Plain English with Derek Thompson - Can "Touch-Grass Populism" Save America?

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

By some measures, the Democratic Party has never been so unpopular as a political brand. While this fact obviously reflects some difficult realities for the party, it also creates an opportunity for Democrats to redefine what the party stands for. Derek talks to Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss about his idea for a digital dopamine tax, the art of politics in an attention economy, why moderate Democrats don't have big bold ideas, Derek's two-party theory for political success in America, and more. Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Jake AuchinclossProducers: Devon Baroldi and Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay Show at The Ringer and Spotify. We're building this thing up and I couldn't be more excited to be back, talking college football and everything NFL draft with the most informed audience out there. That's you. My co-host, Steve Mentioned, I will be with you three times a week throughout the football season with all the latest news, analysis, and scouting intel from around the league. For even more insight, subscribe to my newsletter, the McShay report to access my micaw. drafts, big boards, tape breakdowns, and other exclusive scouting content you can't get anywhere else. It's going to be a great season. And I hope you'll be with us at the McShea Show every step

of the way. Today's episode, what's the matter with the Democratic Party? In March, the Wall Street Journal published a poll in which 63% of voters said they held an unfavorable view of Democrats. That is the worst reading in more than three decades for the Democratic Party and one of the lowest recorded for either major party ever. When a brand's party implodes, it's a moment of recrimination, but also potentially a moment of remaking. The Republican Party brand bottomed out in 2015 and 2016, just before the GOP was entirely remade in the image and likeness of one Donald J. Trump.

So which way Democrats? One answer is the oldest answer in American politics. Moderation. For all the noise of the ideological edges, candidates and competitive elections that are are seen as adhering to the center, still tend to win more competitive races. That's not just vibes, and it's not just my opinion. As The New York Times explained in editorial on Monday, it's one of the sturdier empirical findings of the last few cycles. Now, I believe in the studies, but I also think that studies will never, on their own, offer a roadmap. Winning elections

has to be more about articulating a mission than arriving at the midpoint of every possible debate. And if I'm being honest, as a center-left kind of guy, my tribe hasn't always inspired with clear mission statements or memorable ideas. The Trump right has its punchy promises. Build the wall. Lock her up. The left has its sweeping programs. Green New Deal.

Medicare for all. The center has not been nearly as successful at pouring itself into truly bold visions of a better future. So today we're going to talk about one. very big idea from a politician who doesn't maybe neatly fit into any particular Twitter tribe. Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss has a proposal that he calls a digital syntax, a way to push back on the business model of social media platforms that profit from hijacking our attention, especially our kids' attention. You've heard of sugar taxes and cigarette taxes.

Well, this would be an attempt to price the harms of the attention economy and route the proceeds to public goods. I think it's an interesting idea. I think it's a somewhat problematic idea. But more than interesting and problematic, I think it's a big idea. And I'm excited that someone in the political center is offering it.

In this conversation, we talk about if the Democratic Party brand is melting, can a party of pragmatists learn the art of making the right enemies, of coming up with memorable ideas that people actually want to talk about rather than ideas that feel like they're fit for a PDF? And if attention is the scarce resource of 21st century politics, is it wise to build a coalition

while making an enemy of the algorithms? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Congressman Jake Auchin-Claas, welcome to the show. Good to be talking with you again, Derek. You've written and said many times that digital dopamine is consuming America. How? It is a series of bits that are programming neurons.

directly to the detriment of our society, but more importantly to our sense of self. Let me be specific and speak first and foremost as a parent. I have three children, five, four, and two. I'm the youngest dad in the Democratic caucus in the House. And as a parent, I really feel powerless against what these tech companies have been able to do to our children, which is to attention-prack them, to figure out ways to hijack the dopamine reinforcement system in their brains and monetize that dopamine cycle to the tune of trillions of dollars every year. And yet as a member of Congress on the Committee of Jurisdiction Over Tech, I don't feel powerless. I feel angry. And I'm ready to hit back at these companies that have become the wealthiest, most powerful

platforms in the history of the world, with no accountability to what's best for the American public. There's a lot of bad things that one could blame on phones and social media. Teen anxiety, depression, political polarization, gambling addiction, a general dumbing down of the country even. In fact, I think test scores have been falling even outside the pandemic, and there's some analysis, global analysis, that ties that to smartphone implementation and smartphone access. How confident are you that phones and social media are a core original sin of all of these negative modern trends?

Pretty darn confident. And let's tally some of the liabilities. And Jonathan Haidt has done a great job of this. Starting in about 2012, we did this experiment where we put a Hollywood studio in everybody's pocket and then connected all those Hollywood studios to one another. and it has been a disaster for mental health for our children in particular. The developing brain is really marked by two particular features. One is very highly sensitive dopamine systems, meaning they're very receptive to novel risk and reward. And two is immature prefrontal cortex, you know, underdeveloped judgment. And those manifests slightly differently for young men versus young women.

but in general what we have seen is that a compare and despair social scene for children has made them miserable. They're lonelier, they're angrier, they're sadder, they're feel more disconnected than ever before. And that's not just showing up in the statistics. It's showing up in my own interactions with young people throughout my district. I oftentimes go to speak to middle schoolers and high schoolers. And one of the first things I'll do is I'll say to everybody, all right, put your heads down, close your eyes, and then raise your hand if you think you would be happier if TikTok had never been invented. And Derek, not all the time, but most of the time, most of the hands go up. These children know that they are not the user, they are the product. And they're sick of being

monetized by these companies. Doesn't mean they know exactly how to break free of what is clearly a tragedy of the commons, where we're locked into this really suboptimal equilibrium here. But they know that something is amiss. And it's incumbent upon policymakers to be part of the solution. I think many people are familiar with, especially if they're listeners of plain English, the case against phones. What they might not be as familiar with is what you, Jake Ockin-Claas, want to do about it. You have a policy proposal that would directly take on this wave of essentially digitally delivered anxiety and depression. What is your policy solution?

