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The Realignment
573 | Danielle Lee Tomson: The Story & Authenticity Gap - Why the Center-Left Keeps Losing the Plot
01:20:28
Danielle Lee Tomson, author of the forthcoming Under the Influence: What's Real When America Feels Fake, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Danielle discuss the right's multi-decade project of participatory, oppositional media, and why the effort culminated in President Trump's 2024 election victory. They unfavorably contrast the center-left's post-2024 response, with its focus on top-down marketing, "ideas" disconnected from a broader story and understanding of the country, highlight the importance of storytelling when it comes to creating the "common sense" that oppositional movements require, and compare and contrast the worldviews and stories of the left, right, and center.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today's episode is about something we talk about a lot lately on the realignment the story gap between the center, the populist left, and the populist right. My guest, Danielle Lee Thompson, is a writer and strategist who's worked at the University of Washington's center for an Informed Public and has spent years studying conservative media, from Steve Bannon's world to the overall influencer ecosystem. She also has a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, under the Influence, what's Real When America Feels Fake. She also has a really great substack that I really enjoy reading and recommend you all check out. In this conversation, we dig into the Right's alternative media ecosystem and argue that it didn't just go viral in 2024, coming out of nowhere on the backs of big donors. Instead, the right alternative media ecosystem, in Danielle's telling, is it's the culmination of decades of participatory oppositional culture building. At the same time, liberal institutions keep trying to solve this story problem with marketing polls, focus groups, attention hacks, and new publications and think tanks. We get into the ways that those approaches, while necessary, will not build the overall picture. We get into her writing on authenticity, vibes versus ideology, what Obama's America built and lost when it got forwarded into the dnc, and why philanthropy faces a lot of challenges when it comes to approaching this space.
- [01:39]
B
I really enjoy this conversation.
- [01:41]
A
I haven't spent much time actually speaking with a person who deeply studies communications. At a theoretical level, I'd say we probably have the realignment's highest rate of scholars and academics referenced, but lots of interesting things to check out, and Danielle did a great job of signposting. So hope you all enjoy the conversation.
- [02:02]
B
Danielle Lee Thompson, welcome to the Realignment.
- [02:05]
C
Thanks for having me, Marshall.
- [02:07]
B
I'm really excited to chat with you so folks will know I've been riffing on a bunch of broad topics, specifically on stories and understanding the country over the past eight months, really? And I haven't really found a way to coherently present it. But then I got in touch with you on a totally separate matter and your writing and focus on stories and authenticity and populism. Looking at the right from sort of a center or left perspective is entirely what I do. And because you're an academic, you do this better than I do. So I was really excited to chat with you and kind of build out this space because I think this is where everyone should be spending their time and limited attention. So let's just start here. Can you introduce yourself and your background? Because you do so many different things that I want to make sure people get the right specific understanding of you.
- [02:57]
C
Sure. No, I've definitely been on a journey in the past couple years. So primarily I'm a writer and strategist. During the last election I was the research manager at the University of Washington center for an Informed Public. But through the years I've been working on a large doctoral project at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, which was basically an ethnography of conservative social media influencers, which is like basically hanging out with Steve Bannon and like right wing influencers, but also had a history. It kind of came up in the civic tech scene in New York. So I am this weird intersection of tech, politics, media, and that's where I am.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, that's really helpful. So a couple questions that come out of that background. So a, my second question is going to be just like what drew you into studying conservatism in the first place? But the question comes to mind before that is what are the differences between the established right wing influencer ecosystem and the emerging Democratic left wing one? Because obviously the podcast election and the TikTok election attention, influence has caused a lot of attention to be really poured into that space from a left wing or Democratic party perspective. But if, and I'm not trying to be a dick here, but if I were just to say, frankly, as someone who also studied influencers on the right and knows quite a few of them, I would say a big problem that I find with the left wing and Democratic influencers outside of the populist, populist left, people who aren't actually aligned with the Democratic Party, is that the Democratic Party's establishment version seems to lack juice to, you know, say it the way the Gen Zs would say it. So that's my takeaway by looking at the space, but I'd love to hear how you would compare these two spaces.
- [04:44]
C
Yeah, I mean the main thing I think about is that on the right it's not just this wasn't the podcast or the influencer election. This, this was the apotheosis of a generations of work in like participatory alternative media that's been going on since, since the New Deal. The right is interested in cultivating networks of thinkers and ideas and personalities that offer an oppositional view to the mainstream. Like you could say it's the entire political strategy of the right is alternative media. Whereas which my friend and colleague A.J. bauer has called it. It's like the raison d' et of the conservative movement in some ways. And then the left or liberals, I feel they view it as marketing, as advertising. Like they don't see communications as this interactive thing in the same way they see it as a story that they can like cultivate and test and message at it's very broadcast. And that difference, that participatory nature, that oppositional and transgressive nature, that's the core difference between from that, you know, kind of directional marketing advertising, one that you see more on the left, that's changing as people are realizing it and just reacting to the reality that we're living in now. But that's how I see it.
- [06:00]
B
Yeah, and I like the way you put it. Because if I were to critique the Democratic Party's last second after the election, let's throw this together thing, it's very top down. So it's the political piece, the $100 million project to find the next Joe Rogan or the DNC launching a YouTube channel in the sort of style of a creator. And I think what the left gets wrong here, and I need to be very precise because on this episode specifically, these different ideological and political party things actually matter. So I shouldn't say the left here. What I would say the liberal center left establishment gets wr is they will say to themselves, well, isn't the Daily Wire top down? The Daily Wire has gotten huge investments. There's all sorts of like big things there. And that is true. But as you pointed out in your intro, the Daily Wire, while a top down thing, is the culmination of a 50 year project. So you can't tell the story of Ben Shapiro. And Ben Shapiro being a child prodigy who graduates from Harvard Law School when he's still in his teens and then gets put into position to actually get a media company in the first place. He then goes to Breitbart. He then gets the Daily Wire that just focusing on the fact that he received hundreds of millions of dollars of investment later on is a totally different thing. You can't tell Ben Shapiro's story without telling the story of Dinesh d' Souza back when he was a Dartmouth Review person, where him and Coulter, a bunch of these right wing figures, were getting started on a campus newspaper that was once again, to your point, an oppositional, anti establishment thing. And then you have to focus on William F. Buckley. This is why I did the Sam Tenenhaus episode. He gets started as a conservative, conservative member of the conservative establishment. But his first Book God and Man at Yale is a critique of the liberal higher education establishment. So there's just this like huge gap in terms of what these two left and right projects are kind of capable of doing.
- [07:51]
C
Yeah, totally. I mean, you could even go back even further to around the New Deal and like Charles Mannion and like Mannion Forum and just like the ways in which certain ideas were Left out of 20th century liberal, like consensus or New Deal consensus, centrist consensus. Like that includes the sort of socialist left which just got pummeled. Right. It was surveilled by the state. You have this red scare thing going on, but then you have this right wing apparatus as well, and those ideas that get left out, like Charles Mannion, Father Coquelin, like Nicole Hemmer and Messengers on the right does this really well. A great historian of contemporary conservatism. So you can really go all the way back and. And if you don't sort of see the instincts, like almost the habits, the ritual in conservatism to oppose that centrist consensus, oppose that mainstream, you could call it hegemony. If you want to get Gramshy about it, you can. That's where that instinct lies, which doesn't exist in the same way on the centrist left, in part because they've sort of had control of like the main institutions of knowledge production, which, you know, a lot of people in the alt right, as you'll say, will like to call the cathedral, you know, Hollywood and the academy and the press and all these things. And there's a little bit of truth to some of it, but it's definitely now breaking apart, sort of unwinding, if you will. But you can't understand this story as just an influencer, like in the past 10 years thing.
