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- [00:00]
A
To me, the interesting thing is not why, you know, should we argue about lunch? Who's correct about the question of the $28 lunch? What's interesting here is why do we all think that society is doomed, that this generation is doomed, when the numbers and the reality on the ground just don't bear that out? And now the good fight with Yasha Mon.
- [00:32]
B
Why do so many people today have such a relentlessly negative view of the world, thinking that a host of measures that have measurably gotten better over the last 30 or 40 years are supposedly worse? Why is it that trust in institutions is at record lows? And why is it that philosophically liberal ideas in particular have such hard standing in a lot of public discussions, particularly on social media? Have the transformations of the media and the large role that social media now plays in our lives just spiked? The football, if that is the right American sports metaphor, against the ideals of liberalism, against political moderation, making it easier for extremists of all kinds to win political victories. And is there something that liberals can do about that? Is it possible to engage in social media in ways that don't strengthen the extremists that actually make space for a community of people fighting for more moderate points of view? Well, to think through these questions, I have invited onto the podcast Jeremiah Johnson. He is the co founder of the center for New Liberalism and he also founded a Reddit community that then spread to other social media platforms called somewhat seriously and somewhat trollingly are neoliberal. And it is a really interesting community that fights for model values, for economic growth, for free speech in the form of memes and so on, stands up for moderation against extremism in environments that often aren't very hospitable to these ideas. So in the last part of this conversation, we talked about how to make the case for these kinds of values on social media. And we talked about the vacuum in liberal institutions today, why it's so easy for a 22 year old to go and join a progressive institution or to go and join a conservative institution, even a MAGA aligned institution, but why the path for political moderates is much more challenging. What it is that we need to do in order for institutions like Persuasion and like the center for Neoliberalism to grow and really represent a different way of approaching politics in a more effective way. To listen to that part of the conversation, to support the work we do here on the podcast and at Persuasion, go to writing munch.com listen and make sure that you get access to the full version of every conversation on your favorite podcasting app, I.e. writingdatamonch.com listen. Jeremiah Johnson, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:26]
A
Thanks for having me, Yasha.
- [03:28]
B
So there's been an interesting debate over the last few days on social media in which, you know, the question was, why is it that zoomers are having trouble buying homes? Why are they doing so badly in material terms? And one faction on social media was saying it's all because they're spoiled and they order. You know, they go out to lunch too often and they order on doordash all of the time and they just have terrible financial habits. And the other half of the debate said, no, it's because of neoliberalism and the economy is in terrible state. And why are you blaming these poor kids? It's not at all their fault. It's our evil economic system. What do you think is actually going on?
- [04:10]
A
This was really interesting. So just to set the stage for people who are blessedly offline, let's say, and are not poisoned in the same way that maybe you and I are. Kevin o', Leary.
- [04:23]
B
You more than me, I have to say.
- [04:25]
A
I would say so. So Kevin O', Leary, the guy who calls himself Mr. Wonderful and he's on TV, he's a businessman, he gave some interview where he said something along the lines of like, it just, it makes me sick when I see some young kid who's making $70,000 a year spending $28 on lunch. And this went viral in the way that these things do because, you know, it's intergenerational conflict. It's people yelling at each other about their personal budgets. And one group of people was like, yeah, that's ridiculous. Like $28 for lunch and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, like kind of redoing the whole avocado toast thing that everybody's aware of, like all you millennials and your avocado toast and you.
- [05:10]
B
I was about to say avocado toast, and then I realized that avocado toast is millennial coated. And here we're talking about Zuma. So I refrained myself.
- [05:17]
A
But yeah, this is. But it's the same kind of thing. And then bizarrely also, certain types of people, usually left leaning commentators, jumped in to defend the zoomers. And sometimes this took on the bizarre kind of quality of like, well, lunch just cost $28. Now, have you looked at a menu recently? You know, or people need to do doordash because they're disabled and they can't make lunch for themselves. And in this case, disabled usually Means like I have an anxiety disorder and I can't talk to people.
