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Episode: Episode 209: Popularism and the "Poll-Driven" Democrat as Cover for Conservative Policy Preferences

Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 01:00:50

Episode Shownotes

"Calls for Transforming Police Run Into Realities of Governing in Minnesota," cautioned The New York Times in 2020. "Democrats Face Pressure on Crime From a New Front: Their Base," claimed the paper of record again, in 2022. "How Biden’s recent actions on immigration could address a major issue voters have

with him," announced PBS NewsHour, republishing the Associated Press, in 2024. There’s a common ethos in Democratic politics: Do what’s popular. In recent years, a certain class of political pundits and consultants have been championing so-called “popularism,” the principle that political candidates should emphasize the issues that poll well, in everything from healthcare to labor, policing to foreign policy––and deemphasize, or sometimes outright ignore, the ones that don’t. It seems reasonable and democratic for elected officials to pay close attention to the will of the public–and, in many cases, it is. But it’s not always this simple. Far too often, the leading proponents of popularism, chief among them Matt Yglesias and David Shor, only apply the concept when it suits a conservative agenda, ignoring, for example, that 74% of American voters suppor​t “increasing funding for child care,” 72% of Americans want to expand Social Security 71% of Americans support government funded universal pre-K. 69% of Americans support Medicare for All and so on and so on. More often than not, leftwing agenda items that poll very well are never mentioned meanwhile that which polls well AND aligns with the interests of Wall Street and other monied interests, we are told is of utmost urgent priority. It’s a phenomenon we’re calling on this show Selective Popularism, the selective use of polling and generic notions of popularity to push already existing rightwing and centrist agendas without needing to do the messy work of ideologically defending them. On this episode, we look at the development and implementation of Selective Popularism, exploring how this convenient political pseudo-analysis launders the advocacy and enactment of reactionary policy as a mere reflection of what the "people" demand. Our guest is journalist, writer and host of Jacobin's The Dig podcast, Daniel Denvir.

Summary

In Episode 209 of 'Citations Needed', hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson discuss the concept of 'Selective Popularism', where polling data is strategically utilized to promote conservative policies while ignoring leftist issues that have public backing. Guest Daniel Denvir helps explore how political actors frame reactionary stances as responding to public sentiment. The episode critiques practices from political consultants that prioritize corporate interests over genuine voter needs, highlighting the manufactured nature of consent in political discourse.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 209: Popularism and the "Poll-Driven" Democrat as Cover for Conservative Policy Preferences) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_01
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I'm Nima Shirazi.

00:00:15 Speaker_00
I'm Adam Johnson.

00:00:16 Speaker_01
Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter at CitationsPodFacebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast. All your support through Patreon

00:00:29 Speaker_01
is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We don't run ads, we don't have corporate sponsors or anything like that. We are able to do this show because of the generosity and support of listeners like you.

00:00:42 Speaker_00
Yes, so if you do enjoy the show and you haven't yet, please sign up to our Patreon. It helps keep the episodes themselves free and the show sustainable.

00:00:53 Speaker_01
Calls for transforming police run into realities of governing in Minnesota. Caution the New York Times in 2020. Democrats face pressure on crime from a new front, their base, claimed the paper of record again in 2022.

00:01:08 Speaker_01
How Biden's recent actions on immigration could address a major issue voters have with him, revealed PBS NewsHour republishing the Associated Press in 2024.

00:01:18 Speaker_00
There's an increasingly common ethos in democratic politics. Do what is popular.

00:01:23 Speaker_00
In recent years, a certain class of political pundit and consultant have been championing the idea of popularism, the principle that political candidates should emphasize issues that poll well, and everything from health care to labor, policing to foreign policy, and deemphasize or sometimes outright ignore that which doesn't.

00:01:38 Speaker_01
It certainly seems reasonable and democratic for elected officials to pay close attention to the will of the public, and in many cases, it is. But it's not always that simple.

00:01:49 Speaker_01
Far too often, the leading proponents of popularism, chief among them people like Matty Glazius and David Shore, only apply the concept when it suits their conservative agenda.

00:02:00 Speaker_01
ignoring, for example, that 84% of Americans support adding dental, vision, and hearing coverage to Medicare, or that 74% of American voters support increasing funding for child care. The list goes on and on.

00:02:14 Speaker_00
More often than not, left-wing agenda items that poll well are simply just not mentioned at all.

00:02:19 Speaker_00
And that which polls well, or sort of polls well, and aligns with the interests of Wall Street and other moneyed interests, we are told, should be of utmost urgent priority for Democrats.

00:02:28 Speaker_01
It's a phenomenon we're calling on this show selective popularism.

00:02:32 Speaker_01
The selective use of polling and generic notions of popularity to push already existing right-wing and centrist agendas without needing to do the messy work of ideologically defending them.

00:02:44 Speaker_00
On today's episode, we'll explore how this convenient political pseudo-analysis launders the advocacy and enactment of reactionary policy as a mere reflection of what the people are demanding.

00:02:55 Speaker_01
Later on the show, we'll be joined by journalist Daniel Denver, host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio and author of the book, All-American Nativism, How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It, which was published by Verso Books in 2020.

00:03:10 Speaker_02
Popularism just fundamentally misunderstands how public opinion is made. Popularists treat public opinion as though it's this free-floating, given, transcendent reality. That's not true.

00:03:23 Speaker_02
Consent is manufactured, in significant part, by political, social, and economic power. And the aim of that consent manufacturing is to reproduce existing systems and relations of power. So the very same people who are legitimating

00:03:38 Speaker_02
their policy preferences by pointing to popularism, they have a systematic function of reproducing existing ideologies. So this is like Brahms' She-101. Common sense is made rather than given.

00:03:53 Speaker_02
So it's interesting that the people who make the common sense want to argue that it's given.

00:03:59 Speaker_00
So this is a spiritual sequel to, like, a few episodes. This falls well within our kind of anti-politics series.

00:04:05 Speaker_00
I think specifically this two-parter is an outgrowth of episode 87, Nate Silver and the Crisis of Pundit Brain, where we discuss similar themes. The power of polling knows all, and the power of polling has no ideology.

00:04:17 Speaker_00
whatsoever, and we are simply following the needs of the people, which exist in a vacuum separate from any other consideration. So if you haven't checked that one out, it may edify you a little bit.

00:04:27 Speaker_00
We're going to start with the sort of general idea of popularism as a mode of politics, doing that which is popular as opposed to that which is seen as gasp, ideological, is an idea that of course goes back centuries, but in its current iteration, we'll start the clock in the 1970s,

00:04:42 Speaker_00
In 1972, the liberal-leaning senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern lost the election to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

00:04:50 Speaker_00
Centrist Democrats framed this loss as a sign that McGovern's policy platform, which included reduced defense spending and more progressive taxes, was simply unpopular and thus unviable as an electoral strategy.

00:05:00 Speaker_00
They thereby seized the opportunity to shift the party to the right, which coincidentally dovetailed with the interests of corporate America and campaign donors.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
A few years later, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and critic of McGovern, but from the right, began his largely centrist campaign for the presidency.

00:05:17 Speaker_01
During his campaign, Carter devoted a good deal of funding to polling with seemingly popularist intentions.

