“We live in the worst timeline” is a phrase you often hear people say in left-leaning social spaces. It’s usually a joke, but I think it’s more than that. The truth is that, while Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, democracy in this country has been at risk many times throughout its lifetime, and also that it really couldn’t be said to have fully existed until the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.
The moment we’re living in is complicated. On the one hand, it is true that the United States has never had more social progress than right now. But it’s also the case that people are right to feel that things are precarious. We have to keep two things in mind at all times: Things have been worse in the past, but they can get worse if we don’t understand how they were improved.
It’s a lot to consider. That’s why I wanted to talk in this episode with Lisa Corrigan, she’s a professor of communications and gender studies at the University of Arkansas who specializes in African American and Latino history. This is her second time on the program, in her previous appearance, Lisa and I discussed why there is no “Joe Rogan of the left.” In this episode, we talk about how political change and cultural power, the relationship of conservatives to the Democratic and Republican parties, and a lot more.
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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
07:02 — How the left lost its organizing culture
13:35 — Liberals’ misplaced faith in business and capital
21:22 — The right’s ploy of lowering everyone’s expectations
35:41 — Reactionaries changed Republican political culture through media
37:30 — The importance of formal debate
42:55 — America as a young, tentative democracy
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Lisa Corrigan. Hey, Lisa. Good to have you back.
LISA CORRIGAN: Thanks for having me, Matthew.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, there’s a lot going on as usual. And the, the old song about living in interesting times being a curse.
But you know what? I think a lot of people, they take that, that idea, which is really supposed to be a joke they take that too seriously. And I’m [00:03:00] constantly seeing people say things like, “We live in the worst possible timeline,” and that America’s uniquely under threat more than ever in its history and democracy’s, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I don’t ... I think people are not, they’re not, they’re missing history when they say things like that
CORRIGAN: Oh, I agree. I mean, I think, A, this is not a nation of s- students of history. Our historical, our, our historical education is poor. People are not reading history for fun. I don’t think that they have a sense of context, and I also think it’s a function of the fact that risk has been distributed more widely right now.
So people who felt comfortable in previous recent periods, whether it was, like, during the Obama administration or during the brief respite of the Biden administration, they didn’t feel stressed out about money, or they didn’t feel like their rights were being encroached upon. I think the risk has been distributed more widely, and so more people are concerned that their comfort [00:04:00] has been threatened.
So mostly I think those concerns about, like, this is the worst timeline ever, are expressions of discomfort more than much of anything else
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and they’re certainly not in, in, in resonance with the, with the historical truth. I mean, we could even just go back to the, the, the, early 1970s, late 1960s. I mean, this was a-- that was a time when the, domestic terrorism was a very common thing, in a lot of, every few months there was some big bombing or big riot or fire or assassination. And, it’s like, which-- And it’s so, it is kind of weird to me because, like, a lot of people who are alive and are saying these things, they were alive at that time. Like, do you not remember Bobby Kennedy being killed or Martin Luther King Jr.
being killed and what happened after that? And, the Symbionese Liberation Army, all, et cetera. and like, [00:05:00] it’s, it, it, I don’t know. It’s like, normally people are supposed to remember things that happened in their lifetime. I don’t know what’s going on here, Lisa.
CORRIGAN: I mean, they’re social traumas, right? So they’re just remembered differently, and this is, in everybody’s faces. It’s very immediate. It feels like it’s happening fast because people are not just reading about it in the newspaper or watching it on the evening news. So the 24/7 news cycle is heightening their anxiety about, these compounding concerns.
But I don’t think that’s necessarily their fault. I think that that’s a product of, digital news and, the pace of modern life more than it is about their inability to understand their childhoods or how they f- you know, figure into the present. That said, I don’t think that they have an appreciation for how good Americans have it compared to much of the rest of the world.
And so there does seem to be just such a lack of [00:06:00] connection with labor and with class and with how well off the country actually is, and about how much room there is to change the way that we relate to one another and the way that we relate to money and the way we relate to resources. And it just seems like th- there’s probably space for a recalibration of that, even if it’s uncomfortable in the short term.
And I think that’s why you see so many accelerationists even on the left saying, “Oh, well, in order to get to a carbon neutral America, p- there’s gonna be some pain.” Well, yes, if you want there to be more equality, people are gonna lose comfort. They’re gonna lose, right, privilege. That’s what happens when you redistribute resources or rights.
So, I think, I think that we have a lot of really comfortable people that don’t know how to sacrifice for the greater good, and this period of our life in the United States is gonna challenge their capacity to reengage with the democratic, processes of the country, to reengage in things that [00:07:00] might be difficult for them, including sacrifice,
How the left lost its organizing culture
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I think a, a big part of the, the, the lack of historical knowledge and, and why it matters is that people, they, they, they forgot how the progress that we do have was made and that it required, as you said, it required sacrifice, but it also required doing things differently. Like I-- it seems like to me a large part of left politics kind of moved from societal organizing and, and public education and just moved over to lobbying.
