there's like a couple news channels that
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: have an hour of news a night. There's basically nothing.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: And the world is big and it's changing and there
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: are so many different opinions on it all. And so
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: slowly over time, we go from a condition of fundamental
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: information scarcity, political information scarcity, where the hardest thing is
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: to know what's going on. How would you develop a
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: view on is China a currency manipulator in 1961? I mean,
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: they wouldn't have been because they were super poor, but
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: you take my point. And then you go with the
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: rise of cable news, then the rise of the internet
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: really rapidly. I from this condition that dominated the entirety
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: of human history, information scarcity, to information abundance. And now
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: you could not possibly, could not possibly consume 1% of
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: the information thrust at you every hour. You could not possibly.
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: I mean, all of a sudden, every newspaper in the
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: world to a first approximation is available online and all
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: of the blogs, right? And then all of the digital
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: news sites. And there's not just one 24-hour cable news service,
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: but a bunch of them simultaneously. And it just keeps going.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: Now there's podcasting. And so you might expect that when
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: you lift that fundamental constraint on information, that what would
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: happen is the public would become much more informed because
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: all of a sudden they have so much more information
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: and that doesn't happen. And so people begin to study it.
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: And there are these very fascinating studies that get done
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: right around the beginning of cable news and the internet,
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: because you can actually study homes that had it during
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: this period and homes that didn't. And what they find
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: happens is is that the explosion of choice in media
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: bifurcates the audience in a different way. So it used
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: to be that everybody got some political news, but it
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: was hard for the junkies to get as much as
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: they wanted. But if you bought your TV because you
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: wanted to watch I Love Lucy, you were also there
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: when the evening news came on, and so you got
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: a bit of news. Or you get the newspaper because
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: you want to see sports, but you got to get
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: through the front page, and sometimes something catches your eye.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: And that stops because at the same time, you have
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: an explosion of political news. You also have ESPN. You
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: also have constant sports websites, The Athletic, SB Nation. I
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: don't really understand sports. I don't know. But everything, right?
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: You have rock climbing. You have HGTV. You have Comedy Central.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: You have then, of course, the rise of streaming. And
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: so it is true that all of a sudden, your
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: ability to absorb political news becomes ores of magnitude higher.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: greater than it ever was at any time in human history.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: But at the same time, your ability to not get
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: any political news and instead really dive deep into something
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: else also explodes in the same way. And so what
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: they find is that the people who want to be
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: informed have way, way, way more information, but the people
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: who don't care have way less. And so the average
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: information we have changes, but it becomes a much stranger distribution.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: And that's not great for democracy on some kind of
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: obvious level. But I think this is a thing people really,
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: really miss, that they're so often thinking about media bias
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: and they forget that the people they need to reach
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: are not either ideologues like them in politics or the
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: ideologues unlike them who they also relatively well understand. Like
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: a hardcore liberal kind of understands a hardcore conservative. What
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: neither of them understand is somebody who thinks they are
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: both unbelievably dull and would sooner get a root canal.
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: than watch an hour of cable news.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: I've literally been saying that on almost every episode of
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: this podcast because it, no, it, it, it bothers me from,
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm a, I'm a democratic activist and I
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: think Democrats in general have this view where, okay, how
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: do we win elections? Well, there's two paths. There's either
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: reaching out to the middle, the swing voter, and there's
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: all kinds of stereotypes about who that swing voter is
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: that we can get into that may or may not
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: be true. Or we can go fire up our base
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: and we can bring in more people who don't necessarily vote,
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: who are progressive just like us and look like the
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Democratic coalition.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: We can do that.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: And I always want to say both strategies include reaching
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: out to people who just don't fucking pay attention to
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: the news and especially don't pay attention to political news
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: and are not on Twitter and probably don't have the
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: views that we have, even if they share the broad
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: values that we have. And that's not like a small
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: slice of the electorate. That's most of the electorate, including
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: like not just most Americans, most people who will go
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: vote in a midterm, in a presidential election, but just
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: aren't on Twitter all day long paying attention to the
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: news that we do. Now, I do wonder if it's
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: changed a little bit during the Trump era, you know,
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: when you saw polls before the 2020 election that like
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: more people were paying attention to the election than had
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: ever paid attention to an election before, right? So I
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: do wonder if interest in political news has gone up
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: a little bit over the last several years, but I
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: still think by and large, we're talking all about these
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: political strategies as parties and we're all debating on Twitter
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: and we're all yelling at each other and all this
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: kind of stuff. And then there's a whole country out
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: there who's just going about their business. And we have
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: very little idea what they all think about politics or
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: what action they're going to take when it comes to voting.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: And so this is the, the interesting countervailing trend I
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: was talking about, because I do think it relates there
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: to say Trump. The thing that, um, is the hardest
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: to appreciate fact of American politics in the recent past
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: to me is that the parties just weren't what they
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: are now. They had the same names, like we know
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: a bunch of the people who ran them, but Republicans
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: had a bunch of genuine liberals in there. Democrats had
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: a bunch of hardcore racist conservatives in there. When the
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: Civil Rights Act comes into Congress, a higher proportion of
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: Republican members of Congress vote for it than Democratic members
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: of Congress. When Nixon is president, he considers bills that
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: are more liberal than anything you got from, say, Bill
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: Clinton and at least on par with what you got
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: at times from Barack Obama. But what happens in this
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: process of ideological and party polarization is the parties stop
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: being that different. They become much more dissimilar. So, I mean,
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: Joe Biden goes from being a pro-life senator who opposes
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: Roe v. Wade to a very pro-choice senator who will
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: absolutely appoint Roe-protecting justices if that remains relevant. over the
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: coming years. And the thing here that I think has
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: kind of countervailed this dynamic is that it's become really
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: easy to tell the parties apart. I have a bunch
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: of polling in the book about how few even strong
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: partisans could really tell you the difference between the two parties,
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: because there often wasn't that much. There was a lot
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: of difference between individual senators, but they were all mixed up.
