Ingraham: The instagram posts from nut bag people ..people celebrating. This this is a sickness, honestly, it's so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised.. up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny, a lot of people think he is a hero. pic.twitter.com/DRi5d1QNTv
Basically: Vigilante who kills homeless Black man on train good, vigilante who kills rich white guy on sidewalk bad.
That’s your right wing morality, right there.
(And yes, I know there are people on the left taking the opposite POV but they aren’t on what amounts to state TV flagrantly spreading their hypocrisy to millions in the same breath.)
Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, appeared Monday night on “The Daily Show” and made an impression on host Jon Stewart. That’s not easy to do for a political operative. Wikler, 43, a founding producer for Al Franken’s Air America radio show and former national adviser to MoveOn, is running for Democratic National Committee chair.
“The passion that you’re bringing, that feels like what it needs in this moment,” Stewart said, remarking that DNC chairs he’s interviewed before felt much more corporate.
“You are approaching [politics] from a much more populist, bottom-up standpoint than I’ve heard in the past. Other than Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.” At that Dean reference, the audience applauded.
I’ve mentioned Wikler in the context of the DNC chair’s race twicealready. The two front runners for the position are Wikler and Minnesota’s DFL chair Ken Martin. I met Martin in passing this year at a North Carolina party meeting. He’s known, experienced, impressive, and connected. But indulge me. How I met Wikler says worlds about the man.
Netroots Nation held its 2019 conference in Philadelphia. A few weeks earlier, I’d sent Wikler a link to For The Win via IM. At an after-hours party in a hotel suite packed elbow-to-elbow, I’d slipped into an adjacent bedroom for a conversation where the din was somewhat less. While attendees in the main room sipped beers, ate cheesesteaks, and traded political gossip, a guy sat in the corner of the bedcoom in a cushioned chair with his nose in a laptop: working. Seriously, working. I caught a glimpse of his name badge: Ben Wikler.
When he came up for air, I walked over and introduced myself. He recognized my name.
“Didn’t you send me a message recently?” Wikler asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Did I respond to it?” Wikler asked, recalling what I’d messaged about.
No, he hadn’t.
“I’m putting you in touch with my training director,” Wikler said, pulling up an email form and e-introducing us on the spot. I had a 45-minute call with her the next week.
That’s the kind of chair Democrats need running their national party. A guy who understands and appreciates field work and is passionate about boots on the ground work. It’s what Stewart saw across the table last night.
Update: Let me say again, There is no The Democratic Party. A lot of the negatives Stewart reacts to as “the Democratic Party” are more a feature of the Beltway caucus fundraising arms — the DCCC and DSCC — than activists farther down the food chain. But the DNC chair gets more media face time than the heads of those groups and can set a new tone and agenda, as Howard Dean did and caught grief for inside the Beltway:
“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”
The anger of the crowd and the pettiness of plutocrats
Princeton economist Paul Krugman just published his final New York Times column in a body of work begun in January 2000. He considers how the world has changed over 25 years. It’s a grimmer place:
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
Krugman doesn’t mention Trump again, but he’s the most prominent of those resentful billionaires.
In early 2000, Krugman writes, “Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.” One could point to many reasons for the public mood, but the collapse of public faith in elites features prominently. “The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”
Krugman touches on the financial crisis of 2008 as one reason, eliding the crisis of confidence in American invulnerability that was the fallout from the September 11 attacks. Still, the Great Recession hit more Americans where they live, and their resentments swelled.
Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe were uncontrite and escaped well-earned criminal prosecutions, adding to public cynicism. They kept their bonuses but lost stature in the public eye. They responded with “Obama rage” to the 44th president’s suggestion that they were, you know, in some small part to blame.
These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.
There is not enough money on the planet to fill an empty soul. So not to overthink things, then, it is clear that the incoming 47th president has been trying to buy love his entire career. As have many of the billionaires with which he plans to populate the White House next year. Trump chief among them demands worship. Wealth equals worth in the billionaire universe, and in the country club of the gods.
Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer famously deconstructed billionaire’s mythmaking in a 2012 TED talk. He told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell:
“When a capitalist like me claims to be a ‘job creator,’ it sounds like we’re describing how the economy works, but what we’re doing is something far more interesting. What we’re doing is making a claim on status and privilege. Look, there’s a small leap from ‘job creator’ to ‘The Creator’ — someone at the center of the economic universe…
But elites in general have taken it on the chin over the last 25 years, not just the One Percent. The public mood has curdled, in Krugman’s view, towards elites in particular, and of any kind.
