The Dispatch Podcast - The Great Awokening

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

The Dispatch's own Andrew Egger and Declan Garvey join Steve for a discussion on the blow-up at The New York Times over its Tom Cotton op-ed, woke culture, Trump superfans, and the empathy gap. Show Notes: -The Wokening vs. the Trumpening -Barack Obama on woke culture -Andrew's piece on Trump superfans -Declan's piece on the empathy gap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Sarah is off today. I'm Steve Hayes. This dispatch podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts, where you'll also see an opportunity to join the dispatch as a member. And make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Today I'm joined by my dispatch colleagues Andrew Eger and Declan Garvey. Two of the main driving forces behind our daily morning newsletter, The Morning Dispatch. We have a broad conversation about woke culture and its impact from the classroom to the newsroom. And we dive into some of Andrew and Declan's work from Trump's superfans to the empathy gap in the 2020 election.

Jacqueline, Andrew, it's good to have you with us. We are doing this in part due to popular demand. We have had emails now for quite some time from our dispatch members urging us to let you out of your cages, as Jonah might say, and to have you on the podcast. So it's good to have you here. I thought the way that I would begin was very briefly, we want to be informative, but not self-examined. indulgent here. Ask you a little bit about yourselves and how you came to join the dispatch. So why don't we start with you, Andrew? Yeah. Well, hi, Steve. Thanks for having us on the podcast for the inaugural time. It's nice to know that we can be trusted to speak and not just put words up

on the internet. I'm from St. Louis. I have lived in D.C. since 2017. When I came out here right after college to work for the weekly standard, which I figured I would probably work there for 40 years, and that option was not presented to me, actually, in fact, and came, went over to the bulwark for, it actually just occurred to me. I feel like I worked there for a long time and just came here, but I worked for the bulwark about nine months until you guys hired me over here, and I've now been here about nine months. This is actually a, that just was why to me to think about we've already been doing this. Yeah, I know, right?

I've already been doing that this long. But I have five siblings, play the guitar. That's me. I'm happy to be here. Well, good. We're happy to have you. And Declan, how about you? What was your long and circuitous career path, life path to the dispatch?

Yeah, very long, very circuitous. I had been kind of a big fan of your work and Jonah's work for years. And when I heard about the possibility of what you guys were putting together, I started, you know, sending increasingly desperate emails to that Hayes Goldberg, 2019 Gmail address that you guys set up. And, you know, thank God you guys, you guys found one of them and got back to me and kind of started the. started the process from there, but I, when I started in October, was completely new to journalism. I had done some writing for my college paper, but my first job out of college was consulting here in D.C., and so I was working with different companies and ways that they were looking to kind of improve their presence and brand it here in D.C. And so eventually

wanted to make a shift more towards journalism. And this was kind of the perfect, the perfect place for me to find myself. I'm from Chicago originally, oldest of four, not five, but, and I'm actually headed back there tomorrow, which I'm very excited about. But it's been a, been an incredible nine months, I guess, since we got started here. We do have, we might be accused of overrepresenting the Midwest. We have lots of Midwesterners on our staff. Of course, I think that's a good thing being from Wawatosa, Wisconsin.

Yeah. Well, there was a substantive reason that I wanted to have you on with us this week. And it has to do with what we're seeing, the kinds of changes we're seeing in our society in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. And then in particular, sort of a week or two on, the kinds of things that we're seeing in our institutions, in major companies in, the media that are being sparked or provoked by people in your generation. Some of them, I think many of us would regard as positive. Some of them, I think many of us regard as not positive. You brought us on to stand trial for the crimes of our day. I am about to grill you like you've never been grilled before.

You are now speaking for the woke generation, and you have a lot to answer. You couldn't have picked two better guys. To represent us. Two more woke youngans. No, I'm particularly interested in what happened at the New York Times. And we engaged on this subject with some reluctance. We don't like to talk about the media too much, but I think this is actually a pretty interesting story and one that you both are in a unique position maybe to shed some light on.

Just to give our listeners a little background New York Times Commission an op-ed from Tom Cotton. about the prospective use of the military on our streets here in the United States to clear away rioters and looters. And that's an oversimplification, but that was basically his argument. We should be willing to use the military to do that if the unrest grew, if the rioting and looting grew. This caused great internal angst at the New York Times. almost immediately there were tweets being sent by New York Times staffers saying that the mere

publication of this op-ed was a threat to the lives of their black colleagues. There was an internal petition circulated that I believe ended up with more than 800 signatures of New York Times employees saying that the piece, in effect, the peace should never have run. Subsequently led to a lot of gnashing events. teeth and internal hand-wringing. A.G. Salzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, initially defended the publication of the op-ed, then later retracted that, said that he was sorry that they had published the op-ed James Bennett. The editorial page editor at the New York Times was resigned from the paper to be replaced. And a lot of this happened because of what

folks at the New York Times have described as two different cultures at the paper. On the one hand, a very strong, young, what might be described as woke culture, driven by people in your age cohort, and then a more sort of classic, I will say classically liberal group that's led by, to the extent that it's an organized group led by people who are much older and were raised in different traditions of liberal expression, smaller liberal expression, battle of ideas, what happened. So here we are, and the New York Times has implemented some new policies. There's a new editorial page editor, a 41-year-old young woman who came from the Boston Globe. And they're in the process of implementing some measures to, in effect, get sign-off from the younger staffers and others before they publish an op-ed that might cause people concerns.

