How to compete with the right-wing meaning-making media machine

Writer and policy wonk Heather McGhee on how Democrats failed to reach voters on policy, why having Beyoncé on your side isn't enough, and what it will take to build a left media in the Trump years

In the aftermath of the election, we’ve asked some of the most thoughtful people around to reexamine their presuppositions, abandon their priors, and imagine a renewed, revamped fight for democracy in the challenging years ahead.

Today, we bring you a conversation with author, activist, and policy wonk Heather McGhee, one of the most perceptive analysts of America’s political ills and clearest articulators of potential solutions to those challenges.

When we spoke with McGhee back in May, she made a prescient argument about why the Democratic Party had been unable to compete with Trump in the arena of culture. Where Trump was able to tell a story that let his supporters make meaning out of events in their lives, the Democrats offered only policy prescriptions.

Following the election, we reached out to McGhee to talk about how the election has changed her existing analysis of the Democratic Party’s problems and potential, about the huge challenge of the right-wing information ecosystem, and what it will take for pro-democracy forces not just to tell a better story, but to compete on the level of making meaning in the everyday lives of the American people.

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Following the overwhelming disappointment and emotional blow of the electoral loss, and the prospects for what is likely to happen, as someone who has been a very good prognosticator, are you questioning anything that you thought going into this election? How has this upended your thinking and changed the things you've been thinking about?

I spent most of my career as a policy wonk and as a policy wonk focused on inequality. And in that role, I have focused on policy changes to improve the material lives of people. And much to my surprise, the Biden administration delivered on as much of the progressive economic policy agenda as they could.

I still blame Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for the Democrats not being able to run through the tape on an agenda that would have materially impacted millions of working-class people's lives. Things like $15 an hour, labor law reform, and the care agenda. These are things that — in a way that a long-term infrastructure plan could not — would have immediately been felt in working families’ homes.

And they are things the administration would have been able to immediately take credit for.

Exactly. So one thing I'm thinking of in terms of the policy framework is immediacy and marketability are more important and urgent than dethroning neoliberalism, dealing with antitrust, and creating new manufacturing jobs. All of these things feel very long-term and it’s easy to confuse who gets credit for it.

So that's one piece. But that's not a massive rethinking. It's a tweak, but it's a really important one if people are more enthralled with a $300 stimulus check signed by Donald Trump than they are with the highest rate of manufacturing since the 1970s; if people can vote for $15 an hour and abortion rights in Missouri while soundly rejecting the Democratic Party that stands for these things.

I want to ask you more about that because these are positive policies, which are also broadly popular, but when people voted they split those things off and voted for protecting abortion rights, for raising the minimum wage —  and against the candidates who supported those positions. Were they voting for Republicans on the level of vibes?

I would call that on the level of brand. But I'm really thinking the most right now about solutions to the problem of our kabuki democracy — that we don't have a real democracy. The Electoral College, the Senate, our ridiculous voting system, money in politics, all of that means that the will of the people is not well-represented in our political choices and political outcomes. Donald Trump winning the popular vote says to me the problem is deeper than a structural one. It is, in many ways, a substantive one.

We need to look at the fact that we are now three decades into a right-wing takeover of our information ecosystem that is fundamentally changing people's frameworks. We're talking about the loss of local news. More than half of American counties have no access or very limited access to local news. We're talking about Sinclair, a right-wing operation taking over local broadcasts that reaches over 70% of the American population, with a deliberate agenda and a focus on crime, homelessness, and drugs. Add in social media — where so many people get their news —  and how easily manipulable that is at its best. And at its worst, it's Elon Musk.

You combine that with the crisis in authority that was created by the Covid pandemic and the foreign disinformation campaigns that have become so brazen that people in the federal government are just saying, "We are helpless to do anything about it. All we can do is point out that it's wrong." You take all of that together, plus Fox News and conservative radio. Plus the entertainment ecosystem around men, especially young men: podcasts, and video games. And the rigorous journalism, meanwhile, is behind paywalls. So we can now see a full 360-degree wraparound alternate universe, for most people without a New York Times subscription.

That doesn't diminish the material concerns and the real privation facing working-class families. But it does mean that the meaning-making about why they're struggling to make ends meet, who's to blame, and who can fix it, is controlled by the right wing. 