- [05:54]
B
And obviously, I'm sure there are some people who generally are disabled and generally can't make lunch for themselves. But that is not the average person.
- [05:59]
A
That is very much not the average person. And there is this weird kind of thing where, look, on a very basic level, you can join one side or the other. You can say it's ridiculous to pay $28 for lunch. You can easily pack a lunch. You can join the people who say this is not the reason Gen Z can't buy a home. You know, saving $5 on lunch is not going to allow you to buy an $800,000 home in a nice metro area that you want to live in. But there's an implicit assumption in both of these arguments that things are indeed really bad for Gen Z, that zoomers are suffering, that they're never going to be able to afford a home, that it's really bleak out there. It's very. People have this sense of doom about the economy. And what I find interesting is that's just not true at all. If you look in the data that Gen Z is actually buying homes at an increased rate at the same age they are from where millennials were. Gen Z home ownership is tracking significantly higher than millennial homeownership. And Gen Z is earning more money than any other previous generation. Not literally at this moment because they're all young, their early career, but, but again, if you look at the age of 24, the average 25 year old
- [07:20]
B
today makes more money than the average 25 year old 10 or 30 or 50 years ago. And presumably that is not just in nominal dollar terms. Obviously because of inflation, they're making more money in terms of what the annual pay is. But even justice for inflation, that is true.
- [07:34]
A
Even in real terms, it is true. And this entire narrative around, oh well, zoomers are screwed. I just don't think it's. It's true. And you know, the general economic picture certainly has some, some downsides to it. The entry level job market right now does look a little grim. Inflation is higher than we'd like it to be. And you know, there's some things you can point out, but we've had, you know, in unemployment lower than 5% for like five straight years now. And you know, job growth is good, GDP growth is good. This is relatively speaking a pretty good. And if you are waiting for some other economy to show up, that's going to blow this one out of the water. I'm sorry to Report, you're going to be waiting for a while. And to me, the interesting thing is not why should we argue about lunch? Who's correct about the question of the $28 lunch? What's interesting here is why do we all think that society is doomed, that this generation is doomed, when the numbers and the reality on the ground just don't bear that out?
- [08:44]
B
Yeah. And I've been thinking about this in a slightly broader context and then in the narrow context of liberalism, so perhaps the start of a slightly broader context, people now have much less trust in institutions, for example, and they have, broadly speaking, more negative view of the world, at least in North America and Western Europe. And so the question is, why is that? Is it that institutions have gotten worse? Is it that institutions have always been bad in all kinds of ways, but social media allows us to see the ways in which they're bad much more easily? Even a politician in the past, his most embarrassing moment probably wasn't caught on camera. Or if it was, then it would have been played once in the evening news for five seconds. You know, now every time a politician posts something on social media, the first comment is going to be a 5 second clip of them choking on a pretzel or whatever that is. Right. So it's just like we just are much more aware of the weakest moments of people in institutions and so on. Or is it that institutions were pretty good 15, 30 years ago and were pretty good today, but we now have an unduly negative view of them?
- [09:57]
A
I think that there's some nuance here where our institutions have absolutely gotten worse. And specifically in the last year Under Donald Trump 2.0, we've seen a rate of institutional decay that we have not seen in decades, in generations. So our institutions are absolutely being hammered. But I really do think that that is, for the most part, broadly speaking, give me some rope here. But for the most part, that is literally just a last year or two kind of phenomenon. And what we're talking about, this kind
- [10:32]
B
of downstream from the previous stuff, right. Which say, like, it's because people soured so much on the institutions and became so mistrustful of them that Trump was elected for a second time. And now, in fact, in office, he is degradating institutions at a very alarming rate. But in a weird way, that comes downstream from people having lost faith in those institutions, which is what allowed him to win power again in the first place.
