One of the biggest reasons there is no left-wing Joe Rogan: Democrats lost interest in debate and persuasion

Episode Summary

Following her recent electoral defeat, many people have questioned why Kamala Harris didn't go on to the podcast of Joe Rogan, the standup comedian and sports commentator who has the number-one podcast in the world.

For the record, Harris’s former advisers have said that they tried to coordinate a time with Rogan, but they very obviously did not make it a priority.

The more interesting related question that other people have been asking post election is why is there no left-wing Joe Rogan?

The immediate answer is that there is not a full-service Democratic ecosystem that includes media, legal, and local components. There are also some larger reasons why Rogan and other libertarian-oriented people have signed up with the Republican Party, after having hated it in the 1990s and 2000s when party was less radical.

But there are some more specific reasons for why Rogan and people like him have become de facto Republicans that are especially relevant since Rogan himself once supported the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders—and they involve how the Democratic Party communicates, or rather, doesn’t, to the public.

In recent decades, Democrats and the American left as a whole have moved to a communication strategy which focuses more on controlling the message in every possible way rather than trying to forcefully advocate and explain its ideas to people who have never heard them. On issues of science, economics, race, climate, gender, and regulation, Democrats have, by and large, resorted to blindly pointing to expert consensus rather than making the case to the uninformed.

Joining me to discuss on this episode is Lisa Corrigan, she’s a professor of communications and gender studies at the University of Arkansas. She’s also the author of several different books, including Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation.

The video of our December 9, 2024 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

—How podcasts became a key source of news and entertainment for millions of Americans

—Right-wing comedy isn’t particularly funny, but it’s extremely effective at persuading low-information voters

—Joe Rogan and the epidemic of pseudo-expertise

—Former establishment Republican have made the Democratic party more conservative, and less electorally successful

—As libertarianism has radicalized, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names are turning toward fascism

—Why Christian authoritarians and atheistic libertarians decided to meet in the middle

—The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing rebranding

—How the Donald Trump fandom completely reshaped the Republican media ecosystem

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:24 — Democratic leaders' excessive desire to control all media encounters

08:42 — Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, and the rise to dominance of casual infotainment

14:05 — Democrats have lost the urge and the ability to debate

23:11 — Democrats' post-graduate economic bubble

27:06 — Republicans overthrew their obsolete party establishment, can Democrats?

31:38 — How "The West Wing" encouraged Democrats to adopt a fictional communications strategy

35:08 — Kamala Harris's initial media interview strategy and Democrats' total risk aversion

39:56 — Trump targeted disengaged Americans with media appearances, Harris with advertisements

42:39 — Why did Democrats lose ground with women despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade?

46:49 — The Democratic Party doesn't want to talk to low-information voters

54:40 — As Democrats have won more prosperous voters, they've become less interested in economic populism

59:20 — The ALEC behemoth outside the Beltway

01:03:19 — Conclusion

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: And joining me now is Lisa Corrigan. Welcome to Theory of Change, Lisa.

LISA CORRIGAN: Thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I think one of the questions that is almost inescapable in the 2024 election post mortems is, is why is there no left wing Joe Rogan?

But it's a very strange and weird question to ask because Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders.

CORRIGAN: He certainly was. Yeah.

I think there's no tolerance in the Democratic Party for class analysis, and I think that there is. a class [00:03:00] politics that really chafes at someone like Rogan's style,

And also that he's not controllable. So they prefer to control, highly control their own media, such as it is. And so I think we can read that as a sort of intolerance and lack of curiosity, not just about Rogan, but also his audience.

SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Well, okay.

Democratic leaders' excessive desire to control all media encounters

SHEFFIELD: So, but when you say, I think, I agree with you when you say that the, that the Democratic elites want kind of controlled media. What do you mean by that?

CORRIGAN: think they're going to Move almost exclusively to position their own influencers to just about the party line rather than turning to organic media spaces to actually take the temperature of communities across the country. I think they would much rather control all of the messaging all of the time, and that's gonna in the long term continued [00:04:00] to diminish their effectiveness as communicators.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's a, it is a really good point because when you do look at the few, media operations that have been funded, by the Democratic donor class or party elites. they tend to be 100 percent partisan. So everything that they say is in agreement with whatever the Democrats are saying in any given moment.

And then they also don't have, have even a discussion about what those points are. So like, they'll just say, well, this is the message. And then they'll just repeat it over and over and they won't talk about, well, why do you believe the message? What is this message even mean? It's just no, here's what we're talking about.

CORRIGAN: But it's because I mean, in some ways they have a very low threshold for conflict. So somebody like Nancy Pelosi has never had a debate for her seat in all of the decades that she's held it. She [00:05:00] refuses to debate any challenger,

right? So, so they don't want to actually move the conversation forward. They've chosen their lane and they want everybody to get on the lane and there's no tolerance for people who have alternative perspectives about where that lane should go. So they don't want to refine their ideas. And they're not capacious thinkers. And in some ways they're anti intellectual in ways that are similar, though, in some ways different from the Republican party, right? There's just not the tolerance for rigorous debate and they don't want to be dislodged from their donor class. So they're loathe to upset them. I mean, I think about the sidelining of Tim Walz. As total evidence of that, arguably the best decision of the campaign was to choose him as a vice presidential candidate. And then they sidelined all of his vigor and all of [00:06:00] his successes in Minnesota and his, in some ways, temperament, right? Which is more combative than certainly anybody else in the party during the campaign. What little of it we were able to have. They didn't want to have an open primary. There was no conversation about Biden's efficacy, right, before the fall. All of that, I think, is evidence that they can't really tolerate. dissent or conversation about what they've done wrong.

SHEFFIELD: no, I, and that's a good point. And, and obviously, we do want to say. In this regard, though, that you're not endorsing Joe Rogan's ideas by say