And, and i-instead of trying to, to build unions or build civic organizations or tell, tell people, help them understand the value of public education and civics th- it just became, well, the government will take care of it all. And, and, and it’s such a big difference in the civic cultures of the left and the right.
[00:08:00] Having been inside both of them now, I can say that, on the right, they hate the, government. They hate civil society. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There’s no such thing as society.” So they hate that as a governmental thing, but they love it as a mutual aid thing. And so they are constantly helping each other out.
And as an example, I, I sometimes have-- I think I’ve said it a couple times on the program here that, like when, when I was a anonymous college student who had launched a website attacking Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh quoted from our site on the second day we were live and told people they should go visit it and that it was great.
And then whereas on the left, basically, all the, all the biggest podcasts and channels, like they just have the same five people come on their channels all the time. And so like, of course you already know what they’re gonna say, and they always say the same things, and it’s, it’s, it’s like politics as [00:09:00] therapy session rather than as change-making, seems like to me.
CORRIGAN: Well, I mean, it’s easier to do mutual aid on the conservative side if you’re relatively homogenous, and that’s been the case certainly with the GOP. And so there aren’t, like, all of these viewpoints that have to be brought in under the tent. So there’s not all this conflict resolution, there’s not all of this managing of the money, right, and trying to manage people’s feelings.
So, so conservative news media becomes self-soothing, which is why it repeats the same things over and over and over again. And I think for liberals and for leftists, it’s a much messier side because of, identity politics at mid-century and the impulse and the commitment to including multiple voices.
Well, then people are gonna yell at you because they want a different outcome, and they want, different perspectives to be, to be explored, and they want to argue about what comes next, and it’s more [00:10:00] contentious as the public spheres face. So that’s a different project entirely. But as for it happening organically, I mean, the federal government launched a war against public education at the end of the Carter administration, the beginning of the Reagan administration, and that also changed the way that liberals and leftists thought about and practiced politics because literally higher ed was totally underfunded.
Pell Grants were destroyed. Like, the entire operational functioning of public education from K through 12 to college shifted under Reagan so tremendously, and then, of course, was gutted under Bush, where funding for higher ed is not even 50% of what it was in 2008, and costs have skyrocketed because the federal government is not doing the work of funding it.
So I think that, there are a lot of different ways in which this moment is very different from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and that the projects from the left and the right are also radically different. But I think for me, at least, having a lot of different voices in the room [00:11:00] means you have to have better conflict skills, and if you want to circumvent that conflict, then you go straight to the lobbying and you go straight to Congress instead of talking to the people who are the stakeholders on the ground, because it’s easier and it feels shorter, and you’re circumventing all of that conflict.
But it doesn’t end up being a better system, and it’s not more inclusive. It’s not producing more gains. It’s just easier to justify to donors
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I think that you can see the difference in these two approaches with how the how the, the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, so marriage equality and trans rights have been conducted. Like the, the, the, the way that, that, marriage equality was pushed, it was pushed everywhere through, just civil society and, and, and just basic friendships and family members, “Hey,” standing up and saying, “Yeah, oh, you know what?
I actually am gay, and we’re... And, and I’m not going to hurt, hurt you, and you know that. You know me. And I have [00:12:00] the right to get married.” And, it was, it was something that was also really bubbled up through culture and, and authors and TV shows. And whereas, with the, the struggle for trans rights, y- I think it, it moved far too quickly into the governmental realm.
And it’s any rights that are gained through the courts, well, they can be taken away by the courts. And, and that’s a big difference, when you look at, let’s say, public national healthcare in other, other countries that have it. When you enact something like that through law, even the far-right parties in these countries have to pr- you know, at l- either pretend or actually even support it in the case of France.
Like they do. The far-right parties there do support their public healthcare system. And, so gains that are made through the courts, they’re so much more precarious. But it’s like in a lot of [00:13:00] ways, I think that left elites kind of, they had this, th- the, this great success through the courts, the Warren Court and, and the Burger Court to some degree that they kind of, were like, “Well, hey, we can still get what we want.
And so let’s, we don’t have to spend money on organizing people and helping them resolve conflicts and helping them see that their causes are linked, even if they may not understand that, the struggle for women’s rights is also linked to the struggle for, union rights or environmental protection.”
These are, these are, are not conflicting in any way really.