- [09:26]
B
What's so helpful about what you just said is that what makes conservative alternative media and populist left alternative media really work is once again, to your point, like this opposition to the culture. That's the whole point. It's alternative that naturally gives you a story, something we'll get into later, but just a sort of authentic way of presenting this and hearing the history that you just told me. My conclusion would be left liberal centrist alternative media will probably work in a 2000 and 30s world where, let's say JD Vance wins the presidency in 2028, because if you get two Trump terms and then a JD or a Marco Rubio or whoever, presidency at that point, culture, higher education, all those different dynamics will so clearly lean into the right or have to accommodate the right that you won't look around in the world of 2031 in America and think like, man, these libs are just like in char charge of everything. And if I'm remotely pissed off, I need to blame liberals. You're also kind of giving an explanation for why I'm sure you saw this. We'll talk about this a little later. But Third Way put out their big new report on all these different words Democrats can't say. And one of the responses that I think it's a fair response from an academic perspective to these different words. So like overton window, lots of like woke words, et cetera. Lots of people say, when was the last time you actually heard a Democratic politician say any of these words? And like, yes, it's true, but like we could probably find like specific cases, especially in 2019, 2020. But at a broad level, you really don't see Democrats rolling around like using the certain words that were cited. So people say like this Third way list, while cringe and embarrassing, is just inaccurate because Democrats aren't saying these things. The thing is though, people who are perceived as Democrats, professors, activists, social media influencers, et cetera, are perceived as saying those words. And because alternative media and the MAGA right are not just attacking Democrats, but actually attacking this broad culture, that's why Democrats get hit for it. Because that's the key thing about like maga. It's attacking like the broad cultural dynamic.
- [11:38]
C
Yeah, they're attacking a kind of common sense that's no longer common, quite frankly. And I think that could even go into a little bit of the conversation of like, what is really going on right now. And it's like for an entire generation, you had a conservative movement that was trying to create an alternative worldview to the system and the common sense of 20th century liberalism. Right. And it wasn't until I call this in my book and on my substack what I call the authenticity gap. It's like there's a story of how reality works, a common sense. You go to school, you get a job, you work hard, you have a pension, you can have kids, you retire and you live a good life and the state's going to help you and you're going to help the state. Right. That's the story of how reality works. But when our story of how reality works doesn't align with our lived experiences or our expectations of reality, there's like a break, like an epistemic break that happens. And I call that the authenticity gap. It's feels like something isn't working. The stories and the truth that I've been told don't line up to my reality. And all of a sudden someone else comes in and fills that gap for you. And I think that's what MAGA did. That's what a lot of these right wing influencers and conservative media personalities did. And they explained a new way and it was a very aspirational way of how the world screwed them over. How all these people, you know, the financial crisis, the war on terror, like what you name it, happen, hurt us and the state and the powerful and the elites didn't have our back. And so we're going to come in and offer a new vision for how the world can work. And sometimes that vision is a little squishy, right? But the diagnosis feels right. The, the, the story feels commonsensical. And so that's like the project of worldview building. It's like that, you know, Arlie Hochschild from Strangers in Their Own Land calls it the deep story. Other people call it like common sense. You know, you could call it like the changing of political order, like Gary Gersell, you could call it, you know, Gramsc is downstream from culture. We could go on and on and on, like even Thomas Kuhn and the scientific, like paradigm shifts, right? There's something changing about how common sense works. That's something that you cannot message your way out of. That's not something that you're going to go and ab test or pull like you can, but it's not something that's going to be developed by like the powers that be. This is, we need more Dewey, you know, like more democratic deliberation. Les Lippman, you know, expert, coming down on high, telling you how it's going to be. And so I think that's like the core interest of my work is like what feels real and what feels authentic in these moments is in part something that is in opposition. There's actually this amazing 20th century philosopher, Charles Taylor, who writes about the ethics of authenticity. And he says authenticity is about, you feel, the creation or destruction of an existing way of how the world works. It's original and it opposes mainstream nors and morality. Like that's what authenticity is. It's inherently transgressive. So if you're out here trying to defend the old order like you're not authentic. And so like the, like you call it the Dems or the centrist left or whatever. If you're trying to defend something that it already feels stale and old, like it's always going to fall flat because it's not like that oppositional, that new common sense thing, that world building exercise. And that's just not like, that's like a very holistic project. And I know I just threw a lot at you, so.
- [15:27]
B
Well, no, I want to pick up on the story thing because of the story thing. So when I came across your writing, I instantly knew I wanted to book you and that we were going to be friends because in sort of the way that people think about rarely does anyone truly on their own, like the single unitary person, develop like an idea, because ideas are like products of their times and their products of dynamics. So you and I both actually came across and you developed years further. You wrote it down on a substack first. So I'm not trying to claim co equal partnership here, but you and I were both thinking hard about this story question. And my version on the record here is I was at welcome Fest. So that's the big sort of center centrist Dem, moderate Dem convening. And I was interviewing Representative Jake Auchincloss and Derek Thompson about the Abundance Agenda. And just sort of watching the eight hours previously of programming, I just was kind of like struck by something which is just sort of like I don't really know what story's being told here. So I just said to them the following question. I said, look, we're at a centrist convening. You're an abundance author, Derek. Jake, you're sort of known as the Democratic Party's millennial ideas guy. I'd be really curious in what story you would tell about the country right now. And I know this because of breaking points, because of the fact that I'm in post neoliberal circles. I spent a lot of time with a genuinely deep ideological bunch of people. So I could just say if you are on the populist right, the MAGA story is super easy to that and easy to tell doesn't mean that it's simple or that you could just come up with it real quick. To your point, this is a product of 50 years of work. But the MAGA story actually is basically since the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the Clinton presidency, the American political elite and the institutions that they control have just basically screwed over the entire country. They've made mistake after mistake after mistake. And these leaders and their institutions and their control of the culture is so pervasive and unredeemable that the answer is not to reform them. It's not to sort of bargain with them or make bipartisan deals or form a New consensus. It's actually, they need to be, like, uprooted. And that's what we're going to do. And if you just think about the story they just told, that naturally leads you to, okay, make America. Make, Make America great again. Because what you're saying is, oh, before the 1990s, things were kind of working. So they used to be great. It used to be something that, especially if you're looking at Trump's older voters, they would really resonate with or nostalgia driven, like Zoomers, Gen, some millennials, that would make sense. And then if you say maga, MAGA policies kind of like emerge from that. So, okay, so we're going to do a trade war, we're going to do tariffs, we're going to pull out of NATO, we are going to build a wall. I really don't like when people describe MAGA as not being policy driven or not being serious in that sense. Because once again, we went from a story on the right to a slogan identity that's different than the Republican Party. And then critically, you then take that slogan and if you're just totally lowbrow, you could say, yeah, make America great again. I love that. To your point of authenticity, like a person who would say, that is what I'd want to support, or if you're in the ideas industry, you're a Hill staffer or a think tank person or a philanthropist, you could say, okay, so if the idea is that the elites broke this country and things used to be better, what are some policies or ideas that I could promote to pass that would stem from sort of that story, that slogan and that thing, the populist left version, to keep it, you know, simple and short, is just basically, hey, since the 1990s, the Democratic Party has become increasingly captured by capital, and they've been increasingly captured by the diploma educated members. They've abandoned the unions, They've weirdly gotten to this is 2016, Bernie. But they've gotten, like, weirdly too woke because everything is determined in the faculty lounge. They bailed out the banks, no one wants to jail, the Iraq war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Both the populist left and populist right just have a story to tell. And when I asked this question to Jake and Derek, they both said explicitly, like, well, Derek said that he doesn't think stories are important, which I think is a huge mistake. And then Jake said he didn't have a story, but he thinks that the story will come about via the Democratic primary in 2028, a contest of ideas, which I just actually don't think is true. I'm really monologuing here. And the monologue, the reason why, and you hear this from a bunch of centrist Dems that basically the contest of ideas will be in 2028 and let's focus the attention then. The reason why this won't happen is that a. You can only do contests of ideas put aside whether ever truly has been a contest of ideas. A contest of ideas in a debate sense only works if both sides are equal. So you could have James Baldwin and William Buckley arguing about Southern segregation at Oxford in 1965, because two of them are some of the most brilliant polemicists of their generation and agree or disagree with them, who are matched intellectually and at an ability level. But the problem from the Democratic Party is that Jake Auchincloss knows way more about policy than I would say basically most of like the left populist crew. I think they are better storytellers than he is, but he knows more about policy. So no one is. Everyone has kind of like one advantage in this thing, but there's not actually a process where we're going to really see just sort of okay, so we choose that idea because this was like a fair fight. Also, some people like Pete Buttigieg, I say Pete BUTTIGIEG of the 2028 candidates, probably is the best combination of storyteller and policy wonk. Guess what? Pete's polling of 0% of black voters, South Carolina is the first primary. He's not going to actually have that much time to tell his story and find a contest of ideas. So I just threw a lot at you. But I'd love for you to write talk about this story gap within the center left, like liberal project side of things.