Are you guys to blame for this? I mean, is this your – is cancel culture your fault? Declan and Andrew, is this – should we point the finger of blaming you? I have to say before I actually ask the question, you come from very different academic backgrounds. Declan, you went to Harvard, which is well known for its sort of wokeness, campus wokeness. And Andrew, you went to Hillsdale College, very good liberal arts school in southern Michigan, which is, shall we say, not known for its campus wokeness, a conservative school. So let me start with Declan.

is what we're seeing sort of the natural outgrowth of the campus politics and the campus fights that we've seen over the past 10, 15 years? I mean, it's a great question, and, you know, it's, that's kind of been plaguing universities like Harvard, you know, known Kremlin as the Charles, or Kremlin on the Charles. you know, conservative commentators have long kind of pointed to Harvard and schools like it as kind of a boogeyman of this is what's coming up the pipeline. This is, you know, this is kind of how the younger generation is thinking about these things. And, you know, I'll make one point, which is, you know, the protests that we've seen in over the past couple of weeks point to, the fact that there, you know, are these systemic injustices that have, you know, long been overlooked. And to some degree, some of that, some of the campus wokeness, quote unquote, is pointing towards that and is trying to raise awareness towards that. There are excesses, though.

And I think we saw that with what happened at the New York Times last week. And I, and yes, I do think that, you know, very, very similar events played themselves out. while I was on campus. In Cambridge, I remember one, she must have been two years older than me, published an op-ed in the campus newspaper, calling for affirmative action to be based on socioeconomic and income status rather than race. And it was, you know, I don't necessarily agree with every aspect of the op-ed, much like I don't with the Tom Cotton op-ed in the New York Times. But this student who, you know, was 19, 20 years old. at the time was pilloried on campus.

There were posters with her name and face put up around campus calling for her to never have a platform at the school newspaper again. And this happened the year that it was published, but three years later she was still being brought up as an example of something that can't happen on campus, that can't be allowed to exist. And there were other examples. There was one, a couple of friends and I pushed back on one of them.

It was around Thanksgiving. It must have been my junior year. And the school administration, the school diversity board, put these placemats on the tables of every dining hall on campus. And the placemats had basically, the gist of them was, here's how to talk to your racist family when you go back to, when you go back home for Thanksgiving about the social justice issues plaguing our society. And we printed out our own placements and put them out the following week. It was, here's how to have open and free dialogue on campus and talk to people who disagree with you. And we got the administration to apologize and they retract.

it. But, you know, there is kind of this very real sense on campus that ideas are increasingly being seen as violence as as a means of inflicting harm when, you know, in fact, that they are just ideas. And so obviously, those ideas can grow into something else, but in terms of a you know, the society that that were based, that the United States is based on, and the culture of, you know, rigorous debate and disagreement, I think the answer to that is more speech, not less, but there is an increasing portion of my generation that views it otherwise. So ideas are violence. Andrew, did you see much of that thinking at Hillsdale? It was definitely a different experience. The interesting thing about the not just coming out of a more conservative institutional culture, but the time at which I did was because I graduated, I think like Declan in 2017,

which was so my junior and senior years were the height of the sort of institutional convulsion of the Republican Party as as Donald Trump came in and and you know busted up the the joint and and and so there was actually sort of a very different sort of ideological flavor to to maybe the first half and to the second half of my college experience just because the first half it was like oh it's great you know everything's very collegial and and you know we all sort of ostentatiously have this sense that we're sort of defining ourselves over against the the sort of, you know, you you know, thought police caricature we all had in our minds of places, places like Harvard. And then when it came, you know, time for Donald Trump to swoop in and redefine all the

debates everybody was having about everything, you sort of got a little taste of the opposite flavor where, where yes, you know, it's like more ideas, not less, but also a real big burst of, you know, ideas have consequences and the fact that, you know, you can theoretically see bad ideas take hold and and get the bit in their teeth and and and and go charging off to do a lot of damage in the world and and you know how do you how do you reconcile um those two things one thing i wanted to say uh you you you you you mentioned declan this this notion that that ideas um ideas can be construed as violence speech can be construed as violence um and i i do think that that's that's a big component of of what we're seeing here um with with these stories like the new york

times. I don't want to get, you know, too nebulously off into, you know, this is just what the people are like now. But I think, I think another component specifically of stories like this is it isn't just, it isn't just this matter of a shrinking of acceptable horizons for, for thoughts and ideas and speech, specifically speech, because this is in a media context. So there's a little bit of distinction there too. But it's also, it also has to do with the way that I think a lot of people in in our generation, visualize sort of what, what their calling is, you know, what, what their role is supposed to be in institutions, because I, and this is perhaps even a bigger shift than anything, anything sort of in their, in their larger ideology about the way the world should work,