It's a series of them. One is, I think we need to start talking about what we're talking about when we do policy around these companies. What I mean by that is the major tool that has been used over the last 10 or 15 years has been antitrust. And frankly, parents don't care whether Google has to share information with Bing. It doesn't matter to them. It doesn't affect their life. It doesn't affect their kids screen time. It doesn't stop screen time from stealing from family time.

What they care about is their kids. And so we need the Consumer Product Safety Commission to work with the National Academies of Science Engineering and medicine and come up with a evidence-backed assessment of the effects of social media, of pornography, of online gambling, in particular, on the developing dopamine system and come up with some neuroscientifically grounded regulations about what is acceptable that would inform adult use and that would restrict children's use. You know, you can know as a parent whether a bicycle helmet is safe. You know, the CPSC says, hey, this thing is safe. We've tested it. Nothing like that exists online to put parents in the driver's seat. So that is sort of a regulatory mindset shift. Stop shaping, stop chasing corporations as they shape shift across platforms and start just focusing

on the target area that they care about, which is the ventral striatum and the delivery of dopamine. Number two is tax them. Tax these companies. it's a vice. They reward the seven deadly sins. And we have a very simple way of getting less of a vice. We've used it for cigarettes or alcohol.

And that is to tax it. And in particular, to tax the digital advertising revenues of the social media corporation. So I'm not talking about taxing the users of the platforms. I'm talking about taxing these corporations. Just meta and Google, for example, make $250 billion every year on digital advertising, pay precious little tax because of all of their international shell companies, we should just tax their top-line digital advertising revenue and plow it back into things that matter in real life. It starts with the premise and a premise that I think I have a front row seat to as a member of

the Energy and Commerce Committee in Congress, and for everyone's awareness, energy and commerce committee in the House has jurisdiction over a huge cross-section of the American economy, everything from energy to tech companies. And what that jurisdictional vantage point has shown me is that we have massively stacked the deck in this country for online activity and against in real life activity. If you try to put a accessory dwelling unit in your backyard so your in-laws can live with you, you're going to spend much longer than it's taking meta to build a data center that's training chatbots that Mark Zuckerberg thinks should have, quote,

sensual conversations with 12-year-olds. That's ridiculous. We need to put some sensible guardrails on internet activity, again, particularly around adolescents. But then we also have to unleash the world of Adam so people can build stuff. And obviously, Derek, I don't have to preach to you on this subject. But I think it is important to emphasize that this isn't some Luddite reaction against technology. I think technology is great.

I ran the MIT entrepreneurship competition. I'm all about it. I want technology that solves real problems for people, whether it's disease-related or energy-related, AI-driven robotics that can get us stuff better, faster, cheaper. What I am not as enthusiastic about is a generation of slop thrown across the internet that creates a post-literate society. In the biggest picture, I am totally for this. I mean, the way I see this policy is sort of three parts. Number one, research the effects of social media and sort of smartphones.

of equity. Number two, tax the digital vice. And number three, fix the fact that, and this is sort of my gloss and what you just said, the digital world is underregulated and the physical world is overregulated. It is easy to disseminate porn to children and difficult to build enough houses in America. And that is an asymmetry that makes absolutely no sense. I'm on board for all of that. But when I dig into the details of number two, tax and digital vice, I wonder how you feel about, and surely you've heard this criticism, many of the things that TikTok or Instagram or Facebook are doing are also being done by television. So why would this tax only affect social media companies and not essentially be a kind of across-the-board tax on anything

that consumes our attention in a way that we don't like? An important point. The short answer is because we should care about, we should care more about outcomes and process. And this goes to my criticism of the antitrust approach. The antitrust mindset is one that would find your argument very compelling and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, we got to think about the structure of the business. We got to think about how they operate. And we have to think about consumer surplus and producer surplus and sort of conspiracies against trade. And my view is like a lot of that has been obviated by the very simple fact that these are monopoly companies.

They're really more like utilities at this point. They actually create, classically defined, a tremendous amount of consumer surplus. So that whole concept is kind of out the door. And what we have seen since social media and since smartphones became ubiquitous with social media, is a collapse in social trust and adolescent well-being

that we hadn't seen before that happened. So we can debate from first principles, the relative merits of TV versus social media. But the simple truth is it wasn't until 2012 that you began to see a real corrosion of civil society and well-being and the precipitous decline that's been chronicled by Jonathan Haidt. And so we should address the prime driver of that directly. What is the world that the Alkin-Claas package would give us? I mean, I could imagine that

Google and Facebook, as you said, make $250 billion a year in advertising. If you tax that, you know, 10%, all right, well, there's still making. $225 billion in advertising. And so it's possible that taxing these Goliaths is simply going to leave us with an incredibly similar world, except that you're just going to have to fight and fight and fight a handful of companies, Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, X, that in fact are quite popular, according to surveys, more popular, certainly, than the Democratic Party's brand. Or Congress.

