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Show Notes
In this episode, veteran journalist Brian Beutler waxes nostalgic about the past 20 years of political journalism and muses about its future.
I’ve known political journalist Brian Beutler for a long time. We met back in the late 2000s in DC, in the heady days leading up to Obama’s victory, and have kept in touch fitfully ever since.
Brian, one of the smartest and most insightful political analysts writing today, has published in a wide variety of outlets, but this month he followed me into the wilderness — left his job at Crooked Media to launch his own newsletter, Off Message. He’s already written some great stuff and made some cool videos — check them out.
I figured I would take the occasion to catch up with him, wax nostalgic about politics past, discuss partisan journalism, and muse about how opponents of authoritarianism might show a little more vigor. Please enjoy this long and somewhat indulgent ramble down memory lane.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
So I'm sitting here with my good buddy Brian Beutler, who is a political journalist living in Washington, DC. He has been a political journalist for a long time. We've known each other for a long time, been involved in this mess of political journalism for a long time. He has worked, Brian, where all of you worked everywhere. The American Prospect, did you do that one?
Brian Beutler
I didn't do that one.
David Roberts
The New Republic.
Brian Beutler
Yes, I was there.
David Roberts
Did you do an American Progress stint?
Brian Beutler
No, you're misremembering. I was actually with you at Grist. I think I was on a freelance contract for like six months or a year way back in 2006.
David Roberts
Smokes, I forgot about that.
Brian Beutler
I worked at a bunch of places when I was like, a pup. So I think Raw Story still exists. First reporting gig. But I really got my training as a reporter at TPM. I was there for several years.
David Roberts
Right. That's the one I was trying to call to so spell it out for people. It's Josh Marshall's site.
Brian Beutler
Yeah, it used to be Talking Points Memo that's I think still the URL, but it's just TPM.
One of the longest standing, I mean, still going strong.
I rely on it all the time. I'm friends with my old editor there. He's still basically, like, running the day to day there, I think, the world of TPM. And then a very brief stint at Salon, which I enjoyed, but then The New Republic came and was like "join us instead." And so I said yes. And I did that through a really tumultuous period from like 2014, I think, to 2017. And then I was editor in chief at Crooked Media for six years, and now I am independent.
David Roberts
Yes, this is the occasion for the pod is my friend Brian has left Crooked Media and is now launching on his own, launching a newsletter because all the cool kids now have newsletters, a newsletter called Off Message where he is going to continue political journalism. You should all go sign up. I've learned an enormous amount from Brian over the years. And so I thought, on the occasion of Brian's birth as an indie, self-employed journalist, welcome to the fold, that we would sit down and catch up and I guess you could say, does the world really need two white, bearded, middle-aged guys of roughly similar socioeconomic backgrounds and ideological outlooks, affirming one another's priors for an hour?
Maybe not, but this is my pod, and if I want to have an indulgent episode periodically, that is my right as an independent. We got no bosses anymore, Brian to tell us not to do so.
Brian Beutler
My two favorite flavors are waxing nostalgic and vigorous agreement. And we're just going to —
David Roberts
We're going to get right into that.
Brian Beutler
Give your listeners all that.
David Roberts
All right. I feel like one of the signal characteristics of political journalism, and I expect this has probably always been true in all times and places is just that a lot of stuff happens, one thing after another happens, and it's a constant scramble. And so you can do it for a long time. And you really do not get many opportunities to sort of step back and think about kind of the arc of politics as you've experienced it over the course of a career. I guess what people used to do is report their whole lives and then become opinion columnists and write books.
But anyway, so one of the things I want to do is just think a little bit about kind of the arc of American politics that we've experienced and where that leaves you and kind of what you think about it and how you're thinking about politics has changed over experiencing all this. So you — when did you come to political consciousness as an adult, would you say?
Brian Beutler
It was definitely during the George W. Bush presidency, the first term of the George W. Bush presidency. And it was actually, like, less Bush vigor, although in hindsight, once I became politically awake, it kind of reverse incepted me how important it was. We've been on a wild ride since then. That was a moment when the Gingrich revolution could have been snuffed out, maybe, and normalish politics resumed.
David Roberts
My estimation of the importance of that episode has, as you say, risen steadily, more or less ever since, ever since it happened. And now I see it as sort of like the turning point in US. Politics, the pivot point.