Liberals’ misplaced faith in business and capital
CORRIGAN: I think the real shame is that I think a lot of liberals in particular had faith that business leaders would just lean into profit motive and the obvious opportunity costs of being inclusive, and that would somehow carry the day and bridge the gap between conservative impulses and culture war backlash against [00:14:00] LGBTQ people, especially on the trans debate.
And I think today they’re very soured about the fact that business interests have not been standing up, right? And there’s been this rollback of even, I don’t know, advertising so- solidarity in the wake of the re-election of Trump, and I think that that was a bad gamble. And if they ever thought that those corporations were only going to be motivated by profit, that was a misread on their part, and probably one that was engendered through their close relationship to capital and venture capital and lobbying and, this, this apparatus of fi- campaign financing that came out of Citizens United.
And I think that has radically changed the dynamics for how we think about rights and about organizing, and I don’t think that the liberals were prepared for that at all, not even a little bit.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I don’t think so either. And I think also, as the Republican Party b- has become, successively more [00:15:00] radicalized over the decades ‘cause it, it began with just this small, well, I guess we’ll say a minority faction that, that took control in 1964 with Barry Goldwater and kind of shoved him in through, real professionalized organizing over, a divided opposition of conservatives.
But, over time, they came, the reactionaries came to control basically the entire party. And as that happened, a lot of people who were conservative just sort of came over into the Democratic side. And now those people, because they are so heavily linked to capital and, and a lot of them have very nice media perches at places like The New York Times or The Atlantic to...
In a lot of ways, it’s kind of, seems like the, a lot of the left media and political infrastructure in the United States is actually run by conservatives. And when you look at, like, even some of the most popular, media outlets, like The Bulwark, this is a [00:16:00] conservative organization, and somehow their audience is all liberals?
Like, what is that?
CORRIGAN: Infiltration? Counterprop? I mean, I think it’s really bizarre, but I also think that the right has captured the media sphere, and I think that insofar as there are liberal elites, I don’t even know that there are. There are elites who maybe vote Democrat sometimes, but it’s hard for me to see somebody even like Michael Bloomberg as, like, a liberal, even though he would definitely call himself one and a, and call himself a Democrat.
I think practically speaking, that’s cr- a crazy way to think about him as an oligarch. So I don’t know. I think it doesn’t surprise me at all that the right wing are running Democratic politics and that the Democrats bow down to their perspectives and their narratives, not just about the contemporary moment, but also the past or where we should be going in the future.
I, I don’t understand why they’re given the opportunity to drive [00:17:00] everywhere except that, the liberals don’t want to listen to the experts. They don’t want to listen to the academics, and they think that the academics are pedantic and they-- that academics make distinctions that they don’t want to hear about or they include people that they don’t want at the table or...
I mean, it’s exclusionary in a bunch of different ways. But the fact is, is that they’re terrible at imagining new futures. The liberals are terrible at it
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, and, and I think, in a lot of ways the left imagination i- in the United States, it was always impaired in a-- to a larger degree because outside the US, like in various European countries and and e-elsewhere, they... The left was kind of a-- it was, heavily linked to media in a lot of ways.
Whereas in the United States, when there began to be a more social democratic politics, it was the politicians in a lot of ways who were driving it, like FDR or Truman, or, or some of these the, [00:18:00] the less famous people who were part of that orbit. It was the politicians who were doing it, and it wasn’t intellectual and media driven.
And so when the politicians lost interest in it I think there was nobody to pick up the slack because unions, they were too focused on just their own internal affairs and didn’t understand this was something you have to work for. If you want people to be union members, you have to tell them why unions are good.
You can’t just assume that they’re gonna always ch- sign up for your, your organization. And of course, they didn’t and union membership has really declined quite a bit. And even now, like I don’t, I, I don’t see a lot of willingness on the part of, of y- various unions to speak out and create media publications to the general public.
They just don’t wanna do it. And like this is-- it’s the lobbyist mentality on the further left that has really been damaging, I think.
CORRIGAN: I [00:19:00] mean, the other thing that the Europeans had was the gun, and we had that debate start in the civil rights movement, certainly starting with Robert “Ref” Williams in North Carolina about what the role of the gun is on the left. The Black Panther Party would patrol police who were abusing motorists in California.
That’s how they began, is by reading constitutional law at police officers who were harassing Black motor-motorists. And so the entire conversation at mid-century was what is the role of violence on the left in order to safeguard and/or expand liberty for all? And once that conversation was foreclosed in the United States, then it entirely became about capital.
So if there is no way of pushing back that’s not through an entirely captured judiciary and legal system that is now so totally controlled by finance capital and by dark money, then there’s no way to actually influence politics in a way that is not at the behest of the conservatives or the reactionaries.
So you get the exact moment we’re in right now because the only [00:20:00] option available is through this super narrow lens of politics that’s controlled by right-wing financiers.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.
