A New York Times article published last weekend highlights what has become a clear theme of the midterm elections: the Republican Party’s vicious attacks on Democratic candidates using a variety of homophobic, Islamophobic, and sexists slurs. But this only captures a slice of an even darker story; for while it’s true that President Trump and his allies are leaning hard into such appeals, the full depths of their depravity exceed these attacks on individual candidates. The bizarre claims that Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico is trans or gay; the bigoted references to Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a jihadist who would need to pass through a metal detector to enter Congress; the atrocious ad that effectively belittled the rape of Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton when she was a girl: these aren’t just random lines of attack that MAGA opportunistically sees as fruitful, but manifestations of MAGA’s essential hatred of non-Christians, of gays and trans people, of feminism, and of non-whites.

In this, what some have argued is the GOP trying to cover for its lack of support on various issues (the economy/inflation, the Iran war) can equally well be seen as MAGA simply letting its freak flag fly in an effort to re-create Trump’s winning 2024 coalition. At bottom, this isn’t just a matter of campaign rhetoric. When the president and his allies seek to move voters by attacks that invoke a candidate’s race, or national origin, or religion, or sexual orientation, they are simultaneously working to vilify or demean entire swathes of the citizenry. In doing so, such MAGA campaign strategies are ineluctably declarations of war on the U.S. and the American people: on our basic equality and on the freedom of every citizen to live their life as they please, free from a Republican Party that seeks to turn the government into a tool of political and social repression.

Take the attacks on James Talarico, who Republicans have alternately portrayed as either gay or possibly even trans. When they claim that he is gay, the obvious implication (even if unstated) is that it it bad, weird, and disqualifying to be homosexual. These are attempts to sway voters into loathing not only Talarico, but reminding them of a whole class of citizens that the Republican Party has vilified for decades. A similar maneuver is being deployed when Republicans claim Talarico is trans or, alternatively, is a defender of trans people. Indeed, if gay people are considered unacceptable and immoral in the MAGA imaginary, then trans people are transcendentally so. As Noah Berlatsky persuasively argues, a “vicious hatred of trans people is the core final midterms message of the GOP,” with upwards of $100 million being spent on anti-trans ads in the current election cycle. He correctly identifies this demonization as central to MAGA’s larger reactionary goals, writing, “Trans hate is also a way to push the GOP’s broader patriarchal agenda and justify vindictive control of women, of children, of queer and nonconforming people, of disabled people. Fascism builds on hate to generate more hate. The GOP wants to dehumanize trans people as a goal in itself, and to target others in an ever-expanding orgy of violent authoritarianism.” In other words, although it is quite true that MAGA is resorting to anti-trans rhetoric to try to beat James Talarico, the anti-trans hatred being broadcast is part of a far broader incitement against literally hundreds of thousands of citizens for the sin of their mere existence.

In Michigan, the race for an open Senate seat between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and GOP Rep. Mike Rogers has been the locus of unbridled anti-Islamic hatred by the Republican Party. From the president on down, the GOP has painted Dr. El-Sayed as a terrorist sympathizer and even a terrorist himself. As Ben Rhodes writes, “Donald Trump has called Abdul a “jihadist lunatic” and refers to him as “Muhammad.” Ted Cruz called him a “jihadist leprechaun” and said his election would endanger the United States. Mike Rogers, Abdul’s opponent, suggests that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other surrogates have linked Abdul to 9/11 and various other terrorist offenses.” The president has also said that El-Sayed should go back to where he came from — a nonsensical as well as racist demand, given that El-Sayed hails from Michigan. Again, though, these attacks can’t be seen as somehow limited to just El-Sayed, but rather as invoking and inciting a far broader hatred against Muslims, of whom El-Sayed is presented as a particularly objectionable example because of his proximity to national power.

In neighboring Ohio, the GOP launched a similarly vicious attack on the Democrat’s gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton. In a truly shocking ad run by her rival Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign, Acton’s estranged mother calls the candidate a “liar,” accusing her of concocting stories about her past. The clincher is that the spot disputed Acton’s account of being raped by her stepfather as a girl. Subsequent reporting only re-affirmed Acton’s veracity, including comments from her brother, court documents regarding charges brought against the stepfather, and reports that the stepfather had also been accused of raping his own biological daughter. Disgusting stuff all around — but though some GOP politicos attempted to distance themselves from the ad, or even condemned it, other high-ranking Republican officials (again including President Trump) backed Ramaswamy’s jaw-dropping line of attack. Their defense of Ramaswamy became indistinguishable from a defense of child rape and an attack on Acton and other women who dare to report it; execrable, yet trodding a well-worn path for MAGA and the Trump administration, which have placed the denigration and subjugation of women at the center of their political project. So while nominally directed at Acton, the ad was clearly intended to signal to a certain set of voters that Ramaswamy could be counted on to support MAGA’s war on women.

One final example: in recent weeks, the White House has radically escalated its long-time persecution of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. Federal agents raided Omar’s home, with the Justice Department apparently seeking evidence to support the administration’s goal of denaturalizing and deporting a duly-elected U.S. congressperson. But this abuse of the DOJ to serve the president’s ends was only part of the story, as the bogus investigation was preceded by Trump’s repeated racist attacks not just on Omar, but on Somalis and Somali-Americans more broadly. As I wrote at the time, “Donald Trump and MAGA have not only targeted Omar for years, but have directed towards the larger Somali population in the U.S. inflammatory, openly racist condemnations that verge up to the line of incitement of violence — making the targeting of Somalis as clear an example as possible of MAGA’s goal of an ethnically purified America.” As with the other instances I’ve cited, an attack on a single politician is hardly the whole story. The timing of the raid on Omar’s home, so close to the midterms, made it clear that the Trump White House was making a desperate play to alter the GOP’s perilous midterms trajectory by conjuring a story involving not just supposed Democratic perfidy, but the incitement of hatred against an entire group of citizens and immigrants based on their national origin.

There are many more examples of how the GOP has responded to its declining midterms odds by doubling-down on its core hatreds, but the underlying thrust is clear: MAGA’s campaign to retain control of the House and Senate is indistinguishable from its long-time war against America’s diverse citizenry, the tens of millions of immigrants who have made this country truly great, and the values of equality and comity that bind our free society together. While Democrats decry high prices and Trump’s lawlessness as they appeal to voters, GOP politicos have taken another path entirely: they attack their fellow Americans on the basis of their religion, their sexual orientation, their race, and their places of origin.

Given that Republicans look set for an electoral reckoning in both the House and Senate, we should at least note the hopeful possibility that MAGA’s atavistic appeals to voters’ darkest inclinations might not be working as well as they used to. Given that inflation and affordability concerns rank high among voter concerns, there’s a glimmer of hope that a decent number of voters are re-prioritizing economic fears over social and racial resentments. Here, the case some commentators are making that people can easily see a straight line between Trump’s economic policies and high inflation may prove not just correct, but key to an incipient breakup in MAGA’s anti-social approach to ruling America.

After all, it’s one thing to blame your troubles on immigrants, or non-whites, or women in an abstract sense, but perhaps an entirely different thing when the MAGA king is so obviously running the economy into the ground while enriching himself and his cronies at the public’s expense. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a lot of former Trump voters are starting to see racial and trans hatred as intrinsically wrong, they may be staring at their bank accounts (metaphorically or otherwise) and no longer feeling confident that the president will ever actually deliver them any real economic stability. And for other voters not so pre-disposed to MAGA hatreds, the GOP’s recourse to racism and misogyny may seem more obviously a non sequitur response to more urgently-held concerns when the president (through his obsession with tariffs and his never-ending Iran war) is so obviously responsible for high inflation and gas prices.

Moreover, after years of Democrats failing to fully confront the GOP on issues bizarrely dismissed as “culture war” politics — such as the equality of women in our society, the right of trans people to exist, and the moral imperative of protecting the civil rights of African Americans — we may discover that enough individual Americans do in fact see such issues as vitally important to the country and to their own lives. For instance, it is implausible that the likely enormous Latino swing back to the Democrats is primarily or overwhelmingly driven by disappointment with Trumpanomics. Common sense tell us that it is at least equally driven by repugnance at a war on immigrants that is increasingly indistinguishable from a quest to purge the U.S. of non-white residents, and that has proudly advertised its indifference to the plight of Latino citizens caught up in ICE and CBP mayhem.

Finally, to circle back to the New York Times piece with which I began: although the Times downplays the larger import of the racist and misogynistic slander against Democratic candidates, the way that these individuals have been able to refute or redirect these attacks may well have social benefits beyond mere defense of their particular campaigns. When James Talarico shrugs off accusations that he’s gay or trans, but continues to stand up for the rights of these groups while aggressively going after Ken Paxton’s corruption, he’s demonstrating that the old tricks of divide and conquer won’t work. When Abdul El-Sayed hits back at insinuations that he’s a terrorist or un-American by reminding voters he’s a son of Michigan and mocking his bad-faith critics, he’s showing millions of voters that if he can stand up for his faith and his citizenship, he’ll probably fight pretty hard for their right to healthcare, too. When Amy Acton and her defenders shame the Ramaswamy campaign into taking down its atrocious, hateful ad, they help highlight the basic indecency of MAGA misogyny. As with Ilhan Omar, whose very life story makes a mockery of Trumpist claims that Somalis are unfit to be Americans, every Democratic candidate who refuses to back down, and who turns vile racist and sexist slander into revelatory information about their accusers, is helping win the larger fight for a freer, more egalitarian America. Their individual stories help expose MAGA lies aimed at denigrating millions of Americans, and give us the outlines of a far healthier, inclusive, and optimistic narrative about the United States that every citizen can grasp.

Subscribe now

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was sometimes criticized for his ability to create a “reality distortion field” with his marketing skills. They were formidable indeed, but they were nowhere close to the power that Republicans and right-wing media have demonstrated in their attempts to make transgender rights the subject of a massive national debate.

This is a political controversy that simply should not exist.

Regardless of your stance on trans rights, the fact is that implementing them would have very little impact on most cisgender people’s lives since transgender people are around 1 percent of the population according to most estimates. They are much less numerous in the world of sports: National Collegiate Athletic Association president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of about 510,000 in his leagues. That means that 0.002 percent of NCAA players were trans, according to the official numbers. A few trans athletes have competed in the Olympic games, but none of them has ever won an individual medal.

But in the Republican alternative universe, trans athletes are an omnipresent menace. Curiously, it’s one that did not exist until Glenn Youngkin won a 2021 race to become governor of Virginia while heavily incorporating anti-trans messages into his campaign. Republicans and the mainstream media became convinced that transphobia had given him the victory, rather than the fact that Youngkin was from the opposite party of then-president Joe Biden and that such candidates historically have done very well the year following a presidential election.

Despite thin evidence that fear-mongering about trans people had been electorally effective for them, Republicans and allied groups have made it a centerpiece of their final campaign messaging and advertising. Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign set the tone with an ad accusing his Democratic rival Kamala Harris of being “for they/them” and claiming that “Donald Trump is for you.” The Trump operation spent more money on the ad than on the topics of housing, immigration, and the economy combined, according to independent journalist Erin Reed. Trump repeatedly attacked trans people on the campaign trail, falsely claiming that schools were taking children to gender surgeries.

The effectiveness of the they/them campaign is disputed. Video advertising in presidential elections is regarded as largely ineffective by political scientists, but both parties seem to believe otherwise based on their campaign disclosures. The pro-Harris PAC Future Forward has claimed it moved votes, but the group has never released any public details to support these assertions, whereas a study commissioned and released publicly by GLAAD found that the campaign had no significant effects.

In any case, the catchiness of the attack line is undeniable, and it, along with other trans-panic messages, has since become a fixture of Republican and allied political messaging.

The large constellation of reactionary media outlets has followed suit, making transphobic segments a big part of their content. According to a 2025 Media Matters study, Fox News Channel aired more than 400 stories about trans athletes in a four-month span, including one week in which it aired 59 stories.

This year, gender fear-mongering is especially important to Republicans. Amid a weak economy, high inflation, a disastrous foreign war, and record-breaking fuel prices, Trump and his party are understandably eager to shift campaign conversations to anything else. The anti-trans hoax has thus become the core of a desperate plan to avoid a wipeout in next month’s elections. Fox host Jesse Watters underscored the strategy in explicit detail earlier this month, saying that Republicans needed to produce “fear porn” in order to terrify disgruntled conservatives into voting against Democrats.

Despite Republicans’ reliance on them, however, transphobic messages have not been able to carry their candidates to victory. Last year, Virginia Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, who was running to succeed Youngkin, lost in a 15-point blowout despite spending 57 percent of her campaign’s ad budget on anti-trans bigotry. Her victorious opponent Abigail Spanberger estimated that Earle-Sears and outside groups favoring her spent about $30 million on these commercials. A similar barrage of ads targeting New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill failed to prevent her from winning a 14-point victory. Neither candidate backed down in her support for trans rights.

While anti-trans messaging has not been a panacea for Republican candidates, the far right’s years of propagandizing against trans people seem to have influenced public opinion. According to a study released last year by the Pew Research Center, support for anti-trans policies increased significantly between 2022 and 2025. In 2022, 58 percent of American adults supported laws requiring athletes to compete with others of their birth sex; by 2025, that figure had risen to 66 percent. Notably, the increase in support for restrictive laws came from Democrats. In the first survey, 37 percent of self-identified Democrats indicated that they supported making trans athletes compete against people of their birth sex, while in the second, the number had increased to 45 percent.

Similar declines in Democratic support for trans rights were observed across every question, including bathroom restrictions, censoring teachers who wanted to teach about gender identity, and even laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations such as restaurants. (The study did not provide percentages for self-described political independents.)

The increase in negative attitudes toward trans people among Democrats is so recent that few studies have examined its potential causes. Among Democrats, overestimating the share of the U.S. adult population that is trans—about 1 percent—appears to be correlated with negative attitudes toward trans rights.

That was one finding of a study published last April by YouGov that examined people’s estimates of the sizes of social minority groups and their opinions about those groups. Among Democrats who thought that trans people made up 5 percent or less of the population, only 13 percent supported laws banning people from bathrooms matching their gender identity; 66 percent were opposed. The contrast with Democrats who thought that trans people made up more than 5 percent of Americans was stark: 41 percent backed the bathroom restrictions, while only 24 percent opposed them.

Among Republicans, the correlation between accurate knowledge and support for bathroom laws was reversed. Eighty-six percent of Republicans who estimated the trans population more accurately supported restroom restrictions; 75 percent of Republicans with less accurate estimates backed the discriminatory policy. Just 3 percent of Republicans with more accurate estimates said they opposed the laws, while 15 percent of those with less accurate estimates opposed them.

More broadly, Americans seem to greatly overestimate the size of the trans population. The same YouGov study found that respondents estimated that 12 percent of Americans were trans, much greater than the more accurate number of 1 percent.

A similar pattern seems to exist in perceptions of trans athletes. In a YouGov survey conducted earlier this month for The Bulwark and podcaster Pablo Torre, only 31 percent of adults correctly answered that fewer than 1 percent of NCAA athletes were trans. Nine percent of respondents said that 11 percent or more of college athletes were trans.

It’s still unclear how substantial or durable the apparent increase in negative sentiment toward trans people among Democrats may be or which demographic groups might be particularly affected by anti-trans messaging.

In interviews with the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher in 2024, Republican ad makers said that they liked anti-trans advertisements as a way of portraying Democrats as out of touch, an important component of Republican campaigning since reactionaries became increasingly dominant within the party. Operatives said that ads focusing on trans girls and women athletes seemed to have particular appeal to college-educated suburban women.

“One of the things you see in the focus groups is the moms get really visibly angry on this issue,” a consultant told Goldmacher. Republicans also believed the ads were effective among men from racial minority groups, Axios reported.

According to a validated voter study by the Pew Research Center in 2025, Trump’s share of the vote among Black men increased by 7 percentage points from 2020 to 2024. His share among Hispanic men rose by 11 points.

How much anti-trans fear-mongering influenced voters is impossible to know with certainty, especially since asking poll respondents to retrospectively characterize their decision-making is fraught. Among the problems are that people seem increasingly unable to recall how they voted as time passes. A poll released earlier this month by Strength in Numbers found that 6 percent of people who had previously said they voted for Trump now say that they did not. Four percent of self-described Harris voters now claim to have done something else.

Overall, transgender rights seem to be a low priority for most Americans. Pre- and post-election surveys from many pollsters showed this. A November 2024 study by More in Common found that only 9 percent of Democratic respondents listed LGBT or transgender policies as a top-three issue for them—far below other topics like inflation, healthcare, abortion rights, the economy, and the environment.

An immediate post-election study commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, had similar findings. It found that only 4 percent of voters listed “opposing transgender surgeries and transgender kids in sports” as one of their reasons for choosing a candidate. That was roughly equivalent to the 5 percent who said that “advancing rights for LGBTQ+ people” had been one of their top issues.

Notably, when asked directly which candidate best represented their views on transgender people, Harris led Trump, 52 percent to 40 percent.

It is possible, however, that while opposing trans rights does not specifically motivate people to vote Republican, the party’s expansive transphobic campaign reinforces the party’s long-standing efforts to substitute cultural populism for economic populism and thereby distract the public from Republicans’ unpopular views on issues that Americans view as more important.

One possible explanation for that disconnect comes from a post-election survey by Blueprint, a Democratic-leaning polling organization. While the study could have been methodologically stronger, it is not entirely without merit and its findings are worth consideration. Given a list of reasons for not voting for Harris, the most popular choice (within the margin of error) among swing voters was the claim that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

For some swing voters, transgender rights seem to matter less as a particular issue and more as a synecdoche of their view of the Democratic Party as an institution run by a clique of highly educated people who don’t want them to have a place in society. This conception of the Blueprint finding is perfectly consonant with the fact that other studies find that specific Republican ad campaigns seem to have little or no impact.

As the pollsters and pundits have continued debating the impact of trans issues in 2024, Republicans have doubled down on transphobia in this year’s campaigns. Besides running ads featuring the familiar “they/them” line, party candidates and their allies have been making deliberately fake AI-generated videos of Democratic candidates. Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico has been a frequent target of deceptive ads, including one depicting him wearing a dress and another as a creepy ice cream van operator staring at children and wanting men to compete in sports against girls.

Aside from the unsettling visual imagery, the content of the ads presented deliberately false information regarding Talarico who had said that he opposes trans athletes in female sports “if it risks safety or fairness.” The concession he had made to anti-trans voters could be easily missed by them if their only source about his views was right-wing media and the communications of his opponent, Ken Paxton, Trump, and other Republicans, who have presented numerous totally false statements about Talarico’s positions on everything from trans equality to his diet—lying that he is a vegan and supports banning meat.

Other right-wing operatives appear to have taken the deception to possibly criminal levels in the Lone Star State where unknown individuals have mailed thousands of Texas households brochures containing inflammatory instructions about how transgender minors can become emancipated from their parents using information supposedly taken from the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT). The postal campaign set off a social media firestorm with numerous reactionary commentators and activists decrying the supposed outrage, even as TENT denounced the pamphlets as malicious fakes.

It’s not known as of this writing who sent the brochures, but a number of indications are pointing to various Republican firms. A Texas district attorney has opened an official investigation into the matter and TENT has gone to court to compel the direct mail operations that sent the brochures.

The pamphlet campaign recalls several earlier efforts by far-right posters on the website 4chan to create fake images from fictional LGBTQ advocacy organizations. In 2017, the forum users manufactured a hoax campaign to fool people into believing that sexual minority rights groups wanted to begin advocating for child molesters. A few years later, another 4chan initiative resulted in reactionary bloggers getting tricked by a supposed “Trans Rights Campaign” digital flier about cisgender heterosexual men dating trans women.

A 2023 hoax about a fake “Trans Day of Vengeance” was much more successful, although like the previous efforts, it only managed to ensnare right-wing media outlets including Breitbart, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and the New York Post.

For their part, Democratic candidates have taken a split approach to Republican transphobia. Some have effectively adopted portions of the Republican position, apparently hoping to deprive their opponents of a political advantage. In Ohio, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur released an advertisement touting her support for Republican efforts to censor gender instruction in schools and opposing trans girls’ participation in girls’ sports. Iowa congressional candidate Sarah Trone Garriott likewise has said she opposes trans women using women’s locker rooms. The party’s congressional and national leadership has remained uniformly supportive of gender equality, but the list of Democrats who have embraced anti-trans positions is growing, as Erin Reed has reported.

The knuckling-under approach will not work, and HRC president Kelley Robinson made the case well in a September blog post:

The hate-filled clickbait will run through November. Why? Because a gallon of gas costs $4.30. MAGA allies will cut more and more ads to distract Americans from rising costs, rising inflation, and an endless war. They have zero solutions for people, and millions of dollars for attacks. […]

Turning on a vulnerable community is not a winning political strategy — and it’s exactly what Trump, [Elon] Musk, and MAGA want. It legitimizes their side and weakens ours. And it harms transgender people.

It is worth noting in fairness that not all Democrats who have made concessions to opponents have done so to equal degrees. Talarico’s proviso about “safety and fairness” does actually give fairly wide room to trans participation in sports. So there are nuances.

But given that voters do not seem to place a high priority on trans issues, it does seem that overall, caving in broadly is unlikely to gain support. It would also seem unlikely that people with strong anti-trans viewpoints would even believe a Democrat’s claims that they oppose trans equality, since, as noted above in the case of James Talarico, the far-right political ecosystem has no qualms about lying about Democratic candidates’ policy views.

Even further, since anti-trans viewpoints are highly correlated with religious sectarianism, a Democrat shifting rightward on all trans issues but keeping her positions on other topics the same would be unlikely to gain votes. People who are strongly against trans rights are also strongly against progressive viewpoints on taxation, abortion rights, marriage equality, and social welfare spending.

While caving on transgender rights seems to provide few new votes for Democrats, a YouGov study conducted earlier this year in the UK suggests a strong possibility that Democrats adopting anti-trans positions may be demotivating LGBTQ rights supporters who lean toward the party but have no firm attachment to it.

Surveying voters who had previously picked Labour but subsequently switched to another party, the pollster found that Labour’s adoption of anti-trans policies under new leader Keir Starmer motivated 7 percent of those who switched to other parties to defect. Among those who had changed to the Green Party, 17 percent said that Labour’s stances on trans rights was the primary reason for their departure. An even larger number of defectors, 19 percent, said that Labour being “too right-wing” was the main reason they had switched.

Of course, the U.S. and the U.K. are completely different countries with different political systems, but the statistically significant effect observed within the YouGov survey strongly suggests that researchers in the U.S. should try to duplicate its methods for comparative purposes, especially since the number of people who are trans or have family members or close friends who are trans has been estimated to be between 11 and 21 percent according to PRRI and KFF. Of course, one need not know any trans people to be a very strong ally, so the percentage of Americans who have very strong pro-trans views could be quite considerable.

While the Democratic Party is obviously much more sympathetic to gender equality than Republicans, it is certainly conceivable that trans people and their allies may no longer wish to support politicians that they see as not advocating for their lives and civil rights.

Of course, gender equality-supporting citizens would be making a long-term mistake by staying home in a two-party system. But Democrats explaining why in sufficient detail are unlikely to find purchase.

The newness of trans rights as a political issue seems to be what has made it so important to Republican strategists. In the More in Common study mentioned earlier, while Democratic voters did not rank transgender policy as one of their top priorities, voters in general indicated that the Democratic Party had made trans rights its second-highest priority.

While the cost of living was far and away the top issue for Democratic voters at 40 percent, only 19 percent of the public said that it was.

The contrast between the public perception and the reality of what Democratic respondents wanted was starkest on the issues of abortion rights and trans rights. Among actual Democrats, 29 percent said that abortion was a top-three issue, but the public at large said they believed that 49 percent of Democrats placed it in the top three. Just 9 percent of Democrats said that LGBTQ policies were a top-three issue for them, but 34 percent of the public said that Democrats placed them as a highest-priority.

There really does seem to be what the More in Common authors call a “priority gap” in public opinion on the issue of trans rights, and it’s been made not by a few weeks of campaign advertisements but by the vast reach of Fox, other right-wing channels, and social media sites owned by right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk. Every day of the year, millions of Americans are exposed to news-imitating content which is highly biased against gender equality and trans people in particular.

That some voters might have a more psychological approach toward trans equality than a policy-based approach is consonant with an October 2024 YouGov study which asked registered voters whether they supported 64 policies of Kamala Harris and 64 of Donald Trump. The results were striking: 89 percent of Harris’s positions received majority support compared to just 48 percent of Trump’s. Harris’s policies were so popular that 51 percent of them received majority support among respondents who said they preferred Trump. By contrast, only 34 percent of Trump’s ideas were supported by Harris backers.

The takeaway from the survey is that many Americans are willing to vote against a presidential candidate with policy views that they support. Despite the overwhelming popularity of her positions, Harris lost the election to Trump. Clearly, millions of Americans do not view policy details as central to their voting choice.

Trump also seemed to benefit from the fact that many of his supporters imagined that he supported Harris’s policy ideas when he did not. This was observable across many different proposals including establishing a national paid family and medical leave program (22 percent), requiring criminal and mental background checks for all gun purchases (29 percent), and capping increases on food and grocery prices (21 percent).

Most relevant to this discussion, 26 percent of Trump supporters believed that he wanted a federal ban on discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Despite Trump and Republicans spending hundreds of millions of dollars attacking trans people, more than a fourth of his supporters believed that he wanted to ban discrimination against them.

Democrats’ problem on gender equality is not their position on the issue but rather their ability to communicate it rhetorically and whether voters can hear the message at all.

The communication gap that Democrats face on trans equality is actually a manifestation of the party’s larger inability to directly reach the public, a problem that has far too many causes to cover here, but there are two main ones worth discussing. The first is that Republicans invest far more money in advocacy media than Democrats. This gives them an ability to continuously transmit messages to Americans—not just to their supporters, but also to anyone who happens upon the lifestyle, news, and sports content that gets funded.

As a former Republican media consultant, I have always found it odd that Democrats are so in love with television ads, despite the very large body of scholarly research showing their general ineffectiveness. The reluctance to invest is even stranger considering that Democrats under Bill Clinton coined the idea of the “permanent campaign,” continuing campaign warroom operations beyond November. Instead of Democrats building upon their own meritorious idea, it is Republicans who have taken the concept and scaled it up by billions of dollars a year by encoding political messages inside non-political and partisan news content that Americans will voluntarily watch, listen to, or read.

Democrats’ apparent fixation on ineffecient ad spending is even more bizarre because it is premised upon the idea that politicized video content is persuasive. If that is actually true, then it would seem obvious that voluntarily consumed advocacy media would be far more effective than blaring 30-second ads that political science has consistently found to be widely despised.

And indeed, the research is overwhelmingly clear that biased news-like content can be significantly influential. The far-right billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter provided a perfect example of how content drives opinion. In a study published this past February in the science journal Nature, Twitter/X test subjects who utilized the Musk-inflected “For You” content feed were 4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritize Republican policy viewpoints higher than participants who used the older reverse chronological feed.

The study also found that For You participants were also 5.5 percentage points more likely to disapprove of criminal investigations of Donald Trump, 7.4 percentage points less likely to approve of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and 3.7 percentage points more likely to follow a right-leaning X account. Astonishingly, when participants who had used the For You algorithm were asked to switch to the reverse chronological feed, their opinions remained the same. Just a few weeks of using Musk’s algorithm warped people’s opinions for the duration of the study, a remarkable demonstration of the power of news-like content.

Nor are media effects limited to social platforms either. There is a large body of scholarly literature indicating that Fox News Channel, just one node of the giant Republican media ecosystem, has significant effects across voting choices, issue opinions, partisan identity, and many other relevent metrics.

In addition to insufficient media investment to carry their messages, Democrats have also struggled to develop effective rhetoric in the social media age. Instead of being able to confidently speak off-the-cuff about anything citizens want to hear about, they have often been stilted and poll-driven in their communications.

But some Democrats are finding the better path on communications in general and on gender equality in particular. Instead of caving to the radical right on transgender rights, they have taken more active approach, one that begins by noting that transphobia is nothing more than a distraction from Trump’s failed policies, and then transitions to explaining the pro-trans position.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has been particularly successful in this regard, using his Christian faith to show why he supports equality for trans people.

“We should always stand up for our convictions, and we should always push back against discrimination,” he said in an interview with The Advocate, an LGBTQ-interest magazine. “I don’t like bullies, and so I’m always going to push back.”

“I believe all children are children of God,” he continued. “It says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ not ‘love your neighbor, unless.’”

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed put transgender rights into a larger context during an interview with Pride Source, a Michigan-based LGBTQ publication:

There’s a reason that if I’m asked, I always say that I support trans rights because I believe in all rights. I want folks to see their own rights in the plight of a trans person who’s being discriminated against.

The real question here isn’t about whether or not we can discriminate against one group or another. The real question is whether or not we want a government that can discriminate against anybody at all. A government that is told that it’s allowed to discriminate against some people and not others will eventually discriminate against any and all people for whatever reasons it chooses. We are all in the fight for an America whose government does not discriminate against any of us.

I say that as somebody who puts my face on the ground many times a day praying in the way that I pray as a Muslim. Not everybody has to understand why I do that, but I damn well expect that they’re going to stand up for my right to do it. And similarly, you might not understand somebody else — but you work for their rights. We cannot build the relationships and love and community we need when government is weaponizing against any of us.

That larger context is critical because it enables Democrats and trans rights supporters to flip the latent narrative that the Blueprint study observed by showing that standing up for one group is standing up for everyone else.

What all of this analysis seems to indicate is that candidates who explain their position in detail—especially facts about how trans freedom would not impact almost any cisgender person—allows Democratic-leaning voters to have a better understanding of positions that are actually new within the American political conversation, and why they should support them.

But that dynamic works in the opposite direction as well. Martin Niemöller famously observed how authoritarians never stop at depriving just one group of their rights. In our own time this is very apparent. Trump and other reactionaries have succeeded at constraining personal liberties of trans people and sex workers in many ways, but they will not stop there. They frequently talk about their desire to roll back marriage equality, eliminate federal anti-discrimination agencies, ban birth control medication, eliminate women’s right to vote, and even prohibit men from voting unless they own property.

That litany above is only a small piece of what the radical right wants. It’s an extreme agenda that’s a threat to all Americans. But the only way to stop it is to keep moving forward buy building media, advocating passionately and coherently, and calling attention to the extremely unpopular policies that reactionary Republicans support. Standing up for others isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s smart politics.

We can only protect democracy by expanding it further. I am freed by your liberation, and you are by mine.

A leader who stood up to U.S. President Donald Trump just won an election in Latin America’s biggest country, reversing a trend of new right-wing governments in the region over the past two years.

Incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, having narrowly lost to Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round of voting on Oct. 5, 2026, staged a remarkable comeback on Oct. 25. He erased the deficit and won the all-important runoff election by more than 3.5 percentage points – more than 4 million votes.

It was a stunning result for the leader who proved to be the first Brazilian candidate to win a presidential election after not winning the first round, and who had been all but written off for a possible win. As a professor of Latin American politics, I believe the result offers a number of key political lessons for Brazil, Latin America – and even the United States.

The choice in the second-round election was stark. Lula offered measures to ameliorate steep income inequalities and an economy built on a transition to clean energy, environmental protection and increased access to higher education and technical training. On international matters, Lula balanced defending Brazilian sovereignty from a Trump administration keen on meddling in Latin America, and maintaining good relations with an array of nations and blocs, including the European Union and China.

Bolsonaro, meanwhile, promised sweeping cuts to government spending, more militarized policing and eager support for the Trump administration’s campaign against drug violence. His pitch also came with offers to U.S. investors of access to critical minerals in Brazil.

Such right-wing politics has been ascendant in Latin America of late, and Lula also had to overcome an anti-incumbent mood, brought on by high prices, stagnant salaries, steep interest rates and a massive corruption scandal involving Brazilian elites. That banking probe directly ensnared Bolsonaro himself, as well as powerful Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, whom Bolsonaro’s supporters had tried to link to Lula.

Lula also had to neuter a social media landscape that has been dominated by images and narratives disparaging the president and his Workers’ Party.

Right-wing dominance of that online ecosystem helped carry Jair Bolsonaro, the 2026 hopeful’s father, to power in 2018 and got him close to reelection in 2022.

Especially after the first-round results in the 2026 vote, many analysts assumed the same pro-Bolsonaro social media presence would once again be hegemonic.

Instead, after the first round, a network of young, tech-savvy pro-Lula communicators created and shared effective, often amusing videos on WhatsApp and Instagram.

And they appealed to the center and even some of the right. All told, Lula easily made up more than 2 million votes by which he lost in the first round. He didn’t just increase turnout by millions and lower abstention rates; he also saw the state with the country’s second-largest electorate, Minas Gerais, flip to his side entirely – a swing of nearly 700,000 votes.

Emblematic of the strength of the campaign was the growth in subscribers to the WhatsApp channel Lula’s Army, which grew from 50,000 on Oct. 5 to more than 10 million by the night of the historic election.

The creator of the channel, André Janones, is a federal deputy for the Rede Party, an ally of the Workers’ Party, and a rising star in the circle around Lula. Likewise, Ana Elisa Santos Silva, a 21-year-old digital influencer and law student in the Workers’ Party, got the most votes of any federal deputy in the swing state of Minas Gerais.

Cracks in the ‘Americanization’ theory of politics

A prevalent narrative of Brazilian politics has held that the country’s divisions increasingly mirror those of the United States.

Part of that idea is due to Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which eerily presaged events following Jair Bolsanaro’s 2022 loss.

Like in the U.S., there has also been a rapid rise of a politically active evangelical right in Brazil.

More fundamentally, proponents of the Americanization thesis hold that U.S.-style deindustrialization and “Uberization” of the Brazilian economy have led to a decline of the unionized working class – a core support base for the left – and its replacement by an army of gig employees dreaming of owning their own businesses and throwing off the shackles of the taxing and regulating state.

Yet similarities between the two countries shouldn’t be confused for politics always moving on parallel tracks.

Survey research suggests that many Brazilians see the state as responsible for the realization of their constitutionally protected social rights, including healthcare, education and pensions. Many also regard government employment as inherently more stable and dignified than the harsh labor markets of the private sector, especially for the relatively unskilled.

For all of the apparent rise in American-style libertarian politics in Brazil, the reality is that such a viewpoint remains much smaller in the country. Flávio Bolsonaro’s bet, like his father’s before him, was that this strain of libertarian right-wing politics could nonetheless propel him to victory, much as it apparently had for Javier Milei in Argentina in 2023. But it was not enough.

Even with Lula’s win, Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party did exceptionally well at the legislative level.

When the next Brazilian Congress convenes on Feb. 1, 2027, the Liberal Party will control 28 seats in the Senate – 35% of the total; and 121 seats in the lower house – 24% of the total (as well as five governorships, which are 19% of the total).

When factoring in expected Liberal Party allies, it is clear that the right will have bigger majorities in both houses for Lula’s next administration. That will help Congress solidify control vis-a-vis the executive branch in terms of legislation and, crucially, the budget.

A series of unknowns facing Lula

The election raises several questions.

First, it is unclear how Lula, who will turn 81 on Oct. 27, will be able to effectively govern. The president will have to make major concessions to a Congress with little capacity for responsibly delivering coherent policy.

The federal Supreme Court is also seen as politicized, fragmented and tainted by scandals. On the other hand, Lula could appoint four new Supreme Court justices because of upcoming retirements, meaning that he could shape the country’s highest judicial body in a way that enhances his ability to manage Congress.

Yet it might be difficult for Lula to simultaneously meet the demands coming from Congress and those from the business community. For example, many will push the government to curb the fiscal deficit, currently running at a very high annual level of close to 8% of gross domestic product.

A second question is whether Bolsonaro’s loss will splinter the right. One interpretation of the 2026 election is that to be competitive, the right will want to move on from the Bolsonaro family. One potential figure is Tarcísio de Freitas, a former cabinet member in the Jair Bolsonaro government and popular governor of São Paulo. Yet there are nonetheless five members of the Bolsonaro family in the new Congress, and they are likely to try to keep together the coalition that fought for Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign.

Finally, it’s not clear how the Trump administration, which interfered decisively against Lula’s agenda, will react to his win – and to what extent it will support Bolsonaro’s denial of his election loss even though it was bigger than his father’s in 2022.

Whatever the extent of any interference, the Trump administration’s right-wing Latin American vision invariably sets up conflict with Lula. Yet while the Trump preference was always for Flávio Bolsonaro, that doesn’t mean his administration won’t pragmatically engage with Lula even as it pressures his government. For his part, Lula continues to hold his own leverage, including through Brazil’s large deposits of rare earth elements that the Trump administration covets.

If the past eight years of Brazilian politics are any guide, Lula’s next administration is likely to be a turbulent one in which enduring divisions at home and abroad are continually tested.

Anthony W. Pereira is Executive Director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane University; King’s College London

Last week, federal agents searched the home of Minnesota’s Representative Ilhan Omar, as part of an investigation into her immigration to the United States decades ago. Given that Omar has been a particular target of Donald Trump’s hatred for the last decade, it is reasonable to assume that this extraordinary abuse of power is a Hail Mary effort to scramble a dominant midterms narrative that is currently focused on the president’s manifold failures in office and the GOP’s impending electoral doom. After all, it’s simply unbelievable that after years of unsuccessfully trying to dig up dirt on Omar, the administration just happened to do so right before the GOP faces an almost-certain reckoning in November. It’s also close enough to the election to violate long-time Justice Department guidelines about publicly announcing the investigation of an elected official — this is a move meant to make a splash.

But the the obvious efforts to create a distraction, or even change the thrust of election reporting in the coming weeks, shouldn’t obscure the dire seriousness of what the administration is in fact doing. At the level of the rule of law, Trump is abusing the power of the federal government to go after someone he considers to be a political enemy; and not only this, he’s going after a member of the legislative branch in a way that obviously sets a precedent for a complete collapse of the separation of powers and the ability of the Congress to reign in a lawless president. To seek to criminalize one’s political opponents on fake or trumped-up charges is the mark of an authoritarian regime, not a democratic republic. And the harm includes not just an offense to the politician so targeted, but to the constituents who voted to have this person represent them.

But the administration’s clear intention of finding a basis on which to strip Omar of her citizenship, and to deport her from the U.S., constitutes a second, equally profound layer to the case, where authoritarian intent melds with white supremacist ideology. As John Ganz writes in an essential analysis of the Trump administration’s maneuvers, “the attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers.” After years of incitement of hatred against immigrants, the massive escalation of violent enforcement actions against the undocumented and documented alike during Trump’s second term shows that MAGA is, at its heart, a movement that sees American identity in racialized terms. Real Americans are white; anyone else is at best a second-class citizen, and at worst a literal invader who must be expelled beyond the nation’s borders.

So targeting Ilhan Omar is an opportunity to punish a political enemy and harm the Democratic Party, while also broadcasting to non-white immigrants that they are not wanted here and that the same treatment could be in store for them. But it’s not just that this hangs the threat of de-naturalization and/or expulsion over every naturalized citizen or recent arrival. NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg observes that it’s also “sending a message to every foreign-born American. Oppose Trump too loudly, and the government will comb through your paperwork — including paperwork filled out by your parents — for errors that could upend your life.” In other words, making an example out of Omar is a form of social and political control, a way of intimidating millions into political complacency even if the Trump administration never singles them out for special attention, or fully succeeds in its mass deportation goals.

The seriousness of what I’ve described — the attempt by a president and his movement to strip a congresswoman of her citizenship, while intimidating millions of American citizens and immigrants into lives of fear and alienation in the country they call home — is clearly sufficient to require a strong and sustained Democratic response. At the constitutional level, congressional Democrats cannot abide a strategy that, if successful, would weaken the party by opening the door to the Trump administration literally expelling from the country any representative who happens to be a naturalized citizen. Not only would this be a material threat to the strength of the party, but such an unanswered attack would rightly stir a sense of betrayal and outrage at party weakness by millions of loyal voters.

It should be obvious to even the most cautious of Democratic officials that a message of “an attack on one of us is an attack on all” is the baseline requirement in this situation. To take at face value the charges being considered against Omar is to grant to the Trump administration a deeply unwarranted presumption of good faith; there is every reason to believe that, beyond the clearly selective and thus illicit nature of this prosecution, the Justice Department’s investigation is already marred by some of the same irregularities and outright illegalities that have derailed other politically-motivated cases concocted by the president and his allies. The president’s long-time contempt for Omar — already in his first term, he was urging her to go back to Somalia — should make clear that this prosecution is at best the vendetta of a failing president.

But even more than this, the Democratic Party needs to engage in a pushback that recognizes its elected officials’ obligation to defend not just Omar and their own political standing, but the millions of naturalized citizens and immigrants who are indirectly targeted by this abuse of power. And this obligation, in turn, points us to something that has been absent from even the best of the analyses so far: that the Trump administration’s own attempt to actively highlight MAGA’s vast racial hatred should be viewed as a huge opportunity for the Democratic Party. Most Americans find such state-sponsored white supremacism unacceptable, and this basic reality means that the Trump administration’s aggressive actions, as dangerous as they are, also create massive self-inflicted vulnerabilities for MAGA. And the main way for those vulnerabilities to carry a political price — ideally a catastrophically high one! — is for MAGA’s opponents to call public attention to them, and to describe them in righteous yet accurate terms as the un-American beliefs of a racist, radical minority at war with our democracy and the shared bonds of citizenship.

The counter-arguments to the GOP’s war on immigrants and naturalized citizens are not difficult to grasp or to articulate. Hatred of people for the color of their skins or their countries of origin is racist and arguably evil. The United States has always been, and always will be, a diverse country, built by people from hundreds of lands and ethnicities. Over the last half century, we have grown more diverse as we have done away with racist restrictions on who can immigrate to this country and become a citizen. But as basic as these arguments are, and as foundational as I believe they are to most Americans’ understanding of our country, they will not magically voice themselves. Too often, though, too many Democrats have shied away from explicitly embracing American’s real and irradicable diversity — and from confronting the white supremacist thinking that has come to dominate the Republican mainstream.

This debate cannot be ducked, as the triumph of MAGA’s white supremacist vision of America would reduce our country to a shadow of its former self, with tens of millions demoted to second-class citizens and power illicitly channeled to some Americans on the mere basis of skin color. If Omar’s case is not the place to make a stand, then where will they ever draw the line?

Indeed, the larger backdrop for the GOP targeting of Ilhan Omar vividly highlights this general Democratic reluctance to engage in a political debate over the nature of American identity that MAGA has placed front and center in American politics. For Donald Trump and MAGA have not only targeted Omar for years, but have directed towards the larger Somali population in the U.S. inflammatory, openly racist condemnations that verge up to the line of incitement of violence — making the targeting of Somalis as clear an example as possible of MAGA’s goal of an ethnically purified America.

As the flimsiest of excuses for their attacks, they have pointed to a widespread welfare abuse scandal in Minnesota involving members of the Somali community. Yet their screeds have not only targeted immigrant Somalis, but Somali-American citizens, making crystal clear that MAGA is targeting an entire ethnic group as being incompatible with integration into the U.S. due to its allegedly innate qualities. Trump has stated outright of Somalis that “I don’t want them in our country,” and has denounced them as “low IQ” — a shockingly despicable presidential renunciation of a specific group of citizens. Such rhetoric has only continued to escalate through the present, with Trump recently posting on social media that the “once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants” and “Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”

Yet all of these eruptions of hate are based entirely in racist fantasy. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte describes how the MAGA assertion that Somalis are moochers off the welfare state is a slanderous fabrication:

[The Somali community in the U.S.] has also produced a large number of entrepreneurs. Somali-Americans have higher than average rates of labor participation and contribute an estimated $8 billion a year to Minnesota’s economy alone. Like many immigrant communities, such as Irish and Italians in the early 20th century, the second generation is doing much better economically than their parents.

Moreover, as commentators like Goldberg and The Nation’s Elie Mystal have pointed out, Omar herself is a potent, distilled repudiation of the white supremacist project. Mystal asserts that, “It is precisely because her success defeats the white-supremacist narrative pushed by the Trump administration and the white-wing media that she is being threatened and hunted by this administration.” For MAGA, the problem is not so much that Somalis or Omar are actually terrible, but that their very existence and success negates MAGA’s very basis for existence; Somalis who have already helped make America great nullify the purported MAGA mission to make American great again.

So it is worth imagining how Trump’s attempts to cast Omar out of the country would sound to the voting public if, in the face of such open racism and targeting of a specific ethnic group within our borders, Democrats had previously chosen to present a coordinated front that worked to turn MAGA’s racist aggression against Somalis back against MAGA; if they had chosen to spend political capital on asserting that a president who attempts to demonize a group of Americans and immigrants for their nationality and skin color betrays his oath of office while permanently branding himself as an execrable white supremacist. It is worth imagining how much weaker Trump would be, and how much likelier that his attempts to exile Omar would be immediately viewed by more of the public as further evidence of his depravity.