- [21:15]
C
Sure. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast?
- [21:18]
B
Yeah, go for it.
- [21:19]
C
You know, I have a sort of litmus test sometimes for how, like, what is a good story or a good idea or an interesting institution or project. And it comes down to this, like, does it fuck? Does it fuck or doesn't it fuck? And it's, it's. It sounds sort of silly and trite, but I jokingly, or not so jokingly say sometimes my whole project for the next like 10 years of my life is putting the lib back in libidinal. Like, we got to juicy up the idea of liberalism going back to what, you know, 20th century literary theorist Lionel Trilling called the primal imagination of liberalism. Liberalism is the idea that like a bunch of people with a bunch of different ideas can work and kind of come to an agreement of living with each other, that they're not going to kill each other based off of the idea that the state can serve and be constituted by and motivated by human happiness, that the state's there for human happiness. Not to like, go achieve some great thing or serve some God or serve some king, but like human happiness. That is a profound idea. And if you're not talking about what does it mean to be happy or live a meaningful life or a purposeful life, not just like, oh, do I have a house and a car and am I fed? Like, yeah, you need to have some basic ground level things. And I, and I do find it really interesting that these abundance types are all coming up through the housing policy scene and talking about this very essential, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing. Like, you need some housing, okay. And you also need some other things other than housing to motivate those ideas. Do you want to live in community? Do you want to live by yourself? Do you want to live within a walking distance of a community of your church, your God, a good store, fresh food, like, like organic stuff? It's not just like abundance. Buy a bunch of things, go to cvs, have everything available to you. It's like, are you in touch with the bodies and people and nature and ideas around you and is that even a value? Right. And I think that you and I both sort of came up through the right in some ways. And you know, I'll give you a little bit of history that's really important to my personal context. Like, I was born in western Pennsylvania, very close to, I can say this now, the town where Trump got shot. Butler. Right, Butler, Pennsylvania. My family actually runs a dirt car racetrack out there. And the guy who died during was murder during the Trump assassination attempt, Corey Comprattore, like, volunteered every Friday at my family's dirt car track. So that's. And my family was in scrap metal and steel. And I was raised in a very conservative ecosystem. Like first in my, like first on the farm and my immediate family to go to college. And it was. And I went to Yale. So I had this huge moment of class ascension. And when I was growing up, everything was up for, you know, there was like a lot of vibrant debates. It was not a religious farm. It was more like capitalism. Let's celebrate Ayn Rand energy. But you know, it. It was a debate about like, do we have our needs met, but also do we feel like we're contributing to something, each other, our community and it had this very physical, like, vibe, right? And so fast forward to this problem of story. I remember when I was interviewing folks, I interviewed Steve Bannon's producer, Vishbura, who was really involved in the Hunter Biden laptop thing and worked for George Santos and Matt Gaetz and all this. And I remember trying to like, wheedle, like, what do you believe? Like, what, what, what is your ideology? And he's like, danielle, we don't have an ideology. We have vibes. And that always stuck with me because vibes are something that's really like, it's, it's connected to a story, right? Like, you can't just like have a coconut pilled vibe. And like that's going to constitute a story. Like Kamala Harris tried to do in 2024. Like, just catching a vibe is not enough. You do have to have some sort of story that that vibe points you back to. It's like, oh, I see that meme. It reminds me of maga. I see that rhetoric. It reminds me of, of this populist conspiracy theory, you know, tale, right? That's not so much of a conspiracy theory. It's kind of a. Can feel like a conspiracy sometimes. And so I think, like, going back to this question of story, if, if Derek Thompson wants to think, oh yeah, we, we just need these right Policies, Story's not important. It's sort of like, well, how are you going to get there? How are you gonna win an election? How are you going to get people to uphold those policies in a hometown? Like, how, how is that common sense? Sense? Your policy is not necessarily common sense to a lot of people in this country, sir. So you have to really create common sense. So I don't know how he expects to achieve power if there isn't that culturally rooted vibe, that sense of what's common and embodied and real. And I, forgive me if I sound sort of like the soothsayer of liberalism right now. And now we're gonna go chant some mantras and like, I'll read your tarot. But I think there's something to be said about that. That feeling, that spirit. And if you don't have it, it doesn't.
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B
Fuck, yeah. Build my PG version of that was the. Was the juice. But yours is a little more evocative. I think the. And this is why, you know, you referenced our time on the right. Like, this is like really, really important here because, you know, and you know, this, like Yale specifically as a college is very, very 20th century conservative. And I don't mean At a vibes level. I mean, there's like a lot of like, like actual institutions. There's the Yale Political Union, there's like the Buckley program, there's the grand strategy program that was very sort of framed around right conservative, like grand strategy ideas. So like most of actually the smart, intellectually minded conservatives that I met in D.C. who still went into policy, they all came through Yale. Like, I don't think you would be, even despite your like libertarian family roots, if you'd gone to Brown or if you'd gone to white. Columbia wouldn't have been like the same sort of dynamic. So that's very important. And the thing for me, and this is why the story thing is just crazy. So like, I've been through so many different conservative boot camps and programs and the number one thing they do that I see lacking within like the Liberal project and the Democratic Party broadly is these programs. Folks can look them up. There's plenty of them available. They're very good, very, very intelligent. Funnily enough, if you actually look at the stats of who attends them, there's usually like a decent like one fifth of the people going through a lot of these, especially right out of undergrad where actually like center left liberals, just because there's nothing like this for them. So like you find a weird mix of people. But the thing these things do is they say A at the entry level, they usually send you a copy of God a Man at you and they tell you that William F. Buckley, the father of modern American conservatism, started this movement and organized this movement when he was in his 20s and early 30s. So A, you don't have to wait in line. You contribute intellectually. And you specifically sitting in this classroom in 2016, 2017, you are an inheritor of this project against this broad liberal consensus establishment. And you're in this program because we expect you to build and contribute and write the next chapter of the story. And what's just been so funny is that as I've just been more explicit about just being centered left on this podcast, I've just gotten so many emails from people who they said, so, yeah, I'm center left. I originally listened to your podcast because you and Saga were more right wing because I just didn't really see anything happening on the center left that would let us into the project, would let us contribute, let us do different things. And critically, a lot of these people also applied for American Compass or in Cass's group. It's like so funny how many left liberal people I know tried to do American Compass because once again, American Compass is premised on the idea that like, hey, America's changed. And do you want to join this group of smart people who want to make America different? And they're not framing it as like, this is the GOP group, this is the Republican Party group. This is a group really rooted in ideas. And I think the more you come out of a world of ideas and movements and political philosophy, not in a pretentious, we need to say the classic sense, but just sort of like there is this thing called American conservatism that you're a part of. There is this thing called American liberalism. There was this guy, fdr, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson. They did some pretty big things and you were part of that tradition. I think when you talk about things that way, it's not quite got the sex part of the thing and as you're saying, but like it's at least like intellectually interesting versus like, hey, like come save the Democratic Party at a time that people are more and more uninterested in political parties is like the least sexy iteration of all these different things. And that's like a real problem to be thought through. So my thing here, and I want to talk about this with you, I would love to hear and I need to be very careful here because I'd love to have Jerusalem Dempsis on the podcast here. I don't want to make you speak outlets that you may try to write for someday. But one of my concerns with the argument, the new publication with a lot of Atlantic and Vox alums that launched this past month that was supposed to make that's doing what you're saying you're trying to do, which is like make the case for liberalism, is I think they've confused wonkery with ideas and the type of things that generate stories. So I don't think, and they're not doing explainers per se, but I just think the type of person who was drawn to work at Vox or who writes at the Atlantic, I'm just a little skeptical if that's quite the type of sort of framing or person that's going to sort of save American liberalism. So broadly speaking, the way I'll like make the question easier for you to understand is like how do we differentiate between ideas wonkery and story building things that build things like maga.