but it's, you know, rather than, you know, thinking that you're, you're coming out of school and going into an institution, going into a workplace, what have you, and just sort of like plugging in and sort of subordinating yourself to the mission of that, of that workplace. Like maybe you operate agency, you know, in terms of picking a field or in terms of, you know, deciding where you're going to work, you're going to go to work somewhere that has,

you know, ideological, that is simpatico with you on that sort of thing. But that you sort of very self-consciously see yourself as a part of that institution. And I think a big part of what has shifted ideologically, and we totally saw this at the times, is that a lot of young people, because they have such a strong sense that the existing institutional structure

is so corrupted by all of these systemic issues, they feel as though the duty that they have to the institution itself is sometimes, rather than subordinating themselves, sort of to the structure and going along with that, it's doing this sort of radical speak truth to power, shake up sort of thing where sort of by, even though they're sort of all relatively low on the institutional ladder,

by sort of banding together, they can shake things up and they think they're doing a service to the New York Times by doing that, right? So it's just sort of an interesting ideological wrinkle, not just about the way they think about the world, but the way they think about themselves and their role. Yeah. I mean, none of this is particularly new, I would say. I mean, even when I was, I mean, this is a long, long time ago, when I was back in school, in grad school, I went to Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. I had a professor. I went there because I wanted to improve my writing. I certainly did not go there to have big ideological battles. And where I could, I tried to avoid them so that I could focus on my writing. But the ideological. battles seemed to find me.

And I'm sure I'd bear some of the blame for that because if a professor said something ridiculous, I'm not, that was never the kind to kind of sit back and not say anything. But I remember a confrontation I had in a sports journalism class that I took with someone who was then a senior editor at Sports Illustrated magazine, a guy named Sandy Padway. and he had had in a guest speaker who had made some told us about her experience coaching both men's and women's basketball teams and Padway brought her in as a as a breaker of the glass ceilings and she was was very she was very interesting and inspiring to listen to but she made several points that didn't sort of fit the narrative he was trying to to push on us and I raised some questions about those and in the middle of class, this professor raised his voice, told me I was being ridiculous, and told me to shut up. He said, if you think you're making a point, you haven't, told me to shut up. And it was, you know, it was one of those moments where I, you couldn't quite believe what you were hearing.

Am I, am I at this Ivy League institution taking a class in journalism where literally the goal is to ask the hard questions? And I'm being told I can't ask questions. I'm being told, I'm being told I can't think a certain way. And it was a moment, and we became a bit of a thing. I mean, we had to talk to the administrators about it, and it became a thing. But it seems to me, based on those experiences I had and others, that back in my day, a lot of this was driven by faculty and administrators. It really was much more of a top-down political correctness

phenomenon, and that's what we called it at the time. That's what we talked about. Is that still the case, or is it now something that's much more driven from the ground up? Oh, it's, it's, it's the ground up. You know, while I was there, there were plenty of, of, of, of movements to, to fire faculty, to, to, to, to, to, to oust people from positions that they held because of a donation that they had made 20 years ago or, you know, there were calls to Roger Porter, who was an advisor to, I believe, every president since Gerald Ford was a faculty dean

of one of the upperclassmen houses. And because he was conservative, there was a push to get him removed from that position because as faculty dean, he wouldn't be able to be as supportive to the student body that he was intended to serve. And so there definitely is a kind of a bottom-up groundswell approach here where I think kind of like we did see at the New York Times

that there is this generational divide that kind of, I think some of the older generation, the faculty are looking at kind of the culture that's been created and like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, not us, just, you know, focus your fire elsewhere. But, you know, there is kind of that impulse. And I was looking back to, I wrote a column about what, what it was like to be conservative at Harvard back in 2015. And I wrote that I was so grateful for the experience because it prevented me from putting up my own echo chamber and I was constantly having to have these debates and constantly having to defend what I believed in. And in the course of that, you know, I found out that I believed in a lot of stupid things,

but it also sharpened my arguments of what I did believe, and I was kind of forced to actually think about why it was that I believe certain things and why I think that free markets and free enterprise are so pivotal. And I think that that's an experience that all too often people aren't having on the right and on the left. I think people surround themselves on the Internet and in real life, increasingly geographically with people who think like they do. And so when they're confronted with an outside projectile, like you can consider the Tom Cotton op-ed at the New York Times, you know, they just want to send it back where it came and not grapple with it and not, you know,

we have our, you know, we have our bubble. Things are good here. And let's just focus on that. But then at the same time, you know, you get these people on the right that do the exact same thing. with any criticism of the president or any focus on something other than media bias. You know, it's so I think it's a dual spectrum problem. Political correctness is by far not only a liberal issue. You know, the things that are deemed political and the things that are deemed that are deemed, that are deemed, you know, beyond the pale are different on both sides. But there are, you know, you can, we've seen in, you know, just in our little world of conservative media that you can be, quote, unquote, canceled for having the wrong opinion about Trump or, um, so I, I, I, all that to say, yes, I do think it's a problem, but it's a problem increasingly on both sides. And I think it, it has a lot to do with echo chambers and, and kind of self-isolation, um, as much as it does about, about, about, generations. If I could just jump in to say one thing, two things actually, first about what