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: There's this period where Strom Thurmond is a second most
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: conservative senator in the Senate, at least in terms of
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: how often he votes for the Republican president, but he's
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: a Democrat during that period. And so now the parties
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: become really different. And you don't need to know very
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: much about politics to know which one you like better.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: And so it's actually easier in certain ways to activate
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: people because they don't have to do this complicated choosing process.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: You don't need to like politics or know much about
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: it to know that the Democrats, you know, are the
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: party that's worried about climate change and wants a more
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: multiracial America and wants to give more money to poor
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: people and they like Obamacare and the Republicans are pro-life
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: and they're more Christian and they're more white and they
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: want to cut taxes on rich people and they don't
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: really care about climate change and they don't want to
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: have any lockdowns and Democrats maybe do want to have lockdowns.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: So the choosing, like the ecosystem in which people make
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: their political choices becomes a lot clearer because of particularly
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: elite polarizations. But at the same time, a lot of people,
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: as you say, are tuned out. And I think one
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: thing that we underestimate of how bad that situation is,
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: is that the number of voters who will plausibly swing
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: in any given election has really gone down. It's gone
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: down a lot. Ticket splitting has gone way down. Swing
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: voters have gone way down. And those voters played a
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: really important role in American politics, which is they maintained
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: a certain level of accountability. because they weren't that interested
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: in politics and they also didn't understand the parties that well,
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: so they would vote for either one, when one party
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: really fucked up, they moved against it en masse. And
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: so you could really punish parties for fucking up. And
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: the problem now is it's actually become much harder to
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: punish parties severely, and particularly the Republican Party because of
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: its structural advantage in the Senate and the Electoral College
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: for fucking up. And so I think in another era,
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: if you have something to perform as badly during a
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: global pandemic as Donald Trump did, they would have gotten
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: like 35% of the vote in the next election. But
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: because the parties are so different, people are so locked
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: into their party, actually Donald Trump's approval rating a year
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: after COVID is about the same as it was right
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: before COVID. It doesn't really do anything to change the
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: shape of American politics. And I think that's genuinely scary.
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: And so the uninterested were able to play like a
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: disciplining role because the interested were very rarely going to
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: leave their party for the other party. They were very
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: rarely going to defect because to defect just like it,
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: you know, you kind of hate what the other party
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: stands for. So even if you don't like your guys,
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: you stick with them. But the uninterested would jump around.
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: And now we have a lot fewer of them. And
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: so doing a really bad job, you don't get punished
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: the way at least it was plausible you once did
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: in American politics by like losing in landslides. You can
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: lose a lot in midterms because people don't pay attention
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: and it's driven by turnout differences. But I think this
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: is a much bigger problem than people give it credit for.
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: I think we've lost a pretty fundamental kind of accountability.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: Well, I think the uninterested, there's two issues with them.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: One is either they feel cross pressured. You've named all
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: the different issue positions in each party. And some people say, okay, well,
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: I agree with the Democrats on this, but I agree
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: with the Republicans on this. So these are your sort
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: of traditional cross pressured voters. And then there's another group
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: of them who are uninterested because they are cynical about
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: politics in general, and they're not sure about either party.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: And maybe they call themselves independent. But they're not true
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: independent in the sense that they're like right down the middle.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: They're just really pissed at the establishment and could kind
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: of go either way. And it feels like that group
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: of voters could really swing an election. And that group
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: of voters could really sort of hold a party accountable
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: for not fixing everything, which is also something you're seeing recently.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: Like this has been a very unstable time in terms
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: of party rule, because as soon as one party takes power,
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: you almost can tell that then in the next election,
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: that party's going to get punished. And then we just
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: keep switching back and forth. That feels like a dynamic
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: that's somehow related to people's general cynicism with the political
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: system and how it's been failing to deliver, which I
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: think also benefits the Republicans.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: I think that's true, but I also think it circles
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: us back to digital media, more media in general in
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: an interesting way, which is the rise of a lot
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: of media and commentary and transparency. is just extremely bad
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: for large institutions and organizations of all kinds. There's a
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: lot more ability to see people fucking up, a lot
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: more ability to blast scandal everywhere, a lot more ability
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: and coverage, at least at the national level, of the
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: extremes of either party. And so you were talking a
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: second ago about the less interested but also anti-establishment group, right?
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: And You know, there's a lot of arguments. There's a
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: book by Martin Gurry that makes this argument revolt of
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: the public and makes it globally that basically in the
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: modern information ecosystem, it's almost impossible to maintain trust as
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: an establishment because everything you do wrong and even some
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: things you don't do wrong are going to be what
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: everybody knows about you.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: And the things you do right don't get a lot
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: of attention.
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: Right. The media is... I'm a part of the media.