00:05:24 Speaker_01
A July 1976 critical essay by William Sapphire in the New York Times argued that Carter's candidacy viewed unpopular positions as quote-unquote, divisive. and saw popularism, or this early version of it, as, quote, the path to victory, end quote.

00:05:44 Speaker_01
Now, prior to the publication of the Sapphire essay, Carter had already stated in a speech, quote, what we learned we gave back to the voters in a political program that reflected what they wanted, not what we wanted for them, end quote.

00:06:00 Speaker_01
And it didn't take long for the anti-political nature of popularism to become clear.

00:06:06 Speaker_01
A few months later, in an October 1976 essay, Sapphire would again note that Carter had not, quote, taken a position on a major issue that his pollsters told him would be unpopular with the majority of voters, end quote.

00:06:20 Speaker_01
Additionally, Carter's pollster, Patrick Cadell, was involved in political polling as head of the firm Cambridge Survey Research and also in commercial polling as the head of the firm Cambridge Reports Incorporated.

00:06:33 Speaker_01
As of August 1976, this is during Carter's presidential campaign, Cadell sold reports to major corporations and to the government of Saudi Arabia, raising concerns about conflicts of interest in his polling.

00:06:47 Speaker_01
And according to the New York Times, Cadell also advised a nuclear energy company in the spring of 1976 to, quote, fight fear with fear by using emotional levers such as fear of unemployment and economic stagnation to discredit campaigns to limit nuclear power generation, while at the same time conducting a poll for an environmentalist organization, end quote.

00:07:11 Speaker_00
Multiple polls from the late 1970s conducted by Cambridge Reports and commissioned by corporations conveniently showed public approval for pro-business policies that were published in myriad news media. One from 1978 found that, quote,

00:07:30 Speaker_00
The second largest was, quote, controls on strikes, unquote. This was not really reflective of public opinion.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
A Gallup poll from the same year, 1978, showed that 59% of Americans surveyed approved of labor unions, but they were asking the questions in a way that got the answers they wanted.

00:07:45 Speaker_00
This was an early form of polling as a form of consent manufacturing.

00:07:49 Speaker_00
Cambridge published another poll in 1979 that found, quote, 69% of the public would favor tax cuts if businesses said that some of the money saved would be used to buy equipment and create additional jobs, unquote.

00:08:01 Speaker_00
And quote, 79% thought government regulation of energy affected America's rate of economic growth.

00:08:06 Speaker_00
And by a margin of 2 to 1, Americans believe that when government makes regulations for business, too little consideration is given to the effect of economic growth. Unquote.

00:08:13 Speaker_00
These polls were not necessarily cited by the Carter administration or other high-ranking Democrats at the time. And again, the polls were conducted by Cadell's commercial polling firm, not his political one.

00:08:23 Speaker_00
But Carter's trust in corporate pollsters like Cadell would be a sign of an embrace of neoliberal policies within the Carter administration and Democrats at the time more generally.

00:08:32 Speaker_00
As Joshua Malin wrote for the New Republic in 2016, quote, Carter signed into law a huge capital gains cut that gave 90% of its benefits to the top 10% of taxpayers.

00:08:42 Speaker_00
To this, Carter added a bevy of additional initiatives, including deregulation, fiscal austerity, and monetary restraint that amounted to, quote, slouching towards the supply side, unquote, as historian Bruce Shulman put it.

00:08:54 Speaker_01
Right, so this idea of leaning into what the people want is then going to be shaped by how the polling comes back to you, right?

00:09:01 Speaker_01
Which then relies on how the pollsters are framing and asking questions, how they're analyzing the conclusions, and then filtering that back to candidates who then say, well, I have the evidence to back up all of these popular demands, when in reality, maybe only certain demands are deemed popular, whereas others are sidelined.

00:09:21 Speaker_01
Let's now go to the 1990s. President Bill Clinton would similarly rely heavily on pollster consultants, including people like Mark Penn, who specifically encouraged Clinton to promote a center-right platform.

00:09:34 Speaker_01
Penn also polled for corporations, as well as a number of other politicians, including Tony Blair in the UK.

00:09:41 Speaker_01
Penn's recommendations to Clinton would include adopting Republican positions on issues like, quote, balancing the budget, end quote, putting tens of thousands more police on the streets, and extending the death penalty.

00:09:54 Speaker_01
As Times Magazine reported in November 1996, after Bill Clinton's re-election, quote, were moderate, Democratic-leaning independents who could vote for Clinton, but at the moment were not so inclined.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
Swing-2 voters, representing 25%, were Republican-leaning independents. Swing-2 voters shared many of the concerns of the Swing-1 group on health care, crime, and Medicare, but took a harder line on fiscal issues and taxes.

00:10:31 Speaker_01
And when it came to welfare, they wanted a cutoff after two years. Says Penn, quote, the president had to prove his fiscal responsibility and toughness on crime and welfare before they'd give him the benefit of the doubt on anything else, end quote.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
The Time magazine article would continue, quote, wooing both swing one and swing two would require a hybrid message. Penn said, quote, You don't win by being either tough on everything, like Dole, or soft on everything, the old Democratic cliche.

00:11:05 Speaker_01
You need a synthesis, end quote. If ever there was a Zen candidate, a man who could hit two pockets on the ideological pool table at the same time by combining toughness and compassion, it was Bill Clinton, end quote.

00:11:19 Speaker_00
Now, Penn, like many popularists, urged Clinton to embrace the center-right positions that pulled well and, of course, effectively ignored those that didn't, no matter who suffered.

00:11:27 Speaker_00
In an interview with Politico in January of 2024, Penn said this of Democrats in office, quote, the politics are make a deal. Pretend that you're dragged kicking and screaming and do your best to take the issue off the table.

00:11:39 Speaker_00
You try to move your issues forward, climate change, racial equality, abortion rights. You move those forward, and when you're playing defense on the Republican issues, you have to take them off the table.

00:11:48 Speaker_00
Interviewer Ryan Lizza replied, quote, this was essentially the 1996 re-election strategy for Bill Clinton with welfare reform, unquote. And Penn responded, well, yes, but I would say that I deployed the strategy probably 20 times back in the day.

00:12:01 Speaker_00
It was the same strategy I had with Tony Blair. The conservatives had immigration, and we had to take it off the table. Once we got it off the table, then you went on the other issues.

00:12:09 Speaker_00
Now, never mind, of course, the tremendous human cost of welfare reform in 1996 that led to untold amounts of poverty and criminalization of poor and communities of color. Mark Penn doesn't really seem concerned with this at all.

00:12:22 Speaker_00
It seems like not an issue to him what it means, whether it's immigration,

00:12:25 Speaker_00
mass incarceration, whatever kind of right-wing thing Democrats cleverly co-opt, he doesn't seem to take any stock or inventory into the moral harms that are caused by these policies.

00:12:34 Speaker_00
And of course, the person who invented the concept of triangulation, who coined the term, Dick Morris, who also worked for Clinton and Mark Penn at the time, like Mark Penn, just kind of went on to become a conservative, went on to become a Republican, sort of stopped associating with the Democratic Party.

00:12:47 Speaker_00
Mark Penn went to go work for Tories in a black box of corporate consulting firms, and Dick Morris himself became a huge Romney fan and Trump fan.