The Washington Post reports this morning, “University leaders are bracing for an onslaught of aggressive legislation and regulations amid growing hostility from an ascendant Republican Party that depends less and less on college-educated voters.”
This is not a new trend. Attacks on elite academies by state legislatures have taken place in the last decade in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Only now they may come from Washington, D.C.:
For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.
Now that rift has become a rupture.
In a “Morning Joe” interview aired Monday, President Bill Clinton commented on how “deeply and yet closely divided” the U.S. is as a country.
That divide, distrust of learning and expertise is both organic and cultivated, seeded and nurtured by the very petty plutocrats whose wealth can’t buy love.
Commenting on the Clinton interview, a Bluesky commenter notes, “Since Reagan, the GOP has worked to increase citizens’ cynicism about government, and then campaigned against government. Now, under Trump, the GOP is working to increase citizens’ cynicism about democracy, and then campaigning against democracy.”
Is there a way out? Krugman offers:
We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.
May you all live to see it.
For now, the satire of Idiocracy (2006) bites deeper than ever and we seem a long way from the corner Joe Bowers turned in his inaugural speech:
And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
We know that happened on January 6th. We saw it with our own eyes, heard the testimony of his own staff and read the reports. The facts cannot be disputed. Trump lied about the election of 2020, called people to Washington, incited an insurrection in which they stormed the Capitol and hunted for the Vice President chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” And we know that Trump took no action and let it unfold until late in the day he finally told the rioters that he loved them and asked them to go home.
None of this is the story Trump tells. Instead, he inverts both the culpability and the morality: The rioters are victims, and those seeking justice are guilty of injustices. It’s deeply and transparently self-serving. It’s also the position of the incoming president of the United States, someone empowered to enforce his vision of justice on the rest of the country.
Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker last week during which he outlined his upside-down view of the events of Jan. 6.
Welker asked Trump about his repeated pledges during the campaign to pardon those imprisoned for their actions during the riot. He reiterated that sweeping pardons would be one of his first acts as president.
“Those people have suffered long and hard,” he said of those who were sentenced to prison. He noted that there might be some exceptions — but not those accused of being members of extremist organizations or who engaged in the most violent actions. Instead, he mused that there might have been some “antifa” swept up in the prosecutions, resuscitating a long-debunked idea that left-wing actors were involved in the violence that day. In case there was uncertainty about the extent to which he was suggesting that the riots weren’t the fault of his supporters, he brought up Ray Epps, a man whose alleged role in fomenting the riot has been debunked repeatedly and exhaustively.
“But some of them, 169 of them, have pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers,” Welker reminded Trump.
“Because they had no choice,” he responded.
There were some people who deserved to be investigated or thrown in jail, Trump said: the members of the congressional committee that investigated the riot and the special counsel who brought charges against him.
The committee members did something “inexcusable,” Trump said, when they “went through a year and a half of testimony [and] deleted and destroyed all evidence — that they found.” The Democratic-led committee did this, he said, to protect former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who he has suggested was responsible for the police being overrun. But that never happened. Welker offered a wan “they deny doing that” in response to Trump’s claim; the reality is that the committee’s work and evidence are publicly available and Trump’s hoary claim has been debunked.
They did not do it and Welker failed at her job by not saying that clearly. He’s fucking nuts.
I remain hopeful that Jack Smith will issue a full report on this (and Garland will release it) and preserves as much of the evidence as possible. (Making most of it public would go a long way.) It’s not much. But all we have at this point is history. And Trump’s version of events is 100% delusional.
By the way:
Voters think pardons for Jan 6 protesters is a "terrible, terrible, terrible" idea. Most (64%) are opposed. Just 1% want Trump prioritizing these pardons.
Few (33%) think the Jan 6 protesters were demonstrating patriotism. A majority think it was an insurrection (53%). pic.twitter.com/LXq2mlTxnC
I think everyone knows that the HBO masterpiece “Succession” was based upon the Murdoch family. Well, it turns out that the family has actually based some of its actions on “Succession.”