CORRIGAN: you’re not willing to back up, your politics with m-mass protest and the possibility of violence, then the thing is not gonna change, and European countries have that.
They will burn stuff down. They will occupy their national capital, and they’re smaller and more compact, so it’s easier for them. They don’t have to travel three days to get across the country. But at the end of the day, the possibility of violence is still open as an avenue of, re-re-engineering civil life around things that matter to the people and not just the US Senate.
So I... Until that changes and people are willing to move en masse against their government, which has been captured, I don’t know that there’s some other way to arrange either the media landscape or the political landscape to be more inclusive of ideas that are actually democratic. Instead, I think we’re just doing the idea of [00:21:00] democracy as some sort of national fantasy that’s unrealized in every practical may- way.
I mean, we don’t have free and equal elections. People don’t have the right to healthcare or access to it. They don’t have any of the things that we say are part of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Those are not equally distributed. So at this point, we’re just talking about democracy as a lip service thing.
It’s fantasy
The right’s ploy of lowering everyone’s expectations
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s like a, yeah, it’s, it’s, it is virtue signaling. And, and then just this idea, and it’s, it’s, it’s all very Kantian, I think, and it’s in, in, in all the worst ways. And, and but there is, I mean, there, there is a, a tradition that is worth looking at, and that is, the, in the struggle for Black liberation it was there, that was the one area where there were a lot of media outlets that were regional and that were supporting direct actions and were, engaging directly in community politics [00:22:00] and, and local elections and, and educating people about not just the national, conversation that they were having, but also relating it to them in their personal lives.
‘Cause like, I think that that’s, has been one of the other really awful things about the, hedge funds, taking over control of media, is that they really have kind of destroyed awareness of local politics and, and, and the, and how things actually can be important and impactful to you because, like, people just have this...
There’s, there’s this natural w- way because, I mean, everybody knows who the president is, right? And so there’s a, there’s a... It’s easy to, to have an opinion about national politics, but it’s a lot harder to understand that, well, actually these things do manifest at the local level, and you need to, like in your school board or in, like, and it, and you could have, free lunches for your kid at school, or you could have lower college tuition and not [00:23:00] have to take out loans for yourself as a, 60-year-old adult to have your kid go to college.
Like, these are not things that you should have to pay for, and that in a normal society, in other countries, they don’t have to pay for these. You don’t have to do a GoFundMe because you need cancer treatment. Like, a, a... And, and this is, these are not, fantasies. Like, that’s the other thing is that, the idea of normal, like the, the, the reactionaries are constantly telling people, “Oh, it’s too difficult to have national healthcare.
It’s too difficult to have free college tuition.” No, it’s not. Other countries have done this for decades, and we did this, to a very large degree. So it’s not like this is even a ma- Like, as you were saying, the higher education budgets have just been slashed so much. But the reality is, people have still expected you to continue to go to college.
And it’s like, well,
CORRIGAN: Although that’s changing. Although that’s changing. Now [00:24:00] everybody’s supposed to be a plumber and be happy about it,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or, or be happy to work on an assembly line or something like that. But yeah, it’s like, it’s a degrading... Like, people don’t understand that not only do you deserve better, but here’s how you can do it. And other people have done this, and so can you
CORRIGAN: But I mean, I think that that’s where things will shift. So depending on how this AI bubble bursts and what this next economic catastrophe is gonna look like, it seems to me that localization is the only path forward, and it seems like increasingly the only possibility, right? I mean, especially with environmental collapse.
So depending on what happens to the food system and depending on what happens with fuel prices as a medium-term proposition, I think it’s very possible that people are forced to reintegrate into their communities with an awareness that they’ve not had to had, have for se- really a century. I think it’s gonna be a very different kind of relationship to the local, [00:25:00] and it’s gonna restructure their attention and their care abouts and their finances and their time.
s- I don’t, I just, I think we’re on really the brink of a very different kind of lifestyle in the United States that people are not prepared to engage, and that a lot of that panic that you were talking about at the top of this segment is really coming from a latent awareness that a bunch of stuff is gonna have to change because we are far exceeding the amount of resources that we have and that we should be using, and that it’s gonna really challenge our habits in ways that are gonna change people’s perspectives on their values and the way that they’re engaging in the world.
So I don’t know. In some ways, I think that the challenges that we’re seeing right now are ine- inevitable in some ways, like they’re forcing a reckoning and a different kind of consciousness about [00:26:00] resources and relationships in the community and, governance certainly. And we haven’t had those conversations in the ‘60s.