Brian Beutler
So it was 9/11 and the Iraq war, and I went through a relatively quick transition as, like, an undergraduate from, like, "Holy crap, what's happening? Wait, we got to do something about this. Oh, George W. Bush is going to do something about it," to like, "wait, these seem like crazy ideas. What did Iraq have to do with that?" And by 2004, I was like, "this is nuts." And I voted for John Kerry that year. And I voted for Democrats ever since. And it was after that that I decided I want to go into journalism. But I knew I would end up being, like, a liberal journalist and that I'd have a really hard time just ignoring everything that had happened, you know, going on TV or writing in newspapers as if I wasn't aware that things had gotten so bad or gone so far off the rails.
David Roberts
But before this, did you have your callow, Libertarian high school, college period? Did you go through that?
Brian Beutler
Not really. I think I did vote for the Libertarian candidate in the 2000 election, but —
David Roberts
I voted for Nader. Confession time.
Brian Beutler
But I was in California. I came from a really reactionary part of California. I think the expectation for most people who graduated high school with me was that they'd vote for Republicans their whole lives, and that seemed like stuffy and distasteful to me, but also the Democrats, the Clintons, whatever. And so just like, protest vote Harry Brown, Libertarian candidate, 2000. But it was never like I'm sure I did some of the reading. The Libertarians love to do the reading and then talk about the reading, but I know it's never like, "Wow, Frederick Hayek was onto everything."
So it really was just like a quick transition from total political naivety to: the conservative movement in the United States has a really disturbing vision for the country, and blocking them from power has to be like priority one and kind of everything else falls beneath that and is shaped by that.
David Roberts
I entered the same way and this is something to do with our sort of micro generation. I mean, one of the things I sort of meant to mention is that I faffed about in grad school for a while, getting a philosophy degree after college. So by the time I sort of wound my way into journalism, I kind of slipstreamed into journalism right alongside your cohort, sort of you and Matt and Ezra and then the birth of the Netroots and all that stuff. One of the sort of interesting features of it is that I've always been about five to seven years older than most of the people I think of as my peers.
So, I'm like ahead of you guys in life stage. Like, I had kids while you guys were all still living in group houses and all this kind of stuff. So, I feel like I'm seeing your future. But anyway, you look younger than us though. Oh, well, thank you. That's because I kept the same hobby my whole life. But yeah, to me also getting involved in politics, the occasion was to look under the veneer of quote unquote, normal boring. This is what I indulged in in the 2000 election, back when I was really callow and really disconnected and not really paying attention, I sort of went for the whole, like, duopoly.
The parties are the same: "It's the system, man. It's the system that's broken. And who cares which face of the system you vote for, man." Voted for Nader based on all that horseshit. But pretty quickly watching 2000 and then watching 9/11 and watching Iraq, pretty quickly my whole posture was: under cloak of normal politics there's something rising on the right and it is ugly. And it is like there's an authoritarian, illiberal reactionary movement stirring beneath this facade of normality. And I need to be the town crier. I need to go out and bang on pots and pans and say, "look at this."
Like, look beneath the surface at what's happening. And so it's interesting for you and me both, preventing this rising reactionary movement from taking power has always been one and the same with our journalism and our engagement with political journalism.
Brian Beutler
I have a story about this, which is like, I think that if the Iraq war hadn't happened, or Bush v. Gore hadn't happened, or just things had been a little bit less extraordinary in the post 9/11 period, like, I was at Berkeley, I might have done the flip from 17-year-old pseudo-libertarian to what you were talking about a narrative progressive or socialist or something like that. Just because that was very much the milieu there still. But then 9/11 did happen, and then Iraq did happen and the imperative to try to knock Bush out of the White House was very high and the mistake of the 2000 election loomed really large.
It was 2003 probably, or 2004. There was a live debate at Berkeley between Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner, who was a journalist. I haven't read anything by him in a long time, but he was at the New York Review of Books at the time and they were having an argument about the war, and that's what the debate was. And like, obviously Hitchens had his really signature flair and charisma and pithy everything, and Danner was this more studied professorial type and he was correct about the war, but that's not how debates work, right? And so Hitchens won.
But I was taken with the fact that's what they got to do with their lives. And I wanted to be able to do stuff like that. And I kind of wanted to bring Hitchens-esque persuasive abilities to the big moral issues of the day without being glib and wrong about them. And, like, everything since then, has just been kind of like the Iraq War. But it's some other extraordinary, reactionary, dangerous thing. It's Sarah Palin and the birthers or the effort to repeal Obamacare. It's just — it's just emergency after emergency after like, there's never a shortage of things to be passionate and right about in the hope of like —
David Roberts
Yes, if you want to rail against the machine, there's been no — plenty of machines to scream against. We have no shortage. Another thing about the 2000 election that I wanted to say is it's very paradigmatic in a bunch of different ways. But the main lesson I've taken from it and this is a lesson that I feel like I've learned again and again and again has sunk in deeper and deeper ever since then, which is when a time comes of political chaos, right? Everything's up in the air. Nobody knows exactly what's happening. There's a moment of high potential energy, right?
And no one knows which direction it's going to become kinetic, right? There's this sort of doubt and uncertainty. High potential energy in the air. You get these moments in politics periodically, and watching how the two sides dealt with that was so instructive because on the Democratic side, as you well recall immediately, it was, "How is history going to judge us as we do this? Right? What's the right thing for America. What's the fair thing to do? Let's meet in the middle. Let's be patient." Al Gore, whatever you think about him genuinely in that moment, had noble motives in mind, had history in mind and the larger welfare of the country in mind.
And they were basically the entire party was performing as though the entire episode were being overseen and judged by some sort of referee who was applying basic rules of accuracy and fairness. And basically like they were trying to please the teacher, trying to please the referee. And then on the other side, when chaos comes up and you've seen this happen a million times since then, no one on the right had a moment of doubt or hesitation or scratching their chin and pondering the judgment of history or pondering what's fair in the big picture. No one. No one on a blog, in a magazine, in politics, no one had that moment.
They all like a school of fish immediately recognized this is a moment of uncertainty and chaos. Chaos is a ladder. Let's fight, fight, fight, fight, with any tools necessary. Don't give a s**t about consistency. Don't give a s**t about fairness.
Brian Beutler
Act and then react, and then act again. And then react again.
David Roberts
Always push our interests, no matter what we said before, no matter what anybody else says, no matter what may be fair, blah, blah, blah. Just act on our interest. Push, push, fight, and then secure the victory. And then once you have the victory, then you have all the time in the world to come up with pleasing stories about why you did what you did and how it was all fair after all, and why we just need to move on and why we don't need to dwell on the past, et cetera, et cetera. Once the thing's over, then you can smooth it all out.
But when there's chaos, immediately go on the attack. And we've seen this like, this is the essence of the two parties ever since, really. And you could say the same thing about 9/11. You could say the same thing about Iraq. Just like when Iraq came up, as you say, there were all these people on the left sort of, like, ripping their hair out, like, "what about this? But what about that?" Doing the Hamlet, like, "maybe this, but maybe that. What's the bigger picture? What's history going to say?" And on the right, it was just like, "Here's a moment of chaos. Let's fight to advance our interests on every front at every moment." And that's just, like, the deepest lesson I have written on my psyche about U.S. Politics ever since then.
Brian Beutler
Yeah, and I mean, I'm going to pull a version of David Brooks and say, I think there's a happy medium in between. I like that. Democrats will survey the nation. What are the pressing needs facing the country? And not like they'll address them all perfectly right then and there, but at least they'll just be like, "oh, okay, the roads and bridges are bad. Let's rebuild them. New parents don't have enough money. Let's try to give them some money." And Republicans don't really engage in that kind of assessment, and they don't even think that the government should be doing that stuff.
And it's really hard to bring that analytical bench to things. If A, you're an ideologue and you think you're not supposed to do it in the first place, but B, if you're just saying like I have to say and do in the moment what is necessary to gain power, you're just going to be inconsistent all over the map all the time. And that's why Republican policy is always a bad fit for the moment, it seems like. But the flip side of it is — then you think, well, let's just compare records and which presidents have been better for job creation, which President Joe Biden or Donald Trump actually passed an infrastructure bill versus talked about Infrastructure Week all the time?
And Democrats own that game and nobody gives a s**t because like you said, there's no referee.
David Roberts
Exactly. If there's a referee to be like, "I've tallied up your column, and your column Dems are out ahead on improving people's lives." There's just no one to do that.
Brian Beutler
Yes. And so that's why here we are in the year 2023, and Republicans are, like, crushing Democrats on who's better on the economy, and it makes no sense. And I bet you if you took a poll of the public and asked who's better on infrastructure, Republicans might win that one too. Or at least it would be like 50-50, but it should be 100 to zero, right? It's simple and it's not.
If evidence were involved in any way. But get back to the history a little bit because and tell me if this was your experience too. Sort of like 2004 was like the early first nadir for me because you and I both got sort of like activated against Bush during his first presidency for very obvious reasons. Reasons that in retrospect seem like he hasn't come out better with the passage of time. Like it all looks even worse than it was.
Yeah.
David Roberts
And then 2004 came, and that was the first time I remember an experience that would also be repeated several times over the years, which is me thinking, "well, this is obvious." I don't even really know how to mount an argument here. I just want to say, "look," I just want to hold my arm out and say, "look at all this." Case closed, right? And yet America goes and reelects him. And I was just flummoxed by that. Absolutely spun off my axis. But then after that, we started this arc of 2004 forward where Bush sort of fails on his Social Security drive and Dems win big in the House in 2006.
And then there's the rise of Obama and that race and all the hope around Obama and the election of Obama, that whole period from sort of 2004 to call it like 2009, let's say, let's give Obama one year of that. That was a period that, as I think back on it, if you're a younger person than us, as there are many out there, if you came into politics later, or if you came into politics around like 2010, say, you've never experienced a period like that where it actually felt like, "Oh, my God. The forces of decency are rallying. We're going to move forward again.
There's hope, things are sane. There's a guy in charge who is speaking in complete sentences and is clearly intelligent and is clearly a good person, a good father, a good husband." That whole period feels like a weird dream in retrospect, but it's a dream that people younger than us have never had any taste of. Like, if you came in in 2010, it's been all s**t since then, wall to wall. At least for us. There is this weird, hazy memory of the idea that things could get better.
Brian Beutler
Yeah. So, I mean, to pick up where I left off in college in that Hitchens - Danner debate so it was like, "Okay, there should be really eloquent spokespeople, but not for the Iraq war, but against it." Right.
But that was a time when Democrats, they were not making a dent in that direction. Right. This was John Kerry reporting for duty. Right. Like, the young people won't get that allusion, but it was like a signal moment in Democratic politics prior to Obama. And it was the era when Democrats were, like, agonizing themselves over whether do we have a religion problem? Like, maybe we're not winning because we're not appealing to churchgoers.
David Roberts
Thinking that nominating a war hero would get you something from the other side. Right?
Brian Beutler
Yeah. The referees would say, "look, George W. Bush kind of a draft dodger. John Kerry. War hero. Case closed."
David Roberts
You're not allowed to call this guy a coward because he's a war hero. I'm blowing the whistle on that one. Where was that referee? It never showed up.
Brian Beutler
The swift voting actually left a lifelong impression on me because initially I was like, well, people are just going to be super offended that Republicans are tearing this guy down in this way, but A, they weren't, and B, I was also demoralized and put off and came to lose respect for Kerry and the Democrats for not standing up for themselves. Right.
David Roberts
And just like, waiting on the referee, right? Waiting on the referee is what they're doing.
Brian Beutler
And there is no dignity in that. And honestly, for all the things that you and I spend our time arguing with other people on the Internet about how to optimize politics or tweak policy in this or that way, to make polls move in whatever direction, is like, throw all that out and just act like you have some pride in yourself and will stand up for yourself when people smack you in the face. And a lot of your political problems are probably just going to go away.
David Roberts
Like you would if you were just a person.
Brian Beutler
Yes, be a person. I honestly wish I thought politics were a more elevated craft than this, but it's like, "how do you become popular in high school?" is a better question to ask yourself.
David Roberts
Not having good arguments.
Brian Beutler
Right. It's not having good arguments. It's not conducting polls and then going around to the people in high school and saying what the polls say they want to hear. And it's not like running for class president with an item list agenda. It's just like being chill. It's being a reasonable person, but also not a pushover.
David Roberts
And signaling strength in these sort of like, nonverbal —
Brian Beutler
And being comfortable in your own skin and just like, how do you — and life is like that too, but politics also. And John Kerry was flunking that test. He was like, you are acting like somebody Nelson Muntz would point and laugh at if you were in high school right now. And it left this lifelong impression on me and it's like at the core of my politics today. It's the basis of a lot of what I write about.
David Roberts
Yes, it's sort of the animating message of your writing in the past several years and I assume your new newsletter, which is the same. Like, you have the tripartite failure, right in that episode, right? As a one, you have the right being nastier than — no matter how cynical, you can never keep up. At the time, I was like, "God, that's just like, so gross. Grosser than that's so out of bounds. That's so obviously gross." So like, one, the right being grosser than you think they're going to be. Two, Democrats being passive in the face of it and trying to be dignified and not dignify it with an answer and not get in the mud and all this and wait for the referees to show up and save them.
And then three, the mainstream political press failing to convey that a Rubicon has been crossed, that something has gone out of bounds, that something is now not normal, that it's not normal for a political movement to mock a veteran's service. That's just not like — we are the kind of people who are outraged about that kind of thing, right? Like people just don't know. Average citizens don't know what's normal and what isn't. You know what I mean? They pick that stuff up through signals, through trusted people they know and through media. And if the media says like, "Oh, well, they're just mocking his war service and how's that going to affect his chances in November," then people are like, "Well, I guess that's a thing we do now. I guess that's how they roll now."
And that tripartite failure is basically the template over and over and over and over and over and over again ever since then. Reliably. You could go back to last week and find one if you did.
Brian Beutler
Totally.
David Roberts
I mean, pick a week.
Brian Beutler
Republicans are expelling Nancy Pelosi and Stenny Hoyer from their office in the Capitol to be — like, as retribution for not saving Kevin McCarthy's ass. And it's the same thing. It's like they're just smacking him in the face. Are they going to well, "It's so disappointing that they would do this" like, no. Stand up for yourself.
David Roberts
Yeah. And remember when the a*****e, who was it, yelled "liar" at Obama during the State of the Union? Yeah, that episode also. I was, "Well, Jesus, that's so outrageous. It's so obviously outrageous." But again, it's only outrageous if people react as though it's outrageous, and if they just don't.
Brian Beutler
It was Joe Wilson, right?
David Roberts
Yes. And apparently that's just like, a thing we do now is, like, right wingers shout at the president.
Brian Beutler
Yeah, constantly. Now it's like the whole Republican conference instead of just —
David Roberts
I know. Back then, people will have to trust us, that that was really shocking and outrageous. But pick an episode. It's all that same basic framework.
Brian Beutler
Yes. This thing, stand up for yourself is like a big it underlies a lot of the work I've done over the last few years. It's one of the big reasons I launched Off Message. And another big reason is, like, the Netroots, I feel like arose in some way as a response to that kind of thing, if not that exact thing.
David Roberts
Yeah, right, exactly.
Brian Beutler
And my recollection of the Netroots is that it was premised on two things, right. Like, one, first and foremost, you got to crush the Republicans. But two, Democrats have proven so far to be really shitty at that.
And everyone in liberal politics, I recall, or most people in liberal politics anyway, they were cool with these two ideas, living side by side. And after Trump won, I kind of expected a revival of that kind of righteous ethic. Just like Democrats should be a little bit more confrontational with Republicans, especially when Republicans have power and if they don't, liberals, like the whole progressive ecosystem, et cetera, should feel unencumbered to criticize them for it without worrying that they're helping the Republicans in some way or not presenting a unified front against the right and Donald Trump and authoritarianism or whatever. But it didn't happen.
Like, the politics of over caution dominated in the four years of the Trump presidency.
David Roberts
Well, the immediate response to him winning was, "Oh, we weren't over cautious enough in the run up to this." Right. Like, that was the immediate —
Brian Beutler
When Democrats won the House back in the midterms in 2019, the first thing they did was, like, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi went to the White House. And, I mean, I realized this was a faint and it was meant to embarrass Trump, and so but they said, "Let's do a $2 trillion infrastructure bill together. You got them." It's like instead of everything we've seen the last two years is so unacceptable and accountability is here for you now. And look, the water is warm. If you decide you want to do anything good for the country, we're not going to say no.
But that's not our main mission here. Our main mission is to expose what you've been up to: the things you've been hiding from the public. That's all coming out now. You are in for the colonoscopy of a lifetime. And that was not the attitude. And it's not like I was shocked or anything. I was not like but I still don't understand the mindset that convinces a party and its leadership after suffering so much abuse from this guy that you're not going to do something about it when you win the power to do something about it.
David Roberts
What was it? Josh coined a term. Oh, right. He called it "b***h-slap politics". I think he has since revised this. I don't know if he has a new term for it. I think he's —
Brian Beutler
Whatever, I mean, it's fine. B***h-slap politics. It conveys something real.
David Roberts
Yeah. It's like playground stuff. It's not a rational exchange of ideas. Just like if somebody comes up and smacks you and then people are standing around in a circle laughing and you start into a soliloquy about how unfair it is that they slapped you. Like, this is brainstem level stuff going on, you know? This is stuff that operates on a much deeper level than ideology.
Brian Beutler
The Paul Pelosi hammering to head — Okay. I had an argument with a friend who disagrees with me around that time because I thought, "well, this is something that Donald Trump is essentially responsible for and Democrats should talk about a lot now while everyone is still shocked and appalled by it." And Democrats, of course, did not really want to do that. And this argument was about whether they were right to pivot back to inflation or crime or whatever the thing happened to be. And I was like, do you honestly believe that if the shoe were on the other foot and some left-wing person or progressive person took a hammer to Elaine Chao's head now two months before the election, or whatever. Like, you would agree with me that the election would be over and Democrats would lose, right?
That would be the end of it. Because it would be the only thing that anyone talks about —
David Roberts
It creates a moment. Do you or do you not exploit that moment to advance your political interests? And basically right-wing media just is a giant machine built for that — explicitly that purpose. When a moment happens, bring all the guns, turn all the guns in one direction, dominate conversation with this one thing, and Democrats just don't want to do that. And this gets to my central question. This is the main thing I wanted to — there's no answer to this question, but I want to ask it anyway, because this is what haunts me and keeps me awake at night.
So I'm talking about that tripartite failure of, like, Republicans being grosser and nastier than anyone thought. Democrats still not fighting, not getting angry and fighting in response. And then the mainstream media mushing over it all with this sort of blanket of both sides mush that obscures responsibility and obscures consequences and obscures the sort of nature of it all, that those criticisms were all, as you say, alive and well in the Netroots in the early 2000s. This is what the Netroots came up to say. Like "Fight, for Christ's sake. Like, look at what's happening. This is crazy, what's happening around Iraq, and no one's out saying it.
Like, someone come out and say it." That was the impetus of the Netroots. And so basically, fast forward literally 20 years, Brian, 20 years, and all those critiques are exactly the same today as they were then, and all the behavior is more or less the same. And I used to think back when I started, like, these dynamics are happening under a veneer of normality, a veneer of normal politics. And my sort of job is to sort of strip the veneer and show you the dynamic beneath. Because assuming that if more people saw and recognized the dynamic beneath, then they would just naturally recoil and change things, buyt then, you know, you could cite a bunch of different episodes to make this point, but obviously the big one is Trump winning, right?
Trump comes along and there is no veneer, zero veneer. Not only no veneer, but he will actively destroy any veneer that his allies try to throw up, right? He will actively say "No, no, that's not the reason. It's just because I hate people and I'm cruel." He won't let you veneer him. And it's sort of like, true for Democratic weakness and it's true for the mainstream media's failures. It's all the same as it ever was. But there's no veneer left. So, like, what's my job now? I can't strip away the veneer. There's no veneer. The dynamics are sitting out there in the open, visible and obvious to the naked eye, and yet people are not recoiling and nothing is changing.
So what do you do now? This is my existential, basically since, like, 2015 forward, this is my sort of existential crisis. Like, if America can see directly and obviously this dynamic and it doesn't seem to mind it, it's not recoiling, right? There's no backlash. Then what do I do then? Maybe this just isn't the country I thought it was. Literally, what's my goal now? Does that resonate?
Brian Beutler
Yeah, no, I think I do have an answer to this question, and I don't even think it's that complicated. The only addendum I'd make to what you just said is that it's 20 years later. I actually think that the positive effect that The Netroots had on Democratic politics from 2006 to 2008 or whatever it was that's kind of gone.
David Roberts
It got shut down. Right. It got shut down by the establishment.
Brian Beutler
And it was and absorbed in some cases, by the establishment too. And the absence of it, I think, is very strongly felt because there isn't a loud chorus of liberal voices who are willing to be a little bit iconoclastic and not worry about presenting a progressive movement in disarray or a liberal movement in disarray and aren't worried about what the various congressional offices will think of them. And just say, we don't think that you, the Democrats, are running an optimal opposition strategy to this threat. I think that the truth is that the Iraq war era also had very little veneer.
I mean, George W. Bush was a more polished person, and he well, I.
David Roberts
Think about, like, Dick Cheney. Like, Dick Cheney is the essence of the guy who is an absolute monster in a suit, talking calmly, making you feel just like, oh, this is a calm guy who knows exactly what's going on.
Brian Beutler
When I say the word torture, I bet you a single image comes to your head and it's the guy standing on the thing with the hood over his head in crucifix position. There was no veneer there. That was politics in 2005, and it was awful, and the Netroots was like, "Democrats point at that and call it awful, and if you don't, why are we here to help you? If you can't help yourself, what do you want from us?" Right? I think that that was very healthy, and it doesn't really exist anymore.
David Roberts
Well, it seems like what happened is that when Trump won, it kind of threw everybody a little bit off their axis.
Brian Beutler
Yeah, for sure.
David Roberts
And it's just the danger of Democrats losing again has become so acute and existential that everyone's terrified into tiptoeing.
Brian Beutler
I don't think it's like corrupt forces or capture. There's some level of capture there, but it's risk aversion. It's fear, and it's totally well grounded. It is scary, right?
David Roberts
It's f*****g scary.
Brian Beutler
I don't begrudge the people who get frustrated with me for focusing a lot on Democrats in my writing and criticizing or in many cases, praising the way they respond to things instead of attacking the Republicans, because, as you say, what's the point? We all agree. It's all out there in the open. There's nothing more I can do than just be like, "See? It's bad."
David Roberts
The guy's mocking injured veterans. He's saying, "I find injured veterans distasteful, and I don't want them around me." Like, that's, just like, I don't know how to argue that that's gross. How would you even argue that that's gross? It just is viscerally on its face repugnant. So what do you even say about it?
Brian Beutler
I mean, when Trump won, I think in a weird way, the political world was a little bit lucky that he also won the House and Senate. I mean, like that led to bad things too, but Democrats were completely locked out of power. And so really all there was was just, like, taking stock of what this horrendous formation was doing with their power. And also like, "oh, look at the information that's coming out about Trump" and his business ties and the Russia stuff. And so for that two-year period, that's what I was writing about. And also to the extent that I thought media wasn't conveying the gravity of the situation well enough, there was an element of media criticism in there, but the Republicans ran everything.
And so that was the focus. It was when Democrats won back the House in 2018, but then much more acutely when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump that it's like, okay, we're still in this twilight struggle against authoritarianism. It's still extremely important that Democrats do their opposition politics well, but now they're the ones with the power, or at least they have more power institutionally in Washington than Republicans. What are they going to do with it, and how are they going to exploit it to weaken the opposition so that they stand a better chance of defeating them in the next election?
So that means you're writing a lot about Democrats, you're doing a lot of in-house critique. And I think it's like the answer to the riddle you pose like, what do we do to try to effectuate positive change or better politics or whatever it is when Republicans are so naked, is to be willing to look in-house and see how things are going. And if you think that Democrats are inexplicably letting an opportunity to exploit pass them by, you can just pound the table about it. And, I mean, it's not as intellectually exciting as writing about policy, which is interesting, it's like puzzle solving, but it's real —
David Roberts
There was, like, a few years we got to do that, these brief little lacuna in our careers where we actually were just for a year, policy mattered just for a blink of an eye. I enjoyed those times immensely.
Brian Beutler
Me too.
David Roberts
What about this idea? The big fight these days is — on the left, there's this faction of people more or less singing your song, which is just "quit trying to act like this is normal, quit trying to be normal in the face of this. Convey that it's outrageous. Convey that it's out of bounds. Attack, fight. Like do politics. Brand yourselves as good and brand your opponents as bad."
Brian Beutler
Crazy.
David Roberts
I know, right? Brand the Republican Party as bad. Rather than anytime you mention the Republican Party, it being in the context of how much you can't wait to work with them on bipartisan this and that, right? So just there's a faction of people out there who saying this and have been saying this for many, many years, and then there's a sort of faction, you know, that's like "actually what America wants from Biden is that he's normal." He's not Trump. He's not crazy. He's not fighting all the time. There's not all this fighting. He should in fact, be more normal, make more gestures, know sort of centrist positions.
You know how, like Obama used to sort of make concessions to border security and he used to make concessions he used to make concessions to his opponent's arguments and try to find this centrist road forward and this would pull in more swing voters. Basically the opposite of what you're saying. And there are nuances on all sides of this. But what do you think about that basic argument that what wins for Democrats is being kitchen table focused normies who understand your reactionary impulses and will acknowledge them and not going to criticize you for them, but we're going to try to gently nudge things forward a little bit.
What do you think about that basic argument?
Brian Beutler
So I don't think that the insights or the beliefs at the core of those two visions are totally incompatible. I think that you could, in theory, have a very muscular confrontational politics that was run by a party that had a very moderate policy agenda.
David Roberts
I do want to put an exclamation point on that. This is something I feel like needs to be better understood in some respects those two axes, the sort of lefty versus centrist policy axis and then there's the sort of pugnacious versus accommodating axis, fighting versus not fighting axis. And to some extent those are orthogonal. Like you could come out in different places on those.
Brian Beutler
Absolutely. What do I really think is that if Democrats were trying to be 100% optimal, like right on the top of the curve of what maximizes their chances of winning elections, I think it would probably be some version of confrontational pugilistic, pugnacious you said, politics and like, you know, being chill about policy, not trying to be too radical or whatever, but it just seems very strange and wrongheaded to me to focus on perfecting the policy appeal when the party leaders aren't doing the pugnacious thing right. That's where the untapped potential really is. Any additional margin you can get by adjusting your child tax credit to be just so is like tiny compared to that.
And so my main beef with the people who say Joe Biden should be more centristy, more moderate in his policy and know, accommodating to Republicans is like, it just makes me want to pull my hair out. But how do you think your hypothetical medium voter comes to the conclusion that a particular politician is moderate or not?
David Roberts
Is it analyzing policy positions on their website?
Brian Beutler
These are mostly policy issues that Republicans weigh in on, but yes, I guess abortion, the big moral policy questions of the day. Republicans could gain a big electoral advantage, I think, by saying "we're no longer forced birth people," right? And "we no longer want to abolish Medicare," that would help them. I don't deny that. But I don't think that —
David Roberts
I almost wonder if it would. I mean, this is the thing. This is the whole of our past 20 years is always thinking that there's some threshold right? There's something that could happen that would snap us out of this horrendous equilibrium. Presumably, there's something extreme or obvious enough on one side or the other that it would break us out of this 50-50 balance. But all I've seen over the past 20 years is things that I think will do it, not doing it, and Trump didn't do it. So would that even make that big of a I find myself just kind of speechless.
I don't know what would change public opinion at this point. If Republicans have not been grotesque, if the public is still saying on polls that the Democratic Party is more extreme than the Republican Party, like a year after the Republican Party tried to coup! Literally what could break us out of that equilibrium? Like, if they flip-flopped on abortion, would that do it? I don't know. If Trump literally shot someone on Fifth Avenue, would that do it? I don't know. It's at this point difficult for me to even imagine what could break us out of this frozen 50-50 horrendous equilibrium.
Brian Beutler
The institutions and incentives aren't set up for it. But if Republicans could clean slate themselves from Trump and the last 40 years of their politics and become like kind of Christian social —
David Roberts
A European center-right party.
Brian Beutler
Yeah, I think that they would win elections by huge margins in the United States.
David Roberts
Do you? I wonder about that because I've really come to think that in politics, having a truly furious, activated, well-funded, well-organized minority is better for you than having a sort of majority that's vaguely on your side. I almost feel like having this army of cultish zealots, you know, has advantages for the Republican Party that don't necessarily show up in voting totals. You know what? Like just in clean energy that I cover in wind energy, like they're out organizing opposition to wind energy on the ground in a way that absolutely just dwarfs anything that the left is doing.
And you don't necessarily see that show up in vote totals, but it affects the political balance in the country.
Brian Beutler
I don't know. I'm like you'd have to duplicate the United States and make a new one without a Fox News and without the Schlaflys and you know, like the billionaires who are giving over fortunes to make sure tax rates stay low and saying "any reactionary politics you have to engage in to win that fight, just do it." I agree with you that it's very potent and it makes breaking out of the 50-50 rut very hard. But it's Republicans trying to hang on to the 50%, and that making it difficult for Democrats to get to 55 or 60.
It's not like Republicans are experiencing a big growth benefit from that. You know what I mean? And so I do think that if you could just stop, reset, realign and then hit play again on the United States with a European center-right type Christian, a lot of the Romney-Clinton type voters would go back to the Republican Party, but very few Obama-Trump voters would join the Democrats.
David Roberts
But it's all these poor, you know, high school educated, white, working-class voters that came out of nowhere to vote for Trump. They were not previous voters. The question is whether they would just go back under their rocks or would they continue voting for the best they could get.
Brian Beutler
Yeah, I don't, so I don't really see myself as having a zero-sum argument with people who think that policy is the main lever Democrats can pull to optimize their odds of winning. I think who are the Democrats who overperform in states or districts where Democrats shouldn't be doing well or whatever? And I think that they think that they all look like Jared Golden, and I just don't think that that's true. They look like a lot of different things. Some of them look like Jared Golden, some of them look like dynasts, like Joe Manchin. Some of them, though, look like John Tester and Sherrod Brown.
And they're just better at seeming like they have personal integrity and they don't take a punch without swinging back. And they have this kind of like, "throw the bums out" mentality about Republicans.
David Roberts
So much of it is affect.
Brian Beutler
And like get that stuff right and then we can talk about what is the perfect policy. Do you think that a hypothetical, like a median voter or a very typical voter is going to think that you're moderate because you say, "let's all work together?" Or do you think that they're going to think that they respect you because when someone kicks you in the nuts, you kick back?
And my experience of life is that the best way to make friends and influence people is to act more like that than always turning the other cheek and entering a defensive crouch. And they have this very literalist view of what capturing the middle is. It's like you measure the middle and then you build a contraption that can fit around it perfectly and then it is captured and now those voters will like you. But that's not how humans are, right? They're not like tallying up.
David Roberts
And especially the people who I would say are closer on the pers