you were saying before about the shift in institutional power from, from, you know, the institutional people increasingly to the people that they're around and teaching. And, you know, you can, you can sort of half jokingly, but but not entirely jokingly sort of talk about how it's essentially every faculty members at every institution. Their primary goal is like to survive all of their student interactions, you know, like through a given year. And if they do that, then everything else is secondary to that. And I think one big reason why it's important to point out why that is is not just ideological change, but also technological change. The huge, huge, huge new weapon that, you know, young ideological,

logs have now that they didn't before is an enormous base of fellow travelers on the internet where where you know if if if if there's some something that some faculty member at your school does that's that's that you consider to be outrageous you don't just have like your other sort of like fellow school radicals that you can tap into in order to like focus outrage on that guy if you can you can throw it out on the internet and if it's the most outrageous you know if it's the the most egregious violation of social justice or what have you occurring that week you can you know get the entire nation's worth of young fellow traveler ideologues to to focus fire on on that for a day or two

which can be you know very disconcerting for the person who is who is you know under that magnifying glass so I think that's that's a that's a relatively new thing that we haven't really encountered before and then completely different point to going to what you were saying about echo chambers. I don't know. I've always had maybe a slightly different sensation about echo chambers, probably because like we talked about, I went to a school where I am constantly being accused of having gone to an ideological echo chamber. And that was not really my experience of going to a conservative college. I think, you know, I did not expect this to happen. But honestly, I went into going to a place like Hillsdale a lot more

ideologically committed to such things as free markets and free enterprise, then I, then I came out, came out with sort of a more sort of conflicted and, and, and, um, irritatingly, like, unsettled view of, of those things. Um, but, but anyway, I, it is, it is important to say that, like, I, I think a lot of conservative students in particular, um, go through college with, in these incredibly antagonistic institutions, right, um, where, where they, They feel like they're fighting for every inch of what they think are, you know, their core beliefs. And they think that, you know, all the people around them would sort of tear them to shreds if they didn't, like, defend, defend, defend, defend, defend, and really force themselves to be taken seriously. And you're right that that that sharpens people, that, that, in some sense, refines their beliefs.

But it also really hardens people, I think. And I think that one of the, one of the crises of young conservatism in particular, um, You know, we talk about this knee-jerk need that so many young people in the movement have to, you know, trigger the libs, to be to be sort of like ferociously unapologetic for even relatively gross views. And I think a lot of it comes out of this, this corresponding campus, you know, this campus disenfranchisement culture where where you don't really feel like you have the ability to sort of, freely work your way through your ideas because it's such a minefield, so that you really just retreat back onto what you consider to be ideologically solid and stable ground, and just sort of build yourself up a fortress against cancellation, or you go completely the opposite direction, and you set, and you declare the whole, you know, the whole possibility of cancellation

to just not concern you at all and you're antagonistic and outrageous for the sake of being antagonistic and outrageous and you see that as a virtue in and of itself because you're like sort of striking a blow against campus censorship and things like that and then you really fall off the deep end into all sorts of views

that yes are reprehensible to a cancel culture quote unquote that you find reprehensible but also are just reprehensible beliefs on their own terms and you have no no sort of mooring in a community at all at that point that would help sort of pull you back from those beliefs. So I think that's also a real challenge for young conservatives that we should think about and grapple with ourselves. Well, I think that's a really key point.

I mean, one of the things that I'm probably guilty of as I look back over the past 20 years is, you know, we would hear stories. And I worked in journalism academia before I went and got my degree and started working in day-to-day. day journalism and working as a reporter. And I think as we heard, as I heard these stories about safe spaces and all of the accommodations made for the new woke students on campus, I think I was probably more dismissive than I should have been because I thought this is, we all went through this. I mean, I went through this. This is sort of what college. college is like. Of course, the faculty and administrators are liberal. Of course, you're going

to be challenged. Of course conservatives are not treated well. Their ideas aren't taken seriously. And it seems to me now, in retrospect, that something very different was happening. And this was much more of a student-led phenomenon, taking advantage of the sympathies, the ideological sympathies of professors and finding ways to declare certain ideas are just off limits. And I think what we're engaged in right now on both sides, as you both say, is just a giant line drawing exercise, right? Because there are, I mean, you know, if I think about the way that we run the dispatch, there are pieces we wouldn't run at the district. We don't. We don't run everything. You know, if I got a, if I got a submission from Milo Yanopoulos, making, you know,

alt-right or racist arguments, we're not running that at the dispatch. So we all make these kinds of choices. I think the question is, where do you draw the line and what this new sort of woke culture is doing, moving now from universities to, to the media, is making, shrinking the availability of what's permissible to say and to argue. I mean, I didn't agree with the main argument in the Tom Cotton op-ed, but I just can't imagine how it could be the kind of op-ed that the New York Times would want to retract or wouldn't publish. And the Times has, in the days since, come up with all sorts of reasons as to why the piece never should have run and continues to to hint at widespread factual inaccuracies in the piece, but I will note, as of last night,

Thursday evening, I believe, the Times had not run a correction. They posted a 300-word explanation of the piece, suggesting that there were things that were wrong in the piece, but when the Times gets something provably and demonstrably wrong, it runs a correction and has not yet run a correction. I just wonder if this, to go back to the point that you were making, Andrew, on this being something that is increasingly a problem on both sides, that you have this young, woke, right, reacting to this culture, this growing phenomenon by saying, in effect, you're going to do that your way, we're going to do it our way. and everybody climbs deeper into their own silo. I want to read for you a short passage of something that David French, our colleague, wrote in his newsletter yesterday, making exactly this point.