00:12:55 Speaker_00
Which raises the question, were these people actually committed to this meta-jiu-jitsu, take it off the table so we can pass progressive policy approach, because they were clever and wanted to advance liberal policy goals, or are they just kind of conservative and know that that's who butters their bread and that's where the money is?

00:13:12 Speaker_00
Cut to the mid-90s, it doesn't take a genius to figure out, after the fall of mass political movements, of socialism,

00:13:18 Speaker_00
of the protests of the 70s, of the Soviet Union, that there's really only one game in town, and that you can go as far right as you really need to go, and it's not like there's any left to counter you, so why not?

00:13:29 Speaker_00
And also, of course, that's where the pigs go to the trough. I mean, that's where all the money is, right? You're not really gonna make any money appealing to progressive ideals. There's no lobby for poor black people. There's no lobby for immigrants.

00:13:38 Speaker_00
There's no lobby for welfare recipients. And so they knew that, and they took the path of least resistance because they viewed politics as a means of personal wealth

00:13:48 Speaker_00
accumulation, not something that's supposed to actually change the world for the better.

00:13:51 Speaker_01
Right. Because it has everything to do with promoting the public policies that they prefer, sidelining the inconvenient ones that they actually don't like because they're not progressive as people or they're certainly not in favor of leftist policy.

00:14:06 Speaker_01
And so those get sidelined. You kind of ignore those polls.

00:14:10 Speaker_01
You promote the polls that back your vision, and then you say, hey, we're just following where the people are, and couching that position as somehow the rational, popular, and more successful way

00:14:27 Speaker_01
to engage in politics, whereas we might argue, Adam, a more successful way is to look at what the people want across the board, not just the most conservative ideologies.

00:14:38 Speaker_01
And if you lean into that kind of popularism, that might be a different way to engage in politics that the proponents of so-called populism these days really have no interest in.

00:14:48 Speaker_00
Yeah, because the argument is not that the public doesn't sometimes want conservative policy. I mean, of course it does. And we'll get into that more with our guests. The issue is that it's all over the place.

00:14:59 Speaker_00
And of course, it's malleable and it's shaped by political or partisan polarization, right? If the Democrats support something, the numbers that supported among liberals will skyrocket and inverse. If they oppose it, they'll go the other way, right?

00:15:10 Speaker_00
We know this is a fact of politics.

00:15:11 Speaker_01
Popular opinion is not just like a fact of nature and it's not immovable. It has everything to do with policy and political speech and media, as we cover on the show, like that creates public perception.

00:15:23 Speaker_00
And the issue that we're arguing is that in addition to that, it is a function of selectivity, is that we only get the pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street version of what is popular or some sort of tortured polling version of it.

00:15:36 Speaker_00
Not anything that is remotely subversive or undermines the interests of the wealthy or those who traffic in the same cocktail parties and political milieu of the wealthy. So let's cut to the 2000s and 2010s and 2020s.

00:15:46 Speaker_00
The foundations for popularist tendencies were long laid by its antecedents like Mark Penn and Dick Morris. Now we're going to add a new name to the mix.

00:15:53 Speaker_00
During the 2012 re-election campaign for Barack Obama, the campaign hired data scientist David Shore. Some years later, Shore would become much more visible as a leading proponent of popularism.

00:16:04 Speaker_00
In May 2020, three days after George Floyd was killed, Schor posted a study on Twitter that effectively blamed the uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King for the Democratic presidential loss in 1968.

00:16:14 Speaker_00
Schor was subsequently fired from his job at an analytics company, or as Ezra Klein put it in his October 2021 puff piece of Schor, he was, quote, freed from a job that didn't let him speak his mind.

00:16:26 Speaker_00
But luckily for Shore, this was not a detriment to his career, but in fact was a boon to it.

00:16:29 Speaker_00
He quickly became a media darling, characterized by glossy profiles in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Politico, and others, painting him as a brilliant iconoclast whose philosophy is a perfect solution to an out-of-touch party filled with coastal elite lawyers and corporate managers who didn't simply know what the public wanted.

00:16:45 Speaker_00
David Shore was going to find out what the public wanted. And he, living in a huge loft in Manhattan, he knew what the people wanted. And he was going to tell politicians what they didn't want to hear.

00:16:54 Speaker_00
And he was the anti ideology, the dreaded I word, because, again, in this formulation, the Democratic Party is not run by soulless corporate lawyers and media strivers and corporate consultants.

00:17:03 Speaker_00
It is, in fact, run by ideologues who are just super into racial justice and criminal justice reform and had blinders on to what the real Americans wanted from their policies.

00:17:15 Speaker_00
One of the main things Schor argued was that means testing was popular and thus ought to be encouraged in policymaking. Quote, in polling, the more you means test a program, the more popular it gets, he says.

00:17:25 Speaker_00
Quote, fundamentally, sympathy for the poor is pretty politically powerful and the public is not on board with social democracy. Unquote. Again, the idea that politics is fixed. This is just what the people want. I'm just telling you what they want.

00:17:35 Speaker_00
I have no agenda of my own.

00:17:37 Speaker_01
But even in this notion of fixed polling, the polls didn't show what he said they showed.

00:17:43 Speaker_01
For instance, public polling showed more opposition to the idea that social programs should be more means tested rather than being expanded or even made universal.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
For instance, a July 2024 poll by Bernie Sanders office and Data for Progress in swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, show overwhelming support for progressive policies.

00:18:13 Speaker_01
84% of those polled support expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing. 84% support cutting the cost of prescription drugs in half. 82% support making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

00:18:28 Speaker_01
77% support expanding Social Security benefits by making the wealthy pay the same tax rate as the working class. 75% support instituting a cap on rent increases. 71% support reestablishing the child tax credit. 70%

00:18:42 Speaker_01
support building at least 2 million more units of affordable housing, 70% also support raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour, the list goes on and on. This is what is actually deemed to be popular by recent polling.

00:18:57 Speaker_00
Right, so this contradicts Shor's claim that people like means testing, because it very, very, very much depends on how you phrase the question.

00:19:03 Speaker_00
If I phrase the question in a certain way to support my corporate funders and my ideological priors, then of course I can kind of get some of these answers.

00:19:10 Speaker_00
But if you frame broadly popular economic left-wing policies, higher wages, more union participation, more expansive Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, people generally like them. They're actually very popular.

00:19:20 Speaker_00
And this is not even including the partisan polarization of these issues, because again, these things are very malleable. They can change overnight, pretty much.

00:19:27 Speaker_00
And this is the limitations of this idea of popularism and shows the bad faith of popularism because David Shore has never argued for expanding Medicare in swing states. He's never argued for a $17 minimum wage.

00:19:39 Speaker_00
Mysteriously, these things that are overwhelmingly popular, lowering the age of social security, these things that are overwhelmingly popular mysteriously don't seem very urgent for Democrats.

00:19:48 Speaker_01
nor is the overwhelmingly popular position of not only establishing a ceasefire in Gaza, but also cutting off military aid to Israel. That polls overwhelmingly positive.

00:20:01 Speaker_01
So that is deemed incredibly popular, yet that is not informing current democratic policies.

00:20:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, mysteriously, not the most urgent thing.

