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

Episode Summary

Following her recent electoral defeat, many people have questioned why Kamala Harris didn't go on to the podcast of Joe Rogan, the standup comedian and sports commentator who has the number-one podcast in the world.

For the record, Harris’s former advisers have said that they tried to coordinate a time with Rogan, but they very obviously did not make it a priority.

The more interesting related question that other people have been asking post election is why is there no left-wing Joe Rogan?

The immediate answer is that there is not a full-service Democratic ecosystem that includes media, legal, and local components. There are also some larger reasons why Rogan and other libertarian-oriented people have signed up with the Republican Party, after having hated it in the 1990s and 2000s when party was less radical.

But there are some more specific reasons for why Rogan and people like him have become de facto Republicans that are especially relevant since Rogan himself once supported the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders—and they involve how the Democratic Party communicates, or rather, doesn’t, to the public.

In recent decades, Democrats and the American left as a whole have moved to a communication strategy which focuses more on controlling the message in every possible way rather than trying to forcefully advocate and explain its ideas to people who have never heard them. On issues of science, economics, race, climate, gender, and regulation, Democrats have, by and large, resorted to blindly pointing to expert consensus rather than making the case to the uninformed.

Joining me to discuss on this episode is Lisa Corrigan, she’s a professor of communications and gender studies at the University of Arkansas. She’s also the author of several different books, including Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation.

The video of our December 9, 2024 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

Related Content

—How podcasts became a key source of news and entertainment for millions of Americans

—Right-wing comedy isn’t particularly funny, but it’s extremely effective at persuading low-information voters

—Joe Rogan and the epidemic of pseudo-expertise

—Former establishment Republican have made the Democratic party more conservative, and less electorally successful

—As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism

—Why Christian authoritarians and atheistic libertarians decided to meet in the middle

—The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing rebranding

—How the Donald Trump fandom completely reshaped the Republican media ecosystem

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:24 — Democratic leaders' excessive desire to control all media encounters

08:42 — Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, and the rise to dominance of casual infotainment

14:05 — Democrats have lost the urge and the ability to debate

23:11 — Democrats' post-graduate economic bubble

27:06 — Republicans overthrew their obsolete party establishment, can Democrats?

31:38 — How "The West Wing" encouraged Democrats to adopt a fictional communications strategy

35:08 — Kamala Harris's initial media interview strategy and Democrats' total risk aversion

39:56 — Trump targeted disengaged Americans with media appearances, Harris with advertisements

42:39 — Why did Democrats lose ground with women despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade?

46:49 — The Democratic Party doesn't want to talk to low-information voters

54:40 — As Democrats have won more prosperous voters, they've become less interested in economic populism

59:20 — The ALEC behemoth outside the Beltway

01:03:19 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Lisa Corrigan. Welcome to Theory of Change, Lisa.

LISA CORRIGAN: Thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I think one of the questions that is almost inescapable in the 2024 election post mortems is, is why is there no left wing Joe Rogan?

But it's a very strange and weird question to ask because Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders.

CORRIGAN: He certainly was. Yeah.

I think there's no tolerance in the Democratic Party for class analysis, and I think that there is. a class [00:03:00] politics that really chafes at someone like Rogan's style,

And also that he's not controllable. So they prefer to control, highly control their own media, such as it is. And so I think we can read that as a sort of intolerance and lack of curiosity, not just about Rogan, but also his audience.

SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Well, okay.

Democratic leaders' excessive desire to control all media encounters

SHEFFIELD: So, but when you say, I think, I agree with you when you say that the, that the Democratic elites want kind of controlled media. What do you mean by that?

CORRIGAN: think they're going to Move almost exclusively to position their own influencers to just about the party line rather than turning to organic media spaces to actually take the temperature of communities across the country. I think they would much rather control all of the messaging all of the time, and that's gonna in the long term continued [00:04:00] to diminish their effectiveness as communicators.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's a, it is a really good point because when you do look at the few, media operations that have been funded, by the Democratic donor class or party elites. they tend to be 100 percent partisan. So everything that they say is in agreement with whatever the Democrats are saying in any given moment.

And then they also don't have, have even a discussion about what those points are. So like, they'll just say, well, this is the message. And then they'll just repeat it over and over and they won't talk about, well, why do you believe the message? What is this message even mean? It's just no, here's what we're talking about.

CORRIGAN: But it's because I mean, in some ways they have a very low threshold for conflict. So somebody like Nancy Pelosi has never had a debate for her seat in all of the decades that she's held it. She [00:05:00] refuses to debate any challenger,

right? So, so they don't want to actually move the conversation forward. They've chosen their lane and they want everybody to get on the lane and there's no tolerance for people who have alternative perspectives about where that lane should go. So they don't want to refine their ideas. And they're not capacious thinkers. And in some ways they're anti intellectual in ways that are similar, though, in some ways different from the Republican party, right? There's just not the tolerance for rigorous debate and they don't want to be dislodged from their donor class. So they're loathe to upset them. I mean, I think about the sidelining of Tim Walz. As total evidence of that, arguably the best decision of the campaign was to choose him as a vice presidential candidate. And then they sidelined all of his vigor and all of [00:06:00] his successes in Minnesota and his, in some ways, temperament, right? Which is more combative than certainly anybody else in the party during the campaign. What little of it we were able to have. They didn't want to have an open primary. There was no conversation about Biden's efficacy, right, before the fall. All of that, I think, is evidence that they can't really tolerate. dissent or conversation about what they've done wrong.

SHEFFIELD: no, I, and that's a good point. And, and obviously, we do want to say. In this regard, though, that you're not endorsing Joe Rogan's ideas by saying that he should have been engaged with, you're saying you have to engage with people.

CORRIGAN: I mean, look, my PhD is in communication. If you want to talk to people, you actually have to meet them where they are. Even if you don't like where they are. Like I don't have a classroom of students [00:07:00] who are all exactly where I'm at in terms of how much they've read or kind of life experiences that they've had or what their parents even know about.