David wrote, it's vitally important to recognize that America faces two culture wars. Yes, there are still the old battles over abortion, religious, liberty, free speech, and gun rights. But there's a new struggle between those forces left and right who seek to, to preserve America's fundamental, classical, liberal values, including respect for pluralism, decency, and the foundational protections of the Bill of Rights, and illiberal opponents left and right who would sweep all that away for the sake of social justice, quote unquote, or the highest good, or simply for a man named Donald Trump. Is that what we're seeing today take place in our political debates across the country?

so I I copy edited that I copy edited that piece and I wanted to but did not because I was only copy editing it and I didn't want to speak for David but I thought if I had written that I might have I might have said like for the sake of Donald Trump instead of because it's not just it's not just people who are doing who are you know collapsing everything to be about Trump out of loyalty to him who are who are the problem because he's he and sorry if this is not exactly where you were wanting to go with this. But I do think it's interesting how he sort of poisons every conversation he's a part of, not exactly out of anything that he does, but just because of who he is and the way he sort of reshapes all debates to be about him and reshapes all debates to be sort of a priori polarized and unreconcilable in that way. I think that's obviously an unfortunate moment of an unfortunate fact about the present moment, but I think obviously the causes of that.

He's a little more symptomatic, perhaps, than being the cause of those irreconcilability. Yeah. Let me read one more passage that hasn't gotten, I think, the attention that it probably should have. Remember back in October, Barack Obama was doing it, held a summit on youth activism at the Obama Foundation. And he took questions from the audience and received some questions about activism and what youth activism and organizing means. And Obama was surprising to me actually made a strike. strikingly strong case against all of this phenomenon on the left. He said this idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get

over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People you are you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you. This was, it was an interesting moment that Obama has sort of spoke out against this, this rising wokeism on the left in cancel culture. But I wonder if you think that the fact that somebody like Barack Obama could come out and say that so strongly. really not make much difference. I mean, the phenomenon is as strong as it ever has been, as we've seen in recent days. Does that tell you that this is kind of an inexorable wave toward additional cancellations, towards greater wokenness, and toward the kind of reactions

that we're seeing from the right, which mimic what we're seeing on the left? Declan? Yeah. I've been, you know, I remember being. pleasantly surprised by by that comment from President Obama and you know I I've tried to do some thinking about kind of why

why this is the case why how we've gotten here and I do think that you know I do think that technology and social media has plays an enormous role in it because you know as as he said the

nobody nobody is perfect Nobody is without fault. But with social media, you can create your own communities, you know, to varying sizes and to varying degrees, where everybody does feel that they have no quote unquote fault within that community or where everybody within that community abides by, you know, the same set of values, the same and the same modus operandi. And, you know, that wouldn't have been possible, you know, before social media. You knew the people that you lived near and you knew your neighbors and you knew the people that you went to school with and who your kids played with. And, you know, now you can almost construct this own reality that exists online, not in, you know, your everyday life. But you can construct this reality where, yes, everybody who I want to surround myself,

with and more importantly who I want to signal that I am alike and signal that I think closely to we are going to all abide by this set of standards and we are and I can create a community where that is kind of what we what we live by. And so, you know, I think that that is a very significant development in kind of how we interact as humans. And with, you know, with the advent of social media, you also get new voices in these conversations that for so long we're not listened to, we're not heard. The example of the past month has been, and not even just the past month, but past five years is cell phone videos. And, you know, we see now these interactions that young black men are having with police officers that, you know, too often for the past century or

more, you know, we saw the initial statement that the Minneapolis Police Department put out. It was, you know, a man died. No weapon was used. You know, I can go back and read it, but the police lied about what happened and what, and, you know, and for so long, that was the accepted narrative. That was, okay, you know, that's what happened. Now with social media and with cameras and with, you know, black men are able to tell the other side of that story. And so that reality, I think, plays into a lot of these conversations is that this is not just the accepted narrative of the past 100 years. There are now dozens of narratives that are coming to the surface that weren't part of that official story of America for so long. And so it's kind of a harsh clash to have all of these different.

perspectives coming to the fore all at once. But, you know, it is important to have those conversations. And I think that that definitely plays a contributing role in kind of how we're thinking about a lot of these conversations. I think the, maybe the key point there is, is the way that what you, what you call sort of the established narrative, maybe establishment narrative, sort of one of the big sort of commonalities across a whole lot of different types of ideological issues over the past five years, or the past 10 years, or the past large number of years,

has been the failure of those institutional narratives and the increasing lack of trust for, or the acceptable version of the story. And I think that that plays maybe a bigger role in all these conversations about the Great Wokening of America, and these things, than we necessarily give it credit for. Because I think we'd all agree that this sort of woke discourse is relatively nihilistic ideologically.