The NY Times (link below) reports that a court in Nevada has ruled today that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch can’t change the irrevocable trust to block the rest of the kids from having any influence on Fox News. He came down hard on them apparently but this isn’t the end of the story. I guess there are appeals and also some end runs to get the job done. But this is just fascinating:
The legal maneuvering came to a head during several days of sealed, in-person testimony in Reno in September by Mr. Murdoch, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, Prudence and a number of their representatives on the trust. The proceedings revealed that Mr. Murdoch’s children had started secretly discussing the public-relations strategy for their father’s death in April 2023. Setting off these discussions was the episode of the HBO drama “Succession,” the commissioner wrote, “where the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos.” The episode prompted Elisabeth’s representative to the trust, Mark Devereux, to write a “‘Succession’ memo” intended to help avoid a real-life repeat.
[…]
Mr. Murdoch established the Murdoch Family Trust in 2006, years after he had married his third wife, Wendi Deng, and they had two children of their own, Grace and Chloe. Under the trust, he retains control over the business until his death, at which point his voting shares will be distributed equally among his four oldest children.
The initial trust arrangement was meant to be binding, the product of an agreement Mr. Murdoch negotiated with his second wife, Anna — the mother of Lachlan, Elisabeth and James — who was concerned that he would bequeath an equal share of control and equity to the young children he had with Ms. Deng. Those youngest children were ultimately given an equal financial stake in Mr. Murdoch’s multibillion-dollar empire, but no voting power. However, the language of the trust included a provision giving Mr. Murdoch the right to make changes to it as long as he was acting in the best interests of his beneficiaries.
It was that provision that Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan sought to exploit. In recent years, they have grown increasingly concerned that James — who has left the company and is hardly on speaking terms with his father and brother — was planning to lead a coup with Elisabeth and Prudence to oust Lachlan after their father’s death and change the editorial slant of the company. During the proceedings, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan’s lawyers pointed to a meeting that James, Elisabeth and Prudence held at Claridge’s Hotel in London in September 2023 as proof that they were scheming against Lachlan. But the commissioner ruled that accounts of the meeting were insufficient evidence of “plotting.”
It was Lachlan who initiated the plan to change the trust in the middle of 2023, according to the ruling. His and his father’s lawyers and advisers ultimately drew up a blueprint to consolidate Lachlan’s leadership by amending the trust. They called it — “perhaps too optimistically,” the commissioner quipped — “Project Family Harmony.” It singled out James as the “troublesome beneficiary.”
[…]
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan appointed new representatives to the family trust — including Bill Barr, the former attorney general — to give them the votes they needed to disenfranchise James, Elisabeth and Prudence. They also offered voting power to the children Mr. Murdoch had with Wendi Deng, according to the ruling.
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan introduced their plan at a special meeting of the trust late last year. The ruling quotes a text message from Lachlan to Elisabeth on the morning of the meeting: “Today is about Dad’s wishes and confirming all of our support for him and for his wishes. It shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. Love you, Lachlan.”
There’s much more to this story and as I said, it’s very juicy. Here’s a gift link. Enjoy.
Is everything in life a TV show now? I think it might be.
This is one of the craziest things I’ve heard him say:
Trump's nominee for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth: “The left and progressives used allegiance to state, they used patriotism as a vehicle to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible. The cross and the Bible were replaced by a flag and a pledge.” pic.twitter.com/jxwlxb6GRi
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) December 9, 2024
What is he talking about? He must have been drunk when he said that. It’s been the right that’s pushed the flag and a pledge for the last 60 years! “These colors don’t run!”, “Love it or leave it!” After 9/11 anyone who wasn’t worshiping the stars and stripes was at risk if they didn’t keep their mouths shut.
As for the pledge:
Schoolchildren in Southington, Conn., recite the Pledge of Allegiance in 1942, around the time the custom of placing a hand over the heart replaced the original hand position.
Francis Bellamy was a minister who was thrown out of his Baptist post because of sermons describing Jesus as a socialist. He and novelist cousin Edward Bellamy both saw a future for the United States as a country in which the government controlled virtually every aspect of a person’s life.
Francis Bellamy (who also wrote for a magazine underwritten by flag sales and therefore stood to gain by having schools require a flag salute each day) and his friends got President Benjamin Harrison to incorporate Bellamy’s pledge into the 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. It has been recited in public schools ever since…
[T]he pledge has remained a recurring political hot button. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush became its chief defender when running for president in 1988 against former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who had vetoed a bill requiring students to recite the pledge.
And many conservatives defended the pledge against legal challenges in recent years, winning federal a
I guess this guy was a liberal symp too?