Like, Voting Rights Act just got gutted, but people haven’t engaged with voting rights in a serious, concentrated way for 60 years. They’re like, “Oh, the VRA passed. Okay, that’s handled.” That’s like, no, it’s been chipped away at and now it’s basically gutted, and that’s gonna change so much about the way that people can access governance in really meaningful ways.
But because they’ve been so distanced from the procedures and processes that led to most of the liberal accomplishments of the 20th century, they have no idea how we got there and how we move forward, and all that’s gonna have to be reimagined without labor unions who’ve been AWOL and without the kind of deep organizing that was, essential to those, items of progress in the ‘60s.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and, and, and you can see that, I think, with regard to fossil fuels that, Trump’s [00:27:00] Iran war has, has made costs go up so much that, now people are, are are turning back to electric and hybrid vehicles because, they’re realizing, “Oh, maybe this was a good idea after all.”
And and, and it’s like, whe-when, when you look at how China is-- it like, China is the, the, the undisputed world leader in electrical manufacturing and whatnot. And of course it is because their government made that their plan and, and, and took that, that investment. And, and whereas Trump, has tried the, the reactionary approach, which is, tariffs and then cutting government investment.
And, and of course, that doesn’t work because international trade, the only way you can really get a comparative advantage in it is to subsidize your industries. You can’t tariff your way into prosperity because it doesn’t work. All it does is raise prices on your own people. And so, and, and you’re harming your economy much worse than if you had just spent, a [00:28:00] few tens of millions of dollars on subsidies to, to domestic industry, which of course would’ve created jobs.
And then like, like you would’ve gotten the money back from international sales of these products and also employed people. Like it’s-- So China did it the right way, and they did it the right way, I’m not gonna s- it, it’s, it’s not because they’re, they’re fantastic or whatever, it’s because they don’t have any oil resources in their country, and so they realize, “Oh, well, we should get behind electric stuff because then we don’t have to be dependent on oil.”
And so of course that made sense for them. But, the, here in this country, we, we don’t have-- We have lots of oil in this country. We’re the number one oil country in the world. And, and yet, because Trump has raised the prices so much, people are now, like, it, it is, electrical vehicles, I, it’s, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion now at this point even in this country.
CORRIGAN: I just don’t think that anybody in the White House cares about cost for consumers [00:29:00] at all. I don’t think anything in the Republican Party, as it stands, suggests that there’s an interest in decreasing costs for consumers. I don’t think that’s part of their perspective on decision-making. I don’t think it’s in any way about what’s best for the country.
I think it’s entirely personal enrichment. And so I don’t think any of the decisions that are coming are gonna in some way improve life for the consumer. I think it’s all bad from here out. I don’t think there are any decisions about resources that are gonna be n- net positive for the consumer while these folks are running the country.
And even after the fact, I don’t know that we’ll ever get to a place where there’s even a veneer of improving life for the general population as a guiding principle of governance. We’re so far s- afield from that. So, I... yeah, China, China’s gonna be competitive because they’re like, “At the end of the day, we’re gonna have to supply our own [00:30:00] energy,” period, point-blank.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah
CORRIGAN: the US is like, “We’re gonna be isolationist, and we’re gonna let the, top 10 dudes in the White House just frack out as much money as they can from every avenue they possibly can in short-term deals that make them money as a family,” and that’s it. And it, the rest of it is not gonna matter for the American people, and I don’t know how long it’s gonna take for folks to wake up and recognize that that’s what’s happening, but it is definitely what’s happening.
And I don’t w- there’s no mechanism to unfuck that
SHEFFIELD: Hmm. Yeah
CORRIGAN: nothing, there’s no accountability to change that. Congress has abrogated their duties. Even with the midterm elections, I can’t imagine we’re gonna somehow see, like, consumer protection being, like, a number one issue. There is no economic framing from the Democratic Party at this point that is coherent for a vision of the future that is responsive to any of the aspects that we’ve just covered, even in the [00:31:00] last, like, five minutes of the show. They have no narrative. They have nothing
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s because, at the end of the day, I, I don’t... they, they’re, they’re not, they don’t believe in progress. I mean, like, that’s really what it comes down to. But at the same time, they have left this gaping political hole. And, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, they are feeling it, and, and people love it. Like, that’s, like, that’s the thing to, really look forward to. Like, these, these Trumpers are so incompetent and so corrupt and so selfish and so malicious that, if you can’t beat them, then you are seriously incompetent. And, and so... And, and like you saw in New York, like the, that was after Mamdani got the, the Democratic nomination.