- [10:55]
A
Yeah. And what I was going to say is the things we're talking about predate the election of Donald Trump for the second time. The consumer tracker, sentiment tracker is the lowest it's ever been. Right now, unemployment is something like 4.5%. Job numbers remain pretty decent. And people, if you ask them, have a lower consumer sentiment than they did during the 70s stagflation than they did during the Great Recession, than they did during the COVID recession, during the pandemic. You can extend this to all sorts of things that are not just the economy. People think that race relations are worse than they were 30 years ago, that gender equality is worse than it was 30 years ago. If you just ask, you can look up all the Gallup polling. Gallup does a lot of very good, like, polling over time where they ask the same question for decades. And so you can really see how people are answering the same question over time. People think that, you know, race relations and gender relations are significantly worse than they were in the 90s, which, like, I feel like that would come as news to Rodney King, you know, and certainly, look, race relations have, have hit some spots here in the last few years, I'll say. But the idea that we're not making progress strikes me as incorrect. Just to keep going, like crime, when they ask, do you think crime has gotten better or worse in the last year? They've asked this for like 30 or 40 years straight. And in something like, it's like 29 out of the last 32 years, people think that crime got worse. People think that crime is getting worse every single year, and it's worse the next year and it's worse the next year.
- [12:40]
B
Crime is, you know, way better than it was in 1990. I mean.
- [12:44]
A
Yeah, and that's the thing. Like, the 90s were absolutely a very high point for crime. And people just continually, despite the fact that crime has been, with some ups and downs, crime has been on a very large decline from the mid-90s until now. It's not even a comparison, but 29 out of the last 30 years or something to that effect. People think that crime got worse year over year. And so just in every way, economically, socially, with crime, with everything, people think that things are getting worse. And I do think that it is a function of our media ecosystem and the ways that that has changed. And I think social media plays a lot into this and we can get into why. But there's an interesting question of, like, how differently does social media shape our expectations as opposed to the forms of media we used to have, as opposed to the nightly news, as opposed to newspapers.
- [13:43]
B
Yeah. So let's get into the question of why you think that's happening. Now, to play devil's advocate, if people have said for 29 out of the last 30 years, or whatever it is for 28 out of the last 30 years that crime has gotten worse, that predates social media. So perhaps there is just a general tendency for people on particular topics like crime to just see the world very, very negatively. And of course, you know, one interesting thing is that, you know, in the same way in which people absolutely hate Congress, but often they hate their own. They like their own congressman. People sometimes think, you know, crime is terrible in the world, but my neighborhood is kind of fine. And so. So part of this is just kind of, you know, the places we know very well, they can often judge relatively accurately the places that are far away from them. They end up having these very negative stereotypes about. But insofar as it's true that on all these other metrics, overall sentiment has gotten worse, and I think the evidence of that is pretty clear. Why is that? Is that social media? Is it that our media environment has changed, or is it that our institutions do deliver less for people than they once did? What's certainly true is that you had a very rapid improvement in living standards that was really anomalous in human history, but completely shaped our implicit baseline. When we think about what a normal developed economy, a normal consolidated democracy looks like, we tend to think about the 1960s, 1970s and so on, which are a period of just extraordinary economic growth. Right? I mean, I've cited this many times podcast, but the living standards of the average American doubled from 935 to 1960, and it doubled from 1969. 85. And, you know, at some point, it becomes harder to grow at that pace. And even though, as you're pointing out, actually the story is much less bleak when it's often believed. I have an article showing that the whole kind of, you know, economic doomerism of the 2010s where a whole bunch of different economists said, you know, inequality is only growing and global economic growth only benefits the richest, and wages are stagnating for the middle in America. These are three different authors who argued each of these points. They all revised their opinions or had the work challenged in significant ways, and that basically turns out not to have been right. We tend to think, oh, poor zoomers were doing worse. Actually, they're doing better than millennials were at the same juncture. So the story is not that negative. But it is true that I don't feel like my living standard is vastly better than that of my mom was, I don't think that my kids are likely to have a vastly better living standard than I do. And 50 years ago, people probably did feel that way.
