Where's our Rogan?
How the right co-opted "meeting people where they are." And how the left can wrest it back
Here is a paradox of the 2024 election result: Democrats advanced what they believed to be a profoundly inclusive platform, but they read to many voters as an out-of-touch, elitist party. Meanwhile, Republicans advanced a flagrantly exclusionary agenda, almost exclusively favorably to the richest and most powerful Americans, and they read to many voters as a populist movement friendly to the working class.
There is no point in fact-checking what people perceive. Elections are not math tests. There are no “right answers.” What people hear is all that matters, not what you intended to say.
Some of this paradox is explained, I think, by an underappreciated difference between platform and posture. There is the matter of what you stand for, and the rather different issue of how you stand. We all have that friend who believes all the right and beautiful and just things, but wouldn’t help you in a pinch. We all also have that friend or relative or neighbor who believes awful things but would be the first person to offer to help us move.
For reasons we will still be examining for some time, Democrats have somehow ended up in a situation where their platform is all about openness, but their stance reads to many voters as closed. It feels — and whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point — like a judgmental movement for inclusion and equity. Republicans have, at the same time, chosen a platform devoted to closings — of the border, of the gates of citizenship, of the generosity of the safety net, of fundamental freedoms — but their stance reads to many voters as open, inviting, come-as-you-are. It feels to many like a nonjudgmental movement for exclusion.
Please don’t misread this on purpose. It is not an endorsement of the right’s methods. But I think we need to be straightforward about this paradox. It is a scandal to allow the most exclusionary platform in modern American history to be read as openhearted to so many. It is a scandal that so many of the very people it would degrade feel attracted to the cause.
Part of what’s going on here, I think, is the Republicans embracing an ethic that I first heard from progressive community organizers: Meet people where they are.
This is the organizer’s code, the idea behind all other ideas. But when I wrote my book The Persuaders, many of the organizers on the left whom I profiled were sounding an alarm through my book about their own movements turning away from this ethic. They worried about their movements seeming to have prerequisites to join. Linda Sarsour, the progressive activist, described her own movement as being like a prison where you have to enter one gate and have that gate close behind you to cross the next gate. You had to know the right terms, never mess up, not have questions about the right approach to advancing social justice for marginalized groups, and, frankly, silence concerns you might have about the best strategy.
That Republicans have ended up with more of a “meet people where they are” ethic is beyond ironic. Again, I’m speaking of posture, not policy; stance, not substance. But they have managed to create the sense of an open invitation to join this movement of closings. There is a thirst for converts, rather than a suspicion that they may not be aligned with you on every last issue. There is an understanding that a lot of politics is actually about vibes and having your cause be an aspirational brand people want to join; and the Republicans made inroads with many nontraditional voter groups this time around by having the MAGA hat function as a status symbol, allowing people to flex and separate themselves from other members of their own communities, showing people that they are winners who didn’t need the Democrats’ offers of help.
But what turbocharges these differences in stance is a gigantic media ecology on the right that functions as a voter radicalization funnel. Meeting people where they are means that you pull people into that funnel at its very wide end. As they enter, they are merely annoyed by things around them — upset about inflation, frustrated at not being able to own a home, feeling destabilized by the rising status of women and people of color, unsure of their role. And the funnel — consisting of traditional media, newer media like podcasts and video talk shows, social media, and YouTube content — slowly pulls them from annoyance with questions toward ever more radical and pungent certitude. It doesn’t require them to be at the pointy end of the funnel at the beginning. The point of the funnel is to pull in everyone. The movement is self-confident enough to think that it can turn anyone bothered by a pea under their mattress, whether valid or invalid, utterly racist or genuinely born of pain, into a believer.
The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world. It needs to take lost and lonely boys and men and move them toward a sense of how to be in a gender-equal world. It needs to invite people to see their own story in the story of a pluralist America of the future. It needs to be longer on invitation, shorter on blame. It needs to meet you where you are, and be confident enough to move you, over years even, toward greater consciousness.
There is simply no such media ecology right now, no such organizing infrastructure at the scale required. People who want to build things like this get no help from those who could help them. People sit around and fret about Tuesday but don’t have the vision to help build the mental infrastructure for a different future.
Let’s change that.
What would you like to see or hear in media that you aren’t seeing or hearing now? What do you think that organizing mental infrastructure needs to look like? Let us know in the comments.
I hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. On this dark day, I want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.
One of the lessons of the MAGA era, and indeed of history generally, is that politicians and parties do well when they find an out group toward whom the voters can direct all of their frustrations, resentments, and hatreds. We have seen Republicans do this successfully over the years by singling out migrants, Muslims, and various other minority groups. When Republicans talk endlessly about rising crime, what they are really doing is not so subtly targeting racial minorities. Really, no group other than white males is exempt from this treatment.
Scapegoating doesn't come naturally to Democrats, as it is antithetical to the liberal project. But I believe it may be time to go hard to the left on economic (not social) policy and direct voter resentment toward corporations and the billionaire class. Bernie Sanders found broad support for this message, and it has the added benefit of being true. It really is the case that much of what is wrong with our society results from the endless pursuit of profit and the capture of government and major institutions by wealthy interests. Voters on both sides of the political spectrum can agree that the non-level economic playing field and the corruption of our political system are major factors that negatively affect their lives.
The problem is capitalism as practiced in America. Of course, no one can say this without being called a communist. But a message based on corporate greed and the unearned power of billionaires could resonate broadly. We are entering a new, post-neoliberal period the contours of which are not yet fully defined. Republicans would take us toward an autocratic, corrupt, crony capitalist world where power and wealth are pursued endlessly and without regard to social consequences. The alternative is to comprehensively check corporate behavior in ways that actually benefit consumers yet still provide incentives for innovation, productivity, and growth. This could be achieved through vigorous antitrust enforcement, sensible regulation of social media, investment in innovation, an equitable tax code, pro-labor policies like paid leave, governance and campaign finance reform, and so forth.
Democrats stink at messaging. Social justice messages fall flat and drive many voters away. Phrases like "opportunity economy" sound nonsensical. I would like to see Democrats articulate specific policies that help workers and consumers and to adopt an unambiguously anti-billionaire program. Make people hate the real elites, not just liberals with degrees who live on the coasts, many of whom have no better quality of life than the average MAGA voter. Republicans keep moving to the right. Democrats shouldn't follow them to the center and beyond. They should go left with vigor. The voters want a new system. Give them one explicitly.
I have often wondered why the “progressive” media did not spend time covering positive outcomes for people from the bills passed under Biden rather than spending so much time punishing Trump for his transgressions (which were so many.) interview folks who had new jobs, increased incomes, or were benefiting from infrastructure improvements. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. From all walks of life. Highlight folks who appreciate Obamacare and elders who cannot live without social security. I don’t know if this is what you mean by widening the funnel.