Right. I mean, if you want to. Really have a close consideration of ideas, though you actually have to meet people where they're at and not where you're at. And the Democratic Party refuses to do that. If no interest in it whatsoever.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, they don't. And and yeah, I mean, there's this weird paradox, though, because the, the critique that they often make of the right is that they're anti intellectual, which they are. Right. But at the same time, if you don't want to have any kind of debate, and you don't want to have a discussion, and you won't even explain your viewpoints, let alone debate them, if you don't tell people, well, this is why we want something, that's also anti intellectual.

And it's not satisfying to a lot of people.

CORRIGAN: Yes. And I think at least in for the very online class of mega [00:08:00] voters, right? People were really upset that Harris didn't want to talk about policy until the last month of the campaign. And even though presidents have minimal influence over a lot of forms of U. S. policy making, especially domestically, hearing them talk about their vision About policy is actually quite important to huge segments of the population.

If you refuse to do it, I don't know why you think that they're going to turn out and vote for you, right? If you dismiss them out of hand, if you scold them, then they're not going to show up for you. And so I think a more robust engagement with even members of the establishment who are critical of the democratic party would really be of.

Benefit.

Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, and the rise to dominance of casual infotainment

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think one of the other significant, even fundamental flaws of this Rogin analysis is that it misses who the audience of Joe Rogin is. Like, the [00:09:00] stereotype on the left is that it's just a bunch of 20 something white men. But in reality the men who are younger are majority not white.

And that's when you look at the polls. That's where the gains that Republicans had among men came from. They didn't come from white men. They came from black men. They came from Hispanic men where Trump got the majority of them. And they came from Asian men. And so it's not, it's about something much bigger than Joe Rogan.

So,

CORRIGAN: Yeah. I mean, as a demographic fact, white men are not going to be where either party make gains. Right. I mean, this is just a fundamental fact of the demographics

of the country. Yeah, but I do think that those listeners of the Joe Rogan program are also looking for connection. And they're looking for community and they're looking for information. And so if the Democrats don't want to go there, their only option is to create something else, which is why, right? Why isn't there a Democratic [00:10:00] Joe Rogan? Why isn't there something like that? And in The outside in the info spear where people can go, and that's by design. I think it's a problem though, right?

Because the people who are listening to Joe Rogan, they want novelty and they want community and they want knowledge. They're seeking connection. If you don't build a place for them to come to their knot. I will also say that alongside of the Joe Rogan was also called for like Kamala Harris to go on hot wings. And I'm sure that the establishment just dismissed that as like, I don't know, absurd, but also it's sort of humanizing and playful and people want play. And I'll tell you that Joe Rogan can do

play.

SHEFFIELD: no,

CORRIGAN: says are totally ridiculous, he can do play. And that's what shock radio has always been about. Stern has always been very good at that. And the Democratic party doesn't do play. I will also say that walls should have gone on all of the sports shows and done [00:11:00] coachy coach talk and fishing and hunting and whatever men do with dogs that kind of stuff because people also want to talk about that and he has that capability and he didn't move.

They would not let him move through those spaces either and that could have been a place to make up some of those white male voters, but they didn't explore it at all and this was the one chance they had to do. That it's not like they could have deposed Joe Biden to do that for a bot for Obama. He's not that guy. He's the elite guy. He's the banking guy. He's the law guy.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah and what's interesting though is that there is an understanding from kind of old fashioned retail politics that you have to show up at events and kiss the babies and shake the hands, so Democrats understand that in some limited sense of physical space, but they don't understand that in the media space.

That especially in this, in this era of thousands and tens of thousands of [00:12:00] YouTube channels and, hundreds of thousands of social media posters that you, that's the only way that you can find these people. So, like showing up at the county fair or something that can not, that gets you much less now than it would to do.

An interview with, with someone. And, and, and, and, but that, that's also the, the lack of control. Like, I think that's, to go back to that, that I think is also a probably the fundamental problem with democratic elite messaging is that they don't understand that we're, we're so far removed from the age of five television channels and two major national newspapers.

Controlling all of the information. Now we're in this ocean of media. And the only thing that you can do is surf the waves. You can never control anything. You'll never have control ever, but they don't get [00:13:00] that.

CORRIGAN: don't get it, but also they're, they're too risk averse. And probably because it's just like regurgitating like the Obama campaigns with the same like media strategies as the Obama campaigns. I'm also not super convinced that Harris would have done well on like Normie shows Like some candidates can move through playful spaces.

Clinton, Bill Clinton can do this very well. Right. Where you can talk to anybody, anytime and be interested in them and be curious about their life story and connect with them. But that's a pretty rare quality in DC. I don't know that she would have, she would have done well. Walls would have been fine. It didn't wonderful.

And they should have deployed him in that way. But I think there's a, an aversion to like, I don't know, actually talking with and to. the plebes, like the gen pop, the normies. And I think that that will only continue to undermine, candidates, especially at the [00:14:00] national level because of exactly the media ecology that you're describing.

Democrats have lost the urge and the ability to debate

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, now, so let's, let's talk about where do you, where do you think a lot of this attitude derives from?

CORRIGAN: I think elitism, I really think that the Democratic party elites got cashed out really hardcore. And I think that they have built their own ecosystem of particular oligarchs, right? Some of them are info bros, a bunch of them are tech guys, right? Certainly a bunch of them are holdovers from the Obama administration.

And some of that is because the campaign had to by necessity be so short. It's not like they could totally vet and assemble and massive new comms team. Right. And they had to kind of build the airplane while they were flying it. But I don't think. that they have a sense of how much group think is happening inside of the party apparatus in terms of policy or comms. Like John Kennedy had a sense [00:15:00] about this during the Cuban missile crisis. He basically assigned his executive committee members to debate what the options were to deal with the missiles going into Cuba, and he assigned perspectives that You know, each member of his ex com actually disagreed with whether they're going to do a blockade or whether they were going to move missiles to Miami or whether they were going to do an airstrike and in that way, they avoided group think it's really famous case study and I don't, the Democrats don't do that enough.