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C
Yeah, I mean, look, I am a product of the Yale Brady Johnson program of study and grand Strategy. Right. I totally get what you're saying there. And it was one of the few and I can't attest that I was at that time despite or because of my upbringing, conservative. But it was one of the few places at Yale at that time. This is like 2008 to 2012, that you could talk about ideas and like, what the good life is and the means and ends. Like, what is grand strategy? It is exploring all the different means to achieve a stated or slated end. And you had to be very clear about, like, kind of what is that end? Like, what are we doing this for? And I think a lot of people, when I similarly have been doing some work lately and interviewing folks in center left, left libs, and also some conservatives, and I asked, well, what are you doing this for? What's the point? You know? And you could say some values like, oh, freedom, equality, end. And even that language feels impoverished because it's just been captured like the right sort of drank the milkshake of liberalism in a way. And I say, an old colleague of mine used to say, it's a game. American politics is a game of capture the flag. And we mean that quite literally. It's a symbolic game. You need to own that flag. It's not just the ideas, it's not just the rhetoric, it's not just the story. It's also the symbols, the aesthetics, like where you go, how you show up the embodiment, which, which is also why I think Beyonce's Cowboy Carter is so, like, amazingly transgressive. Like this like black lady looking Dolly Parton on a white horse with a American flag. Like, that's incredible to me. She gets it. Like Beyonce gets the game here of capture the flag that we're in. So to go back to the argument, look, I think my sort of theory of culture, and a lot of people would say this too, is that you don't get. Get a mainstream culture without subculture. You need the wonks, you need the music nerds, you need the transgressive meansters, you need the debates, you need it all. It's not just one or the other. It's yes, and it's an improvisational game. But the minute you start saying like, oh, my thing is to the exclusion of yours, my policy wonkery is to the exclusion of your stories and vibes. You've lost because you're not using all the means to achieve your end, which is the grand strategy part of it, right? So unless we're really real with ourselves about those first order questions, and that's like the kind of ideas like, what is the good life? Is it a religious life? Is it a family life? Is it just living because your choice is available to you? Like, I'm a woman and thank God I can, can have a credit card and a job and a bank account. And for now, if I need to, like, you know, life saving, you know, abortion, healthcare in certain states, right? Like these are available to me. And the choice, if I pursue, we can have a conversation if I could or shouldn't or what is the good life, Right? But that's a first order thinking thing. And then you get to the, well, how do we do that? You know, what does that look like? The wonkery, the policy and surrounding all of that. You need, like the high and low, you need people in quote unquote, elite circles having these conversations, which it's no surprise to me that some of the main leaders of Republican and MAGA party politics, like J.D. vance or even Peter Thiel or Tom Cotton, these characters are coming out of the Ivy League. They are elites. They are combating and contesting who is a better elite in America. They're not asking who's like a better labor organizer in America or a better farmer in America. Like, that's not who they're putting on stage for. All the talk of forgotten man for the past 10 years from the right in 2025, on that inauguration stage, it was all tech CEOs and elites and I was like, oh, guess they forgot about the forgotten man, huh? Like, where'd he go? And I think, I hope that the argument remembers in all of this that yes, there is an elite conversation, a wonk conversation, a first order conversation that needs to be held in concert with these other kinds of conversations and with different styles and different aesthetics and different stories. I think, I think there's a reason people liked Bernie Sanders or, you know, like the Young Turks or this sort of thing, because it had a transgressive style that spoke in a language that people understood. And it's no surprise to me that like, the person who would bring about MAGA would be Donald Trump, a reality television show star who speaks the language of every single American, which is reality tv, you know, WWE pro wrestling, tabloids. It's like tabloid intellectualism. That's what it is. And so I, I'm not, I really hope that it's seen as like a package. Like something like the argument is seen as a package to a whole swath of other kinds of conversations that engage different styles and rhetorics and aesthetics and, and interests. And that's what this needs to be about. And I'm, I'm Sort of like, like do more. I want it all. And I wanted to interact with each other.
- [36:39]
B
Yeah. And I will say you really got to the core here because my beef actually isn't with the argument. I think a lot of my beef is with the, let's say, Democratic left, liberal philanthropy world. Because my real frustration is if I were to sort of whiteboard out the problem here, I would say that since the Obama era, there's been a dramatic over investment in punditry. So lots of new media companies, lots of substackers, lots of writers. Lorraine Powell Jobs buys the Atlantic and subsidizes it until it could actually work as a business, which it does now. And then you basically say, hey, wow, this Trump thing has happened and now we're going to launch a publication to make the argument for liberalism. But just coming from the right, that isn't how the right does things. The right has a really, to your point about grand strategy, the right, I think, thinks great. And this is the point of the piece you write about. The right thinks really grand, strategic in the sense that the right will explicitly say, and I've been in these seminars, some of you are writers, some of you are staffers, some of you are run for office types. Other of you are not writers, but you're the type of person who could be a publisher of a conservative magazine. Other of you are political hacks. And this is very explicitly the conversation that you have. What I have just seen is that the Democratic Party and institutions do not have that strong an understanding. And it's just led to an understanding understanding. And this is also why I'm really worried about all this talk about how, you know, obvious, like fads and philanthropy, like the big fad right now is attention. So you know, Chris Hayes has his big attention book. Ezra Klein has his big interview of Chris Hayes about attention. Kyla Scanlon, who I adore, is talking about attention, attention, attention, attention. The argument in its opening video says, like, attention's at the center of everything. That is true in a certain sense. But the problem with attention, and this is why I'm not particularly optimistic about this, I don't think liberal philanthropists and organizational leaders understand that when you say attention, you're actually preferencing your focus and your resources and efforts on certain types of people. So if attention is the central problem facing liberalism right now, if our inability to get attention in comparison to Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro is a problem, that means we're going to spend all of our time and resources, money, getting a bunch of astroturf influencers, or we're going to just fund, like a publication. I'll just say this because, like, I want to get more of these emails. I get so many emails from not famous, but could be famous people. And some famous people, usually in our 30 something cohort who are like, hey, what's the plan? What do I do? You talk about how you're like, trying to work towards building this next thing. Okay, cool, like, where do I sign up? What do I do? And these people are not writers. They're leadership types. Some of these people, like, hold lower level offices. Others are planning their runs in the next few years. Other of them are, like, work at companies, but these are major companies. They have a bunch of friends who are all asking, like, what do we do? I was talking to someone who works at a. I won't name the company, but like, he. He works at a big, like, Fortune 100 company and he's sort of like, yeah, I was just like, getting together with some of like, my doctor friends and my lawyer friends, and they live in PA and they were sort of like, we were just asking, like, man, this is like, really scary right now. We want to do something. If you're on the populist left, like, there's lots of things to do, right? They are very participatory. They. Their. Their thing is not. Like, unless you could write substacks or blog posts, we don't really have anything for you to do. Or you could donate. You could donate, but that's all the center left has because this crew of people are very Henry, like, upper income. So the thing is that you could donate and help us get more candidates. The populist left would say, like, a, like, you can door knock. B, you could join your DSA chapter C, you can do this, this, this, this and this. The populist right is the same way. Like, part of the reason why I was so attracted to the right. I came to D.C. in 2015. I did one of these conservative programs, and I didn't have an internship yet. And I just met Raihan Salaam at a talk. I walked up to him and Raihan saw the president of the Manhattan Institute. And I was like, hey, I read your book back in high school. He was like, cool, let's get coffee tomorrow. We got coffee. And then a month later, with me just being literally a random intern, I was on the reform conservative listserv. All these incredibly impressive people. That's participatory. There were things to do. That's how I met J.D. vance, before J.D. vance was famous. This is a reality that exists and this is what I'm really getting at when I'm critiquing. Once again, it's not the argument, but my real frustration, I think people have basically voiced to me for having the actual argument is that unless you are quite literally running for Congress right now in a moderate swing district, or you have money, or you can write the center left liberal establishment quite literally has nothing for you to do. And that's really damning a huge problem that I see no focus on. I. If you're putting $4 million into the argument, I don't understand why there isn't a million dollars into a left version, a center left liberal version of American Compass that says, hey, are you a smart like 20 or 30 something and you want to give good new ideas? Like a lot of these orgs talk about how like they're going to, you know, launch new ideas. There's the Project 2029, but Project 2029, no offense, I'd love to have you guys on the podcast sometimes. Neera Tanden and Jake Sullivan are on the board. Right. That's just to put put aside the. Should we be elevating people from failed administrations into prime facing things that sends a signal that our movement isn't about bringing in new voices and new people. Rather, our movement exists to serve our movement and you can get in line and then maybe in 15 years after you go through a couple administrations, then you have a voice. And just like the populous left in Poppy Star, just total opposite. And it's been very, it's been very disheartening, but disheartening to see this, see, to really just like emerge and see this.