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: The media is obsessed with things going wrong. We are
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: not that interested in things going right. And this is
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: true around a lot of things. I mean, God, go
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: read Robert Caro. Lyndon Johnson was so corrupt. He was
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: so unbelievably, unfathomably corrupt. He made Donald Trump look like
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: a piker, but just people didn't really know. And a
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: lot of things are like this. And so It's not
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: really possible for establishments to act. I just did this
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: piece a couple of weeks ago on coronavirus and trust.
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: And the point of the piece, working off some research
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: that looked at country-by-country outcomes across 170-some countries, was that
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: a lot of things that you might expect would predict
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: infection rates didn't do a really good job. GDP doesn't
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: do that much for you. America has terrible infection rates
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: just by being really rich and having a pretty potent
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: healthcare system. But trust, interpersonal and towards the government, actually explained,
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: not a majority, but more than almost anything else with
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: the exception of age, because age makes you much more
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: vulnerable to dying of coronavirus, of course. And one of
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: the points I was making, like talking to some trust researchers,
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: was that one version of this is you get into
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: like an antitrust feedback loop. Like the government performs badly,
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: that gives people more reason not to trust it. And
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: when they don't trust it, it's harder for it to
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: perform well, which makes more people not trust it. But also,
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: there's just not that much evidence right now that doing
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: well really changes people's trust in government in each other.
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: It seems like doing well might not go in the
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: direction of helping you gain trust. And just look at
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: vaccines for an example of that. Vaccines have done incredibly well.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: And the whole week I spent on that column, everybody
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: was debating Joe Rogan and vaccine misinformation. That's where we
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: were as a country at that exact moment. So that
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: is one thing I think digital media has done in
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: a very specific way, which is it is undermining institutions,
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. But I suspect that
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: overall institutional quality is going down, not up, and nobody
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: really knows how to reverse that.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: And I do think as our politics becomes polarized between
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: increasingly a party that is the defender of institutions- the
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: Democratic Party, including like most fundamental democratic institutions, small democratic institutions,
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: and a party that is fighting against those institutions, the
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: Republican Party, then that dynamic, which both parties can contribute
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: to and mistakes made by politicians in both parties can
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: contribute to, I think disadvantages the Democratic Party more. It's
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: just a harder thing for us to go out there
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: and say, we're the party that's going to defend institutions.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: But by the way, when institutions let you down, which
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: they do because people are human and they make mistakes, yeah,
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: that's going to be on us. And Republicans, their argument
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: is just like, fuck, let's burn it all down anyway.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Who cares? Yeah.
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: That it's a really, really hard dynamic. It also has
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: made the Republican party much more dangerous.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: So like take democracy, right? We have always had, and
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: a lot of studies on this and blah, blah, blah, blah,
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: but I'll, I'll try not to get too, too me
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: about it. Um, We've always had a very large anti-small-D
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: democratic element in this country. There's never been a moment
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: when democracy was a settled issue in America. Never, never, ever, ever. But,
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: and I think this is really important, the parties were
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: not polarized around the issue of democracy. So if you
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: look at, or voting, or some of these other things,
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: as I mentioned earlier, the Democrats had all these Dixiecrats, really,
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: really anti-democratic factions. If you look at studies of how
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: easy it was to vote in different states, like five
• 35:43
  Speaker 3: years ago, 10 years ago, what you'll notice is that
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: there's not really a big blue state, red state divide there.
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: In fact, a lot of things that later become highly polarized,
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: like mail-in voting, like that was a red state innovation
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: first and foremost. I mean, it's a big thing in Florida,
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: et cetera. New York, terrible voting laws. Like New York
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: is just a total disaster because of machine politics still
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: is to some degree. But what's happened more recently... is
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: that the Republican Party, and there's good research from, I
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: think it's Leanna Mason, and I'm forgetting her co-authors here.
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: Trump attracted a lot of the voters who had been
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: actually also in the Democratic Party with high levels of
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: what they call out-group animus. If you ask people how
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: much they dislike the out-groups, these folks really liked Trump.
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: And so Trump concentrated and then amplified Republican Party as
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: the vehicle and venue of anti-democratic sentiment. And so concentrating
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: that sentiment in one party makes it much more dangerous
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: because as opposed to being like diffused, and so then
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: you can suppress it reasonably well, like if you have
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: leadership that wants to suppress it, which in the last
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: 20 or 30 years, I think you could say America
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: has mostly had. Now, if the it probably has a
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: concentrated mass of people who just don't believe in democracy.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: Polarizing around that kind of crazy, it's bad.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: Well, the other real danger here is that now the
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: one party that is actually fighting to preserve democratic institutions,
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: the one that we have left, is not doing so
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: well just in normal times, which is with their approval
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: right now. So I do want to talk about democratic
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: party politics. You wrote a much discussed piece a few
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: months ago about former Obama... data analyst David Shore, whose
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: political theory you described this way, quote, the Democratic Party
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: is trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: woke staff members, and quote, it's lost touch with the
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: working class voters of all races that it needs to
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: win elections. Needless to say, this did not make a
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: lot of Democrats on Twitter all that happy. Can you
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: talk about why you wanted to wade into this particular shitstorm?
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: So I think it's a really important fight. So The
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: way I structure the piece is as a debate between Shore,
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: who has become now less quietly, but at that point,
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: I think quite quietly influential, and also Shore's critics. And
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: so Shore has this theory that now gets shorthanded, popularism.
