The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this episode here.
And the sort of narrative throughout that was Ezra Klein was essentially saying the Democrats need to move to the right or move to the middle to win elections. And Coates basically saying... I’m a writer. I’m not here to like, I want to talk about policy and my values. That’s what I do. And then Coates saying, yes, but we talk about elections. And sorry, Klein saying, yes, we talk about how Democrats win. And Coates saying, no, I don’t do politics.
But I think that leaves me with — it left me with a challenge — which is that it seemed to me that, like, Klein was sort of saying Democrats move to the right. Coates was saying, I don’t want to engage in that, which did, which left the implication in some ways that Coates might agree with Klein that the political move, the electoral move, to the move to the right, is correct. But he didn’t necessarily want to condone that or lay it out himself.
So I’m happy to have you here because you’re a progressive person, I think, on some politics issues. But you also — you do work in elections. You do work in winning. You do get into these issues of politics. I want to talk to you about that.
And I want to start from the premise — which I think is a lot of the sort of popularist or pol-ist, or we’ll get into what we should call them in a second — sure. I think their argument, at the core of it, is: if every Democrat who ran for the House, the Senate, and the presidency ran on Joe Manchin’s platform — and we can talk about why that might be morally wrong, which is where I might be and where Coates might be — let’s say that were somehow possible. I think that’s the advice they’re giving, is if every Democrat, the whole party in unison, said these things that polled well and were bland and didn’t offend anyone — Democrats would win more seats.
I think you might disagree with that electorally. Is that correct?
Shenker-Osorio: Just a little.
And we live, as I think everybody on this live knows, in an extraordinarily saturated environment in which information, messages, propaganda, lies, you know, sports, reality TV, your children, the homework, et cetera, is all happening.
And so, basically, that Joe Manchin strategy — let’s call it Joe Manchin is running as Joe Manchin, let’s say, nationally, or whatever his figure, his archetype. And there’s still, let’s say, a Donald Trump running who, regardless of what Joe Manchin is actually saying, is saying that Joe Manchin is a socialist, is saying that Joe Manchin is handing out abortions — and would you like fries with that? — is saying that Joe Manchin personally went to the border to, like, be a coyote to bring people over.
Because of course — I mean, I can prove this with an example — Chuck Schumer is a socialist, right? The senator from MasterCard, a.k.a. Joe Biden, before he became vice president and president, is a socialist. They’re not confined by a reality-based view of the world.
So even if you’ve, you know, maintained your Manchin-ism, that doesn’t actually mean that that’s what people hear about you. Because again, a lot of this polling-ism is credited — it’s run on the fiction that what people believe about Democrats is made out of what Democrats say. And it’s not. It’s made out of what is said about them.
And then the next thing is that it’s credited on the fiction that what people believe about a politician is what that politician or their super PAC paid for by to say. When in fact, most of people’s judgments come filtered through their identity or what their friends and family say.
And so if you’re a political person who isn’t tuning in much and you live, let’s call it, in rural Pennsylvania or in the middle of Ohio or in the Central Valley of my state, California, and it’s coming close to election time, you haven’t thought about it at all, and you wander around and your bowling buddies are wearing red MAGA hats, and no one is wearing any other kind of hat, and you’re kind of like, oh, I don’t really know about that, what is that, back in the day? And then you conclude, understandably, that this is what people like me think. People do the thing they think people like them do.
And so, at a practical level, what that means is that rather than running yourself as Republican-light and crediting this idea that immigration equals border — that that is what is sort of the only thing to know about that topic — what you say instead, and newsflash, we tested it, because I do actually believe in testing, and we tested it in combat testing after exposing voters to a real-world Donald Trump ad, not a make-believe kind of message that we invented ourselves.
And an ad that says, you know, they watch a Donald Trump ad, then they watch The Border, The Border, The Border ad, and basically there isn’t movement. They watch a Donald Trump ad and they watch an ad that says some version of: most of us would move heaven and earth for our families. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. And we know that moving is one of the hardest things a person can do. Today, Republicans peddle hate and take away what all of our families need, hoping we’ll point our finger in the wrong direction. Let’s trade Republican hate peddling for Democratic problem solving.
You basically say, hey, here’s the shared value behind immigration. Then you say, hey, here’s the actual villain. Then you say, hey, they’re trying to get you to point your finger in the wrong direction. You essentially narrate the dog whistle, and then you close with some sort of vision or something desirable.
And that structure, which has a name — we call it the race–class narrative or the race–class–gender narrative — we’ve used over and over and over again. And at risk of taking us too far afield (you can pull me back), an incredible example of it happening right now is Zack Polanski, who is just absolutely killing it in the U.K. as a leader of the Green Party.
Another way of putting this is that you level with people and you say: yeah, you’re right, someone did take your job. You’re right, someone did take your healthcare. You’re right, someone did take your ability to have a single income and be able to go to Disneyland once a year with your kids. If you’d like to know who took your money — it’s the people with all the money. That’s how you can tell. But if they can get you to point your finger at the Black guy or the Brown guy or the trans kid, then we actually will not be able to confront the people who’ve screwed us all over.