The, the [00:32:00] conservative Democratic class, the, the capitalist class, they refused to go along with it. So much for blue m- no matter who. And but, but it didn’t work because, people, people understood that that was not what, what, what the city needed. And, and now I mean, people, they, they approve of Mamdani much more than, than he got in his vote total.
so
CORRIGAN: definitely. He’s exciting, and I think that he is a blueprint in New York, but I don’t know, Mamdani cannot win in the South , like, there are whole swaths of America, especially rural America, that are not interested in what Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez were talking about. And so that rural-urban divide is gonna be part of, the problem for organizing moving forward, even though I also think that the South has been gerrymandered and there is a lot of possibility here even among conservatives.
But it does not gonna, [00:33:00] it’s not gonna look like New York at all.
SHEFFIELD: y- yeah, no, I don’t think so. But, at the same time, there even are, politicians in some of the southern states like Jon Ossoff and like,
CORRIGAN: Coover
SHEFFIELD: and yeah, and, and also, we’ll see what happens with James Talarico, but, he, he’s, he’s doing that, well, and we’ll see.
I mean, even, people, Yeah, I, I mean, yeah, like there’s, it, it, the dialect has to be different and the way, and the issues that you focus on have to be different. But, a lot of the basics like these people are corrupt, they don’t care about you and I think we deserve good things, and here’s how we can get them.
Like these are, these are pretty e- basic things, and yet they’re, they’re, they’re easy, as a con- concept, but, apparently it’s a lot harder for d- for a lot of Democrats to wanna do it. but it’s, I think it’s more a matter of will, not, than a matter of sheer [00:34:00] difficulty.
CORRIGAN: Oh, I think it’s about RICO. I think that there’s so many Democrats that are wound up into what have become these huge, mafia capital deals that the problem is that they are implicated. I think it’s willful in that direction, and I think that the only thing that’s going to unravel the corruption is gonna be RICO-style massive racketeering cases like the ‘80s.
I mean, and I, I really do think that the problem, especially with the congressional class of Democrats, is that so many of them are implicated in that, and they’ve taken money from the same sources, and they’ve been to the same parties, and they’ve trafficked, trafficked in the same kinds of malfeasance.
And so one, one thing that I think is that high contrast races are gonna draw more people into, formal politics. But I think that the organizing game is so far outside of formal politics that the real transformative stuff is gonna be in [00:35:00] local communities, in the school board races, right? In the state legislatures.
And I think recapturing state legislatures is really where the money’s at for what a transformational future for America looks like. It’s just really hard for me to see how Congress is a path towards a more equitable future. I just don’t think so at all. But I think the state legislatures are a place for radical transformation.
Most of them were bought out by the Koch brothers in the 2010s, and I think that they can be flipped back actually, and I think the people are ripe for it. But it’s gonna take a younger demographic, and it’s gonna take different messaging, and it’s, and it’s gotta get outside of the dog whistles than, race panic, sex panic
Reactionaries changed Republican political culture through media
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and, and it’s also, a lot of it does have to, to have media components as well. Like, because again, like I, I, I think the Democrats the left political culture such as it is or was, it was politician dominated rather than values and, [00:36:00] and intellectual dominated. And like that was, I think the, the, the really the engine of success for the reactionaries in the Republican Party is that they built...
So like, they as a coal- they built that coalition. Like the idea of them being more unified, that only happened because they created a media culture that told people, “Look, you like Christian nationalism. Well, it’s easier to have Christian nationalism if the government is reduced to zero and public education is, is eliminated because then, your Christian schools can step right in and everyone will want them and you won’t have to impose them.
Be- they’ll come to you and will make you rich by, by stealing public education dollars and giving them to your school.” So like, like that’s the kind of, of coalition buil- and they, and they, they built it up as a concept which, which was called fusionism. And, and nothing really like that has been done from the media [00:37:00] infrastructure standpoint.
And so, you do have Democrats as this y- coalition of groups that kind of all hate each other and think that only their viewpoint of the world is correct. So you, you got people who only think that everything is racism, everything is sexism, everything is capitalism.
And it’s like, well, actually, w- why can’t you all be right? That these are, that these are, are, are bad things that you can work to oppose and that everybody’s liberation is linked.
The importance of debate
CORRIGAN: I mean, I, I hear that. I, I was a high school and college debater, and I will tell you that I think you can mark the decline of that kind of, mm, generous public sphere, rigorous even public sphere with the decline of high school and college debate. And I think that the problem now is that we don’t have the long-form journalism.
We don’t have the opinion programs. We don’t have public debates. [00:38:00] And so the ability to sit with long-form arguments and interrogate values is so far afield of the everyday American’s experience of mediation that the thing that draws them back in is something like the Joe Rogan, which we talked about the last time I was here, and, these programs that are, I don’t know, just such a basic version of the kinds of conversations that used to happen just generally in the public sphere.