It's all really about just the operation of power and ideally toward some productive end. I mean, the people who are operating the power this way hope that it will lead to a positive reconstruction of society. but it is just pretty nakedly a weaponization of discourse toward, you know, serving ends of power. So it's nihilistic in that way. But I think that the important thing to realize is that nihilistic ideologies don't take off unless the established, you know, prevailing previous ideology was already sort of atrophied and moth-eaten and defective in a lot of ways. And I think that, for instance, looking at something like the Tom Cotton op-ed, people don't, people don't,

look at, you don't have a powerful movement to cancel something like an op-ed unless you're already in a culture where op-eds and, you know, media in general are largely not seen as people, you know, trying to work toward the truth together, trying to like communicate with one another and instruct one another. A lot of people already, you know, prior to Tom Cotton's op-ed, really just see op-eds as another weaponization of power. It's just people putting out press releases for their political leanings, for their preferred narratives in order to give those narratives more heft. It's not a matter of education, it's a matter of largely propaganda.

And a lot of people see it that way. And when you already see a media culture as functioning in that way, then you are a lot more susceptible to be like, well, yeah, I don't want the really bad ideas. to get that preferential treatment in the most powerful newspaper in America. You know, I don't, if the only, if the only thing op-eds are doing,

if the only thing, you know, any media is doing is pushing the balance of power one way or another, then of course you're going to object when it pushes the balance of power in ways that you see as really dangerous and wrong. So I think there's this danger when you talk about the great wokening or whatever of sort of

falling back into this defensive crouch where you're like, and this is why everybody just needs to realize how good things were before this happened. But I think you really do have to grapple with the ways in which people found the prevailing order previously of, you know, pluralism, liberalism, all these sorts of things, the ways in which that had already begun to go wrong and thus opened the door for this movement that I think we all correctly, I would say, because we all believe it to be that find so disturbing. Yeah, I mean, I think the real question we'll see this play out in the next several months and the next few years

is whether the times by giving into the demands of the super woke crowd has actually incentivized that very behavior. And I would argue that the answer is almost certain to be yes, which I think makes more likely the continuation of this kind of talking past one another, of the shouting past one another rather than trying to actually have a conversation or understand or think about the way we think. Let me, in our remaining just few minutes here, let me shift to discuss what I think of the political manifestations of

exactly what we are, have been talking about here in some respects. And you each had, I think, very good standalone pieces this week for the website, Andrew on a band of Trump superfans, the front row Joe's who travel around the country and go to Trump rallies and have kind of created their own internal subgroup that does this and they're friends and they care about one another. And that's very, that was a very interesting piece. And Declan, you had a piece that ran this morning, Friday morning on this empathy gap that exists between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the polling. And I think in some ways, you know, if you want to talk about what's happening here, Andrew Donald Trump has this core loyal,

base that really can't be uh affected they that you know his his way of making the point was the was the the infamous i could shoot someone on fifth avenue and they'd still be with me we've seen now many of those moments that he was imagining and they have in fact stuck with him they're every bit as loyal as they have ever happened and that gives him i think of a pretty high ceiling from which to operate politically. At the same time, Declan, to the point that you wrote this morning, because he doesn't do a great job of showing empathy, that I think, among other reasons, is why he has a relatively high ceiling and high floor and low ceiling. He's not able to grow his, his, his coalition much beyond this this core base um andrew why don't you tell us how you came in touch with

this group of trump loyalists and what you learned when you talk to them yeah uh well so the the getting in touch with them was easy because uh i i wanted to write a piece about about rallies um and what's what's happening uh what trump fans are going to do when he when he resumes them uh which he's doing, I believe next week. And there just happens to be this community that had been that I previously read news reports about, you know, that goes to all his rallies, or at least all the ones they can get to and camps out for days in line in order to be able to get the best seats in the house and interact with, you know, the teleprompter guy or what have you. They got, I mean, it's a very strange hobby, but they're really into it. And so I just, I found previous press

reports of those people, tracked them down on Facebook. They were happy to talk. They like being written about. They like being a little bit notorious. And they were, they were, you know, right there, right ready to get back into the rallies. They were very enthusiastic about it. Specifically, to your point about the sort of impermeability of their support for the president. I think there's a few things going on there. One is just a question of sort of obviously media, echo chamber. Part of the reason why people don't, why the bad behavior of the president doesn't impact them is because they just don't know about it or they're, it's explained away by the time it, by the time it actually reaches them, it's just a question of actual

access to knowledge. The second thing is, and I get into this a lot in the piece, is a question of community, right? I mean, I think a lot of Trump supporters, like many people who are supporters of something countercultural or that goes against the prevailing um prevailing narrative uh they they band together specifically around the fact that they are all sort of subverting that i mean that that's actually like culturally bonding to them actually when i was talking to these guys i kept having flashbacks to a piece i wrote for the weekly standard in in 2017 when i went to the juggalo march in in in Washington because it was like

it was a very similar thing it's like all the people out there think we're idiots and uh have no taste but we know that we're not idiots and we don't have what are what are juggalo's oh sorry yeah Yeah, well, okay, yeah, so that's a real curveball. Fans of the band of The Insane Clown Posse, it's like this really rabid, really rabid fan group of this awful, awful band, but who have a much tighter community than most band's fan bases do precisely because the band is so bad and so universally sort of reviled that they have, they have that going for them.