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: And as you say, his basic idea is the Democratic
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: Party has become so trapped in an echo chamber of
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: its own making, and particularly an echo chamber of highly
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: educated political obsessives, but highly educated being important there. He
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: thinks education polarization is like a core thing fucking with
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: the Democratic Party because it's all these, you know, college
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: grads or post grads talking to each other and they're
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: really different than the country.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: And by the way, we used to, when we lost
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: white non-college voters, we would say, okay, well, a lot
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: of it's racial resentment. That's why we lost these white
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: working class voters and whatever, we're not going to win
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: them back anyway. Now we're starting to also lose non-college-educated
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: Latino voters, and you're starting to see some attrition, at
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: least among Black men, with non-college-educated Black men as well.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: So those are important pieces of all this. So as
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: you say, Shor's view is that the Democratic Party, because
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: of these internal institutional personnel dynamics, basically, they're high on
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: their own supply is a key thing. And so they're
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: running around saying a bunch of things that are fundamentally
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: not popular among the voters they need to win. And
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: the counter-argument you'll hear, which Michael Potters, or the longtime
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: AFL-CIO political director, calls viralism, is basically that this is bullshit.
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: That it is simply not the case that saying things
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: that poll as popular wins you elections in that direct
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: kind of way. You need things that people actually talk about.
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: You need things that that actually to the point of
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: operating in the digital media sphere, to get attention, you
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: need to actually go viral, right? And so you need
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: messages that the party faithful will pass around and around
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: and around like a baton. And of course you want
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: those messages to be popular, but you also need to
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: control the agenda. And I have basically the view that
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: they're both right. And my synthesis of this, which I've
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: said on Twitter for my sins, is sort of that
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: the interesting argument is around unpopularism. I think everybody agrees
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: that if you have a popular view that will also
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: go viral in the electorate, you should talk about it.
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: And this is sort of what Bernie Sanders is actually
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: quite good at. He will run around and say, everybody
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: should have health care. And a lot of people believe that.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: It's a good line. But the really important thing, I
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: think what Shore and others lack is a theory of
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: attention in media, which is to say, how do you
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: get a message to actually get heard? Because it's true
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: that Medicare prescription drug pricing polls really well and Democrats
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: run on it a lot, but it also actually doesn't
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: get you that much attention. Like you can't break through
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: like the Trump stuff all that well talking about drug pricing.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: And that's true with.
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: A lot of these very highly popular economic policies that
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: sometime bring together the Bernie Sanders of the party and
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: the Joe Biden normie Democrats of the party, right? These
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: like economic populist, prescriptions that are very, very popular that
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: I've seen pull well ever since I've been in politics
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: in 2004. But today I've noticed it's even harder to
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: get coverage around those. Like when you tweet about something economic,
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: you don't get as much attention. When we talk about
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: it on the pod, we don't get as much of attention.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: Like the cultural and racial issues tend to just get
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: much more attention now, even though some of the positions
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: that some in the party have taken on those issues
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: are some of the least popular.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: But so let me push on this a little bit,
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: because I think this is where my unpopularism comes in.
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: What drives attention on the internet and in the media
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: is conflict. So it is actually the case that the
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: reason a lot of the exact issues you're talking about
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: don't get attention is because there's nobody to disagree over them.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: And this is where I think the model of Bernie Sanders,
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: for better or worse, is badly misunderstood. What is different
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: about Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways is that
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: he is willing to say things that are unpopular to
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: drive attention to his popular ideas. So I'll give Medicare
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: for All as an example. The left loves to talk
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: about how Medicare for All polls well, and it does.
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: And then you do a couple more poll questions, and
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: it doesn't because people don't like a lot of pieces
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: of it. They particularly don't like something that Bernie Sanders
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: never screwed around with. He never denied that it will, one,
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: abolish their private insurance, which on average people like, and two,
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: will probably raise taxes on the middle class. Both of
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: these are lethal. But if you remember the Democratic primary,
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: every single debate, week after week, feeling like I was
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: living in a recurrent hell of my own making, just
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: began with a debate over abolishing private health insurance and
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: Medicare for all, because it was something you could actually
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: get conflict with. on among the Democrats on the stage.
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: They were all willing to fight with each other about it.
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: And so this is, I think, the key thing in this.
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: And Donald Trump was a genius on this. He understood
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: that you dominated the attentional agenda by saying things people
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: were going to disagree with, like you actually had to
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: create a fight. And so the place where I weirdly
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: think both the popularists and the viralists, I guess, what
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: a terrible name, by the way.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: I know, the viralists.
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: Where I think they're both kind of missing the point
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: a little bit is you have to choose what you're
• 43:45
  Speaker 3: going to talk about that people are actually going to
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: disagree with. And weirdly, I think when you push them
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: all on it, they probably come to somewhat similar answers.
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: Like something Shore will say is a lot of the
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: views of a mansion or a cinema are actually really,
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: really unpopular. A lot of quite liberal economic policy views
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: are popularist and you should fight on them and you
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: should like go to war on them. But the problem
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: is you need their votes, so it actually suppresses that
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: kind of fighting in the party. But yeah, it is
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: the case, I think, that Democrats, particularly through Twitter, have
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: ended up in a much more intense and high-velocity feedback
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: echo chamber of their own sort of elite staffing, etc.