And people are rusty, and they don’t have the ability to interrogate values together in a group in a way that is satisfying to them or is politically productive. Like they’re just not, that is not part of what the demos is doing. Those skills are lost right now. And with the attacks on, higher education and K through 12 and like the book banning and all this culture war stuff, it’s disincentivizing those hard conversations across what are, sm- small [00:39:00] minutiae concerns that can build a conversation that can rise to the level of values, and we’re just not there.
So it’s all of this fracking resources out of the state, right, into private hands instead of larger conversations about where we’re going together as a culture. In some ways, I think that that’s why immigration has returned, right, as the major focus of ire. Yeah, 100%.
SHEFFIELD: The foreigners.
CORRIGAN: that.
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think you’re, you’re right, regarding Rogan, that he’s kind of making a very degraded and stupefied version of the public debates that we used to have that were much more commonplace in the country.
And people do want that. Like, I think that that’s, that is a thing that maybe a lot of people on the left haven’t understood. It’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t want to go on Rogan because I’m platforming him.” And it’s like, Rogan has 100 times as many people as [00:40:00] you do. You are not platforming Joe Rogan by going on his show.
It is the opposite, in fact.
CORRIGAN: Bernie knows that. Bernie gets that.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, he did. And, and now, to her credit, I have to say that Kamala Harris had, actually did admit that she wished that she had done it. And of course, she should have. And again, like, you don’t have to, you don’t have to agree with someone 100% to go on their, on their program.
You just have to think that there are people that are there. Like, that you just have... You’re just acknowledging this is not a completely evil person. And, Joe Rogan’s not that great. He’s not a great guy. But you know what? Hey, he’s not a fascist Nazi. So you should talk to him.
And that’s, I t- I think that that is something that, you know again, of this, this lobbying-focused culture that kind of really did set in among the further left people in, in, in the country, is that, they’re like, “No, I... We only have to just lobby the legislatures and make the lawsuits, and then we’ll win.”
And it’s like, well, that’s actually not democracy, guys. I hate to tell you [00:41:00] that. But you know, if you wanna protect democracy, you actually have to practice it. And both in talking to the public and listening to the public also, but then also helping people have a career in advocating for your ideas.
Like, that’s another thing that the right does so well. Like, they are just... They love throwing money at people who, who agree with them. And, on the left, it’s like the opposite. People are like, “Oh, this person, they’re trying to raise money for their organization. I should be suspicious of them.
They’re a grifter.” And it’s like, what, how does this, how do you think things happen? Like, how do you think journalism is produced? How do you think that organiza- civic organizations exist? It’s not like magic free money from the government. Sorry, guys.
CORRIGAN: I mean, I’m a Gen Xer, and I came up through Republican politics in my Republican state that only had Republicans, and I will tell you, there were no Democrats that were gonna pipeline women into the party in the ‘90s. None. Anywhere. None. Every [00:42:00] woman my age that’s worked in politics as long as I have, all of them had to find their path through the Republican pipeline first because Democrats were unwilling to work with women.
I’m sorry, it just was that way. They didn’t wanna platform women. They didn’t wanna include people of color. They didn’t wanna include immigrants. They were totally exclusionary. And so, like, that was 30 years lost of pipelining into all of the things that they wish that they had captured because they did not want to do that work, and now they’re behind, and so they want a shortcut, and it’s just lazy
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it is. And, but, and yet, despite all of their incompetence and failures we have had real progress as, as Americans in this country and, people... the, the franchise has expanded and, marital rape is illegal and at least-- And, and of course, all of this is just for now because, of course, Russell Vote and people like him they, they, they have their, they have their thoughts.
America as a young, tentative democracy
SHEFFIELD: Um, but th- in light of that progress and this [00:43:00] is why, I, I, I was ki- why I don’t like this worst timeline type of rhetoric. Like the... I, I, I was just talking with a, a friend of mine about, the, the misogynist commentators like Andrew Tate and, and some of these other manosphere-type people.
And it’s like, yes, it’s true that, their rhetoric is, probably more concentrated and toxic than a lot of past commentators have been. But the reality is that the values that, and ideas that they espouse, those were the mainstream ideas. Like they, they’re, they are openly talking about, “Yes, we should go back to getting rid of marital rape laws.
We should go back to, we should eliminate all sexual harassment laws, it’s great to be able to have to grab your coworker’s breast or whatever.” Like, that’s what they’re saying. Like, they’re, they’re not actually trying to do something that is, like uniquely, awful in society.
[00:44:00] No, they’re, they’re, they’re this way in- because they lost. And, and so they’re more toxic, yes. But, all... You just have to turn on a ‘90s, teen movie, and the way that women are talked about in those movies, the way that, sexual women are, just degraded and dismissed as moronic sluts who can be exploited by any man who wants to exploit them and, rape is funny.