And that’s it. That’s it.
And then second... those are the folks who actually spread your message. So the reason why this is meaningful — I mean, if you look at the Obama era, in the Obama era and in the Mamdani era right now — these are human beings who, in their own very different ways (and there are other people in this category), have perfectly hacked the idea of brand advocates. That’s what this is known as in marketing, right? The people who are so excited about and loyal to your product — not that humans are products, but in marketing — that they will bake the chocolate cake with Miracle Whip, you know, serve it at the family reunion. The family eats it and says, this cake is moist and delicious. What’s in it? Would you believe Miracle Whip?
And suddenly people are entertaining Miracle Whip that never, ever, ever would — and especially wouldn’t if Kraft Foods sent them an ad. Because when Kraft Foods sends you an ad saying Miracle Whip is delicious, you’re like, I don’t believe you. That’s your job. You sent me this ad because that’s your job. But if your friend gives you a piece of cake, eh, you might entertain it.
So translate that into politics. These are the folks who, first of all, at a practical level, literally go door to door for you and register voters and get them to the polls and drive them and remind them when the election is and actually ensure that the voting happens. So that’s just a practical thing. And if they’re not excited about the candidate, then they’re not going to do it. And that’s a sort of volunteer base that you really, really need.
And then short of people who are that dedicated — which obviously is not most people — they are the ones who are spreading the gospel and who are saying to you, you know, you need to do this. This is what I’m excited about. This is why you should be excited about this. And telling person after person after person, because a message is like a baton. It has to be passed from person to person. And if it gets dropped along the way, it doesn’t get heard.
And then the second answer is that you can very much win the battle to lose the war. And Bill Clinton presided, as you know, over the great shellacking that the incumbent party has taken in a midterm. And of course, the incumbent party always suffers in a midterm election. I understand that that is a vibe because of differential turnout, and the out-of-power people want to go vote and the in-power people are lethargic and apathetic — speaking of the couch as another option.
But it was unprecedented, at least in modern history, how bad it was. So basically, Bill Clinton and ‘welfare as we know it’ Bill Clinton went in in an argument vilifying government, went in in an argument and a policy platform of NAFTA, actually sort of stepping away from the historic support that the Democratic Party had given to the working class — way back machine FDR times. FDR times when being a Democrat wasn’t just something a working-class person voted, it was something a working-class person was. It was core to their identity, and it was an era of Democratic ascendancy we’ve never seen since.
Right, right. So he wins the battle in terms of winning the presidency — obviously undeniable — and he ushers in an era of Democratic losses down the ballot across the country, which is then, you know, recreated under Obama. And he overall, I would argue, moves the country, the discourse, the belief system to the right — crediting the opposition’s argument that what you should look for in a public servant, what you should look for in a politician, is someone who says the government is bad. And again, that’s the Republican brand advantage. That’s not the Democratic brand advantage.
And so here we are now, and this is an argument that I’m having, obviously, live. If we believe that our job right now — and I believe it is — is to blunt the authoritarian assault that we live within, then we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that electing Democrats in 2018, in 2020 — a trifecta, remember 2020? — and to the extent that we did in 2020, did not stop Trump. Electing Democrats in those instances — I’m speaking facts — that did not stop Trump. It did not stop the abductions. It did not stop the military into our cities. It did not stop all of the things that I don’t need to detail to you.
And so the question really is, for me, the purpose of politics is to enact an agenda. It’s to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives. It isn’t merely to get Democrats elected for the sake of doing so. And yes, I understand that that process requires electing Democrats. But which Democrats we elect, and critically, how we get them elected, matters.
So in... You know, back in the day, not so long ago, it was critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey in history in which the majority of American voters were asked, what is your top issue, your most pressing issue? Critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey where the majority was like, my most pressing issue is trans girls playing volleyball or my most pressing issue is DEI? That’s never happened. Their most pressing issue is money. It’s always going to be money. So the right sees those issue surveys and they’re like, great. Nobody cares about this. Nobody knows what this is. We can use it as a vessel to populate it with our own disgusting meaning and then make an astroturf group like Moms for Liberty to be our choir and make believe this is a big issue. Or with DEI, we call university presidents into Congress. And have at them. So they don’t just issue talking points, right? They don’t just do a social media post. They do a 360-degree surround-sound strategy around issues that are not popular.
And if we don’t deeply understand that and that that is the argument that they are providing to their base, they are providing an origin story for people’s pain. It’s a lie. But they are telling people, these are the heroes. These are the villains. This is why your life is hard. And this is how we’re going to fix it for you. And when we are making believe that that isn’t going on and we are either actually crediting their argument by saying, you know what? You’re right. We did lose because of immigrants and trans people.