So they don't do counterfactual play that way. They do war rooms about how to win sometimes, but they don't really take on positions that they themselves find distasteful. And I mean, tasteful, right? Because it is this sort of value judgment and aesthetic thing about policy choices and about style and they won't do it. They find it distasteful. And so if they can't overcome that feeling about being with people who are different than them, then they're not actually going to win over new voters.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And [00:16:00] well, and it's also, I mean, a lot of that also derives from, and we were talking before we started recording that that a lot of it does derive that after Republicans basically decided to walk away from academia that it became. Just kind of a de facto space in which there was no opposition from right wing beliefs and ideas within academia.

And obviously these ideas have no merit. And they're not demonstrable in any kind of fashion like evolution, obviously it's true, etc. But from a social and political standpoint, you have to have these interactions in your regular life. And the reality is that most of them haven't. Most of the Democratic establishment leaders don't. And so they lost the ability to understand that you actually have to communicate your ideas because to the only extent that they ever encountered them.

It was with [00:17:00] students who were completely uninformed and would just knuckle under whenever you question them. But that's not how things work in real life that if you go to convince people at the bar of your belief or something, they'll tell you to get the hell out or shut the fuck up.

And Democrats lost that ability to go into these spaces and just have a regular debate and articulate your beliefs, because it all became about, well, this is my belief and you have to take it or leave it, otherwise you're a sexist or a racist or whatever ist. And those are not arguments.

They might be true that these people have those beliefs that are, that, that's where they come from, but that's not an argument against them. That's just a label, right?

CORRIGAN: Well, I will say it's so funny that you talk about debate. I was a high school and college debater, and I will say that the trend that you are pointing to coincides with the massive underfunding of K through [00:18:00] 12 public debate programs. And Public debate programs in higher ed. And so when I went to college in the nineties, one of my debate partners was on the ground floor of building the club for growth and the other one worked in the Senate offices of Moynihan, Dana Peck, Moynihan. And so there was a. degree of tolerance for all different kinds of ideas and ideologies. And people went on to do all kinds of things. But if you want more debate in the public sphere, you have to fund debate programs and we don't have that. And as a consequence, I will tell you, as a college professor, the students do not have a threshold for disagreement. They can't think about argument that way. They have no exposure to it on the whole in high school. And they're not prepared to encounter ideas that are different from whatever the vague notions that their family has growing up, which makes them worse readers and worse writers and worse thinkers. So. I think it's a real shame that the Bush administration crushed [00:19:00] funding for public education at both K 12 and higher ed because one of the long term consequences is, an intolerance for multiple perspectives and an inability to debate the actual ideas, which is what you're pointing to as a, as a concern right now. That's a direct consequence of cutting that funding.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and of course, but then at the same time, they also, while that was happening, turned around and created an entire rhetorical strategy about cancel culture and the students are trying to, they're just like, Chairman Mao, and they're going to murder people who disagree with them.

Like, this is just, this is a huge, huge industry on the right to say that the thing that they created. Is actually the left's fault. And then they don't also, they of course don't want anyone to talk about the actual bannings of books. And the actual censorship that's going on by the government is being done by them [00:20:00] exclusively, pretty much.

CORRIGAN: But that's a recursive structure. It's something that ebbs and flows with the Republican party and really has since the 1920s. And so that kind of grievance politics is an essential feature of the GOP. And it's animated by censorship. It's animated by book banning. It's animated by sex and race panic. It always has been.

You can trace it from the twenties. to the fifties to the seventies to the nineties. I mean, whether it's tip or gores like crusade for parental labels on media or whether it's the book bands of the McCarthy era, they converge around civility and grievance and they're fundamentally Puritan discourses.

So cancel culture is directly, right? A product of what is a long vein of American puritanism. I mean, it's the it's what it's what underlies [00:21:00] massive resistance, right? To desegregation. It animates the failure of reconstruction. It animates the fugitive slave laws. All of those things are a product of grievance politics.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and of, of other people being allowed to participate in the civic debate, ultimately. And just civic spaces at all. To exist in public, I mean that's, really what the complaint was. And but it's, it's remarkably effective and, and it's, but it also does filter back into this Rogan situation as well, because Democrats lost the interest in public education, like as a matter of something that they have to do themselves like when Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan and he was condemned heavily for doing it because he was, was platforming Joe Rogan.

The guy with the [00:22:00] number one podcast in the world, he was being platformed by someone who was running for president who was much less famous than him. Like, these, these discussions, these criticisms don't even make any sense. But there there seem to be pretty, although I don't know, I mean, the Harris loss, at least for a little while, seems to have opened up some space for people to realize, oh, well, maybe we don't control everything in the world.

But I don't know, I'm not sure how long this, that this, this little moment's going to last. I don't know, what do you think?

CORRIGAN: It's a bubble, I think, but I do think that you're right in saying that the aversion to going on Joe Rogan was really just vibes. It was deeply unserious. There's no data that you could marshal to suggest that it was a bad idea for a presidential candidate of any stripe to go on Joe Rogan. It's just vibes only. So, I do think that this is a media bubble [00:23:00] and the next election, if we have one, will not unfold in a similar way with a similar media ecology. It's going to change dramatically in the next four years. Mm

Democrats' post-graduate economic bubble

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I certainly hope so. I mean, but the, the other, I guess besides the lack of interest in, advocacy. I think the other reason why that this attitude exists is that the Democratic Party became a party for, that was run by and run for people who live in, you know, the Acela corridor with who have postgraduate educations and they, they have community. So like

the more degrees you get, the more friends you get just in the course of that, and the more connections you have. So like it's, Actually, much, much easier.

And obviously there are exceptions. Lots of people do have, I want to say have got [00:24:00] a college degree and have nothing to show for it, but yet but by and large, on average, it is a, it is that you, you have more connections from that, and you have a better time getting jobs, and you have more community. So, but if you don't have those connections in those communities.