Or Congress, exactly. So I wonder whether this is the right fight to pick. Is this a fight that leaves us with all of the problems that we have in a world of smartphones and social media and short form video? But also now, the Democratic Party has antagonized even further Silicon Valley in a way that bites back in terms of the amount that they're donating to Republicans. I think this actually could be a defining fight for the Democratic Party. You're right that it's a risky.

For years, Democrats have been on our back foot on culture issues, playing defense against a series of sometimes bad faith, sometimes in good faith criticisms. The emerging cultural fault line between in real life effort on one hand and digital dopamine on the other is a culture war issue that Democrats should proactively go out there and pick. These corporations have been treating our children like products. They need to pay for it. I think we can get millennial parents. I think we can get Gen Z on our side on this issue, not by being moralistic about it and telling people, hey, you're a bad person if you don't put down your phone. I mean, Derek, I bought the book, How to Break Up with Your Phone in 30 days. I'm on day one still and haven't made it past. So far be it for me to lecture anybody.

And frankly, what an adult decides to do on their phone is frankly mostly their business. I think society does have a compelling interest in our kids. And when the average American child spends less time outdoors than a federal inmate does, we, have a problem, particularly when their math scores and their reading scores have been plummeting and their mental health incidents have been spiking. We have a problem. Going after these social media corporations, of course, is not a silver bullet. Culture is upstream of policy and there needs to be cultural changes, for example, wait until eighth pledges where parents agree not to get smartphones to their kids until eighth grade. I want to see more smartphone vans in schools. I want to see

just more of a sense of community and the rewards and the virtue of in real life. And the, and the virtue of in real life, engagement, whether it's Elks clubs or going to church or volunteering. We need a lot of different cultural levers to be depressed here. But one of them can and should be that these companies, the metas, the Googles, the TikToks are not just digital empires that are totally divorced from any accountability to the voting public. They shouldn't have a liability shield that Section 230 gives them. They shouldn't be basically tax-free for creating a lot of negative externalities. they've got to pay. There's a way in which I think the most important piece of this policy. Isn't the details of the policy? It's the fact that you as a moderate Democrat are picking a novel

fight. And I want to get back to that point in just a little bit because the idea that Democrats don't fight or don't know how to fight or don't know how to pick the right fights is, I think, a really, really important theme that I want to spend some time on. But before we get there, I do want to connect this big idea of yours to another big idea of yours, which is the unaffordability crisis. Like right now, you're talking about the attention economy. That matters a lot. But I think if you want to know why Democrats have lost so many young voters, you could blame smartphones and political polarization, but you can also blame unaffordability. You can blame the fact that the concept of the American dream feels like it's slipping through the fingers of millennials and Gen Z.

And you have a very particular way of going at this issue. You call it the cost disease. Can you spend a little bit of time telling us how you think about this problem in America, the cost disease? With pleasure. And there's a famous witticism that every politician is simply regurgitating the ideas of long-dead economists. And I am very happily doing that right here because cost disease is not my idea. It's the idea of William Bommel and economists of the 1950s and 60s. And it's sometimes called the BOMO effect. His basic point is inflation is not spread evenly across the economy. People talk about inflation, but actually there's many, many different sectors of the economy, from electronics to housing to health care. And inflation's

quite lumpy, actually. And the interesting thing is less to look at the sectors where there's a lot of inflation, which in America today is particularly housing health care and utilities. And you actually learn more by looking at the sectors that have had deflation, where over the course of the last several decades, in real terms, prices have gone way down. Sectors, for example, like electronics. And you asked, well, how did this happen? And the answer was they were cured of cost disease. Cost disease is what happens when the sector is very labor-intensive and low productivity

growth. Computers is a great example of this. A hundred years ago, a computer was an actual person. Like, you would describe yourself in the job description as, I'm a computer. It was a bunch of people. They sat together in a office building, and they literally scribbled out algorithms. And then somebody, that was a service. It was a very expensive service.

And then somebody built the first computer. It was a massive computer as the size of a building. And it turned that service into a product. And that was a super expensive product. But then that product became mass produced. They built many, many, many computers over and over again. They got economies of scale and scope, and it became incredibly cheap. And now your smartphone does the number of computations that were still a service from 100 years ago

would have taken more people than have ever been alive in the history of the world. So computers were cured of cost disease. The question is like, how do we do that for other sectors? Like, I don't want some of that for healthcare, right? Like, how do we make that the story of health care and housing? And the answer is you take a service, something that's very labor intensive. you turn it into a product, something that can be built or manufactured, and then you scale it. You do it over and over and over again. It's automation at scale. And we know how to do that for housing

and to a certain extent to health care, but we have held ourselves back, I think, both because of corporate and because of government bureaucracy in curing those sectors of cost disease. And the result is that the middle class is paying more than half of their take-home pay for housing and health care combined. There's a quote that I think is sometimes associated with Agatha Christie. I could not find to actually set it. But it's something like, when I was a child, I never thought I would be rich enough to afford a TV and poor enough to not be able to afford a butler or something along those lines. And the point is that like between the early 20th century and the late 20th century, television went from this wild, absurd futuristic technology that nobody could afford to a technology

