Democrats can’t keep telling voters that everything is fine

Episode Summary

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was a triumph of political ecosystems and how much better the right has been in the United States at creating a full-scale ecosystem to funnel people into their party, but it also took place within a larger political environment in which many Americans are unsatisfied with the way things are.

For a decades, most Americans have felt that the country is headed in the wrong direction and that the economy is getting worse. But instead of realizing this and doing something about it, rhetorically and in terms of policy, many Democratic leaders have not responded to the discontent.

As I’ve discussed repeatedly over the years, right-wing propaganda plays a huge role in gaslighting Americans for the benefit of Trump and his fellow Republicans, but the situation here is more than that.

While Kamala Harris was able to motivate voters in the 7 main swing states through spending over a billion dollars, outside of those states, Democrats lost millions of voters compared to 2020. In many ways, the election was decided by people who stayed home.

We’re going to talk about all of this and a lot more with our guest Maura Ugarte in this episode. She is a filmmaker and professor of film at George Mason University and is the co-director of a 2012 film called Divide, which told the story of a West Virginia Democrat who was campaigning for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep doing this. Please subscribe on Patreon or Substack.

The video of this discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

Related Content

— The 2024 election was decided by people who disliked both Harris and Trump

— Americans want progressive change, but to be able to deliver it, progressives will need to change first

— Harris’s loss has permanently discredited timid Democratic approaches to the MAGA threat

— Religious fundamentalism’s intellectual collapse powers Trump’s politics of despair

— Bureaucratic obsessions are ruining America’s educational system

— The science behind why Donald Trump loves the ‘poorly educated’

— Elon Musk and his fellow reactionary oligarchs are much more radical than people realize

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

04:55 — Divide, Maura’s film about building left solidarity

07:54 — How left elites fell for JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” fraud

13:21 — Biden’s failure to inform the public of his popular policies

16:12 — Trump’s new voters strategy and the limits of a “protect democracy” message

19:56 — How Democrats missed real suffering

23:26 — The decline of public trust and Trump’s con artist pitch

29:55 — How Ross Perot foreshadowed Trump’s appeal

31:08 — Fascism’s critique of capitalism must be countered

36:51 — The power of solidarity to beat divide and conquer

45:09 — Blaming voters never works to win elections

49:22 — Hopeful messages for the future

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: So in this podcast and my writing at Flux, I've been trying to focus on the idea of ecosystems a lot in the response to the election outcome. But one thing I want to make clear. That it's easy to say, and it is absolutely true that right wing media was a huge part of why Donald Trump won.

And also, some people's thoughts about the economy are a huge part as well. Now whether that was because of propaganda, that's another thing. But it's a mistake. It's overly simplistic to think that it was just. Only those two things or, her failure to, do this or that smaller thing, there were some other [00:04:00] bigger dynamics and well, and one of them is that besides the fact that Democrats don't talk to the public, they also don't listen to the public or know what to say, even if they were talking.

MAURA UGARTE: It's, it's funny though, like, in some ways, I felt like Harris was responding to political consultants who were telling her to message in a particular kind of way, which wasn't actually listening either, but like, it was just sort of this This very sort of bulleted point, if I talk about this and that and the other thing, and not talk about this, that, and the other thing, it's a winning message.

SHEFFIELD: And your, you've been kind of thinking about how Democrats could listen and speak better irrespective of platforms to the public for a while. So with the the film that you co-directed as well, let's talk about that just a little bit before we get further into this particular election.

UGARTE: It's funny because the thing came out in like 2012, but it seems to, and it's short. It's like 21 minutes long, and it seems to unfortunately continually be politically relevant. It was about a retired white coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia, which is right at the Southern-- it's right, right in the most southern county of West Virginia.

It is one of the poorest counties in all of West Virginia. And this man was organizing for Barack Obama.

Film trailer: If we don't do something in this country, the middle class will be eliminated. There'll be two types of people again. There'll be the rich and the poor. Which it's going that way real quick now the way I see it.[00:06:00]

This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen. Senator Obama's support among hardworking Americans white Americans is weakening again. It's a challenge to try to elect a black man that's named Barack Obama. It is. It's a challenge. Two out of ten West Virginia white voters said that race was a factor.

These are Democrats, white working class Democrats who say in a general election, we're not going to go for you. If we're not careful, we're going to be in the back of the bus and they're going to be in the front. Divide and conquer is of course that's an old saying I know and everybody's heard it, but there's a whole lot of truth in that.

UGARTE: And the, the film, we can talk about how the film came about, which I think is actually kind of important, but the film just sort of tracks his organizing efforts, media the mainstream media messages, both from the right wing and also a little bit from liberal media, mainstream media. and then also integrating that with the labor history of the area and try to tell this broader story of why we're, why we're seeing what we're seeing. And the sort of mechanisms of that, think that's what is important. continuing to be relevant.

And I, I have, I, I've unfortunately encountered a lot of liberals who have very retrograde ideas of what it to be from West Virginia or from Appalachia to be a white working class person, I think.

How the center-left fell for JD Vance's "Hillbilly" fraud

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and that's, ironically, that is those, those, uh, [00:08:00] hottie perspectives and opinions. That was actually when Howard, the success of JD Vance's Heelbilly Elegy book because that book, it was It was marketed as being, well, this is an explanation of why these people did this, but actually what it was, it was just this protracted harangue against, these dumb idiots.

They, they they've thrown their lives away on drugs and they're lazy and they won't move away. They should just leave. But instead they want to stay home and be on drugs. And that's why they voted for Trump,

which is not true at all.

UGARTE: I would remind everyone, I was given this book by several people at the time, people that I loved, people that I cared about liberals, right? People of the left, even people to the left of liberals were giving me this book. He was a darling of it was on the New York times bestseller list.

And if you read it, I only made it a partial way through to be, to to be honest, but he's basically blaming white working class people. He's blaming them for their situation. And,

and basically saying the reason why you can't give welfare to these folks is because they will spend it on drugs. doesn't mention the Sacklers. He doesn't mention any kind of structural problems, right? but he was a way for people to somehow understand the Tea Party. I, I, I, it's a bit absurd.

SHEFFIELD: It was, yea