- [16:31]
A
I think there's a couple things here. There's a couple books I would point to. There's a great book, I believe, by Robert Gordon, where he examines the nature of economic growth. And I forget the exact title. It's something like the Rise and Fall of American Growth. And basically he argues that, yeah, we kind of had this really anomalous period of wild growth and more than just the headline GDP number, that it was really impactful stuff. That it was. We were electrifying the country. We were inventing new forms of household appliance that took away, you know, a significant amount of manual labor that people had to do. That we were really revolutionizing a bunch of things. And that the computer revolution, while, while significant, has not actually changed daily life in quite the same way that, you know, plumbing and electricity and appliances and,
- [17:33]
B
you know, kind of a washing machine and antibiotics, right?
- [17:35]
A
I mean. I mean, antibiotics, yeah.
- [17:37]
B
Life expectancy shot up in the middle of the 20th century because of inventions like antibiotics and because for the first time, most people had access to medical care. And it's hard to replicate that a second time.
- [17:49]
A
Yeah. So there's some argument that our current level of growth, which is good, fine, is just not as emotionally or kind of viscerally impactful in the way that previous growth was. But I also think that there's a second book that I would point to called Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurry. And the thesis of Revolt of the Public is that everyone is mad all of the time about everything. And this will just basically be the state of things forever. And Guri was a really interesting figure. He wrote this basically before Trump, before Brexit. When he wrote it, he was talking about the things like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall street, different protests in Spain and Israel, about the general state of society and cost of living and things like that. And so he was looking at this from a very like, roughly like 2012, 2013 perspective. And his thesis is basically that, look, elites and institutions have always failed to deliver on their promises. That is the human condition, that is as far back in time as you can possibly go. Basically, nobody ever lives up to all their promises, but that it used to not matter that much because we had media systems that either protected the elites or covered for them, or just it was very hard to organize around those failures. What social media has done is it has made very Very obvious. Those failures that, that have always been happening, it makes them really obvious in real time. It makes it very easy to organize around them. And he gives an example of something like JFK's invasion of the Bay of Pigs, which was, you know, if you're not familiar, jfk, early in his presidency, tried to basically invade Cuba with a bunch of like, Cuban, like, what would you call them, immigrants? And he basically gave them license, like, yeah, we're going to try to invade Cuba. And. And it turned out to be a disaster. It didn't work at all. A bunch of people got killed. Hugely embarrassing. And the reaction from the press was basically like, oh, man, that's too bad. We'll get him next time. You know, he's a young president, he's learning, he's growing into the role. Like they basically were just fully covering for him. And can you imagine the United States trying to like and failing to invade a country in the year of our Lord 2026? And the press just, oops, well, we'll get them next time, like it would be. And currently it kind of is, given the, given the debacle that we have in Iran and how badly that's hitting Trump's popularity right now. Basically the press just used to cover for people. You know, you can also think about, like fdr, that there is kind of this gentleman's agreement. We're just not going to talk about how FDR has polio and can, can barely stand up and might be on his deathbed. We're just not going to mention it because it would be unamerican to do that. That kind of respect or that kind of just informal agreement doesn't exist today. Social media makes it impossible. And so the result of this is that people are constantly being bombarded with the failures of the elites, the failures of the institutions. They are constantly angry about it. They don't have much of an idea what to do with all that anger. This is kind of the defining feature of a lot of these movements, like Occupy Wall street, like the Arab Spring, is that they know what they are against. They don't really know what they are for. The Arab Spring was not for anything in particular. Some people wanted liberal democracy, some people wanted Islamism, some people wanted an entirely separate set of things. Occupy Wall street was, you know, united by anger, but had no real policy agenda. And you can see the same thing when you look at, like, Brexit or Trumpism. These are movements primarily against something that are not really unified in what they are for. They just know that they're very angry and they know that they need to toss out the bastards who are in charge and we'll see what happens afterwards. And that's kind of, you know, I think the media environment has a lot to do with this in terms of why people are so dis satisfied all the time about everything.