that is in practically every single manufactured home, like trailer in America. Like TVs are ubiquitous. They are cheap because they can manufacture and that manufacturing can be offshoreed. Butlers, on the other hand, I mean, where are butlers, right? The cost of labor went up relative to manufactured goods because of Baumol's cost disease, the price of labor, humans kept needing to work. I think the classic example from Balmol, the original economist, is that a four-string quartet is going to need four-string quartet to be in that four-string quartet, no matter how productive

the rest of the economy gets. And so you should expect four-string quartet performances to get much more expensive over time than, say, a piece of electronics. I want you to take this idea, which, you know, it's interesting because Baumol's cost disease is sometimes an idea that's absolutely beloved by conservatives. They say, you know, look at what's happened to health care and education prices in America. It's gone up and up and up. That just goes to show that these dumb Democrats are keeping government in education and health care and that's driving up the cost of education and health care.

I wonder what you see as a cure for the cost disease in something as complicated as health care and medicine. It is at the risk of being a drone. I think it's really a four-step process. The first is you have to decide what sectors you want to treat of cost disease because the way that the BOMO effect works, some sector of the economy will always have it, right? Because there's always going to be sectors where labor productivity is slower than other sectors and their cost will pool in those sectors. So 100 years from now, some politician will be on a podcast with a public intellectual and they'll be complaining about how haircut, consume, you know, half of a middle-class family's take-home pay because haircuts are very highly non-automatable good and will probably become more and more of take-home pay.

So my view is, you know, you want to start at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like housing and health care, we need to treat of cost disease. It is not acceptable that those two really basic physiological, social goods are that expensive. Number two is, to your point about conservative critiques of Democrats, yeah, we should cut regulations that are preventing standardization and predictability for building at scale or for automating in the first place, whether that is promoting more genericization and drug development in healthcare, which absolutely can turn a service into a product, whether that is getting rid of redundant or counterproductive building codes or zoning and housing, we should absolutely do that.

And then number three is adopt technology, adopt it ferociously. And mostly the private sector is do that of their own accord, but where the government can be a productive partner, we should be, because technology and in tandem sort of operational improvements to digest that technology is a really important way where you get from end of one to end of a thousand. And then finally, take on the special interests that are fighting to defend the status quo. Sometimes those special interests are going to be sort of government or government adjacent. Sometimes those special interests are going to be corporate. And the old debate within my party of, oh, it's government's the problem or no corporations of the problem. It's just not a very helpful debate. Look at where the problem is. Look at the bottleneck

and attack that bottleneck. I want to return to two words that you said, which were adopt technology, because in my experience, the Democratic Party has had a deteriorating relationship with technology over the last few decades. I think about Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, I think these folks were associated with a positive vision of technology. And I see the vanguard of the Democratic Party today and especially the left as being in many ways anti-tech, certainly anti-social media, and you are clearly not a defender of social media. I wonder how you think about the Democratic Party's relationship to technology, whether you see that as something that is, you know, is a positive relationship with technology, an important part of the Democratic Party's identity.

I think being anti-tech would not be productive because technology improves standards of living and helps us solve problems. If agentic tutoring, when paired with human tutoring, can help our kids read faster, we should be using that. If new geothermal technologies are going to make it easier to drill five to seven miles deep and have high baseload clean power everywhere in the country, we should totally do that. If gene editing helps us cure disease, we should totally do that. I think anti-tech is foolish, and it's a scarcity mindset. What I think people are reacting to rightfully is that technology unto itself is not a value. And the value is a sense of belonging, a value is a sense of trust. And these are things that have been degraded by what has been the most salient technology

of the last 15 years, which is social media and now it's cousin. and chatbots. I want to broaden our focus here to national politics. As a party, the Democratic Party has never been less popular, at least if you go by Gallup Time Series. And the Democratic Party brand clearly has never been weaker. Why do you think that is? I think it's epitomized by the school closures.

I was elected in 2020. I made reopening the schools my day one issue. What I saw is that in blue states and blue cities, the school stayed closed for, 12 and to some degree 18 months well past when Dr. Ashish Dha, who would go on to be Biden's COVID coordinator, had said that they, from social and epidemiological perspective, should be reopened in May of 2020. And what I saw was really a tragedy that encapsulates where the party has gone off the rails. First, it was a focus on process rather than outcomes that actually mattered. The outcome that mattered was get kids back into school.

And in too many instances, the Democratic Party got fixated on process that was really pivoting around interest groups, variously, relatively small slivers of public life. That focus on process over outcome was then paired toxically with a sense of condescension when parents came with real grief and anger to public forums to express that the schools needed to open. they were met with derision, frankly. And as I said, I have three kids. If I had watched my kids sit at home, miss out on education and social moments that they would never get back, I'd be furious too. And so I picture that episode of, one, a focus on process over outcome married with condescension to those who objected as really a parable that sums up where the Democrats got it wrong and a host of other issues, whether it's immigration or inflation or otherwise. Those school closures have stayed with me. And you know what, Derek, it's five years past those school closures.