- [42:19]
C
No, I totally hear you there. Well, it goes back to that authenticity thing because you're bringing in the ancient regime to whatever is next. People don't feel it's authentically responding to the needs of now and what people are yearning for. And I, I totally feel you on that. I think part of it is too maga and the populist right also embraced in some ways and didn't entirely just kick out rhinos, they converted them. And there was a conversion process that happened there or a collaboration process. And yeah, definitely look at John Bolton. He's pretty much out of the movement. But I think that that's something in some ways the populist left and center left need to learn as well, is that they need to engage one another. I mean, look, Zoran Mamdani is doing scavenger hunts in New York City right now. And that's a form of political organizing and participation. Like that's genius. Whether whatever you think of the guy or whatnot, it's getting people out last minute, doing something fun, seeing your city, seeing your neighbors, meeting new people. Maybe you're going to fall in love. Like that's an amazing sort of thing. And, and it's so funny. I always remember going to these conservative, you know, New York Young Republican Club events or CPAC or whatever, and the leadership always turned around. They said you might meet the love of your life here at a CPAC afterparty because everyone knew that they were going to get sloshed later and you never knew what was going to happen. Right. So there is this element of not just raising money or debating ideas or policy rather, but really convening around like ideas and lived experiences and imagining the good life. I think, you know, because Obama came up in a moment where we suddenly had this tech attention thing. Like it was a competition for attention. If you think of like 2008 and then especially 2012, it was all about like, how do we micro target, micro segment these people online to get their attention and use that to parlay that into political power. We're going to do that by these very technological solutions oriented tools and that tactical technical thinking that if, what Evgeny Morozov, whatever happened to him? Right. Like thinking of solutionism almost like eclipsed what Obama really represented, which was a profound primal imagination of liberalism. This hope, this new idea, this sense of possibility, this something different. And you were going to get together and do these things. I mean there was a like, you know, yoga mats into the world and all these organizations that were bringing people around together, share around shared interests for political purposes. You know, these, all these different subcultures coming out for Obama and it wasn't just the tech. And I think like there's something true. And if you, Mike Cernovich, right, he always said that conflict is attention and attention is influenced and there's something true about that. But if you're always, always staying in the realm of conflict as like people beating each other over the head and owning the libs and all of that, eventually that also gets boring because then you realize that it's not a real conflict anymore, it's a performance and it's kind of a fake conflict. So what are the real conflicts that you want to like have and discuss and get into? And it's not what you agree on actually, like, oh, we all agree that we should or shouldn't, you know, Give money to Israel or we should or shouldn't change our housing policy or we should or shouldn't Medicare for all. But I'm interested in is actually the stuff we don't agree on in the nuance of those disagreements. And that's kind of sexy and interesting and actually almost like a form of political radicalism right now. To have a nuanced political opinion that isn't just, you know, black square on your Instagram posturing, your opinion, it's something in between. It's sexy, it's the je ne sais quoi. It's like, where are we gonna get with this? And if I were to say something to the center left right now, it's fun worldview building exercises, institutes, not just online, not just in your substack. Like all of the right wing podcasts or events, events or podcasts or publications have like events and meetups and these physical things and offline things attached to them. And I think that that's a really important thing. So like, if you're center left or fun, the worldview building, I want to get together and in like a quote unquote safe or, you know, respectful disagreement way, talk about the gray. And that's going to be the opposition to whatever is coming. Like, if there, if I were to wave my magic wand and think about the 2000 and 30s and what is the opposition to this new hegemonic power of maga where there's like now all the power is consolidated because we've basically privatized our defense and intelligence and security establishment and our schools and all this. And it's like very like if you burn the flag, you get a year in prison and you know you're not coming out, no parole. The weird thing, the interesting thing, the transgressive thing is going to be the nuance, the gray, the what if, the yearning that something different, that it's not the opposite of maga as in like, oh, if we're giving, if we're privatizing schools, we're going to make all the schools public. It's like, no, like, let's think of all the colors of the rainbow and paint with not just black and white, but blue and purple and pink and yellow and all. And that's going to become transgressive. But you have to fund that not as policy, not as messaging, not as just narrative development, but like people getting together, talking about the vibes, the stories, the ideas that, that first order thinking stuff on the Internet, off the Internet, in a lot of different levels of Society.
- [48:28]
B
So, you know, I will just say as a response, I think a lot of the dunking on Obama stuff gets pretty silly pretty quickly. Just in terms of like he didn't sign the bailout. Republicans on day one said they were going to oppose him. He lost the 60 vote majority pretty quickly. But an area where, and this is actually quite sad when you put it this way, where he a hundred percent owns responsibility for failure. Was this like organizing for America transition?
- [48:56]
C
Yes.