- [22:29]
B
It has been a long winter, but now finally summer is here. As I'm recording this in New York, it really feels like mid July and I'm trying to figure out what to wear. When I'm just going to the gym. I usually just wear a Persuasion T shirt which looks pretty good. But when I want to go to a social occasion and look nice but not overly form formal, I always struggle to figure out what I should wear. Well, I have started wearing really nice linen pants and shirts from a company called Quince. They are perfect for the summer season. They are really nice and soft but lightweight. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% cheaper than comparable brands. A few weeks ago I got a lovely 100% European linen relaxed long sleeve shirt. It's really casual but elegant and I've been wearing it through our mini Heatwave. I strongly recommend it. If you want to look good without spending a fortune, Quince is the way to go. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com Good fight for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com Good fight for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quinns.com Good fight yeah, Martin Gruy's World Republic is a really interesting book. I've had him on the podcast for a couple of conversations, so if people are interesting they should go and look out those episodes. I think the thing that is quite persuasive in Martin's book is the somewhat nihilistic impact this might have where the ability of what he calls the periphery of these self organizing publics or these people who come together for some cause very quickly and they might also very quickly dissipate to take on power to challenge hierarchies is really strong. But the ability to actually organize and impose a structure of their own or to coherently put forward an alternative program is really weak. And so what you get is this lurching from one thing or another and there's a kind of nihilistic carnivalesque element to it. I think that's quite persuasive. I mean, in terms of movement you talked about, I guess I would quibble a little bit and say that there's distinctions between them. Occupy Wall street was a set of people who had somewhat unified politics, though with important differences between them. But it's not very concrete vision because they wanted to Occupy Wall street and make Wall street go away. And it's just not really clear what that means. It's not really clear what they want to put in its place. And a bunch of them were influenced by a kind of utopian socialist thinking, which honestly, compared to where a lot of the progressive spaces are today, feels sort of charmingly quaint. But that thought that it's impossible to really make an alternative to the current system within the system. And so it would take a democratic revolutionary process to figure that out. And so somewhat deliberately, we don't want to offer you that alternative now. So I think that really was an example of a movement that just didn't really have a clear alternative in its mind. I would, I guess, argue with something like the Arab Spring was different because a lot of the people who took part in the Arab Spring did have very, very clear visions of what they wanted. It's just different visions, right. The one thing that they were united around was, was we want to get rid of these often old, always corrupt, kind of Mariban dictators who've been dominating our country for a long time. And they could have a coalition around that shared goal. But what we want to put in this place was just, you know, there were some people who generally wanted liberal democracy, and there's other people who wanted kind of Muslim Brotherhood style soft Islamic government. There were others who probably wanted an even more fundamental Islamist government and so on. So there. It's not like nobody had an idea of what they wanted. It's just they all had different ideas about what they wanted, which is, I think, a slightly different problem. But I want to connect all of this to a question of liberalism. And in a way, these are two separate questions. We've been thinking about legitimacy of institutions. And our institutions are in certain respects liberal, but in other respects not perfectly liberal. And so it's a slightly different topic, but I do think that liberalism faces a similar set of problems because people associate liberalism with the status quo and because part of our political orders have been built by liberalism. A lot of what's good in our world is because, and insofar as it actually lives up to liberal principles and precepts, the trouble that liberals have in defending their ideas is, I think, a little bit related to the trouble that institutions have in sustaining some kind of Respect for them, some kind of approval for them? Because again, in the debate, it seems like on social media, whether you're clobbering liberalism from the left or whether you're clobbering liberalism from the right, it's very easy to say everything is terrible. And the person who's pointing out, you know what, actually zoomers are buying apartments at higher rates than previous generations, or perhaps actually there are some pretty good things in our world compared to any other epoch in human history just don't have standing in that debate. Is that an inherent feature of liberalism as a political ideology or just of our political order being somewhat liberal and therefore representing the status quo and being mistrusted? Or. Or is it the thought of liberals for not knowing how to use social media, not knowing how to argue for their positions on social media? And you're obviously well placed to speak to that question as somebody who's really thought about how to argue for liberal points of view in the daily battle of social media.