Democrats still do not have a compelling education platform. And shame on us for that. We need to have a really strong point of view on how we're going to fix what was broken during that pandemic. I want to go back to the idea that school closures are a microcosm for what explains the implosion of the Democratic Party brand. Because one thing that's interesting about that is that you didn't see. Joe Biden's popularity plummet in the first two quarters of his presidency when, as far as I understand it, lots of schools were still closed. You saw the Democratic Party really start to collapse in popularity toward the end of the Biden administration and then into the Trump administration.

So I want to take seriously this idea that the ingredients that you've put on, the table, which I think must, as far as explaining the Democratic Party's decline in popularity, must apply far beyond the school closures, right? A focused interest groups that shout the loudest rather than the outcomes that matter the most. I hear that as being number one. And then a condescending tone toward the kind of undecided or independent middle, which is pushing them away from the party. where in the last year, let's say, long after the school closure debate was over, where in the last year or two do you think those issues have mattered most to voters?

I take your point that the school closures are like almost like a parable. Yes. For what's gone wrong in the Democratic Party. But there's no way that, and you anticipated this in your reply, there's no way that like millions of Americans today. find the Democratic Party unlikable because of something that happened in like the final quarters of 2020 and the early quarters of 2021.

Like that doesn't seem to match up to me as like a causal story. So I wonder like whether maybe some of the ingredients in that parable, where those ingredients in that scroll closure story have like played out in the last few years that might actually explain what's happened to the Democratic Party's brand.

I think it's someone described the Democratic Party as America. Erica's HR department, and that's always stayed with me, because, again, there's too much of a of emotion that is process-oriented, jargon-filled, divorced from outcomes that really matter, and then slightly patronizing. I just think that is like, it's a sheen across the public's perception of how the party approaches issues, which is a shame to me because I happen to know a lot of elected Democratic officials. And I can tell you that's just really not how they think about issues at all. And this group that I'm sharing, majority Democrats, has 32 of them who are in many ways the

exact opposite of that. And so it's not an insurmountable problem that we have. It's like we just, we have to get out there and actually have authentic in real life engagement that shows people who we are and understand that the true scarce currency in politics is not attention, it's trust, and the party that builds trust back first at a moment of historically low trust in this country is the party that's going to have a generational majority. I feel like one answer to the question of where do Democrats go from here is, well, they run toward populism. You run toward the economic populism of Bernie and of FDR.

And I want to get your take on populism because three weeks after Donald Trump's inauguration, You went on Ezra Klein's podcast, and you offered what you called a Diet Coke theory of Democratic politics. And I would love for you to recapitulate that Diet Coke theory because I think it bears quite directly on the question of where do Democrats go from here. The Diet Coke theory is that when someone orders a Coca-Cola, they don't want a Diet Coke. And if Democrats think that we are going to beat Maga populism with a more polite version of populism that sort of offends fewer people, We're going to lose. The way to win is one to understand that the electorate is being realligned. Seventh time in American history, it's happened, first time in my lifetime. But the electorate has been realligned. Okay. The biggest city in my district, Fall River, voted for a Democrat for president

every year for the last century, excuse me, every four years for the last century, voted for Donald Trump in 2024. This is a realligned electorate. Okay. And I should say Fall River is a multi-ethnic working class city. Okay. And when there is a realignment happening, the advantage goes to the party that can define the new center, because that is equivalent to defining the terms of debate. So it would be a very tired proposition for us as Democrats to say, we're going to have a contest between center and left.

One of them will win, and then that faction will go campaign. The much more productive debate would be let's, as a party, define the new center and take the best ideas from across the variety of ideological factions in American life. The libertarian hostility to centralize and personalized executive power, yes, we should adopt that. Goodness knows, MAGA is not going to be welcoming to it. The conservatives' traditional support for free enterprise and faith and family, yes, we should adopt that. You know, we should have different policies that are going to actuate it, but we should uphold those values. Traditional liberals support for due process and civil rights, yes.

Progressives' commitment to investing in a level playing field. Yes, I talked about baby bonds, which is a traditionally progressive idea that I think is a great idea, give people an equity stake in America. Populist, skepticism of corporate capture, yes, when that comes to health insurance or social media corporations, we should adopt those ideas. We should be promiscuous in taking the best ideas from across American life, putting them together into a platform that defines a new center. and when you define the new center, you invite people in to this new debate.

I don't particularly consider myself a populist, but I want to briefly defend populism here in a way that I don't think many populists will appreciate. I think populism is essentially a political skin suit. I think it's a costume. I think almost any idea can be dressed up as populism. And we acknowledge this when we use the word populist. Trump is a populist. Bernie is a populist. FDR was a populist. Obama knew how to play the populist card. These people's politics have nothing to do with one another. Nothing to do with one another. I think populism is the ability to draw a very specific line in the sand that says over there are the small number of powerful people who are bad. And over here are the many people who are good. And to orient your politics around that line, And as I was thinking about your idea for the digital dopamine tax, I thought, wait,