There’s nothing about the Bible there…
This is who Trump has chosen to lead the US military and he’s dissing the flag and the pledge as left wing propaganda? My, how times have changed.
I guess I’m feeling cynical about just about everything right now, so perhaps my point of view isn’t realistic. But my immediate reaction to this is that it’s a fool’s game and will just legitimize our shadow president Elon Musk:
Billionaire Elon Musk’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is attracting interest from an unlikely corner: the left.
Progressives aren’t likely to support much of what Musk and his partner, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, are aiming to do with DOGE — cut some $2 trillion from the federal government, which could include critical programs for Americans.
But Musk has been critical of wasteful spending at the Pentagon and of overbudgeted programs helmed by defense contractors, potentially aligning DOGE with progressive lawmakers who have long called to slash a defense budget that is approaching a trillion dollars per year.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) drew headlines when he said Musk was “right” about defense spending, because the Pentagon has “lost track of billions.”
“Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change,” Sanders wrote on the social platform X.
Other progressive lawmakers have also backed the opportunity to potentially work with DOGE on the Pentagon budget.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), a progressive lawmaker who has long pushed to reduce the Pentagon’s budget, said he was unsure if DOGE was a “complete joke” or a “play toy” for Musk.
“Elon Musk is somewhat more of a colorful figure than an expert in government funds,” he said, but “if they actually give them some staffing and put in some responsible efforts and they seek bipartisan input, like I said, I’m more than willing to try to work with them on things, but especially on the defense budget.”
There’s a part of me that thinks this is worth trying since Musk does seem to be open to defense cuts (for the moment.) But I do not believe there is any chance that the GOP congress will do this and even if they do, the price for their cooperation would be something completely unacceptable to Democrats. It feels like a trap.
I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump has an appetite to cut the military budget. Last time he bragged endlessly about raising it. He likes to pretend that he is some kind of peacenik but the whole thing is based on spedning vast sums on the military “so we never have to use it.” It’s about being so big that everyone in the world will be afraid of the United States.
I do not trust Elon Musk’s “populism” because that’s completely absurd. He is the richest man in the world and his agenda is self-serving and obscure at best. I just can’t believe that legitimizing his DOGE advisory board is worth any of this. My instinct is to resist it altogether.
This whole thing is probably going to fall apart sooner rather than later. Musk and Trump are going to lock horns and this relationship is going to fall apart before too much longer. Two narcissists at this scale cannot work as a team. It’s against their nature. So why give this process even the slightest bit of legitimacy? It just doesn’t track for me.
Time to wake up people. After a month recuperating from the grueling campaign Donald Trump is back in our faces.
The presidential election last month was a disappointment to say the least. And ever since then it’s felt as if the air has just been slowly leaking out of the opposition. Much of the mainstream media seems to be attempting to change course and curry favor with the new administration while Democratic officials appear to be in shock. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the days in the lead up to the Iraq war, with a quiet resignation taking the place of the febrile excitement that characterized the push to rally around the flag. People just seem enervated and spiritless. Sometimes it’s hard to remember why we fight when it all seems so futile.
Well, I think the opposition is about to get its mojo back. And that’s because for the last month all we saw (to the extent we were even paying attention which many of us couldn’t bring ourselves to do) was the news telling us about what Trump is doing, who he’s nominating and what he’s planning. And that’s all bad! In fact, it’s worse than many of us thought it would be.
But all that has a sense of unreality because Trump himself, for the first time in years has been scarce. It’s been reported that he was completely exhausted at the end of the campaign, which is to be expected for a man pushing 80 years old. So he was happy to spend the last month holding court down at Mar-a-Lago with his new best bud, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and basking in the adoration of his many fans and sycophants. He has not been in front of us and that absence has led to the sense of ennui among the opposition. Unless he’s out there I think many people understandably put him at the back of their minds and forget how crazy it is that such a man is going to be the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Again.
In the last few days he emerged from his Florida lair and flew to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame. And it all came flooding back:
I don’t think anyone really knows why Trump shakes hands with Macron like that but it’s just weird. So is the fact that instead of Melania, he brought along his new BFF Elon Musk whom he apparently can’t be without even for a minute. At some point just before the ceremony, Musk walked up to Trump who was seated with the dignitaries, they had words and Trump, appearing annoyed pointed his finger at Musk who retreated back to the seat he was assigned.