- [48:56]
B
So it's, it's actually really fascinating. So like to your point, 2008 you had, so in 2004 you had moveon.org, that really powered like Howard Dean first. So that was sort of like version 1.0 of the Internet, like embracing Democratic politics and changing the dynamic. And then in 2008, like Obama, Obama for America. OFA was really sort of the actual endpoint. And it really was like, if you sort of ask me, there's the whole like ban phones debate. If we could snap our fingers and reduce America to the Internet of 2008 plus like maybe Uber, I'd basically be happy with that. I think, I think actually, no, I think everyone would be actually happy if we could like freeze Internet infrastructure realities with what's, you know, let's give some starlink level speed. But we basically get the deal there. And so OFA was like very Democratic, was very participatory. Everyone's doing things. It was really great. There's this story which always stuck with me. There was this OFA organizer who was in Iowa and he actually stayed around in the town. He was organizing and became elected and got elected mega there as he was like that like deeply. I always like wonder, I read that in a book like a decade. I always wonder what happened to him. But the point is like that is how like unironically like participatory that was. What then happens though is like after Obama's elected, they don't really know what to do with OFA because it was, you know, change we can believe in. That's the campaign slogan. It's Obama for America. But like Obama's elected. So it ended up getting wrapped into the dnc. It became an arm of the dnc, became Organizing for Action, and then that then led to it just basically becoming like an arm of the DNC. And I remember back in 2010 during the midterms, I showed up to do some ofa stuff and it was just like calling people and this is important. So I'm not trying to claim I was too cool for school but it was just reduced to like phone banking midterm candidates, which is fine, but that's what the DNC is supposed to do. OFA had the potential to be something different. And to your point of, about democracy and engagement, doing things like a. As everyone agreed, to quote Sarah Palin, the holy change thing, no one really knew what change meant during the Obama years. There's a bunch of open, really real questions you had everything from the financial crisis to Obamacare to all these different things. OFA if it stayed outside of the DNC apparatus and an actual serious political talent. And frankly about political talent, because I really think seriously about this in the same way with Charlie Kirk, the reason why Charlie Kirk is successful with Turning Point usa and why, no offense to some of you liberals trying to create your own version of Turning Point usa. Charlie Kirk is obviously a politician who, like, I think when he was in high school, wanted to be a senator or a governor, and he's just taken that exact skill set and applied it to Turning Point. I wish, because you know, there's all this like, talent at the Democratic side that got just wrecked by like the Obama years in the midterms and like 2010 and 2014. I wish you had a genuine A list political talent run OFA knowing that that wasn't going to lead directly to elected office because instead it sort of went to organize Y types and the cool kids were at the White House and then the cool kids are running the dnc. So just like, you really had this potential for this to like, really be something that people would have been participating in. So that's just like a real takeaway I had from what you just said. Because it's hard to imagine because Obama was just a generational candidate. It's hard to imagine another change stance too. And Andrew Yang kind of tried to do this with forward, but he doesn't have the juice and he framed it the wrong way. I feel like OFA was probably like the last, oh, wow, this has juice. It's actually growing organically and it could be like a third space different from the White House, different from the dnc. That could be a space for people.
- [52:34]
C
Yeah, no, I totally hear that. I think oftentimes there were these efforts to get people to run for office and run for something. And building a talent pipeline is super important in the years to come. It's not going to happen immediately. Right? Because in part there's this idea that it's just voting and running for office and then like donating and campaigning and like, that is what constitutes center left or liberal politics. And I would say like there, there are some real efforts that were interesting on the populist left side like the sunrise movement. And there's a lot of fascinating organizing that happens in the populist left or the sort of like left, liberal left, the sort of race conscious left, that whole world that's very powerful, but also really does threaten some powerful people and the powers that be in ways that they're probably not going to get money. But there's a lot of creativity there and they do more with less. And it's fascinating to see. So I don't want to, I think we have to take, I think that the left, liberals, what those, this thing, right, what do we even call it, needs to take inventory of what exists right now. Where are the diamonds in the rough? Like not just for running for office, but different kinds of organizing talent, building the messenger pipeline. That's not just politicians, but people who are going to organize in different ways and that can be a profession and a career. So that the messengers, the message, right? And that's not just advertising. That's what comes out of these conversations and debates and nuance that's going to feel like juicy. And then of course the medium, like we do have some real questions about not just the structure of media online and the substackification of it all or the tiktoking of it all, but we also have to ask like there's a lot of things, a lot of power consolidating on these platforms and that's where I am also interested. I'm not going to go down some, you know, tech policy conversation right now, but I think that we also have to really ask ourselves what that's going to do to, to speech and quality of speech and diversity of speech that we have out there and that we have access to. So yeah, I think we got to think of this. Not just medium, not just message, not just messenger, but like a compilation of all three and where you can lean in and participate and offer your expertise, your passion, your drive, do so. And also to expand the aperture on what constitutes political speech and political participation and civic speech and civic participation. It's not just going to be talking about America all the time. Sometimes it's going to be talking about your faith or your relationship to astrology or nature or medicine or.
- [55:17]
B
Well, MA is very good at this.
- [55:20]
C
So I think that really embracing all of that is going to sort of be the answer. And it is building an alternative colorful worldview of a future that we can yearn for instead of just being terrified of it. It's a chrysatunity, if you will, because we didn't like what we had before. It wasn't working for us. So we have to do something else or else someone else is going to come in and give maybe a far uglier vision of what the future could be than we could. But that's going to require not just a knee jerk reaction to the opposite of us and them. It's like, hey, maybe, maybe the problem is all of us and we got to color. We got to paint with all the colors of the wind into anyways, Disney here. I'm not a Disney gal. Don't take. Don't think I'm a Disney adult. Marshall, that would crush.
- [56:04]
B
That's fairly. I could tell that you've spent time on the right because of your instant fear of being labeled a Disney adult. So one quick statement, then a couple last questions here. So one, I also want to say, so you know the decent number of philanthropists and sort of like givers and orgs listen to this podcast. So this is really a note for you all that's building off of what Danielle just said said doing that. There's another person in the room and it's the audience. The thing that I really want to give advice off of this conversation is that I think philanthropy needs to get really, really uncomfortable because it's too easy. So another example here too. So the way the realignment got funded is I did one of these conservative programs and then the professor of one of them was like, media is cool. Let me know if any of you are interested in doing media. I was like, I want to do media. And then he introduced me to a big donor and he was like, hey, here's 50k to do a podcast. There was no spreadsheet. There were no questions about metrics. There was no like analyze the space. It was just sort of like, okay, like we'll see how this goes. And like I'll call you and say very mean things to you if you do a bad job after this episode. A quick story here is after the second episode of the Realignment was with George Will. And this donor called me afterwards and said, well, at least you tried. I was really dissatisfied. I was really dissatisfied by your attempt on your second try to interview George Vo about the state of modern American conservatism. But just like, look at that story for a second. Like a. This donor was. I was getting like 500 listens an episode here. So this like very wealthy person Is like listening to episodes and then demanding that we do calls afterwards to talk through it. He b just sort of let me vibe and was just sort of like, hey, you seem smart. Like, this money replenishes itself because of the stock market and these things. So here's 50k, whatever, and we'll see how it goes. And then see, like, it was just like a very participant. I did a program, I met someone in the program. He vouched for me, I went to a meeting and then I was funded versus liberal philanthropy, man. Lots of questions about metrics. Oh, I should also know I didn't meet with any staff, so I didn't go through like the list of like five different staffers who would like, say, well, you know, we did things this way at this organization and this other organization. We did that way. He was just sort of, okay, here you. So every single. I was actually talking to a prominent liberal philanthropist about the realignment's origin story and he said, oh yeah, we never would have funded. But ironically, they love my work now, but they're like, oh yeah, we never would have funded any of that. And what I was too polite to say is, can we think about that then? Can we have a conversation about how you like me now, but you wouldn't have funded me to suggest there's something wrong with our process. And I just think technocratic liberalism is just so obsessed with metrics, so it needs to be much more open. So that's just like a note on my side of things is getting much more uncomfortable and the actual place. That was a tangent. I was too excited to speak with you. These are things I've had for a while. So I'm kind of going all over the place. So bear with me, listeners. But the other thing I wanted to bring up, because you brought up Sunrise movement, this is also another awkward place for philanthropy because the thing that philanthropy loves about activism is the story and the aesthetic of activism is great. Young people think of the March for Our Lives Parkland kids. They get the Time magazine cover and they could actually bring out numbers of people. Sunrise could say we protested X events. We. We brought X number of people to Nancy Pelosi's office. March for Our Lives was X number of people in the National Mall. That is the definition of a space that you could fund it and have like very direct metrics of what you're trying to do. But also because they're actually turning out people like, it just feels very sexy to be a 40 something program officer to philanthropy and fun young people. To do things. The awkward thing now is that activism in terms of the 2000 and tens theory doesn't work. So it turns out the reason why we weren't passing climate legislation wasn't because the oil corporations had bought everyone. It's because Republicans control majority of this country's power and they don't care what Sunrise says. Nancy Pelosi wasn't the blocker on climate legislation. The blocker is the Republicans control the Senate now and the Senate because of the culture war does not care what left wing activity activists say. Same thing's true on gun control. Right. There's like quite literally no protest that would have gotten Joe Manchin to change his position on gun rights. There's no protest that would make any Republican in Texas change their position. So this is an area where philanthropy has a lot of we can fund this new transgressive thing, but it fits our, you know, metrics and are like sort of wanting to be on the edge of thing that's kind of gotten us. So that's an open question. So last questions for you here. So number one, your substack, which I really need to shout out, we've talked a lot about. All your work is called Failure to Communicate and the tagline of it is Making sense of America helping you do the same. My question is about how does one make sense of America? And I'm phrasing make my interpretation of Making Sense of America relates to your, your story about the authenticity gap and there needing to be a story, I think of sense making America as like the foundation. And then everything is built on top of that. So your policy, how you run your organizations and your donors, who runs for office, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And sort of the definition of the person who is my favorite sense maker. Peter's sort of gone on a weird tangent with the Antichrist thing. But in 2013, one of my favorite books we've talked about this is the Unwinding by George Packer. And it was wild to read the unwinding after the 2016 election because it was already three years out of date. In the Unwinding, George Packer interviewed Peter Thiel about his work and his investing, his political philosophy back in 2012 when it was featured in book the book, Peter explicitly says, quote, the weird thing about America right now is that everyone thinks that people are missing sunny optimism and a person who could speak to this glorious future that we're working towards. I actually think there's a dark undercurrent to America right now. Despite the fact that Barack Obama just was elected. And my bet is that there will be a figure that comes around the corner who will see that darkness, will harness that darkness and run based off of the. That that is a perfect three years before articulation of what Trump did. So that is what I mean by Peter. Despite people's thoughts on him in 2012, there was no poll that could have given you that results. There's no idea there. Right. It's hard to write a paper on that. He just had a feeling. So that's what sense making is for me. I'd love to hear what you think sense making is and how it operationalizes through your writing.