But it is not too late. Democrats shouldn’t be fooled by a false choice between “falling for” Trump’s bait, on the one hand, and doing the right thing by standing up en masse for a threatened colleague, for the principles of constitutional government, and for basic American principles of equality that MAGA seeks to abolish. Indeed, even the preternaturally cautious Barack Obama has weighed in on the slanderous legal jihad against Omar, calling it “appalling” and laying out a case for why selective prosecution of a political opponent is fundamentally un-American. Democrats should take up Obama’s line of argument, and push it further by highlighting how the attack on Omar is a facet of a far larger project to demonize all immigrants, Somali or otherwise.

Believing that the president forever possesses impregnable strength on issues of immigration and race is not so much cynical politics on the part of Democrats as a tragically self-fulfilling prophecy; the sooner congressional Democrats aggressively and collectively confront the sheer racism and latent violence of the MAGA vision, the closer they will be to demolishing this radical movement’s malign influence on our politics.

Subscribe now

Texas’s Senate race has become one of the most-watched elections of the year. MAGA Republican nominee Ken Paxton pulled off a rare primary defeat against a well-established 24-year incumbent, while challenger James Talarico has been polling well enough to ignite hopes of electing a Democrat to represent Texas in the Senate for the first time since 1993.

This election could have a major impact on issues like education and healthcare prices, which rank as Texas voters’ top priorities. But an outsized amount of coverage of the race has centered instead on transgender people. Paxton’s campaign and its supporters have run several AI-generated ads attacking Talarico’s pro-trans positions. That focus has shaped reporting on the race, both by right-wing media like Fox News and in mainstream outlets like The Washington Post, with many describing Talarico’s stances on trans issues as a liability. Talarico himself has walked back some of his positions in response to controversy, expressing support for some restrictions on trans athletes and rescinding a promise to co-sponsor the pro-LGBTQ Equality Act.

This outsized focus didn’t come out of nowhere—on March 3, when Talarico was declared the winner of the Democratic primary, there was a stunning increase in traffic on X related to his takes on trans issues.

In the three days leading up to his primary win, Uncloseted Media and The 19th could only find four posts about Talarico’s take on trans issues. But in just over 24 hours after Talarico won the primary, the newsrooms identified nearly 200 posts. Most of this was driven by three viral videos that were initially posted and amplified by GOP-affiliated politicians and strategists before being circulated by right-wing influencers, media personalities and activists. The spike shows how an army of accounts work together to amplify attacks that can shape the political debate in key races—and perpetuate harmful rhetoric.

“It is a match made in heaven, the business model of social media and people pushing hate,” Sarah Oates, a professor of communications at the University of Maryland, told Uncloseted Media and The 19th. “Because the social media companies know that these are the things that engage people.”

So how did the proliferation of this narrative happen? The following is a play-by-play of how the videos and their accompanying narrative spread in the 26 hours after Talarico’s primary win. The timeline is accompanied by analysis from experts in political communications and strategy.

What Are People Saying, and Where Did It Come From?

10:08 p.m. EST, March 3, 2026. Brandon Gill posts → 298.4k followers

Five minutes after election analyst Dave Wasserman calls the primary for Talarico, Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas posts a clip from a 2021 debate in the Texas legislature where Talarico says that “God is nonbinary.” This is one of two clips which suddenly go viral despite having existed for years—the other, which comes from a 2021 hearing where Talarico says that there are “six really common biological sexes,” is posted by Gill the next morning to a similarly large reach. Talarico has since walked back both statements.

As Gill’s post spreads, the replies are increasingly filled with animus. In one reply, Lynn Conrad writes that “this false prophet speaks with a forked tongue and will lead many from the truth.”

Prior to Talarico’s win, these clips had gotten a small amount of media coverage and appeared in an attack ad by Terry Virts, one of Talarico’s primary opponents. However, Republicans seemingly waited to boost them further until after the primary. Matthew Sheffield, political analyst and a former right-wing political consultant, says this strategy is common.

“Sometimes candidates will decline to reveal [opposition research] that they have for other-party candidates until the general election,” Sheffield told Uncloseted Media and The 19th. “When that’s done, it’s usually because they perceive that the other-party candidate would be severely damaged by the disclosure and they actually want that person to win their party’s nomination.”

10:16 p.m. Greg Price posts → 527.4k followers

Eight minutes after Gill’s first post, the same clip is posted by Greg Price, a political consultant who held a leading role in President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and worked at the White House in 2025. Within the next hour, accounts with direct connections to the Republican Party and the Trump administration post the clip and spread anti-trans talking points. This includes the National Republican Senate Committee; their regional press secretary and senior adviser; and Steve Guest, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s former communications adviser, who posted the clip and wrote: “James Talarico is a radical trans activist who weaponizes Christianity to push a far-left agenda to mutilate children.” Overall, 12.1% of the posts we analyzed came from such accounts.

At least 23 other accounts go on to post Gill and Price’s version of the clips, helping their message go viral. The posts above are also reposted by accounts with millions of followers, including conservative writers Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter, fundamentalist Christian radio host Jenna Ellis and an account called End Wokeness.

11:23 p.m. Andrew Kolvet posts → 311.8k followers

About an hour later, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA and the co-host of The Charlie Kirk Show, posts the “God is nonbinary” clip while calling Talarico a “beta male white boy” and a “compliant little lap dog.” Right-wing media figures are quick to jump on these talking points, with 18.7% of all the posts we analyzed coming from them.

Sheffield says that right-wing outlets scour the internet for stories that could “forward their narratives.”

“They do this not just with trans issues, they do this all the time with anyone who puts an argument forward that is helpful to them, and I personally experienced this myself,” says Sheffield, who entered into politics after his small anonymous right-wing website was covered by far-right heavyweights Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly mere days after its launch.

8:02 a.m., March 4. ATX data posts → 5,852 followers

As the nonbinary video spreads like wildfire overnight, a new clip drops around 8 a.m. the morning after. This clip, which shows a sermon in which Talarico says that “our trans community needs abortion care too,” is the only one we analyzed which hadn’t surfaced prior to the Democratic primary. It’s first posted by ATX data, an anonymous account that bills itself as providing “conservative news and public policy covering local Austin and Texas issues.” While the account has less than 6,000 followers, the clip is picked up quickly: Fox News anchor Will Cain posts it within an hour and Kolvet and Price do so within two, allowing it to rack up over one million views.

Sheffield says that while Democratic leaders tend to prefer to establish rhetoric and positions in-house, Republican leaders more frequently look to grassroots supporters for talking points.

“That’s what this was an example of—they found something that seemed effective to conservatives, so they started picking it up and using it,” Sheffield says.

10:52 a.m. Libs of TikTok posts → 4.7M followers

As lunchtime approaches, influencers and political commentators, who make up 18.1% of the posts analyzed, begin boosting the clips. Accounts with millions of followers, including Libs of TikTok, End Wokeness and podcast host Matt Walsh, help them go viral. The three aforementioned accounts rack up a combined 1.26 million views on their posts about Talarico.

Ashley St. Clair, the mother of a child with Elon Musk and a former MAGA influencer who has since left the right-wing online ecosystem and has spoken out about its “very coordinated” nature, says influencers are incentivized to repost right-wing talking points with momentum on social media because they can make bank from ad revenue, brand deals and practices like paid retweets.

“I worked with [Libs of TikTok], and that’s a business where she makes money hand over fist from this type of content,” St. Clair told Uncloseted Media and The 19th. “It’s become an obsession where she spends all day scouring the dark corners of the internet to make a minority seem like the rule.”

Libs of TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

By 11:00 a.m, March 4…

Between 10 p.m. on March 3 and 11 a.m. on March 4, Uncloseted Media and The 19th identified 48 posts about Talarico that use similar anti-trans talking points, including 26 separate posts of the three clips that would amass millions of combined views. In contrast, we identified zero pro-trans posts about Talarico in the same time period. Oates finds this sharp turn in the discussion suspicious.

“When you see a shift in a discourse on a particular platform that’s quite abrupt and moves from one side to another and then stifles all dissent, that’s generally gonna be inauthentic,” she says. “That’s generally gonna be led by people who are pushing propaganda or political messaging. … It’s not reflective of general public opinion on the issue.”

This perspective reflects statements by St. Clair. She told The Washington Post that she joined large group chats where influencers would receive “marching orders” from the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. She also shared direct messages with The Post that showed White House staffers asking her to boost talking points and Republican strategists offering her money to amplify posts. Based on Uncloseted Media and The 19th’s findings, she says it’s likely that the anti-trans attacks against Talarico were coordinated in this way.

“I’d be willing to bet there was money put behind it in a paid campaign, because this is how MAGA operates,” St. Clair says. “Most people don’t understand that a lot of these MAGA influencers have access to a dashboard through certain companies where they can just log on and see any campaign that they can sign on to … and all they have to do is push out messaging, which means they don’t have to disclose that they’re paid.”

Sheffield says that many right-wing actors have such closely aligned interests that they don’t need to work together to act in concert.

“Probably most of it is not intentional when you see something go big,” Sheffield says. “They all have a movement mentality on the right, so when they see something that looks effective, then they’re gonna repeat it.”

11:32 a.m. Emmanuel Rincón posts → 619.5k followers

As the morning progresses, the same talking points are adapted to French, Portuguese and Spanish, the last of which 28.5% of Texans speak at home. Like in English, they’re primarily spread by right-wing actors, including political strategist Emmanuel Rincon, who has nearly 620,000 followers on X and is the first to post the sermon clip to a Spanish-speaking audience. By the end of the day, the Spanish news media had also picked up the story.

11:35 a.m. Collin Rugg posts → 2.9M followers

One especially viral post comes from Collin Rugg, co-owner of the right-wing news site Trending Politics. Rugg stitches together a video that includes numerous clips of Talarico speaking on different topics, including the three trans-focused clips. In his post, he incorrectly says that Talarico claimed there were six genders rather than “biological sexes,” a misquote later repeated in an article by the Daily Caller, Fox News anchor John Roberts and later Trump.

Matthias Kettemann, a professor of internet law at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, says that social media optimized for engagement allows misinformation to spread easily.

“Untrue information is usually more emotionally charged, and therefore there is a prima facie advantage,” Kettemann told Uncloseted Media and The 19th.

12:29 p.m. Real America’s Voice (RAV) → 570.8k followers

Shortly after noon, these posts begin moving outside of X and social media. The Charlie Kirk Show, broadcast on the streaming and cable channel Real America’s Voice, airs the nonbinary and six sexes clips. Later in the day, anti-trans talking points about Talarico make it onto Newsmax’s “The Big Take,” “Ed Henry: The Briefing,” and “The Pulse” as well as Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show.” By 8:30 p.m., “Jesse Watters Primetime,” which is the second most-watched cable news show in America, discusses Talarico’s stances on trans issues to an audience of roughly 4 million.

By 12:35 p.m…

Shortly after the clips air on The Charlie Kirk Show, the conservative print media starts picking them up. At 12:35 p.m., the Washington Examiner publishes an article titled “FLASHBACK: James Talarico said there are six sexes while opposing ban on men in women’s sports.” Later in the afternoon, the Daily Caller, the Daily Signal, The Gateway Pundit and Voz all post articles about the clips, with three of them citing X posts from earlier in the day.

Howard Polskin, president and founder of TheRighting, a website that tracks and analyzes right-wing media, says that right-wing social media and traditional media narratives tend to support each other.

“It’s a virtuous cycle,” Polskin told Uncloseted Media and The 19th. “If something gets written about in an extremist right-wing website, it might be posted on social media, then more social media outlets will pick that up and it might go viral.”

By 6:14 p.m… Matt Whitlock introduces the narrative to broadcast media

Matt Whitlock, a former senior adviser to the National Republican Senate Committee and the current senior vice president at CRC advisers, a PR firm known for serving conservative organizations, plays a key role in getting these anti-trans talking points on TV. He is the first one to introduce them on Fox News and Newsmax.

“The problem for [Talarico] is he’s created so much incredible ad content already that if you look at [X] today, it is flooded with clips of [him] saying absolutely insane things,” Whitlock told the host of The Big Take on Newsmax.

Whitlock uses the fact that social media is “flooded” with clips of Talarico advocating for trans rights to legitimize his claims that Talarico is an unviable candidate, despite the fact that right-wing operatives like himself are the main ones responsible for the spread of those clips. Oates says this reflects a common strategy in propaganda campaigns.

“Social media has the opportunity to spread more outrage more widely and more freely, but it’s not as influential as mainstream media,” Oates says. “What’s worrying is when what’s going on on social media starts to shape discourse in the more influential mainstream media. … ‘The people are saying’ is a classic propaganda gambit.”

Whitlock did not respond to a request for comment.

What to Make of This

All told, we tracked 182 anti-trans posts attacking Talarico on X in the 26 hours after he won the primary. Sixty-three included or referenced the nonbinary clip, 50 referenced the sermon clip and 35 referenced the sexes clip. Between these posts and the citations in the right-wing media, the talking points targeting Talarico’s pro-trans positions likely reached over 10 million people.

In the leadup to the midterms, some Democrats have walked back their positions on trans rights—candidates have come out against gender-affirming care for minors and transgender inclusion in bathrooms or sports, with one Ohio representative running an ad opposing “gender ideology” in schools.

Oates says that the manufactured nature of this spread indicates that these anti-trans positions do not accurately reflect the feelings of the voter base. A recent poll of American adults by The 19th and YouGov found that 37% of respondents think that both Democrats and Republicans talk about trans issues too much, and trans issues ranked the lowest in terms of importance among respondents to a September CNN poll.

“It’s understandable that some politicians would limit what they say about trans rights, but I think it’s misguided,” Oates says.

Despite how successful these social media tactics can be for Republicans, Democrats rarely follow suit. Oates attributes this to the fact that Democratic narratives tend to be more factual and less inflammatory, making them less suited to virality. Kettemann adds that research has found that right-leaning people tend to be slightly more susceptible to online misinformation.

“There have been few examples of campaigns like you’ve described coming from the left,” he says. “One of the reasons is that people from the left, by and large, are more technologically savvy and don’t fall into the trap of this kind of messaging.”

These Tactics Endanger Trans People

The spread of these posts endangers trans people. The spike in anti-trans rhetoric in the 2020s has increased rates of poor mental health and suicidality among trans people and incited violence against the community. Oates says X’s algorithm rewards hateful content, especially since Elon Musk removed several guardrails for content moderation, including replacing the site’s independent fact-checkers with a volunteer-based community note system.

Social media platforms have increasingly come under fire for the harmful consequences of their engagement-focused algorithms. In the U.S., legal accountability for tech platforms can be difficult to achieve due to laws protecting them from being liable for content on their websites. But in their current state, Oates says that social media platforms like X are not healthy for democracy.

“By participating [on X], you’re not participating in real civic discourse, you’re being used as a commodity by a social media company that not only doesn’t have your best interests at heart but is deliberately trying to inculcate hatred.”

Oates believes that moving beyond the midterms, we will see one of two paths in American politics: “One in which political power is defined by ... campaign[ing] on fear,” and another where “people decide ... to embrace news and information that’s actually based in reality.”

Additional data reporting by Andrew Norris.

No one in the political world talks much about blogging too much nowadays, but from the mid- to late-2000s, they were the media hot property. I had a firsthand vantage point to the power of blogging at that time as one of the right-leaning bloggers who helped to end former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s tenure as an evening news host after he presented fake documents in a story. (As most of you know, I changed my political opinions in the years that followed.)

But blogs were big on the American left too, including one that is still alive and well, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, which has a vibrant community of people who have kept the conversation going since 2004.

Flux and LGM are going to be teaming up for regular live streams, and so I figured the first one would be about our mutual history and passion for blogging on the internet. Joining me for this discussion is Robert Farley, one of the LGM co-founders, and Scott Lemieux, another LGM co-founder.

Besides writing for their own site, Rob is a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky on international affairs. Scott is professor of political science at the University of Washington.

The video and transcript of our conversation are below, including audio chapters for your convenience. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

11:07 — Have Democrats learned anything about media since 2004?

15:33 — The hack gap and media asymmetry

20:11 — Coalition coherence and the blogosphere

24:27 — Progressive donors and plutocratic influence

29:50 — The professor’s fallacy and voter irrationality

35:03 — Moderate Republicans and primary challenges

39:21 — The Overton window and triangulation

43:44 — Coalition fractiousness and single-issue voters

48:58 — Rural voters and the Democratic coalition

53:35 — Jeff Gannon and the U.S. right’s love of new voices in contrast to the left

58:14 — Blogosphere history and media promotion

01:02:49 — Conservative vs reactionary politics

01:07:44 — Margins matter and campaign hustle

01:12:22 — Reactionary takeover of the Republican Party

01:17:28 — Media strategy and earned media

01:22:37 — Single-issue voters and coalition openness

01:27:22 — Regular people and Republican messaging

01:32:15 — The Ariana Grande theory of politics

01:37:14 — Successful political parties focus on both short-term and long-term

Audio Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcription of the discussion.

Introduction

Matthew Sheffield: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a live edition of Theory of Change. It’s great to have you here. We’ll cover a few preliminaries while we wait for more people to join the livestream. I’m Matthew Sheffield, a former conservative blogger who is now a progressive. I write about politics, technology, media, and other subjects.

I’m also a programmer. I’m joined today by two other gentlemen, so why don’t you introduce yourselves? Let’s start with you, Rob.

Robert Farley: My name is Rob Farley. I’ve been blogging since 2004, primarily at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I’ve also written for Tapped at The American Prospect, a couple of blogs associated with The Diplomat, and the naval blog Information Dissemination. I’ve been all over the place, but Lawyers, Guns & Money is the biggest and longest-running site that’s still active.

Scott Lemieux: I’m Scott Lemieux, one of the three co-founders of Lawyers, Guns & Money, along with Rob. I’m also an alumnus of Tapped, the long-lost great blog at The American Prospect. I once had beers in Washington, D.C., with Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias.

My career moved much further away from mainstream recognition after that. That was probably its peak. I also had beers with Clare Malone once.

That’s about it. Go ahead.

Robert Farley: I played poker with Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and a few others one evening. I think Spencer might have been there. I don’t think Ezra was there, but Matt Duss was.

Scott Lemieux: That’s right.

Robert Farley: Loomis was at that game, too, so it’s surprising anybody escaped alive.

Scott Lemieux: I also teach political science at the University of Washington.

Matthew Sheffield: You didn’t mention your academic affiliation, Rob.

Robert Farley: I’m at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Matthew Sheffield: He’s been looking for Mitch McConnell, and he finally found him for us.

Scott Lemieux: Are you going to start a revolt against Beshear for not replacing Mitch McConnell with somebody who would actually vote? That would supposedly be a huge win, for reasons that remain unspecified.

Robert Farley: It’s shocking how many people went quiet about the need to replace McConnell once it became apparent that he was alive and sufficiently functional that it would be impossible to remove him from the Senate. I think that had been apparent for a long time.

Scott Lemieux: Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah.

Robert Farley: A lot of people don’t know how the institution works, but what are you going to do?

Scott Lemieux: Yes, the political scientist’s curse.

Matthew Sheffield: I forgot to mention my own background in blogging. I was blogging before the word was even invented. One of my brothers and I co-created a website called ratherbiased.com, dedicated to criticizing Dan Rather.

In those days, Rather wasn’t as open about his political viewpoints, which, as we now know, are pretty progressive. I approached things from a Republican perspective, and at the time I was also a fundamentalist Mormon, although I didn’t advertise that to readers.

My brother and I were both still in college, and we didn’t even put our names on the site because we thought CBS might sue us. We were anonymous for at least a year. It didn’t matter, though: Rush Limbaugh quoted us on the first or second day after we launched.

That was an interesting experience. Then we got constant promotion on Fox & Friends. The contrast was striking. Sorry, a quick production note: Rob, can you make the post sticky so it stays at the top of the LGM site?

It looks like Paul just put something up.

Robert Farley: Yes.

Matthew Sheffield: Blog readers have always tended to navigate to the top post.

Scott Lemieux: Our blog has almost no coordination. We’ve gotten a little better about not publishing posts within minutes of one another, but it still happens.

Matthew Sheffield: I think you can delete the image at the top, or move it below the video so that visitors see the video first.

Robert Farley: I could put it below. Let me try that.

Scott Lemieux: The way our blog is configured, there has to be an image. But placing it below the video should work.

Robert Farley: Yes.

Matthew Sheffield: Okay.

Scott Lemieux: That’ll be fine.

Matthew Sheffield: While Rob does that, we’ll give more of the audience a chance to join us. Scott, let’s start with you. How did you get into reading the rants of random people on the internet? That’s how it always starts.

Scott Lemieux: For a lot of bloggers, the Iraq War was foundational. I spent time on blog message boards trying to dismantle the weak arguments being made on behalf of the war.

It felt like we were sleepwalking into the war, and the disagreements didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. Another important aspect of my background was being a Supreme Court scholar, which became relevant soon after I started blogging.

We’re not going to get into the orange story, but I came to the attention of The American Prospect because my now-friend Sam Rosenfeld, who was editing there, saw posts I’d written about comparisons between Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia. My argument was that, from a progressive perspective, Alito would be much worse than Scalia.

Scalia had some idiosyncrasies and occasionally voted from a libertarian perspective. Alito was much more reliably partisan, even if he was less flamboyant. At the time, that counted as a contrarian opinion. I was teaching at CUNY and had a long conversation at an event for Linda Greenhouse with a prominent Republican lawyer who had been involved in the Watergate prosecution.

I’m fairly confident this lawyer later voted for Clinton and Biden, so he wasn’t a hardcore movement conservative. But he told me, “You’re going to be so happy that you got Sam Alito. He’s going to be very mild.” He was confusing moderation in tone with moderation in voting. Simply pointing out things that now seem obvious could get you attention back then. The Supreme Court was in flux, and it was one of the two subjects I liked to argue about. Around the same time, David—the third original member of Lawyers, Guns & Money—Rob, and I were all finishing graduate school.

I’d gotten a job, and I think Dave stayed on for another year, although I forget the exact timeline. We were all going to be living in different cities. I’m pretty sure Rob suggested that, since we were already commenting on blogs and participating in that community, we should start our own.

We had no long-term vision or idea where it would lead. Am I recalling that correctly, Rob?

Robert Farley: I don’t know whether I originated the idea. Dave was the one who founded the blog on Blogspot. Scott left for New York first, then I went to Lexington, and a couple of years later Dave headed to Dayton. The idea developed over that period.

For my part, I was interested in the interpersonal side of blogging. I was also frustrated that public conversation on the left of the blogosphere, particularly about security issues, was often vague and poorly informed.

Matthew Sheffield: You mean national security, I presume?

Robert Farley: Right. That was true even though we were involved in at least two wars, one of which was incredibly poorly conceived. Many critiques from progressives also conflicted with the realities of how the national security state works and how wars are conducted.

From my point of view, we should resist the war in Iraq, but we should do it with a sound understanding of that war.

Scott Lemieux: That’s a great point. Our frustration about the war wasn’t just with support for it; it was also with opposition that focused on the wrong arguments. You could watch Fahrenheit 9/11, a major antiwar film with a huge audience, and see 45 minutes wasted on nonsense about a pipeline in Afghanistan.

The actual arguments against the war were much stronger than that. So we were frustrated not only with the arguments made by the war’s proponents, but also with weak arguments made by its opponents, which were easy to knock down.

I want to emphasize that distinction, because it’s often missed. Some of us believed there was a very strong case against the war but also believed that case wasn’t always made as well as it could have been.

We were frustrated with both sides. Rob had more expertise in this area than I did, but I felt that frustration, too.

Robert Farley: Scott, I don’t think the English language has words sufficient to describe how thoroughly you’ve been vindicated on Alito. He’s more hackish than any of the Trump-appointed justices. That’s what’s so stunning.

Somehow, Donald Trump has been unable to find anyone as hackish as Sam Alito. That makes your origin story particularly impressive.

Scott Lemieux: I suppose I have to give myself some credit. It might seem obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to a lot of people then. Over the past 20 years, Matthew, I’ve generally been right about the things I wish I were wrong about, and wrong about the things I wish I were right about.

Matthew Sheffield: It sucks being a Cassandra. It really does.

I’d rather not have that experience.

Scott Lemieux: People forget that Cassandra was right.

Matthew Sheffield: I’d much rather not have the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.”

Scott Lemieux: Absolutely. I’m happy to take the loss on a lot of those predictions.

Democrats’ messaging failures and media parallels

Matthew Sheffield: Something you both said reminds me of the parallels between the early days of blogging and politics today. It’s as if Democrats have learned nothing in 20 years. Looking back at 2024, Joe Biden had a lot he could have talked about.

He had popular, helpful policies, but he wasn’t out there taking credit for them. Meanwhile, Trump supporters were putting “I did that” stickers on gas pumps everywhere.

Did you ever see those? I saw them in Southern California, where there aren’t that many Republicans, but they were still active. That speaks to a larger issue. When I got into blogging, I felt that the Republican establishment under Bush wasn’t as passionate about messaging as I was.

It also wasn’t as insistent on attacking the media. I doubly wish I hadn’t been right about how effective those attacks would be. Trump has operationalized that strategy. Steve Bannon put it aptly during the first Trump administration when he said, “Our real opponents are the mainstream media. That is the enemy.”

He’s exactly right, because Republicans don’t have to talk about their policies. Most of their voters don’t know what those policies are, and many wouldn’t like them if they did. Scott, I’m sure you can speak to the polling showing that many Republican voters oppose their party’s positions on numerous issues.

That isn’t limited to economic policy. On abortion rights, voters in Republican states have supported reproductive freedom in ballot measures.

Scott Lemieux: In Florida, they had to change the rules.

Matthew Sheffield: And in some states, those protections haven’t become law because Republican legislators have obstructed them.

Scott, let’s focus on that.

Scott Lemieux: People have written a lot about the “hack gap” and what to do about it. But one widely misunderstood aspect of Fox News is that what it doesn’t cover is almost as important as what it does cover.

There’s a big difference between a conservative media outlet and a Republican media outlet. There is plenty of progressive media, and it would be inaccurate to call an outlet like The New York Times conservative.

The difference is that left-leaning media outlets are often highly critical of Democrats. Sometimes that criticism is justified, but Democrats’ policy failures and limitations receive extensive coverage.

That doesn’t really happen on the right. Fox News isn’t asking why Donald Trump isn’t codifying his immigration policies or why Republicans aren’t pushing for a national abortion ban. Unpopular initiatives, and failures to pursue initiatives with real consequences, simply don’t get that kind of coverage.

Instead, the focus is on migrant caravans or a transgender girl playing junior-high volleyball in Idaho. It’s an incredibly disciplined machine. The problem is that I don’t think there’s much of a market for comparable media on the left.

Even if somebody created it, would people want to watch? People pay for The New York Times. I wouldn’t want to pay for the liberal equivalent of Newsmax. Part of the difference comes down to the coalitions themselves.

That isn’t an easy problem to solve. But it means Republicans can get away with a great deal. During the last campaign, for example, Trump was able to distance himself from an incredibly unpopular policy platform simply by saying, “Oh, that’s nothing.”

The hack gap and media asymmetry

Scott Lemieux: “I don’t know anything about Project 2025. It had nothing to do with me.” And then the story was dropped. I don’t think Kamala Harris could have done that. If someone had produced a white paper full of deeply unpopular far-left policies and Harris had denied any connection to it, the story wouldn’t have disappeared after 12 hours.

I certainly don’t have a solution, but that asymmetry creates serious difficulties. I’ll never forget a 2018 interview with Claire McCaskill when she could see her race slipping away.

Someone pointed out that Missouri voters supported Medicaid expansion and abortion rights. She responded that outside St. Louis and Kansas City, every gas station, repair shop, and barbershop had Fox News on.

Those outlets weren’t covering those issues. Her point was that whatever limitations her own message had, people weren’t hearing it. There was no earned media. You can argue that this is an easy explanation for a losing politician to offer.

Maybe there were things she could have done differently. I’m not absolving politicians of responsibility for their failures. Still, it’s a legitimate problem, driven not only by the rise of Fox News but also by the collapse of local media and its advertising model. We have access to more news than ever, but that news is increasingly ideologically siloed.

There isn’t much local coverage. That makes breaking Republican dominance in rural areas very difficult, even when Republican policies are unpopular among rural Americans.

It’s hard for contrary information to break through. People notice when their hospitals close, but they don’t necessarily know why it’s happening unless they closely follow politics. That doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent or incapable of understanding the issues.

Even many of my students don’t fully understand how Medicaid expansion works. It’s fairly complicated policy, and the message is hard to communicate.

Matthew Sheffield: Another problem is that much of the remaining local media is owned by right-wing groups. There’s Sinclair, talk radio, and Christian radio, which is enormous and available nearly everywhere. In many places, you have both local Christian propaganda stations and Republican talk stations.

Sometimes you can’t even receive NPR. And NPR is nothing like the networks that promote a fiercely ideological and partisan agenda.

Scott Lemieux: I didn’t realize how long Jim Bakker remained involved in the grift. I think he was literally selling MyPillows. But that’s part of a much larger media network. People our age remember taking road trips, crossing a state line, turning on the radio, and often finding a Christian station first.

Younger people may not share that experience, but those networks still exist. And many people in the demographics most likely to vote still get their news from them.

I have another thought, but I want to give Rob a chance to speak first.

Matthew Sheffield: Rob, would you like to add anything?

Robert Farley: I have some tentative theories about why the media landscape looks the way it does, especially on the progressive side. They concern differences between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

We could spend all day discussing the different groups within those coalitions. But I think most people recognize that the Republican coalition is more demographically and ideologically coherent than the Democratic coalition.

By “coherent,” I don’t mean that Republicans’ arguments necessarily make sense. I mean that more of them agree on basic ideological premises.

Matthew Sheffield: They’re compositionally more coherent.

Robert Farley: Exactly. That made the early blogosphere particularly interesting on the progressive side, perhaps more interesting than on the Republican side. We can come back to that.

Coalition coherence and the blogosphere

Robert Farley: Bloggers came from many different groups and brought diverse views to a conversation broadly situated on the left. They were small operations, though. They didn’t have to build something the size of a left-wing Newsmax and confront all the decisions involved in managing factional disagreements.

A larger organization would have to align with certain factions and make decisions that angered others. If it had survived into what some people call “woke 1.0”—what I call the “high woke” era—it would have faced disputes about who deserved a platform and whose voices should be respected.

The broad Democratic coalition simply isn’t well positioned to develop the media coherence and organizing logic that worked so well on the right in the 2000s and still works today. There isn’t enough ideological agreement to avoid factional conflict.

Matthew Sheffield: I think that’s true, but coherence on the Republican side was also engineered.

Robert Farley: That’s true.

Matthew Sheffield: It wasn’t happenstance. Fox News, for example, wasn’t profitable for at least its first several years, as I understand it. Newsmax grew from a tiny, self-funded operation with a shoestring budget.

I have a personal connection to Newsmax’s early days. In addition to building websites and doing some political consulting, I was producing a conservative comedy television show.

I’ll put links in the show notes, and you can share them as well. The show was called The Flip Side. We were trying to do something more like Jay Leno, but on the right, without being as mean-spirited as some other conservative comedy.

In fact, some people complained it wasn’t nasty enough. We pitched it to Newsmax for distribution, although we were already broadcasting it through syndication around the country. Chris Ruddy, Newsmax’s CEO, said, “It’s a good product, but our audience is too old for this.”

He thought his viewers wouldn’t like it because of their age. Normally, television executives talk about the coveted younger demographic. Newsmax was telling us to make comedy for 70-year-olds. But the larger point is that this infrastructure was deliberately built. The Washington Times, for example, has been around since 1982 without making a profit. There are many right-wing outlets like that, some owned by religious organizations that I would characterize as cults.

The Epoch Times is one example.

Scott Lemieux: The Washington Times, too, of course—the Moonie Times.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. There’s a commitment on the right to promoting the message and creating gathering places and information-distribution centers. The Washington Examiner is another example; I don’t think it has ever been profitable. Neither was The Weekly Standard, which is why it no longer exists.

There’s a willingness to create media products that lose money. On the left, Al Gore launched Current TV around the time blogging was taking off. It wasn’t immediately profitable, and he eventually pulled the plug.

Imagine if he had stuck with it and followed Newsmax’s slower-growth, self-funded approach. It might still be around and have a devoted audience.

Progressive donors and plutocratic influence

Scott Lemieux: Or consider Chris Hedges buying The New Republic and, after it didn’t turn a profit within a year, effectively deciding he’d rather build more wine tunnels in Manhattan than keep funding it. More broadly, plutocrats have moved heavily toward the Republican Party. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that Democrats became accustomed to a financial advantage during the Trump era, and that’s no longer the case.

Maybe that won’t matter much in this election cycle, but it’s a change we haven’t fully reckoned with. Even among wealthy progressives, too much money goes to vanity campaigns, like Tom Steyer’s, or to odd nonpartisan initiatives.

There’s no real left-wing equivalent of the Adelsons, who seem focused on one question: “How can I use my money to elect the most Republicans?” On the left, that kind of direct instrumental thinking can seem too vulgar.

I don’t have those resources myself, so I don’t know how to persuade wealthy progressives. Philanthropy and other projects are fine, but at some point the left also needs to counteract Republican political spending.

Another thing that drives me crazy is the recurring story every March after an election about donors such as Elon Musk or the Koch brothers supposedly tiring of partisan politics.

They talk about philanthropy or perhaps forming a third party. Then, by the summer of the next election cycle, they’re putting hundreds of millions of dollars behind Republican candidates. Can we stop reporting their declarations so credulously until their actions actually change?

There are a lot of frustrations there. Another gap—perhaps one particularly relevant to the Trump era—involves media that isn’t primarily political but can introduce political content.

The important thing about Joe Rogan and similar personalities is that their shows aren’t mainly about politics. Precisely for that reason, they reach people who don’t pay much attention to it. Trump’s ability to mobilize sporadic voters and nonvoters offsets many of his political weaknesses. That makes him much more complicated to defeat than some people recognize.

He has major weaknesses, but his strengths are difficult for liberals to replicate—and even for other conservatives to replicate. I don’t know what an equivalent outlet on the left would look like. The blogosphere largely served people already interested in politics.

Reaching people who normally aren’t paying attention with a political message is incredibly powerful. I don’t know whether there is a way to create a left-wing equivalent.

Robert Farley: Sorry to interrupt, Matthew, but that connects to your observations about today’s Republican coalition. Many of its members aren’t committed to particular policies. Their ideological coherence comes from a commitment to the Republican Party itself.

That’s different from supporting everything the party advocates. Scott’s point about Rogan reminds me of Gamergate, which wasn’t exactly political but was deeply political at the same time.

The people involved could be passionately focused on one extremely niche issue, regardless of what they thought about everything else in politics. Trump could mobilize their anger around that issue, even if much of the public wasn’t aware of it.

That connects with Rogan, Barstool Sports, and other ostensibly apolitical outlets that nevertheless steer audiences toward particular political viewpoints.

Matthew Sheffield: I just recorded an episode with Kristen Kobes Du Mez on that topic, focused on women rather than the male-oriented outlets we’re discussing. Returning to the early blogosphere, one similarity between bloggers on the left and right was their frustration.

We were frustrated with our own parties and with the media available to us. I heard that from Driftglass, another early left-wing blogger. His feeling was that Democrats weren’t saying what they needed to say, and nobody in the media was saying what he wanted them to say.

There’s also been a severe shortage of openly aggressive left-leaning media. I think that remains true. There’s an epistemic problem on the left: highly educated, financially comfortable people with left-leaning views often assume everyone thinks the way they do.

The professor’s fallacy and voter irrationality

Matthew Sheffield: They really do. In philosophy, this is sometimes called the professor’s fallacy, or it relates to the myth of the rational actor: the tendency to project one’s own reasoning onto others. Cognitive psychology has challenged that assumption. Economics treated rational behavior as a foundational doctrine from Adam Smith onward, until thinkers such as Daniel Kahneman demonstrated how much less rational people can be than economists imagined.

Kahneman wrote an entire book about it. I don’t think Democratic elites have fully absorbed that lesson. By contrast, right-wing elites often have so little respect for the public that they assume voters are stupid. They organize their messaging, campaigns, and financial systems around the belief that voters won’t understand policy arguments, and that they don’t need to.

Instead, they attract people through culture. Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun in the United Kingdom was famous for its topless photographs. For a long time, it featured one on a particular page of every issue.

Scott Lemieux: Page three.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly, page three.

Every day there was a semi-nude photograph of a woman, sometimes with contests attached. You can dismiss that as awful, and of course there was an exploitative element, particularly when the women submitting photos needed money.

Nevertheless, Fox News uses a similar attention strategy: interesting angles, unusual stories, striking photographs, and plenty of sexual content. That’s ironic given how strongly the party wants to constrain people’s sex lives.

Robert Farley: That’s an interesting point. It’s somewhat less true now that the lunatics really do run the asylum. But living in Kentucky is different from living in Seattle or another urban area, where you might go a whole day without encountering a Republican.

That’s virtually impossible in Kentucky. Over the past 20 years, I’ve had many conversations with Republican policymakers, candidates, and people connected to them. Before Trump, almost every conversation seemed to include the line, “You don’t understand how crazy these people are.”

Republican officials would describe the people they encountered daily in small Kentucky towns as insane. They saw themselves as the sane, rational shield between liberals and what ordinary conservatives really thought about them and the country.

That was an extraordinarily common way to frame being a Republican, at least here, and I think elsewhere too. Then the Trump era arrived and that posture disappeared. Republican politicians stopped presenting themselves as the shield between the lunatics and the rest of the world.

Instead, they joined the lunatics. Democratic elected officials and people in the party’s electoral ecosystem may dislike leftists, to varying degrees depending on their relationships and locations.

But they’re generally not afraid of them, except perhaps that leftists won’t turn out to vote. By contrast, many Republican officials before Trump were genuinely afraid of their own constituents and what those constituents wanted to do. I’ve always found that disconnect fascinating.

Scott Lemieux: You can see that in Washington state, too. People forget that when we moved here for graduate school, Slade Gorton was still in the Senate. Republicans haven’t held the governorship for a long time, but some of those races were extremely close.

Until fairly recently, Washington Republicans were trying to assemble majorities by combining rural conservatives with Seattle-area suburbanites. Since Trump, they’ve largely stopped trying to compete that way.

Something similar has happened in California, where Republicans were competitive around the turn of the century. Rather than looking for openings among voters dissatisfied with decades of Democratic governance, the party has embraced full MAGA politics, despite having little electoral constituency for it in the state.

California does have a conservative tradition. Republican elites used to try to hold together a broad coalition while acting as a moderating shield. That approach is now largely gone.

Moderate Republicans and primary challenges

Scott Lemieux: Part of the reason is that Republicans who try to be moderate lose primaries. In Washington, a Republican House member who voted to impeach Trump lost his seat, which helped bring Marie Gluesenkamp Perez into the House. This phenomenon is visible in many places, even if Rob experiences it more directly in Lexington. States that were competitive 20 years ago now have Republican parties dominated by Trump.

It will be interesting to see what happens after Trump. As long as he’s alive, he’ll remain the party’s de facto leader, regardless of who its candidates are. The question is whether anyone can eventually replace him in that role.

Matthew Sheffield: We have a viewer comment I’d like you to respond to. The username is CaseRay7, I think. They write that Republicans cost themselves Washington’s third congressional district by nominating Joe Kent in 2022.

Scott Lemieux: Absolutely. In many of these races, success requires both a strong Democratic candidate and a weak Republican opponent. Beto O’Rourke, for example, is obviously a gifted politician, but that probably wouldn’t be enough if Republicans ran a relatively normal conservative candidate.

Texas right now is a classic example. Talarico is a very talented politician, although perhaps more liberal than you’d ideally want in a statewide Texas race. But Texas Republicans chose a staggeringly bad candidate without gaining any ideological advantage.

Cornyn wasn’t moderate or anti-Trump. The decision is baffling. Upsets often require both parties to make a contribution, so the comment about Joe Kent is exactly right. Kent emerged after his predecessor suggested that trying to overthrow democratic government might not be a good idea. Ten years ago, that position wouldn’t have seemed especially controversial.

Democrats may have a few suboptimal nominees, but overall I think our candidate recruitment has been better. It’s remarkable that we’re barely even talking about the North Carolina Senate race.

Trump won that state three times, yet the race isn’t very competitive. In many places, Democrats have found reasonable candidates while Republican primary voters, without that old moderating shield, have made choices that help Democrats.

I still won’t quite believe a Democratic victory in the Texas race until it happens, whatever the polls say. But I hope Democrats can take advantage of this opening. Despite their many structural disadvantages, Democrats benefit from the fact that some Republican primary voters don’t care very much about winning general elections. In many places, they can afford not to.

In certain races, though, those choices really matter.

Robert Farley: I’m going to take an extraordinary personal risk by invoking Matthew Yglesias, who gets a lot of criticism for arguing that the median-voter theorem still matters, even if the reality is more complicated than his account suggests.

There are trade-offs between nominating an ideologically appealing candidate and a more moderate one. But Republican primaries offer plenty of examples of nominees who substantially reduce the party’s chance of winning otherwise competitive races.

That’s been true since at least the 2000s, with examples in Delaware and elsewhere. I wouldn’t go so far as to endorse Yglesias’s argument for replacing primaries with smoke-filled rooms.

Still, the two parties have very different dynamics when it comes to nominations.

The Overton window and triangulation

Matthew Sheffield: I want to push back somewhat. I agree that Republicans lose races by nominating extremists. But their willingness to nominate extreme candidates also shifts the Overton window to the right.

They may lose occasionally, but imagine one candidate running as Hitler and another saying, “I’m only going to be kind of like Hitler.” To many voters, the second candidate now looks moderate.

Most voters don’t know much about ideology or have a coherent ideology themselves. Surveys consistently show that many people describe themselves as moderate when asked about their political identity.

But their actual views may not be moderate. Some describe themselves as conservative because they believe the Bible is true, even if their policy preferences aren’t conservative. There’s considerable inconsistency.

Republicans are willing to lose an occasional election to gain a longer-term advantage. Democrats have had the opposite problem: they often nominate candidates who seem reasonable, but the logic of triangulation moves them closer to their opponents’ positions.

Over time, that has helped make Republicans extremely reactionary, while the Democratic Party, until recently, was much more conservative than many ostensibly left-wing parties internationally.

Robert Farley: I’m not sure I agree, especially with the international comparison. There’s a lot of political science on this. On many issues, the Democratic Party wouldn’t be seen as conservative compared with a European center-left party. People are often surprised by that when they visit Europe.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s true now, but things have changed since Bernie Sanders came along.

Robert Farley: Yeah.

Scott Lemieux: The Democratic Party is certainly to the left of where it was under Clinton, and in some respects to the left of where it was in Obama’s first term. Biden governed in a surprisingly progressive way, even though his presidency had many failures. That wasn’t necessarily what people would have expected.

As a political scientist, I also have to point out that the structure of American politics gives Republicans much more leeway. They can afford to be more homogeneous and even throw away several Senate seats under circumstances that should favor them.

They might still end up with 48 seats. Democrats, by contrast, have to win nearly every race they could plausibly win just to secure a narrow majority. The Republicans’ structural advantage gives them a choice: they could build a broad Christian-democratic-style coalition and often threaten to win 60 Senate seats, or they could remain highly conservative and assemble narrower majorities. They chose the latter.

From their perspective, that isn’t necessarily the wrong choice.

Robert Farley: Sometimes it helps and sometimes it hurts. Both during Trump’s first term and now, he would have benefited from another Senate seat. Better choices in Republican primaries could have provided one.

Scott Lemieux: So there are real trade-offs. The strong rural bias of American political institutions does create significant challenges for Democrats.

Coalition fractiousness and single-issue voters

Robert Farley: Another reason I’d push back is that I don’t think many problems within the Democratic coalition—or, more accurately, Democratic coalitions—can be analyzed simply in left-right terms.

One of the major lessons of 2024, apart from the Biden issues, was that there was no way to satisfy every part of the Democratic coalition on Israel and Gaza policy.

I know people can become hostile when we discuss this, but every step toward distancing the United States from Benjamin Netanyahu risked angering a group of very loyal, wealthy Jewish voters who have long supported Democrats partly because of the party’s relationship with Israel.

Every step in the opposite direction risked alienating a newer, extremely vocal faction of the party. And this isn’t limited to Israel and Gaza. Transgender issues create similar internal tensions.

On Bluesky, you can pretend that the Democratic coalition is uniformly supportive of trans rights, but it isn’t. Pro-trans politics can carry a cost in some Democratic-leaning communities. These conflicts aren’t captured simply by the categories of left and right.

The fractious nature of the Democratic coalition makes it harder to practice the kind of politics Republicans practice.