You know, it's like you're, if you're around another juggalo, than like you know your bros because specifically because people who aren't juggalo's think you're so strange. And it honestly is a very similar, very similar thing for some of these like really intense Trump fans. Like if you are a front row Joe, if you're camping out at one of these events, you know that like either you get it or you don't, right? It's like if you're in, you're really in.

And they're really, really tight-knit. They're really close. I mean, they talk constantly. There aren't that many of them. I think I talked to eight. There's probably, you know, well, it's not like there's not like you pay dues. It's not like there's a register of them. But yeah, I mean, they're like each other's best friends now.

And yet there are some striking differences between them, particularly on some of the big issues of the day. I mean, obviously, when you talk about starting rallies again, there are now some pretty significant risks in doing that. And the Trump campaign, when it announced this rally for next week in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had at the bottom of the announcement, sort of a disclaimer saying, if you go to this rally, you can't hold us responsible if you contract this COVID-19. They didn't all see eye to eye on COVID-19 and on mask wearing and these things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's definitely real division.

I had one woman I talked to who had been trying to. to be very careful about the masks, another who was extremely scornful and dismissive of the whole concept of masks. I think all of them were in agreement that you shouldn't go out and hassle businesses in your community. I didn't get it into the piece, but we had kind of a fun interaction where they were all kind of trash talking, the videos they'd seen going around on social media, people like filming at their grocery store, trying to browbeat them into letting them in without a mask. And they were like, no, just go to a store that's like not going to make you do that, you know? Like, don't be mean to the poor guy. Yeah, so that's a, that's a real,

there are, obviously, they're not all ideologically sympathetico. They're not all strategically sympathetico on all of these things. I did think on the point of the Trump campaign, the way they're going about this, I don't, I, it's really, I mean, it's really gross to me. I don't know if I could, if I could imagine a better illustration of the way that, that the campaign looks at the base as both as both like very frightening like they don't want to cross them they don't want to do anything that's going to make it's going to rile the base

up and just completely expendable you know I mean like like you you're not going to ask people to come in and social distance you're not going to ask people to come in and wear masks because you know that for a lot of those people that's seen

as weak and you can't you can't appear weak to your people you can't appear weak to your people even if appearing weak by doing that you were protecting your people you were literally keeping some of them from dying and and it's i mean it's it's it's it's one thing to be like i could shoot i could shoot somebody on on fifth avenue or whatever i don't remember the avenue and uh and and and i wouldn't lose my supporters it's kind of another thing to be like i could shoot you and you would still support me you know like that's and that that's honestly what it kind of feels like with with with this this rally so i don't

know maybe that's sorry if that's not where you wanted to go with that but i I just, I cringed, you know? No, and on the other hand, I mean, I think there's sort of hypocrisy abounds in this discussion. Because on the other hand, you have, you know, many of the very same people who told us for, for weeks that we weren't to have contact with anybody outside our hard quarantine bubbles, even to, you know, to open up your business if you've had a business for all these years, or to go to a funeral of a loved one. And we weren't supposed to interact with people. And yet when it came time to have these protests, all of those considerations by at least some on the left, including prominent politicians who were very aggressively in favor of the lockdowns and the quarantines, are just thrown out the window.

So, you know, they, too, I think, treat some of their followers and ideological compatriots as somewhat expendable in the name of this bigger, of this bigger good. Declan, you wrote about what we might regard as the flip side of what Andrew describes. I mean, Andrew's piece, I think, did a very good job of illustrating this community of the Trump base. And it really is a community. The reason that they are so tight-knit and so devoted, I think, is precisely because there is this somewhat subversive element. to what they're doing. And your piece on this empathy gap helps explain,

I think, why, while that appeals to that core base, it's precisely that subversive element of Trumpism that appeals to that core base. It's also what keeps him from growing that number, because other people, you know, independent voters and soft Democrats, don't find, not only don't find that appealing, they're repelled by that. Is that a fair description? That is a fair description. And, you know, I, I'd been thinking about writing a piece like this for a while.

The polls have kind of borne that empathy gap out for a while. But Tuesday morning was when it kind of solidified in my mind when I was like, okay, I need to, I need to write this piece this week. because, you know, on Tuesday morning, Joe Biden recorded a video and that was played at the funeral of George Floyd. You know, he said, we know you will never feel the same again to George Floyd's family and his young daughter. Unlike most, you must grieve in public. It's a burden that is now your purpose. And, you know, people on the right, you know, will fairly or not criticize him for being politically opportunistic, for, you know, showing up there and speaking to that pain. But for most of America, that's what they want politicians to do. They want