00:20:09 Speaker_00
The New York Times has mastered selective popularism with its own unique patronizing racial lens, particularly in the issue of policing and black support for policing in 2021 and 2022 amid racial justice uprisings and calls for reform of the police system.

00:20:24 Speaker_00
The New York Times published half a dozen reports.

00:20:27 Speaker_00
depending how you define it, maybe even more about black voters demanding more police for their neighborhoods from Democrats and that Democrats were responding organically to this organic black desire for more policing as people saw crime rise in certain urban areas.

00:20:41 Speaker_00
And they implied and even sometimes said that murder was up in a lot of cities. This is it's now down precipitously, but it was up during this sort of height of the pandemic for a variety of reasons.

00:20:50 Speaker_00
And the implication was that police reform was driven by largely white, kind of Soros-funded non-profit types, rather than representing the organic desire of the Black electives. And that Democrats were responding to this organic demand.

00:21:03 Speaker_00
Now, even if one accepts this premise, which I think is somewhat contestable and far more nuanced than the New York Times would let on, that Blacks were crying out for longer prison sentences and harsher DAs and more police on the streets,

00:21:15 Speaker_00
African-American voters at the same time disproportionately and overwhelmingly support more unionization, a higher minimum wage, reparations, free health care, free college, affordable housing, and much more money for schools.

00:21:26 Speaker_00
But mysteriously, I did a survey of the New York Times around that same time period, 21, 2022, the New York Times never ran any stories about how Democrats are being pressured by black people for more money for schools, affordable housing, free college, reparations, higher minimum wage, and more unionization.

00:21:39 Speaker_00
Mysteriously, these organic black populist demands were nowhere to be found. The New York Times never reported on him. Mysteriously, only more police.

00:21:47 Speaker_00
That which aligned with the New York Times white wealthy readership and conservative disposition happens to be the thing for which they suddenly care and their heart suddenly bleeds for black voters.

00:21:57 Speaker_01
Because then all the hand wringing that white liberal readers were doing would then just be part of their support for what The quote unquote black community wanted. So it's like, hey, it's not that we're freaked out by calls to defund the police.

00:22:11 Speaker_01
It's really just, you know, I could go either way. I could go either way on this. But black communities are saying that they want more police. And so therefore, that's actually what is more popular. We should listen to that.

00:22:24 Speaker_01
while totally ignoring, I mean, one, something we've talked about on the show for years, Adam, the idea that when police are made synonymous with the idea of public safety and that no other way of safety can be considered, that is police or nothing, right?

00:22:39 Speaker_01
When you're drowning and someone hands you a piece of barbed wire, well, you have to grab it because it's your only option, right? It would be better to throw a rope or maybe make sure that person isn't drowning in the first place.

00:22:50 Speaker_01
But those things are not considered. So the only option is police.

00:22:53 Speaker_01
So therefore, if that is deemed popular, then therefore that becomes the popular position to support while simultaneously and deliberately ignoring the overwhelming popularity of actual progressive social programs and changes in policy that would cause material benefits in the lives of millions and millions of people in this country.

00:23:14 Speaker_01
Those are deemed unworthy of wall-to-wall newspaper and cable news coverage because they don't align with the hand-wringing needs of what the audience wants, which is to hear that what they think already is actually what other people think, too.

00:23:32 Speaker_00
Well, yeah, it's one of the oldest modes of manufacturing public approval of something, which is you limit the options. You say, well, this is the only option.

00:23:39 Speaker_00
It's either chaos and crime or the more of the same incarceration state stuff you had before. And again, if those are your two options, you'll you got to do something. Right.

00:23:47 Speaker_00
And that is how you give the impression that these things are organic, because the New York Times can't go around telling its white, squishy, liberal readers that They're pro-more police.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
They have to launder it through this ostensibly organic black uprising against democratic elected. So this selective populism has been uniquely harmful on the issue of immigration policy. Another thing that Shor emphasizes.

00:24:06 Speaker_00
Mattic Lacey is another major proponent of selective populism. has emphasized the notion of an American public that overwhelmingly opposes humane immigration policy.

00:24:14 Speaker_00
He wrote for his blog Slow Boring in August of 2021, quote, even though American culture and American society are more immigrant friendly than what you see in most places, it's not the case that there is a huge mass constituency in favor of immigration.

00:24:26 Speaker_00
He would go on to add, quote, people would like strict enforcement of the immigration rules, and we ought to give it to them and use that to create space for constructive changes to the rules.

00:24:35 Speaker_00
The post 2014 approach of saying we don't love the rules, so we're going to be iffy about enforcement hasn't delivered security for the people it's intended to help and seems to have pushed the larger politics of immigration backwards, unquote.

00:24:46 Speaker_00
The Associated Press echoed at Madagascar in June 24 when Biden was still running for reelection.

00:24:51 Speaker_00
The news agency claimed that Biden's quote, significant restrictions on immigrants seeking asylum in the US while also offering potential citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people without legal status already living in the country, unquote, would give Biden, quote, a chance to address one of his biggest vulnerabilities of this election campaign, unquote.

00:25:08 Speaker_00
The AP would go on to cite its own poll, which found that only three in 10 Americans approve of Biden's handling of immigration and a smaller share approved of his handling of quote-unquote border security.

00:25:18 Speaker_00
The AP added that quote the election year policy changes offer something both for voters who think border enforcement is too lenient and for those who support helping immigrants who live in the U.S. legally unquote.

00:25:27 Speaker_00
Curiously missing from this is any moral imperative to be more humane to those coming to the U.S. fleeing from their home countries.

00:25:32 Speaker_00
The implication of course is that Biden needs to go to the right on the issue of immigration because Americans are inexorably and intractably cruel and racist towards immigrants.

00:25:42 Speaker_01
Exactly. The hostility is popular, so therefore the policy has to follow that hostility. Also, this notion of people polled being dissatisfied with Biden's, quote unquote, handling of immigration could go either way, right?

00:25:57 Speaker_01
I mean, you could also respond that you are unhappy with the Biden administration's handling of immigration because you think it is too cruel. And yet when it's framed by the AP,

00:26:08 Speaker_01
as being disapproval ratings, the implication, as you just said, Adam, is always that the policy has to shift toward the right, never, of course, to the left. This only ever goes one way.

00:26:19 Speaker_00
Again, there's this idea that politicians, and Biden specifically, and any president, somehow exist outside of political opinion formulation, that they sort of only respond. They cannot curate.

00:26:31 Speaker_00
We know that political polarization, as I wrote for In These Times on this very issue,

00:26:36 Speaker_00
that during the Trump years, the hostility towards immigrant, despite the fact that there was a surge in immigration relative to 2015, 2016, became more humane, more in favor of more humane border policy, a decrease of five to seven points for tougher border security, depending on how you phrase the question, according to a pupil that's done every year in immigration.

00:26:53 Speaker_00
So this idea that somehow, again, I think on the issue of immigration, it is quite possible that people generally in America have more conservative, inhumane, beliefs about the border.

00:27:03 Speaker_00
I think a lot of it has to do with how the media sanitizes the violence of the border by using these euphemisms like border security and tough on the border and that kind of stuff.