Matthew Sheffield: That goes back to Scott’s point about the Republican coalition’s homogeneity. It’s also important to distinguish conservatives from reactionaries, something I don’t think the left does nearly enough.

That distinction matters because many conservative voters support Democrats. It’s one reason Republicans talk so much about trans issues. As you said, Rob, the issue has little direct relevance to the lives of the vast majority of voters.

The NCAA president said that among tens or hundreds of thousands of athletes—I’m forgetting the exact figure—fewer than 10 were trans athletes.

Scott Lemieux: And most were ordinary athletes playing on ordinary teams.

Matthew Sheffield: They aren’t dominating competitions.

If trans athletes were winning all these events, we’d constantly hear about it.

Scott Lemieux: Exactly.

Matthew Sheffield: Instead, the far right keeps putting forward Riley Gaines, who lost to cisgender women.

Scott Lemieux: And she says, “I can’t believe Hillary Clinton is still talking about losing.” Really, Riley? You can’t imagine anyone still dwelling on where they finished? Fascinating.

Matthew Sheffield: Funny you mention that. You’re right that Democrats are more ideologically diverse. Pew Research Center publishes useful political typologies every few years, and I’m working on a detailed analysis of them to show the internal divisions within the Democratic coalition.

But these dynamics are not immutable. Scott, you’re right about the electoral system favoring Republicans, but that’s a feature of the current political alignment. Historically, many rural voters and rural states were progressive.

Consider William Jennings Bryan. Today, if people know him at all, they often remember him as the man who opposed teaching evolution. Earlier in his career, however, he ran for president on a platform that was progressive for its time, with some proposals that would still be considered radical.

He was also a Christian fundamentalist. It’s not that Democrats can’t win rural or highly religious traditionalist voters. I think party elites see how difficult that would be and simply don’t want to try.

Robert Farley: You’re partly right. But Democratic elites also know that many of their current voters don’t want rural Kansans as part of the coalition. Some might stop voting Democratic if they felt the party was specifically appealing to those voters.

Rural voters and the Democratic coalition

Robert Farley: That’s especially true if the party softens cultural appeals that are extremely popular in urban areas. Even small changes can make the urban coalition harder to hold together.

Matthew Sheffield: I’m not sure how that disagrees with my point, Rob.

Scott Lemieux: I see the connection, too.

Robert Farley: Those voters aren’t simply available to be won over. Under almost any plausible political arrangement in 2026, you can have one group of voters or the other, but not necessarily both.

Matthew Sheffield: I’ll respond to that, but first I want to let Scott jump in.

Scott Lemieux: One thing I want to emphasize is that margins matter. We sometimes frame the question as whether Democrats can win the rural vote.

That’s a very long-term project, because political identity is sticky. Some states may be write-offs in the short term. But in other places, there’s a huge difference between winning 32 percent of the rural vote and winning 20 percent.

Barack Obama didn’t win the rural vote, but he did much better among rural and white working-class voters than Joe Biden did. Part of that difference reflects long-term coalitional change. One of my disagreements with Yglesias is that I think he overestimates how much a candidate can gain through positioning in a single election.

You can’t simply reassemble Jimmy Carter’s coalition by running a particular kind of candidate. Still, I agree with Matthew that fatalism can set in. Some ideologically committed voters will never want to join a multiracial, diverse coalition.

But that doesn’t describe everyone. Other people might prioritize economic issues or hold more moderate views. Democrats have to recognize the electoral system as it exists and find ways to reduce the margins by which they lose in difficult places.

The goal isn’t necessarily to win unfavorable demographic groups outright, but to stop the bleeding. That’s easier said than done, but it isn’t entirely zero-sum. Reaching out to new voters doesn’t automatically alienate all your existing supporters.

Often the goal isn’t to win a majority of a particular group. It’s to keep your losses small enough that your majorities elsewhere can carry you to victory.

That’s why it’s dangerous to permanently write off whole regions. I’m not saying Democrats should follow people who insist they should have poured more resources into Missouri in every election.

Robert Farley: Mm-hmm.

Scott Lemieux: In individual elections, you have to triage.

You can’t compete for every voter all the time. But as a long-term project, you can look at Kansas, for instance. After Sam Brownback, it has moved somewhat toward Democrats, has a potentially competitive Senate race, and is attracting more liberal residents to the Kansas side of the Kansas City suburbs. Could those changes eventually make the state competitive?

Those possibilities are worth exploring. Not every state with a large rural population is Wyoming.

Jeff Gannon and the U.S. right’s love of new voices in contrast to the left

Matthew Sheffield: There’s a good comment on the LGM page where this livestream is embedded. Let me find it. Disqus moved it on me. Here it is: Chris Mote writes, “Don’t forget to discuss Jeff Gannon.” That’s actually a very relevant example.

Scott Lemieux: Excellent, Baz.

Matthew Sheffield: People who followed politics then may remember Jeff Gannon, a gay escort in Washington, D.C. Somehow he also became a far-right blogger. I’m not sure we ever learned precisely how that happened.

Those roles might seem incongruous, but he was doing both. He obtained credentials to the Bush White House press room and started appearing there. In some ways, that foreshadowed how the Trump White House deals with the press.

Matthew Sheffield: There’s a major difference in how the parties’ elites respond to their own constituencies. Republicans are often willing to include almost anyone, unless they’re openly advocating something as extreme as killing Jews—and even then there are exceptions.

Robert Farley: Even that line can be disturbingly blurry.

Scott Lemieux: Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: For most Republicans, Nick Fuentes is a bridge too far, but barely.

Unless you’re as extreme as Fuentes, or close to him, they’ll embrace you, promote you, and fund you. On the Democratic side, by contrast, elites often despise their influencers and treat them as people to be manipulated.

They expect influencers to distribute the party’s messaging without questioning it. That creates an adversarial relationship. I knew I had it easier on the right, but when I moved left, I was surprised by how much worse the dynamic was than it had appeared. When my brother and I launched our anonymous ratherbiased.com site, Rush Limbaugh promoted it on the first or second day.

He had no idea who we were. We were anonymous people attacking someone he disliked, and he told his audience to read our website. Fox News followed suit. One Fox & Friends host, E. D. Hill, later got fired after a racist remark about Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bump.

Remember that? She called it a “terrorist fist jab.”

Scott Lemieux: Can you imagine someone getting fired for that now? In 2026, that might be the hundredth most offensive thing on a typical Fox & Friends episode.

Matthew Sheffield: They say things like that every day now. But Hill called our site her favorite website, and Fox & Friends repeatedly quoted our material on the air.

Meanwhile, MSNBC seems unwilling to engage with people unless the algorithms have already given them an enormous following. Once you’ve gained 500,000 followers, MSNBC might invite you on.

With 50,000 followers, forget it.

Robert Farley: This is interesting, and Scott has discussed it in our blogosphere-history series. Some of the differences are structural, but others are personal. The divergent development of the left and right blogospheres partly reflects how Josh Marshall, Duncan Black, and Glenn Reynolds understood their ideological projects.

Glenn Reynolds saw his platform as a way to promote writers from across the right, including people he disagreed with. He would amplify figures under a broad right-wing umbrella in a way that you didn’t see as much from Josh Marshall or several other prominent bloggers.

I’ve wondered how much of that evolution reflected structural forces and how much reflected individual choices. And speaking of the difference between having 50,000 and 500,000 followers, it’s worth recalling that a major presidential campaign in 2008 went all in on the blogosphere.

It hired several controversial figures from the left blogosphere. We all love Amanda, but I’m not sure I would have placed her in the role John Edwards’s campaign gave her. I don’t know what Edwards expected to gain.

So the left blogosphere had complicated internal dynamics. Its history isn’t simply a story of the Democratic establishment rejecting bloggers.

Blogosphere history and media promotion

Scott Lemieux: Rob and I have been discussing these issues in our history-of-the-blogosphere series. Atrios, or Duncan Black, actively sought out people to promote, including us. Josh Marshall generally didn’t. And that’s not a criticism: Josh has built a profitable news site and does terrific work. But his blogroll might have had five names, one of them Mickey Kaus.

Discovering other people’s writing and linking to it just wasn’t the focus of his project, and that’s fine. It was a different approach. More broadly, ideological liberals tend to be individualistic rather than strongly team-oriented, which also shapes the kind of media they want to consume.

That’s not necessarily bad. I wouldn’t want a left-wing Newsmax, but there are costs to that orientation, and the same tensions showed up in the blogosphere and its relationship with the party.

Not everyone in the Democratic Party shunned bloggers. Some campaigns, including Edwards’s, tried to engage them, but the efforts weren’t always carefully thought through.

The broader relationship between party elites and media was already playing out in the early blogosphere. What strikes me is how quickly enormous conservative platforms began promoting your work, Matthew.

Younger people may not understand how influential Rush Limbaugh was. It’s hard to imagine a liberal counterpart. Even in an alternate universe where Al Franken had Limbaugh’s audience, I doubt he’d be linking to an obscure new blog right away.

That’s generally not how the left operates. The striking thing is that this wasn’t just Glenn Reynolds promoting you; it was Rush Limbaugh and Fox & Friends. They were amplifying a critique of Dan Rather at a moment when he had badly mishandled a story about George W. Bush, which ended up insulating Bush from otherwise legitimate criticism.

When someone overreaches, you can use it to discredit them. The right recognized both an opportunity to promote young writers and a larger narrative that could help its cause.

That’s something the left doesn’t have in the same form. I don’t know how to reproduce it, or whether doing so at that scale would even be desirable. But it’s a remarkable anecdote that fills in an important piece of blogosphere history.

Speaking of that history, Rob, did you ever interview Jonah Goldberg?

Robert Farley: No, I haven’t. I’ll try again. We might as well ask the old professor for his perspective. Another point I want to make, Matthew, builds on something you already mentioned.

Rush and the Fox personalities weren’t just recognizing your work. They were extraordinarily good at identifying the other side’s center of gravity. Rather than directing their attacks exclusively at Democratic politicians, they understood that Dan Rather was a valuable target and that mainstream media was, in some ways, a load-bearing pillar of the Democratic coalition at the time.

That was strategically savvy, and I don’t often see the same degree of awareness among people on our side.

Matthew Sheffield: I’m exploring some of these points in an e-book called What Republicans Know. I should turn some of my outlines into chapters. The asymmetry we’re discussing is real, and I think its origins are tied to the distinction between conservative and reactionary politics.

Conservative vs reactionary politics

Matthew Sheffield: A conservative wants to preserve things as they currently are, not restore them to the way they once were. That’s an important distinction. Many people are politically inert: they don’t know much about politics and aren’t highly motivated by it. They’re waiting for someone engaging, talented, or funny to capture their interest.

The particular issue may not even matter. Some of these voters supported Barack Obama in 2008 and, to some extent, in 2012. Suffolk University used to conduct a useful polling series about “unlikely voters,” asking why some people don’t participate in elections.

Democrats often misunderstand nonparticipation. They assume people don’t vote primarily because registration is difficult, they don’t know where to go, or they lack time. Those barriers are real for a minority of people.

But I think the main reason many people don’t vote is that no one is speaking to them and explaining, “Here’s what I’m going to do for you.”

Robert Farley: We’ve discussed this a lot on the blog. Common assumptions among both leftists and liberals about the ideological preferences of nonvoters have turned out to be largely wrong.

There isn’t a vast untapped electorate waiting to vote for socialism, nor a huge population of committed liberals who would vote if only they could make it to the polls. What’s fascinating is that Republicans don’t seem to fully understand this either.

If they did, they might be less enthusiastic about restrictions on voting. A significant number of the roughly 38 percent of Americans who rarely or never vote could support Republicans—and perhaps more of them than would support Democrats.

Matthew Sheffield: Pew has found that, and so has The New York Times. Many nonvoters like Trump.

Robert Farley: Yeah.

That finding still doesn’t seem to have changed Republican thinking about voting access, which fascinates me.

Scott Lemieux: Whenever I think about Trump, I remember something Bill James wrote in one of his early baseball abstracts. He argued that people lump bad teams together, even though they can be bad in very different ways. The San Francisco Giants, for example, developed tremendous talent and then traded it away for nothing.

That was different from the ordinary incompetence in Cleveland. The Giants combined extraordinary strengths with extraordinary weaknesses. Trump is like that. People often say he should be easy to beat, but he has distinctive strengths that other politicians lack.

He’s not easy to beat. For one thing, he was a famous celebrity able to command immense media attention. Another strength—something I saw someone note online—is his appetite for campaigning and being on the road.

He made many more appearances than Clinton. Biden’s 2020 campaign was different for obvious reasons, but even compared with Clinton and Harris, Trump’s schedule stood out. It’s frustrating, because Harris, despite some weaknesses in unscripted settings, could be very good at rallies.

She was capable of strong extemporaneous speaking. I don’t know whether she was receiving bad advice or making her own choices, but she wasn’t doing two or three rallies a day the way Trump often did. Now, I suspect Republican elites would prefer Trump to stay off the road.

They even seem to be steering him away from swing areas. But Democrats can learn something from Trump’s presidential campaigns. As you said, Matthew, they won’t reach sporadic voters and nonvoters if they never try to speak to them.

If you’re willing to travel and hold more rallies, you never know who might come along with a friend and hear your message.

Some attendees will connect with it and others won’t. The idea that there’s a huge population of nonvoters who already share a coherent ideology and just need to be mobilized is wrong. But there are people who might respond to something you say. Many sporadic voters who backed Trump don’t embrace his whole agenda; they may simply have responded to one specific promise.

Matthew Sheffield: And they don’t even know the details.

Scott Lemieux: Lower prices. That was the promise.

That sounds appealing, and many of those people won’t vote in the midterms. Some of Trump’s strengths are unique to him, but not all of them are. Some of it is simply a willingness to do the work.

Margins matter and campaign hustle

Scott Lemieux: This returns to my earlier point about margins. Elections are so competitive now that you don’t need an enormous demographic realignment. A small number of sporadic or first-time voters, or a slight shift within a demographic group, can be decisive.

Democrats should look for a 2028 candidate who isn’t merely good at communicating, but genuinely enjoys it and wants to be on the road talking to voters. I like what Jon Ossoff has been doing with debates and his willingness to engage directly.

One lesson I take from Trump—and one I’ll be interested to see explored in your e-book—is that hustle matters. Try to attract the attention of as many voters as possible.

Democrats haven’t always put enough emphasis on that. Political science shows that campaigns can have limited effects, often only at the margin. But marginal doesn’t mean immaterial.

Matthew Sheffield: It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Scott Lemieux: Exactly. Margins matter a hell of a lot.

Robert Farley: Every U.S. presidential election since 2000 has been decided at the margins, except perhaps 2008.

Scott Lemieux: Yeah.

Matthew Sheffield: We have another comment from CaseRay7, making a point I was thinking about. They write, “Trump rallies benefited from outsized media attention because he largely ad-libbed them and was prone to saying insane things, and therefore got more coverage.” I assume they’re thinking especially of 2016.

That’s true, but Jon Ossoff has demonstrated that Democrats can generate attention without saying insane things. Too many Democratic elites seem to think that if they aren’t willing to behave outrageously, they shouldn’t even try to get that kind of coverage.

Ossoff mentioned Natalie Harp in a single sentence and set off a national news cycle that lasted at least a week, maybe two. How often does a Democrat do that? I can’t remember the last comparable example. People want candidates to engage. Democrats can provoke Republicans and generate attention, but they have to try. Too often, when faced with something unfamiliar, their response is, “I don’t understand this.”

Then they write another New York Times op-ed. The Times has an enormous audience—it’s one of the country’s leading print and digital news outlets and among the best known in the world—but that audience is still limited.

I have friends who work there, and some may watch this later. Hello to them. But you have to fish in more than one pond.

Trump understood that. The idea even goes back to Barry Goldwater, who had a phrase about going where the voters are. What was it?

Scott Lemieux: Hunting where the ducks are?

Matthew Sheffield: Right, go where the ducks are. Goldwater was talking about reactionary voters.

But there are also plenty of ordinary voters no one talks to. They may dislike Trump and have no intention of voting for him, but they still won’t vote for Democrats if Democrats don’t reach out. And this connects to my distinction between conservatives and reactionaries: the reactionaries who took over the Republican Party made media central to their project from the start.

They targeted a national party that had been a cross-ideological, cross-regional coalition led by professionals mainly interested in winning elections. The reactionaries realized that if they took control of the party’s institutions, those professionals would have to support them.

Reactionary takeover of the Republican Party

Matthew Sheffield: Once that happened, the party professionals had to back them. Through their media outlets, reactionaries then radicalized and frightened more passive conservatives. They told politically disengaged conservative Christians, “If you don’t vote Republican, Christianity will be illegal.”

They also say, “If you don’t vote Republican, they’re going to turn your child trans,” along with other horrible lies. Democrats rightly reject that rhetoric, but the underlying communication tactics are separate from the content. You can learn from the strategies without copying the falsehoods.

Democratic elites don’t seem to grasp that distinction. Republicans have to be better at politics because their ideas are so unpopular. If people understood their agenda, I think they’d get perhaps 20 or 25 percent of the vote.

That may be the share who truly supports those views when policies are presented without partisan labels. In 2024, YouGov conducted an interesting survey in which respondents evaluated policies endorsed by Trump and Harris without being told which candidate supported them.

It found that more than half of self-identified Trump supporters preferred Harris’s agenda. Imagine how badly Democrats must be branding and marketing themselves if their policies are that popular but many voters don’t associate them with the party.

That’s my problem with the Yglesias approach: Democrats already have popular ideas. Their problem isn’t the policies themselves; it’s that voters often don’t hear about them.

Robert Farley: Or the policies don’t matter to their vote.

Matthew Sheffield: Or they don’t matter. It’s probably some of both. Either way, Democrats are approaching politics incorrectly when they assume people vote primarily on issues. Some people do, but many don’t.

Remember the way George W. Bush was compared with John Kerry? People were asked which candidate they’d rather have a beer with. That’s a ridiculous criterion for choosing a president.

Robert Farley: Especially when one actually drank beer and the other was a recovering alcoholic.

Matthew Sheffield: It’s a crazy way to choose a president, but it’s part of political reality.

Scott Lemieux: I have another meeting at six Eastern, so I’ll have to go soon. But there’s one more point I want to make: Democrats need to use the media instrumentally. They have to think strategically about their relationship with it.

I think the coverage of the 2016 campaign was an absolute disgrace. I understand why Hillary Clinton was furious. The disproportionate attention to trivial scandals was ridiculous.

Having said that, Amy Chozick’s memoir describes Philippe Reines directing some disgusting, misogynistic insults at journalists. That might feel satisfying, but it’s not an effective mindset for a campaign that’s trying to win.

Your job is to communicate your agenda. As Matthew says, Democrats have many potentially popular policy positions. They need to get those messages out through earned media.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who received fair treatment. I probably agree with 98 percent of the Clinton campaign’s complaints about its coverage, but litigating fairness isn’t the campaign’s main task. Worry about that afterward, and let surrogates criticize the press if necessary.

Trump understands the practical value of the media. He’s had a symbiotic relationship with it since the early 1980s. He complains about it constantly, but he also knows how to use it.

Democrats need that kind of strategic mindset. It won’t magically make voters cast ballots strictly on policy, but in closely fought elections the tactical choices matter.

You have to ask what journalists want to cover, what material you can give them, and how to get your message into those stories. You can’t simply expect nonconservative outlets to treat Democrats fairly, however reasonable that expectation might be. Ossoff’s approach—naming someone in a way that generates stories without being offensive or making false claims—is a good example.

Media strategy and earned media

Scott Lemieux: Those are the sorts of opportunities candidates should look for. Someone compared Ossoff with Newsom today, particularly Ossoff’s calm questioning of Collins about the 2020 election. Fighting back doesn’t mean pursuing any random controversy or whatever happened to show up on television.

The fight needs to be considered and strategic. There’s nothing wrong with moderating some positions, either. But Gavin Newsom sometimes makes a point of announcing that he’s taking a moderate position. That isn’t especially useful. It’s better for those positions to fit naturally within an overall public persona.

You shouldn’t simply announce, “I’m a liberal trying to appeal to moderate voters.” That’s ineffective. The message should appear coherent and authentic, not like a series of transparent tactical adjustments.

I’m not endorsing Ossoff for 2028 at this early date. But he and other successful candidates show how Democrats can reach people who aren’t already strong supporters with messages that might appeal to them. That’s the bottom line.

Matthew Sheffield: I agree. I know you have to leave, Scott, so I won’t keep you.

Scott Lemieux: Thanks very much for having us, Matthew, and thanks to everyone who listened and who reads the blog. This was a terrific conversation, and I hope we can speak again.

Robert Farley: Absolutely.

Matthew Sheffield: That was great.

Scott Lemieux: Thanks.

Matthew Sheffield: I agree with Scott’s points. Rob, can you stay until the bottom of the hour? Okay, we’ll go another 28 minutes. Another thing Republicans do well is invest in media.

For Republicans, media is the central pillar of their strategy, not something peripheral. Trump complains about it constantly because he thinks about it constantly. Media attention is how he gets the pomp and circumstance he wants.

From an investment standpoint, many right-wing outlets aren’t profitable. Breitbart and The Daily Caller are examples. Apart from talk radio, Fox News, and Newsmax, I would argue that most of the major right-wing outlets have never been profitable and probably never will be.

Yet they survive because Republican campaigns direct some donor money toward these outlets by buying advertising. Let’s take a hypothetical example involving The Daily Caller. These numbers are illustrative, not actual figures. Suppose its annual budget is $2 million.

Suppose normal advertising revenue is only $200,000. A large shortfall could be filled partly through a nonprofit foundation that funds articles and accepts tax-deductible donations.

Campaigns also buy ads. An outlet accustomed to receiving $200,000 in annual advertising might receive $50,000 from a single week of campaign advertising across its site. That spending helps keep these outlets alive. Collectively, they’ve helped turn relatively passive conservatives into radical reactionaries.

That’s part of how Republicans became so extreme under Trump. Reactionaries had been working on this transformation for decades, but Trump accelerated it by giving them an opening to cement their control of the party.

It worked. Democrats, meanwhile, still operate like an old-fashioned coalition party without a strong unifying ideological impulse. They need one. That doesn’t mean everyone has to become a socialist or a communist. It means building common cause among people who care about different issues—environmental protection, civil rights, reproductive freedom, and others.

It’s fine to be a single-issue voter, but you also need to recognize that other issues matter and support people working on them. In that sense, you have to be like Glenn Reynolds: promote people even when you don’t fully understand or agree with them.

Single-issue voters and coalition openness

Robert Farley: Here’s where I see a fundamental disjunction. I’ve made this observation jokingly before, but I think it’s true about the Trump coalition.

Imagine a Republican voter living with five family members, three of whom are undocumented immigrants. He hates trans people so much that he votes for Trump, even though he can’t join a union and is suffering heavily from inflation.

He may also be harmed by workplace regulations under Republican governments. Nevertheless, the Republican coalition welcomes him. So, too, with a hypothetical lesbian bookstore owner downtown who is deeply hostile to immigrants in her neighborhood.

Despite agreeing with Democrats on many other issues and disagreeing with Trump on most policies, she’s welcomed into the Republican coalition. The message is, “You’re free to join us.” Democrats don’t operate that way, and I don’t think we can with the coalition we have now.

Maybe we could have done that 25 or 30 years ago. But I know how our own comment section works at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I know what some commenters think about Kentucky and the people who live here.

Single-issue voters aren’t as welcome in the Democratic coalition as they are in the Republican coalition. I don’t think that’s simply a decision by elites or party establishments.

I think it’s a feature of the coalition itself. You’re right that Democrats aren’t an ideological party in quite the same way Republicans are, and that goes back to the parties’ histories. Democrats were built as a governing coalition.

The Republican Party, by comparison, was founded around a stronger ideological core. This makes competing difficult. One possible explanation—and I’m still working through this—is that Trump is uniquely capable of exploiting the Democratic coalition’s weaknesses.

He exploits its factionalism by mobilizing single-issue voters whose common thread is hostility to some element of the Democratic coalition. That makes them available to Republicans.

Matthew Sheffield: I agree that’s a problem. Media is one of the ways Republicans exploit it. They attract someone like your hypothetical lesbian bookstore owner because she dislikes immigrants, then begin feeding her messages on other subjects.

Over time, some people change their minds about guns, taxes, and other policy areas. Sadly, some even reverse their support for marriage equality.

It’s awful to watch, but it happens. Republicans also treat someone who doesn’t fit their usual demographic stereotype as a valuable spokesperson. That embrace isn’t necessarily sincere: they don’t want to hear her views if she supports marriage equality or opposes Christian nationalism.

But if she sticks to the one issue she shares with them, they’re eager to put her front and center, despite her disagreements on everything else. Democrats underestimate the power of ordinary people with compelling stories and strong feelings about an issue.

It’s more than a hypothetical dynamic. I experienced a version of it when Fox promoted me even though I was an unknown, anonymous blogger.

Regular people and Republican messaging

Matthew Sheffield: Fox doesn’t do that just with me. Every day they’ll introduce an ordinary person—John Smith from North Carolina, angry about one issue, or Susie Q, upset about something else—and let that person tell a story.

For people who don’t follow politics, or who distrust politicians, seeing a relatable person speak passionately about an issue can be compelling, especially if they agree with that person. It’s important that these guests seem authentic, speaking in their own words rather than reciting a disciplined campaign message.

This allows Republicans to disguise how plutocratic their policies are. A very large share of their funding comes from billionaires who treat politics as an investment rather than a donation. Yet a party whose leaders want to extract wealth from the country has managed to portray Democrats as the anti-American party.

Robert Farley: There’s something to that, but I want to add a point.

Matthew Sheffield: Go ahead.

Robert Farley: Democrats win about half the time, which is what you’d expect in a two-party system. What’s striking isn’t simply the number of Republican victories; it’s that Republicans seem to have defied the median-voter logic we’re discussing by growing ever more extreme.

They’ve become more extreme without paying the expected electoral price. That’s puzzling. Media is clearly part of the explanation, but there’s also something distinctive about Trump himself.

It may have something to do with perceptions of corruption. In 2016, many people didn’t see Trump as radical; they saw Clinton as more radical than Trump. That finding has been widely discussed.

We’re still trying to explain why. Much of the answer may be what you’ve described: Democrats lack a media ecosystem capable of consistently portraying Trump and his associates as the radicals they are.

But some of the explanation may lie in Trump’s uniquely familiar public image. On our last podcast with Julia Azari, she said, “I’ve never not known who Donald Trump was.” She was born in the 1980s, I believe.

There’s never been a moment in her life when she didn’t know who Trump was. That’s unusual, and I find its political implications difficult to assess.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s a fair point. Republicans still win other races, though, so the broader political system is also strong in ways many people on the center-left underestimate. Is it Paul who has the Ariana Grande theory of politics?

Is that Paul’s idea? Could you summarize it for listeners who aren’t familiar with it?

Robert Farley: The Ariana Grande argument is similar to what we’ve been discussing. I’d phrase it a little differently, but the basic idea is that politics is a hobby or an enthusiasm, like baseball, popular music, football, or gaming.

People who are deeply interested in politics know a lot about it and have considered reasons for their views. Other people are deeply interested in Ariana Grande and only start paying attention to politics in the four months before an election.

Those Ariana Grande voters need to be informed and mobilized in ways different from what political obsessives are accustomed to. We may think about politics as a responsibility or a passion, but a huge portion of the public thinks about it differently. Their votes still count just as much as ours.

I think that’s a fair summary of Paul’s view.

The Ariana Grande theory of politics

Matthew Sheffield: I agree, and it illustrates the myth of the rational voter that I mentioned earlier.

Robert Farley: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Sheffield: Democrats need to come out of the ivory tower. Even the word “populist” has a different history from its current use. The original Populist Party in the United States was a left-wing party.

Populism is historically associated with the left. Yet even writers who should know better, including people at outlets like Slate, describe Trump as a populist. Donald Trump isn’t a populist; he’s a vulgarian.

Robert Farley: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s what he is.

Having seen how both sides operate, I think the Republican agenda is openly plutocratic. Rather than present it that way, Republicans have constructed a form of cultural populism.

They use that cultural populism to establish credibility with ordinary people, and it works. We can say it’s awful and illegitimate that they get away with it. But the useful question is what we’ll do differently in response.

I hear Democrats complain that the rules are rigged and the system isn’t fair. But that’s the system they have to operate in. Republicans figured out how to use it. Historically, votes were distributed quite differently, with competitive races in rural and midsize states such as Kentucky.

It wasn’t just the South. Utah, where I was born, had a Democratic governor in the 1970s.

Robert Farley: Idaho did, too—Cecil Andrus.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. Illinois and many other states also had different partisan alignments. Back then, both parties included a wider range of ideologies.

There were genuine liberal Republicans winning in Kansas and other places. Rural voters aren’t inherently unreachable; progressives need to learn to speak to them. And they need to think of themselves as a minority, assuming that most people haven’t heard their arguments or may even dislike their beliefs. They have to ask how to win from that starting point. Republicans are good at asking how to attract politically inert, nonideological, or mildly conservative voters. Those voters don’t have to love Republicans if Republicans can make them afraid enough of Democrats. I don’t think the left does that effectively.

Robert Farley: I have so many thoughts about that. First, I’d love to know who first described one of the world’s most famous billionaire New York real estate developers as a populist.

There might be a traceable first use in a major outlet, and I’d be curious to know where it originated. I also think we should take seriously the flip side of your point about formerly competitive places like Kentucky, Kansas, Utah, and Idaho.

Scott mentioned earlier that Washington is now essentially out of reach for Republicans. That wasn’t true when I was growing up. The same is largely true of Oregon.

My 20-year-old students are shocked by the idea that a Republican could win California. But I grew up there in the 1980s and remember how conservative much of the Central Valley was.

So there are two sides to this change. Democrats have lost ground in areas where they used to compete, but Republicans have also become politically unwelcome in places that were once competitive for them.

Campaign strategy and the military analogy

Robert Farley: Because I study military affairs, I often think about campaign strategy in military terms. To develop a short-term strategy, you have to make two decisions.

First, decide where you’re going to fight. Second, decide how you’ll fight on that terrain. The first is a shaping battle: choosing the issues, understanding voters’ positions, and trying to influence those positions through media, outreach, and activity outside election campaigns.

Eventually, though, you have to accept where the electorate is. You meet voters where they are, just as an army has to deal with the physical terrain: hills, rivers, fields, and walls. In a particular election, you won’t be able to move the hill.

You may not be able to move the river, either. You have to design a strategy around its existence. That would be a more productive way to talk about political consultants and their influence on campaigns.

These days, when people start complaining about consultants, I often tune out. The term has become shorthand for general frustration with campaign strategy instead of a specific critique.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s true. Another asymmetry involves donors. Many donors on the left see themselves as nonpartisan or nonideological. Someone who gives overwhelmingly to left-leaning causes once explicitly told me, “I don’t see myself as part of the right or the left.” I can’t name the person.

There are many people like that, and I sympathize with them to a considerable extent. We need donors who support civil society, including nonpartisan voter registration efforts.

I’m not arguing against arts foundations, education programs, or organizations that buy classroom supplies for teachers. Those are worthwhile things to fund.

But the asymmetry is real. Someone also needs to counteract Charles Koch, the Adelson family, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. Supporting civic institutions and countering partisan political influence are both necessary.

Here’s the odd part: across the campaigns and super PACs in 2016, 2020, and 2024, Democrats often had more money, but they wasted too much of it. Consultants deserve criticism for failing to invest in a durable media ecosystem.

Republicans have built a cradle-to-grave media ecosystem. Someone can enter it as a child and never leave. That may sound like a disturbing propaganda structure, but an alternative doesn’t have to consist of nonstop political messaging.

It could simply consist of interesting people talking about subjects they care about from progressive perspectives. Let them speak in their own voices. Stop trying to control every message, because that no longer works.

Robert Farley: That issue is especially close to my heart because foreign policy is an area where many analysts still place enormous value on nonpartisanship. But in foreign policy, as in other fields, fiercely partisan actors can overwhelm nonpartisan institutions.

They’ll push straight through them. Consider the Quincy Institute, which was established as a restraint-oriented, noninterventionist institution. That’s a laudable mission.

Its origins were laudable, too. But you can see how committed right-wing partisans can overwhelm the nonpartisan participants and turn such an institution in a partisan direction. Some donors understand very well the power of partisanship.

They understand how funding can create a partisan DNA within particular institutions and around particular issues. Earnest nonpartisanship alone can’t reliably resist that force. It isn’t built for that competition and may be almost destined to lose.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. As with your military analogy, you have to deal with the mountain or river in front of you. It’s fine to develop a long-term plan to reroute the river, but in the meantime you must operate on the terrain that exists.

And for God’s sake, Democrats should try something different. They win about half the time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better at politics. That’s partly what happens in a first-past-the-post, two-party system. It’s tempting to interpret victories as proof that Barack Obama or Bill Clinton were uniquely brilliant candidates.

But after George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, was a Republican really going to win in 2008? Unless Democrats nominated someone extraordinarily incompetent or lazy, they were likely to win regardless. Too often, Democrats win because Republicans have made such a mess that voters turn to Democrats and ask them to fix it. Then Democrats mistake that opportunity for proof that their own strategy was superior.

After fixing the problem, they still don’t know how to win the next election.

Robert Farley: Right.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s the problem. The party that governs effectively and offers policies people like should win more elections than Democrats currently do. That’s my bottom line. And we’re right at the bottom of the hour.

It’s been a great discussion, Rob, and I’m glad Scott could join us earlier. I’ll also get the transcript posted. I look forward to doing more of these conversations.

Robert Farley: We’d love that. We’d also like to have you talk more specifically about your experiences in the blogosphere for our oral-history series, so we could dig further into that history.

Matthew Sheffield: Thanks for joining us, everybody. If you’re watching after the livestream, make sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube. Thanks again.

Subscribe now

Last time, I talked about the necessity of taking a critical look at the small but increasing number of Republican politicians who are making a show of “distancing” themselves from President Donald Trump. Panicked by a midterm environment that glows gloomier for Republicans by the day, they have correctly intuited that public rejection of the president — both generally and on specific fronts like the economy and immigration — has created not so much headwinds as a proverbial wrecking ball set on a crash course for the GOP’s congressional majorities.

But these maneuvers shouldn’t obscure the underlying reality: on issue after issue, on goal after goal, the contemporary Republican Party seeks to advance a vision of the U.S. that is largely indistinguishable from major initiatives and priorities of the Trump administration. This means that a key challenge for Democrats, not just in the weeks leading up to the midterms but over the next two years before the next presidential election, will be to both maximize the damage that Trump has inflicted on the Republican brand while also not letting his allies, toadies, and even reluctant defenders off the hook for their complicity in outlandish policies and ideologies.

After all, in the person of Donald Trump, the many pathologies of the contemporary GOP are legible for any American to see: he makes explicit what so many in the party would rather downplay or dissimulate. His contempt for women; his incitement of violence against both his fellow citizens and defenseless immigrants; his embrace of white nationalism: on so many fronts, his shameless pronouncements and behavior help make evident what might otherwise feel abstract, or retain a modicum of plausible deniability. Properly described and framed by the opposition, Trump can be a skeleton key to assist in the wholesale discrediting of a political party whose views he so often advances. And when you add in his bottomless greed, his narcissism that seeks to swallow all the attention in the world, a general undermining of the U.S. on the world stage, and his clearly deteriorating mental state, it would be a lost opportunity not to remind American voters that this is the man the Republican Party has chosen to sell their souls to — and to judge the party accordingly.

But Democrats need to bear in mind that at some point, they will be entering a zone of diminishing returns in trying to tie the GOP to the bloated failure of Trump and his administration, rather than hitting Republican politicians for their own policy and ideological failings. To my mind, this means that the pivot to emphasizing GOP complicity in Trump administration depredations needs to start now, and ramp up through the 2028 election. The worst thing that could happen would be for the Democratic Party to stand up a narrative, inadvertently or not, that Donald Trump is the primary source of the GOP’s moral rot and anti-democratic animus, so that the GOP is able to enter the 2028 election cycle with semi-plausible claims that it will be a reformed or more palatable party with Trump no longer in power or on the ballot. For the remaining years of the Trump administration and beyond, the ambition of Democrats should match the country’s political crisis and the danger that the Republican Party presents to the continuation of democracy in America. They have been presented not just with a generational opportunity, but a moral obligation, to discredit the Republican Party as a political force in the United States, and should not hesitate to seize it.

If this sounds extreme or grandiose, then I’d simply ask the reader to consider the project of the Republican Party over the last decade and more, which has constituted nothing less than an escalating insurrection against American democracy — including an explicit goal of permanently keeping Democrats out of power at both the state and national levels. This insurrection has been propelled by a millions-strong reactionary movement of Christian nationalists and white supremacists who wish to turn back the social progress of the last half century and more; augmented by millions of less ideological Americans who nonetheless find themselves unsettled by rapid social change, a sense of economic precarity, and political disempowerment; and bankrolled by a rogue’s gallery of tech oligarchs and assorted billionaires who have seen in the Trump era an opportunity to reshape the American economy even further in favor of the hyper-wealthy.

Looking beyond Trump’s congressional co-conspirators to individual red states and their Republican leaders, there is little reason to think that a post-Trump GOP will somehow be more moderate. It’s always bracing to recall that the GOP’s push for permanent political dominance achieved its first, striking successes at the state level, with the party obtaining, via gerrymandering and voter suppression, a stranglehold or disproportionate power not only over red states, but also purple polities like Wisconsin. Indeed, as Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, the cruelty and extremism displayed by GOP politicos in the ur-MAGA state of Texas make a good case that the party is set to go even further off the democratic rails in the coming years.

Despite all this glaring evidence of a grotesquely revanchist GOP, there is a certain strain of Democratic politico who asks us to ignore the full evidence of our senses; to turn our backs on all the outrages against democracy, dignity, and human life that we have suffered, and to concentrate on “real,” material things like “affordability” and a return to “normalcy.” But in fact the citizenry has been forced by the Trump administration and the radical GOP to realize that there is no “normal” we can get back to without fully confronting and discrediting the forces that have turned our country so very abnormal.

Even the narrow, cautious focus that some in the party counsel — such as on affordability and health care — turns out to be inseparable from larger questions of American identity, equality, and freedom that the GOP has thrust to center stage. We cannot have a meaningful discussion about health care if it is poisoned by the idea that some Americans are less American than others. We cannot have a thoroughgoing discussion of economic justice if the millions of immigrants who contribute so much to our country are to be considered as less than human. And this is to say nothing of the idea that there is small pleasure to be had in full employment and fat paychecks if, at the same time, an autocratic government can abuse you or your family for having the wrong skin color, treat you as less than a full citizen because of your gender or sexual orientation — or render your ability to meaningfully participate in our democracy null and void.

But despite so many Democrats’ refusal to engage fully with the GOP’s advocacy of racism, misogyny, and Christian nationalism, or to highlight these assaults on the nation and its populace, the citizenry has indeed been forced to grapple with such outrages and their larger meaning for the nation’s future. Federal agents’ sadistic abuses of non-white immigrants and the citizens who have attempted to defend them; an unending torrent of racist, homophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric from the White House aimed at diminishing the safety and status of millions upon millions of Americans; a ceaseless unleashing of hate against trans people that aims to deny them their very right to exist: Trump and the Republican Party have made no secret of their desire to corrode not just U.S. politics, but American society itself. The direction they’re trying to push us in is palpable not just intellectually, but at a gut level for so many people: to raise white, straight, Christian men up to positions of high authority and social dominance, and to put everyone else in their proper, degraded place. For millions of Americans, this push is alternately frightening, enraging, and disorienting.

But here’s the crux: having seen this grotesque social and economic experiment run in real time and at national scale, a strong majority of citizens are repulsed, and wish to be freed from this radical re-envisioning of America. Democrats must directly speak to Americans’ ongoing engagement and reaction to a Republican assault on basic notions of equality and national unity, and be unafraid of channeling this disgust and outrage.

So as important as it will be for the Democrats to develop legislative strategies to minimize any further damage Trump tries to inflict on the country over the next two years, they also need to communicate a narrative to the American people of what the president and the GOP have aimed to do to our democracy and our society, the damage already done, and the prospect of further horrors should they continue in power. If and when their party wins back the House (and hopefully the Senate), Democrats have every incentive to amplify their scope of victory by casting it as a public repudiation of this unacceptable GOP vision, both to bolster their fight in the next couple years and over the longer term. The goal should be to strike at the fundamentals of contemporary Republicanism, with Exhibit A being the clear failures and horrors of the last few years, and the antidote being a full-court press to restore American democracy, strengthen our free society, enable an economy that brings prosperity to all, and hold their antagonists to account.

Subscribe now

While the Family Research Council’s recent and final Pray Vote Stand national activist conference was a pale imitation of the group’s glory years, speakers made clear that the still-powerful religious-right movement is committed to advancing an anti-equality, anti-freedom, exclusionary Christian nationalist agenda—and looking to make it all possible by keeping Republicans in power in the upcoming midterm elections.

The stars of the opening night were U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and his wife Erin Hawley, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which played a major role in getting the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Sen. Hawley, a close ally of dominionist activist Sean Feucht, expressed anti-abortion activists’ frustration that the number of abortions in the U.S. have risen since Roe was overturned, because federal policy changes made during the Biden administration facilitate the distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone by mail, allowing patients to access it despite state-level abortion bans.

Religious-right groups have been demanding that the Trump administration reverse those policies, which Hawley complained “is turning every mailbox in America into a Planned Parenthood.”

Trump administration officials say they are undertaking a safety review of the drug, and suggest that it will lead to a withdrawal of its approval by the Food and Drug Administration, but that has not satisfied its religious-right supporters. And even if the FDA does what Hawley wants and reverses its finding that the drug is safe, that won’t be enough for him.

“They need to go beyond that,” Hawley said. “We need to go beyond that. Congress needs to ban the abortion drug in the United States of America, period.” Hawley has introduced a legislative ban but his colleagues have not rallied around it, presumably because they know that most Americans oppose abortion bans.

The week before Pray Vote Stand, Perkins joined Hawley and other conservative Christian leaders in releasing a “Declaration for Life.” At their press conference, Perkins complained that “the Republican Party has lost its voice on the life issue.”

On the PVS stage, Hawley promoted an initiative on the ballot in Missouri this year that would place an abortion ban in the state constitution. He asserted that Missouri is a “pro-life state,” despite the fact that it was Missouri voters who enshrined abortion rights in the Constitution in 2024.

Reversing Marriage Equality

Overturning the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling is another goal of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it is the primary goal of the “Greater Than” coalition launched earlier this year by strident anti-equality activist Katy Faust and dozens of religious-right groups. The drumbeat of anti-equality propaganda may be reflected in reduced support for marriage equality among Republicans, though about two-thirds of Americans still favor allowing same-sex couples to marry.

Faust’s strategy is to portray “gay marriage” as a dire threat to the wellbeing of children, returning to an old and dishonorable strategy of the anti-LGBTQ movement. She demeans gay couples who want to be parents as “selfish” people who have enabled a “global baby trade.” She told the Pray Vote Stand audience, “You do not regulate a baby buying industry…You abolish it.”

Faust began her diatribe at PVS by talking about abuses of surrogacy, starting with the story of a Chinese tech billionaire who she said has between 100 and 300 children procured through surrogates in California. But she does not appear interested in exploring legal changes that might, for example, create similar procedural safeguards as those involved in adoption. Instead, she wants to use a few horror stories to justify banning surrogacy altogether because it violates what she says is God’s plan.

Faust vowed that the campaign she is leading is going to “retake marriage” and she outlined its three-pronged strategy:

• Pursue a legal strategy to pass laws that the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority can use to overrule marriage equality—similar to the strategy used successfully by the Alliance Defending Freedom to overturn Roe v. Wade.

• Shift public opinion with an “army of influencers” promoting the campaign’s propaganda message that “gay marriage results in child victimization.”

• Engage the church with materials designed separately for Catholics and Protestants

Conservative Christians Only For Federal Judges

The Family Research Council has repeatedly given a platform to right-wing judicial activist Phillip Jauregui and his Center for Judicial Renewal to promote their campaign to convince Republican presidents and senators to require that future Supreme Court justices and other federal judicial nominees meet his “biblical worldview” test—never mind the Constitution’s ban on religious tests for public office. Conservative judges who don’t pass the test are put on a “red list” that the group uses to lobby against their promotion. At this year’s conference, Jauregui told activists that his group’s ratings are already working.

In a separate session, Jordan Lorence of the First Liberty Institute, another religious-right legal group, praised Trump’s judicial nominees, saying, “I feel like it’s been Christmas morning for the last few years at the Supreme Court, and you’re getting, you know, everything on your list.” In addition to overturning Roe, his list included rulings undermining church-state separation, limiting gun regulation, expanding presidential power, upholding the Trump team’s enforcement of immigration laws, rebuking the transgender rights movement, and more.