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: party than is good for them. On the other hand,
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: the weird thing about that, the thing I think they
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: sometimes miss– is that has allowed also a constant testing
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: of what sort of policies will attain enough controversy to
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: actually get people to pay attention to them. And so
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: you need to be willing to choose among that set
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: of policies. And Democrats have. I think the question that
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: is being asked here is, have they made the right choices?
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: I think Democrats really are willing to fight around equity policies,
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: racial equity policies in particular, that are not clear political winners,
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: but I think they're morally right. they're less willing to
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: fight over a bunch of those economic policies, or they're
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: less willing to fight around some of maybe the foreign policies.
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: But you have to choose where you're going to actually
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: elicit conflict in order to have any chance of controlling
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: the attentional agenda when the attentional agenda is controlled for
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: better or for worse by conflict.
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: Well, and I think that Shor's critics make a good
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: point in that, like, and I saw Anat Shankar Osorio
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: say this in the piece who we've had on the
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: pod a number of times, that, like, the Republicans have
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: a say here, too, right?
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: Democrats aren't just, like, speaking into a vacuum. First of all,
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: you've got a media filter. That's where your message is
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: going through the media filter and reaching a lot of
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: those uninterested voters. And so how do you reach those voters?
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: And then the Republicans have a message, too. In 2012...
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: Barack Obama wins that race because Mitt Romney played on
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: the field we wanted him to play on. We wanted
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: to talk about economics. We wanted to talk about how
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: he and Paul Ryan wanted to give tax cuts to
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: the rich and cut Medicare, and we didn't.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: We wanted to fight for the middle class.
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: And that's exactly the argument that the Obama campaign wanted
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: to have since 2012 before we even knew Mitt Romney
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: was the nominee. In 2016, Hillary Clinton could talk about
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: economic issues till she was blue in the face, but
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: Donald Trump's saying that Mexico's not sending their best and
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: he's being anti-immigrant and racist and xenophobic and all this shit. And,
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: you know, to Hillary Clinton's credit, like she can't just
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: ignore that. She can't have Donald Trump being this like
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: xenophobic bigot and she's just going to be like, well,
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: let me tell you, I'm going to raise your minimum wage.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: That's all I have to say to that. So I
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: do think the Democrats... even if they don't want to
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: base their campaigns around some of these issues that don't
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: poll as well, the Republicans get a say too, and
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: you have to figure out what you're going to say
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: to that.
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: I think that's all correct and undeniable. And I also
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: think that to a degree, nobody quite wants to admit here,
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: even the people who say they're admitting it, that policy
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: communication just isn't that powerful. And I say that as
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: died in the wool policy nerd. And somebody who fundamentally
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: wants American politics to be fought out on that ground.
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: By the way, that is another distortion of politics and
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: political communications being dominated by highly educated, highly ideological people
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: who are in this because they want to win on
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: a bunch of policy issues. Policy is more interesting to
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: us than it is to others. So Shore is very–
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: he was on the Obama campaign in 2012. And 2012
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: Obama really sits as like a very important election to him.
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: I think that like 08 Obama is at this point
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: in particularly democratic politics way underplayed as an important way
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: of thinking about politics. Because for everything I've been saying,
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: it's basically true that lesser political talents have to work
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: with conflict and policy and greater political talents can work
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: with inspiration. Because it just is true. As much as
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: people sometimes now want to look back and count it
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: as cringe, which is on the list of things that
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: I see happening where I'm like, oh yeah, maybe Democrats
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: will just never win another election again. The decision to
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: say that popular things are just cringe. We don't like
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: Lin-Manuel Miranda anymore. It's cringe that everybody loves that. It's
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: a real dangerous thing to see liberal tastemakers, which has
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: maybe always been how it's been, but liberal tastemakers coming
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: up with a new word for popular things, which is
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: just like that they're embarrassing because all these people like them.
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, the nature of something being cringe fundamentally is
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: that it has to be popular first.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: Well, it's like, hey, everyone, remember the goal, build a
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: majority that can beat off the party that's trying to
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: destroy democracy.
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: And you build majorities through cringe.
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: You have to win people over.
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: You have to win people over and not tell them
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: that their opinions suck about everything.
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: But patriotism and certain forms of it is very, very powerful.
• 49:12
  Speaker 3: It's funny because I think that one thing that is
• 49:13
  Speaker 3: missed in all the debates about 1619 is how unbelievably
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: intensely patriotic Nicola was. opening essay is. And I think
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: that the reason Barack Obama drove the right completely nuts
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: was partially, of course, that he's a Black man, but
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: also partially that he took the American narrative away from them.
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: He created an alternative patriotic narrative which said, The real Americans,
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: like the real patriotic Americans are the Americans who understand
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: America's flaws and fight to change them. Like he created
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: this whole, I mean, it always been there, of course,
• 49:46
  Speaker 3: in our history. He didn't invent it. He weaponized it.
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: Like he actually drew a circle and said, you all
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: are outside of it. And this was right after George W.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: Bush, right?
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: This was right after George W. Bush and the real
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: Americans and the heartland. And here comes Barack Obama saying, no,
• 50:01
  Speaker 3: like the real American tradition, the heroes of the American
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: tradition are those who see our flaws and who correct them.