That's, that's the majority of the people who don't have those connections and don't have those communities, but to the Democratic establishment they can't even see them because they're surrounded by people who are just like them. Either they've worked in democratic campaigns, so maybe they don't have a graduate degree or whatever, but they have they came in as an intern and worked on a presidential campaign and worked their way up, so they have all the right connections and whatnot. and

so. They can't see that the majority of Americans, have no connections, and the majority of Americans have no employer loyalty. Their what they can get out of life as a [00:25:00] job is minimal. And like,

CORRIGAN: Mm hmm.

SHEFFIELD: higher unemployment rate has kind of masked the fact that a lot of people are, are taking substandard jobs because, They have no choice.

CORRIGAN: I mean, those people also live in walkable cities. Mm hmm. And the most of America is rural. And so part of it is democratic party elitism that fundamentally refuses to engage rural politics. I mean, if you are going to write off all of those parts of the country, and your goal is to just flip blue cities to vote for you, you're going to have a problem. Not just at the top of the ballot. But also down ballot. So the inability to see how much people are missing, both a robust public sphere and connection in their communities is a long term problem. Like for democracy generally, and the rise of fascism and [00:26:00] also for the party's ability to make inroads with new voters.

And I think one thing we haven't talked about is young voters, especially whether we're talking about Joe Rogan or new. Ecologies, info ecologies or media ecologies. New voters are not watching the news. They don't give a shit about MSNBC. They do not care about Rachel Maddow. They don't know who Chris is Hayes is. They're not going to go read the next book by Lawrence O'Donnell. They don't give a shit about those people. So if you're not going to go to where they are, they're not coming over to cable news.

SHEFFIELD: No and especially if you've only got one channel whereas Fox, there's like seven alternatives to Fox that, that Republicans have created. And if, if, if you were only investing in TV, you could at least have more than one. But it does, it does, it comes back to control. Like that's when you watch MSNBC, you are watching the Democratic Party line.

And and a lot of people, they don't want to [00:27:00] hear that. And I can't blame them. would you blame them?

Republicans overthrew their obsolete party establishment, can Democrats?

CORRIGAN: It's not that they don't, that they can't hear them, but they're tuning out. So I think that's been a fascinating consequence of the Harris loss is that a bunch of reliable lib white viewers have turned off MSNBC and I don't know that they'll come back, but if they don't, it's a huge problem for the party. And I'm not saying doubling down on MSNBC is the move forward. I'm saying it's not right. That is not the path forward, but the fact that people are turning out the news and they don't want to hear like Maddow's take on everything. Is really I think significant and should spark a kind of reckoning about what the media strategy is because Those are reliable voters and they are pissed and they're they feel alienated from the party And they don't feel necessarily alienated because of class they feel alienated by the one sidedness Of representation and also the [00:28:00] fact that like the democratic party was huffing its own supply But I think my biggest take after the election is like, okay She raised a billion and a half Billion and a half dollars and bought literally nothing durable cash, literally, definitely buying media platforms would have been a much better use of that money.

There's no

SHEFFIELD: Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And well, and the fact that they did it, though, that it goes, again, to the kind of the way the Democratic establishment is structured. I mean, the Republican Party used to have all of these same problems before Trump because, and I know, because I was, I was in the Republican politics and worked there during that moment, and they were, they had all kinds of grifty, sclerotic professionals who gained the system for themselves and were getting enormously wealthy from it, while continuing to lose race after race.[00:29:00]

And so what Trump did for them and why he, part of why he won is that he, he hated all of those people because they hated him. And so he, he wouldn't hire them. He, he threw them out and then he brought in new people who were doing new ideas. And didn't know, well, this is the way it's supposed to be this is the way you do things, quote, unquote.

And and, and it worked. I mean, the amount of money that Trump set, spends on television ads is, like, especially in 2016, was almost nothing in comparison to what Hillary Clinton, and, I mean, but here, here's the other going back to this anti intellectual, fake intellectualism that the Democratic operative class kind of has, is.

The political science data is unanimous that in presidential campaigns, advertising doesn't work, it has almost no effect. [00:30:00] And yet, they claim to we're all about the data, we all we believe in the data, they never even talk about this. mean, there is literally not one study out there that shows that advertising works for presidential campaigns, not one.

CORRIGAN: but that's because they're chasing celebrity.

SHEFFIELD: What do you mean?

CORRIGAN: I mean, they're putting the ads out there because they want to like send the ads in for Emmys and they want, they want the flash. Of the ad for the campaign.

SHEFFIELD: And they want the money for replacing it. Like,

CORRIGAN: Sure. They want the grift of it. Financial grift is absolutely a part of it. I will say though, that it's true that Trump has a higher threshold for creative risk in campaigns and even in governance.

Right. But his people are equally networked, in, in terms of their pedigrees and their education and the institutions [00:31:00] where they're networked.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, I mean, but it's, it is, that's true for like the cabinet people, but like the actual campaign operatives, it wasn't true actually. So like Corey Lewandowski or, the people, or even his past campaign managers, like the ones he just had, Susie Wiles, like she was just a Florida governor.

Person who had never worked nationally at all. So I mean, but I, I agree with you in a certain extent, like it's certainly his top advisors, the inner circle, that's how it is. But yeah, I mean, I don't know.

How "The West Wing" encouraged Democrats to adopt a fictional communications strategy

SHEFFIELD: Some of this, though, I do think is with these ad obsessions. It's also kind of a in a lot of ways the Democratic Party was very negatively influenced by the West Wing, I feel like.

What do you think?

CORRIGAN: Yeah, I lived in D. C. in the Beltway when the West Wing [00:32:00] was on and it was intolerable, like I've never seen it. Because I

lived there during the Bush administration. And I was like, this is such projection. So I've never seen it, but they're obsessed with it and they want it to be true so badly. It's

SHEFFIELD: well,

it is, yeah, and like they, I mean, and the core premise of the show, which was repeated over and over, was that if you can just deliver the right message, the right sentence the right comeback, the right quip, then the Republicans will fold and they'll say, oh gosh, you nailed me. I was, I was just lying the whole time.

And you told the truth too, too hard for me. And now I have to confess, that's what, that's what the show did. And real life is not that way.

