Who Do You Think You're Talking To?

A genuine question, not a rhetorical one.

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for People's Action Institute)

Try imagining yourself as someone with weak political commitments—someone who doesn’t watch or read much news, but whose fortunes turn pretty heavily on the course of federal policy.

Maybe you’re middle class, and soon won’t be able to afford your pre-tariff lifestyle, which is about to cost a few thousand dollars more each year—but you’re only dimly aware that a big price shock is coming, and don’t fully understand why. Or maybe you’re self-employed, and won’t be able to afford your current health plan when ACA premium support falls significantly next year, but nobody’s told you to budget $200 extra each month for insurance. Maybe you’re a little bit poorer than that, a single man who relies on Medicaid, and you don’t realize that the GOP’s top priority is to strip away your coverage.

If nothing changes, you’ll pay the price in the near future, but for now, in your blissful ignorance, you whip out your phone to do some scrolling. You happen upon a guy in a suit, trying very hard not to seem bent out of shape. He says, “the GOP budget provides enormous tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, allowing them to pocket hundreds of thousands in tax savings while working families face rising costs and cuts to benefits.”

A few videos later a more normal seeming bloke is livid. “You’re going to lose your health insurance because Donald Trump and all the greedy motherfuckers who hang out at his golf course think you and everyone like you are a bunch of leaches. They’re gonna scheme and lie and break the rules to get this bill passed, pocket all that money, and won’t lose a lick of sleep when it ruins your life.”

Which video might get you to call your representatives or march in the streets? Which one did you swipe past the moment you heard the word “budget” or the uncanny phrase “working families”?

BLUE BOILERPLATE SPECIAL

I painted this only-slightly-tendentious picture for two reasons. First, Democratic donors have decided to get in the business of media talent scouting, a development widely characterized and mocked as Dems trying to create a liberal Joe Rogan.

Second, Democratic operatives, funded presumably by at least some of the same donors, have weighed in on how congressional Democrats should build public opposition to Trump’s top legislative priority—a bill Republicans muscled through the House Thursday while most of America slept. And their guidance was to be as bland and dispassionate as humanly possible.

From the geniuses at House Majority Forward, the issue-advocacy arm of the top House Democratic PAC.

It was also, specifically, to “Avoid Hyperbolic Rhetoric.” Don’t get too worked up, don’t aim for the lizard brain.

For whatever it’s worth, “murder budget” isn’t my idea of good demagoguery, either. It’s not how I talk, and I don’t think it’s how most people talk. Part of the idea should be to rally and persuade simultaneously with genuine, emotionally evocative language. Maybe for some people that’s “murder budget,” but out of my mouth, and out of most Democrats’ mouths, it would sound conspicuously forced, artificially transgressive. You may have noticed a related awkwardness after the election when Democrats in Congress, or the social media staffers who work for them, suddenly started slipping PG-13 swear words into their tweets.

But this one phrase is mostly beside the point. The overarching issue is that top Democrats are desperate to prevent members from popping off and showing emotion—even on their best issues—as if the ideal way to reach and activate people is by being as placid as possible. They’re wrong about this, in a way that should be obvious. Many, many senior Democrats, including the party’s leaders, believe that approximately every controversy under the sun is a distraction from the only two issues that matter: health care and tax cuts for the rich. But now that they’re in the fight they want to have, their advisers want them to parry using language that makes them sound like the grown-ups in Peanuts. They’re not going to increase the salience of legislative-budget politics speaking in cliche.

To make matters worse, these strategists apparently rigged their test of more aggressive language to ensure that it failed¹, all to settle an intramural score with rivals who want Democrats to fight harder.

My hope wading in here is two-fold: First, that Democrats in Congress will not heed this advice and bite their tongues for fear of conveying raw anger—or “hyperbole” if you prefer; second that their affinity for mealy-mouthed garbage doesn’t suffuse parallel efforts to enlarge the Democratic Party’s media footprint.

ROG’S GALLERY

Most Democrats in Congress can probably remember the long and painful effort to pass the Affordable Care Act, and all the times Republicans nearly killed it. But if you asked them to recall the “strongest-testing messages” from that era, they’d probably be stumped. By contrast, they probably can recall the furor over the “death panels” slander, or that Republicans accused Democrats of throwing granny off a cliff. They might remember that a congressman serving at the time—Alan Grayson—described the Republican health-care plan like so:

“Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”

I’m not sure any of those messages were ever formally tested, but if they were, they would have tested poorly; Democratic consultants would have run the Grayson line through a focus group and discouraged Democrats from ever repeating it.

But Grayson’s approach was plainly, obviously more galvanizing than any message that includes the phrase “working families.”

Nobody normal ever uses those two words together the way Democrats do, and when normal people hear Democrats lapse into cliches about working families, they can tell they’re reciting bloodless, scripted pablum. As the writer James Downie noted, “it immediately screams ‘I focus grouped these remarks, and forgot how to sound normal.’”

Even if some naif somewhere overheard one of these canned lines about working families and perked up—“Yes? I’m a member of a working family…”—why limit the audience for the message in any way? Democrats rend their garments over the difficulties they’ve had appealing to single young men, then solicit braindead talking points that presume people who aren’t part of “working families” don’t really count.

Which brings me to the supposed hunt for the liberal Joe Rogan.

I honestly think that characterization is unfair. That sentiment may be out there, but it does not appear to me that Democratic donors intend to conduct auditions to cast some ersatz liberal as the Democrats’ answer to Joe Rogan and hope he finds an audience. They’re going to seed talent, give people who might be able to build big loyal audiences the resources they need to try, and see what blooms.

This pretty closely resembles a few of the ideas I traced out after the election. Contra critics, I think it’s a worthy effort. Worst case scenario, they come up empty.

But as they proceed, I do hope they remain clear eyed about a few things:

• No broadcaster or influencer, no matter how talented, will come close to competing with Rogan speaking in the idiom of the Democratic consultant class. Has Joe Rogan ever used the term “working families”?

• Joe Rogan isn’t a Republican influencer. He’s a hobbyist whose politics have become fairly right wing. If he were a Republican influencer, he wouldn’t have such a big audience

• Thus, if donors give money to partisan Democratic influencers (current or aspiring) hoping one of them blossoms into liberal Joe Rogan, they will be disappointed.

• If they actually want to build up a liberal Joe Rogan, they shouldn’t give anyone money, but instead encourage Democrats to engage directly with simpatico pop-culture figures whose audiences aren’t overwhelmingly liberal already. That could be Rogan himself, but it could also be a different comedian like Bill Burr.

  Pete Buttigieg
  set a good example here in his two-hour appearance on Andrew Schulz’s podcast Flagrant.

• Under no circumstances should Democrats put themselves out there like Buttigieg did if they don’t already know what they believe. Without belief, they will stammer, afraid to say the wrong thing, and lapse into “working families” boilerplate. The opportunity will be worse than wasted.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

1. When House Majority Forward and its pollster tested Anat Shenker-Osorio’s hyperbolic rhetoric, they apparently designed the test to fail, prefacing it: “Democrats say you should support them because the MAGA regime’s murder budget…” Emphasis added.