words of comfort and times of mass upheaval. And we're, you know, we're living through one of the most harrowing periods in recent American history, you know, with the pandemic, with that come November, there could be, you know, close to 200,000 dead, you know, tens of millions of people are out of work. And now we're also grappling with, you know, what for a large portion of the country has been generations of racial injustice. And, you know, for Donald Trump and his supporters, it's fine for him to be focusing during this period on bashing the media, on kind of fanning these various culture war issues around the Confederate monuments and and things like that. But a large portion of the country just wants a leader to speak to the to the pain that

they're feeling and to kind of this sense of almost nationwide loss. And as I get to in the piece, this, you know, that is really one of, you know, for all his faults as a politician and, you know, I think he's wrong on several key issues throughout his career, but this is one of Joe Biden's strength is speaking to loss because he has experienced it himself with the loss of his wife and young daughter back in the 70s in a car accident and then his son, Beau, to brain cancer back in 2015. And Biden has kind of publicly grieved those losses in front of an entire nation that has kind of followed him through that process. And so, you know, the New York Times had a great, great piece yesterday that was recounting all of the eulogies that Biden has given over the course of his career.

And it was, you know, fortuitous timing that their piece came out a day before mine. But it was really, really moving kind of the way that he has channeled his own loss and his own pain into providing comfort. to others. And, you know, that may not be what, you know, Trump's most hardened fans, what the front row Joe's want, but the polling kind of bears out that it is what a lot of Americans want right now. I look back to 2016 and, you know, Trump was able to get by. It's not that he was seen as incredibly in touch and empathetic in 2016, but neither was Hillary Clinton. And so that was an easy way for him to kind of weather some of some of those gaps in his um in his persona but there was still a pretty significant empathy gap between trump and Hillary yes yes yeah so it was

it was nine points in 2016 it has grown to 19 points between Biden and trump and you know it and I and I also look back at um in 2012 there was an empathy gap between Romney and Obama. And let me see if I can pull up this. In 2012, Romney won voters who cared about sharing their values, about being a strong leader, about having a vision for the future. But he lost voters who cared about a candidate caring about a person like them, about having empathy. And he lost them by 63 points. And that was enough to wipe out his lead in all those other categories. Because Ultimately, you know, we were in 2012, we were still coming out of the Great Recession. There were a lot of people out of work, and people just didn't feel like Romney was on their side.

And so, you know, it didn't matter in 2016 for Trump. I mean, it did. He lost the popular vote, and he, you know, came very, very close in three states to not winning the election. But I think it will matter in 2020, and I think it will matter more than it, than it. it did in these past elections because we as a country are going to be grappling with so much loss and kind of, you know, Trump has, not to say that Trump hasn't, you know, commemorated George Floyd in his life he has, but it's a point of emphasis with him. And so he can say one thing about the death. And I believe it was after the SpaceX launch, he gave kind of a speech

on a teleprompter simultaneously commemorating the life of George Floyd and condemning kind of the more violent riots that have had sprung up at the time. But then, you know, he loses focus and changes the subject. And instead of, you know, he gets criticized in the media for not focusing on the death. And instead of just focusing on the death and empathizing, he, attacks the media for not focusing or for not paying attention to that one time that he did and so it's kind of this cycle that um you know people just want him to kind of speak to some of these issues that they're feeling and he just he can do it for a very short period of time and then he loses track and then he um you know focuses on antifa provocateurs and buffalo um or uh you know

confederate monuments or or all these other things that he'd rather kind of fight fight fight on. And so it's I saw the Trump campaign yesterday put out a big statement about how they want TV networks to be airing all of Joe Biden's speeches live and full

because they think that that will show his kind of incompetence or declining mental state or what have you. But I think Joe Biden will be very happy to kind of just live low under the radar and let Trump go off on his kind of various tangents that, you know,

yes, excite his base, but really, really repel the vast, not the vast, but a pretty sizable majority of the country. Yeah, and I think that the real question as it relates to this empathy gap is whether these continue to be the issues that shape the election. And I would say in a normal year, if you have these kind of. of things that have driven our thinking on our politics for the first six months, five, six months of the year, and so dramatically reshaped what the public is thinking about and how we're acting on a day-to-day basis, it would be a sure bet that this is then what

would shape the outcome of the election. And yet, because it's 2020, one imagines that there might be many new external, external factors that have equal or compelling ways of changing the ways that voters are looking at, at these including things that I think could play to Donald Trump's benefit. I mean, if there is some kind of conflagration with Iran, if that heats up again and Donald Trump can say, well, I'm the strong one. And Joe Biden gave millions or billions of dollars to the Iranians or there's a terrorism question or what have you. I mean, there are other ways in which you can see that some of the things that people look to for Donald Trump or look at his strengths might come back into play far more than they

are today when I think the debates are taking place on unfriendly ground for Donald Trump. Well, thank you both to Declan and to Andrew for joining us today. This was an interesting and I think fun. discussion in its own way. And thank you all for listening. If you have not subscribed to the podcast, please go and do so. And if you care to give us a rating, that would be helpful in allowing people to discover what we're doing. Stay tuned for upcoming, for news on upcoming dispatch live events, which are available to dispatch members. And of course, if you are not yet a dispatch member, we would strongly encourage you to go and join us for the last several months

of this election and what comes after. Thanks a lot. Thank you.