Here’s what must have really happened. Mrs. Marcon was sitting between Jill Biden and Trump. Musk must have tried to sit to Trump’s left, which was reserved for President Macron. There’s even signage on the chair. So Trump directed Musk to make himself scarce.😂 pic.twitter.com/aTMOS6ofPi
Why is it that these scenes only happen when Donald Trump is on the world stage? He makes a fool of himself and the country everywhere he goes.
While it was a relief not to have to see or hear him for the last month it made it easy to chalk up the horror of his campaign rhetoric to the heat of the moment and his desire to win at any cost. His appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday put any such thoughts to rest. He’s just as angry, vengeful and batshit crazy as he was on the campaign trail.
In a wide ranging interview Trump defended his tariff scheme saying that he doesn’t believe tariffs cost the consumer more but he can’t guarantee that they won’t. Insufferably blathering on forever about his supposedly historic first term’s massive economic success he said:
I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich. We’re subsidizing Canada to the tune over $100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion. We shouldn’t be — why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state.
That is insane. The US is not subsiding Canada and Mexico and this trolling about them becoming a state is simply insulting. He told Welker that when he spoke with the president of Mexico on the phone and threatened her with a 25% tariff:
[W]ithin ten minutes after that phone call, we noticed that the people coming across the border, the southern border having to do with Mexico, there was at a trickle. Just a trickle. In fact, I called the border. See, unlike my opponent, I do call the border a lot. And I said, ‘How’s the border looking today?’ They said, ‘There’s nobody here.’ They couldn’t believe it.”
He “called the border?” Is there a central switchboard or something? And the “invasion” stopped within 10 minutes of his threat to impose tariffs? Were they all vaporized? That he could think anyone would believe such an absurd fantasy is delusional.
That was the tip of the iceberg. He said he thought the entire January 6th Committee should be put in jail. He insisted he would leave it up to his FBI nominee Kash Patel and Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi to ultimately decide whether his enemies should be prosecuted though, so I suppose we can always hope they weren’t watching TV on Sunday morning. He also says he will likely pardon all the January 6th insurrectionists unless it turns out some were actually Antifa or perhaps FBI plants.
He says he will end birthright citizenship on the first day, that American citizens of undocumented immigrants can be deported with them, that the Biden administration allowed 13,000 murders into the country when the statistic actually represents the past 40 years, and that he thinks RFK Jr should look into whether vaccines cause autism (they don’t.) There is so much more.
But just writing down that brief synopsis sane-washes him. The best thing you can do is either watch the whole interview, which is painful, or read the transcript which is simply mind-boggling. He literally makes no sense half the time and the rest of the time he’s filibustering, lying, bullying and deflecting. It’s not new but it’s worse than before.
He’s mentally a complete mess and it’s fair to speculate that there’s a reason that Elon Musk is stuck to his side like superglue these days. Is Musk is his Rasputin? Perhaps it would be smarter for Meet the Press to interview him instead of this man who has completely lost the thread.
Once the country sees him as president again I suspect that the disconsolate lethargy so many have been feeling will lift and we’ll see some energy return to the opposition. It had better. Hiding our heads in the sand isn’t going to make him go away.
Thank goodness Syria’s autocratic regime collapsed before Bashar al-Assad “suck-up,” Tulsi Gabbard, had a chance to prop him up as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, quips Michael Tomasky. Our unstable world is about to become more so.
Here at home, Democrats still smart at losing the presidency to a criminal imbecile and walking advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. How they pull the country and the world back from the brink of Idiocracy will occupy them until the next general election, if that long.
Perhaps Democrats’ biggest obstacle to freshening up their brand, aside from institutional lethargy, is a media ecosystem owned and operated by reactionary billionaires. Democrats’ post-mortem spitballs over how to regain market share with the American electorate are so many trees falling in the forest if no one hears the sound. Perhaps more star power could break through?
Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith suggested last week that perhaps “Democrats need their own demagogue,” to break through the right-wing noise. The good kind, of course. He admits to twisting the definition for didactic purposes:
Trump, twice now, has demonstrated the importance of choosing a compelling character as your party’s nominee. Yes, the substance of what that nominee is selling matters. But being able to generate attention in an ever-more-fragmented media world and reaching the crucial, growing population of low-information voters matters more all the time. That’s something Trump, a 78-year-old creature of old media, graspedin 2024.