I feel like you're getting at something that's pretty important there. We posted last week asking why the left doesn’t have its own Joe Rogan. But what you're saying is that it's really not that simple. You’re competing with a completely separate ecosystem of media and a marketing funnel from memes and video games to far-right YouTube channels that leads people into this entirely other way of understanding the world

Well, first, let me just say, Beyoncé is great, but she's not giving you an analysis of where your problems are coming from and telling you how to fix them. There's a real difference between having someone co-sign a candidate as a personality and having someone in your ear every day saying, "Look at this piece of news. This is how this fits into my story of grievance,” as Joe Rogan does. 

That’s meaning-making in a real way. It's about being there on voters' shoulders all day, helping them make sense of the world. And there is a version of that across multiple platforms in the right-wing ecosystem. 

Vice President Harris came out with a strong populist message and set of proposals on costs, about corporate greed and price gouging, right? And then the chattering class responded and said, "Oh, that's so stupid," right? You know It may be smart politics, but it's dumb policy. And then the billionaires who wanted to be on the Democrat side said, "You're going to have to get rid of Lina Khan." And so it just got muted and muffled and put aside. 

But that’s just not the same as saying — as Vance and Trump did — that the reason your housing is so expensive is because of illegal immigrants yeah and the government giving them all the good houses and saying that over and over and over again until people believed that it was true.

You read about people’s reasons for voting and it almost seems that beyond that, the prevailing sentiment was "Well, as long as I got mine, forget it.” Whether that’s about rights, housing, or anything having to do with my taxes paying for someone else's needs. 

That's where the zero-sum nature of the right-wing argument is just so powerful, right? That this fabricated other is a threat to you and yours. And unless that fabricated other is actually billionaires and powerful corporations, it's a story that creates the seeds of fascism and creates an authoritarian answer.

One of the other things I was really surprised about was how nearly a decade of brutal, dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric from the right instead of creating a racial solidarity consciousness among Latinos offered them a choice. That is the choice that has been offered to immigrants throughout our history, which is to either remain  the maligned and dehumanized other or opt in and be white. Just be white, you know which is the greatest thing in the world to be, apparently.

And Latinos literally have that option on the census, they're not a race. They're white people who may or may not be of Spanish-speaking origin, It's not surprising in the sense that many people have predicted that this would be what would happen. But I think that the scale of it, and in response to such pre-genocidal rhetoric. Rhetoric that fully dehumanized immigrants, made them into mortal threats, that created a blood libel narrative.

So I don't want to blame the people who are making that choice because it happened in the context of what looks to have been disappointingly low turnout from Democratic voters overall. And I wonder about that failure to motivate the base. There was this overall failure to appeal. And I don't know what to make of that either, in that context that you described, of this outright fascist rhetoric.

I really do think that the Democratic brand has been so defined by our opposition. At its worst, we are what the right wing says. But at our best, we are ineffectual. We promise a lot of things and we can't actually deliver. 

So when Bernie Sanders says that Democrats abandoned the working class, you know that's a tough charge to level against Joe Biden on the picket line, right? But the problem is the Democrats also include Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and Bill Clinton. 

People who directly prevent delivering for the working class. 

Exactly. And so you know I think this is why in late-stage capitalism, in an era of astounding inequality, clear populist messages continue to win the day. An anti-status quo message; throw the bums out. Politics will keep whipsawing this country back and forth until there is a fundamental political realignment and the Democrats get more coherent on the class agenda so that they are not co-opted by phony populism.

A lot of Democrats are probably going to be saying, "Oh, we need to embrace what the right is selling and just go there." But really, the idea here that you're pressing on is that what you need is a real left populism.

You need to actually embrace the real needs of working-class people, really try to deliver against all odds on those promises, and you need to be able to sell it.

But we're in the wilderness, right? Democrats are in the wilderness. So we're not going to be able to govern and deliver in most places. Certainly not at the federal level. But we can really recognize the monumental task of the information ecosystem problem for what it is and start rebuilding there. 

So what does that look like?

I think that looks like taking very seriously the rebuilding of the local news infrastructure. There are major capital plays that our donors could be doing, right? Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? How much would it cost for unions and groups of medium investors and some class-betraying billionaires or millionaires on our side to map the news ecosystem and really aggressively try to take it back over? To build up our influencer network to really make a play for the world of video games. We just need to take it seriously, and understand that it's not enough to be an elite party.

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Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images