Like this is what these guys want. And, and like we should, we should, we should at least take some solace in what has been accomplished and understand it in that context, but also understand we have to work to keep that and keep moving the ball forward. That’s a lot. I’m sorry. But yeah, go... W- whatever you wanna pick out of that.
CORRIGAN: it, it was a good rant. I mean, no, I-- you can pick out any John Hughes movie, and it’s a, it’s super objectionable from a-any [00:45:00] serious perspective, right? So you’re right that there’s been some progress, at least in representation, and there’s been some legal progress, but I just worry about overstating the case.
Like, if America’s a democracy, which is a big question for me, it’s only really been a democracy since ‘64.
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.
CORRIGAN: It’s not 60 years we’ve tried to do it. So everything about it right now feels very teenagery. Like these are just baby ideas and baby steps and, immature decisions and immature politics. So when I’m feeling very generous about the political moment, it is leading me to suggest that we’re just so new at politics as a nation, that all this stuff is very nascent and unformed, and it’s unformed adults that are saying these things, and it’s, half-assed media ecology, and it’s tantrum-throwing oligarchs, and it just strikes me as [00:46:00] so politically immature, and I think that that’s how much of the world sees it, too.
And that perspective, I think, could be instructive if the people in the rooms that w- you and I are not in could hear that, to be like, “Oh, the rest of the world thinks you’re a baby. That’s, those are baby ideas. That’s radically immature. Bless your heart. That dog don’t hunt.” Right? And so I, I don’t know. I think the way out of that doomerism right now is a sense that the country’s so immature, and these ideas are so half-baked, and their solutions were so underfunded, and that there’s so much room for improvement.
And to start from there’s so much room for improvement, let’s try and improve, is a better spot than, it’s all lost, which of course it’s not. We’re gonna lose a lot more, and things are gonna radically change, I’m sure. And also, that creates [00:47:00] space for potential and new interest convergence and different kinds of conversations and opportunities for collaboration, and you can’t have one without the other.
But ultimately, it, it reads to me just as radical immaturity
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, so much, yeah, elite left theories of politics, they are extra-extraordinarily immature and and like, I mean, that, and that’s one of the other kind of asymmetries between the right and the left in the US is that the right wing has a very sophisticated understanding of how democratic politics works, but a very poor...
Well, they don’t care about it. They don’t want it. But they understand, in other words, how to talk to the public. And they understand, way how... So, like, on the left, the debate continually between the two progressive and liberal factions tends to be, “Well, your issues are a liability.” Like each side is saying that, right?
And, and the reality is the public doesn’t even know [00:48:00] about the issues.
CORRIGAN: Yeah
SHEFFIELD: and, and I just found a poll that the Pew Research Center did in 2010 that really illustrates this, I think, more than anything I could ever say, which is, so 2010, it was June of 2010. Joe Biden had been the vice president for a year and a half. 41% of Americans did not, could not name him as the vice president. And so, when-- So the idea that the public knows about the particulars of your issues or a particular ad that your candidate ran, no, they do not. They don’t know what your ideas are. They don’t even know who the vice president is.
So, like, it, that, that underscores your point, though, like the, of just this, we are a, a, a democracy that is very immature and and the people who are supposed to be protecting it are similarly immature and need to understand that the biggest menace [00:49:00] to democracy is ignorance and mediocrity.
That’s what i- and, and overcoming that and struggling against that has to be your number one endeavor. If you want to have any kind of other progress, you have to pr- you have to educate, and you have to be there, and you have to, to explain and to listen. And, and otherwise it’s not gonna work.
CORRIGAN: No, I think Americans are living the unexamined life, and I think politics here is basically forced teaming where people wear their jersey and that’s the team they’re on, and that’s the level of engagement that they give politics. And if that’s the case, then the solutions look really different, right?
Than they would if you had an engaged population. So I think if you can bring more people into politics, into conversations that create meaning for them, right, where they feel engaged and seen and heard, then, the way that we do politics in the country changes, whether that’s on a local level or [00:50:00] on a national level.
But without that, it’s gonna continue to be the same immature stuff that we’ve al- always seen. Yeah
SHEFFIELD: all right. Well, you’re, you’re coming up on your hard out here, Lisa.
This has been a, a good discussion. We could go on for a lot longer, I think. But for people who wanna keep up with your stuff why don’t you, plug whatever you want here and, and then we’ll get you out.
CORRIGAN: And they can follow me @DrLisaCorrigan on Bluesky, and they can read either “Prison Power” or “Black Feelings,” both published by the University of Mississippi Press
SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. All right. Good to have you back again. Good to see you.
CORRIGAN: Great to see 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, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscriber to the program, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support.
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