00:27:11 Speaker_00
But as our guest Dan Denver will lay out that this is not something that emerged entirely organically, that this is part of a bipartisan effort to demonize immigrants. And that's kind of the point.

00:27:20 Speaker_00
The point is that politics exists downstream from media narratives and political preferences of elites. It is not something that simply emerges a priori among people.

00:27:29 Speaker_00
There's this sort of 320 million Americans kind of sitting around and they're in the little matrix bubble, right? And they kind of just form political opinions out of nothing.

00:27:37 Speaker_00
It's like, well, obviously people in charge have a huge role, an outsized role, in telling people effectively what they should care about and why they should care about it.

00:27:45 Speaker_00
So this idea that politicians must do these reactionary, conservative, and violent things because, well, they have no choice. Otherwise, the other guy is going to win.

00:27:53 Speaker_00
is a really, really great way of avoiding the central thing that almost all Democrats and certainly all liberals wish to avoid, which is discussing ideology, which is defending the bad thing or the reactionary thing as such on its own terms.

00:28:04 Speaker_00
And the avoidance of that conversation is where the selective populism comes in, because it offsets responsibility from the people making decisions onto this nebulous public, which is constantly demanding these really shitty, conservative, violent policies.

00:28:17 Speaker_01
To discuss this more, we're now going to be joined by journalist Daniel Denver, host of The Dig, on Jacobin Radio, and author of the book, All-American Nativism, How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It, which was published by Verso Books in 2020.

00:28:34 Speaker_01
Dan will join us in just a moment. Stay with us. We are joined now by journalist Daniel Denver. Dan, it's been a little while. Welcome back to Citations Needed.

00:28:50 Speaker_02
Always a pleasure. One of my favorite podcasts to listen to.

00:28:53 Speaker_00
Thank you. And we want to begin by discussing this is a very sort of meta episode.

00:28:58 Speaker_00
Someone who's kind of been in the weeds of the shenanigans and trickery of the discourse for as long as you have, I think, is familiar with this particular mode of politics or what we call anti-politics, which is the idea that Democrats have to go right wing on issue X, sometimes pretty much every issue, because if they don't, they'll sort of lose the election, that the electorate is

00:29:20 Speaker_00
kind of axiomatically conservative and we have to pander to the drooling idiots even though you and i are erudite liberals who know better we sort of have no choice right it's the jack bauer i have no choice i have to torture someone know what we are you is that this is a bit of a conservative stalking horse for a couple reasons number one it's a very selectively applied

00:29:39 Speaker_00
Sometimes left-wing things are popular, sometimes centrist things are popular. It's actually quite random, and it varies based on the election cycle often. It certainly varies on how you even phrase the question.

00:29:49 Speaker_00
But things that are universal, pre-K, childcare, free education, more parks, more unions, better jobs, higher wages, higher taxes on the rich, These things that are indexed as left-wing somehow mysteriously never get this.

00:30:03 Speaker_00
We have no choice because the people want a treatment. Only things on the right get this and what we call selective popularism.

00:30:09 Speaker_00
The second problem is that it sort of assumes that the electorate is static, that it sort of is a permanent state of conservative and politicians have no real sway or candidates have no real sway on public opinion. There's no bully pulpit.

00:30:21 Speaker_00
I want to start by talking about the kind of first critique of this mode of politics, which is this idea that lefty things that are popular just get kind of not talked about. They get thrown into a well and never mentioned again.

00:30:34 Speaker_00
So I want to start by talking about this double standard, how this is kind of a convenient skeleton key for whatever conservative stalking horse one wants to push, and how it kind of turns the average person into a pundit.

00:30:45 Speaker_00
You see this a lot, both with people you talk to in real life or even on social media. Everyone starts to game it out, like, well, we have to do this because it's popular.

00:30:53 Speaker_00
If they do this thing that's left-wing, they'll lose votes, so we have no choice. Can you talk about how this rots the discourse and makes us all into Nate Silvers?

00:31:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, how unfortunate that we've all been rendered into little Nate Silvers. Yeah, the discourse really is rotten.

00:31:08 Speaker_02
I mean, it's revealing that the political powers that be within the Democratic Party typically revert to this notion of we can't do the good thing because the good thing isn't popular, when in fact, many of the good things that progressives at the left, that the labor movement has long pushed for and demanded are, as you noted, very popular.

00:31:31 Speaker_02
And so the fact that Democrats are dressing up, Democratic leadership dresses up what it can and can't do in the guise of popularity is just because it can't make a moral case, because there's not a moral case to be made that every child doesn't deserve pre-care or that

00:31:49 Speaker_02
Palestinians should be continued to be subjected to a genocide in Gaza. And it's a way to selectively use data to dress up democratic conventional wisdom. And that conventional wisdom is that it's actually the really smart move.

00:32:02 Speaker_02
It's the really serious move to punch the progressive base in the face. And this is, again, not new. Under Bill Clinton, it was called triangulation.

00:32:11 Speaker_02
And the idea that it's such a genius move, I think, is really undermined by the fact that the very people, the kind of imaginary voter that Democrats are trying to appeal to with these centrist or conservative policies, is often this kind of mythic white working class voter.

00:32:30 Speaker_02
Well, why did Bill Clinton preside over the loss of so many white working class votes? Why did Barack Obama, who David Shore, the coiner of this term popularism, why David Shore praises Obama as the exemplar of the populist approach.

00:32:48 Speaker_02
Why did Obama preside over this just cataclysmic realignment of white working class voters against the Democratic Party. And I have some theories as to why. I think they have everything entirely wrong.

00:33:04 Speaker_02
I mean, David Shore points to Obama as the exemplar of the popularist strategy, when in fact, Obama presided over this historic loss of white working class votes. I mean, just look at states like Iowa or Indiana that Obama won in 2008.

00:33:20 Speaker_02
that it's kind of incomprehensible to imagine them voting for a Democrat again.

00:33:25 Speaker_02
Look at just the historic number during the Tea Party wave of state legislative seats that were lost across the country that it's hard to imagine being gained back anytime soon. Well, what happened? What happened was the economic crisis.

00:33:39 Speaker_02
And the economic crisis was also a profound political crisis that loosened political allegiances and identities in a way that's not possible during ordinary times.

00:33:53 Speaker_02
It was an extraordinary moment of political and economic crisis where people's political allegiances and identities were up for grabs. What did Obama do? He bailed out the banks and presided over a really insubstantial recovery package.

00:34:10 Speaker_02
letting millions of people lose their homes, unemployment spike, hit depression levels amongst Black Americans, et cetera, a really profound economic crisis that was a political and policy choice made by the Obama administration.

00:34:25 Speaker_02
And the right, by contrast, seized this opportunity of people being in this political economic crisis and their identities and allegiances being up for grabs. They seized that opportunity. and defined the nature of the crisis.

00:34:39 Speaker_02
Instead of Wall Street banks, the blame was put on immigrants and muture welfare recipient types. And they did that effectively, and Obama didn't even contest it.

00:34:51 Speaker_02
And this is basically the popularism just fundamentally misunderstands how public opinion is made. Popularists treat public opinion as though it's this free-floating, given, transcendent reality. That's not true.

00:35:05 Speaker_02
Consent is manufactured in significant part by political, social, and economic power. The aim of that consent manufacturing is to reproduce existing systems and relations of power.