Jake Alkenclos is a populist in a way. He's a narrow populist in that he's drawing a line in the sand that says the vast majority, the largest number of people, the children of America and the phone addictive people of America, they are good. And the small number of people, the social media companies, they are bad. you are, Congressman, I'll just name it now, you're a touchgrass populist. Like, that's what this policy is. It's touchgrass populism. So I agree that there is a benefit to being ideologically promiscuous and taking the best

ideas from libertarians, conservatives, and liberals, and MAGA. I think there was a paragraph in my original Abundance Agenda article that said that that's what I wanted abundance liberalism to be. But ultimately, I think politics is. about specificity and it's about focus and picking what you want to talk about and who you want to name the enemy. And there's a way in which I think the success of your digital dopamine tax is precisely the power of its populism. You're a touch grass populist. How do you feel about that accusation? Derek, I could not put it better myself. It's almost like you frame ideas for a living. It's exactly right. Well, expand me on the compliment. I mean, like how... I can't. I mean,

you've nailed it. It is. I am a hundred percent. I'm going to take that term, by the way, in the spirit of ideological promiscuity. A touchgrass populist, it is absolutely an us versus them. It is absolutely immoralistic, good versus bad. It's absolutely the many versus the few. and I believe that it is productive populism in the sense that it is corraling that energy towards a productive end in the sense that it is a set of policies that are going to expand prosperity and belonging for Americans rather than drag us further into tribalism, which is what too much of particularly ethnically motivated populism tries to do. One thing that I like about the digital dopamine tax, even though I have skepticism about its individual details, is that it's a big idea.

And I don't think Democrats, especially centrist Democrats, I don't think they have their big idea. I think if you ask people, what's Chuck Schumer's big idea? I don't think a lot of specialists. I think a lot of people who follow politics for a living would be able to tell you, what's Akeem Jeffrey's big idea? What's Nancy Pelosi's big idea? The equivalent of abolish the police, abolish ICE, Medicare for All. I'm not endorsing the substance of those policies. I'm just saying people know what they are and they know the people that are associated with them, the Green New Deal.

Do you agree that Democrats and maybe specifically moderate Democrats have a big idea deficit? Yes. Why? Over the last decade, the party's been in an ideological straitjacket because the imperative to fight Donald Trump has subsumed a lot of the energy. There was an old maxim that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. In the last decade, that's flipped. Actually, Republicans fell in love. In fact, they created a cult of personality.

And Democrats fell in line to counter that cult. And it hadn't worked if you haven't noticed. Donald Trump's approval ratings are exactly what they were 10 years ago because we've been telling people who were against, not what we're for. The good news is that now there is newfound energy to bring forth new ideas, but ideas are only one of a three-part equation for Democrats to craft a majority. We need ideas, big ideas, cross-cutting ideas, as I said, that defy the label of moderate or progressive. We need talent. We need the people out there who can campaign on them, win on them, deliver on them. And we need courage because talent plus ideas is going to upend

the status quo and there's going to be a lot of defenders of that status quo. What does courage mean to you? Courage means bearing the opprobrium of your friends and allies. You know, it's easy to go out there as a Democrat and criticize Republicans or vice versa. Courage is Liz Cheney. Courage is, and I saw how she was treated by Republicans in the House and those Republicans should be ashamed of themselves, how they treated Liz for her courage. totally ostracized. We're all humans. We're all social creatures. We all seek acclaim and belonging, particularly politicians. And to, you know, risk being cast off is, it's scary,

which is why it needs to be a collective effort that draws strength from one another. I've been working for the last few months on a piece that's never really reached a publication quality, but I feel like this is a good time to sort of work it out. It's sort of like a two-part theory of political success in the 21st century. And the extremely simplistic two-part theory and what two-part theory isn't simplistic is part one, figure out what you want to say, part two, tell everybody. And that's it. And that might seem so simplistic as to be sort of devoid of any substance. So let me just briefly defend the fact that there's a substance here. I think it's astonishing how many politicians don't actually know what the F they want to say. I don't need you. I don't need you

to affirm verbally to what I'm going to say next. But I think a huge problem with the Kamala Harris campaign is that it was very, very clear to undecided voters that she did not know what she wanted to say. And now that I've seen clips from her book tour where she had months to think about what she wanted to say about her book and her 107 days, I think it's still clear that she didn't quite know

what she wanted to say. And that's a long time to not know what you want to say. And it's not a Kamala Harris problem. I think it's a Democratic Party problem. I think there are too many Democrats who, through triangulation or a lack of courage, or a sort of perverse fetishizing of a certain sort of ideological sophistication that says I'm for 17 things, so don't make me summarize it into one thing.

Just don't know what they want to say in a way that is specific enough for people to remember it. And specificity is a huge part of this. I think that one thing that Zoranamadani and Peepoo to Judge and you and AOC have in common, even though you do not at all have the same politics, is that you have specific stories you want to tell. You have specific policies that you want to talk about. And the ability to be specific is a superpower because if you have something specific that you can say, you want to tell everybody. And that gets to part two, that Democrats need to be more, this word's coming back,

promiscuous with who they talk to. Talk to Joe Rogan. Talk to the right, talk to the middle, talk to the libertarian weirdos. God knows I love him. Talk to the far left. You have to talk to everybody. And you can't be pure about only talking to the people who you expect agree with 9, 9% of what you think. So help me, help me edit this piece for final publication, the two-parter. One, figure out what you want to say. Number two, tell everybody, where am I oversimplifying and what am I missing? I would say yes, and the and I think maybe a bridge between one and two is not only does it need to be specific to what you want to say, the surge one-on-one tutoring to every student in America, the billed five million more homes,