But Democrats typically are more interested in governing and making the world a better place for people. They’re less focused on the show. Trump’s emphasis on showmanship represents a kind of “genius,” says Ashley Etienne, a sometime a top communications aide top-tier Democrats. Savants often do one thing spectacularly well.
Smith proposes New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Democrat who fits the bill:
Inside-the-Beltway types tend to dismiss her as having peaked in 2020. But Ocasio-Cortez, more than any other young Democrat right now, is a brand. She has a gift for social media, with more than 8 million followers on Instagram and 1 million on TikTok, and a talent for generating polarizing reactions. The second quality is highly useful in the current and foreseeable information age. David Hogg, the anti-gun-violence activist, recently posted a smart take on the importance of Democrats having a facility for direct-to-camera online video. Hogg’s prime example, 26-year-old Brooklyn city council member Chi Ossé, won’t be old enough to run for the White House in 2028, but Ossé has clearly learned from AOC. Sure, Republicans would vilify Ocasio-Cortez as a radical lefty, but they do that to all Democratic presidential candidates anyway, including Harris, who was solidly centrist. And maybe it’s time for the Democrats to lean into the party’s liberal base; eagerly embracing Liz Cheney in pursuit of moderate Republicans sure didn’t work.
A friend who’s written for Hollywood has for years rent his garments over Democrats relying on chummy, inside-the-Beltway consultants for messaging rather than people who tell compelling stories for a living. Smith consults Billy Ray, the talent behind the Hunger Games script. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned an Oscar nomination:
“Stop any American on the street and say, ‘What does the Democratic Party stand for?’ The only answer you can come up with is, ‘They are the party that hates Trump,’” Ray says. “That is a failure of storytelling.”
But Democrats need more than a left version of Trump or better storytelling to build brand identity. There’s that nagging trees-and-forests problem.
Mike Lux believes the next Democratic National Committee chair needs a way to win back the two-thirds of the electorate with blue collars. Lux recommends several excellent structural reforms that might help with that, but leads with addressing the party’s “Jupiter-sized” media problem:
But the biggest reason by far that voters didn’t know about our accomplishments is the utterly ravaged media landscape outside of the biggest cities. Newspapers are gone or are shells of their former selves. Local radio stations are gone or part of big media conglomerates that don’t cover the news much. Half of local TV stations are owned by far right media companies like Sinclair.
Meanwhile, more and more people are getting most of their news through social media, which is awash in rightwing disinformation.
This Jupiter-sized problem will not be solved overnight, and can’t be solved by the DNC alone. Democratic investors should be buying up media properties so that rightwingers don’t own such a high percentage of them …
But there is plenty the DNC can and should be doing in the media space beyond buying ads two months before Election Day. The new DNC Chair should appoint a task force and give it some serious money to build a media strategy that reflects the modern media era. The Chair should be pulling key Democrats together to get them to invest in some of these other efforts.
That’s a fine idea, if not an original one. Progressives have advocated for left-leaning billionaires to jump headfirst into the media pool for decades. But the deepest pocketed won’t commit to that long-term investment the way a Rupert Murdoch will, nor the way right-wing ideologues of the Koch variety fund think tanks that manufacture talking points like widgets for their media allies to traffick.
If there are among the wannabe DNC chairs a candidate with the gravitas to persuade left-leaning billionaires to do that, please! But the rotating DNC chair has no more ability to finagle left-wing billionaires into undertaking the purchase of major media outlets for a decades-long branding project than RNC chairs did. The most party heads can do is ask pretty please.
Plus, lefties’ fondness for novelty means getting them to get on and stay on the same page, message-wise is their Achilles heel. The left first must craft a message the party faithful will repeat and persuade them to sing it together long enough for it to lodge in voters’ brains. But without a delivery system for that, it’s another tree falling in the forest. President Biden accomplished more for working-class Americans in his four years than perhaps any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Voters heard little about it.
WisDems chair Ben Wikler. Photo by Angela Major/WPR.
Robert Kuttner profiles the two DNC chair front-runners, “Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party.” Kuttner writes, “If ever there were a moment for both a strong Democratic Party and a compelling face of the party, it’s now.”
Which takes us back to screenwriter Ray’s free advice for what Democrats’ storytelling ought to be:
“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”
That’s a terrific start on a message. Finding a riveting messenger—someone who can stir passion in millions of voters as Trump has, only for good instead of evil—will be a little trickier.