- [28:37]
A
So there's a lot to unpack there. And I don't think this is an inherent feature of liberalism that it's just destined to lose arguments on social media. But I do think that there's an inherent feature of social media that benefits extremist ideologies, basically, that extremism in virtually all of its forms is inherently more viral and more algorithmically beneficial than moderation. And liberalism has not always been kind of the moderate option. There were points in history where to be a liberal was to be on one of the extreme ends of the political spectrum, right, where liberalism was a very revolutionary form of politics. The thing is, that's no longer the case. As you said, for all intents and purposes in the west, philosophical liberalism has built virtually all of our institutions. And liberals were the great Victors of the 20th century in terms of, you know, winning the Cold War, winning World War II. And so they are the ones who are poised to lose in a new system that basically basically just it makes it such that whatever is currently in power is likely to be tossed out. One of the ways I like to think about this, when I think about kind of extremism on the Internet, I feel like it sometimes makes sense to use like a non political example because say you're on YouTube and you're bored and you're kind of just surfing through YouTube and you see something about like, I baked a four pound cake. It's really big. Would you click on that? Yeah, maybe not, it's not that interesting. But what about, I baked a 40 pound cake. What about, I baked the world's largest cake. Guinness world record, a 400 pound cake. You're more likely to, to do that. And this holds true for basically any form of video. If you look at like the world's most popular social media influencer, it's a guy named Mr. Beast who is a YouTuber. And his whole thing is that he just does really, really big things. His first viral, his first viral video was. Yeah, his first viral video ever, when he first kind of broke out as a star, was he got $10,000 from his first like big endorsement, his birth, his first big brand deal. And he said, give me $10,000 and I'm just going to go give it to a random homeless person on the street. I promise it'll go viral. And it did. It went like super insanely viral. And so the next video, he gave $20,000 to a random homeless person and then $50,000 and then he just bought a house and gave it to somebody on the street, said, you're not homeless anymore, here's a house, you can have it. And he just kept going and going and going. He kept going bigger and bigger and bigger and he became the world's biggest influencer. He has something like half a, I'm sorry, not half a million, half a billion followers on YouTube. I think he's about to hit 500 million. And that's his entire ethos is never go small when you could go big. Always do something bigger than the last thing you did. You know, the Internet has done this in a lot of ways. Like if you're a spicy food enthusiast, you know, pre Internet, you might know one or two restaurants that had really spicy food, or you might subscribe to some really niche magazine, you know, hot sauce magazine, where maybe you would read about like a really thing, a really spicy sauce you could order by mail, right? But these days you can go online and see, oh, they've been breeding the Carolina Reaper ghost pepper X thing. That is like, you know, 10 trillion Scoville units. You can go watch them breed the hottest thing that's ever existed in the world. You can order it instantly, literally. You can chart the spiciness of the most spicy pepper over time and it's gone off the charts. And this is just what the Internet does. The Internet pushes everything to its extremes. It's also doing that in our politics. Which political message do you think goes more viral if you post something that says, you know, look, the world is fucking burning man and we're all gonna die in the next 30 years from climate change and the oligarchs have screwed us. And it's the reason you can't get ahead is all these greedy people who are just looting the world while it burns to the ground. Or, you know, a message that says, well, look, climate change is a serious problem and some people are certainly going to be harmed by it, but if we have the right policies, we can mitigate that harm. And wouldn't you know, society will probably be fine in the end and economic growth will probably continue. And it's doing okay right now. And half of you have already fallen asleep. Like, the first one goes incredibly Viral. You know, 10,000 celebrities quote it and he's saying, so true, so true. And you know, the other one gets maybe seven total likes. And this is just a feature of how algorithms work. Things that, you know, inspire you to respond inherently go more viral.
- [33:49]
B
So how do you think about pushing that reasonable message in a way that is more exciting? Because that's. You started a bunch of accounts called neoliberalism and other things that. I don't want to presume your opinion about climate change, but I'm guessing that the boring message you just gave is a message you in fact believe in. So is it just, Are we just doomed? Is that message just never going to cut through? You don't seem to think it's doomed because you seem to think it is, in fact worth engaging on Twitter, on Reddit, on all kinds of other platforms, trying to push out that more boring, more middle ground message if you believe it to be true. So is it a question of repackaging that? Is it engaging in the fight? But, you know, you're always going to be at a disadvantage and probably we're going to lose, but it's worth at least trying. Like, what's your rationale and how would, how do you go about doing that?