the Medicaid public option, whatever, it has to be memetic, which is to say, it has to be an idea that is not only understood by the person hearing the idea, that person then needs to be able to repeat that idea to somebody else in a way that retains the integrity of the idea, so that it can spread orally as well as through the written word. And the reason I really emphasize that in terms of how you actually tell everybody is because what has really collapsed in media over the last 30 years is trust. You know, I don't have a way to prove this offhand, but my guess is the number of people who command attention and the economy, the attention economy today is about the same as it was 50

years ago. They have very different platforms, obviously. It's probably about the same number of people. It's still a power law. There's still a relatively small handful of people who really command a lot of attention. What's changed is now there's all these local trusted intermediaries, the neighbor, the cousin, the, a friend who somebody who has given up on, you know, our online debate as a country goes to hear about what people stand for. And if your ideas can't make it to that trusted local intermediary and then be relayed to the, you know, the end user of them, they're not going, you can't quote, tell everybody. That's the bridge to me to between one and two is memesis.

You've got to have these ideas be capturable. Let's tax the social media corporations and use the funds to build 1,000 trade schools? Yeah, the idea needs to be built for virality. I was just thinking about the political memes that jumped to my head as you were talking. Medicare for all. Build the wall. Hope and change.

Green New Deal. And since I've been reading about China recently, the policies of one child policy and zero COVID came to mind too. When I think about these ideas, to say nothing again of their substance, they're all short. They're basically all three words.

and they all have numbers in them. There's something interesting about that. They tend to have the numbers zero, one, or infinity. Zero one or infinity. Zero, COVID. Build the wall, one wall. Medicare for everyone, infinity. It's almost as if there's a power to these numbers,

zero one, infinity. And I just think it's so important to use memorable language in this way, to make our ideas as elemental as possible so that they spread when we share them. And I think there is another element here is using in real life engagements to vet the resonance of those ideas. I really, as a politician, cannot stress this enough, how much it matters to talk about things in a crowded room. It's like stand-up comedy. Stand-up comics don't know what's funny until they deliver it to a live, crowded audience, because laughter is contagious.

And I think political resonance is contagious. An audience picks something up and you feel the room's energy change. when you're talking about things, which is part of why I am so calm. I can point you to the polling, but it's not the point that interests me. It's the feeling and living rooms when I'm talking to parents

about social media and the effect on their kids that convinces me this is a winning issue for Democrats. The energy changes in the room. And that's what majority Democrats has been doing. We're in Atlanta, we're in Michigan, we're in California, with some of these really talented elected leaders

doing in real life events and we're sort of like playing some of our best hits. But then we're seeing what lyrics the crowd is going to chant back at us, because those lyrics that people are chanting back, that's the policy that you want to take front and center. Yeah. God, I can only imagine being a politician and talking about Bommel's Cost disease

in a room of 100 people, and they all go crazy with productivity divergences. Like, yes. I did it in Fall River, Massachusetts, and I have the Wall Street Journal to attest to it. I'm not going to claim that people were throwing undergarments at me like a rock star. Yeah, I'm making fun of you,

but I think Bommas-Dazza is an incredibly important point. If people are clapping about this in Massachusetts, I think that's great. Is there an example of a policy that you're sort of like workshopping, like that you think it's important, but you haven't found the melodic hook to make it catch on with the throngs of audiences when you go back to Massachusetts? Yeah, Medicaid. The Republicans are attacking Medicaid. Their theory of the case, and I'm on the Committee of Jurisdiction,

we did this debate, is that Americans think Medicaid is for other people, particularly immigrants. And I think they're making a huge mistake politically. And on a policy perspective, I think Democrats, our opportunity is to lean into Medicaid and to say, no, no, no, Medicaid is long-term care. Medicaid is at-home care. Medicaid is addiction services. And we've got to find a way to make Medicaid a sustainable path for long-term services and supports for the middle class, like a public option buy-in to Medicaid. And as a way to put downward pressure on health care inflation, as you said earlier, like, the Medicare for all versus not Medicare for all is not productive to me.

I think the party needs to rally to Medicaid as a way to bring down costs and expand access, and I think the middle class will be with us on it. Yeah, that's an important one. And yeah, Medicaid is hard to sexy up. Yes, it is. But, yeah, but I mean, in total seriousness, it's hard to sexy up. But, I mean, what does Democratic Party stand for, if not standing for helping the vulnerable and making sure they don't enter medical bankruptcy, right?