All of this, said Lorence, was because Trump was elected in 2016 with a Republican-majority Senate, and “then by the providence of God got three vacancies to fill on the U.S. Supreme Court.” He warned that if Republicans lose their majority in the Senate, “There’s not going to be a whole lot of good judges getting confirmed.”

Lorence called former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “a hero” because he “basically did not confirm almost all of President Obama’s nominees for the last two years of his presidency,” creating a backlog of judicial vacancies for Trump to fill—and of course for refusing to allow the Senate to consider Obama’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Lorence tried to mollify right-wing activists enraged at conservative justices who rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn birthright citizenship, saying we’ve had it for 100 years and there were good arguments on both sides.

The Religious Freedom Asterisk

Asked about right-wing Christian claims that Islam is incompatible with the First Amendment and the Constitution, Lorence waffled, saying that it’s “troubling” to think about people who would use the First Amendment to weaken the First Amendment, but added that not every Muslim is an “Islamicist” and that he has Muslim neighbors who he gets along well with, and “the last thing they would want to do is do jihad in the neighborhood and make us be inferior as either Christians or Jews.”

No such nuance was evident when Perkins convened a panel on Islam and the supposed threat of Sharia law supplanting the U.S. Constitution. (Note: Muslims represent about one percent of the U.S. population.) Panelists included Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch; former Rep. Michele Bachmann of Regent University; and Shahram Hadian, a former Muslim turned Christian pastor.

Hadian portrayed interfaith efforts as a Trojan Horse for Muslim’s strategy of conquest. “There’s no common ground. There’s no interfaith. There’s no ecumenicalism with Muslims,” he said. Bachmann and Hadian said that communities that allow the public broadcast of the Muslim call to prayer have already been “subjugated.”

Perkins and other FRC officials have repeatedly suggested that Islam is incompatible with the Constitution and does not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as Christianity because it is a political system not a religion, which is ironic given that the Christian right has spent years arguing that their interpretation of the Bible should dictate everything from gender roles to tax policy.

This article was first published by Right Wing Watch.

After Donald Trump’s 2024 election win returned him to the White House, millions of appalled Americans grappled not only with the shock of his victory, but with the challenge of imagining how to endure a second term of a president who had literally tried to overthrow American democracy just four short years before. Even the 2026 midterms seemed a century away. Meanwhile, Democratic politicos were presented with the daunting task of contending with a president and a party that not only controlled all three branches of government, but were clearly intent on securing permanent dominance at the federal level. This fight appeared all the more challenging as many Democratic politicians self-flagellatingly embraced a Republican and media narrative that Donald Trump had effected a permanent realignment of U.S. politics, attracting substantial shares of traditional Democratic voting blocs like young voters and Latinos.

If, nearly two long years later, we have arrived at the cusp of those once-inconceivable midterms, we should in the first place take some solace in the country having thus far more or less survived a second Trump term that has been about as bad as many imagined it would be. Second, we might (cautiously) take courage in the apparent fact that many millions of Americans appear to have withdrawn their former support from Trump and the GOP, and are prepared to either abstain from voting in November or to cast ballots for Democratic candidates.

Although it is always good sense to be reasonably skeptical of political polling, the staggering numbers regarding Trump’s growing unpopularity, as well as the general trend towards increasing support of Democratic candidates both in generic congressional surveys and polls of individual candidates, suggest the swelling of a possible “blue tsunami,” in the words of various observers. Take these recent results highlighted by New Republic’s Greg Sargent, who has been a careful observer of the president’s falling support. A recent Reuters poll shows Trump’s approval at 32%, a new low, with an average of national polls putting his approval at a mere 35%; approval of his performance on cost of living at a dismal 17%; and only 29% supporting his foreign policy actions (with a smaller 18% agreeing that the president’s handling of the war against Iran is helping the country).

After Trump’s pair of head-spinning wins over the last decade, we can be forgiven for only cautiously accepting what is increasingly obvious: the president and the GOP, having engaged in all manner of lawlessness, incompetence, and general mismanagement of the country, appear to be forcing a decisive public judgment against their actions and their ideology. This judgment is being rendered not just by Democratic-leaning voters, but by a decisive turn by unaffiliated voters, as well as in a small but sure erosion of GOP-affiliated ones. It’s also being signaled through the flight from the GOP of those very demographics — Latinos, African-American males, younger Americans — that had created the myth of a realignment in 2024 (for those looking for a good time, I encourage you to look at some of the recent polling around the collapse of Latino approval of Donald Trump).

Just as back in 2024, many of us feared to speculate what it would be like to live another two years, let alone four, under a second Trump presidency, I’d wager that many didn’t dare imagine a time or circumstances when GOP politicos might begin to break from Trump. After all, they had rallied around his third candidacy even after he had shown himself to be a lawless insurrectionist and aspiring dictator. If that didn’t sour them on him, what ever would?

As it turns out, what is finally turning a handful of Republican candidates to seek space (or at least the appearance of it — more on this below) from Trump isn’t necessarily any particular action by the president, but his measurably catastrophic loss of support among American voters — which in turn threatens their own political survival. In other words, GOP politicians have openly supported or turned a blind eye to Trump’s warmongering (with hundreds of civilians dead from his Iran and Caribbean) campaigns and ICE-inflicted sadism, but only flinched when Trump’s falling poll numbers raised the prospect of their own personal political apocalypse.

And so, as Paul Waldman has helpfully summarized, a slice of GOP candidates around the country has started to distance themselves from some of the president’s policies:

• Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar released a video in which she said some Hispanic supporters of Trump feel “betrayed” by his immigration policies

• GOP senatorial candidates in Iowa and Nebraska have criticized his plan to import more beef to lower prices for consumers

• two Iowa GOP representatives voted to support a Democratic resolution opposing the Iran war

• Multiple Republicans support restrictions on data centers and AI, in contradiction with Trump’s gung-ho (and deeply self-serving) support of the industry

Such developments, in prior decades, would have generally signaled the healthy operation of democratic politics: politicos listening and responding to the public, and critiquing a president with whom they disagree. In our era, when the GOP has appeared to be in lockstep with Donald Trump, there is a clear temptation to see such “traditional” political maneuvers as a sign not just of Trump’s waning power, but also of outright democratic health. “See that?” we can imagine a political analyst exclaiming. “The Trump fever is breaking, just like we always said it would.”

But it would be a grave political error for Democrats to treat attempts by GOP politicians to distance themselves from a few specific, unpopular Trump policies as a decisive break with Trump, or from their complicity in the larger retrograde political project he has enabled. That they are afraid for their own political survival based on souring public opinion in a turbulent midterms environment is not the same as repudiating a host of noxious ideas that they’ve largely been happy to support, and which constitute not simply Trump administration policies but mainstream beliefs of the current GOP. Here are some of the most prominent presidential moves welcomed by both federal and state Republican elected officials: the unceasing attempts to use all manner of state power to rig elections to support permanent Republican majorities not only in dozens of states, but also at the national level; the advancement of Christian nationalist ideology and goals; the evisceration not only of crucial public health entities like the CDC and NIH, but relentless efforts to sow doubt in basic medical science; the advancement of a white supremacist vision of America, which has encompassed everything from racially-motivated mass deportations of even documented immigrants, to the purging of non-white general officers from the U.S. military, to endless lies that the United States is being invaded by non-white “aliens” who seek to literally replace white Americans; the deployment of the U.S. military to seize the country of Venezuela as a sort of surplus oil-producing vassal state, signaling a depraved neo-imperialist vision of the U.S. in Latin America; and a vast, party-wide corruption in which the president and his allies abuse their levers of power for illicit personal enrichment.

With two years left of his final term in office, Democrats need to grasp the risks of any over-emphasis on Donald Trump as the root cause of America’s ills, and his eventual departure from the American scene as synonymous with the return of normalcy. The authoritarian inclinations, misogynistic worldview, racist assumptions, and essential corruption of which Trump is such an exemplar have taken strong root in the Republican Party; indeed, many of these pathologies pre-date the president’s personal hold over the GOP. And while a good number of prominent Democrats have argued for structural changes to root out corruption and revive American democracy, there has been much less stress on what it would mean to hold the GOP accountable for its radicalization into an extremist, far-right, anti-democratic party.

All this means that the phenomenon of Republicans making a show of opposing particular Trump administration policies is a test case for how well the Democrats grasp the authoritarian threat of the radicalized GOP that they will still face in two years, even after Trump is no longer in power. While there undeniably are some political advantages in pointing to Trump’s weakening personal hold on the GOP, these should be balanced with a necessary, long-term effort to remind the public that there is in fact little daylight between most GOP officials and Donald Trump on a host of vital issues. It is not so much that Trump has placed the GOP in his thrall against the party’s basic beliefs — the reason he has the party in thrall is because there is very little that fundamentally separates Trump from the lickspittle politicos who have enabled his worst instincts for the past decade.

To credit GOP politicians for actually changing their beliefs now, rather than simply dissimulating to buy themselves votes in a desperately adverse midterm environment, would be an incredible act of generosity to opponents who deserve neither the benefit of the doubt nor such an extension of grace.

The need to impugn and diminish the GOP goes beyond mere political maneuvering. If the goals and policies of the GOP are truly existentially threatening to U.S. democracy and modern American society — if the mortal threat transcends Trump’s two presidencies — then Democrats should be aiming not just to defeat the GOP in 2026, 2028, and beyond, but to fundamentally discredit its immoral ideologies and its very basis for existence. The Republican Party has become the vehicle for a mass reactionary movement encompassing tens of millions of Americans, one that aims to roll back the social advances of the last century and even to crush democracy if it stands in the way of reviving discredited hierarchies of race, gender, and religious identity.

So as we see GOP politicos begin to try to distance themselves from Donald Trump, it is vital that both ordinary citizens and Democratic politicos treat their proclamations and motives with the greatest skepticism and scrutiny. If a Republican politician is truly ready to decry the fundamentals of Trump, then such a politician should be willing to place themselves in opposition to the mainstream of the GOP, and to essentially declare themselves in favor of reforming the party so that it conforms with the basics of American democracy. Otherwise, the significance is only superficial; such politicians simply cannot be trusted to serve the United States, even after Donald Trump has shuffled (or been escorted) off the political stage. If it’s true, as Paul Waldman observes, that the relatively small numbers of GOP politicians voicing dissent from particular Trump policies is set to escalate, then Democrats need to be ready with a take-no-prisoners politics that paints them not as true critics of Trump, but as cowards and liars whose superficial opposition to heinous policies and ideas only confirms the moral rot that has consumed the GOP.

After so many years of Trumpist chaos and reactionary victories — the overturning of the right to an abortion, the brutalization of thousands of non-whites across the country at the hands of ICE, the deliberate erosion of common belief in vaccines and public health — it is likely that some Democrats will, in the coming years, argue in favor of whitewashing the conflicts of the last decade, towards the end of societal healing and moving forward.

Instead of asserting that the United States has endured a de facto ten-year-long insurrection at the hands of authoritarian-minded politicians and radicalized voters, they may point to issues like affordability and inflation as the actual seismic forces in American politics. Indeed, we can already see some version of this at play, as Democrats emphasize anxieties about the economy as key arguments to persuade voters to support their party in the midterms. And while in the abstract and as a matter of political expedience, there is nothing wrong with hitting a prominent weakness that has millions of Americans of various party affiliations riled up, it would be self-defeating to pretend that the conflicts of the Trump years have been merely about the cost of things, and not primarily about fundamental questions of American identity; merely about affordability, and not about basic issues of whether Americans of all kinds deserve to share equally in the American dream, as well as fundamental questions about whom the economy should serve.

Subscribe now

Christian nationalist Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins sat down for an interview with right-wing broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, during which she bragged that she knows God is supporting the Trump administration because they are a “group of warriors” who are dedicated to “bringing the light to a very dark world.”

After serving in various capacities during the first Trump administration, Rollins and other Trump insiders launched the America First Policy Institute, which has subsequently played a key role in staffing the second Trump administration. In her current capacity as Agriculture Secretary, Rollins has been leading right-wing Bible study sessions for members of Trump cabinet.

“I believe so strongly that God was not done with our country, that we are the greatest country in the history of the world.,” Rollins said. “So, building that organization [AFPI] to prepare for a second term of America First—whether it was President Trump or somebody else—is what we did. But now to be able to step up and meet the moment; I pray a lot that maybe we don’t feel like Moses, frankly, in Exodus, maybe we don’t feel like we’re fully prepared for this moment, but that God’s got us.”

“Walking into the West Wing every morning, I could feel God was with us,” she continued. “I felt just this peace. These jobs are hard. You’re being shot at figuratively, and our president literally, 24-7. The mainstream media is so dark. Big business, big government, big agriculture, big all of it is against you and so walking in that first term and seeing all of those wins in the first term, [it was a sign] that God was with us.”

“I held Bible studies in the first term, we prayed all the time,” Rollins added. “We built the America First policy Institute on the biblical foundations of everything: It’s biblical to want a secure border. It’s biblical to put children first in their education. It’s biblical to put patients first in healthcare. It’s biblical to fight back to the land of milk and honey in the Old Testament, to fight for our farmers and ranchers. And now to be here the second time and to see this extraordinary amount of winning that we’ve been able to do, none of it is possible without God. We are a group of warriors to our core. gathering once a week to have a cabinet Bible study and remind all of us what we’re fighting for.”

“I do use this platform,” Rollins admitted. “I believe in making disciples of all the nations. I believe that God has blessed this country and so ensuring that we are using this and bringing the light to a very dark world, that’s what this administration is about.”

“I have been sued a couple of times for, they say, talking about Jesus too much, but I’ll never stop talking about Jesus, “ Rollins vowed, before claiming that America will be doomed if Republicans do not maintain control of government in the midterm elections.

“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” she warned. “It’s an existential threat to the future of not just America, to the world. ... I have two daughters and two sons. I will hopefully someday have some grandchildren and they will not have an America that we have unless we’re able to win at the ballot box. We can keep fighting every day, but if those socialists, those Democrat socialists who believe in bigger government, who don’t believe in God, their religion is a radical climate agenda, wake up America. This is real and the darkness will overcome the light in this country if we’re not successful at the ballot box today and in the future.”

First published by Right Wing Watch

The long-running tension between moderate and progressive Democrats to steer the party’s direction saw a revealing development last month, as a prominent centrist group indicated it was declaring “war” on the Democratic Socialists of America. Alongside the allocation of $15 million dollars to attack the DSA and those who share its positions. Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way, asserted that the DSA presents a “mortal threat” to the Democratic Party.

Before we delve into how misguided Third Way’s targeting of the DSA is, it’s important to say upfront that the DSA’s platform contains various positions that lie outside the American political mainstream, such as defunding the Pentagon, empowering Congress to choose the president, and extending voting rights to permanent residents. It’s also fair to note that the DSA organization contains some members whose views are arguably in direct opposition to American democracy itself. As Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall recently observed, DSA co-chair Megan Romer is a member of the organization’s Red Star caucus, which terms itself a “a Marxist-Leninist caucus in DSA” and has noted that “Our primary goal, the goal which informs all of our organizing work, is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism. We do not believe that capitalism can be reformed into socialism – it must be overthrown and replaced.” Marshall correctly notes that, “This vanguard, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party claptrap is [ . .] the seed corn of left-wing authoritarianism.”

In light of this glaring extremism displayed by a small subset of DSA members, though, what’s immediately notable about Third Way’s declaration of war is that the centrist group appears to have chosen to foreswear such obvious, self-discrediting targets in favor of a broader onslaught on positions Third Way deems to bear the stains of “democratic socialism” — positions, we should immediately note, that are held far beyond the DSA membership rolls. And so Third Way head Cowan told the New York Times that:

the effort would include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the “D.S.A. dodge” — flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.

The idea that Democrats might be damaged when the party nominates candidates who hold controversial or unpopular positions, and that it thus might have an interest in patrolling its ideological and policy boundaries, is not crazy on its face. White supremacists or those who advocate violence as a way to solve political differences are obvious, clear examples. But Third Way appears to be doing something quite different than calling for the exclusion of such truly outlandish ideas. Instead, it is denouncing as “democratic socialism” a whole host of policies in an effort to preemptively delegitimize them rather than engage with them on their merits. And while this might be an appropriate tack to take against, say, self-proclaimed Democrats who advocate for the overthrow of the U.S. government, it’s an overwrought and counter-productive strategy against simply controversial or unpopular ideas.

For the Democrats, a party that includes both moderate and progressive wings, the proposition that certain ideas can simply be excommunicated rather than repudiated with opposing ideas and arguments is simply not realistic — or desirable. A scorched-earth strategy by one faction — in this case, Third Way essentially promoting “moderate” policies and trying to exclude “extreme” ones — seems doomed to fail. At the broadest level, it signals not simply disagreement but contempt for opponents who in reality are simply too numerous to be dislodged from either the party’s elected officials or rank-and-file. Such contempt will tend to raise hackles and promote digging in by its targets. It’s also a strategy intended to bum rush rather than persuade more middle-of-the road Democrats; human nature being what it is, you’d expect more than a few of these voters to react badly to attempts to scare them into line.

Damningly, Third Way also radically misreads the political, economic, and sociological contexts currently making Americans more receptive to fresh ideas such as those propounded by the DSA and the left more generally. At the broadest level, we face a vexing constellation of challenges, including but hardly limited to: the extremely unsettled, perilous state of American democracy; an economic system that not only generates increasing levels of extreme inequality, but appears increasingly unstable and unable to meet the needs of ordinary people; the destabilizing and even apocalyptic specter of AI; and escalating climate chaos that threatens to undermine our very planetary home and hopes for collective prosperity.

Equally disqualifyingly, Third Way seems not to grasp the single most dangerous political threat of our time: the emergence of an authoritarian and racist Republican Party led by an increasingly unstable would-be dictator. In the face of this, are we really to believe that the highest priority in American politics is not to beat, discredit, and dismantle a fascistic GOP, but to administer a beatdown to the Democratic Socialists of America? The choice to declare war on the one but not the other only becomes more bizarre when you consider the centrality of pro-democracy and egalitarian policies within the DSA platform and general appeal to voters (more on this below). Agree with them or not, there is simply no comparison between the DSA and a Republican Party that is openly scheming to rig the 2026 midterms so as to avoid a much merited and growing public judgment against GOP rule; has unleashed a regime of ethnic cleansing against immigrants; and stands by as the president pursues a futile and self-destructive war against Iran. We need to be talking about de-legitimizing fascist ideas, not controversial or unpopular ideas that nonetheless lie within the democratic spectrum.

In such an extreme and unpredictable era, it is hardly surprising that many Democrats would be skeptical of moderate or centrist ideas associated with establishment politicians and factions. To be blunt, moderates were the ones who were in charge while extreme political and economic circumstances gestated and then exploded into our lives over the past two decades. This is in fact an extremely common assessment of our current anti-establishment era, a rejection of the status quo attributed to both Republican and Democratic voters in their very different ways. For Democrats, the single most powerful argument for extreme skepticism of policy moderation is the fact that moderate Democratic candidates lost twice to the openly authoritarian and racist Donald Trump, who both times ran on a fake populist message that he would help ordinary Americans do better economically while scourging immigrant “invaders.”

In the face of such failures, the idea that many millions of Americans might be excited by politicians and policy makers on the left is no surprise at all; and to the extent their ideas might succeed where other policies have failed, such discussion and excitement should be encouraged, not treated as an alien force to be held responsible for the shortcomings of the contemporary Democratic Party.

All of these are general observations; when we are talking about political policies and positioning, the devil really is in the details. But it is at the level of specifics that any sort of moderate “war” on democratic socialism becomes doubly objectionable. Here, it’s helpful to take a look at actual DSA policy positions — not as a guide to what every DSA member, self-labeled democratic socialist, or plain old progressive should be held responsible for, but as a reality check on what Third Way seems to consider threats to the very existence of the Democratic Party.

At its website, DSA policy positions are sorted into three categories: Thriving Working Class Communities; Working-Class Foreign Policy; and Working-Class Democracy. And so this is the first thing that draws your attention: these policies are specifically geared towards attracting working-class voters. Next, looking at the specific policies, you might notice their deeply aspirational quality. Housing for all; Healthcare for All; End the U.S. War Machine; Economic Democracy. Whatever you might think of the specific goals under each of these and other policy areas, there is a vision that combines worker power, pacifism, and egalitarianism.

If we stop here, at the broadest level — particularly in terms of social, gender, and economic justice — you can see how any Third Way or other moderate declaration of antipathy against democratic socialism or others lumped into the “too extreme” camp is already problematic. The DSA vision is pretty clearly on a continuum with mainstream Democratic interests. The emphasis, of course, is different — the stress on working-class people rather than appeals to the “middle class” that characterize so much Democratic rhetoric and policy appeals comes immediately to mind. (Not incidentally, the moderate war on the left also echoes and amplifies the GOP’s efforts to steer American politics in a far-right direction, which carries the danger of truly foreclosing democratic, just solutions to our dire challenges. An attempt to shut down a political movement associated with worker power is a lamentable accompaniment to the GOP’s anti-union, anti-worker policies (such as opposition to minimum wage increases and a veritable obsession with rolling back child labor laws)).

However, digging into the specifics, you will indeed find many policies that strongly diverge from the Democratic mainstream. “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people” is a straightforwardly socialist policy that few elected Democrats would get behind, and that a majority of rank-and-file Democrats would oppose. Likewise, “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress” are not commonly-held positions in the Democratic Party, to put it mildly; these would require major constitutional amendments re-conceiving our government as more of a parliamentary system, and at any rate, they far exceed more common proposals for reining in an over-bearing president and corrupted Supreme Court. And “Defund the Department of War” strikes me as a hard sell to all but the most devoted followers of pacifism; nearly every country in the world has at least a minimal military with which to defend itself.

Yet just about every policy listed at least addresses an actual real-world problem or concern in a rational fashion. Yes, corporations exercise too much power over our lives (exhibit A being tech companies which, through AI, seem poised to radically re-make the economy in ways that could well cause massive economic and social dislocation in service of funneling massive amounts of money to the richest among us). Yes, the current president and Supreme Court are wildly out of control, and even less deranged presidents have far too much unconstrained power (the unilateral power to commit the country to wars comes immediately to mind). Yes, the funding of the Pentagon is deeply corrupt and wasteful, as American are witnessing as we discover that a short war with a minor power like Iran has wiped out our reserves of essential munitions.

Alternatively, you will look in vain for DSA policies calling for the targeting of Americans based on their religious beliefs or sexual orientation. You will likewise fail to find claims that the United States is being overrun by illegal immigrants, requiring the harshest measures to seal the border and deport the “invaders.” And you will see no paeans to “heritage” white Americans as the truest citizens, deserving a greater say in the governance of the country than others less well-established here.

This essential contrast with mainstream positions of the GOP — a party that has devolved into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist party violently opposed to the rights and even existence of competing social and ethnic groups (and this is separate and apart from its complicity in the corruption of Donald Trump) — is another area where Third Way claims to both political leadership and righteous judgment as to who truly should be a Democrat hit the proverbial wall. While many DSA positions are certainly on the outer edges of political discourse, they are not fundamentally anti-American in the way so many GOP policies and stances are. The downplaying of such a key aspect of our current political context — that the GOP has radicalized into an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist party that not only serves the interests of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the great majority, but actively seeks to ethnically cleanse the U.S. of non-whites, subjugate women into second-class status via elimination of equal rights like the right to an abortion and the promotion of tradwife domesticity, and deny trans people the very right to exist via gender affirming care — is a major flaw in efforts by Third Way and other moderates to promote a narrow orthodoxy regarding what issues we are allowed to discuss, and how.

Alternatively, a political faction that advances an egalitarian vision across the boundaries of race and gender is a direct repudiation of mainstream GOP pathologies, and should be encouraged and embraced, not ignored or downplayed in wholesale critiques of the DSA. Conversely, when groups like Third Way downplay these pro-equality aspects of the DSA, they are also effectively downplaying a central threat to American society posed by MAGA, which openly avows white supremacist ideology in its fight to return America to a discredited past where whites were the “real” citizens, and everyone else was expected to defer to their perch atop the social hierarchy.

The experience of Michigan Democratic senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed provides a vivid example of the dynamics I want to convey. His race against Representative Haley Stevens was generally viewed within the party and by political commentators as a contest between the left and centrist wings of the Democratic Party. Both moderates and observers predicted that El-Sayed’s leftist policy positions on Israel, healthcare, and other issues would harm him in the general election against the GOP candidate, Representative Mike Rogers. Yet in the last few weeks, we have seen Republicans settle on a line of attack that targets not his economic beliefs and other DSA-adjacent policy positions, but his personal religion and ethnicity. Republicans immediately began emphasizing his full Arabic name, portraying him as un-American and threatening (Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville labeled him a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST.” Vice President JD Vance accused El-Sayed of wanting Sharia law in the United States (a long-running right-wing attack line against American Muslims). And no less a figure than Donald Trump posted a photo comparing El-Sayed and his hijab-wearing wife to the president and Melania, with the appalling caption “two VERY DIFFERENT America’s [sic].”

In attempting to enforce a rigid and self-interested view of what is politically viable or acceptable for the Democratic Party, Third Way and other avowed enemies of the left ultimately betray a basic misunderstanding of how meaningful progress is accomplished in the United States. All manner of policies now considered mainstream, from the necessity of abolishing slavery to the 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and child labor laws, were once widely condemned as outlandish impositions on the free market and illegitimate exercises of government regulation. There is also the basic political reality that the existence of maximalist policy proposals can expand our political imaginations in positive ways, and create the space for compromise steps that are both beneficial in their own right and lay the ground for bolder changes to come. At a time when the ruling GOP is trying to cripple Americans’ sense of possibility across a staggering range of life, from politics and science, to racial and gender equality, to health care and an economy that brings true security to all, it is nauseating to see a political faction urging the Democrats to rein in their imaginations, and our hope for what we can collectively accomplish for the country.

Subscribe now

Across multiple surveys, about 30 percent of Americans say they have no religious beliefs, and for the past several years, a majority of people say they “seldom or never” attend religious services.

People are free to think whatever they want to about philosophy and metaphysics, of course, but are they actually doing so? I have my doubts. Whether you agree with religions or not, they at least get people thinking something about minds, selfhood, and ethics.

Daoism, Buddhism and some other Eastern religions figured out centuries ago that you don’t need to believe in gods in order to think deeply about these topics. But here in the West, we never developed non-theistic epistemic traditions to any real degree, and so many non-believers here are philosophically impoverished, and don’t have much to say about minds and ethics.

Luckily for us, however, my guest on this episode, Eric Oliver, has been doing a lot of his thinking in this regard, and he’s written a great new book about it called How to Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.

You might recall Eric from his first appearance on Theory of Change and the fact that we also distribute his podcast on the Flux network called Knowing: With Eric Oliver. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of six different books. This one is based on a very popular course he teaches there called The Intelligible Self that’s based on his extensive research in philosophy, psychology, religion, and cognitive science.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

This episode is audio only. The full transcript is available. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

09:18 — Erich Fromm, love, and the terror of agency

17:44 — Transcendence for non-religious people?

26:04 — Abstract reasoning made humans much more intellectually powerful, but also more vulnerable to delusion

31:04 — AI and why the narrative self depends upon the living self

39:28 — Secular ethics and the meaning of life

43:33 — Energy use and ethics

46:36 — Deriving group ethics from nature

54:18 — Balancing acceptance with making the world better

Edited Transcript

Matthew Sheffield: So I have to say I am glad to see your book out on this subject, and I think it’s an important one, [00:03:00] especially for people who are not traditionally religious. It’s important that we think about things like this more than we do. But before we get to that, why is a political scientist who mostly does sociological research writing this book, Eric? Tell me.

Eric Oliver: So I think the book comes from two sources, one of which is sort of a longstanding interest on my own part in trying to apprehend what’s behind this experience of being. For me, it started in high school when my high school English teacher wrote “Know thyself” on the blackboard. And she assured us that if we wanted to have a meaningful life, we should heed the distillation of the ancient Greeks into these two simple words.

And I thought, “Oh, okay.” And so I spent a lot of my 20s and 30s reading about philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and Buddhism, going on meditation retreats, studying yoga, going on long hikes in the wilderness, [00:04:00] and talking to priests and gurus of all stripes. And when I got to the University of Chicago, one of the great things about being here is that they let us teach whatever we want.

And so I thought, “Oh, well, it would be kind of interesting to put a class together around these eclectic interests.” And my wife Thea said, “Oh, you should call this class Stuff I’m Interested In.” And I realized, oh, no, this is actually a class on how to know yourself. So I named the class The Intelligible Self, and I’ve been teaching it for more than 20 years, and the class has gotten to be very successful.

And in the time that I’ve been teaching it, I’ve met a lot of adults who were like, “Oh, that sounds like a fascinating class. Do you have a book to recommend?” And the problem was that I had hundreds. And I thought, well, maybe here would be an opportunity to do something that I didn’t see in any other books: put the Eastern contemplative traditions, modern neuroscience, ancient and contemporary philosophy, and psychology all in conversation with each other and see if I could integrate them into [00:05:00] a relatively legible story about what’s behind this experience of being that we’re having.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and I think you certainly do that. But okay, so what is the overall take for people who might be thinking about buying it? What’s your take on it?

Eric Oliver: Sure. And one thing I would say is that there are hundreds of books out there that purport to help us help ourselves, but none of them really describe what the self is that they’re trying to help. And so this is a book ostensibly about what the self is, why it so often malfunctions, and what we can reasonably do to make it work better.

And I think within that is the idea that the self we normally think of as ourselves is not really who we are. Most of our self-understanding is at best sort of shallow or misattributed and doesn’t really get into what’s going on underneath the surface. And I’ll give you just a quick example.

I usually think of myself as a thing. [00:06:00] Things are easy, legible, and discernible for us, so we like to think of the world in terms of things. But there’s nothing about me that is stable at any moment. On a molecular level, I’m constantly swapping atoms and molecules in and out of my body.

At a cellular level, my cells are constantly in metabolic action. At a cognitive level, my consciousness, my thoughts, and my speaking right now are all the result of just the storm of neural firings in my brain. There’s nothing that’s fixed at any moment in time. And this intuition, this strong sense of myself as a singular, stable being, is a projection.

If I identify myself with that projection, I’m going to be missing a lot of what’s going on and probably not getting a full sense of what the potential of my experience could be.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, this is a different view of selfhood than the Buddhist view, even though I [00:07:00] think a lot of people might say, “Oh, well, you’re just doing Buddhism there, Eric.” But that’s not what you’re doing. Most Buddhism basically says there is no self, while you are saying there is a self and it’s more than what you think of it as.

Eric Oliver: Right. And I think when we think about the Buddhist claim that there is no self, we have to contextualize that comment, just as we need to contextualize this whole “know thyself” idea. I think we misunderstand both. So when my teacher wrote “Know thyself” on the blackboard, she said, “Oh, this was what Socrates said.”

But the Greeks didn’t have a word that meant self in the way that we think of ourselves as a self. And insofar as they were saying “know thyself,” what it really meant was “know thy place.” And for most of human history, those were the best words you could live by because our ancestors all lived in very tightly bound communities that were largely parochial and highly traditional.

And to get along well, you didn’t really have any freedom, so you just [00:08:00] had to do what everyone told you to do. So you were a hunter or a gatherer. You were a father. You had these social roles. Your familial and love relationships were basically assigned to you. You didn’t really worry about what your meaning or happiness was because that was all from your culture and custom.

And the same thing goes when we think about what’s called Anattā in Buddhism, which is translated as non-self. That’s actually a response to this Vedic and later Hindu notion of Atman: that within us is this eternal, stable, singular soul that wants to find its eventual reunification with Brahman, the greater spiritual essence of the universe.

And when the Buddhists said, “No, there’s no Atman,” that gets translated as “no self.” And so we typically think Buddhism says that means, “I don’t exist.” And that’s not really what Buddhism says once you kind of get into Buddhism. It says that you are this process and this construct.

And yeah, a lot of what I talk about is [00:09:00] very consistent with Buddhism. And I think Buddhism has influenced a lot of my thinking on this, but it’s also remarkably prescient for its time, and it’s remarkably consistent with a lot of what we know now from neuroscience and even from physics and biology to a certain extent.

Erich Fromm, love, and the terror of agency

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. That’s right. And it is interesting to kind of see those intersections sometimes. One person who has a lot of interesting theories about selfhood and its relation to agency in the modern context, and whom you cite several times in the book, is the psychologist Erich Fromm. He wrote two books that are both really good, and I would encourage people to check them out. The first was called “Escape From Freedom,” and then he had another one, which you cite more in yours, called “The Art of Loving.” But they both really deal with very similar topics.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, I think [00:10:00] one of the most important things to understand about ourselves is that we are not isolated beings. We are thoroughly social all the way through. One way is just to look at your own molecular biology. For example, within our cells are mitochondria, which have entirely different DNA from the DNA that programs us.

And the best explanation of that is that sometime way back in our evolutionary past, two organisms interacted and developed a symbiotic relationship. But what it means is that you and I are not a singular species. We’re a composite of species, and if you add your microbiome, that just adds to this sociability.

And then, of course, as humans, we have language and we’re culturally situated, so that makes our sense of self even more socially bound and determined. And then I think this is where Fromm comes in. At some level, our whole development—the way our psychology works and the way our sense of self works—is a consequence of our prior experiences with other people. [00:11:00]

And we need that consistent updating vis-à-vis other people to kind of keep our system going here. And Fromm does a great job of differentiating between what he calls love and loving. I really discuss this toward the end of the book: we all want love, and we all sort of fantasize about love.

But it’s important to note that love is a noun. It’s the emotional experience that we might be having vis-à-vis someone else at any moment in time. Loving is the act of relating to other people. And when we want to know ourselves, a big part of why we want to know ourselves is, A, what is triggering feelings of love within us?

But, B, how can we sustain better loving relationships with others? And I think knowing yourself is really crucial to that because one of the biggest obstacles for most people to engaging in meaningful, healthy, loving relationships is their own [00:12:00] shit: their own attachment issues, their anxieties, their tendencies toward withdrawal, their inability to hear what other people are trying to tell them and communicate with them, and their own neuroses coming to the fore and presenting themselves as obstacles to actual meaningful connection.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, definitely. He does touch on that a lot. And there’s also the political dynamic, which is not as much in “The Art of Loving” as in “Escape From Freedom”: the idea that, historically, human beings existed in deeply hierarchical societies.

You had to know your place, as you said. And you had to know your station, I think maybe is the English phrase for that. And then over time, as you had a proliferation of economic plenty [00:13:00] and specialization and whatnot, more and more of people’s basic survival needs were met in different ways.

And so you were left with yourself in many ways because your worldly or biological needs were kind of met. To bring Maslow in here, once the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs were met, people moved up the hierarchy.

And people were kind of terrified. “Well, what am I supposed to do with myself? What am I supposed to think? What even am I? What are these other people? Are they even as real as I am?” All of these questions are, I think, a huge part of what underlies a lot of the reactionary revolt against modernity that we’re seeing so much around the world now.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. I think in a lot of ways you could think about this project of knowing yourself as an extremely modern phenomenon. In a way, we think of [00:14:00] knowing ourselves in terms of this sort of isolated individual. Much of it comes, for example in my case, from the fact that I abandoned my Catholicism when I was a teenager, and that left a big void for me in terms of purpose and meaning in my life.

And in a lot of ways, I think what those of us who have left behind our parents’ religions and no longer have that ballast to anchor us struggle with is this: how do we find purpose and meaning? How do I know what’s behind my own existence? How do I account for this existence? Luckily, I think this is where science, philosophy, and the Eastern contemplative traditions, if we bring them together, can actually provide us some guidance.

And a big part of it for me is sort of saying, “Okay, well, what is the self here? What’s ultimately behind this experience of being?” And it really goes back to being a life form because what all living things are doing is resisting entropy. At some level, we’re all energy systems, and life forms are energy [00:15:00] systems that push back against this great energy degradation of the cosmos.

And so physicists will tell us that the universe is unfolding, and as it unfolds, it’s degrading in its energy potentials. It has less energy to make stars and galaxies. At some point, it’s going to stop making them altogether. And everything is kind of heading toward this dark, inert state, but life is pushing back against that and keeping itself going by drawing in energy, reproducing itself, and protecting itself from threats.

And I call this the life force, this impetus of living things to keep their life processes going. And we can begin to think of the self, then, as all of those processes that help this life force negotiate with reality. So within us is this impetus to resist entropy, and everything from our DNA and cellular structure to our muscles, bones, animal psychology, and now our culture is part of that self-process.

And I think, most interestingly, when it comes to knowing [00:16:00] ourselves, our sense of egoistic attachment and identity—the sense of me as Eric, a professor, with all my hopes, ambitions, and dreams—is part of this self-process. All of these elements are ultimately just trying to keep this life force going and push back against entropy.

Now, okay, great. That’s there. These processes change historically over time, and we’ve talked a little bit about that. But the problem is also that I think a lot of our cultural and historical circumstances throw these processes out of balance. We end up spending an inordinate amount of emotional energy, psychological time, or cognitive exertion around issues that are ephemeral, don’t matter, or are counterproductive for us.

And ultimately, I think knowing yourself is about getting to a point where you’re not so compressed in a particular mental state or emotional state, [00:17:00] and when you’re less compressed, you can open yourself up to the greater sort of effervescence that’s actually kind of latently there. And this is, I think, where Buddhism comes in because it says there’s a way of being that’s a lot more sparkly and sensitive and open to experience, just below the sort of compressed level of our ordinary consciousness.

And I think that’s ultimately what I would say is the final act of self-knowledge. This goes back to Maslow’s idea of transcendence, and what transcendence, I think, is ultimately doing is realigning these self-processes so that they work more harmoniously and in greater balance between the demands of, say, order and vitality.

Transcendence for non-religious people?

Matthew Sheffield: Well, although that’s not how people who are religious conceive of transcendence. So how do you think religious people would define it?

Eric Oliver: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think they use those terms. When you say religion, the problem is that there are so many different forms and types of religion. They probably don’t use that terminology. But I think a lot of what I would call spiritual practices are really about getting past your own ego and your worldly concerns and putting you more in touch with your own energy experience. [00:18:00]

They may also give you terminology or a way of trying to apprehend that experience. And sure, they might say, “Okay, go say these prayers,” or “Go do these rites,” or engage in this kind of spiritual discipline. But I think ultimately they’re about some sort of realignment of self-processes to create better harmony.

And I think the big challenge for us is that most religious traditions evolved within particular ecological niches, and they’ve mutated and transformed over time, and they’re not [00:19:00] necessarily appropriate now to the same niche. And I think that’s why they can oftentimes be abused and cause us so much trouble.

So take Christianity. It evolved relative to a pastoral culture in the Levant, with a lot of tribes there, in the context of Roman domination. So it was this sort of pastoral religion that ostensibly became a form of political resistance to the Roman Empire and then kind of spread in that regard.

We live in a very different kind of context now, but nevertheless, we still hold onto Christianity. For some people, it serves them well. But I think for a lot of us, there’s just a gross inconsistency between the tenets in both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible and a modern way of understanding the world, and it’s kind of hard to reconcile those.

Matthew Sheffield: Well, I mean, I think so much of that question is about what transcendence [00:20:00] and enlightenment are. To a large degree, I think people who have a scientific worldview hear you say things like that and think, “Oh God, I don’t want to hear this woo-woo bullshit.” But if I may bring it into the scientific context, essentially what we’re talking about is the fact that there are two kinds of selves. Everyone has two selves. There is the biological, processual self, which is the sum total of all your biological processes and how they interact with each other.

And then that generates the conceptual self, or the epistemic token of the self. It’s easier to think this way because you have to think of yourself in terms of doing actions like, “I am going to go do this. I have to do this today. I have to do this tomorrow. I have to pay my bill on Friday,” or whatever it is.

It’s easier to think of yourself as an “I,” but [00:21:00] really that is a generated image of ourselves, not our real self. And that’s really what the traditions you’re talking about here are trying, in varying ways, to make us more aware of: what we really fully are, and that we’re more than ourselves.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean importing any kind of religious or supernatural context.

Eric Oliver: No, it doesn’t have to. And I think the way to think about this is that animals don’t have religions, and I think our hominid ancestors, probably before they had language, didn’t have religions. And so the question is, why did we evolve religion? And we evolved religion, I think, once we started speaking and having abstract concepts for apprehending the world.

And once we had that, we could make laws, we could make morals. And I think one of the primary things religion was doing was [00:22:00] linking everyone together in a set of shared concepts that were bound together primarily by myths and stories. And a lot of this had to do with regulating the reproductive economy.

It was regulating sex. It was also telling us when to plant crops or when to take the herds out, all sorts of instructive things. And what were the codes of the tribe and the group? What differentiated this tribe from the neighboring tribe? Early on, I think that’s kind of what religion was doing, and since then it has morphed, grown, and evolved over time to try to meet other types of needs.

But I think the question we have is: Is there an alternative way to find meaning and purpose in life without having to make reference to some doctrine that invokes a supernatural deity? I think there is. And I mean, you could still use the doctrine of supernatural deities.

Fine, go for it. But for those of us who don’t find that plausible, then okay, what is the alternative? And in a lot of ways, what this [00:23:00] book is trying to do is say, “Okay, this is what an alternative framework might look like.” And at the very least, I think what I’m trying to do in this book is help people expand the vocabulary of their own lived experience.

And I think this goes to your epistemic idea here, because ultimately that’s what books and knowledge do for us. They give us a wider array of concepts and tools to bring to bear on our own experience, to understand what’s going on, and to give us some perspective on it. And I’ll give a simple example of this.

So prior to the advent of writing, the evidence seems to be that most people didn’t often realize that the thoughts in their head, the mental discourse in their own head, were coming from themselves. And so they often attributed them to outside forces, to spirits or gods or demons or whatever. And it was only with the advent of writing, once people actually started writing things down, that we see this shift.

And you can see it, for example, in tales that were [00:24:00] oral tales for long periods of time, like, say, Homer’s Iliad or the early chapters of the Hebrew Bible. The characters in those stories don’t have their own interior lives. To the extent that they’re motivated to do something, they hear the call of God or gods.

Matthew Sheffield: Like with Pharaoh, most famously, God put the thought in his head to resist Moses. It was God that did it.

Eric Oliver: Right. Right. And then once you start getting widespread literacy, as people are writing things down, they’re like, “Wait a minute, I am the author of my own thoughts.” And so this new analytic kind of era begins to emerge, and this is when you see the beginnings of philosophy and more analytic thinking.

And it’s not like the mythology gets displaced. It stays with us. It just gets elaborated and now intermixed with this new analytic framework. And I think this is, in a sense, what we’re doing when we’re trying to expand our self-knowledge. We’re beginning to get a better sense of, oh, all those things that I was attributing to gods [00:25:00] or demons or whatever, maybe that’s actually part of me.

And so I’ll give you a kind of modern example. I might experience a lot of anxiety, and then my mind looks to rationalize that anxious feeling, and I generate some sort of narrative in my head. But if I can sort of stop and say, “Oh, this is just me being neurotic,” or “This is just my anxiety at work,” I’m no longer caught in the vice grip of whatever fear I feel I have to act on.

I can distance myself from it and say, “Oh, okay, that’s just me making an attribution relative to an emotional state.”

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s right. And it does give us an awareness that we don’t have to do everything that pops into our head and that not everything we think is true. I think that is another big difference between humans and animals: if animals see an optical illusion, they believe it.

They believe everything that they sense until something contradicts it. That’s why they’re so easy to surprise, and [00:26:00] anybody who has a cat knows how easy it is to surprise them.

Abstract reasoning made humans much more intellectually powerful, but also more vulnerable to delusion

Matthew Sheffield: That’s because they believe all their senses, whereas we don’t. But at the same time, that development of abstract reasoning has also made us more vulnerable in a lot of ways because we can know that our senses might not be telling us the truth, or that things can exist even when we don’t perceive them—that object permanence is real.

We can also know that other people may know things, or have first-person experiences, that we don’t. All of these things can also be flipped around in a really negative way, and this ties back to the previous book that you wrote, like the idea of what you called intuitionism.

Essentially, if I haven’t seen vaccines or don’t personally know how they work, then they don’t work. If I wasn’t [00:27:00] there to witness the moon landing, then it was fake.

You know, flat Earth, et cetera, or Trump’s stolen-election claims—these are all paradoxically the result of abstract thinking. But this kind of thinking detaches us from reality rather than attaching us to it.

Eric Oliver: Yes, and I think that’s really one of our central challenges right now is so much of our thinking is detached from reality. I mean, just think about how much of our time and attention is caught up on social media and smartphones. And we get caught up in this kind of mediated cyber existence that has no real bearing on our material experience at any moment.