00:35:18 Speaker_02
The very same people who are legitimating their policy preferences by pointing to popularism, they have a systematic function of reproducing like existing ideologies. So this is like Gramsci 101. Common sense is made rather than given.

00:35:35 Speaker_02
So it's interesting that the people who make the common sense want to argue that it's given.

00:35:42 Speaker_00
Yeah, and we discussed at the top of the show how volatile these things are. But just a few examples we mentioned are that support among Republicans for electing a felon tripled literally overnight when Trump became a felon, right?

00:35:53 Speaker_00
Trust in the FBI and the CIA completely inverted along partisan lines after and during Russiagate, right?

00:35:58 Speaker_00
And indeed, support for pro-immigrant, non-carceral policies, especially for liberals and Democrats, spiked during the Trump administration when it became a partisan polarized issue and then reverted back when Biden came in office.

00:36:10 Speaker_00
We have plenty of evidence that partisanship and partisan leaders can meaningfully redirect public opinion, that they are not actually subject to public opinion. But in many ways, to some extent, they are, of course.

00:36:22 Speaker_00
But in many ways, they can direct it if the circumstance calls for it. And of course, there's a very sophisticated media apparatus designed to perpetuate that polarization.

00:36:30 Speaker_00
But that polarization, of course, seems to only be for ill and never for anything positive.

00:36:34 Speaker_02
On immigration, This is like basic George Lakoff, that kind of left liberal linguist wrote this short pithy book called Don't Think of an Elephant. I don't know, probably like 20 years ago or something. And its insights are pretty straightforward.

00:36:48 Speaker_02
If Democrats accept Republicans basic premises, and try to say, but we're better at them, what voters are left with is the affirmation of that Republican premise.

00:37:01 Speaker_02
And that happens constantly, whether we're talking about crime, whether we're talking about terrorism and the war on terrorism, or whether we're talking about immigration. And what we've seen on immigration in particular

00:37:12 Speaker_02
is particularly, since the Clinton administration, a constant effort to be like, oh, no, from the Democrats.

00:37:21 Speaker_02
Democrats perceiving themselves as vulnerable on immigration and then attempting to turn the tables on Republicans by saying, yes, Republicans are right that there's an illegal immigrant invasion and the border is insecure and being overrun, but we're the ones to secure it.

00:37:37 Speaker_02
And there was a brief break in this, which was under Trump, when, as you pointed out, there was this intense partisan polarization on immigration, which was a welcome polarization.

00:37:47 Speaker_02
Suddenly, Democrats thought it was useful to say it's barbaric to put kids in cages, and no, we don't need a border wall. But unfortunately, under Biden, we've seen a total reaffirmation of Republican talking points once again, and this 12-dimensional

00:38:02 Speaker_02
chess that Biden and Schumer and others and the New York Times reporters chronicling this all seem to think is one key to success in November, which is this bizarre thing they did earlier this year. Harris talked about it recently.

00:38:14 Speaker_02
Biden's talked about it a ton, which was they put this extremely draconian border security bill together and tied it to military aid to Ukraine and Israel. And then basically dared Republicans to vote against it.

00:38:28 Speaker_02
And obviously, Donald Trump was like, vote against it. And they did. And then Biden and now Harris are running around being like, oh, look, Republicans are just playing games on the border. Joe Biden

00:38:40 Speaker_02
took executive action that gutted asylum, vote Democrat. I mean, Harris very well, I think, is in a good position to win for a variety of reasons. But the idea that affirming Trump's position on border security is going to help is delusional.

00:39:00 Speaker_00
What we argue at the top of the show is there's a conventional wisdom that Democrats go right because they think it's politically expedient. And I think that's part of it. I think that it's a path of least resistance, right?

00:39:09 Speaker_00
Like you're not going to get angry calls or lack of donations from poor immigrants starving in the desert, right? It's an easy punching bag.

00:39:16 Speaker_00
Immigrants, just like, you know, many marginalized groups are easy punching bags, you know, substance users, trans people, whatever it is that you want to throw out the donor classes, he said.

00:39:25 Speaker_00
Exactly, but I also think there is something more at play here And I want to get your thoughts on this and what we argue at the top of the show is that in many ways?

00:39:32 Speaker_00
The right-wing turn is not an electoral strategy But is in fact in many ways and oftentimes the electoral strategy is actually a moral cover that they actually just have conservative ideological commitments and specifically on the border they have national security commitments that many many security analysts and people at the State Department and Pentagon and

00:39:52 Speaker_00
have run the numbers on climate chaos and understand that a very militarized border will be essential to do this forward Apache approach to climate chaos, which appears to be what everyone's settling on, which is to not do anything about it and just basically make sure that America is kind of a children of men fortress.

00:40:07 Speaker_00
And that the sort of electoral angling is kind of pretextual. And that's what selective popularism does.

00:40:12 Speaker_00
It avoids the ideological discussion rather than Democrats saying, man, we really want to punish immigrants and we really want to take a conservative position.

00:40:19 Speaker_00
And here's why that's good, because climate chaos is going to happen and we need to smash their heads with a baton to send a lesson to the global south that the borders closed, don't come. They go, we have no choice. And it's brilliant.

00:40:30 Speaker_00
It's sort of like with Israel, right? We can't stop them. It's a process thing. Electorally, it'll damage us. We don't have the power. There's always some process criticism.

00:40:39 Speaker_00
An example I use is that when I have a toddler, and whenever he says, I want a popsicle, rather than getting into the ideological weeds with him about why he can't have a popsicle, I just say, we're out of popsicles because it's easier.

00:40:48 Speaker_00
And it's a similar dynamic, right? Like we have no choice but to be conservative. The voters demand it. We have no choice. And in that way, it's easy because you're not having an ideological conversation. Right.

00:40:55 Speaker_01
Because you're basically laundering ideology through pragmatism.

00:41:01 Speaker_00
Exactly. And that it's actually the inverse. And the example I use is Dick Morris with Clinton, as you know, who invented the term triangulation, later went on to become a partisan Republican and a huge Trump supporter.

00:41:12 Speaker_00
That should tell you something about the kind of ideological underpinnings of this so-called strategy, that in many ways it is just they're conservative.

00:41:18 Speaker_02
It's that amazing tweet that someone re-upped yesterday from earlier this year that says something like, you're doing it wrong, says the guy who doesn't agree with you or want the same outcomes as you, or something along those lines.

00:41:31 Speaker_02
It's friendly advice from your political opponents.

00:41:35 Speaker_00
It's episode 69, the inexplicable Republican best friend who's suddenly giving you advice.

00:41:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I've gotten advice, quote unquote, advice from people who say that the uncommitted movement is doing it wrong because we're putting too much pressure on Harris, even though we're the people going to the DNC.

00:41:52 Speaker_02
And rather than protesting in the streets circulating a letter, you know, respectfully requesting an arms embargo while tens of thousands of people in the streets will be out there yelling something much louder.

00:42:02 Speaker_02
And it's like this comes from people who I have not seen make public statements around the ongoing genocide in Gaza. So I take that advice, you know, with a grain of a large grain of salt.

00:42:13 Speaker_01
But but, Adam, your point is a glacier of salt.

00:42:15 Speaker_02
a glacier of salt. Your argument's really interesting. I think both things are going on.

00:42:20 Speaker_02
I do think, looking at immigration, that there is an ideological superstructure taking on a bit of a life of its own, relative life of its own, where there has been just a discursive ideological arms race on securing the border, cracking down on immigrants, the Secure Fence Act,

00:42:38 Speaker_02
was passed and signed into law by Bush. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for it. It led to hundreds of miles of border fencing, which is really indistinguishable from a wall, in many cases, being built.

00:42:50 Speaker_02
The anti-EU will go from a few thousand border patrol agents to roughly 20,000 from the early 90s to today.

00:42:58 Speaker_02
the ante gets upped and upped and upped, that the only thing left for Trump to do is to be like, we're actually hermetically sealing the entire border with an impermeable wall. So there is this kind of discursive ideological dynamic at work.

00:43:11 Speaker_02
But then again, I just talked about an actual wall being built. There's a material underpinning to that.

00:43:15 Speaker_01
Which is then said to be synonymous with open borders so that you can attack your opponents, even though it's actually like hundreds of miles of a wall.

00:43:21 Speaker_02
Quite the opposite. Yeah. And part of the material underpinning there is the national security state, the new national security state that emerged with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9-11.

00:43:33 Speaker_02
And there is a, to your point, Adam, there is certainly a sort of like non a more like technocratic national security logic to this whole development. And I do agree that a lot of it is looking forward to a future where wealthy industrialized states

00:43:54 Speaker_02
need to feel like they need to legitimate dealing incredibly harshly with larger and larger number of surplus populations, people who are pushed from their homes by war and climate change to normalize mass death in the Mediterranean, to normalize what's going on in Gaza right now.

00:44:15 Speaker_02
That's why I think it was incredibly prescient and brilliant. when Colombian President Gustavo Pedro basically said that Gaza is a laboratory for our future. I think he's exactly right.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
So I want to take us to a slightly different topic. Obviously, these are all very closely related, but you mentioned these kind of racial elements.

00:44:34 Speaker_01
And I want to sort of take us to how selective popularism shows up in much more racialized context domestically. Oftentimes, again, to like launder liberal racism, again, as just like political pragmatism.

00:44:48 Speaker_01
So the New York Times has really mastered this mode of journalism, namely in the years following the George Floyd uprisings, like from 2021, 2023, doing so much work.

00:45:01 Speaker_01
during the kind of defund movement days to highlight how black elected leaders and black communities as seen through like very tortured polling to really tell the public, right, the New York Times reading public, that actually black officials, black politicians and entire black communities

00:45:23 Speaker_01
Were demanding more policing demanding that the Democrats that you know they voted for not cut funding to police but actually up funding for police we need more police and the times obviously at the same time did not write several articles.

00:45:40 Speaker_01
about how those same communities of black voters also wanted, say, more unionization or a higher minimum wage, reparations, free health care, free college, affordable housing, more monies for schools and public systems, as kind of most communities want, those did not get the same kind of

00:46:00 Speaker_01
constant reporting, the same opinion pieces published again and again.

00:46:05 Speaker_01
So it's, again, this sort of what they choose to frame as being really important, you know, as you mentioned, George Lakoff, that idea of just, you know, framing and how far that goes to really defining our entire kind of narrative and political discourse.

00:46:18 Speaker_01
So, Dan, I'd love for you to talk about this dynamic, this like taking one or two data points that even tortured polling is saying that minority populations agree with wealthy white counterparts. Wow, we all agree now that we need more policing.

00:46:37 Speaker_01
But of course, omitting what is actually also popular, getting into this idea of what is allowed in the conversation and what is not allowed in the conversation.

00:46:46 Speaker_02
Yeah, I find this to be one of the most annoying discourses.

00:46:50 Speaker_02
And I mean, I guess to concede one point to that side before I go on to critique it, it's true that there can be a sense that portions of the left in discourse can have a sort of portray an inaccurate, maybe like romantic idea of black politics as sort of like

00:47:07 Speaker_02
homogeneously left-wing and revolutionary, when obviously it's internally extremely contentious and contradictory, like any community's politics. But the idea of using Black public opinion as a cover for law and order politics is really cynical.

00:47:23 Speaker_02
James Forman Jr. wrote a great book called Locking Up Our Own. It's about how the Black political class came to be complicit in legislation and policies abetting the rise of mass incarceration.

00:47:38 Speaker_02
But what he really clearly lays out is that Black organizations, Black leaders,

00:47:45 Speaker_02
in this period following the victories, the political victories of the Black Civil Rights Movement or the Black Freedom Struggle, they simultaneously confronted the rise of neoliberalism, the deindustrialization of American cities.

00:47:59 Speaker_02
I think Forman speaks very clearly to this history where Black leaders, Black organizations coming on the heels of the victories of the Black Civil Rights Movement, the Black Freedom Struggle, were also confronting

00:48:13 Speaker_02
a really intensely negative emerging political economic reality entrenched a kind of new generation of hypersegregation of poor Black people, the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities. And as a result of this economic

00:48:35 Speaker_02
crisis, a huge social crisis that did include a really serious increase in crime and social disorder that hit black people and particularly poor black people first and foremost. But what black leaders said was, We want this taken care of.

00:48:54 Speaker_02
But they, by and large, had a social democratic agenda. Did they believe police played a role? Did they want police to take care of the person on their corner who was mugging people in the neighborhood on their way home from work? For sure.

00:49:07 Speaker_02
But they also wanted a social democratic agenda to rebuild their communities, to create good paying union jobs, to have schools that were excellent rather than separate and unequal, they got Black communities in America, James Forman Jr.

00:49:25 Speaker_02
shows, got none of that. They just got cops in mass incarceration. So to say, to use that history, that reality of neoliberalism, hypersegregation, separate and unequal apartheid school system,

00:49:41 Speaker_02
to say that the reality of social disorder, that these economic crises imposed on Black communities are thus a justification for mass incarceration, is incredibly cynical and, again, a selective use of polls.

00:49:54 Speaker_02
Because if we go to polls, we can see that Black Americans are much more critical of mass incarceration and police abuses than white Americans. That holds very, very true.

00:50:08 Speaker_00
That's what makes this collective popularism so deeply cynical and effective is that, again, I think the way it's used on so-called black communities is really the quintessence of how it can be exploited.

00:50:17 Speaker_00
Because like you said, everything else they care about, jobs, unionization, reparations, environmental harms, none of that fucking goes anywhere. I looked, when I wrote my original article on this a couple of years ago,

00:50:31 Speaker_00
I look, and the New York Times never reports on black demands for those things, ever. They certainly don't do a drumbeat every other day to sort of pressure Democrats, which they were doing around the issue of crime. And so it is a skeleton key.

00:50:42 Speaker_00
You can kind of use it to push whatever pre-existing conservative agenda you have. I want to talk a bit about

00:50:47 Speaker_00
what we mentioned earlier as the discourse rot where everybody becomes nate silver now i argue that referencing the public opinion is useful as a defensive tactic because i don't think it's a good idea to just concede that centrist things are inherently popular or are popular because that's just taking for granted and pretty much all media like reporters can casually say

00:51:08 Speaker_00
Politician X has to move to the center for electoral reasons, and they don't need to provide any evidence. You see in the New York Times article, CNN, it's just an axiom that these midwits in Washington and the press, they just take for granted.