CORRIGAN: No, but they love a conversion [00:33:00] narrative

SHEFFIELD: They do, but only if it's fictional. They don't like the real ones like mine. Um,

CORRIGAN: truths though.

SHEFFIELD: any comedian in what way?

CORRIGAN: Because I don't think that you were persuaded a persuasion thing didn't happen to you. Nobody gave the magic bullet argument.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I, I found it myself. Yeah. People didn't do it for me. Yeah. And like, but, but it, and it, it, I think though that that West Wing ification, like, that is part of why there is such an obsession with controlling the specific wording. Like, it, that's part of why it appealed to them, but it also reinforced it at the same time.

Like, and they, and they just haven't understood that we're, this is such a huge country. We've got over 300 million people here. With all, all the kinds of different ages and regions and races and all the, all these things. [00:34:00] There's never going to be a perfect message, but I hear that all the time well, Democrats have to get better at messaging.

They need to have, have better rhetoric. And it's like, they need to have more rhetoric and they need to actually listen to people. And, and respond to the things that they said like, and I think that the COVID 19 pandemic was another example of, of this faulty, fake intellectualism.

So if you're a, a, a scientist who is an immunologist or a virologist or a public health, biologists you can destroy any of these things that a Joe Rogan person has to say. But they didn't do it. They just sat back for the most part and just like, well, I'm not going to, I'm not going to platform those people by talking about their ideas.

And and it's [00:35:00] like, are going to talk about these ideas, whether you engage with them or not. So. best that they hear from you.

Kamala Harris's initial media interview strategy and Democrats' total risk aversion

CORRIGAN: I know. But don't you think that they're scared to go on Joe Rogan? I mean, I'm not convinced that Kamala Harris would have done well on that show because I think that she would be afraid that he would make fun of her or yell at her or bring up something that she hadn't carefully researched.

SHEFFIELD: Well, okay, so, I mean, we, it is the case that some of her top advisors were recently on the Pod Save America show, and they did say that they wanted to do Rogan, and that they tried to, but they didn't.

And it is the case that, like, that first month of her campaign, Harris didn't do any interviews, and and I, and I can understand maybe she was wanting to not [00:36:00] get tripped up by some gotcha question right before the convention or whatever, like, that's a reasonable thought.

But on the other hand, then you, you structure your media unveilings with friendly interviews in the beginning. Where you won't get the gotchas, and they didn't do that and they didn't do it until later after the convention and when they started getting desperate.

CORRIGAN: But my most generous read of that is that they didn't think that there were any friendlies. And so I think that the campaign was actually quite paranoid. And in that way that's where the circle meets on the right and the left is around paranoia. And I think that they were very paranoid sabotage especially well known media figures, and they didn't want to engage them at all. And when I'm feeling generous, I think that that was their pragmatic decision calculus.

SHEFFIELD: Well, I mean, look, I don't think, I mean the, the [00:37:00] mainstream media, the audience just isn't there the way that it used to be. So I don't think there was anything wrong with not doing that, doing them at the beginning, but they should have stepped forward and gone on Howard Stern, some of these, or I mean, Jimmy Kimmel would have loved to have had Kamala Harris there.

Do you think he was going to be mean to her? He was not, and to her credit, I do want to give her credit that when she did go on the Bret Baier show on Fox, she did fine and like when she had the debate with, so, so she can actually handle herself. It was just that I do think the advisors, they were so paranoid about, well, what if she gets this, thing, we'll just have endless plays of this and whatever. And it's like, so what, like you do enough media that, that one particular gaff or whatever, it becomes meaningless, like that's. That, I think, is the key communication strategy of Donald [00:38:00] Trump is that you just have so many things out there that no one can focus on any particular bad thing that you said.

CORRIGAN: No, I disagree with that, because I think that the standard is actually wildly different for black women and black men and women. So the gaps actually are stickier. And they get replayed in different media spheres. I think it's not the same. I mean, I think that they really should have handled her media rollout differently. I don't know that it would have made a difference though, based on what we ultimately saw, but I will say that this is anecdotal. Okay. So take that for a grain of salt, but I would say that the very high, highly engaged voters in my family, especially the women, especially the boomers are getting all of their information. From the late night talk shows now about politics and they'll never go back to MSNBC. So not going on the humor [00:39:00] shows is a problem and also it speaks to their risk threshold and they need to increase that risk threshold. If they want to get back voters or win new ones.

SHEFFIELD: Well, okay. What do you mean when you say risk threshold?

CORRIGAN: Well, like, I don't think that they want to be butt of jokes, so they don't want to be on the humorous spaces. And I think that they didn't want her on Rogan because he is off the cuff and funny and he talks a long time and he's a curve ball and they can't control the media environment. They can't feed him questions, right?

Like, I think that they need to increase the risk threshold because that's where you get candor and that's where you get the kind of content that new voters want to see, especially younger voters. But if they stick to the same old media strategy from it's going to continue to fail and it's going to fail harder and harder and harder.

And the costs are going to be higher and higher.

SHEFFIELD: Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Trump targeted disengaged Americans with media appearances, Harris with advertisements

SHEFFIELD: And, well, it, it, it's also that you have to [00:40:00] actually be listening to people. Like a huge part of media strategy is listening and listening, not just to the to your, to the people who agree with you, but also to the people who kind of disagree. Maybe like you more than not.

But you need to be figuring out, well, why are they kind of lukewarm? And that was, that was a really big difference, I think, between the Trump and the Harris campaigns is that the Trump campaign, they knew that the the hardcore loyalist Republican. Was gonna vote for him. They knew that. But, and so they put all their focus on and they were saying, this right out for months in the campaign.

I did several shows on it where they were saying we're, our entire basis of strategy is low propensity voters who don't follow the news. And they were telling the Harris campaign what they were doing. And the [00:41:00] Harris campaign in response to that was Well, we're going to put Liz Cheney on the stage with her, and that's how we're going to and, and then and then we're going to target these lower information people with advertising, which, again, is so dumb because no one watches ads anymore.

Like, I literally know one person who likes ads and she's like 75. And that, and she likes him because she doesn't watch the news. So she thinks the ads are a source of news for her. And I guess in some sense, you could say they are, perhaps. I don't know. But, that's it. Like, everybody else is like, oh no, an ad.

And they try to skip it. Or they turn on or they have an ad blocker on their browser. Whatever it is, like, no one wants to see your ad. And if they see it, They hate it. And they hate you for having one. That's the problem with ads. Like, Democrats don't realize that. People hate your fucking ads. They don't want to see them.

CORRIGAN: [00:42:00] Yeah, but they're in denial about most of their media strategy. Like it's total blanket denial. So not a surprise to me that they ignored like the Trump administration's clarity about who their audience was that they were appealing to. And also like, yeah, they put up Liz Cheney and then they lost one percentage of the Republicans who had voted for Biden in 2020.

They didn't even, they won nobody.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, because Liz Cheney is hated by Republicans. So, if you like Liz Cheney, you're not a Republican at this point. By and large. So, so they gain nothing by, by having that outreach.

Why did Democrats lose ground with women despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade?

SHEFFIELD: And of course there is another, The other side of the, of the sex divide is that they also lost support among white women.

And, and once again, Trump got the majority of, of white women. And this was, of course, the first presidential election after the Andrew Roe versus Wade. [00:43:00] So it's, it's like, and I, and I said this on a previous episode that they, the Democrats missed, The Gen Z women and younger millennial women were obviously very affected by the removal of Roe versus Wade.

But for women older, let's say, I don't know, 37 and higher, generally speaking, they're not having children. They're not going to get pregnant because they've either had the procedure or their partner's had the procedure, or they don't want a partner, whatever it is, or or they're not they're in menopause.

So, like, they're not having a pregnancy, there's no risk of pregnancy to them. lo and behold, that was what powered the Trump victory was, women who were not at risk of becoming, having another one in pregnancy, but Democrats didn't seem to, think about these women at all. Did they? I don't know. What was the message for them? Did they have [00:44:00] one

CORRIGAN: No, she wouldn't even, I mean, what she, she barely said abortion. It's not like Biden wanted to talk about abortion.

He can barely save the word. So it's not like there were

between Dobbs and the election, all of this messaging from the party about abortion. I also think there's an interaction effect from the states who had ballot initiatives, right?

So women could vote for abortion rights in their state and also vote for Trump. And it kind of gave those women an out to do both. And that's what happened in places like Missouri. You and I were talking about that before we started recording. Missouri had a ballot initiative. Women voted for it. It passed.

They have abortion rights restored to a certain point, and they also went for Trump, so I don't know that it's just a fertility issue.

SHEFFIELD: well, actually, no, that, that, that is a good point because yeah, like If you're, if you gave them the opportunity to say [00:45:00] that, well, I'm going to, I'm going to I support abortion rights access and, and I'm going to vote for it, but also that makes it safe from Trump or somebody else trying to get rid of it, because now it's safe in my state and he said it's turned over to the state.

So, I'm good. I can vote for him without putting myself at risk or somebody else. And yeah, I think that's a great point. But, but it's also goes to the, that they were, they were trying to, they were unable to articulate the larger theory of the case, which is like why do Republicans want to criminalize abortion?

Well, it's because they want for the same reason they want to criminalize birth control for the same reason that they want to make. Being non heterosexual. It's because they want to have a forced gender conformity. which is religion control. And they don't tell that to [00:46:00] people.

CORRIGAN: But that's because they're doing the same kind of sex panic. They're fundamentally conservative. It's fundamentally anti intellectual. It's not like you saw Kamala Harris defending trans people. She didn't bring any trans people out during the, right, the, the convention at all. There was no mention of trans rights or rights in a larger framework.

There was no clear understanding of where the party was going to be on privacy or, or medical rights or the military or any of the things that we're about to see, or even divorce, right? No fault divorce. So like all of those things in project 2025 that are also part of like the state GOP platforms and a bunch of the Southern states are going to be part of the public discourse moving forward.

No mention by the Harris campaign whatsoever.

The Democratic Party doesn't want to talk to low-information voters

CORRIGAN: So no, they refuse to contextualize any kind of rights into a larger framework for the party. See also the economy. It's not like the [00:47:00] Democratic party is creating large sweeping narratives about where its platform stands moving forward. Instead, she ran a campaign against Trump and invoking him as a bad boogeyman. And we you don't want four more years of Trump. Well, no, people actually felt fine about that. But in terms of creating contrast, you have to say instead of. Trump's world view. Here's what we want. And there's, I mean, no world in which she did an excellent job or the party did an excellent job of creating contrast aside from like terms that they would throw out, right? Like, of course, he's an authoritarian. Fine, but what does that mean for an everyday voter in Missouri?

SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm.

CORRIGAN: Especially one who has already voted to restore abortion rights and voted for Trump. Like, how do you, how do you create that narrative? And in some ways, the Democrats, when they're [00:48:00] working hard at it, they fall victim to nuance, to over explaining. Trump doesn't have that problem. He never over explains. He under explains. Right? And in some ways, that serves him better. But, in the absence of a worldview, there is no contrast. It's just epithets, and name calling, and fear mongering.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

CORRIGAN: that the fear mongering would turn out voters, and it did not.

SHEFFIELD: No, it didn't. And because, yeah, they, like, these are just labels. They're not. They don't have any inherent meaning especially, especially also because, like, I think a lot of Democrats, they thought that protecting democracy was a very strong thing to say against Trump, but even if it was, which it was maybe for some people, but hardly anyone but let's say that it was for, I don't know, [00:49:00] 35%, not true, but let's say it was, Trump also muddied the waters On that very issue, because he said that he was protecting democracy, because the deep state and the cancel culture are trying to eliminate democracy and impose Marxism on the country.

And so when you, when you looked at people who did say, because like, and a lot of polls were like, Oh, look, 50% 60 percent of the public wants to protect democracy. That's an important issue. And they never asked the Republicans who said that, and the Republicans who said that wanted to protect democracy from the conspiracy that QAnon had uncovered, like, that's what they wanted, and like, Democrats, they never look beyond this little surface level understanding of things, and the same thing like on the abortion stuff, that by becoming the party of more educated Americans, that's They became the party of people who are [00:50:00] high propensity voters, which meant that those ballot initiatives were going to be overwhelming in favor of protecting abortion choice. And it didn't mean anything about the rest of the public who didn't participate because they weren't there.

And like then that's why Democrats did so well in these midterms and, and not because they're now the high propensity voters, Republicans are the party, at least while Trump's around. I mean, we'll see if anything happens differently, but under, in the age of Trump, Republicans are the party of low information, low propensity citizens. That's how it is. And Democrats. They couldn't even understand, begin to understand that that's how it is.

And that this is just a change.

CORRIGAN: No, I mean, that's what I'm saying about them being in denial. I don't know that they want to talk to low information voters. I just don't think that they want to do that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:51:00] Well,

CORRIGAN: But

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. What is, yeah, they, they don't have an interest in it. And I think you're right that, About that. And, Because they look down on them. They're like, well you don't, read the New York Times every day. You don't subscribe to my favorite podcast. You don't read 20 books a year, you're irrelevant. I don't who's, who cares what you have to say about anything.

You can't have a politics, a democratic politics without the people. But that's basically what they have, have tried to do.

CORRIGAN: I mean, that's where they've converged with the GOP's philosophy about what the party does. And in some ways, I think we could probably do a study that trace the tech finance, right, money into the Democratic party and also map it onto the way that they talk about rural communities or the South or the Midwest or manufacturing jobs or educational [00:52:00] attainment or voting patterns. And I think you would see a shift in the way that they have moved away from parts of the historical rhetoric of the democratic party, certainly in the late 20th century to now, and it maps right onto the changing finance capital of the party since citizens United. And in some ways you can see it with Biden, right?

Because he's still little Joey Biden from Scranton and he wanted, so he wants to talk about manufacturing jobs and he's going to go down right to the union strike. And I mean, he is, he was still participating at least in some of the fantasy of the Democratic party's relationship with labor in his presidency in a way that. Harris made no attempt to connect with really. And I mean, the Democratic party has lost the unions and arguably, and that's a problem, right? If we, if the Democratic party no longer sees itself as in conversation with labor, I don't know how they think that they're going to speak [00:53:00] to the majority of workers in the country, especially with the minimum wage that hasn't moved in like two decades.

And The lack of home ownership and I, I mean, are they, who do they want to be? not going to tell us, it's not like people are going to like somehow come to an organic answer on their own, right? The Democratic party just ceases to exist as a legible entity of political influence.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I mean, the minimum wage, I think, is a really great example of that, like, this is a position having it raised in whatever your locality is they get 70 percent of the vote in almost everywhere it's put on the ballot. So, you would think that if Democrats are all about the data, and they, they want to be their data professionals.

Well, then Kamala Harris should have made that, centerpiece of her campaign, but she didn't.

CORRIGAN: But, and there's also, [00:54:00] listen, I'm a race and gender scholar in addition to being a scholar of politics. And there is also a certain set of the academy that's like she lost because she was a black woman. And there is some truth to that, certainly. And also it's not the entire story and you can't tell her identity story as the top of the ticket and not talk about the fact that people do have class concerns that are reflected in their voting patterns. And that's not about their household income necessarily. It's about how much money they are spending at the grocery store. And if they feel shitty about it, they're going to not turn out. And this was not a high turnout election compared to previous elections for the democratic party. And that seems like a non negligible variable.

As Democrats have won more prosperous voters, they've become less interested in economic populism

CORRIGAN: But I will say that even among my circles of like academics who, who, especially on the political science side, who are deeply invested in Democratic politics, they do not want to talk about class and they don't want to talk about the alienation of voters or how they feel about money, even though they're happy to talk about how they feel about [00:55:00] identity, they don't want to talk about how people feel about money. And that's a mistake because the way that money is operating in the culture is changing drastically. They don't want to talk about crypto. They don't want to talk about the U S dollar and its valuation or devaluation. They don't, and these are the academics that don't want to talk about that. Right. Who are, I would say closer to the Democratic party elite. And if they don't want to talk about it as like, as a vein of inquiry, It's not like there's going to be some other way to get that conversation to the democratic elites and be like, yo, people have feelings about money. If you don't tap into them, you're going to be hosed in all of these metro areas, which are the only places you're really competitive.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then, and I guess you, as somebody who has lived in the South for a long time I mean, that's, you have seen all of these things happen in your own life, personal life, right? You want to talk about your story in this context here?

CORRIGAN: Yeah. I mean, I was born and raised in Ohio, in Northeast Ohio. Right. So I w my, my [00:56:00] dad was a steel worker. I'm from the Rust Belt. I've seen that side of politics. I did almost 10 years in the Beltway for graduate school. And I taught there. Taught inside of DC for years. And then I moved to the South and I've been here almost 20 years.

And the thing about it is that almost all of the innovations in American political life in the last 20 years, I think have happened in the South where people are forced to do more with less. And so we're a bellwether for where things are going and there's no interest on the coasts and certainly on the East coast and talking with people in the South about how to engage. Like these new voting blocks or the ideas that they represent, even though we're successfully doing it here. And I think that speaks to the larger issue of the anti intellectual bent and democratic party. They're not curious about what's happening in the middle of America. And they're not curious about rural America [00:57:00] and that's the majority of the country.

So it's really, it's hard, I think, for us, a lot of the people in the South to watch because it's all of this fear mongering and the blue states like, Oh, we don't want to be a red state and look at them and they're so backward. And it's like, if you don't think that retribution politics is coming to your blue state.

I have a story to tell you about how this unfolds across time, because it is a recursive, predictable part of American political life. So in a state like mine that only has 3 million people in it. We, everybody knows everybody, right? It's very, it's a very intimate state and a lot of the country is that way.

And if you cut people out of their communities and they have no spaces of intimate politics, they're not coming back to participate. And if you're already in a deficit for voters, it seems like a long term problem. So I, I mean, I moved to Arkansas when it was still [00:58:00] a blue dog state. And I watched the Koch brothers buy up the legislature here and the politics of the legislature doesn't match the will of the people in terms of our ballot initiatives.

And that's a lot of the country, including states like Missouri or states like Nebraska. And I think the Democratic Party, if it's serious about winning, has to be serious about what's happening in these states and think about two way organizing and what they're bringing to the people to get them to come to the Democratic Party for the first time or come back to it if they've left.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great point. And it reminds me that one of the Harris advisors who was on the Pod Save America show in that interview David Plouffe, he, he said people need to understand that the swing states have a lot of conservatives in them, and it's really hard for Democrats to win in those states.

And so. The answer to that should be, well, maybe you can test out ideas and strategies across the country where there are many places [00:59:00] where you can experiment and like this whole idea of the laboratories of democracy or that is poli-science 101. Like, it's like they, they, they completely lost track of that and also don't understand that should apply to campaigns, not just a policy.

The ALEC behemoth outside the Beltway

CORRIGAN: But there is no national Democratic Party presence in most of the states in terms of trial ballooning policy, and it's not like we have an ALEC, right? I mean, CAP is like the Center for American Progress is not. Doing the same kind of work as Alec and producing template legislation, but it should be, you should be able to just roll up as a newly elected member of your legislature and be like, I would like to download the legislation about this great idea that the democratic party wants to trial.

How do I do that? And you should get the kit to do that. Right. And there isn't a place for that. And I know that because I, I work with legislators across the aisle who want some other [01:00:00] option for template legislation other than Alec and they don't have it. So they all have to invent it from scratch. That is a simple problem that has an easy solution that could be funded with the

billion and a half dollars that we, that that lady shit out onto ads.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and here's what's even more depressing. That if you look at what the super PACs included, she had three and a half billion dollars. And yeah, none of that money has any return on it.

CORRIGAN: No, but I'll tell you as a public university instructor, I have to demonstrate ROI for my classes and stakes are so much lower. Right. And it's like elections are a public good. I mean, honestly, I think none of this, not even the vision side gets ironed out without campaign finance reform. And I don't see that coming, but I think that if anybody is serious about democracy, they would talk about that, which is why I don't think the democratic party is serious about democracy because they don't want to talk about [01:01:00] campaign finance reform, finance reform, because the people who are in charge of promulgating that kind of legislation are deeply benefiting from a lack of campaign finance law reform. And so they're not going to push it because they're personally, you know benefiting from it.

And so there's a sense of which the democratic party is best most ethical messaging was about, Democracy promotion and democratic institutions, but it continues to participate in grift and anti democratic functions of capital in ways that undermine that messaging and make them not credible messengers for it.

And , I think that's why everybody is so fixated on how much money that Harris raised and where the hell it went. in the same way that, like, Garland never really got Trump for his numerous crimes against the nation, so too did this claim that he's a grifter become hollow at the point at which that much money goes to one campaign and it turns into nothing durable. And I think that that undermines the ability of the Democratic Party [01:02:00] to make a credible case for itself as an entity of change. Which is self inflicted!

SHEFFIELD: is. Yeah. And, well, and then here's what's even worse is that because they became less interested in focused on economic things because of the new donor class that came into the party, they, they tried to focus more on abstract like protect democracy type things. But then they also to some degree make some concessions on grounds of gender or race. But ultimately, even those concessions are not real either, because like, and, and, like, you will, you would see, for instance I remember there Ta Nehisi Coates gave a lecture at Georgetown University, and the workers of Georgetown were on strike because they were being treated, and I may not be Georgetown, so don't say I'm in Georgetown, but whatever the university, like, they'll go and have these conferences and these lectures about inequality and [01:03:00] and identity, and then when the actual people who are there, who are suffering because of their identity, ignore them, and they have nothing to say to them.

And in fact they tell them to get lost.

CORRIGAN: I mean, well, the or they speak out for Palestine and then they get tear gassed and beaten and the cops called on them.

Conclusion

CORRIGAN: So like, okay, like, I mean, there's no doubt that academics are inconsistent about where they put their movement energy or social change energy. But that's, I think, a symptom and not the problem, right. The problem is that capital makes it very difficult for people to participate in civic life because everybody's working too much in jobs that they hate. And they don't feel loyalty to their employer because they are only taking those jobs for healthcare, which they're overpaying for.

And so everybody's exhausted. And they're alienated and they don't know how to connect with one another in ways that are productive. And that's above and beyond the social violence that they're facing as a result of poverty or race or geography or [01:04:00] whatever.

So, it's not, it's not that the academics are hypocrites. It's that the culture is foreclosing possibilities to engage meaningfully in community in ways that create a sustainable vision for progress and people don't feel like the nation is progressing on both sides of the aisle, and they feel kind of hopeless and burnt out, especially since the pandemic has taken such a toll on communities and in public health. So, if the Democrats were like, if they had just extended the child tax credit. I think that they could have won the election. I think, I mean, I think that they, if she had embraced even one 10th of the, of the actual things that the Biden administration had done that improved the economic position for the lower 50 percent of the country, she could have potentially won that election, but they didn't even try to make the case for the successes that they had.

That they had lodged. And student loans were not going to [01:05:00] be a winner for the election, but it would have potentially turned out more of that MSNBC audience that potentially stayed home. But that's just like not where the conversation is for them. And I, I, I mean, it's inexplicable to me. It's just a will to fail.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, actually, that is a very good way of saying that. Describing a, a terrible problem all right. well, so this has been a great conversation, Lisa.

But all the good things have to come to an end. So, why don't we just end with just giving you a chance to plug your social media and books and other stuff so people can keep tabs on what you're doing.

CORRIGAN: Yeah. If you're interested, you're welcome to pick up Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation or #MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist or Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties. You can find me at “drlisacorrigan” on the socials, and as an occasional contributor for The Nation. Thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate [01:06:00] everybody joining us for the discussion, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, and I also encourage everybody to go to flux.community. Theory of Change is part of the Flux Media Network. So please go there and check us out.

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