Yet we are completely held captive by this attention algorithm and this kind of dopamine-centered stimulating process. And you could make that argument about a lot of cultural phenomena too. Think about [00:28:00] Marx’s idea of false consciousness: people would gladly participate in their own self-subjugation thanks to a certain kind of belief system.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And then even he himself, with his march of history idea, like that itself was a delusion as well.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. It’s myths all the way down.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, I do think that it is really important for non-religious people to actually get more of a handle on some of these ideas because where I live in Southern California, like there are so many people out here who are “spiritual but not religious.”

And basically that means they believe in tarot and astrology and crystals and anything else that is nonreligious mysticism or supernaturalism. You could argue that this is just as harmful as, or perhaps even more harmful than, a lot of religious delusions. I mean, we’ve got a guy who wants to be the mayor of Los Angeles and says that crystals are magic.

And [00:29:00] so it actually really matters for people to understand: look, okay, it’s fine if you don’t want to believe in religion. Well, then you still have to think about this stuff, because if you don’t, then you’re probably going to fall prey to delusions of one kind or another, I think.

Eric Oliver: Right. And I think that goes back to this theme of why it’s so important to try to know yourself. The way I actually describe this to my students is that I say, “Okay, how much of your life story are you the author of?” And if you think about our life stories—the narratives that we tell about ourselves, such as “this is what success means,” “this is what a good life means,” and “this is what is important for me”—these are stories that we haven’t written for ourselves. They were bequeathed to us by our parents, by our culture, by whatever context we’re in. And sometimes those stories are useful, but a lot of the time they were not necessarily written by people who had our best interests at heart. And a big [00:30:00] part of that is what I would say is this kind of egoistic self.

And it’s interesting: if we go through and look at our self-processes, there are some parts of our self-processes that are very legible to scientific inquiry. So, like you were saying, there’s the biological self. We can observe most of our biology. We can observe ourselves as physical beings. We can actually even observe a lot of our language; it’s all finite and tractable, even if it’s constantly evolving.

What becomes really hard for us to observe—and this goes to the question of consciousness—is our subjective experience of being. And, more importantly, what are those psychological processes that I’m using to understand my position in relation to other people around me?

And this is ostensibly what the ego is. It’s all of those concepts and emotions that we utilize to sort of defend our place in society, to know what our entitlements are, and to motivate us to try to get more, to ensure that we’re not [00:31:00] just kicked down to the bottom of the pecking order in any given context.

AI and why the narrative self depends upon the living self

Eric Oliver: At the same time, these processes get very much intertwined with names, identities, titles, and status markers. And those, in turn, get intertwined with narratives. The problem is that those ego processes are not readily available. We have some clues about where in the brain they might be correlated, but we don’t really know if the ego as such exists.

But how do we understand our egos? Well, most people understand their egos by going to therapy. And what do you do in therapy? You sit on the couch and you tell your stories, and you tell your stories about your parents and your childhood, or you tell your stories about your contemporary circumstances.

And it’s through interpretation of those stories that you begin to understand this aspect of yourself. So I think this goes to your understanding of this sort of epistemic aspect of us, which is going to be fundamentally narrative-driven. We are a narrative species through and through. And so at some point, we have to come to terms [00:32:00] with our own stories.

Matthew Sheffield: We do. And I also think one of the biggest problems in a lot of analytic philosophy and a fair amount of early cognitive psychology is that a lot of it was very language-tied, with this idea that selfhood comes from language.

But that’s not what modern neuroscience and modern cognitive psychology indicate. One of the worst examples of this, and somebody who irks me, was the philosopher Jerry Fodor, who had this idea that there’s a language of thought, and all thoughts take place in a syntactically derived language that exists because there’s a module in our brain, even though I don’t know where it is, I can’t prove it’s there, and no one can prove it’s there. It’s there. And we all think in the same linguistic manner.

And it’s just [00:33:00] not true at all. Sadly, these ideas have persisted contrary to all of the scientific evidence, and now they’re coming back to us in a lot of the large language model discourse, with people saying, “Well, the fact that they can understand what you say means that they are conscious, and it means that we should treat them as moral patients.” Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founders of the field, was just recently saying that he thinks they probably are conscious because they can write about consciousness. And that’s enormously frustrating to me. It’s all coming from this language-centered idea of selfhood and consciousness.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. A player piano is not musical. It’s a player piano. In that sense, it’s not generating its own music. [00:34:00] It’s funny; it even starts with this Cartesian notion of “I think, therefore I am.” Well, if you didn’t have a word for think, then would you not exist?

I mean, that starts with the same linguistic fallacy: that cognition somehow has to be understood only if it’s oriented in some lexicon of words. And that’s one aspect of our type of cognition, but it’s not cognition in its totality.

And I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding in terms of what consciousness is. Our willingness or eagerness to ascribe consciousness to, say, LLMs also reveals what our own brains do with respect to consciousness, because our sense of self is a model that our brains are creating. I’ll maybe situate this in another way. We oftentimes think that the way we perceive the world works like this: I just open my eyes and the world [00:35:00] comes to me through my senses, and then my brain is there processing all this incoming information and kind of creating a scene.

It’s not really what’s happening. What happens is that in the moment before I open my eyes, my mind is already generating a prediction about what it thinks the world is going to be like, and then this information comes in and basically updates and varies that prediction relative to the incoming information.

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and that’s why you can wake up when you’re asleep.

Eric Oliver: Right.

Matthew Sheffield: That’s because if your mind was stopped, you couldn’t wake up if you heard a noise or somebody talking to you.

Eric Oliver: So our whole experience is really this ongoing dialogue, in a sense, between the information coming in and this model that our brain is putting forth of what it thinks is going on in the world. And when there’s a discrepancy between the information coming in and the model that our brain has, that triggers an emotion within us. And it’s not simply the model in our brain in terms of some sort of [00:36:00] cognition; it’s also our body chemistry. So you can think about it like this: my body chemistry now models hunger, and so I need to get food to reestablish my body energy.

And biologists call this homeostasis. It’s sort of the natural balance set point that we’re at. And what our brains ostensibly are doing is projecting these images of ourselves and comparing them to the world. If those comparisons are off in some way, we get an emotional response, and then we get new, deliberative thoughts: “Okay, how can I correct this? Maybe I need to update my model of myself, or maybe I need to go out and change something in the world.”

Until I can sort of rectify that, I’ll still be stuck in this kind of emotional, motivational state.

So I’ll give you an example. I’m walking in the woods. I have a model of these beautiful, peaceful woods, and all of a sudden I hear a rattle, like, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

Okay, that’s a new piece of information that’s out of sync with my [00:37:00] model. I get a fear alarm. I look around. I begin to think, “Oh, that’s probably a rattlesnake. It’s probably good to get out of there.” And I motivate myself to move away from it. Once I move away, if I don’t hear the rattle anymore, my model and my external circumstances come back into alignment, and I calm down and go back to a homeostatic set point.

And we are basically doing that constantly. Our brains are constantly doing that in any number of dimensions. And that’s, I think, really what’s at the heart of our experience of being.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, it is. And that is, of course, why large language models are not conscious: they do not exist in the world. And they don’t even exist when they’re not being talked to. So there is no independent, continuous experience.

Eric Oliver: Well, and I would say it’s because they don’t have a life force. At this point, they don’t have any incentive to replicate themselves or protect themselves from destruction. We could potentially program a silicon-based life form that drew in energy, reproduced itself, and protected itself from threats, ostensibly giving it the qualities of living. [00:38:00]

At that point, I think it might evolve something akin to consciousness. It probably wouldn’t be the same kind of consciousness we have because it would have a very different set of inputs to draw from. But maybe at that point it would start doing something that might resemble consciousness in living beings, or the way living beings perform consciousness.

And I think another issue is that because we see these LLMs and they seem to replicate us so well, we naturally make the assumption that they are like us. So we anthropomorphize them, just as we anthropomorphize everything that [00:39:00] seems to have any kind of independent movement.

And especially because they’re so adept at mimicking what we’re doing, naturally, of course, we’re going to want to anthropomorphize them. How could we not? But that’s our brains tricking us. We have a model: things that talk have human intentionality; therefore, they’re going to be like me, they’re going to have theory of mind, and I’ll be able to read some sort of consciousness into them.

But that’s not really what’s going on.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. No, it isn’t.

Secular ethics and the meaning of life

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and the other reason I think it’s important to think and talk about these ideas in general—selfhood and one’s existence in the world—is that doing so lets us derive ethical paradigms and group motivations.

I think that’s another area where non-theistic cultures have kind of dropped the ball in a lot of ways. Consider the old questions people often ask, such as “What’s the meaning of life?” [00:40:00] or “Why am I here?”

And these are questions that a secular worldview can answer. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the more purely hard-science people just say, “Oh, well, those are dumb questions.” Or there are philosophers like Daniel Dennett who say things like, “Well, there is no self. It’s imaginary. It’s a delusion. It’s a fiction, and it doesn’t mean anything. Felt experience is just a lie you tell yourself.”

And that’s not going to be persuasive to people, I think.

Eric Oliver: Yeah. And this is where I would disagree, and it’s also my refinement of Buddhism. There is a self, and insofar as you think of yourself, it’s not a thing. It’s a very complex set of processes that help this life force—this drive to resist entropy—negotiate with reality.

And it has all different kinds of layers and all kinds of complexities to it, and we do it probably in a way that’s far more [00:41:00] sophisticated and complex than any other living creature. I mean, that’s clear just from our language, culture, technologies, and whatnot. But there is a self there. There are all these processes going on. As long as we’re alive, we’re going to have a self, or we’re going to have these self-processes occurring.

And then I think it’s incumbent on us to try to apprehend what these self-processes are. And I think traditional religions describe these self-processes in terms of intentional gods, deities, and spirits, and then they make laws and attributions from that.

But we too can develop an ethics based on this: here you are as an energy system trying to resist entropy. You have these balancing tendencies. On the one hand, there’s order. You need to structure this way of resisting entropy and have some rules and forms in which to do this.

But then you also have to let the energy itself flow, and I would call these two things [00:42:00] order and vitality. Optimally, what you want to do is balance that order and vitality. You want to have it so that you’re not over-ordered, so that you’re inefficient and stifled, but you don’t want to have too much vitality because then you’re wasteful and incoherent.

And you really want to find, I think, the optimal way, relative to your ecological circumstances, of balancing order and vitality. Our single-celled ancestors did this by altering the pH balance within them. They evolved different cellular structures. As animals became multicellular, they evolved sense organs and muscles and all kinds of ways of doing this.

We have evolved cultures and technologies that purport to do this. I think right now, though, we are way out of whack with respect to this balance, and I think this is where we can start thinking about ethical issues. For example, consider the consumption of energy. How many natural resources do we need to consume just to stabilize [00:43:00] ourselves?

You and I use so much more energy than any of our ancestors ever did, and what do we use this energy for? Well, to go and make AI cat videos. Okay, is that really helping us achieve balance in some way? Or are we just so desperate for something interesting to focus on, to distract us from the living moment, that we expend an enormous amount of energy just to keep ourselves from actually trying to be within our own existence?

Energy use and ethics

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, okay. But for somebody who would say that this doesn’t really explain the feeling that I’m more than my self-concept—for example, that I feel there are forms in the world or spirits in people’s bodies, and that’s what grounds my [00:44:00] ethics—how would you answer that?

And one could argue that there are some people who do say something in line with this idea of resisting entropy. Take Marc Andreessen, who is an atheist right-wing billionaire and embraces what people are calling effective accelerationism, which basically says the goal of life is to enable entropy, as he puts it.

And we enable it by maximizing energy use. Therefore, we should use as much energy as we can and not restrain capitalism in any way, because restraining it would be immoral.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, I mean, this is perverse. To use energy for the sake of using energy doesn’t really make any sense. We utilize energy toward the end of sustaining the energies of being alive. And I think the other thing I see a lot in this tech orientation is this [00:45:00] prioritization of humans.

I mean, I think once you begin to sort of see yourself as an energy system and as a living energy system, you realize that we humans are just one little leaf on this kind of greater tree of life. All living things, for example, trace their origins back to a common ancestor that lived about 3.7 billion years ago that had 350 genes that you find in all living things.

And what this actually means, though, is that we’re just one little expression of a sort of greater life force. We ourselves are not that distinct. We’re not that important. This is where I think things get kind of humbling and oftentimes very confusing, because we humans could annihilate ourselves next week.

Life will still go on. Most of life is still microbial and would sort of shrug. And it’s not like our particular human incarnation of life is really that much better than any other kind of life [00:46:00] form or is deserving of anything more relative to any other life form. Life is chaotic. It’s self-feeding.

It’s generative. It will continue to go on. But what always constrains life is what energy is available and how it works relative to its ecology. And what we should be thinking about ethically is, okay, what is the ecology that we’re constructing?

How does this actually help life itself thrive, or is this destructive to kind of life on the planet?

Deriving group ethics from nature

Matthew Sheffield: Well, and how does that generate moral duties to each other? How would you answer that?

Eric Oliver: Yeah. I mean, it goes back to this idea that it’s important to remember that our selves don’t exist in isolation, that we are fundamentally socially contingent beings. And so no self is an island. A big part of our [00:47:00] self-processes is caught up in the laws that we make, the rules that we follow, the culture that we share, our patterns of interaction, and the ways we relate to and love other people.

All of these things are essential for thriving. I kind of punted on this in the book because I’m like, “I can’t really describe what the ideal socioeconomic political system is.” I don’t know if anybody can, at least at this point. It varies a lot by circumstance. But nevertheless, knowing yourself and working on yourself doesn’t mean focusing just on the solipsistic individual.

It also means: what am I doing with my community? What am I doing with other people? I mean, to me, the very simple ethical claim is: am I doing something to make the world a better place? Is any action I’m doing making things better for those around me? Or is it harming those around me? Obviously, you can come up with various kinds of situations like [00:48:00], “Oh, if I could go back in time and kill Hitler, should I do that?

Is that making the world a better place even if I had to kill Hitler?” Whatever. We can be pragmatic about these things. But I mean, just as a general rule, I think that’s a pretty simple and easy ethical answer, at least for me.

Avoiding protagonist thinking and living in the moment

Matthew Sheffield: Okay. And then let’s maybe end with Friedrich Nietzsche, who did a lot to get discussions of secular ethics going and was famously atheistic. He often said that once people realized that there were no gods, they would become depressed, become nihilistic, and think, “Well, what’s the point of doing anything?”

And, you know, in a lot of ways, I think your book is trying to answer the question of what the point is, because I’ve had conversations with religious people before when I’ve talked about [00:49:00] the idea of a processual self and the epistemic self, and they’ve said, “Well, that doesn’t mean anything to me. That’s depressing, the idea that I’m just a bunch of molecules.”

And the way that I respond is that you decide the meaning of life for yourself, and that should be empowering and beautiful. Nobody can tell you what the meaning of life is.

You have to decide that. But it is a responsibility, and that’s part of the thesis of Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom”: if everything is up to you, that’s terrifying to a lot of people.

Eric Oliver: It is. And I would even go beyond that. At some level, if you say, “Oh, it’s up to me to determine my life,” I’m still living within this kind of linguistic-cognitive frame. I’m still living within this idea: “Oh, my life needs to be motivated by a story in which I’m the [00:50:00] protagonist.” But what if there’s a way of living where there doesn’t need to be a story? There doesn’t need to be a protagonist.

And that’s hard for us because our brains almost reflexively go back to, “Oh, there is a story. There is a protagonist.” That’s our model of the world. But part of beginning to know yourself, I think, and then engaging in this act of transcendence, which means kind of unlearning these habits of mind, is opening yourself up to an experience of being that’s not so bound and delimited by certain kinds of word concepts, or, as you might say, certain kinds of epistemologies.

And I think the more that we can do that, the more we open ourselves up to an inner effervescence of being that doesn’t require this. And I’ll give an example. I go on these long meditation retreats. They’re a lot of work. They’re very hard. And what I’ve noticed when I encounter people who have very deep contemplative practices is that they’re very [00:51:00] quiet and very present, and they’re just lovely to be with because they’re fully there. You don’t get a sense that there’s any kind of agenda on their part or anything they’re trying to get from you.

They have such an exquisite way of existing that they sort of present to the world. And I think this ultimately is what we can begin to cultivate through self-knowledge, and it’s hard to do. It requires a lot of discipline. You could call it spiritual discipline. You could call it physical discipline.

But this, I think, becomes a goal in and of itself. And now I spend a lot of time thinking, when I observe my own thinking, “Oh, is this thought helping anything?” A large percentage of the time, my thoughts—I’d say a big chunk of my thoughts—are not helpful in any way. They’re just me regurgitating some story or rationalizing some kind of anxiety or resentment or [00:52:00] whatever.

And the more I can then sort of let go of those thoughts and just be in this sensual experience of being, the more at ease I am, and I think the better I live.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm. Well, and like you talked about toward the end, that experience is always in the present. Really understanding that as a lived concept matters. People always say, “Oh, well, live in the moment.” Well, what does that even mean?

But you actually do get into that.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, it’s a hackneyed cliché, but what living in the moment means is not having your consciousness so compressed by a very narrow storyline or being so dominated by whatever emotion you might be in. Instead, you have some equanimity with your own experience and an ability to just sit and ride with it.

And the more [00:53:00] you can do this, the more vivid that experience becomes. Food tastes better. You hear bird songs that you might not otherwise hear. You can see colors around you that normally are just tuned out. And you offer yourself a much richer existence.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. And none of this requires any supernatural beliefs. None of it requires any crystals or anything like that.

Eric Oliver: No.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, I mean, what it requires is a lot of work of retraining your mind, and it requires some intention to say, “Oh, I want to try to live honestly. I want to try to live more completely. I’m not going to try to just continually be distracting myself with my phone, or the fridge, or the liquor cabinet, or whatever.”

Instead of always evading, I try to say, “I’m going to try to meet the moment head on, sit with the discomforts that the moment provides, try to hear what those discomforts are [00:54:00] telling me, and not get so caught up and attached to some high-pleasure experience that my life is simply defined by one peak experience after another.”

I want to allow the subtlety of this moment to become more manifest.

Balancing acceptance with making the world better

Matthew Sheffield: And how does all of that conception reconcile with trying to make the world a better place? I ask because stoicism is famous for kind of saying some of these things, but it is also often criticized as saying, “Well, you should just be content to have nothing and be content to have no power. And if you’re repressed, well, so what? It doesn’t matter.”

But you’re not trying to say that.

Eric Oliver: No. I think it’s about recognizing that we live in a social circumstance. We live in economic and political circumstances. If we see or experience exploitation [00:55:00], abuse, or insecurity, we need to address those things. I mean, it goes back to what you were saying about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

It’s going to be very hard to focus on any kind of transcendence if you’re starving to death, or if you see people starving around you and you have that kind of instability. Part of understanding that our self-processes are socially situated is recognizing that if I want to live better, I need to help make the world better too.

It’s not just about my own internal experience; it’s also about trying to figure out how I can help others with their internal experience, making sure they have enough to eat, making sure they have shelter and safety, and making sure they have basic rights that are being observed.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point because we are in communities of minds. I think that’s what we are. And if they are harmed, then so are we, and it impacts us in a lot of different ways. So it’s a great point. And I [00:56:00] guess the question is, what’s the final thought of the book here? Let’s get that out.

Eric Oliver: Well, I think the final thought is that there’s a real temptation, either when writing a book like this or encountering a book like this, to want the easy seven-step solution. But there is no easy seven-step solution. Recognize that there’s not a quick and simple way to know yourself. You are a very complicated being.

But the more that you can begin to delve into this, the better your life will become. There’s no one way to do it, and there’s no simple way to do it. It’s about being willing to be curious and open, to try things out, and to basically engage your curiosity about your own experience.

And I think that’s really the first step.

Matthew Sheffield: Okay, very good. All right. And so, yeah, I encourage people to check that out. We’ll have the links to it. And you also have a podcast, which we distribute on the [00:57:00] site, so people can also see that in the Flux podcast feed as well. So keep an eye out for that.

Eric Oliver: Okay, great.

Matthew Sheffield: So, yeah. Thanks for being here. It’s good to have you back.

Eric Oliver: Yeah, it was great to be here. Thanks so much. I loved our conversation.

Matthew Sheffield: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. If you’d like to become a free or paid subscriber, obviously I would prefer the latter. You can go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack.

Thanks a lot. And don’t forget to subscribe if you’re listening to this single episode over on your favorite podcast app as well. I’ll see you next [00:58:00] time.

Subscribe now

Over nearly a year, the U.S. military has attacked more than 60 vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. At least 200 people have perished in the strikes, which have been conducted under the aegis of “Operation Southern Spear.” Purportedly an effort to stop narcotics trafficking, the Trump administration has refused to provide evidence to the public that their targets were actually involved in the drug trade. This lack of evidence is paired with an equally egregious element of the campaign: the total militarization of drug interdiction, which the U.S. has traditionally treated as primarily a criminal matter. No more: those who traffic drugs into the country have been re-conceived by the Trump administration as a de facto invading army, with drugs themselves constituting the weaponry of these attackers. Whereas every previous administration sought to seize drug shipments and arrest perpetrators, the Trump administration has adopted a posture of maximal national defense, shooting first and refusing to ask questions later.

It was clear from the earliest days of the campaign that the administration was far more interested in the spectacle of violence and the thrill of inflicting death than actually trying to curb drug importation, let alone domestic drug use and addiction. The Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth has promoted snuff films of the attacks, which as far as we know have exclusively involved sinking vessels that do not attempt to defend themselves. The point was not so much that the United States was stopping drugs from entering the U.S. than that the military was executing supposed “narcoterrorists” in the most violent and horrible ways possible.

Very quickly, it turned out that the United States was not exclusively, and potentially not even most of the time, attacking boats actually transporting drugs. Survivors of attacks began to tell their stories, and so we learned of multiple fishermen blown out of their boats and left to fend desperately for survival. We also learned that an early attack involved a follow-up strike on shipwrecked sailors — an act in contravention of long-standing maritime laws, and quite arguably constituting a war crime.

Though the Trump regime has engaged in outrageous and illegal acts that can seem too numerous to count, these Latin American attacks are particularly chilling even as they share much in common with other administration offenses. As with other examples of regime law-breaking, one is almost dizzied by the intertwined layers of incompetence and bloodlust. At the most general level, the Trump administration has militarized an activity — efforts to curb drug importations — that previous administrations and the vast majority of experts have seen as generally benefitting from police action. But with its profound shift in approach, the administration has simply gone full throttle into total lawlessness, effectively declaring the drug trade so dire a threat to the homeland that no manner of excess is too great to bring it to heel. What other conclusion to draw from the apparent fact that the U.S. has repeatedly killed innocent men, with even survivors wantonly punished through the loss of the fishing boats that provided their livelihood, and in general has served capital punishment upon hundreds without judge or jury? These attacks defy any rational purpose, since even by their own terms they are not actually stopping drug importations into the U.S.

The far truer, more disturbing intentions lie in plain view; if they seem hidden to some, it is mainly because too many Americans are unwilling to accept the horrors that the administration itself so gleefully advertises. Trump and his allies like Pete Hegseth are less interested in promoting American interests than in projecting images of their own strength and indulging their own darkest, cruelest fantasies. And so the point is to blow shit up with weapons of war, the mismatch between victims and executioners a key part of the thrill. High-tech weapons funded and built to take on actual threats to the United States — opposing armies, terrorist cells — are turned against skiffs and speedboats thousands of miles from U.S. shores. Those targeted cannot in any sense be conceived of as opposing combatants, but rather as dehumanized vermin: bugs being squashed by the glorious lightning of god from above. And the release of snuff films that subsume the killings into the cartoon language of video games is meant to promote the spectacle not just of violence but of vast power: one moment the target is there, the next it’s a bright explosion. Something becomes nothing, like the creation myth run in reverse.

In the last week or so, reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times has brought a bit of clarity to what had been a mysterious subset of this deadly maritime campaign — reporting that helps further strip away the official pretenses for what is essentially a murder campaign. Back in March of this year, three Ecuadorian fishing vessels were attacked and sunk by unknown assailants in the eastern Pacific near the Galapagos Islands. One ship with eight men aboard disappeared without a trace, save for a plume of smoke seen by a couple of sailors who had been out on one of its smaller boats. But with the two other vessels, all aboard survived, and they were able to recount the dire events that had befallen them: of drones striking their vessels, and armed men speaking English and wearing uniforms with American flags subsequently detaining them before releasing them to authorities in El Salvador. In at least one attack, injured sailors were denied medical attention by their captors. The twist was that the U.S. government denied that American forces were involved in these attacks; as others have observed, this was an oddity given the outsized efforts to promote Southern Spear strikes in the waters off Latin America. Another key piece of information: the sailors themselves deny being involved in the drug trade, assertions which received corroboration from an investigation by Human Rights Watch.

The Washington Post is now reporting that all three attacks were connected to a covert CIA program, although “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.” A key part of the reporting was the repeated appearance of a small, anonymous jet traced back to the United States that appeared to track all three vessels prior to the attacks (the Post was not able to directly confirm whether the jet was flown and manned by CIA employees).

At the most general level, these revelation are pretty astonishing: not only is the administration ostentatiously killing hundreds of sailors via Operation Southern Spear in order to make Trump and his allies feel like modern-day gods, but has established a separate, secret program that is killing still more innocent sailors. As with the larger-scale campaign conducted by the U.S. military, the CIA effort (at least what we know of it) seems to specialize in murdering innocents and blowing up their boats. But unlike Southern Spear, the American people don’t even know who’s doing the killing in their name. Survivors of the attacks say their attackers spoke English, with at least some wearing uniforms with US flags and “USA” stitched on. Whether they are military personnel, CIA employees, or mercenaries is at this point not publicly known.

The prospect of non-military involvement suggests a homicidal metastasizing of the Latin American maritime killings. Where Operation Southern Spear advertises the administration’s bloodlust and lawlessness, this CIA program should chill us with its secret extent, common murderousness, and clear incompetence. What are they trying to hide? Equally, it should raise all manner of alarm bells given prior U.S. involvement in Latin American affairs, a litany of offenses that include complicity in genocide in Guatemala and the operations of death squads in El Salvador. (The Post reminds us that last year, Trump “granted the CIA new authorities to counter narcotics trafficking, signing an authorization for covert action aimed at countering transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force”; moreover, CIA personnel were involved with the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and two employees were killed in a traffic accident following an anti-narcotics operation in Mexico.) It is as if the Trump administration had looked at all the interventions and atrocities committed by the United States over the last century, and determined that the lesson offered by history is that we need more killing, more murder, more counterproductive interventions in sovereign nations.

Moreover, the lower-tech nature of the attacks on the Ecuadorian fishing boats, and the possibility that armed mercenaries were involved, helps undermine the spectacle of vast American power blowing unsuspecting ships out of the water. The use of quadcopter drones to attack the ships sounds more like the jerry-rigged combat of the Ukraine war, while the prospect of mercenary companies making a buck off killing innocent fishermen should appall anyone with a conscience. This doesn’t look like a video game; it reads as plain murder. The possibility that mercenary companies might now be cashing in on these killings adds a fresh level of immorality.

What we’re learning about the Trump regime’s activities in the waters of the Caribbean and eastern Pacific should be viewed in the larger context not only of its other acts of Latin American neo-imperialism, but the demented warmongering that has led the U.S. into an illegal and debilitating war against Iran. And all of this should in turn be viewed within the frame of the white supremacism that courses through MAGA like a spiritual poison, in which non-whites are seen not only as unworthy of citizenship but as less than human. In both Iran and Latin America, the Trump administration seeks to enhance its standing via bloody gambits that betray both short-term thinking and a comfort with violence inflicted on non-white populations.

There remains a too-common presumption that this administration is somehow advancing U.S. interests, in however misguided a fashion: but we are well past the point where this presumption of good intentions should be granted. Just as Donald Trump started the Iran war in significant part to distract from the Epstein files and to counter his falling popularity with what he thought would be an easy “win” (as he seems to think he accomplished in Venezuela), it’s crazy to say that “U.S. interests” are being served by blowing up boats in the waters off Latin America. It is far likelier that we are seeing what happens when broken men are given control over the most powerful military in the world, and choose to deploy it for their own psychological and political aggrandizement. Our politics and our society need to catch up with this reality, not the comforting one that would have us believe there is a deeper method in the madness.

All this said, I keep coming back to the fundamentally disproportionate nature of these killings. These are state executions driven in part because of the White House’s accurate perceptions of the victims’ powerlessness. They are not warfighters; it seems most are taken by surprise by the attacks; and it appears that even their own governments are either complicit with the killings or unwilling to pick a fight with the United States over them. In a very basic sense, the Trump administration is slaughtering these people, most of whom appear to be innocent of any crimes, and none of whom deserve summary execution, simply because it can.

And one of the reasons the administration believes it can is that it has faith that Americans will not object too much to non-white, non-Americans being killed to keep the United States “safe”; that the killings are too remote to merit much pushback. This sense of impunity and trust in the complicity of ordinary citizens is exactly why we all should shine a spotlight on these murders, and call for both their cessation and accountability for the government’s crimes. In raining down death on foreigners who do not deserve it, this regime is violating the most foundational ideas of democracy and even civilization itself. If there’s one thing not only any citizen but any human should be able to count on, it’s that you will not be killed for unspecified crimes by weapons of war as you go about your business. This basic principle might seem naive or impossible to meet, but my point here is that we Americans should at least do what we can to force our own government to adhere to it. We cannot meaningfully claim to be citizens of a democracy if we do not work to stop horrific actions done in our name, particularly actions that tear at the very foundations of civilization and morality.

Subscribe now

We’ve talked a lot on the program about the Trump administration’s wars on science and education and why they’re doing as part of a larger far-right attack on the achievements of modernity.

This month, the president announced that a change to federal immunization guidance for infants to reduce the number of recommended shots. He cited no actual evidence, just his ludicrous belief that doctors were pumping infants with a liter of vaccine liquids. I wish I was joking.

In addition to the harms to public health and science that Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Junior are creating, the destruction is wreaking havoc on real people’s lives at the scientific and government agencies.

My guests on this episode are two people who have been on the frontlines of these battles. Both are former employees at the National Institutes of Health, which has seen massive layoffs and its scientific recommendations ignored and censored by Kennedy and its director Jay Bhattacharya — after he made his career claiming to oppose censorship of science. They also have a great essay out about the Trump administration’s attacks on science and how to fight them.

Alexa Romberg was former deputy chief at the Prevention Research Branch at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Sylvia Chou was program director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute and is a scholar of linguistics and health communication. Both are members of 27 UNIHTED, an organization supporting employees who have been laid off or resigned from the National Institutes of Health.

Our conversation focuses on the how people have been impacted, the hypocrisy of Bhattacharya, and why scientists are having to learn to be more political with their livelihoods under attack.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

08:12 — The people behind the worst Covid-19 ideas are running Trump’s health policies

14:39 — The gross hypocrisy of Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s NIH director

19:37 “Wellness” advocates and the need to debate bad medical advice purveyors

28:47 — How tobacco companies set the template for today’s anti-science attacks

35:41 — The importance of community in helping people understand science

38:06 — Civic virtue and excellence as necessary for democracy and science

44:29 — Scientists have not been used to being political, but they must be now

51:14 — Science has always been linked to politics, even if you didn’t realize it

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: So we have a lot of ground to cover here today, but first I just want each [00:03:00] of you to give a little brief introduction to yourselves and your scientific work and then what, how you decided to get into more activist stuff in the present moment.

So let’s start with you, Silvia, and then I will go with you, Alexis.

Sylvia Chou: Sure. My path into NIH science and out of it is kind of, not very straightforward. I grew up in Taiwan was not particularly a good student, but I came to the US and had a chance to go to community college, and I th- later majored in music, played piano, then went into linguistics. Through that, I learned that I’m really interested in this whole idea of end-of-life conversations, this discourse between patients and, doctors.

And so I end up doing a dissertation in sociolinguistics not knowing where my next step would be. But then there was this postdoc opportunity at NCI, National Cancer Institute. [00:04:00] I really put all my, apples in one basket got this fellowship, and it was really a life-defining moment because then I got to then go into public health. And it, was through my MPH, Master in Public Health, at UC Berkeley that I discovered really my calling is to do science related to the public’s health. So then I became a program director at NCI, and that-- in that role, I served for 15 years. The last few years, the work is really focused on the intersection of social media and misinformation and the trust or the erosion of trust in science. Very I would say of practical work, but also a lot of deeper thinking about root causes of sort of society’s, challenges that have caused the sort of symptom of misinformation spread. So that was kind of my NIH role. But after 2025, after Trump 2.0 took over it was [00:05:00] immediately clear that this whole area of research would be either gutted or severely censored. So I worked very hard, both as a whistleblower but as someone who wanted to just keep talking about what’s happening to end up making a decision to resign in January of this year. So we can talk about kind of that decision a little bit later, but that’s kind of a story of my career.

Matthew Sheffield: yeah, that Was great, Sylvia. Thank you for that. Um, and Alexa, how about you?

Alexa Romberg: So like Silvia, I had a nonlinear career path where my undergraduate major was in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. But after graduating, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. And so, I spent time doing other things and and and eventually went back to graduate school in psychology.

And so I’m trained as a behavioral scientist and, my work in my early academic career was [00:06:00] really on learning and attention particularly first language acquisition, and cognitive mechanisms that support that. But over the past now 10 years, I moved into tobacco control really looking to have to be working in a space in which I-- that my work could be contributing more directly to the world.

So as opposed to really thinking about only what was happening in people’s minds, really looking to contribute to the, larger good through, through my work. And so I so I kind of shifted gears into tobacco control and working in tobacco use and nicotine use prevention. And that led me then to take a position at the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse in 2020 where I was then eventually the, deputy chief of the Prevention Research [00:07:00] branch. And one of the things that when I took the position in the government, it was 2020. I thought that a federal job was really, stable and that it-- there would be space really to over the long term to change systems, to really support diversity in science, to address the health disparities that we see related to tobacco and other substance use.

And one resolution that I made to myself was that I would bring my whole self to work, that I wasn’t going to perform for others. I was going to live my values in in the workplace. And what happened as the second Trump administration came, came in and started their kind of shock and awe campaign against government workers, is that the systems that were put in place within NIH really deeply conflicted with my values. So that so, so they, they-- the, situation just became untenable for me. [00:08:00] I signed the public the, Bethesda Declaration as Silvia did and then ultimately chose to resign in protest of the administration’s actions in December of 2025

The people behind the worst Covid-19 ideas are running Trump’s health policies

Matthew Sheffield: Okay. Yeah. And that’s a perfect segue, Alexa for the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is, so what, is the Bethesda Declaration for people who haven’t heard of it, and why, what is the, what does it signify?

Alexa Romberg: Yeah. The, and the, Bethesda Declaration a public letter of dissent from, NIH current and former employees to the director of the NIH Jayanta Bhattacharya. And I did not conceptualize it. That credit belongs to other people including Jenna Norton, who I know that you have spoken with before on your podcast. But the idea was [00:09:00] that the policies that were being pursued and are continuing to be pursued by the Trump administration within NIH was, we believe were truly undermining the mission of the NIH. So it’s not just there was a disagreement about where the emphasis should be or how implementation should go for particular ideas, but really that there’s a fundamental harm that was happening to the agency’s mission that merited speaking up in a very public way, right?

Which is obviously not typical for government employees who are often asked to implement programs or priorities that they may not really, believe in personally or have other ideas about. And so the Bethesda Declaration listed five areas that were causing harm to the NIH mission, including the politicization of research the interruption of global collaboration undermining [00:10:00] peer review the cap on indirect costs, and the firing of, essential staff. It was called the Bethesda Declaration kind of modeled after Dr. Bhattacharya’s own Great Barrington Declaration, right? In which he helped create and disseminate this declaration that was meant to be kind of a dissenting opinion about how public health during the COVID pandemic should, be handled. And he had made public statements about really wanting to foster civil dissent within wi- within the he has said. And so, so we thought that this might be a way to engage him, and and particularly since many of those initial policies were started before he, he started at NIH, right?

to be able to really engage him in the kind of dialogue that he had claimed that he really wanted to, have and encourage with with scientists broadly.

Matthew Sheffield: yeah, His alleged [00:11:00] values. Sylvia, yeah, what, do you think? You got anything to add?

Sylvia Chou: the only thing to add is it was much beyond a letter or a declaration. We really have started a movement and a community. I, think I didn’t even expect this part to be so salient. It literally kept me alive. I really felt like it kept me sane to be part of this community that was pointing out what’s clearly in front of us and understanding it as it is, because our workplace has turned into this very weird upside-down world,

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm.

Alexa Romberg: Flux

Sylvia Chou: are scared.

They’re saying things that they know are not true but not seeing another way. It was very, bizarre and weird and

Alexa Romberg: Yes

Sylvia Chou: Soul-crushing. So having the Bethesda Declaration community and fellow colleagues that are both supporting each other, strategizing, having a [00:12:00] real discussion. I think it... Before we came on, you talked about just engaging in a discourse, in a conversation. I’m really appreciating how much just talking things out honestly, candidly can do, both for the world, our society, but for our individuals’ well-being. and to me, that’s what I got the most out of Bethe- Bethesda Declaration.

Our motto is, “Courage is contagious,” and we really have been leaning into each other’s bravery but skillfulness as well. How do we do this? How do we show up, every day in defense of the integrity of science and, truth?

Alexa Romberg: Yeah, if I could just follow up, I, I, really agree with with Sylvia on that point where to, One of the that, that Dr. Bhattacharya did do in response to the, declaration was invited some signers to [00:13:00] a roundtable to, to discuss some of the concerns. And during that time as we were preparing for to have that conversation the, the, group met to discuss, like, how...

What, how could we approach this? What are ways to advance equity in this process? And it was really a revelation working with people who were so diverse where, from those who were post-bacs having, working in labs in the Intramural Research Program, to those who were senior scientists in the Intramural Program, to those who were branch chiefs, and those who were analysts, to those that were admin, right?

All working together to create a shared vision of how to communicate about a-about this. And group really modeled a for each other, a sense of community and of listening. And I credit Jenna a lot with that because [00:14:00] she, really modeled that very well in, in running meetings.

And I think that participation in excuse me, in that community really changed the way that I think about working with people and building community over time, and I’ve been applying those lessons ever since

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s wonderful. and it is an, a, fortunate contrast to, what had happened before within the field of science, and we’ll get to that a bit later in the discussion.

The gross hypocrisy of Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s NIH director

Matthew Sheffield: so but I think a lot of people, they might not know who Jay Bhattacharya is even though he has a very important job.

So, Syl- Sylvia, can you just give people a bit of a primer on his background before he got the NIH role, and then, and, why he got that [00:15:00] role?

Sylvia Chou: So Jayanta Bhattacharya was a health economist working at Stanford University. I think I mean, I don’t know his scholarship too well. I know he r- had received several federal research funding on various projects using, sort of economic analysis tools and so on. I think he came to be recognized as somebody who the administration looked upon very favorably because he was the leader of the Great Barrington Declaration, which during COVID time was a reaction against a lot of the COVID policies. They really felt like the guide- guidelines were too extreme, that they were seeding doubt in both the, policies like social distancing, but also, vaccine development and implementation. So, but I think one of his main kind of values or what he claims to be the important value is academic freedom and the freedom to [00:16:00] dissent, that we should be able to be disagreeing and still listen to each other. And we agree with that. That, part is 100% important. I think as a contrarian really coming into NIH, we expected him to shift a bit and stop being a contrarian and actually lead, and, and that has not been what we’ve observed. And we can go into kind of the policies at NIH if you want, but it, it was, I’ll, give one example of something that was

Matthew Sheffield: Yes, please

Sylvia Chou: We had a rule that we cannot use nicknames and pronouns or anything in our signatures or even on our Zoom calls. So you have a, Chipper becomes a David, a a Annette becomes a, Mary.

It’s just weird overnight. And we also couldn’t put anything else in our signature block. And then the next day he showed up, and he sent a message to the entire NIH, and he [00:17:00] signed Jay. And we-- I have a, passport name, which is Chinese, and my nickname is Sylvia. I could not have Sylvia in my signature, even though I, go by Sylvia. And so I think a lot of people were just,

Alexa Romberg: Flux

Sylvia Chou: it’s, a little bit too much on the nose that the hypocrisy, like you make a rule but that some people don’t have to follow. so that’s one example of kinda either you can see that as kinda being tone deaf to the morale problems, or that there are rules that apply to some but not others.

Alexa Romberg: Yes

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah, and just for the record his, actual legal name is Jayanta not, Jay. So just for, so people can get your, j- your joke there.

Sylvia Chou: you for that.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, and, COVID really did unfortunately, empower a lot of people like this because, the, I mean, the political history [00:18:00] of, this movement, if you will, it was, people, they had, kind of coordinated actually around Stanford University unfortunately for Stanford and been associated with other groups there, some of which, many of which were funded by Peter Thiel.

And, it was... COVID, though, was a, moment where I think there, the, most heartless aspects of libertarianism really did come out there because you had... I mean, they were at just saying it. “We should let people die. People should die so we can go shopping.” That was what they were saying.

And or, and of course they would deny that. they would say, “Well, because we didn’t think anything bad would happen.” And, the, results are clear that their, the ideas that they got, which, they got a lot of what they wanted, contrary to the claims that they were some [00:19:00] persecuted, endangered censored minority.

these people were on Fox News every day. They were, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of Substacks and other things like that. No one was censoring them, especially the government. So it’s, worth saying that, I think. So, but, and but the, it does kind of, th- that’s one half of the, Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr., the, and Health and Human Services secretary who we’ve talked about a lot on this program, so we don’t have to, go into him too much here today though.

“Wellness” advocates and the need to debate bad medical advice purveyors

Matthew Sheffield: But, one person who was kind of exemplifying his personal views of things, ‘cause he wasn’t, as far as I know, that in connected to Bhattacharya before the pandemic.

But he was connected to the woman who he had nominated to be the surgeon general Casey Means, who came out of the w- the wellness [00:20:00] movement. So Alexa just g- c- like I think to some extent, maybe some people who, are not into all of that, they just see it as harmless consumer fads. That they’re like, “Well, it wastes people’s money and it’s kind of not something I’m interested in, but what harm can it do?”

And I that’s unfortunately not the right attitude for a lot of this, I think. Not, it’s not all bad, but some of it is.

Alexa Romberg: Sure. I think that’s that’s very true. And, we have the, wellness industry is really focused on unregulated supplements or treatments or postures that are not outs- that, that are outside the pharmaceutical industry, right? Because the pharmaceutical industry is tightly regulated by the FDA for good reason, right? But the, supplement, the wellness industry is is outside of all that. And I think [00:21:00] that people like RFK Jr., people like Casey Means have been using that posture to say, “Well, we’re anti-industry. We’re anti-pharma. We’re, we are looking to pursue health in these other ways,” when really what they’re doing is they’re rejecting the evidence base that underlies our understanding of human health and doing so for profit. So it is rare that these folks are not involved in selling something directly to consumers as part of their wellness advocacy, including we, see this for the new the, new person nominated for surgeon general as well. And so this really that they’re outside of, the pharmaceutical industry and talking about the corruption that’s involved in in industry is they’re, very conveniently saying, “We’re not a part of that,” even though they experience the same conflicts of interest [00:22:00] in in, in, in the way that they are approaching health.

Sylvia Chou: I mean, I, think another bigger goal of them is to sow doubt, and to sow doubt in evidence, in establishment. I think healthy skepticism is important. I think we should not take every piece of information that comes our way without thinking critically. I think this is a whole ‘nother level.

It’s really leveraging fear. Some of it is fear-mongering. Other, others, is really tapping into anger and frustration in the, community. So I, just worry sort of from a perspective of public health of this distrust in science and scientific evidence that all of this current drama can create for our future, and I think about how do we restore trust, and it can’t just be that we do better messaging.

We have to earn it. We have to [00:23:00] trustworthy. So how do we do that? That’s, what I think a lot about.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, and, it is such an important question. And a lot of it has to be conversations and debates. A lot-- I think there, there are people that I know who work in science that they absolutely cringe at the idea of debating a creationist or debating an anti-vaxxer. But they have to. And, may- well, they personally, if you don’t wanna do it, like I, I wouldn’t, force it on anyone who didn’t wanna do it, but somebody needs to because, these arguments are like weeds.

If you don’t pull them up, they’ll grow bigger and take over your whole garden. And look, you have the facts on your side. So, if you don’t, feel comfortable doing that in public, you’re not a good public speaker or whatever, that’s fine, but you need to encourage people who are, and you need to find them and elevate them and support them.

