Communication Breakdown
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So, in part I’m hesitant to link to this New York Times op-ed about Democrats and communication that came out yesterday. I obviously just linked to it but I think it makes sense to talk about why I didn’t want to first, which is that these people represented here as Real Talkers are morons and it’s hard for a lot of us to get our heads around this. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where being nice paid off and building equality paid off and eliminating offensive words paid off? It would! Alas, we do not live in that world. We live in the United States of America, where Donald Trump has been elected president twice, once after every American who voted for him had already lived through the experience. Now that’s depressing.
So the reason to link to this is that it’s probably right. Democrats can’t recreate a Joe Rogan because that totally misses the point. Democrats also need to stop using words that no one knows the meaning to and need to quit being so sensitive to the world that their biggest fear is offending someone. That’s not because it’s right to offend people. It’s because you can’t protect anyone if you don’t hold power and the kind of politics educated liberals (and really, in 2025 what other kind of liberal is there?) engage in are really alienating to a lot of people.
Thus, here we go, if you hate all of this, I totally get it. But I think it’s also on people to explain why this is wrong, as opposed to unpleasant.
But if the bro-casters lack a coherent policy agenda, what they do have is a well of knowledge, honed from years of touring the country from one chuckle hut to another, about how to talk to people without talking down to them. And in a world where authority of all kinds (medical, professorial, journalistic, political) is in decline, where information from top-down media is losing ground to an infinitude of bottom-up sources, this precise kind of realness matters. Authenticity, it seems, is what fills the void when authority dies.
Democrats long since forgot how to communicate that way. They operate on the assumption that ideas and governance are the primary things that move people. That’s why we get endless debates about what Democrats should stand for that are of interest to insiders and hugely off-putting to everyone else. The problem isn’t getting the ideology right; it’s using words like “ideology” to begin with. Democrats are very much not out there going: This is my truth.
If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness. “The word ‘retarded’ is back,” Mr. Rogan recently announced, ridiculously, “and it’s one of the great culture victories.” Mr. Schulz wound up his latest Netflix standup special with a long bit, the upshot of which was basically that people from Staten Island were a super race of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Retards.”
Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege. The comedy of that time mocked the latest language strictures, whichever new initial was being added to the L.G.B.T.Q. array and anything trans. I first encountered Mr. Schulz in 2018 at New York’s Comedy Cellar, when he was a successful but not yet famous touring stand-up comic, developing what would become his signature style: marching up to the line of woke heresy and letting the tension hang there before performing a quick switcheroo. One bit: Schulz introduces the topic of trans women in sports. Nervous anticipation from the audience. Punchline: He’s in favor, because “then women will know what white people went through when we let Black people play sports.” Anti-woke made Mr. Schulz one of the country’s top comics, and now one of its more prominent podcasters.
The bro-caster ecosystem is a safe space for men to such a comical degree that it seems less menacing than juvenile. Only in this world could Eric Adams bond with Mr. Schulz over the need for a New York outpost of a particularly baller Miami strip club. By my rough count, fewer than two dozen of Mr. Von’s last 467 shows, spanning almost a decade, featured women, and two of them were Nikki Glaser. But male doesn’t necessarily mean brutish or insensitive. On air, Mr. Von can be emotionally finely tuned, open to thoughtful discussions of mental illness and parenting. Last year, he had an uncannily human conversation with Mr. Trump about, amazingly, cocaine. “Is our conversation going OK?” he asked during an epic dorkfest with Mark Zuckerberg in April. A few years ago, Mr. Schulz let an increasingly drunk Alex Jones wave around a machete and offer to castrate any boy who wanted to be trans — but looking past the theatrics, I find that Mr. Schulz circa 2025 is against racism, welcoming to gay people, largely chivalrous to women, agreeable about ideological differences. He’s decent.
If the Democrats ever want to get their groove back, it won’t work to tune out these folks, or to insist that engaging them is just feeding the trolls. It was the shunning of characters like Mr. Schulz and Mr. Dillon that led them to position themselves as free-speech warriors — the same ressentiment that helped fuel Trump’s victory.
Schulz describes himself as a Bernie bro who voted for Trump not because of any intrinsic conservatism but because Democrats lost their chill. Liberals used to get all the action, Mr. Schulz said recently; now, conservatives are the ones who live large “and say whatever they want.” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, fully taking the bait, called this “possibly the stupidest argument for a transition to MAGA that I’ve ever heard.” But this is sort of making his point, no?
I don’t really know.
But I will say–Democrats will keep losing until they are the funnier people. So long as right-wingers seem cool and funny and hip, they are likely to keep winning, especially the way the popular media works (as opposed to what ABC does, which no one really cares about much except people like us). Liberals are determinedly unfunny these days–I mean, have you spent time on Bluesky?
In any case, you can’t just replicate Joe Rogan for liberals. In fact, that doesn’t even make sense. It just misunderstands who and what Rogan is and why modern liberals would be hopeless to try. But I do agree with this one thing–you have to be yourself. Fire the entire consultant class and do what Kamala Harris would not do–talk to anyone at any time about anything off script and just do it. Might work, might not, but it has to become a norm in Democratic politics. And as I’ve said many times since the election, the question among Democrats right now is far less about more left or more center than it is about being a normal person ready to punch back hard.