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: And so one of the tricky things about this is
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: it's just hard to find generational political talents. Nobody wants
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: to say this exactly, but it just is. And Hillary Clinton,
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: who I'm much more of a defender of than other people,
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: but she's not that kind of communicator. And Joe Biden,
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: definitely not. And so one of the things right now,
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: I think, is that Democrats are working with weak material.
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: I mean, one, they're working with a weak situation at
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: the moment. I mean, inflation is high. They can't pass
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: major bills now that they want to pass. The child
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: tax credit is going to run out. It's very hard
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: to spin a reality that is getting worse for a
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: lot of people. But it's also just the case that
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: I do think a little bit in this whole debate
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: over popular policies and viral policies is the fact that
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: most people are just not policy-oriented. But when you say that,
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: I think then where people naturally go, and I know
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: this is where some of the show's critics go, they
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: go to negative polarization. They go to saying you should
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: still be running against Donald Trump. I've had this conversation
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: with Michael Pedorza many times, and I don't think it's
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: going to work. But the problem is Democrats don't have
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: a good inspirational option right now because where they are
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: is not highly inspirational. But you do have to, at
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: some point, give people a vision for the future. that
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: is somewhat thrilling to them and that makes people arguing
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: for the present seem like sideshows. I mean, a big
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: part of my work right now is among other things,
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: trying to argue that you need to, to, to imagine
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: a technologically different future and mobilize government to create things
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: people need and don't have, because that is actually part
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: of how you build a vision of something that is
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: not just based on zero sum fights over what we
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: have now. Like you can buy that or not buy it,
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: but you, you actually need things that, um, make people
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: feel like part of something, not just combatants and something.
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: And what Obama always spoke to really, really well in
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: American politics, which is it is like the most fundamental
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: thing in our political rhetoric, going all the way back
• 52:12
  Speaker 3: to George Washington's farewell address, where he warns about how
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: parties are terrible, even as he's actually making an argument
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: on behalf of his own emergent political party. Like the
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: most potent thing in American politics is to promise people
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: a way out of fighting about politics. And like, it's
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: not a policy, it's a vibe. But like this is
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: an on Twitter, what emerges is kind of an alternative
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: to popularism. Vibes are really important.
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: Vibes are really important. Look, on the Obama thing, like,
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: of course, I think he was talented, too. Part of
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: what I think helped him is his identity and not
• 52:47
  Speaker 2: just his identity as a black man, but his identity
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: as someone who, you know, went to wealthy schools and
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: worked in very poor neighborhoods and lived in the United
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: States and lived abroad. And he's half black and half
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: white and has, you know, Chinese relatives, Canadian, right?
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: Like he's got relatives from all over the world.
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: So he has had a foot in so many different
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: worlds that I think what he wanted to do more
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: than anything was constantly remember that his job was to
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: try to persuade. And like, we should get into this too,
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: because you and I have talked about this in the
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: past about like, the power of persuasion. I know, you know,
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: you think that it's overrated in politics, and I've probably
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: come closer to your point of view over the years,
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: especially over the last several years. But even if you
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: don't fully persuade someone, so much of Obama's rhetoric was
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: saying to the country, you might feel this way that's
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: different than me, and I understand that, even though I
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: believe X. And you can argue that he did that
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: to a fault, but the way that you come up
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: with a story about America that is patriotic, that makes
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: people feel like a part of this country, no matter
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: who they are, what they look like, or where they
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: come from, is empathizing with the differences we all have
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: and then celebrating them in a way. And not just
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: the differences in identity, but the differences in ideology and
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: the differences in ideas. And I think he was constantly
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: thinking about that on every single policy topic, on every
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: single issue. And I do worry today that we believe
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: the issues we believe. And if you don't believe those,
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: then like, we're not even trying to persuade you. And
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: we don't think you think you're wrong. We think you're bad.
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: And I'm not like sitting here, like 90s DLC, like
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: now let's moderate our policy positions. Keep all the policy positions,
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: keep them all, all the progressive policy positions, but at
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: least talk about them in a way that gives people
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: space to come inside the tent because we need a
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: really big tent right now. If again, we're trying to
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: be people with anti-democratic tendencies, if not fascists.
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: We've really fallen down Maslow's hierarchy of political needs. Let
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: me say two things to that. So, of course, you're
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: right that I am not a big believer in the
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: power of certain, at least, forms of political persuasion, by
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: which I mean, like, I don't tend to think in politics,
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: particularly a president can stand up and convince people something
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: they don't believe on a polarized issue.
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: At the same time, I think, and particularly I think Democrats,
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: although Republicans do for that matter- just wildly underestimate the
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: importance of what I would call the precursors to persuasion.
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: It's just fundamentally relationships. I think something that we get
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: wrong in politics is that we think the fundamental question
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: for a voter is, do they like the politician? And
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: I think the fundamental question for a voter is, do
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: they think the politician likes them? I think that comes first.
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: Feeling that the politician likes you, that they see you
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: And whether they agree with you or not, they're going
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: to try to be there for you, try to understand you,
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: try to bring you along, try to fight for you.
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: That much more than anything else to me was Obama's genius.
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: He was really good for all the reasons you talked about,
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: for all of his weird straddling every possible world you
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: could think of. He was extremely good, particularly earlier, before
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: he got so polarizing and so on, at communicating the
• 56:20
  Speaker 3: idea that he probably liked you. Bill Clinton, a master
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: at communicating the idea that whatever you thought of him,
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: he probably liked you. You can name your politicians who
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: are not as good at that. I think we overrate
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: the importance actually of persuasion and underrate the importance of simply,
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: I don't want to call it opening a dialogue because
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: it isn't a dialogue, but holding a kind of space
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: that people feel, you might call it a safe space,
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: that people feel relatively safe in. I think this is,
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: by the way, I say this in the book. I
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: think it's so funny that safe spaces became this much
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: mocked word because, of course, the most fundamental political hope
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: is for safety, like all kinds. And that's why everybody
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: always wants to talk about free speech and cancel culture
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: because even just feeling rhetorically unsafe, people hate it and
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: they can't stop talking about it and thinking about it,
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: even as it's like pretty far down the list of problems,
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: I would say, that a lot of these folks are
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: actually facing.
• 57:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: But that goes then, I mean, to keep this a
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: little bit on the offline theme, that is not what
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: a lot of our communication mediums right now are tuned
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: to do. This hasn't come out yet, but I've got
• 57:28
  Speaker 3: a podcast coming with a philosopher of games named Thi Nguyen,
• 57:32
  Speaker 3: and his is just great work about Twitter. And he
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: talks basically about how Twitter gamifies discourse. And in gamifying discourse,
• 57:40
  Speaker 3: in creating a very obvious point system, the retweets, the likes, etc.,
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: It replaces the many different kinds of incentives you might
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: have and goals you might have for a conversation with
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: Twitter's goals for your conversation. And they're not the same,
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: even if it's easy to forget that. And what doesn't
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: get you high score and points in a lot of
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: media right now is holding an uncertain space where a
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: lot of people can be tentative and feel that even
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: if we're not all going to agree... we're going to
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: just kind of keep working this out together. Like what
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: works is certainty. It's drawn lines. It's the dunk. It
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: is like drawing the lines of your group ever tighter,
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: you know, to show that you're part of the truth here.
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: I mean, even all these words, we're using popularists and
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: vibes and viralists, like nobody's even any one of these
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: all the way anyway. Yeah.
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, the coalition required to beat Donald Trump in
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: 2020 included everyone from AOC and Joe Manchin and everyone
• 58:45
  Speaker 2: and the Never Trump Republicans and the far left. And
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: figuring out how that alliance holds together, which is maybe
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: the most important project of the next few years, requires
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: a level of strategy and communication and collective action that
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: even if we got everyone in a big room together
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: to try to figure out would be messy, let alone
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: figuring it all out together in public online on these
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: platforms that's the challenge that we're facing right now and
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: and you don't get a lot of space to like
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: make mistakes grow be clumsy all the kind of things
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: you do when you're in an organization trying to figure
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: out strategy do you.
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: Think that can hold together without donald trump actually on
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: the ballot no yeah i.
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: Don't either I don't know if we can hold together
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: with Donald Trump on the ballot, though. I certainly think
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: we have no other choice but to try our hardest.
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: And I think we have a fighting chance. I think
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: if he's not on the ballot, it depends on who
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: the candidate is. And it depends on whether that candidate
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: seems enough like Trump or seems as scary as Trump. Like,
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: you know, how close does Ron DeSantis have to get
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: to Donald Trump to feel like the same kind of threat?
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: Maybe to me, he's already there. But to a lot
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: of other people, who knows? So yeah, I don't know
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: about that. I think it's a very unwieldy coalition as
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: we're seeing right now.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: I think that also gets to a real just difficulty
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: in democratic politics now. I don't feel like I have
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: confidence in the counterfactuals of the other candidates winning the primary.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: I don't know what would have happened if Bernie Sanders
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: Cory Booker and so on. I got my guts on it,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: but I wouldn't put down a big bet.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: Same.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: But- What I think is really interesting and sort of
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: undeniable is it only Joe Biden and only Joe Biden
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: as Barack Obama's vice president could have run Joe Biden's campaign.
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: Like that campaign completely fails absent his name recognition and
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: like deep ties to every constituency. And so whatever comes
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: after Joe Biden, it won't look like the Joe Biden
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: coalition because he actually in many ways, the thing he
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: did was run a fundamentally inoffensive campaign where he made
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: Donald Trump the mobilizing figure and his particular talent was
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: creating enough coalitional structure that AOC and Sunrise could still
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: be on his climate committee and Joe Manchin could still
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: feel good about him and never Trump Republicans didn't feel
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 3: that threatened by him and so on and so forth.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: But he also was able to run basically a non-digital
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: campaign with no need to compete in this attentional digital
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: conflict economy. And not one other candidate was able to
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: do that. Nobody else had that opportunity. So he could
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 3: avoid a bunch of landmines. None of the other ones
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 3: were able to avoid. He was Barack Obama's vice president,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 3: so he was always going to be at the center
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: of the ballot. I think in many ways, the reckoning
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: over where digital politics has taken the Democratic Party is
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: yet to come. Because we still haven't seen the first
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: presidential and national candidates from the Democratic Party who are
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: from this era in politics, who rose up in this
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: era in politics. And whether that's 2024 because Biden doesn't run,
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: or it's 2028 or what, that's coming. And the people
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: who knew how to do the old school thing, it
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: doesn't select for them. And so maybe that's better, maybe
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: that's worse, but But it's coming.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: It's what you said earlier. You know, it's hard to
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: find a once in a generation talent like Barack Obama.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: But we kind of need to, I think, because that
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: person is not only going to have to come up
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: in that era, but also be somewhat apart from that
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: cohort of people in that they know that their audience
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: and the coalition they're trying to build is bigger than
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: the online space that they still have to be embraced by.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: So which is a really, really difficult challenge.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: And don't you think that'll mean running against this era?