Sylvia Chou: yeah, [00:24:00] in order for a debate to be a true debate, there has to be, fair rules and like you said, there are facts and then there are fiction or there are lies. That has to, there has to be room, and I think the reason, you initially, thought we could have this conversation was based on our app a- op-ed, which is focused on this topic of communication about science. And what we’re seeing right now the government side is a lot of heavy-handed muzzling or censorship of communication science, of science. Some of it is in talking point being vetted. Others are telling you can’t say this word. And I, just worry that we can’t really have a discourse if there is so much over what can and cannot be said. So I, I guess the question is who sets the rule and where, on what platform, what, space can we have a genuine [00:25:00] conversation and disagreement? I think setting the boundaries and the parameters and forums for that is, is really an important priority. And you know better than anybody, I mean, the media landscape is filled with echo chambers and silos that don’t cross, so there are rabbit holes that are hard to get out of, or people who have gotten so used to only hearing like-minded comments that they take anything that’s contrary to their worldview as either misinformation or threatening. that’s kind of a bigger,

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, yeah, they, view science as misinformation. That is actually what they think. And it, until, scientists accept that and what it, that it has massive implications for them, because the reality is the ivory tower exists within the world, and somebody can burn it down, and some people [00:26:00] want to, and they are right now.

Alexa Romberg: Yeah, I would, I mean, I would be just a little bit careful about this argument, I guess. I think that of course, we all are charged with engaging responsibly with the public. But people have also been debating creationists for decades, right? And that is not what, has led to our current crisis. Right? What has led to our current crisis is people making enormous profit off of sowing misinformation and disinformation. And so I don’t think that we’re going to arrive at solutions by simply having

Sylvia Chou: A debate.

Alexa Romberg: conversations. We are going to arrive at solutions by creating structures that enable us to thrive and enable people to thrive in our society. And so, I think that’s where we need to be thinking as opposed to thinking about changing individuals’ behaviors.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s a good point. And I, I [00:27:00] guess in my own defense, if I may, I would-- I said that it, has to include debating. But yeah, it’s absolutely 100%. yeah, the institutions the, unfortunate thing I think that, really it like, after the Cold War, there was this great consensus that developed against reactionary extremism, and in favor of science, in favor of education, in favor of competent governance.

This was, that is why the 1950s and 1960s were what people envision as the glory days. It was because we had such a great people running the government. That’s why things were so good, And also, of course, that we were the only un- undamaged, um, economic area in the world. But, the fact that, that, both parties had a commitment to good governance and science and education was so important.

But one of [00:28:00] the bad things about that it was, what they had learned in, from fighting Nazis, which is that you cannot trust reactionaries. You must stop them in every way when you see them, politically. It was not something that was really kind of formally known, in an abstract sense.

Nobody wrote a book. I mean, to some extent there were books like Hannah Arendt and, some other people like that, but it was more about “Oh, well, what is the psychology of fascism?” And not, “Well, how do we stop people from listening to that, and why would they want to?” Um, just regular people.

Like there was some part of, there was some good stuff in that, I should say. but it, didn’t really hit the political mainstream as much as it should, because I think people didn’t see a need for it,.

How tobacco companies set the template for today’s anti-science attacks

Matthew Sheffield: And the mentality that now is, running the administration in the US, it started with the tobacco industry.

And, it started with the [00:29:00] idea infamously in the memos that they sent that, “Doubt is our product.” And because the, they knew that they did not have the evidence. They knew it. But they knew also that didn’t matter. If you could convince people that evidence didn’t matter and that alternative facts were real and obviously you Alexa this is something you have a lot to say about, I imagine.

Alexa Romberg: Yes. I, do. And, and I will say that as someone, I, I was obviously highly educated, had a PhD but y- didn’t even realize before I started to work in tobacco control how harmful tobacco really is, like the bodily harm that it causes, and that this was still a huge ongoing problem right?

That this is, that we have f- about 480,000 people in the United States who die every year from [00:30:00] tobacco-related causes, right? And those those deaths are not evenly distributed across the population. Rather, they are tend to be concentrated in in specific populations that experience disparate outcomes related to their use.

For example Black Americans don’t smoke at higher rates than white Americans, but they experience worse health outcomes related to, tobacco. And partly that is due to the tobacco industry’s playbook in really targeting specifically Black communities to to, come onside. The marketing of menthol cigarettes in particular to, to Black communities that we have a lot of evidence are harder to give up smoking than non-menthol cigarettes. But but also engaging in different marketing campaigns across different populations, in, in, the US. always looking to i- to, similar to today’s situation, embrace freedom, [00:31:00] like a freedom to choose to smoke. And that’s something that the, that tobacco controls had to, push back on in terms of other people’s freedoms in or-- to, to be free of a smoky environment, for example, while they’re working at a bar or restaurant, right?

And we see that same tension between, in COVID vaccines between I wanna have the freedom to decline a vaccine but, we ... But in choosing that, you are increasing the opportunity of harm for those around you as well. And we see the current administration is quite pro-tobacco. And this was something that really is mind-boggling when you think of the Make America Healthy Again movement. of all the things, right, tobacco is a, it’s, a huge profit-driven industry. It can’t be anything else, right? It’s like public [00:32:00] shareholders.

They’ve gotta maximize profit.

Matthew Sheffield: And they’re filled with all-- cigarettes are filled with all kinds of terrible chemicals that Kennedy allegedly hates

Alexa Romberg: and it’s, you, and you, right, you have folks who, you have so many who are dying, and it’s, and it is preventable. So you would think this would be, like, a clear, win for tobacco control that we have people ascendant, but it’s turned out to be quite the opposite. So even when I when I was a program official, I held projects in tobacco control and including large centers for the, Tobacco Regulatory Science Program that uses FDA funding at NIH to fund original research to inform regulation. And one of those those centers that I held in my portfolio was terminated last summer. Right? And just, the, hypocrisy that we are trying to make America healthy again, while at the same time undermining research that’s [00:33:00] intended to benefit the people who are most harmed by tobacco really hits, the, conflicts of interest in, in, in this administration, right, right in the heart.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Sylvia, did you wanna weigh in there?

Sylvia Chou: No, I think that was well covered. I mean, there’s just a lot of hy- hypocrisy all

Matthew Sheffield: There really is

Alexa Romberg: if, we could just return for a moment to the kind of this post-war glory days of of American science, I would like to push back on that a bit because if we the ‘50s and ‘60s in the United States was one of deep and institutionalized racial inequity, right? We have Jim Crow,

Matthew Sheffield: For sure

Alexa Romberg: a academic space, that specifically excludes non-white males, right? So women, people of color, indigenous peoples non-English speakers, [00:34:00] everyone. And that space is what created the foundation for our current scientific infrastructure. And so yes, that infrastructure has certainly yielded incredible dividends for our country and has advanced health overall. However, it has done so by persistently and systematically excluding that weren’t there at the beginning. And so I think that there’s a lot of rethinking that we need to do about how we can best create a scientific infrastructure that actually advances the interests of all peoples, and not those that are just most have the most privilege in our society

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s a, great point. And yeah, and, that exclusion, I do think it did serve as the kernel of the zombie Socratic method. The zombie I can’t even say my own point. The zombie Socratic method this skepticism without a [00:35:00] brain that, it’s pervasive in, in, in lots of communities.

And, in some cases that skepticism it, is caused by things that government did. So whether that’s, the government experimenting on Black people, various drugs or not, drugs not giving people medical treatments. Yeah, so and then and then of, there’s a long record unfortunately of medical professionals not giving adequate treatment to women particularly Black women.

And even now that persists to this day that Black women have m- significantly higher mortality rates in pregnancy just as one example.

The importance of community in helping people understand science

Sylvia Chou: we’ve been talking a lot at the level of, what is ri- right evidence and exchanging of ideas. But I also wondered if a big part of it is human, like a fractured social fabric. It’s a relationship, the way people are failing to [00:36:00] re- build new relationships, or that we are there’s an isolation either efforts to isolate people or people finding themselves isolated by happenstance. I, think about it, one study which was looking at vaccine tweets, Twitter it was published in American Journal of Public Health. I can give you a reference later. But basically, they were mining data on vaccine-related c- contents, and what they found was there was a large effort on behalf of Russia and the Russian trolls and bots that were seeding contents that were both pro and anti-vaccine. It was really an attempt to build up a fight. So this is why I call these engineered controversies. They really wanna... It’s a, it’s kinda like a classic colonialist effort to get two groups to dislike each other. [00:37:00] So there are actually efforts to get people to really n- hate each other. And I think that’s something that creates this idea that sometimes people would call it false equivalency.

We need to hear there are good people on both sides, that kind of argument, or both-sideism. These were all ideas that there were just different, differing opinions, and we need to hear them all. But they actually came from attempts to create divisions. And maybe it’s a human instinct. I know you have a background in philosophy, and I, do think, we like to be around people we like and we agree with.

I know that it’s a bias of me. Sometimes I cannot stand, I mean, to socialize in certain settings or even hearing some news because it’s just too painful to have to hear things that are diff- that challenges you, your, worldviews. So, but I think that’s important to kind of bring into this conversation in terms of how [00:38:00] to build healthy and thriving relationships or relations.

Civic virtue and excellence as necessary for democracy and science

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, that is a perfect tee off of me, thank you, Silvia, to talk about that in the philosophical context because I, always love bringing Aristotle into my science episodes because Aristotle, was one of the earliest scientists of whose, achievements that we actually have written evidence for.

And, but he was also a philosopher. And, he integrated both of those things into everything that he did. And, two of his core concepts in, in the ancient Greeks generally, and we have these, we have equivalents for these words in English but as a civic practice, w- the it’s fallen away.

so the, in, in Greek philosophy, there, there’s the concept of eudaimonia, which is civic excellence and [00:39:00] thriving. And then there is the individual counterpart to that and that is arete. and it’s often translated as virtue in English, but virtue for the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t mean like chastity.

What it meant was excellence, the belief and the pursuit of excellence in your life and in your society. and that I, think has, that’s has gone missing in certainly in our politics. And some school systems actually are good about putting some of this in, into their curricula.

But yeah, we could use a lot more of these two ideas and, getting people to think about them. And it’s important also, I think, for, people as, traditional religion has become less popular over time in the US and around the world the, this, the [00:40:00] necessity of talking about what is, truth, what is knowledge, what is ethics, what do we owe each other?

Like these are things that still matter. And even if you’re not religious, you need to have answers for these questions, or at least you need to ask the question a lot, I think.

Sylvia Chou: That’s a great-- I mean, I, think about the two things that we’re here to talk about in terms of what’s most under threat, m- under attack. One is science, which is the pursuit of excellence, truth. There’s a methodological sort of processes and a level of humility accept, findings that are, may not be what you’re looking for.

And so that’s sort of one thing that’s, I think, under a lot of challenge, right? In integrity. Another is public health, which is about the social good, kinda like the societal. It’s not about just enriching the wealthiest or the smartest or whatever it [00:41:00] is. It’s about, looking out for everybody, because if everybody’s treated well, then we all benefit.

Or if, you know-- And I think those two c- two values, science, especially public health research, research that’s trying to actually, is kind of, good reasons, I think, for some of the people in charge right now, that they find it threatening. so, so I, do feel like as an individual, we have to find, re-re-redefine kind of where we are in this world.

How do we contribute? I heard this one colleague who’s c- from an evangelical background and I think struggled a lot growing up. He said when he found science, it felt like finding his safety, I mean, his comfort place. And it’s a shelter, it’s a refuge there is a process. It’s not to say religion is [00:42:00] not that, but he didn’t have a language or a mechanism to pursue excellence in the same way. So it’s not contrasting each, but I think there are different ways one arrive at what is good and true to oneself.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm. Alexa, did you wanna, weigh in there? I, have thoughts, but I wanna let you go first.

Alexa Romberg: yeah, I think that this is really relevant to the process that Sylvia and I went through over the past year in thinking about how to respond to, to the attacks on the integrity of NIH, right? Where we, Well, I’ll, speak for myself that, for me it was clear that the actions of terminating grants without notice, regardless of the topic or whether you think it was a good thing to study, is unethical and harmful. [00:43:00] I don’t need a religious framework to make that judgment. I can rely on my own judgment and that of scientific best practices, right? And so I know that the people who are deciding to do that do not intend to prevent harm, right? And being in an environment in which that is expected, in which people will lose their jobs if they don’t comply, this creates a lot of moral injury and, and a lot of dissonance in terms of what we know to be best practices where we can have room for dissent, we can have room to discuss what is, what is the right way to, to pursue these questions?

What are the right ways to, broaden participation in science? What are the right ways to address health disparities, right? But none of those involve, [00:44:00] behaving unethically in ways that completely break trust with the people who consented to participate in science, who consented to participate in a study for the public good, right? And and so I think that’s in just thinking about what the administration is willing to engage in i- whether it’s illegal or not, I’m not a, legal expert, but I know that is unscientific and it is unethical.

Scientists have not been used to being political, but they must be now

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s right. and, that, and it goes to something that we hit on very briefly, which is, despite all the rhetoric from Bhattacharya or Kennedy earlier about, “Well, I, support free speech,” “You guys are censoring me. I-- Everyone should be able to say what they want.”

A- and the reality is they want the exact opposite of that. They want them to be able to say whatever they want, and you to say what they want. [00:45:00] that’s how they, want things to be. And but I think it, it’s hard though for a lot of people who work in science to have to accept that they must stand up at this moment.

This is a difficult realization for a lot of people, I think, and obviously you guys, know this better than I do from your personal experiences. But, it seems to me that a lot of people, they thought that they were getting away from politics, that they were getting away from the, the scrum of debate and, the dirtiness of discourse.

And of course, science has its own many debates irrespective of that. But still, there, there is an, a commitment overall to extrinsic exchange within science generally speaking. And so it’s, hard for people who had... That’s what they were looking [00:46:00] for with their career path.

Like I’m sorry, I have a friend who, works in a federal agency who, you know, i- in pub- in communications, and they always have problems getting scientists to participate in their public communications because they, the scientist will say, “Ah, that’s just a waste of time for me to talk about this.”

Sylvia Chou: I, bet they don’t feel that way now probably, hopefully.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Well, I haven’t checked in with, them, but I should. I should. ‘

Sylvia Chou: Cause I think it’s really been a reckoning. I mean, a wake, wake-- people are waking up to the fact that you don’t have any necessarily guaranteed public sort of acceptance or understanding or appreciation of the work you do if you don’t engage and articulate and really assert your role in civil society. I, think that’s a really important next step, is for scientists and researchers to [00:47:00] at least think about opportunities to communicate their work with their non-scientist, fellow human beings. But I, do think a lot of people in leadership, even to this day in science, are unprepared for this moment. There has been a traditionally fairly insular and well-regarded kinda structure for doing our work, and there was this idea that we stay in our lane, keep our heads down, and we just do good science, and that’s, all we’re called to do. So when the attack comes at such a musk- muscular and fast rate, it left most people, confused, scared. I think I see a lot of duck and take cover if we just let the storm blow through, if we just stay quiet. I don’t personally think that’s gonna work. I don’t necessarily have a [00:48:00] perfect sort of solution, but I think it starts with actually engaging and looking at the truth for what it is. And that even takes courage, to look at what’s happening to the scientific enterprise. But I, think it’s a start. It’s a start.

Matthew Sheffield: Mm-hmm.

Alexa Romberg: I have a number of thoughts on this. One, I think that the idea I agree it’s often prevalent among scholars that science is apolitical is both foundationally incorrect and also out of the white supremacist origins of modern science, right? And so if you bring in Indigenous scholars, if you bring in scholars minoritized scholars, they will be able to, document and explain very clearly how participation in science at any level, as the scientist, as the participant, as the funder, as the institution receiving funding, has always been a deeply political process, [00:49:00] right? And so it is a place of privilege and insulation or to say that this is separate from the political world, right? I-- and I couldn’t agree more with, Sylvia about the lack of preparation therefore, right? Because we have elevated people in science who have enjoyed that privilege and who have enjoyed being a, being able to benefit from these structures. And that with, the fact that institutions right, their goal is to protect the institution often, right, rather than some larger ideal, right? And so we see this really playing out in a lot of conflict in o-o-over the past 18 months as institutions have really by and large, right, the majority of them, certainly not all of them, but the majority of them have looked to how can we comply, how can we...

or how can we, not make noise, or how can we survive this, as [00:50:00] opposed to thinking about what does survival mean? What does my position as someone leading a high-profile scientific organization right now require of me in order to protect scientific principles, right? And so that’s why one of the reasons why I signed the Bethesda Declaration, I took the leap, putting my name out in public a year ago, right?

It was June of last year that it came out, was because I too sit in this position of privilege, right? I was someone-- I, am someone who has benefited tr-tremendously from my status. am currently, right, I am married. My spouse carries our-- can carry our health insurance for our family. We have enough support that losing my job if I should speak up is is something that, that our family could weather without it completely overturning our lives, right?

And that is definitely not the case for every single person out there. It probably is the case, though, for [00:51:00] every leader of a scientific institution, right? And so I think that it’s incumbent upon us who have really benefited from the privilege, particularly in the scientific infrastructure, to be the ones raising our voices at this time.

Science has always been linked to politics, even if you didn’t realize it

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah, the, people who, say that they’re non-political, they make two fundamental errors. Number one is that saying you are non-political is a political act, and the only people who can say that are people who have the privilege to say that. Because, politics, it will come for you even if you don’t want it.

and in science, in a lot of ways it-- some, many scientists were living in denial about that, I think. Um, and, and you’re right that, to, go back into the, um, the history there, Alexa, that [00:52:00] the other thing is that w- of why it’s so important to encourage diversity in science is that science is about the world as it is, and if you’ve excluded people who are in the world, and especially within the realm of medicine and biology, if you exclude people, then your science is wrong.

It’s incomplete. It’s filled with lacunae, and it’s not good science. Even if it has, the conclusions that might match, a, more well-sourced science, it’s still the methods are wrong and you have failed

So

Alexa Romberg: I, I would extend that to all areas of science, including, for example, cognitive psychology,

Matthew Sheffield: Appreciate you

Alexa Romberg: when you have theories that are born out of a very homogenous then they’re not meant to capture the diversity of human cognition, for [00:53:00] example and lead to pathologizing what the white privileged class views as non-normative

Sylvia Chou: Mm-hmm. and I just wanna add, I think we’ve made a lot of strides. I mean, I know this always looking back, we see so many holes or problems, feel like over the last years, we’ve really increased participation. We’ve diversified the workforce. It’s far from over, but I think what we’re seeing now is a severe backlash.

We’re taking a cou- many steps backwards. But I think sometimes it’s hard to-- it’s, easy to lose sight of the progress that we’ve made. So to sort of hold both realities of sort of a progress even to be here having this open conversation, uncensored, and yet watching the threat that people felt very nervous about this.

I mean, this is a threatening [00:54:00] to have a conversation like this where we connect science and democracy and politics in one, I think is perceived as threatening to some. and that, I would say is I even underestimated how quickly politicization of science took place and how complete the destruction, has been

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point, Sylvia. And and one of the things that has been a big part of that destruction, though, has been a thought a- across many institutions not just those of science. We saw this with law firms and universities in general, of this idea of “Well, if I just put my head down and, they’re only asking me to fill out forms, or I’ll, just pay off the settlement then they’ll leave me alone.”

And, let this preemptive obedience. It’s been [00:55:00] so destructive. And it was, wrong from day one, and a lot of people were saying that from day one that they shouldn’t do it. And, universities that have thought that if they could placate the Trump regime, like Columbia University, big one in particular, and some of these law firms, they, one- once you have bent the knee, they will never take their boot off of your neck, I think

Sylvia Chou: Yeah. There’s a, really distinction between people who are like in the Bethesda Declaration, seeing the bigger picture, to this idea that these are all just series of nuisances. “Get me-- get out of my back. Stop asking more questions.” And these are inconvenient workpl- workplace drama. I mean, there are still people who felt like they, that’s how they can survive this, is to think of each thing as a small hurdle that passes. But I, disagree with [00:56:00] that perspective. Empathize with it. I think for some people it’s a survival mechanism. but that’s not my stance. Yeah.

Alexa Romberg: And I think this is what we were looking to engage people with in the recent op-ed in, inside Higher Ed in which we really, brought people some actions that they can the first is exercising your rights while you have them, right? If you give up your freedom of speech just because, then you’ve given it up and, th- and, there isn’t recovering it, right?

You are setting a norm in which there is less, allowed speech. And obviously, there’s a lot of conflict there in terms of, the, personal and a- and, the ideological. But I think in really grappling with that and and engaging [00:57:00] with it deeply is really key. And, another tenet that, we put forth is really that every bit of fighting and pushback matters.

And for some folks, this may be really personal. Maybe, right, like keeping your mind free, having your eyes open understanding the harms that, that, we’re seeing, right? For others, it’s going to be a lot of direct action, right? And actions can be small, and actions can be big. They can be visible or less, or invisible to, to, to the public.

But it’s thinking about that, of “What’s in, what’s possible for me in terms of action, visible or invisible?” the, third part was really about growing a community of support that sees the truth and understands the need for speaking up and action at, this time.

And I think that, as Silvia and I both spoke about kind of becoming part of the larger community [00:58:00] of Bethesda declaration signers and the support that afforded us as we really thought about how to navigate the current attacks on the NIH and on our democracy. It was like I, I certainly couldn’t be doing the things that I am now without that support.

And actually, it grew for me out of really meeting with it and even with, a smaller group of just folks who I worked really closely with at NIH, starting and talking with them. And so it’s really those small actions, that talking to someone, understanding, growing your sense of connection in the world that can lead to, to, larger things in the future.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. It really can. And yeah, and I think that does bring me to one of the things that, you know, a lot of people, maybe not a lot, I, guess it’s hard to know how many, but, [00:59:00] some people who have long-term science projects, they have decided that, given Trump and all these other people, that the United States is not going to be a safe home for their research.

And so they’ve left, and I understand why they would do that. I but, I would say to them that, if you’re going to leave, then you, need to keep fighting for the people you left behind because n- not everybody has that luxury. that’s, one of the best privileges you could possibly have, is the ability to take up your research shop and port it over to another country and have them pay you to do it.

So please don’t leave the rest of us behind. and, and the fact that you’re leaving, that’s... You should tell people that and stay, connected.

Sylvia Chou: Yeah, I try to emphasize when people hear that I resigned, and like [01:00:00] I’m giving up, but really it’s the opposite. I just decided that I needed to uphold my oath of office by fighting from the outside. I really think it’s a big distinction that I’m not just retrieving, to the mountains, at least not yet. I, remember growing up in, Chinese literature in Taiwan, you would hear these scholars that have seen it all, and they move to the mountain to play zither and drink tea invite the moon to a, some liquor. And I always wondered, who are these people? Why would they do that? But now I appreciate where that idea comes from. But I’m not there. I wanna give my good faith every bit of effort I can to assert my right and engage in conversations. So I mean, I really thank you for engaging us in this conversation because I think it’s been a tremendous learning time for all of us and it’s very humbling. But I’m seeing [01:01:00] even growth in our community of both individually and as a group of

Alexa Romberg: Yes

Sylvia Chou: how to do this, how to with the situation. But I did hear a joke not a joke, but in China, they call Trump the true patriot. Meaning they-- Trump must love China so much to give up science and let China, take it o-on.

I mean, a, colleague was given a position where they are able to hire, 50 f-faculty lines and they’re ready to go. it, is really astounding the in-infrastructure that’s growing almost reacting to what’s happening in the US elsewhere in the world. So, I think brain drains and sort of, issues of scientists moving is happening, and it-- we, won’t understand the extent of its impact until later.

But I like your c- idea that, we, this country, this structure [01:02:00] belongs to us, and we need to be an active participating participant in effecting change, positive change even in dire times.

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and, I think one of the other things that just regular people can do is make sure to support politicians who will invest in, institutions of science, institutions of education, and institutions of public awareness. that’s that’s has been s- unfortunate to see, like the, They went after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for instance, which funds PBS and lots of great programming and NPR stuff as well. And like I, there, there, is a real opportunity though for blue states and other countries. I mean, I, it’s my personal view, I, that there [01:03:00] has to be a reverse Marshall Plan from Europe and other countries.

because if we, go rogue in this country, like it’s gon- it’s gonna affect you guys, and you know that. So maybe you should help us out, the people that are fighting for democracy here, a lot more than you are doing now. That’s what I would think. So if you guys are listening,

France, if you’re listening

Sylvia Chou: we can say science and health, they don’t know passport, holders who, which from which, right? It’s we’re all in this together. Discoveries are not bound by nationalities. So you’re right. mean, maybe that is my kind of more Buddhist direction of sort of interbeing.

Like this is all gonna be, we’re all in this together

Matthew Sheffield: Yeah

Sylvia Chou: Yeah

Matthew Sheffield: All right. Well, did you wanna weigh in, Alexa? Or I was gonna wrap it up here if you... And w- when you’re ready

Alexa Romberg: That was covered [01:04:00] nicely

Matthew Sheffield: Oh, okay. Great. Well, it, so if people want to join you guys in your fight what’s your advice for them?

Sylvia Chou: We definitely welcome them, and we have a group, 27 United. It’s 27 U-N-I-H-T-E-D United, but H is... Basically, this was born out of people who were originally fired from the NIH, but now really we wanna be an advocacy organization that connects researchers and federal scientists together. So that’s one idea.

Another is really just, join your communities, whatever community it is in your local area. And if you’re a scientist, really get involved because you can’t really afford to just stay in your lab and focus on your inquiry. You really need to see how your work fits into the larger current political system. So I, definitely [01:05:00] encourage people to not lose faith and not stay in the place of despair, but getting involved. I have found that I’m more hopeful when I’m enacting in action and being part of a community and having a conversation like this. It gives me hope that

we, can figure this out if we really keep talking and learning.

Matthew Sheffield: Excellent

Alexa Romberg: And I think really coming back to, to, to building that community, finding people to, to talk with, and that every action matters. Actions may be really small. It may be talking with a person down the hall from you at work, or talking with your department head or a... or, something about folks can be best supported, how researchers can be best supported at this time, acknowledging what is happening.

It could be working with your neighbors. It could be working in areas that are completely separate [01:06:00] from science or largely separate from science, right? I think that it’s like finding a voice and finding actions that are, that you can, that, that you can really do, right? So if, calling your senator, calling your congressman, you’re like, “I just-- I, I don’t wanna do that,” right?

find something else that that you can do because the, communities that we build, they’re going to last regardless of how the next few years turn out, right? They don’t hinge on a specific win or a specific shift in the tides. Rather they create the space for us to support one another and live the best lives we can.

Matthew Sheffield: Exactly. All right. Well, I think I will let you have the last word there, Alexa. Thank you so much, Sylvia Chou and Alexa Romberg for being here today

Sylvia Chou: Thank you for having us. It’s great.

Alexa Romberg: Appreciate it.

Matthew Sheffield: All [01:07:00] right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation. And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. You can become a paid or free subscriber if you go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack. And there’s also a GoFundMe for the show as well if you are not interested in either of those platforms.

And of course, you can watch the show on YouTube or, get it anywhere you’re on your favorite podcast player. So thanks a lot for your support and I’ll see you next time.

Subscribe now

This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.

Four weeks after charging former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the Justice Department has moved to withdraw its indictment, pointing instead to botched work by a contractor as the cause of peeled lining. As I discussed previously, the targeting of Hearn was the culmination of increasingly frantic efforts by President Trump to deflect blame for a botched refurbishment of the pool, and constituted the sort of abuse of power associated with tinpot dictators. In order to evade his clear responsibility for the incompetent renovation — in which not only the pool’s waterproofing did not take but the water itself became discolored with green algae — the president concocted an alternate reality both absurd and ominous. In his telling, numerous vandals had attacked the pool in an effort to undermine both the president and the nation itself. To instantiate his tale of a country besieged, he dispatched troops and other security forces to the Reflecting Pool, militarizing a tourist site that draws some 20 million visitors every year.

If it had ended there, such an abuse of power would have been sufficient to torpedo the presidency of previous chief executives — an unstable concoction of menace and stupidity, with the president blaming the algae growth on unseen vandals who had supposedly dumped fertilizer in the water, and ranting about a 350-foot-long “gash” that invisible assailants had cut into the pool lining. But a deeper corruption lay in how the president was able to conscript willing accomplices into his fantasia of D.C. bedlam. Notably, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated the lies about vandals, as if through repetition they could overcome the lack of actual evidence. Even worse, the Justice Department — through the initiative of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jean Pirro— indicted Hearn on a felony vandalism charge that could carry a ten-year prison sentence, attempting through the abuse of the justice system to turn Trump’s self-serving fantasy of anti-American vandals into reality.

It is heartening to see that the withdrawal of charges against Hearn has garnered fairly extensive news coverage. Given the president’s stance of never admitting error, the Justice Department’s admission that it has no actual case against Hearn carries the whiff of novelty. More broadly, it offers a glimpse of the possibility that Trump has hit a barrier to his various abuses of power, in this case as his own lackeys appear unwilling to carry out an impossible prosecution. And here, we should take note of speculation that Pirro fears real consequences, such as disbarment, for pursuing a fact-free case. She previously claimed to have “tremendous evidence” of Hearn’s guilt, yet in her remarks about withdrawing the indictment claimed that the Interior Department had not provided her previously with information about the shoddy repair work. At a minimum, this suggests she had failed to do the minimum due diligence in filing the charges against Hearn. There is a real air of public servants caught red-handed abetting a presidential vendetta.

But the larger story remains Trump’s own abuse of power; most specifically, his willingness to mobilize resources of the federal government to target a single innocent American in order to distract from his own incompetence. I will be the first to admit that Donald Trump has done many worse things than this: attempting to overthrow American democracy following his 2020 election loss and his recent decision to make war on Iran come immediately to mind. Yet, in the escalation from a botched Reflecting Pool restoration to the deployment of the U.S. government to prosecute a single citizen, the cruelty and incompetence of Trump have congealed in a novel way. I am struck by how the president conjured this whole supposed “crisis” of a besieged Reflecting Pool completely out of the whole cloth of his own delusions, and then sought to send a fellow American to prison for a decade to cover up his own failed, self-initiated effort to. . . refurbish an ornamental body of water.

Incredibly but predictably, Trump’s lies and desire for retribution have continued in the days following Pirro’s nixing of the indictment. He has voiced his strong disagreement with her decision, saying that she “made a mistake,” “choked,” and “folded like an umbrella.” (Pirro apparently attempted to bolster her case that the president not fire her, and that vandalism was not to blame, by literally bringing a box of evidence to the White House on Tuesday). He has continued to broadcast the lie that vandals, not a botched repair job, have caused the problems with the pool, writing on social media that “To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” and referencing a video supposedly providing corroborating evidence.

News reports have tended to emphasize Trump’s critique of Pirro and the question of whether she is safe in her job — for example, this New York Times piece plays up the reality TV-style drama of the tension between Pirro and Trump. But the focus on the U.S. attorney’s fate obscures the president’s continued efforts to conjure a phantasmagoria of “box-cutter”-wielding vandals (the box-cutter reference more or less obviously meant to evoke the attacks of September 11). Most damningly, Trump’s opposition to the case’s dismissal and his ongoing lies about vandalism mean that he effectively continues to marshal the power of the presidency, however ham-handedly, to target and defame David Hearn. Impugning an innocent man via the presidential megaphone is itself a blatant abuse of power, and the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the case “without prejudice” — a legal term meaning they could re-file charges at a later date — is another sign that the abuses are ongoing (Hearn’s legal team has countered this by filing a motion to ensure the charges cannot be revived).

Whether Donald Trump is delusional or simply sticking to his own self-absolving script of an antifa anti-Reflecting Pool jihad, this single incident of vindictive and bullying behavior would likely have been a crippling scandal for any previous presidency. The breadth of his lies and his obsessive behavior should not blind us to the underlying menace of a president who would imprison an innocent man to cover up his own incompetence.

Subscribe now

American democracy has been widely seen as embattled for the last 10 years or so, but the factions seeking to undermine or replace it have been active for many decades.

We’ve covered the political groups who have been at work in this regard here on Theory of Change, but it’s also the case that many business leaders have become increasingly radicalized to view democracy as a threat to business — even though the social democratic nations of Europe have combined vigorous capitalism with strong democracy for decades without either one destroying the other.

Corporate interests have always sought influence within governments, but since the 1970s or so, right-wing business leaders have banded together to leverage the federal judiciary to evade public accountability and democratic governance, largely by making conduct that was once criminal perfectly legal.

Joining the show to talk about how this happened and how it works is Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, she’s a professor of law at Stetson University and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. She’s also the author of Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, which is the basis of our discussion today.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

05:34 — Red-baiting as a PR strategy against holding businesses accountable

13:55 — Buckley versus Valeo and the beginning of corporate influence in federal campaigns

24:53 — Nixon and the right’s obsession with controlliong federal courts

28:57 — Bribery and the post-Buckley campaign finance regime

33:58 — Trump and the Roberts court’s almost total refusal to restrain executive power

38:03 — Poll: Democrats strongly dislike the Supreme Court, but they don’t think it has too much power

43:58 — The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”

49:34 — Reform ideas for SCOTUS

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: I always like to start with the historical angle. And your book obviously is focusing on the role of corporations in kind of hijacking American democracy. But you do talk about how this is not the relatively recent trend that I think a lot of people might suppose that it is, and it goes all the way back to World War II in some sense, right?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Indeed. I have a whole chapter about what I consider the worst campaign finance story I’ve ever heard. And it goes something like this. We have the scene opens on a political party, and this particular political party is broke. And you could sort of ask the question, what do you do if you’re a political party that has no resources?

And what lots of political parties do in this situation is they ask the richest people in their society for money, which is exactly what this political party did. They have a secret meeting. They invite titans of industry to be there. Leaders from the political party are there and give speeches, and the speeches are pretty disturbing.

One leader says, I think something along the lines like, “Business cannot survive in a democracy.” and there were other anti-small D democratic statements that were said at this meeting. And the result of this was the businessmen opened their coffers of their corporations and gave lavishly to this political party, saving it from financial ruin.

This happened in 1933. The party I’m talking about is the Nazi political party in Germany, [00:04:00] and they literally were bailed out by German industrialists.

SHEFFIELD: They were, and it is uncanny and, unfortunate the parallels that we are seeing in the rhetoric of people like Peter Thiel nowadays who, I mean, literally, wrote a whole essay arguing that, business freedom and democracy are incompatible. And also the, voting rights of women as well are not compatible with business freedom.

So it’s a very long and unfortunate series of viewpoints that never really went away, it seems like.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I found when I was doing the Nazi chapter is it wasn’t just German companies that supported the Nazis. There were plenty of American companies and American businessmen who supported the Nazis as well, including Henry Ford. Henry Ford was a rampant anti-Semite and he funded a young Hitler.

They were big fans of each other. I think Henry Ford is the only American who’s named in “Mein Kampf.” And I think Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford on his desk. So they were sort of thick as thieves. But that is also one of the ways that the Nazi party thrived, is not only did they have German corporations backing them, they had American corporations backing them too

Red-baiting as a PR strategy against holding businesses accountable

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, this is kind of a trend that ki- really does kind of resurface, I mean, just since the emergence of, democratic movements really beginning all the way back to the 19th century, you really saw it. And it was something that, you know, less, you know not overtly fascistic people like Milton Friedman [00:06:00] even were in, were into this kind of rhetoric.

He in fact had an argument that he would often make. He called it the “suicidal impulse of the business community,” in which he argued that business leaders who support government interventions ultimately are going to make it so that their, country becomes communist and that their business will be criminalized and nationalized or, some variation of that.

And obviously it’s not true because, we have a pretty long record of many countries around the world in which they have social democracy policies and capitalism is not a criminal offense. But there’s a, there’s... It seems to be an innate appeal to at least some people with a lot of money, it seems like.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Red-baiting has a long tradition. You scare people by saying that the communists are coming, and then you get them to do things that they maybe otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a pretty long and sordid history of that type of behavior in the American context as well

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, even less kind of overtly sensorial would be, like, ‘cause the other-- another thing that Friedman was very big on was stopping businesses from having corporate social responsibility policies. And, that’s been a continuous line of attack that we see now even, with the anti-DEI movements where they’re a lot of far-right people are trying to say that y- there can’t be any efforts to have diversity in business, and that’s wrong and it’s gonna ruin business, et cetera, et cetera.

Even though, in a lot of these policies actually end up promoting very often, disadvantaged rural white people and because, they’re part of diversity, in fact. And so, it’s-- it-- there, there’s a pretty consistent through line. I think that’s one of the things that you talk about in the book, like it’s-- you just-- there’s a lot of...[00:08:00]

The argumentation’s there, the history is there, and the people are there, right?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: The, the fight over ESG is one of the things that I think has been happening in the background over the past decade. It’s just been happening at shareholder meetings. And I think there are, weird caricatures of what a shareholder is. But if you have a 401, chances are part of that retirement account is invested in normal blue-chip companies.

And it all depends on whether you’re invested directly or whether you’re invested through mutual funds, how much voting ability you have as a shareholder. But ultimately, there are just everyday people whose retirement is in the stock market, which means they have a say about how these companies are going to be run.

And so under the securities laws publicly traded companies allow for what are known as shareholder proposals. And shareholder proposals are literally from shareholders, and they are trying to get their fellow shareholders to vote on something. And one of the things that shareholders have brought to one another over the past decade are what is known as ESG, so environmental, social, and governance questions for the corporation.

And this is one of the ways that shar-shareholders have demanded more transparency around corporate political spending. So one of the big watershed moments in I think the life of the country as well as my own, was the 2010 Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. This is the decision where the Supreme Court said that corporations were [00:10:00] constitutionally allowed to spend as much money as they wanted in any American election, whether it’s local, state, or federal.

And that was a huge change because before that corporations were barred from spending corporate treasury funds directly on US elections at the federal level and in half of the states. And that decision got rid of all of those protections all at once. and that allows corporations to spend more freely and to spend money that as Justice Brandeis would say, is other people’s money.

So the money that’s in a corporation is in part money from shareholders who’ve invested in that corporation. It is not really just the money of the CEO, for example, or the, top corporate management. They are entrusted with the, those funds by investors who don’t want to spend all day running a company.

But it, at the end of the day, it is not their money. So shareholders have used these parts of the securities laws to communicate with one another. And so one of the things you’ve seen is shareholder proposals on supply chain, trying to make sure that there aren’t conflict minerals in products, that there is better human rights for workers, and more recently, that there’s more transparency of corporate political spending

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. one of the other changes I think also that had been kind of pushed through in this regard was the, shifting of the corporate priority from kind of the longer term, sustainability of the business toward a more, quarter-focused instantaneous profit-taking, motive.

And that’s been severely [00:12:00] destabilizing for American politics, I would say, and also for a lot of corporate governance. I mean, like there is a terrible irony in that as a lot of these businesses have become more politicized and right-wing over time they actually are doing the very same things that they’re that they, condemned earlier.

The, activist, right-wing investors had condemned earlier. They were saying, “we don’t, we don’t wanna have environmental sustainability. We don’t wanna have, any of these other things. But we do wanna have political sustainability for our, ideology and for, crony capitalism and things like that.”

So it’s-- There’s, an unfortunate irony, but it’s also destabilized a lot of corporations as well and made it so they don’t invest in things like training for employees or have a more long-term view of their place within the market and the market itself, I would say. What do you think?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I mean, I think part of why you see such virulent, attacks on ESG is concern that these shareholders were actually making a difference. And so there are all these different efforts to hem that in and to stop it and to vilify it. And, the anti-DEI aspect is just one line of trying to get at this what if, you’re more regressive, what you perceive as a problem, but the problem that they perceive is shareholders actually caring about what their corporations are up to and saying something.

So I’m a big fan of using the tools that are available to us and using shareholder proposals to raise these social issues and to encourage corporations to do better, I think should only be encouraged

Buckley versus Valeo and the beginning of corporate influence in federal campaigns

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, we’re gonna circle back to Citizens [00:14:00] United in, a second here, but I think kind of the ruling that really did kind of kick off this corporatocracy within American politics was Buckley versus Valeo, and that’s a case that doesn’t... is not as infamous nowadays as, perhaps it should be.

So w- can you walk us through, what the law that was at stake there before and then what the case was and the ruling? And then we’ll go from there.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: I have to spend a lot of time with Buckley v. Valeo because it is the foundation of modern campaign finance law. So Buckley was a review of the Federal Election Campaign Act which was a post-Watergate reform. Watergate which is now 50 years behind us, was a crazy welter of crimes that happened during the Nixon administration, and specifically during the 1972 election when Nixon was up for re-election.

And I think he and his top aides just went completely bonkers making sure that he got re-elected. And so they just started breaking all sorts of laws, including the preexisting campaign finance laws. So Nixon set up this Committee to Re-elect the President, which has the awesome acronym CREEP. And CREEP was taking in huge amounts of donations from corporations during the 1972 election.

Now, the problem with that is that it broke the law. So there was a preexisting law from 1907 called the Tillman Act, and the Tillman Act makes it illegal then and now for corporations to give corporate treasury funds directly to federal candidates, and that is exactly what CREEP [00:16:00] was doing. It took in money from all sorts of corporations and every time they asked for one of those corporate donations, that was a crime, and every time that a corporation gave money to CREEP, that was a different crime.

And this embroiled all sorts of different people. So sort of famously, this is how George Steinbrenner the former owner of the Yankees, at that point he had not bought the team yet, but he was embroiled in one of these CREEP scandals because he was the head of a shipping company and the people at CREEP wanted money from him.

And Steinbrenner, to his credit, realized that this was illegal, so he tried to make it more legal by giving fake bonuses to people at his company and then directing those executives to give to CREEP. But that in itself is a crime ‘cause you’re just circumventing the corporate ban. And that’s how he ended up with a criminal conviction ‘cause he pleads to it instead of going through a criminal trial.

So people like that literally get criminally indicted and prosecuted most of the businessmen involved in funding CREEP actually are not prosecuted, which I think is a bit of a problem. I mean, it always strikes me that when you look at the list of the biggest donors to CREEP, almost all of those corporations still exist.

And I think that is very telling, that the very corporations who break the law during Watergate are still with us. And part of why they’re still with us is they didn’t have the book thrown at them generally. A- and they also had sort of this song and dance of, “the Nixon people were nuts.”

And, [00:18:00] I, have some sympathy for this view of things because the Nixon administration was a little bonkers. I mean, they really were breaking the law whenever they asked for these donations. And so from the point of view of some of these businessmen, they sold th- their version of events as we...

This was a shakedown. Like, “They were shaking us down for money, and we had no choice but to give it to them.” But I think on further examination, almost all of these businesses that gave to CREEP had something that they wanted. So, often it was approval of a corporate merger because that has to go throu- through the DOJ.

And there was also this very weird period with CREEP where The sitting attorney general, so John Mitchell, is, both the sitting attorney general and he is running CREEP. So he’s running the president’s reelection campaign while he is still attorney general, and that gave him enormous leverage. So, he really could demand these illegal contributions from people, in part because he was the gatekeeper of whether you were going to be prosecuted for something.

And I think he really abused that power. So fast-forward to the reason why Watergate is known as Watergate. So some of CREEP’s employees break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate building in ‘72, and they are caught and arrested. And it doesn’t take long for reporters and for prosecutors to realize that the trail doesn’t just stop with CREEP, it goes all the way to the White House.

And Nixon basically spends two years trying to cover up his involvement in Watergate, and there are congressional hearings [00:20:00] about all of this. And after those Watergate hearings, one out of four letters into Congress from the public demanded campaign finance reform. And Congress, to its credit, actually did something.

So they passed this Federal Election Campaign Act, otherwise known as FECA, and this was a huge change from the way that campaigns had been regulated before. So it had contribution limits, it had expenditure limits, it had public financing for presidential campaigns. It created the FEC, the Federal Election Commission and required disclosure of money in politics.

Almost as soon as the ink is dry on this new law, it is challenged in court, and that goes up to the Supreme Court, and that is what becomes Buckley versus Valeo. Now, the Supreme Court had dealt with the Nixon White House with- in many different cases. So they had dealt with Nixon with the Pentagon Papers case, and they had ruled against the Nixon administration, which was trying to stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers.

And they had also dealt with Nixon’s secret taping, and they had ruled that Nixon had to release his tapes And so I think court watchers might have thought, “Okay, we have this post-Watergate reform in FECA. It’s being reviewed by the courts, the same court that ruled against Nix- Nixon twice while he was president.

Maybe they will do the right thing when they are looking at this campaign finance reform.” And instead of ruling I think for democracy, instead they split a enormous amount of babies in the Buckley case. And so one of the [00:22:00] things they rule in Buckley is that expenditure limits are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

That means that you can’t have an expenditure limit basically on anyone who’s spending in politics. That is a huge gift to the ultra-wealthy because the way that this case was Done. It, didn’t really have to do with corporate political spending because corporate political spending was still and is illegal under the Tillman Act.

But what this really freed was the, your friendly neighborhood billionaire because it said, I mean, what the, bumper sticker misreading of Buckley is that money is speech. It never actually says that in the case. It gets very close to saying that. It basically said that you need money to communicate in a country as large as ours, which is true.