- [34:46]
A
I think we're always going to be at a structural disadvantage. And by we, I don't necessarily even mean liberals, but just anyone who tries to offer nuance and depth and kind of reasonableness that wants to provide a message that plays towards, you know, factual reality rather than emotional reality. There's always going to be a structural disadvantage. It doesn't mean that you can't win, but it does mean that you're playing, you know, starting at a disadvantage. And so you have to take certain steps, right? Like, the reason this all exists is because social media rewards the opposite of nuance. It rewards really quick actions, really quick reactions and thoughts, and, you know, like, swipe, like it again, Swipe again. Sometimes I like to think back to like what media was like in a previous era. I think back to like the, the Lincoln Douglas debates, for instance. For instance, to go all the way back to like pre Civil War. This was like the hottest thing happening in 1858. But like Lincoln Douglas, these debates were national news. They were the front page of every single newspaper. In terms of like, who won this latest debate, you know, what were the arguments and you know how they were structured was one guy would give an hour long speech uninterrupted, the second guy would give a 90 minute rebuttal and then the first guy got to come up again for like 30 more minutes to give his 30 minute closing. And this was to packed, not stadiums, because they didn't have stadiums, but to packed venues. Like, people's attention spans were such that they were riveted by this. They could not fit enough people in to hear them. Today, our political discourse, you know, has devolved from that to, you know, the kind of Will Buckley vs. Noam Chomsky debates, to CNN Crossfire, to just 10 second out of concept, out of context clips on social media. So, you know, the age of nuance is dead to some extent. But there are some things you can do. You can kind of create these little islands of quality. I think the fact that social media is structurally against nuance doesn't mean that nuance will never survive anywhere. There are still going to be people who care about it. And you can create communities of people that actually still want to understand the world in a realistic way. And I think those communities are what allows you to get your message out, that you have to build a group of people that cares about something, whether that's, you know, in a subreddit, in a Discord server, in a substack newsletter, whether it's listening to podcasts like this, people who actually care about, you know, the world as it really exists, and nuanced, complicated, complex questions that can't be answered in 10 seconds. If you can get those people and keep them and convince them that you're not just an individual, you are part of this group that I have created. This is part of your identity. Now that's really powerful. And I think that's part of what happens. It's part of what we're trying to do at the center for New Liberalism is build an identity around that kind of politics, because identity is really powerful.
- [38:19]
B
That's really interesting. I think there's a few slightly different questions that feel identical but actually are importantly distinct here and it's important to keep them apart. So one question is, are the extremes, the people who are angry, the people who are loudest, the people who are least subtle, always going to dominate certain social media platforms, particularly ones that are especially political. And that seems like.
- [38:42]
A
Right.
- [38:42]
B
It seems likely to me that Twitter by its nature is always going to be dominated by the most.
- [38:48]
A
I don't know if they'll always win, but they will always have an advantage, is what I would say.