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, one thing that I think people forget about
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: Obama from 08 is as much as he ran against anything,
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: he was really running against cable news.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was Washington.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 2: It was it was special interests and lobbyists, but it
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: was also the, you know, up and down politics as
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 2: a game.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: That's who he was talking about.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: And, you know, in the red and blue America and
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: the dicing and the.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: Blah, blah, blah, blah. Because remember, it was the pundits
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: that were dicing.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: The pundits that were dicing.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: That was the enemy in that line.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: I think people underestimate how much Obama was running against
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: the vibe of political media in 2008. Not literally political media,
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: like he wasn't actually running against political media, but he
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: was running against the vibe of what political media felt
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: like and how it understood the world in 2008. And
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: by the way, that annoyed a bunch of people like me.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: I remember writing all these columns about how he didn't
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: understand the intransigence of Republicans and blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: But that is still very powerful politics. And I suspect
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: that the next dominant Democratic figure like that– I'm not
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: going to speak for the Republican coalition here– is going to,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: sort of like Obama did, have to fundamentally fully understand,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: fully be a creature of that understanding of politics– and
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: be able to position against it. Not be not a
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: creature of it like Joe Biden is, right? Somebody who, like,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: Joe Biden doesn't know what vibes are. But somebody who
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: came up in it and seems to radiate its taste
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: for it that even people in it feel, right? That's
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: the key. I think to the extent anybody was trying there,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: it was Buttigieg. Buttigieg was a very knockoff Obama approach
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 3: to politics, but it's going to have to be an
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: approach like that, I suspect. Because you can't run, you
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: will have to be of it and simultaneously against it.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: And like that was sort of Obama's underplayed genius. I mean,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: 12 was different, but that was 08.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 2: No, and I think, you know, getting back to the
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: subject of this podcast, it is going to have to
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 2: include what people are increasingly feeling about the toxicity and
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: silliness and stupidness of all of us living our lives online,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: particularly coming out of a pandemic, which is just added
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: to those problems and is like, you know, we're still
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: going to be going through the collective trauma of coming
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: out of that as a country for quite some time.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: So sort of like somebody who's run like a big
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: democratic podcast, but then begins pivoting to a podcast about
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: how the digital world is sort of making everything worse.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: That's a real fucking, that's a disaster in the making.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: Last question I'm asking all of our guests, what's your
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: favorite way to unplug and how often do you do it?
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: I've been really trying to do digital Shabbats, really trying to.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: What is that? Tell me what that entails.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: Oh, so digital Shabbats is simply, like, I don't get
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: to look at screens from roughly sundown on Friday to
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 3: sundown on Saturday. Wow. And this was hard, and I
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: screwed around with light versions of it because I was like, well,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: I'll just try not to look at. you know, the
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: parts of the screens that, you know, jacked me into
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: all this stuff. But I need to be able to
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: listen to music, obviously, and listen to an audio book
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 3: and get directions on my phone. And then more recently,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: we had a second kid that has also really hurt
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: my digital habits because I just, you know, you sit.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: Around a lot. Yeah, you sit and you look, you scroll.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: So I made the decision that no, I don't get
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 3: to quarter low fit. Like I don't have directions on
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: my phone because I don't have my phone. I don't
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: get to listen to music because I need some time
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: with that input. I'm not saying this has been going
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: on for that long, so we'll see how it continues,
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: but it's really created a profound sense of spaciousness in
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: that Friday night to Saturday period. And obviously some inconveniences.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: And I don't exactly know what I'd do if my
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: wife wasn't still open to using her phone occasionally when
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: we needed to get somewhere. But that's a practice that
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 3: I've started and I'm trying to really, really do because
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: I think that for some period of the week, I
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: need to feel what it's like to not be a
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: little less in it, but just not in it. Actually not.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I might start trying that. I'll do a
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: little bit at a time.
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: I've finally got the, you know, you've hit your hour
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: on Twitter notification on my phone that I've been doing
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: since Christmas. And I haven't blown through it too many times,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: which is good. But I already do feel a little
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: bit better. And when you go back to Twitter after
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: having that time limit, The controversies, the tweets, the stupid shit,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: it does start feeling a little bit more foreign and detached.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: And you're like, why do I care about this?
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: So it's a good thing.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that stuff, I always end up circumventing it.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: That's why I found this is true for a lot
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: of things in my life. Willpower is rough on me.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 3: I'm not good at portion control. I'm not good at
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: portion control. I can do none, but I can't do some.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: And it's been just, I'm 37. I've come to accept
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: this as a weird As a weird part of myself. Yeah.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: Ezra Klein, thanks for doing Offline.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: This was a pleasure. Thank you.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Andy Gardner Bernstein
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin,
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madison Hallman, and
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: share our episodes as videos every week.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: Before we go, a reminder. Next week, Offline is, well... off.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 2: We'll be returning on Sunday, March 6th in our very
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: own feed. So head on over to Offline with Jon Favreau.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: The link is in our show notes and smash that
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: follow button. Thanks for being an offline listener and for
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: all your excellent feedback. I can't wait to keep the
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: conversation going with you guys.
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: See you soon.