If you’re running a presidential campaign and you’re trying to reach 50 states, you’re going to need money to do some communication to voters. But you sort of take that grain of truth and the Supreme Court, I think, has distorted that out of all reason. And so the court upholds contribution limits.

They uphold disclosure. They uphold the presidential public financing system. But because they rule that expenditures are un- expenditure limits are unconstitutional, that really empowers the wealthy to spend as much as they want to in American elections ever since 1976. The other lesser-known case which happens after Buckley is a case called Bellotti.

So Bellotti was a challenge to a restriction on [00:24:00] spending by corporations and banks, and it arose in an election where it was a ballot measure and the, First National Bank who’s a party in this case they challenged the law that said that a corporation couldn’t spend in basically a ballot initiative.

And the Supreme Court agreed with them and said that the restriction on corporations and banks spending in elections where all that was on the ballot was either a referendum or an initiative, that was also unconstitutional under the First Amendment. And so Bellotti created this First Amendment right for corporations to spend in politics, which they did not have before that case.

Nixon and the right’s obsession with controlling federal courts

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and also I think it’s worth pointing out that just quickly that the Buckley in Buckley versus Valeo was in fact James Buckley, the brother of William F. Buckley Jr. And that’s, it, that really did kind of, I think in a lot of ways, kind of reorient or begin reorienting, right-wing political movements toward the Supreme Court and trying to take it back over.

And you can see that, um, with regard to, w- the, Warren Court a- and the Burger Courts being, ano- anomalously quite liberal compared to all previous courts and subsequent courts. And so there was, there was this there were many protest movements in the country against the court, the Massive Resistance protests against civil rights rulings and, um, there were, for decades there was the, signs and people carrying around about a “impeach Earl Warren,” um, that they had argued that the court had, infringed upon the silent majority.

That was a, [00:26:00] common Nixon phrase as well. and so they, there, there was like a reorientation almost entirely of right-wing rhetoric and political strategizing to educate their, voters or people who agreed with them to understand that the court is something that we need to have power over.

And it became, a really persistent focus, um, ev- and, w- with Ronald Reagan as well, and, all the subsequent Republican presidents after him.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Describe the Supreme Court to my law students is often the presidency is the party and the Supreme Court is the hangover. And but with the Supreme Court, the hangover can last two decades because they’re appointed for life. No Supreme Court justice has ever been successfully impeached and removed, so they really are there for life.

Even if on paper they could be removed through the impeachment process, it’s never worked. It was only attempted once, and it, failed, and I think that set the precedent that we’re not gonna do this on a whim, which is probably good. You want the Supreme Court to have some independence from the political branches.

But the life tenure combined with increased life spans of, human beings means that we really are gonna get some very old justices who were appointed by a president, decades before, but they still have an enormous influence over the fate of the nation because, the Supreme Court is our final arbiter of what is constitutional and what is not

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and it wasn’t-- doesn’t seem to have been intended that way by the founders [00:28:00] either, but this is how it is right now. Or what do-- no, you-- what do

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I think when lifespans were a lot shorter, it’s... the stakes are lower. So if you really think that, So it’s my understanding that the reason why the retirement age was once set at 65 is that most people died around that age. And so there was an, anticipation that you could have, you know, social security for people around age 65, in part because by, 69 they’d be dead.

And I think part of the same strain that you see over the social security system, which is now has to deal with like lots and lots of people living to 100 our court system have a very similar problem. Like we have lifetime appointments where you would’ve had someone there for maybe 15 years and now you have them there for 30 to 40 years

Bribery and the post-Buckley campaign finance regime

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. True. I think so. And yeah, and I, and that’s a separate discussion in terms of, like the judicial supremacy, so we don’t have to get into that. But I do wanna kind of r- bring it back to the, implications of Buckley versus Valeo because, one of the other things that you talk about in your book is, essentially one could say that corporate bribery of politicians effectively could you could say that it became legal in a lot of different ways.

And that’s not exactly what you say in there, but walk us through what you mean when you, refer to corporate bribery.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: I, think there’s bribery and then there’s the campaign finance system, which are distinct. And I understand the impulse to conflate the two. However under Supreme Court precedent and our laws, most candidates for office in the United [00:30:00] States have to run by raising money from other people.

And so we have this privately financed campaign finance system which most candidates have to use. Now, there are very limited opportunities for public financing in places like New York City and certain states, but that is the exception and not the rule. The other way you can avoid the campaign finance system is being independently wealthy yourself.

So you can have the Mike Bloombergs of the world who, I think he once turned in, a campaign finance report when he was running for mayor that simply said, “I spent $100 million on my own re-election.” And that’s all it said, and that’s all it needed to say because it was truthful. He had self-financed his campaign, and so he had the luxury of not asking other people for money.

But everyone else basically does have, have to ask for campaign contributions when they’re running for an office in the United States. So all of that, when you ask someone for a lawful donation and they give it to you, I do not consider that bribery There is bribery that happens with certain corporations who, much like, the Nixon administration and CREEP, just go far beyond the campaign finance system to literally give a politician a bribe.

And one of the ways you can think about the distinction is with a bribe, the money tends to go directly to the candidate’s personal bank account or something that they control. And that is different than giving to a lawful campaign. With a lawful campaign, there are personal use restrictions. You are not allowed to use campaign finance dollars [00:32:00] to enrich your own lifestyle.

That is personal use, and that is illegal. When you actually take a bribe and you put it into your own bank account, as, say you’re the governor, that’s when I think it really is bribery. And there are cases of that in my book as well. So there was this, guy named Larry Householder. He was the speaker of the house in Ohio, and there was this company called FirstEnergy, and they wanted a bailout at taxpayer expense of some of their nuclear facilities.

And they knew in order to do that, they needed legislation to get through the, Ohio legislature. And so they literally bribed him and other individuals in Ohio to get that legislation passed. and the sad part of the story is the legislation did pass. It w- it did become law. The, voters in Ohio did have to foot the bill for bailing out these crappy nuclear facilities that FirstEnergy owned.

And so I think that’s where things get very distorted, but part of that story of how they did that was actually perfectly legal. So the perfectly legal part of it is, I think, something we can blame on Citizens United. So Citizens United, again, allows corporations to spend in politics. So to the extent that FirstEnergy was simply buying political ads in the Ohio elections, that’s the legal part.

The illegal part was when they were literally giving checks to Larry Householder, and he was depositing them in his own bank account. That’s where you get to real corporate bribery.

Trump and the Roberts court’s almost total refusal to restrain executive power

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:34:00] and we keep unfortunately seeing a lot more of that. And Trump has really kind of, I mean, just taken that off completely beyond what anyone, even before this, even his first term, really imagined. Like overtly saying, with the Supreme Court’s permission basically, that the E- Emoluments Clause and anti-bribery laws, they don’t apply to him because he’s the chief executive.

That seems to me effectively what...

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Like, not exactly.

SHEFFIELD: go, go ahead then. You tell, me how I, said that wrong

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Okay. So, the emoluments clause cases I think were deeply, disappointing, For those of us who cared about them so there are two emoluments clauses in the US Constitution. One is the foreign emoluments clause, which essentially says you can’t take gifts from a foreign prince. And then there’s a domestic emoluments clause, which says that the president’s salary can’t be augmented by either the federal government or the 50 states.

And arguably Trump was in violation of both of those clauses during his first term because of funds that went through his businesses. Now, I think unfortunately the Supreme Court didn’t take this threat seriously enough. So there were multiple lawsuits to enforce the emoluments clauses.

One was brought by members of Congress in the minority, so by the demo- by Democratic representatives and senators. And when that case gets to the Supreme Court essentially says, “you guys don’t have standing to bring this lawsuit.” And this is not completely off the wall for the Supreme [00:36:00] Court and for the federal judiciary.

The federal judiciary is very stingy about recognizing what would otherwise be legislative branch standing to bring federal lawsuits. And the idea behind being stingy about doing this actually makes constitutional sense. The, the legislature has its own branch of government. If they wanna change something, they can literally make new laws and they are not powerless.

And so the courts have always been very hesitant to let them argue about what is sometimes called a political question. Like there’s a whole political questions doctrine. Like we wanna keep the political branches doing what they wanna do, like in their own spheres. We’re not going to let them also do this in the courts.

So that was one missed opportunity to opine on the merits of the emoluments clause issue. And then there were other lawsuits that were brought essentially by states and by competitors of the Trump organization, and those are mooted out by the Supreme Court because by the time that those get up to the Supreme Court Trump has left office and the Supreme Court basically says there’s no b- no longer a case or controversy here.

And so they don’t rule on those emoluments cases, which I think had stronger standing arguments than the congressional plaintiffs. But nonetheless, the long and the short of all of this is we didn’t get definitive rulings on the constitutionality of the two emoluments clauses as applied to a business president in the first term.

And I think that explains some of the [00:38:00] behavior that we’re seeing in term two

Poll: Democrats strongly dislike the Supreme Court, but they don’t think it has too much power

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Okay. I think I agree with that, but it’s also like he, he’s basically, with their permission, able to relabel anything that he does as an executive function. Um, that’s essentially what he tries to do. And, like we’ll see if he can get away with it in terms of the ... ‘Cause people are still suing for some of these things that he’s doing.

But I don’t know. I ... Not, not looking so good for the plaintiffs as far as I can tell. Back to the idea though of the Citizens United, within this environment that they’ve created. It really has I, I think that there’s an unfortunate gap between public awareness of just how radical that ruling was and what it actually enables. ‘Cause most people would not want to have anything remotely close to this in, and be the campaign finance law. An Example of this that came out recently, the Pew Research Center, they have a, I guess it’s about every two years or three, they do something they call their Political Typologies Report.

And they ask tens of thousands of people a series of, really important questions that don’t get asked as much as they should be in polling. and one of the questions that they ask people, or they ask several, p- questions about the Supreme Court, and one of them is, what is the political ideology of the Supreme Court?

And one of the... And what they found was that there’s a significant, like the biggest plurality group of Democrats, wh- which they called the Order and Opportunity Left, which is effectively kind of people who are not quite as engaged in politics and have a more socially conservative but socially fiscally liberal viewpoint.

Only 45% of them knew that the Supreme Court was [00:40:00] conservative. And among Democrats as a whole, or like Democratic leaners, we’ll say that not even 50% believed that the Supreme Court had too much power. And this despite the fact that the left-leaning groups gave the Supreme Court a 22% approval rating.

So it’s like in a large way, the, right-wing political figures, they, educated their voters, extensively, repeatedly, and like that was kind of the s- one of the central messages of Trump in 2016 was, “if you don’t like me, you should get over it because I’ll give you a Supreme Court that will do what you want.”

And, doesn’t seem like that people on the left have succeeded as much in mirroring that. What do you, think about that? I know that’s a lot.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: That is a lot. So I mean, the Supreme Court is supposed to be independent of the two political branches. And depending on, where you take your snapshot in time, you have had justices who start farther to the left and migrate to the right while they are justices. And you’ve also had the exact opposite, where someone who is more conservative, I think of someone like Souter, he was not a raging liberal when he started, but, in the strange world that is the Supreme Court, he becomes like a reliable liberal vote.

So... And I think part of the reaction to the behavior of Justice Souter and, say Justice O’Connor, who also sort of ended up, I think, more progressive in her later years than she started that I think upped the ante for those who really [00:42:00] wanted a more conservative, reliably pro-business Supreme Court.

And so I think there was a lot more put into vetting Supreme Court justices, supporting their nominations to the court. It has become its own little mini industry of trying to place particular people with a particular ideology on the Supreme Court, and that effort, I think, is reflected in the 6-3 split that we have today, where it’s, and it is completely mapped to the party of the president that appointed them. This has not always been true. So for example, Justice Stevens had been appointed by a Republican, but by the end of his life was voting reliably with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Now, um, the six who are voting reliably for conservative, and pro-business stances were all Republican appointees.

So it, we might have a recency bias that this Supreme Court looks incredibly partisan, but it has not always been that way, even in the relatively recent past.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s true. And I mean, it, changed though because of people like McConnell and various people in the Federalist Society of, trying to reorient sort of right-leaning opinion. I think that there was some of that and also the kind of consensus after World War II, the kind of global consensus of things in favor of social democracy that kind of leached into that as well.

And there was... I don’t know. I mean, anyway, but that’s perhaps a different podcast episode.

The Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”

SHEFFIELD: [00:44:00] so one of the other areas that I think, has really enshrined a lot of corporate power was the implementation of the shadow docket by the court. It was not something that really was that common in the past for the court.

So let’s talk about that a bit. So for people who don’t, know what that is, can you explain it and then what, exactly people, they’re using it for nowadays?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: So I’m not a huge fan of the phrase shadow docket because it, it’s something that you could look up. I mean, I work on the issue of dark money in campaign finance, and with dark money, you really can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is completely secretive. The only way that you discover dark money is either through litigation or a leak if you get lucky.

But with the shadow docket, it is the procedures docket of the Supreme Court, and this is where emergency requests come into the court and usually on procedural matters. Like, are you going to stay what a lower court has done, or are you going to allow what a lower court has done? Now, that is a lot of lawyerly gobbledygook for who’s winning right now.

And I think the pernicious part of the shadow docket is the Supreme Court has been making nearly in some cases election altering decisions because part of what gets litigated today is which congressional map are we using? Which campaign finance laws are we enforcing? All of these different rules that have to do with the mechanics of democracy, those are often up at the shadow docket asking for an emergency ruling on what [00:46:00] some lower court has done.

Now, what I dislike about the shadow docket is it’s typically decided very quickly without full briefing, without a full record in some cases, and without oral argument. And so you’re making huge decisions, the Supreme Court is, without the benefit of all of that information, both factual and legal. And so I think the chances for grave mistakes with such a procedure is astronomical.

And because, these tend to come up on an emergency basis, that is usually not the Supreme Court deciding something on the merits. So they’re only deciding stay, not stay, of the lower court decision, for example, which is purely procedural. It’s basically do you keep the status quo ante in place with a particular legal challenge or not?

And so in some ways it is all like so cut and dry and boring. But when you sort of look underneath that, I mean, one example of this is congressional maps, which have been the source of enormous, litigation over the past few decades. And usually the political party that controls their legislature also controls the drawing of these maps.

And so what lots of legislatures have done over the years is they will draw a map that just puts their party back in power. And there used to be more checks on that because of the Voting Rights Act and a- and other con- constitutional doctrines that allowed you to challenge some of these maps as violating equal [00:48:00] protection And, but the instinct of lawmakers to make maps that are good for their own political party is so intense that often they will do it even if they think it breaks the law.

And you, run up to the Supreme Court if you win a case below that allows you to keep that bad map in place, and if the Supreme Court agrees with you on the shadow docket, then that map is going to be used for the next two years. Because typically that’s how long litigation is going to take to round trip back to the Supreme Court.

So, what I least like about the shadow docket, besides the you don’t have a full record, you don’t have full briefing, you don’t have oral argument, is it can reward really bad actors two years at a time. And even if when you get back up to the Supreme Court, they finally make the ruling that was more constitutionally dictated and they’re like, “no, that map has got to go.”

Elections have already been held using that perfectly illegal map but voters were trapped in it. So I think there are huge implications for how the shadow do- sha- how the shadow docket is used and/or abused, especially in the context of democracy.

Reform ideas for SCOTUS

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, at the end of the book, you do talk about some reform ideas that people have been proposing, and you discuss your, views on them. But one of them that you don’t talk about and I did wanna touch about it and why you don’t like it, is the idea of court packing.

So what is it, and what is wrong with it in your view?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: The most famous attempt at court packing [00:50:00] was done by FDR. He was hitting a Supreme Court which had these justices which he named like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And the reason he gave them this negative name is they kept on voting down his New Deal reforms. And so he threatened to pack the court so that he would keep appointing justices until he had enough justices to actually uphold the New Deal And there’s a lot of scholarly debate about whether this mere threat of court packing changed the opinion of the justices.

But shortly thereafter, there is what is known as the switch in time to save nine. And the justices suddenly, especially one of them in particular suddenly switches sides and upholds his New Deal reforms. And so it, goes from being a five-four court one way to being a five-four court the other way.

And they actually uphold s- many of the New Deal pieces of legislation. Now, I think part of why scholars debate whether the threat of court packing changed that behavior is that threat of court packing didn’t happen alone. What also happened was Roosevelt is reelected and the justices are no fools.

They know that means he has four more years of appointments, so whether he adds new seats to the court or not, he’s going to have an enormous influence on who their new colleagues are. So whether it’s just knowing he had that appointment power or it was his threat to pack the court, they do change their voting [00:52:00] behavior.

But we’re-- it’s, hard to pin down exactly why. And the other thing is that in its own time, there was huge resistance to packing the court because it made the court look like it would be the president’s plaything which I think is not a constitutionally great place to be either. As I, I think I alluded to earlier, the Supreme Court was designed to be independent of the political branches.

That’s why they have life tenure in the first place. So they can be-- They can make hard decisions that are not politically popular and be faithful to the Constitution So I worry about that perception that if you pack the court, that you will have lost some of the independence of the court itself and some of its legitimacy in the eyes of the general public.

So I go back to Alexander Hamilton that the court is the least dangerous branch because it lacks the sword or the purse. And it really relies on all of us thinking of it as a legitimate source of law. And when you lose that, the game really is all over. Now, I get the frustration with this court especially in the last couple of terms.

They have shown so little respect for their own precedent and that is deeply disturbing from a rule of law point of view. But I’m not sure that, adding, say it’s three more seats is going to solve that. And the other thing that I worry about is just the tit for tat. So if the Dems when they are-- have the presidency add three more seats then I’d imagine the Republican president that follows will add [00:54:00] four, and it will create sort of a large and unwieldy Supreme Court, which could create rulings that are even less clear than the ones we get today.

So one of the things that is really a challenge as someone who has to teach constitutional law is often there isn’t a clear five-four on these decisions. It’s really three-three-three, four-one-four, and so you literally have to parse words and decisions that do not agree with one another to try to figure out what the law is on any given constitutional subject.

And that is also bad for the rule of law, because if it’s not clear what the law is, that, I think, invites all sorts of coloring in the gray for unscrupulous lawyers everywhere. So what I would love is a Supreme Court that is a lot more coheres- clear and cohesive in their decisions, even when I disagree with them, if it’s clear what the rule is.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, you also are in favor of several other reforms that court reform advocates are favoring. So, let’s talk about some of those.

You obviously like the idea of term limits and rules on justices, because right now they, have no ethics rules governing their behavior, and that’s a big problem

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yes. It-- And I have to be pretty hypercritical of John Roberts and his leadership at the court on this issue. He put out... So, I have to give hats off to ProPublica for asking really basic questions about our complement of sitting [00:56:00] justices. I think the most basic question they asked which the press probably should have asked a long time ago, is how are the justices spending their summers and who is paying for it?

And when they asked that simple question they got these just crazy revelations of the justices having, these junkets with individuals who have matters in front of the court, maybe not directly, but definitely indirectly. And that, I think, has contributed to the public’s distrust of the Supreme Court.

And Chief Justice Roberts put together this non-binding ethics code for them, and the biggest problem w- I think with that sentence is the non-binding part of it. So I understand that it’s very difficult to have rules that apply to the justices because they literally are the ones who are the final word on what the law is, but they can’t be a law unto themselves.

And so I think they could still get their ethical ducks in a row if they want to. I think the real question is do they want to? Because the more that they act like the law doesn’t apply to them, I think the more you’re going to get more sort of radical reforms imposed on the court, which could themselves be damaging to the long-term sustainability of constitutionalism and respect for the rule of law.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and also you are in favor of term limits for the justices. Let’s talk about that, or judges in general. Yeah.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Yeah. I think the frailty of the human mind definitely is something to be [00:58:00] concerned about if you can live to be 90 or 100. And while I’m sure there are some perfectly sentient 90-year-olds and perfectly sentient s- centenarians the risk that someone who has, suffered dementia or some other debilitating illness of the mind, who is nonetheless the final word on what law is...

I mean, we had this happen before. Like Justice Douglas, I think in his later years, was not all with it, and the other justices knew that. And so they basically agreed among themselves that they wouldn’t create five-person opinions where he was the deciding vote because they knew that was untrustworthy.

Now, that showed a lot of self-awareness on the part of the other justices, but I don’t think we can be lucky enough to rely on that in the future. I think there are two things that speak in favor of term limits for federal judges. One is the frailty of the human mind once you get very, old that you can lose your capacity to reason. And then the other is just the happenstance of which presidents get to make which appointments. If we could regul- regularize that a little bit so that every president gets one appointment to the Supreme Court, but not four, or, whatever the numbers we think are reasonable I think that would take some of the sheer panic and high stakes out of some of the Supreme Court nomination fights that we’ve been having.

I think part of why they have become so contentious is not [01:00:00] just that people have different views of ideologically of where the Supreme Court should end up. It’s that every time you nominate someone in their 50s, that person could be there for decades. So the stakes are much higher than if you thought, “Oh, they’ll only be there for a decade or, less.”

So I think having some sort of retirement age for federal judges would lessen the temperature on some of these fights that we’ve been having about the courts.

SHEFFIELD: there, I mean, There’s so much more we could discuss here, but we, both have things to do, and I don’t wanna burden the listener and the viewer too much here.

So if people want to keep up with your projects besides getting the book here what’s some of your advice? What, would you like them to check out?

TORRES-SPELLISCY: You can find my podcast, “Democracy and Destiny,” on wherever you get your podcasts. You can find my books wherever you buy your books. And then I’m over on Bluesky @profciara, so P-R-O-F-C-I-A-R-A. And I post frequently, not just about law, but a lot of birds and flowers, too

SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. sounds good. I encourage everybody to check that out. Thanks a lot for being here.

TORRES-SPELLISCY: Of course.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have an unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.

You can become a free or paid subscriber at patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on substack. If you’re watching on YouTube, please click the and subscribe button to get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot for your [01:02:00] support and I’ll see you next time.

Subscribe now

Federal agents’ rapid-fire killing of two unarmed immigrants this month — both slain in the space of a week, and neither the intended target of the precipitating ICE operations — has created unfathomable tragedies for the victims and their families. The shooting deaths of Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston have inflicted sorrow and trauma on their friends and loved ones; Guerrero had a wife and young daughter, while Araujo leaves behind a wife and three adult sons. The sheer human pain and suffering of these unnecessary deaths must remain part of the larger public discussion of what happened and how to stop it from happening again.

Affirming the sanctity of all human life, and empathizing with the victims, is particularly important in these cases, and the numerous other federal killings of immigrants. This is because such deaths are ultimately rooted in the Trump administration’s effort to dehumanize the millions of undocumented immigrants who currently make their lives within the United States. They have done so by calling them rapists and murderers; by claiming they eat the pets of good citizens; by the use of reductionist, authoritarian language (“vermin”); by saying that they are vectors of disease and chaos within the U.S.

So these individual tragedies are at the same time fragments of a titanic political and social conflict whose stakes for the United States are measured in blood spilled, freedoms abrogated, and social cohesion frayed to the breaking point. The stakes are nothing less than the question of who belongs in this country, and who should ultimately count as a real American. For years now, Trump and his MAGA allies have not only driven hard to dehumanize immigrants, but to cast them as outright enemies of America. Characterizing them as an invading army that seeks to replace white Americans with brown-skinned interlopers, they have all but guaranteed that the poorly-trained and MAGA-sympathetic agents of our immigration agencies view them with maximum hostility.

Indeed, since the start of Trump’s current term in office, immigration agents have shot 23 people; six were killed, including three U.S. citizens. Adding fuel to the fire, Trump and his advisors have signaled to immigration agents they are “above the law”, while also “recruiting people through nativist, often racist messaging,” as Radley Balko notes. So even as it’s appropriate that these killings shift the public spotlight anew towards the lawlessness and lack of qualifications of ICE and CBP agents, it’s equally important to understand the politicians, pundits, and underlying ideology that create the incentives for state murder.

Moreover, these were not simply crimes against the individual immigrants who paid with their lives, but also moral crimes against the United States and the American people: against the great majority’s belief in the rule of law, and the ability of those who go about their business peaceably to be free from arbitrary state violence. They are also moral crimes because they are manifestations of the Trump regime mobilizing the U.S. government, including agencies like ICE, into instruments of racial purification and state terror.

The message from the Trump administration is clear, whether or not Americans choose to hear it: the federal government considers all brown-skinned immigrants to be an existential threat to the country, with agents of the state authorized to kill them based on the mere perception of threat. They are not primarily enforcing the law, but rather a twisted vision of national purification based on racism, slander, and hatred. Such motivations render descriptions like “immigrant enforcement” or “mass deportations” only marginally sufficient as descriptors. This is ethnic cleansing on behalf of a radical white supremacist minority, obsessed with delusions of its own divinely-ordained status and soul-sick to the point of believing that anyone who doesn’t look like them must not be fully human.

This supposed threat, of course, has been amplified most consequentially by the president himself into a matter of existential conflict. And so it is no surprise that within a day of an apparent order by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to at least temporarily halt vehicle stops like the ones had preceded both recent killings, Donald Trump made personally clear that such stops would resume, posting on social media that, “The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job” and that “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

It’s not just that the president received pressure from MAGA personalities that he maintain the pace of deportations, and sensed political danger. The motivation is deeper, and deadlier, even as it’s difficult for decent Americans to stomach. Acts of violence are not just inevitable byproducts of a mass deportation regime carried out by poorly-trained ICE and CBP agents. Violence serves the underlying contention that immigrants collectively constitute an invading army, and individually can be considered as soldiers or terrorists within this army. To restrain the killings would be to undermine the inciting lie, and this the president and other MAGA enforcers cannot do, for it would risk the premise of their own claims to power: that they are protecting Americans from the unspeakable, subhuman horror of mass immigration. To treat immigrants as fully human, even if it did not instantly pop the bubble, might still open cracks and provoke questions as to who the real criminals are. By treating them as less than human, agents of the MAGA state hope to make it so.

It is worth noting that both of the recent ICE victims were working within the U.S. immigration framework to remain in the country. According to his father, Joan Guerrero was in the country legally, and worked as both a Door Dash driver and as a cleaner. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo lived in the U.S. for 35 years, raised three sons and built a business in the construction industry, and was seeking a way to remain in the country legally. This information is important for understanding the wider atrocity playing out across the United States, for trying to play by the rules could not save these two men from deadly injustice. And the fact that Araujo has three American-born sons also reminds us that the war on immigrants can’t be separated from a war on American citizens. Millions of people in the U.S. live in families that are a mix of documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and citizens.

As Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes reminds us, these shootings took place half a year after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota — shootings for which no federal agents have been brought to justice. In that time, the U.S. government has blatantly blocked and slow-walked efforts at investigation. The lack of accountability, and what amounts to obstruction of justice, aren’t simply a sign of a rogue agency or a sclerotic bureaucracy; rather, the cover-up of public executions reflects the corrupt desires of a lawless president. This Trump-approved lack of accountability has always been indistinguishable from a green light for immigration agents to resume their killings of immigrants and those who seek to protect them. His reaction to the two most recent shootings — to absolve ICE of any possible wrong and to insist agents continue with tactics that led to two killings in the space of a week — means that he is fully responsible for any future killings.

It feels grim to say so, but Democrats and others who oppose this regime should not make this assertion simply in the hope that they will change the policies that lead to such anti-immigrant violence — although with enough damage to his allies and to his own political standing, there is always some possibility the president might finally meaningfully restrain immigration enforcement. Rather, they should also do so in service of a larger project of exposing the irreducibly racist goals of the larger MAGA movement, with the aim of discrediting the politicians who serve its cause and, ultimately, their white supremacist ideology itself. Rather than haplessly suggest that with enough pressure, the president and his allies will change course, the emphasis should be to emphasize that the fundamental beliefs of Trump and his allies make state-level violence against immigrants inevitable, and that only the ejection of MAGA politicians from political office will bring peace and safety back to American streets.

With such a high-level effort setting the overall terms of the conflict with MAGA, a tandem attack on the lawlessness of ICE will be far more effective, both politically and practically. We will end with two recent examples: First, multiple news sources have reported that the apparent killer of Guerrero, an ICE officer named David Brouillette, has a history of violent behavior and mental health issues, including attacking women and physically abusing his teenage daughter. Brouillette needs to be held accountable for his shooting of Guerrero, but is also a vivid example of the bottom-of-the-barrel recruiting in which federal immigration agencies are engaging. And this is also where the hateful anti-immigrant ideology of the Trump administration becomes manifest in the world: openly hostile to the lives of immigrants, they recklessly recruit people who shouldn’t be allowed to own a firearm, much less work in anything remotely related to law enforcement. Many have already noted that Brouillette is likely just one of hundreds or thousands of similarly unqualified monsters filling out ICE’s and CBP’s ranks.

A second example: in the last few days, we have learned that FBI agents have received instructions that they “would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents.” As the New York Times goes on to observe, this “would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers.” There is little other way to read this move than as Trump regime encouragement of ICE impunity in the name of mass deportations. As much as any other recent event, such a move highlights the contempt with which this administration holds the lives of immigrants. Indeed, we can see here how the war on immigrants is leading not just to violence and cover-up, but to an assault on the rule of law itself, as the White House continues to do what it can to abet and cover up ICE offenses. With the White House determined to further accelerate its immigrant purge, even in the face of blatant abuses, Democrats must be sure to communicate to the American people that the mayhem will not stop until enough of us rise up against MAGA’s dark vision for America.

Subscribe now

Four months out from the critical November midterms, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address on Thursday night attempting to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections, repeating well-worn lies about the 2020 contest that he lost and claiming to have uncovered a sprawling Chinese plot to meddle in the voting process.

Trump, who has said his administration should “take over” US elections that are currently run by states, asserted in his speech that the American voting system was “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” by his political enemies and accused China of “illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files” in an effort to undermine him. Trump’s speech coincided with the declassification of intelligence purportedly revealing China’s “sinister” scheme to disrupt US elections as well as attempts by “members of the Deep State” to “suppress and downplay” the scheme.

Experts and critics of the president said his speech cherrypicked intelligence agency findings to concoct a false, self-serving narrative about the vulnerability of US elections and the need for legislation such as the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that Trump has obsessively worked to push through Congress.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that Trump “selectively declassified intelligence to try to rewrite the history of an election he lost.”

“Even his own document release does not support his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It confirms what we’ve long known: Foreign adversaries targeted our democracy, but there is no evidence they changed a single vote or altered the casting or counting of ballots,” said Krishnamoorthi. “President Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square. If he cared about election security, he wouldn’t be putting unqualified political loyalists in charge of our intelligence agencies or weakening the agencies responsible for protecting our elections from foreign threats.”

“Instead,” Krishnamoorthi added, “he’s reviving conspiracy theories about mail voting, pushing voter suppression, and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal takeover of our elections—all while ignoring the real challenges facing American families.”

During his speech, Trump lashed out at major TV news networks for declining to broadcast his speech live and in full, accusing media outlets of being “part of the plot” and calling for the “revocation” of NBC and ABC’s broadcast licenses.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump’s threat “insane.”

“At a time when millions of Americans are finding it harder to pay for groceries, housing, and healthcare, when the climate crisis is causing record heatwaves and forest fires, Donald Trump felt it appropriate tonight to spew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” said Sanders. “Pathetically, in true authoritarian fashion, he even threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC and NBC because they would not cover his speech.”

“All of us, regardless of our political views, must stand together against this dangerous president who is seeking to undermine our Constitution and our basic freedoms,” Sanders added.

Trump’s address cited “raw intelligence” that he said shows an attempt by China “to manufacture illegal ballots” for former President Joe Biden. The president claimed, without evidence, that the intelligence was maliciously “buried by rogue bureaucrats.”

But, as The Washington Post observed, “raw intelligence reports are often wrong, incomplete, or contradictory, and spy agencies rely on judgments by expert analysts to vet and piece together the information to make conclusions with different levels of confidence.”

“Officials in 2020 disagreed about whether China wanted Trump to lose and about whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him—a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report described consensus on the conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actors had tampered with any votes,” the Post noted. “The hundreds of pages of documents released online by the White House during Trump’s speech did not appear to support Trump’s contention that China interfered in the 2020 election to try to defeat him or that US intelligence officials deliberately hid information about Beijing’s intentions from him.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, characterized Trump’s speech as an attempt to divert public attention from his administration’s “catastrophic policy failures and plummeting approval ratings.”

“Trump is waging an illegal, unconstitutional, and utterly pointless war that continues to put American and Iranian lives in jeopardy and drive up gas prices. Corporations are setting prices out of reach for people being paid too little,” said Weissman. “Trump rammed through tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting healthcare and food assistance for millions and millions of people. An out-of-control paramilitary force is kidnapping people off our streets and killing them at shocking rates. Trump’s delusional rantings tonight are a transparent effort to distract from these realities.”

Living United for Change in Arizona, a pro-democracy organization, warned that “Trump is trying to end our democracy in front of our very eyes.”

“Tonight Donald Trump stood before the nation and attempted to rewrite history, erase the will of the voters, and prepare the country for his next assault on American democracy,” the group said. “We must call this what it is. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he does not like, cancel the will of the people, and hold onto power by any means necessary.”

The article was first published by Common Dreams.

It’s easy for us to tell if someone is enjoying their meal or not. They lick their lips if they like it, grimace if they don’t.

Our new research, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows we might be able to read insects’ facial expressions in a similar way.

This offers potential insights into their inner lives – and builds on a wave of new work that is daring to suggest insects might have a form of consciousness.

Humans read each other’s expressions and body language all the time. By doing so, we can typically get a pretty accurate read on what another person is feeling.

Naturalist Charles Darwin was one of the first to discuss how facial expressions in other animals might also give us a read of their emotions.

Most dog owners would agree that dogs can communicate clearly through body language and expression when they are joyful, afraid or in pain. In mammals, at least, basic features of facial expressions associated with liking and wanting seem to be deeply conserved through evolution.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge and his colleagues pointed out just how eerily similar the facial expressions of newborn baby humans and baby rats are when they receive a surprising sweet treat versus a bitter one. In both species the former triggered lip licking, whereas the latter triggered a mouth gape of revulsion.

Based on a combination of careful neurobiological and behavioural studies, Berridge has convincingly argued that we can use facial expressions to read what a rat likes and dislikes, and he has used this as a measure to understand the neurobiology of liking in rats.

What about other animals with radically different brains, bodies and faces? What about, say, insects?

Getting a read on an insect’s inner life

Insects have a hard exoskeleton. Their faces are impassive masks, but bumblebees do have highly mobile mouth parts. They can extend their long glossa (the equivalent of a tongue) to reach deep into flowers to sip nectar.

In experiments performed at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, colleagues and I studied how bumblebees moved their glossa and other mouth parts when sampling different tastes.

To a single bumblebee we offered a tiny droplet of sugar water from a pipette. The bee vigorously extended her glossa to drink the droplet, but even after she finished drinking and the pipette was taken away she kept extending and retracting her glossa into thin air – almost as if smacking her lips.

By stark contrast, when we offered the bee a droplet of dilute salty water she sampled it with her glossa, then backed away shaking her head and wiping her glossa as if in disgust.

Could these responses be simply innate reactions of the glossa to the different chemistry of sugar and salt?

To test this we changed the bee’s physiological state. We heated the bee to 40°C for a short time. While this didn’t harm the bee, it was equivalent to the bee being active on a hot day and caused her to become dehydrated.

Now when we offered the bee dilute salty water, rather than shaking her head and wiping her mouth, she drank thirstily and showed those glossa extensions.

This showed the glossa movements were not automatic responses to sugar and salt. Rather they had more to do with the bees’ physiological state. A dehydrated bee needs dilute salty water, and now when offered it she showed the glossa extension responses she would otherwise show to sweet sugar.

It’s somewhat like those oral rehydration electrolyte drinks. Most of the time they are bearable – just. But if you have just completed a long run and are dehydrated, they taste so much better.

In other experiments we directly manipulated the bees’ neurochemistry.

We found that if we treated bees with different neurochemicals we could change the glossa response to sugar. Bees treated with the neuromodulators octopamine and dopamine were more reactive to sugar, but did not show those post-drinking glossa protrusions to a sucrose drop.

However, bees treated with an endocannabinoid (a different neuromodulatory system that in mammals is related to mood, appetite and physiological regulation) showed enhanced post-drinking glossa protrusions, but were not more reactive to sugar.

This told us two things. First, the glossa protrusion is independent from a sugar reaction. Second, very specific changes in bee neurochemistry can enhance the glossa protrusion response.

A subjective inner state

Together these experiments showed that the glossa responses were subjective to the bee, related to her physiological state, and not simple reactions to chemicals.

This evidence suggests the bee’s responses to what it likes and dislikes are similar to those of humans and other mammals. At the very least, we can say that the bee’s responses gave us a read of her subjective inner physiological state.

Does our study tell us conclusively that a bee feels emotions like liking and disliking? No. But it does add to the body of work showing that insects have some sort of inner life and are more than mere reflex machines.

Now that we can read bees’ faces to get a read on their subjective state, we can do a lot more work to probe what the inner life of an insect is like.

Andrew Barron is a professor at the School of Natural Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

As November draws nearer, Democrats’ electoral prospects are looking very similar to how they were in 2018 before the party swept to victory in many congressional and statewide seats. 2028 is much further away, of course, but there is a very real possibility that Democrats could gain trifecta control of the presidency, Senate, and House.

If the recent past is any indicator though, in just two years’ time, voters will swing wildly in the opposite direction, handing control back to Republicans. American voters (and elsewhere) are clearly very dissatisfied with what political parties are offering them, but thus far, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have taken the message.

Public opinion surveys keep indicating that people want major societal reforms, including one from last September which found that 77 percent of American adults wanted major political changes, that included 24 percent saying they wanted “complete reform.”

Democrats are disadvantaged by the current political system, so it’s in both their ideological and electoral interest to change things.

But what would major changes look like? That is the project that Adam Gurri, my guest on today’s program. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, an online magazine has just put out a new book on this very topic. It’s an anthology of policy proposals and system reforms called The Reconstruction Papers, that is in a lot of ways similar to the Mandate for Leadership a book that’s more informally known as Project 2025, the collection of policy proposals that has become the centerpiece of the second Trump administration’s agenda.

The Reconstruction Papers has a lot of great and interesting ideas, and we get into several of them, but today’s discussion also focuses on the larger question of what liberalism is or should be, which as you might imagine, the publisher of Liberal Currents has thought about quite a bit.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:45 — Defining liberalism

11:21 — A liberal version of Project 2025?

16:22 — Liberalism must be able to take its own side

17:42 — Fixing federalism

26:19 — The importance of more than two parties

31:17 — Reforming the Senate and adding more states

40:01 — The vital importance of judicial reform to protect democracy

47:10 — Restraining the president

52:14 — Reforming higher education and promoting national service

59:22 — The importance of public mixing institutions

01:03:34 — Reclaiming national greatness from the far right

01:06:38 — Housing needs to be cheaper and more plentiful

Related Content

• As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive—and less successful electorally

• The economy has collapsed for the middle class, Democrats must admit this and act accordingly

• Anglo-American liberal elites have lost the ability to argue for their own principles

• Democrats get lots of bad advice, particularly the idea that most voters are ideological

• As Trump’s popularity has declined, Democrats’ polls are up, but not their brand-name, why?

• Keir Starmer is a cautionary tale for politicians who only want to play it safe

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 Adam Gurri. Hey, Adam. Welcome to Theory of Change.

ADAM GURRI: Thank you for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, good to have you. So this book, I think, is a very necessary one that you guys have put together. So let’s just first, just give us a kind of a brief overview of, what it is and why you’re doing it.

GURRI: Yeah, so Trump comes along and gives us a decade at this point of damaging our institutions and our norms and the things that make our society function. And there’s an impulse to just be reactive to that and talk about what was good about what was broken. We had the biggest publicly funded system of science in the world by a large margin.

We pr- we had a historic accomplishment in our higher education institutions. we had all these things that Trump is smashing to pieces and, oh, and, competent civil service and things like that. But [00:04:00] those things were not perfect before Trump came along. In fact, they were already in crisis and had been for decades.

Not like they were never great or, sort of like cutting edge at any point in their history. But by 2016, it was already time to, if not go back to the drawing board, at least seriously think about reform. Immigration, by the way, also one of those areas that we had like 20 years of very near reform passing and just not quite getting enough political will to do it.

And so the system itself just became an incredible mess and accumulated on itself to, to now we just have, essentially everything again is getting hit with a wrecking ball. So our idea is you don’t go back, you don’t repair. You say, “Well, in, even in 2016 if we were given the political will to build something much better than we had, what would we want?”

So this is-- the premise is if, enough people hate what Trump has done by 2028, we could potentially have a big enough Democratic trifecta of Democrats actually willing to do things that we could have our shot at actually fixing the public funding of, science, actually fixing the university system that was in chronic ill health for most of my lifetime and thi- things like that in, in a number of areas.

Es- essentially, conservatives spent a century wanting to kill the administrative state, and now in the second Trump term, they really are taking their shot. So it’s time for us to think about taking our shot too.

SHEFFIELD: And that’s right because I, mean, as you say in the introduction to the book that the United States was in many ways running just off of the inertia of an earlier time, and largely the, post-war World War II era and to a little extent maybe the, Lyndon Johnson.

O- otherwise there really wasn’t any large scale innovation or even thought of it of [00:06:00] new programs in any real meaningful way. I mean, I guess maybe the one exception might have been Obamacare, but right away they immediately, ruled out a public option, which is, was a huge mistake.

GURRI: Yeah. And I think Obama had ambitions of being an LBJ-like figure. It’s just obviously the politics were very different. First of all, LBJ himself came from the Senate, knew how to get votes. Second of all, the party system was completely different, completely incomparable to what Obama faced.

And just the politics of the country had shifted a lot. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and also I, think he also, and this is one of the, themes kind of throughout the book is that that Obama and probably most liberal institutional leaders they never had a conception of liberalism as an affirmative vision. They, saw it more as being the guardians of civic neutrality and creating a marketplace of ideas, and then not really offering any big transformative ideas.

And, he-- And in the post-Obama era people talked about it a lot but to the extent that there were things — And, they weren’t necessarily bad things, but, like, the, It was more along the lines of “Well, we’re going to invest, we’re going to invest money in, roads or, bridges or whatever,” and things like that, and not —

And maybe they did actually invest in, like, semiconductor things, but there was no effort to try to articulate a bigger vision of, “Well, this is what we’re doing, and this is why we believe it, and here’s specifically how we’re going to do it.” So you guys are kind of trying to do that here.

GURRI: Yeah, absolutely.

Defining liberalism

SHEFFIELD: Okay, so, so what is liberalism then in your conception here? I think we should talk about that.

GURRI: Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously it’s a family of ways of thinking about it. It’s individualistic, so it’s about individual freedom. It’s egalitarian, so it’s [00:08:00] taking individuals to be equals in the sense of moral equals and deserving equal dignity, deserving equal opportunity. There’s different ways of, formulating it, but for the purpose of this collection especially, it’s a pretty assertive vision.

It’s a vision that requires a willingness, a pol- political willingness to create the conditions for individuals to flourish and have freedom. So, Sama- Samantha Hancox-Lee, her-- the executive editor, her essay is sort of about what are liberal virtues. She talks about reason, like we’re cultivating actual individual reason, having the, courage to actually live un- under conditions of freedom because a lot of what reaction is, essentially a defensive crouch against the inherent dynamism of, a free society, right?

Like whether it’s a local NIMBY that doesn’t want anything new built that’s going to change the way that the neighborhood feels, or it’s anti-immigration politics that’s afraid about how that will change the character of the country over time culturally and, whatever. So, li- liberalism is about-- it’s, giving people the conditions in wh- under which to thrive as individuals and having that freedom.

But also it’s sort of an ethos of having the courage to actually live with the open society and, what that means and to, to seek to protect it against the ones that want to close it down.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and the idea though of, giving people the conditions in which they can exercise their freedom, I think that’s c- that kind of fell by the wayside dur- especially during neoliberalism.

GURRI: Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: that neoliberalism has, within your publication has, been something you guys have —

it’s been a persistent theme of trying to differentiate what you’re doing versus what the neoliberals are doing. So let’s talk about that.

GURRI: one thing that we want to recover, especially now, especially in the Trump second term, is that early [00:10:00] liberalism was very militant. And in fact, there is a militant liberalism throughout its entire history. When we had our fundraiser at the end of last year, Jamelle Bouie did a little promo for us, and he went through how liberalism is not just the, squishy institutionalists of today.

It’s also the people that destroyed monarchy and the people that abolished slavery and the people that fought fascism, built the military that fought fascism. So it’s, the, idea that it’s not just a neutral arbiter of different substantive goal, ideas of the good which is, like, a whole philosophical debate that I feel like gets conflated with more practical political things.