- [62:23]
C
Yeah, I mean, we talk about this a lot. I have to give a shout out to my colleagues at the center for an Informed Public, who really did a lot of intellectual heavy lifting around this. Like, sense making is sort of the understanding of how things work in a given organization or community and the sort of common sense of that, like, what's happening and why. And you might take little pieces of evidence of out there and reality and apply different frames to it that kind of take all of that uncertainty and give you a little control through the story so that you can live with yourself, basically. And I think, you know, religion does that. Politics sometimes does that for a lot of people. Economics does it, like supply and demand. That's just how the world works. And I think we have a lot of different ways that we can make sense of what's going on. But similar to you, George Packer's the Unwinding was a big moment for me, but also similar to Mr. Thiel. I mean, I feel like I'm like outing myself, but I was a bit of a campus critic of Obama at Yale, and in part because I felt that there, Obama was a very performative figure. He performed this Hopi changey thing. And the thing that I think my work, my academic work is a little transgressive about is like, I don't look at Trump and the influencers or Bannon as mis or disinformers. I looked at them as performers that are performing a sincerely, almost like manifesting a different vision of the world. And they use performance tactics like it is a kind of drama and theater. And I sometimes joke, like, if you look at a lot of people in the movement, they come from like, theater backgrounds or. Or movie backgrounds or they wanted to and they failed. And I'm just gonna leave a joke that I could make aside there, but. And so I think, like, when we think about Making sense. There is the, the flip. There's the dream, there's the hope and the change and then there's the flip side. There's the nightmare, there's the possibility of the imagination in America and then there's the delusion. Right. It's why like the idea of the confidence man. And Herman Melville always got me his book. The Confidence man talks about this weird moments in American history where there were just like figures that really fed off of the sincerity and the desire to dream and create and think big. And this possibility, like we're only a 250 year old country, like that is a baby. Our myths are literally invented. Like our civic identity is recreated with every generation. And that is a profoundly huge responsibility of creativity that can also veer into absolute delusion. I think it's like I grew up in New York in the time where there was a lot of the sort of techno utopianism and like the weworks, like we're going to change the world with this co working space. Right. It sounded freaking insane sometimes to me. Like this weird shibboleth of like, of like if, if you could dream it, do it and think global and act local and all these little details of that time that look feel almost quaint now. But I want to get back to that because that is the nugget of it. Like as much as there was this wild, almost delusional hope of the Obama years. Yes. There was something boiling underneath of it. I totally see that. And when you make sense of things it's in sense making. It's like taking the sensors, the evidence around you and packaging it in a way that explains your lived reality. And you need that right now, not just in America but like how does capitalism work? Because this like supply demand thing does not explain it. How does health care or health, or I should say health insurance, like how does that actually work? And all of these stories that we have about the rough edges of. Oh, explain to me foreign policy. Right. I can't really tell you what the liberal or the non Trumpian protectionist nationalist kind of vision of foreign policy was. Is foreign policy designed to serve Americans interests like everyday citizens? Or was it America's interest? And it's, you know, it's security, it's defense contractors, like who? And so I think we, I really try to think about sense making as. Let's take each of these nuggets in these spaces and really try to explain in basic terms how does this work and what are our assumptions that are no longer living up to our lived experience of them and tell it like it is. You can bring in the experts and to explain to you American capitalism or foreign policy or all this. But do you feel it? Does that feel right? Is it in your body? And that's why I think, you know, okay, yeah, there is a reason that we could support Ukraine or Israel or like the vision of a certain kind of world order, but it actually isn't so obvious to most people in this country anymore. If you explain it in a very important commonsensical, almost, almost like folklore philosophy. It doesn't, it's not a, it's not a given. And I think that's why a lot of like boomers and elders right now are so frustrated with other organizations like we must support Ukraine. And young people are like, well why? And then they get upset that you're not like, oh, you're not democratic, you're not upholding the liberal world order. And what about World War II? And you weren't even around for that, bro. So I think it's, that's what I mean by sense making. It's, it's, it's a story that or a series of questions that ask how does this work and why and how and what other questions can I ask to figure out how that should work? And that's what I, if I could set up like a whole series of sense making institutes around this country. Just people who really know at, from like top to bottom, like how certain things in economy, foreign policy, health, environment, God, right, Like all of this should be up for debate and we should be making sense of this. That's where I'm at in my life. And I think a lot of the assumptions that I had growing up were, were disproven in a lot of ways. And I'm not out here to solve all the problems, but lean into those problems being indicators of like, oh, let's take this as data towards something bigger and something better and try to figure it out and make sense of it and not take everything for granted. We cannot take liberal ideas for granted. We cannot take freedom for granted or equality for granted. We cannot just assume everyone knows what we're talking about when we say those things. We have to explain them not just in rhetoric and logic and rationality, but in that embodied feeling. That sense of this feels right as well. And not make fun of people for saying that, I think either because there's a lot of putting down in center left stuff sometimes until you find the crypto astrologer. I keep bringing up astrology because I was talking to a friend about it a lot this weekend. So millennial girls and their astrology apps.