- [38:52]
B
Yeah, I guess the question is what is winning and what is having an advantage as well. Right. So what I mean is, is the most viral tweet often going to be pretty extreme? I think probably yes. I guess that's different from whether or not the tweet actually persuades people and convinces people. Right. And part of it, of course, is that the people who are on Twitter exposed to political content are already quite a small percent percentage of a population. Most people tend to seek out social media that is much less political in its orientation, and then they might encounter political content every now and again. It matters what that is. But the people who are on Twitter, if you have a Twitter account, and when you look at your Twitter account, most of it isn't sports or gossip, but it's political tweets, you are in a very self selected minority of the population. So that's an important thing to kind of bear in mind. The other thing that I was wondering about, I guess, is whether there might not at some point be a kind of course correction in norms and expectations. I mean, there was a while when it was enough for three or four people to claim that they were terribly offended by some exhibit or play or movie or speech for that to go super viral, for the New York Times to write up, you know, the controversy in very neutral terms and for the thing to get canceled. Right. You know, there was a while where you could post a 10 second video of somebody seemingly misbehaving without any context and everybody would credulously jump on the bandwagon and say, that must be a terrible human being. And eventually people kind of got the message right. They realized that this is just inviting conflict entrepreneurs to gin up, you know, completely spurious cancellation attempts. That a lot of the time, you know, the 10 second video comes from a five minute context in which somebody was antagonizing someone for four minutes, 50 seconds. And all you captures the 10 seconds where they can't take it anymore. Right. And nowadays, I think not always, but quite often when people post that kind of content, the median response is not, oh yes, of that with a hat. But, well, why is it only 10 seconds? What about the rest of it? Right. People have become a little bit smarter about it, and I think the appetite for that kind of social media drama has somewhat abated. I don't want to overstate the point. There's still a lot of social media bullshit, but it does feel like people have gained some kind of literacy. So I guess I wonder whether at some point something similar is going to happen with extreme political views and statements where some people are going to say, oh, my God, it's another person breathlessly making this exaggerated claim, and just many more people are going to roll their eyes or perhaps push back against them. We might not, over time, learn to adapt to it in ways that lessen that advantage. But is that overly optimistic?
- [41:48]
A
I think it might be, to be honest, and I have my own optimistic angle, but I think it's just a feature of social media that unless we change the way that algorithmic feeds are constructed, unless we change the way that TikTok operates, that Instagram Reels operates, that Twitter operates on a very fundamental level, and Facebook too, people still use Facebook. It's very. Among the older generations, it's still very influential. But unless we literally change the nature of algorithms, what's the saying? A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes? I think that's just necessarily true. And the same goes for negative information versus positive information. Scientifically, we've studied this. We know that negative information is more viral than positive information. So in terms of just the way that our information systems are set up, I do think we're always going to be operating at a disadvantage. We might still win certain battles, but we're going to be the underdogs a lot. Now, where I am a little bit more optimistic is that I think we can't spend the entire time thinking about this problem just in terms of messaging, because the other thing that actually influences how people feel is reality on the ground. And I do think that when things are, you know, you do enough good for a long enough time, people do notice. You know, I've kind of been talking about how, like, look, things are good, but people believe they're bad. But even in that context, if you do enough, people start to notice, hey, my life is kind of improving. My life is getting a little better. Look, I got this, you know, I got this check. During the pandemic, the checks were very, very popular. Now, did they help Joe Biden get reelected? No, because they went out, you know, three and a half years before he, before the reelection campaign. But there is a sense in which, like, I don't want to make the case so strong that, like, oh, material reality just doesn't even matter anymore. It still actually does matter when you don't deliver for people, as Trump is currently not delivering. For instance, Trump was reelected largely on the back of cost of living, and he is making the cost of living crisis worse in terms of how people perceive it. He started a war with Iran, so gas prices are spiking. He's implementing tariffs all over the place so consumer products are more expensive. People notice, and he's less popular than he's ever been. And the hope, obviously, is that if we can elect someone with better principles than Trump to succeed him, with liberal principles, and they can reverse some of the damage, that in the end, you know, people will actually notice that, oh, we've actually started fixing, fixing problems, and that that leads to a virtuous cycle rather than the kind of damaging cycle that we're in now.
- [45:03]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a Good Fight. And in the rest of this conversation, we get concrete. I asked Jeremiah, what actually can moderates, can philosophical liberals do on social media to enter the debate in a way that is productive, that builds community, that stands up for nuanced values? And how is it that we can build an institutional environment where there's space for liberal ideas in a world that feels increasingly hostile to these ideas? At a moment in which big parts of the right and significant parts of the left are abandoning philosophically liberal values, what does it take to create a set of fighting institutions like persuasion that can actually argue for these values? Listen to that part of the conversation. To support the work we do here, go to writing.jaschambunk.com listening. Sam.