Political liberalism should never be neutral. Political liberals should always be very substantive in their goals and very aggressive in pursuing them in our perspective. And this, collection is an example of what we think because, the things we push are not politically easy to get, but-- And it’s not like we’re saying, “Okay, we’ll just give it to the next guy, and they’ll definitely do this.”

It’s more if we h- if, someone can create the political conditions, this is what we should be fighting for. We should have big, ambitious goals in mind, and we should fight for them

A liberal version of Project 2025?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, a common trope in the, liberal blogosphere since its inception was the idea that people think that only conservatives ha- or that conservatives have no agency.

And I don’t think that — I always think that was a wrong analysis, because really what it w- the passivity that was trying to diagnose was more that liberals thought that, or Democrats in general thought that, “Well, they won’t work with us, so what can we do?” Well, the answer is ha- should be, well, you work to get rid of them and replace them.

That’s the proper way of, dealing with intransigence rather than just simply saying, [00:12:00] “Well, we can’t do anything with them.” and, and s- and, that also, by the way, the idea of steamrolling the opposition, that is actually how the Republican Party thinks of political change. there was always that dichotomy between the, two sides, and having been, seen both from the inside, like, in a lot of ways, Democrats are more conservative than Republicans. Republicans, are full of radical reactionary ideas for change. And, one can obviously disagree with them, and one should.

But at least they think about transformation and how they would do it. They, don’t even necessarily talk to the public about it, but they talk about their cultural vision and their political ideological stance in a way that you just don’t see from most Democrats, it seems to me.

GURRI: Yeah Certainly. Also, I mean, part, of that is that in many ways, liberals had-- it was their game to lose for a long time. the New Deal consensus was pretty durable for a very long time. And conservatives as they exist now are sort of the product of an ideological insurgency, which is why they have that kind of attitude, right?

Whereas the established side felt that they could rest on their laurels a bit. They would win by simply preserving the status quo. Insurgents are always just throwing bombs, because they f- they feel, any, variability in the situation is going to increase their odds of success

SHEFFIELD: and so this is no longer the time for that. And so I guess perhaps one could say that in, in, some ways what you guys are trying to do here is a, liberal Project 2025. Is that, an accurate way of saying that?

GURRI: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because there’s actually something called Project 2029 or something, but they, seem to completely miss the point because they seem to be mostly [00:14:00] thinking in terms of something to campaign on which is not what we need to be doing. what we need to be doing is offering a governing philosophy for people that are actually in office.

There’s this idea from ACT UP of inside strategy versus outside strategy. Outside strategy is very broad, very high level, and it’s much more like campaigning, but it’s usually more protests. It’s mass politics. But then-- So, the in the case of ACT UP, it was draw attention to the AIDS crisis, for example.

But once you’ve drawn attention to it and you’ve, have outraged people about it, you have to have people that have conversations with the policymakers to say, “Okay, here’s what you do about the AIDS crisis.” And that’s not like the laundry list of specific things you do for a public health program aren’t necessarily what you are chanting at protests or in order to mobilize people, but you have to have both strategies.

And Project 2025 was absolutely an inside strategy thing. And the Reconstruction papers is, similar in that sense. We’re trying to influence the conversation among people who could potentially do this in the future. One of the key differences is Project 2025, other than like the obvious substantive difference in our goals, Project 2025 is very much aimed at helping establish a dictator-l-like presidency.

Even if it’s not an actual dictator, it’s, more or less if, if elections don’t go away or become meaningless, but Project 2025 was otherwise successful you would have like an elected dictator every four years, more or less because of how unconstrained they are. Whereas we don’t quite articulate it in, the collection itself, I think, though we have elsewhere.

For us, it’s very important to center Congress in, in, in radical changes because that actually has grounding in the larger democratic body, like small D. So, we, want to remake, the, Federalist system, for example, I did an essay on. It’s stuff that’s going to requi- Well, you, want to fix the court.[00:16:00]

Like it’s stuff that’s going to require actual legislation, which means you-- it’s a high bar of you have to actually have not just a president, but a trifecta in place that is willing to do these kinds of things. But that is when change has happened in the past, right? the New Deal most classically.

they they had their trifecta, and they, accomplished enormous things. So it’s, it is possible. It’s just rare.

Liberalism must be able to take its own side

SHEFFIELD: The other thing also that I think, you guys are, having a similarity Project 2025, is that w- in liberalism, as it became kind of hollowed out and non-ideological in many ways it also failed to understand the difference that you have to have-- Your policies have to be structured also to preserve and help your own coalition and preserve and, to foster the kind of civic culture that you want.

And so, where-- And so, like, th- there was this dissociation between sound policy, like good policy, and the culture that would elect and want that sound policy. The latter part, they lost almost all interest in ability to understand the need for that and how to generate it

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: governance.

it was — So it was something that happened as a result of the post-war consensus but they didn’t understand wh- how it happened and why, it was made, and, how people specifically did it. Like, it- this wasn’t a thing that just magically happened. It was through the work and planning of people

GURRI: Yeah, I agree with that

Fixing federalism

SHEFFIELD: yeah. And so, so that’s, and so that’s a big, point. And but, let’s — So to, to that end, though, let’s talk about some of the structural changes that are in the book that some of the authors, including yourself, are talking about. Well, I guess we can start with yours this idea of [00:18:00] fixing federalism.

what do you mean by that?

GURRI: Yeah. So I, I-- a few years ago, I wrote something on this, and the basic idea is that s- state governments are better than local governments, and that a lot of our problems in our country actually come down to local governments. This idea seems a little strange to s- be saying in 2026, frankly, when the, the biggest problem is actually the federal government.

But I still think there’s something to that. S- at the time, I was pretty pessimistic about the federal government playing much of a part in any shift there. Now, again, things, have changed so much that I think it’s necessary. It’s, again, it’s if we got the trifecta we wanted, this should be something that they push very hard.

And the way this would work is sort of three parts. Th- the first and most important part, which is the newest part from, my old essay, is guaranteeing the republican form of government, which the Constitution says we, we should do. But it’s thin on details, and that’s never really effectively been enforced.

Even something like the Voting Rights Act was couched s- more in terms of the 15th Amendment than the Guarantee Clause, which some previous I forget the court case, but they, deemed it non-justiciable. In my opinion, that should be used as the rationale for a law that’s just lays out in detail, here are the range of government forums a state can have and be considered the republican form of government.

And the, bare minimum change that they need to make from the current status quo across almost all of them is one of their legislative chambers needs to be proportional representation. Which I don’t-- we don’t have to go into the technical details of, but essentially, for people who don’t know, there are a few methods you can use to essentially guarantee that if 40%-- if, a party gets 40% of the votes, they get 40% of the legislative seats.

So you don’t have to worry about gerrymandering. That’s not, like, that, immediately [00:20:00] en- ends that, that race to the bottom. And you have at least-- and if, if, states went this direction, they would have at least one chamber that could not gerrymander their way into competitive authoritarianism.

It also says that if you keep a separately elected executive like, like the governor, it has to have some kind of runoff. So e- either a traditional runoff where there’s two rounds of voting and there’s just the top two that run against each other at the end so that someone gets a majority, or what people call ranked choice voting which is actually in political science called instant runoff because it’s the same logic.

S- again, so that you can avoid a situation where someone with substantially less than a majority takes the governor’s office, which is pretty powerful. And I offer another set of ranges, but the, bottom line, like, details aside, and they’re all in there is the federal government should be very prescriptive about what state government-- how state governments are allowed to organize themselves, and they should actually enforce that.

The second p-part, though, is, and th-th-- you know, if that’s the stick the carrot for state governments is one, administrative authority should be consolidated at the state level. So right now, t-to give an example, Texas has a law saying that localities can’t collect more than a certain amount of, rev tax- of revenue in fines because there’s this terrible incentive where people just fine-- localities that have a l- small tax base will just over-fine people in order to get some more money.

And Texas wants to put a stop to that. Localities just do it anyway, and Texas is very bad at actually enforcing it. If they wanted to enforce it, essentially the state attorney general would have to sue the locality and take them to state court and, like, go through that slow process. Whereas what I’m suggesting is, alternately, those localities should just be part of a state administrative body, and the attorney general or someone else in the state government could just look at the person who is breaking the state law and say, “You’re fired,” and replace them with someone who will be, who will actually follow that law.

[00:22:00] And the federal government can help facilitate this consolidation. But most, most-- and the main way they would do that, and th-this is the, third leg of the stool is by having fewer strings attached to block grants to states. Right now, we actually are less I would say that like Canada and Germany are better at fiscal federalism than we are.

Liberals and, progressives talk a lot about how in welfare, having a lot of compliance costs can make it so that people that are supposed to get their benefits don’t because it just becomes too difficult for them to. The compliance costs that the federal government puts on, for example, education funding to the states are so massive.

I mean, they dwarf anything comparable in welfare. When-- And th- this, goes back to LBJ, w- by the way. He-- they wanted to help create state departments of education, and they did. But like the lion’s share of what the work that those state departments of education would do would be compliance work rather than substantive education policy or administration.

So you don’t want that. We should have-- we should make-- we should have a more egalitarian fiscal federalism so that budgets per state resident, state budgets per state resident are a lot more equalized across states. And then the way-- the, enforcement mechanism for making sure that you’re not just giving lots of money to an evil, red state government or something is the Guarantee Clause action.

That making sure that whatever it is they are doing, it’s something they’re democratically accountable for in as responsive a way as we can make them be.

SHEFFIELD: So what does that mean though?

GURRI: the, the, when I was talking about the r- proportional representation. Basically, like, you can’t have a gov- y- trying to avoid the outcome where the federal government is giving a lot of few strings at, y- n- hardly any strings attached money to a state government that then gerrymanders its way to not being responsive to a majority of its voters

SHEFFIELD: [00:24:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Well, so, but how — Like, these are pretty big changes though. Like, it seems like people would have to be talked about. Like, this would have to be debated in public and presented. So, like, what would be the — How would you kind of justify these, changes to people? Especially the idea of changing state constitutions and allocations of seats and apportionments.

GURRI: I think that they’re making that easier for us than ever. With the gerrymandering fight that they kicked off this year, or, this, term I think it’s pretty, like, out in the open and ugly, and I don’t think anyone likes it, I mean, like, the p- whoever may potentially win it may like it in hindsight, but for the most part, I don’t think, I don’t think even the Republican side is particularly comfortable with the overall competition and race to the bottom that’s been created by it.

And there’s not necessarily a clear winner as a result. And national politicians are, you know-- it’s, the, pos- the national position of the party isn’t necessarily improved by it. There’s definitely, like, specific people that get screwed over. There’s not necessarily s- definite winners at the end of it.

So, and, and voters for the most part h-hate it, right? Like, they hate what’s go- what’s, being done. The r-Republicans Vir- in Virginia hate it. Dem-Democrats in Texas hate it. So I think a national program that says, “We have the means to make sure this never happens again,” and r- and sells it on that basis could, work.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so like saying you, you’re, going to ca- campaign on unrigging the system basically.

GURRI: Exactly. but you actually have a specific plan to do so. Like, everyone runs on unrigging the system, and then it’s just like some minor campaign finance reform or something. this actually, I think, the political science is very clear. You ac- you actually do-- If you actually do proportional representation in the legislature, and you actually have runoffs for the separately elected [00:26:00] executive and you’re not going to have a gerrymandering problem.

You’ll still have other problems, like it’s not going to-- Like, getting your institutions right doesn’t fix your politics. Like, it’s not, a cure-all. but one thing you’re not going to have is insulating yourself into power, by making it so that you can win even if you lose a majority of votes

The importance of more than two parties

SHEFFIELD: Well, and, it’s, the, idea of proportional representation, it also i- encourages more parties, and I think that’s, that has been probably the, biggest flaw of the American system and, why, I mean, it’s hasn’t really been copied too much anywhere else around the world because, people in other countries when, they looked at our, ideas, they’re like, “Well, why would we be forced into two parties?

That’s absurd.” and so — and it’s also really important too because the, two-party system, it does actually really discourage a lot of people from being interested in, in politics because they do feel like, “Well, I don’t really align with either party.” And then it also makes both of the major parties not really be coherent, at least if they’re not run by a, movement.

Like, that’s — I mean, the fundamental difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is that the Democratic Party is a traditional political party, whereas the Re- Republican Party is controlled by an ideological faction. And so when you have one party that’s explicitly ideological and then the other party that is not then the ideological party is the one who’s going to have the momentum.

And because it, that, because they actually want something and they can see how to get it.

GURRI: And your point about multi-partyism is good because, again, in theory, it would be Democrats that would be-- have to be the ones that would be pushing this. And the fact that they are pushing a system that would weaken the [00:28:00] Democratic hold on blue states, it’s like argument against self-interest. Like, it’s, it shows that they’re committed to actually democracy rather than the Democratic Party. And the-- I mean, that’s-- And then it’s a real question if, you can actually get Democrats that would want that. I mean, I would o- you know, I would hope given the stakes of what’s happened that you could.

But I, I do think that is the way out of a lot of this stuff

SHEFFIELD: Well, it is, and I th- yeah, having more parties is especially also important on the right side of the aisle because really what powered Trump to his presidential victories, it wasn’t that people, I mean, like Project 2025, Trump explicitly denied that he was connected to it, of course, even though his OMB director formerly and currently, Russell Vought, was the prime mover behind it.

So that was an obvious lie and people knew it at the time. But still, even if he had said he was, con- connected to it, it’s just not something people would’ve, really understood. But l- but, point being, though, let’s say they had m- like when you look at polls, so f- like for instance, an, a poll that, I find very interesting i- in the 2024 election, it was done by YouGov, and what they found was that that 50 4%, I believe it was, of Trump supporters, or 57, something like that of his voters agreed with Kamala Harris on at, at least eight major issues.

And so, th- and that was his issue, like his, supporters, and then the general public was like 60s 60-plus percent with her. So, so the problem for Harris wasn’t that her positions were unpopular. Like this is the, a, serious flaw with the populist people that say, “Well, we can just win if we have popular positions.”

Well, no, the, you just tried that, and it didn’t work because people don’t vote on issues. They vote on, l- values. They vote on [00:30:00] how they see the larger system of governance and, what society should be doing for them and for itself. That’s what people want most people.

Like they, they’re not, they don’t care, they don’t even know about, the various policy minutias. And another example in like in 2010, Pew did a, survey of, they asked people so Joe Biden had been the vice president for 18 months by this time, and they asked people, “Who is the vice president?” 41% of adults could not name Joe Biden as the vice president. So like the idea that people are voting on policy is just, it’s absurd. It is an absurdly naive idea. And so, but what that means on the other hand is that, if you can construct a larger vision and, really sell well, then you can do a lot of things and people will give you wiggle room like that.

We saw that even with Trump, like, his policies became unpopular because people don’t like them, and we-- and, he should have known that, but still they were willing to give him a chance even though he And so that’s that’s something that people can look forward to, I think in some sense who are liberal.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I agree

Reforming the Senate and adding more states

SHEFFIELD: okay. So, but of course, one of the other issues or things you talk about is reforming the Senate as well. So what does that, mean?

GURRI: Yeah, that’s Kevin Elliott. It was interesting ‘cause I-- he-- when he-- we, wanted him to do some kind of, dem-- political reform piece, and he just-- he picked the Senate. And I was curious to see what he could do because, it’s, a difficult institution to change. But he made this a strong case that a lot —

I mean, there’s fundamental things that you can’t change without an amendment, right? The, apportionment, the staggered terms that make it so difficult. But a lot of what we think of that’s wrong with the Senate other than that are things that the Senate has chosen to do [00:32:00] itself.

And his, argument is, look, we just have to accept we have moved to a system that is polarized into two parties, and when each party gets their turn, they get to try their thing. And the Senate just even now, even as bad as Republicans are has not accepted that. It’s still, it’s still-- People think about the filibuster, but really it’s more like the unanimous consent component, where one senator can hold things up regardless of what the rest of his caucus or, the majority of the chamber wants because they do so much through unanimous consent, which is in-insane.

What-- it’s bad enough to be supermajoritarian. Like, doing anything on unanimity is just-- It’s incredible that the Senate has ever accomplished anything on that basis. And it only does because it sort of maintains this fiction that agreeing with the step of unanimous consent for things to move forward is not the same thing as agreeing to the actual legislation itself, despite the fact that it is clearly enabling it to potentially pass at some point.

So it’s, there, there are these games. The filibuster is the same way. Obviously, filibuster more famous or infamous. The fact that it, supposedly requires 60 senators to do anything. Well, what it really is, that there are not enough senators within the majority party who want to actually vote on the legislation that gets filibustered to do something about that.

When it-- Every, single time they actually feel strongly enough, they carve out new exceptions. The-- most recently that I’m aware of anyway Republicans voted to do an up or down vote for a huge slate of nominations that, that, Rep- that Democrats had been holding up for months at the end of last year, if I remember the timing right.

So, whenever they really care, they-- the majority, that is, the majority party cares, they work around the [00:34:00] filibuster. The filibuster is just sort of like a paper-thin excuse for them not to have to do things and take stands. But anyway, Kevin Elliott’s main proposition is the Senate needs to be reorganized so it operates like the House more or less.

Like, they just actually vote on things. When partisans have control, they actually do just vote for their party’s things more or less. He also talks about adding states. He has a fairly out there idea, which is not original to him, of like making like a, more than one DC state in order to, more or less gerrymander the Senate to try and push some things through or pot- you know, potentially to pass amendments and things like that.

We went back and forth on that one. I let him keep it in with some like footnotes, like talking about some of the difficulties because we like, we, we do want to think creatively. But I think the main takeaway from that essay is you can make the Senate a lot more like the House in how it operates, and that would fix a lot, honestly.

That would fix a lot of the current dysfunction of Congress. The House is often very willing to do work and the Senate just simply seems to exist to stop work from happening. So, there’s multiple ways you can go about that, but he, goes into those.

SHEFFIELD: I thought his yeah, he would’ve been better served by talking about breaking up California. And I live in California. Like, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you have, a completely desertified part of the state that also has to have the exact same policies as, a co- the coastal part of the state.

It doesn’t make any sense.

GURRI: It’s funny though, I’ve argued that before, and I’m trying to remember which political scientist it was, but it is a California-based one who vociferously argued with me against it because he said that California is like the only geographic unit of the United States that is the correct governance unit just because of its geography, is what he said.

And so I thought that was interesting.

SHEFFIELD: Huh. Oh, well, I guess I’d have to look at that. But yeah, to me, I mean, it’s nice that we have basically every kind of climate the United States has in one state. Like, I like that. But on the other hand, yeah, it’s there, ‘cause there is something, I- [00:36:00] fundamentally undemocratic about the way that a lot of our governance is structured and, it goes back to the two-party idea, like, and even for people who are, conservative because, a big portion of the, Trump base, or the Trump vote, as I was saying earlier, like they’re not people who are reactionary. they, they’ve never heard of Russell Vote. they don’t support what he does.

And yet because of the two-party system and the way that the states are allocated it means that basically you do have, significant percentages of each state and, and the country as a whole that basically are not represented by anyone because neither party wants them. Because the Democratic Party by and large, is a, a slight- a slightly conservative corporate-friendly party by and large.

Like, that’s what it has been. And it changed a little bit under Biden. But you know, roughly speaking from, let’s say Jimmy Carter up un- up until then, that’s what it was. So it was a, kind of slightly conservative-ish party. And then you had a, reactionary Republican Party. So to somebody who is, more of a, let’s say, Dispatch-style conservative or somebody who is a socialist or somebody who’s a social democrat, they haven’t really had any representation and neither party wants them.

GURRI: Yeah. I will say that the issue of the Senate and the president, like the Electoral College and things, is w- m- was my original reason for writing the original essay about redoing federalism, because it’s much easier to make each state more democratic than it is to make the federal government more dem- democratic.

Because state, constitutions are incredibly easy to update. Just incredibly easy. And, it’s, in, in some cases one can argue it could be mandated by federal law that, they do so, and has been in the past. So I, think, the basic idea was you can have state [00:38:00] governments that are actually democratic, and then you can have fiscal federalism that makes sure that re- regardless of what state you live in, whether it’s very populist or very, or, not, whether it’s very wealthy or not you’re getting a similar per capita level of investment in your infrastructure and thi- and things like that.

And that sort of like balances both the equalizing effect of the federal government across the disparities of local conditions and the difficulty of getting the federal government itself to be particularly democratic compared to what we could do with state governments

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, one thing that, yeah, isn’t in the p- book is as I thought it would be, is like the expanding the, idea of plebiscites and ballot initiatives. ‘Cause like those, even in red states actually have been the source of a lot of, good policy. I mean, like that is why we have seen abortion rights protected in, in many states that otherwise vote for a Republican.

Like they would people would go and vote for Trump and then also vote to protect a woman’s right to

GURRI: Yeah, though I, part of me thinks that they thought they could have their cake and eat it too. If they were forced, if they were forced to do things through the legislative process or through, politicians, then maybe they would feel a little more urgency to not vote for evil Republicans, that want to take away the rights that they want to keep.

And I actually, I’m, I am fairly-- I won’t say that I’m entirely against. I’m pretty against ballot initiatives per se as, as law. I’m not against referendums, like non-binding referendums, ‘cause the p- the politics often means that in the end you get those policies anyway once, once you’ve seen that, like, that’s what they want.

But I, feel like you have to actually have the connection between the people making the rules and the people that are going to implement it, enforce it. And that often ballot initiatives, A, they’re n- they’re often not particularly well-written, frankly, in terms of like how they end up on the ballot in the first place, like that whole [00:40:00] process.

The vital importance of judicial reform to protect democracy

GURRI: And second of all, they kind of are too easy to undermine, as we’ve seen in the case of some of those abortion pro- pro-choice, ballot initiatives. The states immediately figured out ways to ignore them or undermine them. I think you actually have to focus the l- the locus of democratic competition on the personnel to get the people that will actually fight for-- ‘Cause it’s, in my opinion, it’s never just about passing a law, right?

So for example, court reform or, housing reform, it’s not, it’s, so to, to stick with court reform, it’s not about like you pass a law. So like Wyden had a plan a few years ago for court reform, and it was more or

SHEFFIELD: Senator Ron Wyden.

GURRI: Senator Wyden. Sorry, yes. And the plan was more or less, we’ll have a fixed number of appointments per presidential term so that it’s not so tied to just when people die or something.

And you, in theory, you have to like, have an amendment to set term lengths. But in practice, what we’ll do is we’ll make a law that says after you’ve been in the Supreme Court for a certain number of years, you’re in a new senior track where you don’t hear cases anymore, right? So like they try and do that.

Say they actually pass that law, and then the Supreme Court immediately, some conservative group challenges it. The Supreme Court hears it before anyone new is appointed, and they try and strike it down, before it’s done anything. S- in my opinion, it matters less whether or not that plan would have worked, whether that would have happened, then that we get a Congress and a trifecta that’s willing, if the court does something like that, to smack them down.

You have to-- You-- There, there has to be a commitment on the part of the elected branches to actually see it through, which, is difficult, right? It’s similar again, so the, the predatory finding thing I mentioned, same deal. Passing a law is not enough. You actually need the p- you actually need to figure out the administrative side of how to do it.

Housing, it’s similar. California has passed a ton of laws that on paper are great. localities have fought them tooth and nail. and essentially California’s like at war with itself, right? In terms of its state government versus its [00:42:00] local ones. And most famously of all, the, Civil Rights Acts.

People remember the 1964 Civil Right Act, but it was not the first one. Eisenhower passed the first one, and what happened is we created a civil rights division in the DOJ. They went and tried to implement the law, and Jim Crow lo-localities and states were very nimble about fighting them, and playing the clock in the courts and things like that.

So you had like a decade of fighting one another before you get to forget the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, the Voting Rights Act, where the, civil rights department of the DOJ says to Lyndon Johnson, “Here are the tools that we legally need to be able to do to actually win this fight. Like we’ve been fighting this for a decade.

We know their tactics, and we know what they-- we know, like, we just need you to give us the power to go and register voters ourselves,” and a few things like that. So it took commitment. It was-- There was-- The politics were such that nationally there actually was enough of a commitment to, to see that through, fighting Jim Crow.

and it took a decade of before they got the right tools, and then of course it took much longer than that even to, see it through and actually crush Jim Crow. but so my, theory of the case is, and I know this is like a tangent from the actual collection or anything, but I, do feel strongly about this.

And my theory of the case is you have to line up the politics, that you want with people in office, who will ac- who actually can-- who actually they have both the commitment to seeing it through and like they develop the, knowhow to do so.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and that goes to the militancy idea that you were talking about earlier. Yeah, and, I mean, the, thing about-- the biggest thing about Trump too has been just the, desire to, just go for it. Just do what you want, even if you might lose in the courts. And because, if you lose in the courts, then you can make that an issue itself, and, it makes people [00:44:00] more focused on the courts as a, locus of, of, attention.

Because, like right now and when you look at the way both parties talk about the courts to their voters the, polls show very consistently that Democratic voters do not understand the courts as a, as political institutions, as, quasi-legislative, well, really actual legislative institutions, that they don’t understand this argument.

And like there, there is a lower approval rating among them, among Democrats in general, but there, there are significant slices of the Democratic electorate that, actually have pretty close to majority approval of the Supreme Court. Even though they also, they get upset at Democrats for not doing things that they want or like that’s what they think. But in reality, it’s the courts that have stopped the Democrats, and the Democrats haven’t really said this to them and talked about, “Well, here’s how we’re going to stop the courts from stopping us.”

GURRI: No, the fact that Wyden proposed that plan at all frankly was a good sign. And I do actually think-- I actually am optimistic for a future Democratic trifecta doing something about the Supreme Court. I think they’re, ready from what I’ve heard.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it seems that way. And, and, this does reflect a problem, a mistake that was made by liberals was that they became addicted to the courts themselves. During the Warren Court and the Burger Court, they abandoned the idea of pushing civil rights through the legislatures.

And that was a huge mistake

GURRI: Yeah. No, and that’s, our concluding essay, right? That’s Adam Rust talking about the distinction between constitutional law and constitutional politics, and how constitutional politics comes first. Constitutional politics is the fight to decide what the Constitution means in the first place, in practice.

And because we got [00:46:00] some courts for a period of time, like the Warren Court, even the Burger Court, frankly that were very willing to aggressively push liberal rights and positions a lot of, people in the liberal legal space especially, but in general, came to view the court as having a role that we should not have granted to it.

It has its particular, it has a particular, like, functional role that it plays in the l- the legal system, but we shouldn’t pretend that it has a moral role in term-- it, it has moral authority, in other words, to force us to accept whatever it rules, whatever five of, its members decide is the meaning of the Constitution or the law on any given day

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, or, like just the idea that even what they say is what it is.

GURRI: Right. Exactly.

SHEFFIELD: I’ve had several conversations with attorneys even now who, they have — This is a childlike belief that the court is correct when they say things. No, that’s just their, that’s just their opinion.

There’s a

GURRI: just have power. They just have power, right? Like, yeah,

Restraining the president

SHEFFIELD: yeah. So, okay. So, and so reining in the court, reforming the Senate these are big things. But then, but there’s also the danger of the imperial presidency, and that’s that is the focus of — I, so there, I mean, that’s a the focus of one essay in particular by Patrick Sabowski.

I, I, sorry, Sabkowski, I think that’s how you say it, right? but it’s, it is a persistent theme in some of the other essays as well because, like that’s — And you alluded to that earlier, this idea of that the reactionary right is basically wanting an imperial presidency. And this is a worse way of doing political majoritarianism than a parliamentary system.

Because in, at least in a parliamentary system, while they, while the prime minister has, [00:48:00] supreme authority, they also can get thrown out like that by their, by, by a vote of no confidence. And, the American system doesn’t have anything like that. And the repeated failures of impeachment, the fact that none has ever succeeded in the entire history of the country suggests very strongly that the executive has to be, the, as a person, has to be restrained quite a bit.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of our problems are downstream of how dysfunctional Congress is specifically. Both the court and the presidency sort of are downstream of that, and anything you can do to make Congress more functional will fix a lot. Because Congress ultimate- even with the Senate being the way that it is Congress ultimately draws from a broader cross-section of the country in order to be able to do things.

And the punishment is, swifter for it if it oversteps. And just in general, the way-- the president is a guy who does things. Obviously, the executive branch is a whole other can of worms, but Congress is an institution with hundreds of people that are elected to it and that, plus then their staff.

The, the-- And they do things other than just legislate. They do, the committee work that they do is, I feel like very underestimated and very poorly understood by the American public, and even many people that are fairly politically engaged. but, like, Congress actually will turn the screws on administrative agencies because they often frequently have to come back to Congress and ask for more money to do things.

So, there’s good literature that’s very sort of like under-underread and undervalued that shows that, like, if, Congress is, more or less on the same page about how a lot of ex-executive, the executive branch should behave, they tend to behave that way. Especially, like, the more independent agencies and things that don’t directly respond, react to the president.

but even, stuff that’s just-- I mean, the, executive branch is so big that one person can’t really run it on his own. [00:50:00] so c- when Congress is, functional, the system as a whole just kind of works a lot better. And that’s why, Pat-Patrick’s essay, a lot of it comes down to just make Congress more stronger compared to the, the, presidency.

We also have the other essay by Judith Starr, which is specifically about strengthening watchdog agencies in the executive branch, which currently exist but have been more or less demolished functionally by Trump.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and so, so specifically how though? Like, ‘cause they, what they have to be is independent of the president and not controlled

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry. Top, top of mind, I don’t have all of the recommendations. but a lot of it has to do with similar to how it works with Fed Fed governors, staggered terms so that they don’t perfectly align with presidential terms and things like that. some-- Like she’s, she fixed, she gives them a little more, the, inspector generals a little more direct authority to interface with Congress, or parts of the DOJ that aren’t like directly under the president’s control.

I’d have to — Actually, it’s been a while since I’ve reread that one, but yep, the gen- the general th- thrust is strength- strengthening the posi- the position of the inspector generals, making them a little more independent of the president.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and, the reason why these agencies and the presidency in general, I mean, became so out of control was that Congress became more dysfunctional. And so, so they basically, decided, “Well, we don’t understand this stuff. We, don’t want to understand it. And we’re going to get rid of our offices of technology and other things like that. And so we’re just going to let you guys handle it, and we also don’t have to run the risk of, taking a stand on our own there.”

And that’s, like ultimately what that does though is not only [00:52:00] does it, remove accountability of electoral accountability for, policymaking, but it also, it makes the policies much more easily captured by private special interests as

GURRI: Yeah. Ab- absolutely

Reforming higher education and promoting national service

SHEFFIELD: okay. So l- let’s just kind of go back though to the idea of opportunity, of enabling the gov- the government enabling people to exercise liberty, because that’s also a big, theme here that the, government has through neoliberals and conservatives and reactionaries have really kind of drastically, again, since C- Carter roughly focused on, reducing government spending in a variety of areas.

A- and education w- has been probably the, biggest area because they certainly haven’t cut defense. And and, so it’s cr- it’s created this perverse structure in which the university systems, they get money for doing things no one wanted them to do. So like, there’s a, zillion law schools now that, that churn out students who will never get a job in law.

They have wasted their money g- seeking that degree. They have been lied to. And so, a lot of people are upset at the educational institutions. And then but at the same time, q- moving toward just a purely vocational way of doing things, that’s not going to work in a, in an age of AI where so many of the specialized tasks especially that are, white collar oriented, those, those jobs are going to be eventually be automated away.

And so you guys talk about that in a couple of the essays as well.

GURRI: Yeah, I mean, I think I don’t make any predictions about what the, industrial organization of society will end up being in terms of automation and things like that. I feel like we always think everything’s going to be [00:54:00] automated for the past 100 years or 200 years, and somehow there always ends up being lots of things that you need humans for still.

But I think what’s clear is that even now, the premium to having a college degree versus not is pretty significant in terms of your earnings. There’s also, like, thicker reasons we want people to seek higher education if, they can in, in terms of it just create-- There’s, a, there’s like a social cohort effect when people go to college.

They get certain, tools. They work, they end up-- It, it makes it easier for them to work well with other people who’ve also gotten a similar education. It’s just like that was one of the great achievements of the post-war world, right? Was just this huge push into higher education, and it really was a world-class achievement.

But it, higher education ex-exactly like it’s been so dysfunctional. Since the ‘90s, tuition rates have been exploding for various reasons. And at the same time, money is poured in through the student loan system, but that just increases the price and increases the debt burden on

SHEFFIELD: And there was no control on the universities either

GURRI: Right. Exactly. So, yeah our, offering in, the higher education space Brendan Cantwell he is of the opinion that essentially because, policymakers think of universities as just about the education part. But of course, that’s not what students think about, and that’s not what their parents, prospectively were thinking about even just, that.

there’s this whole cultural side to colleges that it’s easy as a policymaker to want to discount. But clearly it’s, hard to discount when that’s what, they’re not just the consumers of higher education, right? They’re also the voters in the, states and the country that are deciding these policies for these things, and it’s clear that they want that kind of thing.

So he doesn’t go as far as to say, “No expensive football teams. Stop building so many damn buildings on your campus,” overbuilding like crazy. More what he says is there [00:56:00] should be generous public, mostly state government packages of support for state schools, including community colleges.

And they should come with strings attached that are about controlling their spending. and the strings are enforced by essentially drawing back on support from the state if you’re going to go nuts on the other things and increase your tuition too high. So, he, sort of has a, It’s not a silver bullet approach, and it-- he himself calls it a framework, not like a detailed policy package for what to do. But yeah, I mean, that’s, one. I think in terms of like also ag- conditions for exercising freedom, I know you were thinking of getting to this, but Alan Elrod’s piece on public service, also another, I think, c-critical pillar in that regard.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, actually let’s, talk about that. Yeah.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah

SHEFFIELD: saying there? ‘Cause he’s, yeah, he’s been a guest on this program, so I’ve gotta

GURRI: Oh, good. Nice.

SHEFFIELD: some, respect there.

GURRI: Yeah, I, mean, Alan’s theory of the case really is like we’ve grown too isolated, we’ve grown too willing to communicate digitally. Ev- even like people that you know in your immediate life, you like spend more time texting with than like seeing in person necessarily like your friends.

So he’s, very like in favor of creating conditions that push people to meet up in person. And then of course, there’s polarization. And what I like about what he says is he’s, sort of nuanced in what he thinks putting people together with different political perspectives will do. He specifically says the evidence is not that Republicans and Democrats working together makes them depolarized politically.

In fact, there’s no evidence for that. But there is evidence that when they get together and know each other and work together they have less of what’s called effective polarization, which is like conceiving of the most caricatured version of your political opponent. Like the way-- it brings the temperature of the conflict down [00:58:00] because you stop conceiving of your political, the, other side as like ideologues that are seeking to destroy you, and more like just an ordinary person like yourself who, and the people, people that are perfectly nice that believe that, just have a wrong-headed idea or something from your point of view.

So, he wants y- he wants a huge fu- well-funded federal public service that involves like sending people to multiple locations across the country, not where they’re from to, build community theaters and do all the, little things that, that, you would expect public service things to do, what the Peace Corps does in other countries, what America does do now.

It’s just AmeriCorps is very small, very small program and very limited in, its scope. So he wants something bigger. His, in his ideal world, if you have someone who is sort of, without direction after high school or even a high school dropout, say, the group that really does have it

SHEFFIELD: Or hell, why limit it to post-high school people

GURRI: sure. but, ag- I think like in, in the past, traditionally, someone who’s sort of wavering after high school might decide to go into the military because they don’t know what to do with themselves, and that’s always an option. In his dream, vision, you would have a civilian alternative to that.

Not like it’s bad to go into the military and serve, but like you could do service that’s not military service.

The importance of public mixing institutions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the historic evidence, I want to bring that in here on this point, like it, it is pretty clear. And there’s two real test cases that I think show this. One is the is World War II. and, even the Vietnam War and the Korean War, like those were draft wars.

And so, and I’m not in favor of having people go to war under a draft, but unless, like, absolutely necessary. But you know, what that, what those, things did, and the military does this just in general, is that it does bring people together who have different backgrounds, [01:00:00] different ways of life, different ethnicities and religions or none.

and, it, yeah, it, and it shows them that, as you said, these are just people who think differently than you. And that’s, that is really important as a as, something to instill in, in regular people because like that’s really what powered the, Trump victories, is that, you have decades of these evangelical churches telling their adherents in, and, this is chronicled very well in the movie “Jesus Camp.” they, tell them from childhood that these people that we don’t like are literally satanic. They’re under control of Satan, and they’re going to destroy you. That’s their goal in life. And and so if you have somebody who’s had that drilled into their head, for 20 years, including in their young childhood, of course they’re going to be, hateful and

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: support fascist people like Donald Trump.

So, so like, so yeah, this program would go a long way toward stopping that. But, then also, like in the ga- the, movement for same-sex marriage rights and marriage equality, that succeeded because people came out of the closet. Because they, had, lived in it for so long that a lot of, straight-presenting people, heterosexual-presenting people b- actually didn’t realize that that there were a lot of people who were LGBTQ.

And then once they saw that and, that it was their f- friends, their family members, their community members who they knew from their own interactions as, they weren’t going to recruit you to be gay or, silly things like that. But these were, these were innate conservative beliefs that were false.

And so, this overt mixing of people, it was a really [01:02:00] good thing for for everyone

GURRI: Yeah, no, and, more generally, I would say, tying it back to the idea of milit- liberalism that’s very assertive. Like, the world that, liberalism wants is open and dynamic and mobile and sort of embraces the best of change and, difference rather than shrinking from it. The fear is more stagnation and shrinking and becoming something small and, rigid versus being afraid of the upheaval of change, right?

And so if you want to sell that, one way to do that is to create a program that encourages people to mix it up a little bit more and s- and be exposed to people they would not have otherwise met and see places that they would not have otherwise seen. And, like the military, you can do it in a way where, you hope it-- You- the hope is to sell it as a high status thing, right?

It’s you-- If you go into the military, one of the things about it is they have high expectations of you. They hold you to a high standard, right? It’s not like-- It’s not you, can get in, but it’s not like it’s an easy ticket, right? You go in and they work you very hard and they demand a lot of you. So you could have a public service that also has high standards that they hold you to, makes you feel like you’re really doing something.

So it’s not just like, you’re opting out of trying to get a job or something. You’re actually doing something important and, being challenged. And then, s- sends you out to experience the country, which is an incredibly diverse country, both sort of like geographically and in terms of the different cultures across that geography.

Reclaiming national greatness from the far right

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the other thing that’s good about this idea is that and, this is w- r- an area where, Biden’s infrastructure spending really failed is that it creates physical monuments to civic greatness.

and, that’s, th- there’s something to the Trump slogan of Make [01:04:00] America Great.

Like, it, is something that has a visceral, somatic quality to it that, that is meaningful in a way that is un-- you don’t even have to, make that argument. Like, the America’s smaller towns especially and smaller cities, they, have even now, public structures that were built during the, Roosevelt administration or, the Carnegie libraries,

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: by Andrew Carnegie.

Like these are physical monuments to something or someone that was-- that did something good in society and, like, and, we don’t have those anymore. And so the way that infrastructure spending is done and has to be done in this way, I think, in order to, really be meaningful because, oh, we th- you fix a road for someone, well, that’s nice.

People like a nice fixed road, but they don’t understand what went into that or why, it was good

GURRI: Yeah, for sure

SHEFFIELD: okay. Well, you can go off on more on that if you want. I I agree. And it’s, it’s taking credit for things, right? It’s, the, actual, “This was part of this program. This was done by this agency.” I mean, here in m- here in New York City, again, Mamdani has been very good at this. There’s only so much a mayor can do in his first few months, but when we had a blizzard, he was doing videos and being like, “Here’s exactly what all the waste management people are doing while you’re at home in order to make sure you can get back out there.”

GURRI: Like, it, he’s, I cr- credit-taking is something that I don’t know, like you actually, you, it’s, a job. It’s something you have to actually do. You can’t just, you can’t just deliver. You have to make sure they know who’s delivering and how that happened,

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

GURRI: or you take it for granted.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Because, the, far right has spent, 80 years telling people, “Government does nothing for you. It’s a total failure. It’s a waste. Everything it does is stupid.”

GURRI: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and that’s [01:06:00] a lie. But if you don’t show them, as, Mamdani was doing, of, this is what government actually does.

Like, the, biggest problem with effective governance is it’s about what doesn’t happen. And so i- it’s about what doesn’t go wrong. and, we’re seeing that, with with Trump’s horrible approach and with RFK Jr. toward vaccinations and, disease and, things like s- the screw worm.

That’s the whole point of government, is to stop bad things from happening.

GURRI: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And so you have to tell people, “Well, we stopped this from happening.”

GURRI: You do.

Housing needs to be cheaper and more plentiful

SHEFFIELD: yeah. All right. Well, so l- and then the, one of the other persistent themes in the piece or in the book and there’s is — so it’s not a, like, dedicated theme, but I, like that it is touched on by several authors, is just the idea of housing.

Because that’s that’s, that is such a huge problem for people now that, there just hasn’t been enough construction in the country. And prices just keep going up and up. And, it — and the government is the one that has to force that. And, it goes back to what you were saying earlier, that, the local governments in many ways are the problem because of the not in my backyard, NIMBY people really have ruined things for a lot of younger Americans.

GURRI: Yeah. Yeah, no, and, we didn’t have, like, a big build more housing piece. Frankly, we write like 100 of those at “Liberal Current” all the time. But yeah, no, it’s, very true. We do touch on it at a number of places. Sort of in-- we, we have different from our usual angle as well, we have Moira Burse talking about the climate like the climate dimension of housing and all the places that people need to move away from and how you manage that, how you manage the insurance aspect, which Florida has completely failed to do, and frankly, California’s on the exact same trajectory just earlier at this point.

Yeah, we talk, we talk about that as well, just like [01:08:00] there’s, we haven’t built enough, and then there’s, a lot of our housing is on coasts that are very climate vulnerable. And we have to think, we have to think ahead about that kind of thing. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: yeah, we do. And it’s also, but it, is a way of making climate change policy more of an opportunity for, citizens. Because while it’s easy, for the, to, for people to scaremonger and say, “Oh, they’re going to take away your truck,” or, various things this is a way of, restructuring public spending that can, again, be a visible benefit to, people in a way that is also being helpful toward reducing carbon emissions and and things like that.

GURRI: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, I think we’ve touched on a lot of the bases here, but this book is, it’s, it’s pretty comprehensive, so I encourage everybody to check it out. There’s a lot more in here than what we touched on, but, we hit on the bigger notes here.

But yeah, let’s just kind of give the concluding sales pitch here, for people and why they should buy this and take it seriously.

GURRI: Yeah. I mean, so I think we’re at a window of time where we will either shoot our shot or we won’t. The I am not afraid at this point that Donald Trump will actually successfully consolidate an authoritarian system by the end of his term. What I am afraid of is that we’re going to enter a cycle of every four years, we get, like, Democrats trying to be normal, a normal party, and then every four years after that, we get another bite of the apple of attempting fascism again for however long until we finally get it.

So the stakes are very high to get out of the immediate crisis, which is something we write about, but also to lay the groundwork for a durable new, century of l- liberal democracy that’s stable, actually. So that’s, the real pitch for the book. And, we’ve, been through this before.[01:10:00]

Americans like to focus most on the original founding moment, but to me, the tradition of the Founding Fathers is the willingness to to redo it all. I mean, they did the, Articles of Confederation first. They did a ton of experimentation with their state constitutions after that, and then they looked at it and they said, “This isn’t working,” and they did the Constitution, which was huge, which they then amended a few times before they, before that generation died and, fully intended to be r- regularly amended.

And then of course, Reconstruction, big, change. I would say from, Woodrow Wilson to to FDR, also an enormous transformation of our government. However you feel about any one of those, and all of them were flawed I think just, taking the spirit of the willingness to go back and actually try and make drastic changes to our system is a big part of who we are, and we gotta, we have to rediscover it.

SHEFFIELD: We do. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we should think of this moment as an opportunity for a second reconstruction in a lot of ways. Yeah. All right. Well, cool. Glad to have you here today, and for people who want to follow you personally what’s your advice to them there?

GURRI: Well, there’s, Bluesky, I’m on there. And, but of Liberal Currents, I mean, we have an email you can sign up for. You can decide what level of emails you want to get, including just like updates about, us rather than our actual essays and things. So yeah, definitely, sign up for those updates

SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. All right. Thanks for being here.

GURRI: Great. Thank you.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, a- audio and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for your support.

You have unlimited access to the archives as well, and I really appreciate that. But if you can’t afford to subscribe on a paid version, we do also have free versions as well. You can become either type of [01:12:00] subscriber if you go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack.

Thanks a lot. Oh, and if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to click like and subscribe. So, let’s do that again. All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to all the archives, and I thank you very much for your support. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there is a new episode. And if you want to become a free or paid subscriber, you can do that on Patreon at patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can do it on Substack at flux.community.

Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time.

Subscribe now