00:51:18 Speaker_00
It's like gravity or the tides. It's just a thing that is naturally, the center is sort of more electorally advantageous. It's just taken for granted, right? And you don't ever need to prove it or show any evidence for it.

00:51:30 Speaker_00
So I think it's fine if in response to that, the left says, actually, this is popular, that's popular, right? Like sort of the ways in which people say, well, Harris can't support a ceasefire because it'll cost during November.

00:51:38 Speaker_00
But then you say, well, actually, polls show arms embargoes on Israel are actually quite popular. And in fact, a lot of voters are more likely to vote Democrat if you support that, and very few are less likely to vote. as just one example.

00:51:49 Speaker_00
So I think it's okay to cite polls as a defense, because otherwise, you sort of just concede these conservative premises.

00:51:54 Speaker_00
But ultimately, everybody seems to be Nate Silver in many ways, and much political discourse, much pungentry, is people laundering ideological preferences through this alleged voter demands.

00:52:06 Speaker_00
And, you know, the left, again, does this as well, I think, offensively, in a way they probably shouldn't do. Because the whole point of being left is it doesn't really matter if what you're doing is popular. We're in the soul converting business.

00:52:16 Speaker_00
Our job is to convince people. It's not necessarily to say, well, we're just going to put our finger to the wind.

00:52:20 Speaker_00
And I want to talk about this Nate Silverification of politics, where everybody, even like random normies, will kind of internalize why they have to do things that are bad or evil or suboptimal because they just have no choice.

00:52:33 Speaker_00
They're sort of forced by electoral politics. And this kind of pundit brain trap, it avoids what I think is, of course, the far more interesting issues, which is just having normative debates. Like, John Shaik can't just say, I'm a conservative.

00:52:45 Speaker_00
I support a conservative politician. He's physiologically incapable of doing this. So he's got to say, Harris has to be conservative because that's what the people want. It's like, just fucking say you support

00:52:53 Speaker_02
This is a hypothesis, but my theory as to how pundit brain became so normalized, it would be great for someone to actually try to pick this apart as a history and do a historical discourse analysis of media coverage of politics to see how this has changed over time.

00:53:12 Speaker_02
But my sense, my theory, is that the absence or decline of the sort of like organized institutions that represent and bind ordinary people to politics, namely labor unions. These are sort of mediating institutions.

00:53:30 Speaker_02
Their absence and decline that we have this sort of these isolated atomized individuals relating to politics when they're not entirely alienated from politics, in the cases that they are still relating to politics, relating to it vis-a-vis the media.

00:53:49 Speaker_02
And so those Americans who are still paying attention, and many, many, many are not, many are so alienated, Those Americans who are still paying attention are connected as individuals to the media, to the pundits, thus spreading pundit brain.

00:54:08 Speaker_02
That's my theory.

00:54:09 Speaker_01
Dan, before we let you go, this has been so great, but before we let you go, can you tell our listeners what you are up to, what they can look forward to maybe on The Dig coming up? What do you have going on?

00:54:20 Speaker_02
I've been up to a lot. I just finished a 16-part history of 20th century Arab politics called Thawra out on The Dig podcast.

00:54:33 Speaker_02
Really, if you're trying to understand what is going on today in terms of Arab and Middle Eastern politics and the role of US and Western imperialism and what sort of political strategies and ideologies Arab leaders, organizations, masses developed to fight back,

00:54:50 Speaker_02
I highly recommend it as a good use of 30-something hours of your time.

00:54:56 Speaker_02
And then in terms of this discussion about popularism, I recently published an essay at N Plus One magazine called Due Border on just the sort of issue as it's emerged with the Biden-Harris approach to immigration, trying to beat Trump at his border security game, which I argue is total folly.

00:55:18 Speaker_01
Well, everyone should check all of that out. The deep digs that you do on your podcast are always incredible. So just thank you again.

00:55:26 Speaker_01
We have been speaking with journalist Dan Denver, author of the book All-American Nativism, How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as we know it. And of course, the host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio, which everyone should check out.

00:55:38 Speaker_01
Dan, thank you again for joining us today on Citations Needed.

00:55:42 Speaker_02
Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it.

00:56:00 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think what the faux popularism framework is, is it's part of a broader regime, which we've talked about quite a bit, which is that nobody wants to really talk about ideology. People run from ideology like it's a hitchhiker with pets.

00:56:13 Speaker_00
Nobody wants to sort of make arguments from first principles because that gets messy. It pisses people off. So there's a kind of buyer's market for systems or electoral logics

00:56:24 Speaker_00
that absolve one of moral responsibility and moral burden, whether it's kind of process stuff around, you know, we see this with Gaza, where it's like, well, you know, wouldn't matter if we stop sending them bombs anyway, or the politics of like the faux possible based on popular polling.

00:56:37 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's a way of avoiding the issue of like, well, why should we have more racist and extreme border enforcement, like defend that on its merits, rather than saying, I'm sorry, but the locals in this country just want tighter border security, right?

00:56:49 Speaker_00
It's not what I would choose. But you know, I'm beholden to the people. Which again is a very convenient out to something that gets everyone off the hook anytime there's a kind of industry for conflict avoidance or ideology avoidance you're gonna get.

00:57:02 Speaker_00
Increasingly savvy and sophisticated ways of avoiding those issues the popular is margaret really is a skeleton key you can use it.

00:57:09 Speaker_00
For pretty much anything you want to avoid or any right wing policy you wish to advance you can simply say well you know fifty one percent of people want it so i will what am i gonna do like throw the election there is other more important things because like you said it's not coming down to arguing for things that you actually.

00:57:25 Speaker_01
truly believe in and believe are important and so therefore you're kind of carrying the mantle that way you're building a platform that way or if you are just fundamentally like a racist person and a bigoted person you're also not necessarily

00:57:40 Speaker_01
going to be like, I think these people are subhuman. I mean, some people do. We've also seen those kind of popularists, you know, well, you know, immigrants are doing X, Y, Z, when really it's just like a mask for being super racist.

00:57:53 Speaker_01
But again, using the kind of popularist argument, obviously, I would say the right is, I think, far more comfortable in their racist ideology, whereas I think liberals and even more progressive, let's say Democratic Party folks, do that kind of popularism masking.

00:58:09 Speaker_01
where they launder their bad ideas through the shoulder shrug of popular opinion.

00:58:15 Speaker_00
Yeah. And of course, it gets everyone off the hook. So why not? I mean, it's the conversation stopper. You can't really go anywhere from, well, that's just what people want. So that's it in the conversation.

00:58:24 Speaker_00
It's like, oh, the media is bad because it's all about the clicks. And it's like, well, great. I guess we're done here because you've created this quasi-libertarian moral burden shift.

00:58:32 Speaker_00
We're away from the person doing the thing, making the editorial choices, or an elected or a candidate making the political choices, onto this nebulous public. So therefore, no one's responsible.

00:58:42 Speaker_01
Right, exactly. Put your hands up, back away, nothing to see here, nothing you can do about it. That will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening.

00:58:52 Speaker_01
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