that's so fundamental to what I would hope to think of is the core identity of the party. And it's about uncertainty and anxiety. I met recently with a bunch of financial advisors who consult to my constituents. And it's always a very helpful way for me to like kind of get a secondhand assessment, aggregated assessment of how my constituents are thinking about financial security. And what really popped in this conversation is an unexpected healthcare cost, not just of yourself, if you're, you know, 55-year-old parent, it's of your kids and even more so of your parents. You're sitting there thinking, Mike, you know, dad's 80, mom 75, dad's got Alzheimer's,

worried about mom's mobility, and, you know, we're one event away from things going totally sideways, and I'm already trying to save for my kids' college education. That anxiety is so deep, and people do not feel supported on long-term care and the predictability of their health care expenses. I think saying to people, oh, health care is free, I think it's disingenuous. Health care is not free. People, you know, doctors and nurses and clinicians, they need a salary. Not free. But it also shouldn't devour a third of your take-home pay and go up by 15% year over a year. I agree with that. I want to do a beat on the Democratic Party and young men. And you touch on this in the Times piece. You've touched it in

in other contexts. You know, the Democratic Party has not won a majority of the male vote, I believe, since the 1970s in a presidential election. So when people talk about the Democratic Party having a problem with men, this is not a problem that was invented in 2016 or 2024. This is a problem that goes back decades. And I wonder how you diagnose it and how you think about a reasonable prescription, especially for this generation of young men. that if the polls are accurate, swung dramatically toward Donald Trump in 2024, and now are basically fed up with him. His popularity has plummeted among young men in the last few months. How do we get these guys back?

You're right on, I think, the analysis of where we're at. An 18-year-old man was more likely to vote for Donald Trump than a 75-year-old man, which is really stunning, right? He's 2024. How we don't get them back is... through a patronizing tone of, you know, meeting young men where they're at. I have been 18 years old in my life. I don't want to meet an 18-year-old man where he's at. An 18-year-old man needs a lot of guidance about where he's going to get to.

And it's patronizing to suggest otherwise. What we need to do is stop condescending and start building and give young men, I think, what they're really seeking, which is camaraderie and challenge in pursuit of, a common mission. This is what I wanted when I graduated from college and joined the Marine Corps. I wanted to suffer together with other young men in pursuit of something that felt bigger than me. And we're not giving young men, I think, enough of those channels. Every society from time and memorial has struggled with this, the combination of dopamine-seeking and high testosterone and

adrenaline that characterizes 16 to 25-year-old males. This is a challenge for every society about how they route them. And if we don't make it constructive, decision about how we want to route that energy, corporations are going to route it towards online gambling and pornography and social media, and it's going to be corrosive and self-destructive, and we're going to waste a tremendous resource, which should be getting directed towards enterprise and service. And so it's, and here is where, you know, we go back to your, your, I think, fair rebuttal of like, do you really want government involved in these decisions? We have to be. Because if we're on the sidelines, it's going to be these mega corporations

that decide how young men are spending their time. It doesn't mean that we have government like program young men's time, but it does say that we should have a point of view as a party about what is productive behavior, that we should emphasize in real life, sweating and striving over the mindless pursuit of digital dopamine, that we should be directing, we should be uplifting trade schools and the military service and the benefits of enterprise and the importance of marriage and taking care of your family. Like, these should be principles that define the Democratic Party's view of the good life. I agree with so much of that. I'm concerned that the Typical, getable, 18 to 25-year-old male voter does not want to join the Marines.

He wants to play call of duty. And if that's talking down, then it's talking down. I just think that's the state of reality. And I wonder whether an emphasis on prescribed civil service rubs up against the very male inclination, especially very young male inclination, to just be left alone. Stop telling me I'm using the wrong words. Stop telling me I'm thinking the wrong thoughts. Just let me do my own thing.

And this is where I think the sort of, my sort of like platform concept of abundance liberalism is sort of reactivated a little bit. Like, I want to make it easier for these guys to find a job. I want to make it easier for them to buy a house. I want our politicians to model what it means to be a good husband and father and neighbor. But I want that to be modeled rather than prescribed because I basically just want to build the platform upon which they feel free to make their own decisions and that they will find that vision. of a political party, more appealing than the vision of a political party that is swapping out the

HR department for the Army recruiter. Both of those might feel a little bit too prescriptive for a generation that prizes its independence, even if that independence might lead them to make a bunch of terrible decisions, which frankly, we all made at 18. So I guess I wonder how you feel about that potential downside. I one part agree, one part disagree. A part agree is that culture is upstream of politics, 100%. Culture eats politics for breakfast,

and we can't fix many of these elements politically. We can model it. We can, you know, embed it in our definition of the good life as politicians and what we aspire to. But we are downstream of cultural forces and need to respect that. Yes. Where I disagree is your thesis that males at that age, in particular individualistic.

I actually strongly disagree with that. In fact, one of the defining features of adolescent males is when they're left to their own devices, what they do is they form teams. You see this in how young boys play. You see this in how adolescent males behave. They immediately form teams. And sometimes it can be very constructive

where it's company formation and sometimes it can be very destructive, where it's gang formation. But much more so than with females, males are focused on forming teams and setting up rules for competition. And so we just need to route that impulse towards, okay, you want to join a team? Here's a bunch of different teams.

One's a union. One's, you know, second battalion, seventh Marines. One is, you know, the local Elks Lodge. Like, they're all great teams. But you should join a team. You should be a productive member of it. You have responsibilities as well as rights and get to work. I love that.

That's a great answer. This was awesome. I could talk to you for five hours, but this is not a Joe Rogan podcast. and I will fix that by just having you back in the show sometime soon. Congressman Jake Ockin-Claas, thank you very much. Always a pleasure. Thank you for listening. Plain English is reported and hosted by me, Derek Thompson.

This episode was produced by Devin Beraldi and Devin Rinaldo. If you like what we're doing here, please rate and subscribe. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday.