The other issue is that voters—rightly or wrongly—have different expectations of the parties (especially in the Trump era). Republicans are expected to break stuff, fling poo, and throw hissy fits, while Democrats are expected to "be the adults in the room" and govern—even when they hold no actual power.
Voters punished Democrats in the 2011/12 Wisconsin recall elections because they didn't "stay and fight" during the passage of Scott Walker's union-busting legislation—even though fleeing the state was literally the *only* tool that Democrats could use to slow the process. And that's just one maddening example.
Another issue is that audio media (such as podcasts or talk radio) are disproportionately popular with people who spend a lot of time behind a steering wheel, and those people are more likely to be attracted to right-wing politics due to anti-environmentalist resentments and the zero-sum competition for road and parking space.
I agree fully with the notion that it’s hopeless to set up a Left Wing political media operation, but….t he whole premise of the Media Matters chart is flawed and dangerous to Left interests.
To lump Theo Vaugh (and yes, even Rogan) as some sort of explicitly “Right Aligned” podcast misses completely that these properties have huge audiences not because they are politically aligned, but despite the fact that they are at times. Most of the Theo Vaughn content is not political. Rogan still regularly has 3 hour shows about random bullshit (some new comedian, talking UFOs with Jacques Vallee last week, etc) where politics do not come up.
Meanwhile, the “Left Aligned” list is almost explicitly politics first properties (you can argue Noah is general interests, I guess, but no one really sees the Daily Show is general interest and hasn’t since Kilborn hosted it). Meanwhile, people like Marc Maron and his WTF podcast (largely apolitical interviews with his former Air America hosting Left politics sprinkled in) is completely off the list (55 Million Listeners a year).
If we can’t even see the field properly how do we even expect to play ball? The focus should be on be on building out and selectively leveraging the Marc’s Maron (and even less politically engaged) of the world to selectively platform and engage with Left adjacent ideas in an organic way…not (once again) wasting all our energy focused on a caricature of people who align with the Right (fully or partially).
how do you leverage general interest platforms that are only marginally Left aligned?
Well, you put in years worth of effort outside of campaign season getting people on these shows to shoot the shit and build up rapport on general interest topics, only sprinkling in politics here and there. Then maybe, come campaign time, the audiences on these larger platforms will be willing to hear you out…
But no, people want an “Easy” button that allows them to just show up and spent an hour of All The Smoke’s time just talking boring stale campaign talking points and then wonder why it didn’t all work 😒
A lot of these marginally aligned podcasts are perfect to attract moderates. The most popular center-left "podcast" is probably the streamer Destiny - who went from competitive videogames to RW politics to left-wing to dem establishment. The Rogan model of going from interest pieces to semi-political debates and interviews appears to be the (or one) correct model
I am not even sure i would consider it a “model”, so much as its just part of the low overhead nature of these multu-hour podcasts or streams. You are trying to fill up time, you are not interested in editing much if any content out…so you end up normalizing political and other content types across your library. Instead, you basically leave it to your listener base to basically tune in / out of what they care about…and that’s exactly what most do. I still listen to Marc Maron’s WTF, he still fits occasional political rants, but unless he has a guest on i like …rarely to i listen to the episode.
Part of the appeal is that political conversation is somewhat normalized and intermittent, but not infrequent….so lots of people encounter it sometimes, again and again…
And if you do these shows with some regularity you sort of build up a rapport and credibility with that audience that is worth more than just going on once during election season for a boring pre-set discussion where you aren’t even comfortable weighing in on whatever happened in the F1 or basketball game last night, etc
I explained to some guy in a kpop reddit why hating on a female idol is a silly use of time and the whole convo seemed to work and idk I'm just confused at how easy that was once I did it carefully
No one is backing Joe Rogan, just like no one is backing Marc Maron…. because their audiences are mostly apolitical people. There is no “Easy” button here… you can’t fake this shit people see right through it and they just turn you off…
The only way to garner clout with folks is to legitimately engage with pop culture stuff without always trying to steer things into political soapboxing…only then with casuals or marginally political folks be familiar enough with you to just not tune you out completely.
You can’t just show up on Kevin Garnett or Jeff Teague’s podcast spouting politics and expect to get downloads. You have to go on and cut it up about your favorite NBA team, wildest moments, whatever…only then will you be able to steer a convo to politics now and then and have folks hear you out.
You have to have more than Culture War shit to relate to people on. That’s how you win people over bit by bit…
The Left is not capable of being able to do culture without it being intertwined with politics. It's in their DNA. It goes back to when I used to complain that all my friends were doing Sunday Funday instead of caring about the erosion of civil liberties and lack of healthcare during the Bush Administration. Everything is political and as long as some cause in the world needs attention, casual fun is not allowed. They dialed it up to 11 during the pandemic, when anyone who wasn't "taking it seriously" was evil and they decided to go to war with brunch. Again last year when every social event had to be protested because "there's a genocide." You would need an entirely new Left in order for this to be successful.
I agree full stop, but also… it’s at least worth mentioning (again) that *would be* the way…should any aspiring Left aligned politician is feeling open to ideas…go find a way to be a regular guest in some promising ambitious general interest podcast in hopes of one day having that relationship pay political dividends… reality is…you really only need a few charismatic politicians to exploit this pathway for it to pay dividends.
That's a really good point. D keeps digging into this myth that the rightists have always been so, and this is like, I guess a good attitude when you're getting too many votes.
its a self serving myth because ultimately their hope is that someone wastes millions more dollars propping up Air America 3.0 and folks like them stand to gain…. least for a little while til the load blows….
I think it's an outgrowth of this purist woke-style politics. When woke was "cool" it seemed like being kind of blunt/absolutist/trivializing people leaving as not worth giving a second thought about was OK. That is notttttttt the world we live in right now so it needs t stop.
Btw I bash the woke ideology but lib-centers did woke too, they can't just blame the left for it. Really antiracism is just the half of leftism that lib-centers liked and decided to make the party thesis while ignoring "caring about blue collar people."
In general, Leftist were cultural Gatekeepers for the last decade or so. When Conservative Baby Boomer / Gen X bosses aged out of middle management or senior editorial roles at cultural institutions…hip Millennials gained influence and power for a brief “hot minute”…. but with the continued rise of Google and digital advertising milkshakes getting drunk…all that has ebbed away and now all they have is their niche Leftist podcasts, an fallen eyelash, and one final prayer… the gates will never be put back up by the keepers. Yet all they can talk about is their power to influence “The Discourse” on a site they all claim to loathe where not even 1 out of 10 Americans have an account.
Good riddance I say to the gates and their former keepers, these people are getting too dangerous for all our good… and thankfully they realized their peril far too late to grasp it back.
oooh I disagree, the problem is white college dems pushing out everyone else from the democratic party. they just picked the ideas from the Left they liked the most and it wound up including BLM and trans rights. now the popular ideas on the left, basically what bernie talks about constantly, those the white college dems didn't want.
I'm down for blaming Leftist IDEAS but not people. I don't want to pick an intra-party war for crap that doesn't have anything to do with left/center and has to do with college/noncollege.
White College Dems are still disproportionately represented in the Media and Cultural Gatekeeper arenas… and for the most part their politics more or less align with Leftist whether they know what that word is or not…
As for pushing people “out of the tent”, I mean cruelty and ridicule has always been the weapon of the Cultural Elite for keeping people in line, punishing those who dare to question the Intellectual Line, etc….
Used to be, this “power” was really only used by hipsters in music scenes to arbitrarily decide which bands were “cool” and which were not…but music / movies / culture is more niche than ever and Bernie pulled a ton of these folks into making politics, not music, their entire lives and unfortunately that has had some negative societal effects…
If you haven’t noticed, they are all openly calling for a Tea Party of the Left now…as if the Tea Party was *good* for the Republican Party (or society) on the whole…
While it's true that conservatives have more media, they also get that media by actually talking to the audience instead of preaching. Joe Rogan us entertaining and acts like Johnny Carson
All good points, except I'd argue that a "Fuck big corporations/eat the rich/we're for working people" platfrom a la Bernie/AOC is a simple and unifying message for a large swath of Americans. The problem between the moderates and leftists there is that the corporate-backed moderates in power don't really seem to support this platform at all.
But they absolutely could. There are many reasons, many times when policies more socialist-leaning policies could be vastly improved by nuance, evidence, acknowledgement of the needs of diverse--including *gasp* capitalist--stakeholders and unintended consequences. But instead their continued compromising with the right just makes them appear beholden to corporate-backed, neoliberal, globalist, elitist economic policies, while giving voice to populist ideology in terms of civil rights and social progressivism only. They are, in a word, just the same Barbara Streisand limosine liberals my conservative friends ridiculed in the 90s and 00s.
So yes, Dems *could* reconcile around a real worker's party platform (with all social justice and environmental sustainability flowing down from that), and then disagree and compromise on different center-to-far left strategies to get there. But I think it would require a tea party style hostile take over of the party, pushing out all the old fucks that have been holding court for decades. Nobody on the left or right trusts them at all anymore. And if they can't unify, they should just split into two parties and caucaus together on key issues.
Yes they made some strides toward that, and I do think his policies were more to the left than Obama. But (1) they still didn't go far enough and (2) everything they did they did with completely absent, flaccid, and ineffectual communication. Half the job of the presidency is being a leader, which Biden totally sucked at. He had no presence, no command, he failed at half of his job and therefore failed as a president no matter how bending-towards-the-arc-of-justice his economic policies were.
The problem is the best candidates for these socialist policies, and their grifter media supporters like Hasan thrive on the outsider label. Saying the moderate Dems should compromise with Bernie is like saying the moderate republicans should compromise with Trump. Extremists only work when they are total outsiders or authoritarians running a cult of personality. Just adopting socialist policies without the bluster and authoritarianism is a dead end because the policies themselves are dogshit in the long run and can't hold up to scrutiny. Wealth tax, Bernie's M4A, AOCs forced co-opification are all policies dug up from the trash heap of history just like Trump's tariffs - so any party that actually puts power behind them will be a one-term shit show.
Meidas Touch Network also has a YouTube channel where they post daily, a Substack, and a website. I think they're our best hope for getting our message out there.
The other issue is that voters—rightly or wrongly—have different expectations of the parties (especially in the Trump era). Republicans are expected to break stuff, fling poo, and throw hissy fits, while Democrats are expected to "be the adults in the room" and govern—even when they hold no actual power.
Voters punished Democrats in the 2011/12 Wisconsin recall elections because they didn't "stay and fight" during the passage of Scott Walker's union-busting legislation—even though fleeing the state was literally the *only* tool that Democrats could use to slow the process. And that's just one maddening example.
Another issue is that audio media (such as podcasts or talk radio) are disproportionately popular with people who spend a lot of time behind a steering wheel, and those people are more likely to be attracted to right-wing politics due to anti-environmentalist resentments and the zero-sum competition for road and parking space.
I agree fully with the notion that it’s hopeless to set up a Left Wing political media operation, but….t he whole premise of the Media Matters chart is flawed and dangerous to Left interests.
To lump Theo Vaugh (and yes, even Rogan) as some sort of explicitly “Right Aligned” podcast misses completely that these properties have huge audiences not because they are politically aligned, but despite the fact that they are at times. Most of the Theo Vaughn content is not political. Rogan still regularly has 3 hour shows about random bullshit (some new comedian, talking UFOs with Jacques Vallee last week, etc) where politics do not come up.
Meanwhile, the “Left Aligned” list is almost explicitly politics first properties (you can argue Noah is general interests, I guess, but no one really sees the Daily Show is general interest and hasn’t since Kilborn hosted it). Meanwhile, people like Marc Maron and his WTF podcast (largely apolitical interviews with his former Air America hosting Left politics sprinkled in) is completely off the list (55 Million Listeners a year).
If we can’t even see the field properly how do we even expect to play ball? The focus should be on be on building out and selectively leveraging the Marc’s Maron (and even less politically engaged) of the world to selectively platform and engage with Left adjacent ideas in an organic way…not (once again) wasting all our energy focused on a caricature of people who align with the Right (fully or partially).
how do you leverage general interest platforms that are only marginally Left aligned?
Well, you put in years worth of effort outside of campaign season getting people on these shows to shoot the shit and build up rapport on general interest topics, only sprinkling in politics here and there. Then maybe, come campaign time, the audiences on these larger platforms will be willing to hear you out…
But no, people want an “Easy” button that allows them to just show up and spent an hour of All The Smoke’s time just talking boring stale campaign talking points and then wonder why it didn’t all work 😒
A lot of these marginally aligned podcasts are perfect to attract moderates. The most popular center-left "podcast" is probably the streamer Destiny - who went from competitive videogames to RW politics to left-wing to dem establishment. The Rogan model of going from interest pieces to semi-political debates and interviews appears to be the (or one) correct model
I am not even sure i would consider it a “model”, so much as its just part of the low overhead nature of these multu-hour podcasts or streams. You are trying to fill up time, you are not interested in editing much if any content out…so you end up normalizing political and other content types across your library. Instead, you basically leave it to your listener base to basically tune in / out of what they care about…and that’s exactly what most do. I still listen to Marc Maron’s WTF, he still fits occasional political rants, but unless he has a guest on i like …rarely to i listen to the episode.
Part of the appeal is that political conversation is somewhat normalized and intermittent, but not infrequent….so lots of people encounter it sometimes, again and again…
And if you do these shows with some regularity you sort of build up a rapport and credibility with that audience that is worth more than just going on once during election season for a boring pre-set discussion where you aren’t even comfortable weighing in on whatever happened in the F1 or basketball game last night, etc
I explained to some guy in a kpop reddit why hating on a female idol is a silly use of time and the whole convo seemed to work and idk I'm just confused at how easy that was once I did it carefully
To what extent is the issue that the right has a greater _ability_ to play the long game as you describe, thanks to deep-pocketed backers?
No one is backing Joe Rogan, just like no one is backing Marc Maron…. because their audiences are mostly apolitical people. There is no “Easy” button here… you can’t fake this shit people see right through it and they just turn you off…
The only way to garner clout with folks is to legitimately engage with pop culture stuff without always trying to steer things into political soapboxing…only then with casuals or marginally political folks be familiar enough with you to just not tune you out completely.
You can’t just show up on Kevin Garnett or Jeff Teague’s podcast spouting politics and expect to get downloads. You have to go on and cut it up about your favorite NBA team, wildest moments, whatever…only then will you be able to steer a convo to politics now and then and have folks hear you out.
You have to have more than Culture War shit to relate to people on. That’s how you win people over bit by bit…
Largely, the Left isn’t even playing that game….
The Left is not capable of being able to do culture without it being intertwined with politics. It's in their DNA. It goes back to when I used to complain that all my friends were doing Sunday Funday instead of caring about the erosion of civil liberties and lack of healthcare during the Bush Administration. Everything is political and as long as some cause in the world needs attention, casual fun is not allowed. They dialed it up to 11 during the pandemic, when anyone who wasn't "taking it seriously" was evil and they decided to go to war with brunch. Again last year when every social event had to be protested because "there's a genocide." You would need an entirely new Left in order for this to be successful.
I agree full stop, but also… it’s at least worth mentioning (again) that *would be* the way…should any aspiring Left aligned politician is feeling open to ideas…go find a way to be a regular guest in some promising ambitious general interest podcast in hopes of one day having that relationship pay political dividends… reality is…you really only need a few charismatic politicians to exploit this pathway for it to pay dividends.
That's a really good point. D keeps digging into this myth that the rightists have always been so, and this is like, I guess a good attitude when you're getting too many votes.
its a self serving myth because ultimately their hope is that someone wastes millions more dollars propping up Air America 3.0 and folks like them stand to gain…. least for a little while til the load blows….
I think it's an outgrowth of this purist woke-style politics. When woke was "cool" it seemed like being kind of blunt/absolutist/trivializing people leaving as not worth giving a second thought about was OK. That is notttttttt the world we live in right now so it needs t stop.
Btw I bash the woke ideology but lib-centers did woke too, they can't just blame the left for it. Really antiracism is just the half of leftism that lib-centers liked and decided to make the party thesis while ignoring "caring about blue collar people."
In general, Leftist were cultural Gatekeepers for the last decade or so. When Conservative Baby Boomer / Gen X bosses aged out of middle management or senior editorial roles at cultural institutions…hip Millennials gained influence and power for a brief “hot minute”…. but with the continued rise of Google and digital advertising milkshakes getting drunk…all that has ebbed away and now all they have is their niche Leftist podcasts, an fallen eyelash, and one final prayer… the gates will never be put back up by the keepers. Yet all they can talk about is their power to influence “The Discourse” on a site they all claim to loathe where not even 1 out of 10 Americans have an account.
Good riddance I say to the gates and their former keepers, these people are getting too dangerous for all our good… and thankfully they realized their peril far too late to grasp it back.
oooh I disagree, the problem is white college dems pushing out everyone else from the democratic party. they just picked the ideas from the Left they liked the most and it wound up including BLM and trans rights. now the popular ideas on the left, basically what bernie talks about constantly, those the white college dems didn't want.
I'm down for blaming Leftist IDEAS but not people. I don't want to pick an intra-party war for crap that doesn't have anything to do with left/center and has to do with college/noncollege.
White College Dems are still disproportionately represented in the Media and Cultural Gatekeeper arenas… and for the most part their politics more or less align with Leftist whether they know what that word is or not…
As for pushing people “out of the tent”, I mean cruelty and ridicule has always been the weapon of the Cultural Elite for keeping people in line, punishing those who dare to question the Intellectual Line, etc….
Used to be, this “power” was really only used by hipsters in music scenes to arbitrarily decide which bands were “cool” and which were not…but music / movies / culture is more niche than ever and Bernie pulled a ton of these folks into making politics, not music, their entire lives and unfortunately that has had some negative societal effects…
If you haven’t noticed, they are all openly calling for a Tea Party of the Left now…as if the Tea Party was *good* for the Republican Party (or society) on the whole…
You’re a clever lad Nick and full of common sense and integrity
While it's true that conservatives have more media, they also get that media by actually talking to the audience instead of preaching. Joe Rogan us entertaining and acts like Johnny Carson
https://www.gofundme.com/f/7qhsn-help-me-pay-my-late-rent
All good points, except I'd argue that a "Fuck big corporations/eat the rich/we're for working people" platfrom a la Bernie/AOC is a simple and unifying message for a large swath of Americans. The problem between the moderates and leftists there is that the corporate-backed moderates in power don't really seem to support this platform at all.
But they absolutely could. There are many reasons, many times when policies more socialist-leaning policies could be vastly improved by nuance, evidence, acknowledgement of the needs of diverse--including *gasp* capitalist--stakeholders and unintended consequences. But instead their continued compromising with the right just makes them appear beholden to corporate-backed, neoliberal, globalist, elitist economic policies, while giving voice to populist ideology in terms of civil rights and social progressivism only. They are, in a word, just the same Barbara Streisand limosine liberals my conservative friends ridiculed in the 90s and 00s.
So yes, Dems *could* reconcile around a real worker's party platform (with all social justice and environmental sustainability flowing down from that), and then disagree and compromise on different center-to-far left strategies to get there. But I think it would require a tea party style hostile take over of the party, pushing out all the old fucks that have been holding court for decades. Nobody on the left or right trusts them at all anymore. And if they can't unify, they should just split into two parties and caucaus together on key issues.
This is basically what the Biden presidency tried to do
Yes they made some strides toward that, and I do think his policies were more to the left than Obama. But (1) they still didn't go far enough and (2) everything they did they did with completely absent, flaccid, and ineffectual communication. Half the job of the presidency is being a leader, which Biden totally sucked at. He had no presence, no command, he failed at half of his job and therefore failed as a president no matter how bending-towards-the-arc-of-justice his economic policies were.
The problem is the best candidates for these socialist policies, and their grifter media supporters like Hasan thrive on the outsider label. Saying the moderate Dems should compromise with Bernie is like saying the moderate republicans should compromise with Trump. Extremists only work when they are total outsiders or authoritarians running a cult of personality. Just adopting socialist policies without the bluster and authoritarianism is a dead end because the policies themselves are dogshit in the long run and can't hold up to scrutiny. Wealth tax, Bernie's M4A, AOCs forced co-opification are all policies dug up from the trash heap of history just like Trump's tariffs - so any party that actually puts power behind them will be a one-term shit show.
Uhh where is PSA on that list? Can’t see if they’re too small.
Thank you for this. I've been trying to articulate a similar message among friends for years and now I can just link to this instead.
Meidas Touch Network also has a YouTube channel where they post daily, a Substack, and a website. I think they're our best hope for getting our message out there.