- [69:27]
B
Something that you said that I really want to pick up on and I want people on the populist left. The breaking points, listeners and viewers who are watching here, which is that I liked your talk about Melville and the confidence men in like the hopey changey optimistic part of America and how like the 2000 and tens produced a lot of millennial cringe on a couple different levels. A couple CEOs are now in prison right now, a couple of failed companies, especially including WeWork. But when you remove all of I think there's a political thing for us millennials to do, it's to not throw the baby of the bathwater out and acknowledge that there was too much of that like over optimism relative to what was coming down the pipeline line in 2013. To the peer to a point. But my big problem of too much like anti establishment media, especially on the left side of things, is that it's actually so cynical and negative that I don't think people think hard. And then the people are shocked. For example, like if you look at the breaking points comments like you'll get a lot of breakers who were there when the show was like more left wing and less like right wing than it is. And those things like what's the deal here? Why? Why is everyone so maggot? Why is everything so conservative? Like we're over the Medicare for all homies from 2020 and it's hey, just so you guys know, like you've been in a media ecosystem which is persistently told basically one message, everyone is corrupt. Everything is bad. Every single person who's coming to say something positive needs to really be taken down because they're probably scamming you or they're corrupt or they have something bad in their past. And not to say those things can't be true. True. But if you over index on that, the logical endpoint of that is not democratic socialism and is not a expansive rebirth of the American welfare state completing the dream of fdr, Harry Truman, LBJ and Bernie Sanders. It's actually right wing magazine cynicism. And that's what I really see happening. So I just love your point. I hadn't really thought about like I just dunked on the sort of WeWork fives, but it's sort of like, no, but there was something there and there's something really important that we shouldn't ditch. So you write a lot about neoliberalism and post neoliberalism and this is a space that people, including the people at the argument, increasingly dunk on. I think that's actually pretty fair for taking post neoliberalism literally seriously, because it gets pretty silly very, very quickly. I once saw a post neoliberal argue that neoliberalism is like a threat to democracy. And I just asked the question, like, wait a second though, like, Mitt Romney is like the most neoliberal Republican and he voted against not certifying the election. And the Republicans who voted against certifying the election are actually post neoliberal. So just at a baseline level, this theory doesn't make that much sense. So maybe we're over indexing here, but what I love about post neoliberalism and why I want every single person in this broad like, we're rebuilding Left Liberalism project to at least, like, take it seriously, not literally, is it's a story neoliberalism. Like, the post neoliberal people, what they do a good job of doing, that's why they're very influenced by the right, is saying since the 1980s, X, Y and Z happened across multiple administrations, and these decisions that really harmed America's political economy, really disrupted our social structure, led to a situation where you could see Bernie and Trump and all this broad dissatisfaction we're all feeling. And then when they get into their solutions for that, it gets a little iffy. But the point is, if you spend time in post neoliberal spaces, you will not struggle with the why do I need to tell a story question and why I need to tell a story question and what I want more from the argument. I'm not a writer, so I won't pitch this piece to them. But I would love the argument to write a piece that says we can't just say we're going to defend the principles of American liberalism in a strong sense, we're going to argue against terrorists, we're going to argue against J.D. vance's new right philosophy. We're going to do this, this, this and that. What they need to do, in my opinion, informed by neoliberalism, is say, or at least the post neoliberal theory is say, say, hey, what happened over the past 30 to 40 years? And like, why are people skeptical of like, posting of what happened? Why do people, if we're saying our publication is fighting against the populist left and the populist right, I think the starting point, because I'm like a politician type and not a writer type, is, okay, so like, where are our constituencies? Like, what did we get wrong or what's their beef like, to your point? Like, what's their story? What's the authenticity gap here? And then we defend it accordingly. Because the danger for the argument is that they just turn into the Dispatch and the Dispatch. It's really funny, when people heard me privately critique the argument, they think I'm arguing it's going to be a business failure. That's not my point. I think they're going to be very successful at a business level. Take some of the biggest, most social media centric writers, put them together in a bundle and sell it. That's going to freaking sell. They're going to be an okay business. That's the Dispatch's theory, too. The Dispatch is also a profitable business, that enterprise. The problem, though, is the Dispatch did not in their opening. Sent opening statement much in the same way the argument at opening statement. They did not say they were going to prove that you could have a funded business company on substack. Their thing was we are going to defend conservative principles against how awful and damaging Donald Trump is. And on that count they failed because having surveyed them for 10 years, all they have consistently done, whenever Trump does something, they just go like, well, here's why tariffs are. Aren't within the tradition of buckwheat American conservatism, or here's why January 6th was bad within conservatism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't root their arguments with like, oh, yeah, like, I get why you want tariffs. It's because you live in the deindustrialized Midwest and your life has gone to shit over the past 30 to 40 years. So, yeah, I get it. And the answer to that person is not like, I've got a Cato scholar and the Cato scholar is going to write you a paper proving that the China shock was actually due to automation and not immigration and industrial policy. Right. Like, that isn't how it works. So I would just love for you to talk about like, neoliberalism and the story. And then we've taken so much of your time, but I appreciate it. Take us out on that, wherever you want to take. Because it's your last answer.
- [75:25]
C
Sure. First of all, I have to say I'm not an economist. I'm a communications scholar. And I think. But that's okay, right? Because I actually think the fixation of the truth. I was like, well, actually, tariffs are this or sanctions are that. And this is the reason why. And here's the China. It's like the wonkiness doesn't ever crack through to the common sense of how the economy works. So I am very interested in, like, trends. Right. As a communication scholar, I'm interested in how people, what words and symbols and language people use to articulate an identity or a sense of reality or how things work. And so if neoliberalism has become a slur for a lot of people in this country, that's data. And you can say, oh, well, it's like, it's propaganda and like the propagandist won, well, then you should look at maybe for all the reasons why they won and understand the data of whatever it was that got people to buy into that. Neoliberalism bad. Like, like it's a slur. And that is what I mean. I have another dear friend who says there's a lot of, like, there's, there's a lot of demand for something that's post neoliberal. And are the people who could supply that actually going to supply it? What do I mean, actual policies? Like, people don't necessarily want some just like, rampant free trade world where you can get something made out of polyester from China within 48 hours or something. I know I'm being kind of glib, but again, like, think of the, the folkloric myth right now, like the, the mass conversations that we're having about the food that we're eating, the clothes that we're wearing, the homes that we're building and the quality of those things. And I guarantee you it's not just, you know, people in elite circles talking about the whole point of Maha is, hey, I want to be able to eat real food because I don't feel nourished by what, what's available to me. And so if neoliberalism didn't, or the idea, the folk understanding of neoliberalism didn't deliver on good food and good building materials and good jobs and good clothes that last a long time, not just like an abundance of those things. Because I live basically, you know, I'm sort of bopping around right now and I don't have a massive closet. Like, I can't, I don't want abundance. I want the opposite of abundance. I want, like, good, vital quality of life. And that is, like, specific. And so I would ask, and I would implore folks who are so obsessed with the policy outcomes of neoliberalism or defending neoliberalism to say, you know what, man? Like, if that's what you really want to achieve, maybe consider what the story is, what the, the story vehicle is. Going to actually give to people to get you there. Like, if you really believe that it's. No one likes someone to defend what was. Like, that's like very backwards looking. In some ways it's nice, but it's, it's like you got to promote a vision of the future a little bit. And if, if the vision of the future is having like an affordable home that's beautifully built from materials that are nice, that are not going to like just be made, made out of plastic and like put up in a day, you know, I, I understand that there is a desire to, to make like affordable housing for many people because it's expensive and they don't care what it's made of or whatever. But I would say why are, why aren't we thinking bigger than that? Why aren't we thinking of like, I want something nice for everyone. You know, you go to some of these older homes. Like, I'll never forget, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, right? And there was something called like the Aluminum City terraces. And it was like all these Bauhaus house architects who fled Germany and ended up in like New Kensington, Pennsylvania, right? And we're building these public housing projects that looked, I mean today they look like a little strange, but at the time they were shiny and new and interesting from all these like materials made by the local, you know, metal fabrication facility, you know, like the mills. And it had this like electrifying sense of place at the time. So I would ask ourselves, like, what, what like why defend the word neoliberalism if it's going to keep delivering this sense of dread that something didn't work? Don't be an economist about it. Be a, be, be a person about it and really lean into what that feels like in, in your life. And so that's what I'd say to those folks. Just like let go of the wonk and lean into the everyman understanding of that thing and it will reveal feels so much to you.
- [80:06]
B
That is the perfect place to end. And the way we can also summarize this too is that like we don't just need wonks, right? Like wonks could probably keep wonking. It's just that, and this is why we were talking about how like other people need to be let into the tent here. There are other types of people who could be doing the everyday person job. So that's very important. Danielle, this has been really great and really enjoyed talking with you.
- [80:26]
C
Yeah, such a pleasure. Marshall.