Local political ecosystems are vital to protecting democracy nationally

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary

Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump came as a huge surprise to many Democratic Party loyalists, especially since Republicans had a number of serious defeats in elections in 2018 and in 2022, and abortion rights ballot initiatives prevailed in every state where the public had voted on them since the Republican Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

So what happened? We've talked on this program at length in several episodes about how Democrats have failed enormously to invest in advocacy media to the degree that Republicans have. But a political ecosystem isn’t just about national media, it’s also about how things work at the local level as well.

And in that regard, the Republican Party is also very superior to Democrats. Working together and individually in cities and towns across America, fundamentalist religious organizations and local talk radio hosts are constantly explaining Republican viewpoints to the public, taking the message to Americans who don’t follow politics closely.

While they may not understand all the particulars, these citizens believe that there are people in their communities who are looking out for them. They can see and talk to people who explain the world and tell them what they can do about it.

Within the Democratic Party, however, these types of local political institutions are sometimes regarded as antiquated or absurd. This was not always so. In the past, labor union halls and liberal religious communities were places where people were able to learn that progress isn’t something that happens, it’s something that’s made.

The right’s huge advantage at the local level has been in place for a long time, as sociologist Theda Skocpol documented in 1995:

“The Democratic party no longer has a national, locally rooted infrastructure of loyal local organizations and allied groups (such as labor unions) through which concerted grass-roots political campaigns can be run. The conservatives right now have such an infrastructure, in the form of grass-roots Christian fundamentalist groups and Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio. But Democrats depend on pollsters, media consultants, and television to get messages out to the citizenry. Yet pollsters and political consultants tend to think in terms of appealing labels (‘Health Security’) and advertising slogans (‘security that can never be taken away’) rather than in terms of explanatory discussions.”

One person who understands how all of this worked in days of yore is our guest on today’s episode. His name is Eric Loomis, and he's a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island. He’s written several different books, including A History of America in Ten Strikes. And he’s also a writer at the blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money.

The video of this discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

05:58 — Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years

10:28 — How local organizations preserve collective memory and protect democracy

13:50 — The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party

29:02 — Why reproductive freedom didn't save Democrats in 2024

32:38 — The rise of AOC-Trump voters

36:15 — Biden's communication failures made it so no one knew about his policies

41:59 — Operationally, Democrats are more conservative than Republicans

45:36 — Economic and social justice need each other to succeed

52:13 — Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win

01:02:06 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Eric Loomis. Welcome to the show, Eric.

ERIK LOOMIS: Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

SHEFFIELD: So you and your co-bloggers have been tackling this idea of there's something wrong with Democrats, even before the election, you guys were kind of been edging around this point for a while, it seems [00:04:00] like.

LOOMIS: Well, yeah, I mean, if you look at the election, right? In a lot of ways, and I should say up front, I think that there are so many election hot takes out there, and I think a lot of them are flawed. I think we do have to everything into a kind of global context about, about governing parties and the post pandemic inflation generally doing quite poorly in elections, and that's all very important, and I think we have to keep that as part of our focus and not just engage in a kind of contextless blame game, but I also think that we're facing an opponent here that's not like an opponent that we faced with even Reagan, right? Even George W. Bush, who were, genuinely terrible people and terrible presidents.

This particular iteration of the Republican Party is effectively a fascist party. And it's very important to be thinking about broader ways to resist that. And the Democratic Party's model of anything has not really adjusted itself in 15 to 20 years. But what does a Democratic campaign look [00:05:00] like today? It's this post Citizens United endless fundraising effort, right? And that's really all it is. You get inundated with endless emails and texts and maybe suggestions to engage in a get-out-the-vote campaign or something of this nature. And that's really kind of it.

And eventually you start tuning this out because it gets annoying to get this many text messages and this many emails. There's a certain effectiveness in it. I mean, Kamala Harris had an ungodly amount of money, but as we've seen over the last, it's really several cycles, including congressional and Senate campaigns, you can have an endless amount of money, and you run out of ways to spend it, and it doesn't actually help you win.

The campaign to defeat Susan Collins in Maine in 2020 was a perfect example of this, right? And so I think Democrats have to figure out new ways to conduct campaigns and new ways to think of themselves as Democrats in order to engage a kind of broader populace who is very unhappy about the way things are going and clearly is not responding to the kinds of campaigns that Democrats put together.

Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years

SHEFFIELD: They're trying to, and [00:06:00] I forget who said this, but I liked the idea, that they're trying to activate people rather than engage with them.

LOOMIS: And there's room for activation. I mean, that's part of is, that can be part of a campaign, but that can't be all of the campaign. And so often, that's become all of the campaign-- is a short-term activation of people. And then it's like: 'Okay, now we win, it's all good. Go back to your regular lives.' And nothing really happens until the next campaign.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it comes off as very insincere to people, because this message, I mean, I don't know, to some degree, is it fair to say that the Democratic Party has been crying wolf about the Republicans being fascist? Because they were saying things like Mitt Romney is trying to create fascism.

I've heard people say things like that, or that George W. Bush, what wanted to be Hitler. And Donald Trump, as you said is a completely different candidate than these people. [00:07:00] And so to some degree, I think people are, might be put off by that, but also just the fact that there's this tremendous urgency that exists for three months of the year, and then there's no urgency at any other time.

LOOMIS: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that regardless of the accuracy of such depictions, which are obviously less accurate under Romney and Bush than they are under Trump and Vance and these sorts of people, regular voters, everyday folks don't respond to this. And that's the bigger issue, they don't respond to this. They tune it out. And I think that, you saw this in the, with the Harris campaign's choice to go all in on people like Liz Cheney, which I don't have, I wouldn't have had such a problem with if it was going to move any voters at all. But it moved nobody, like, like nobody cared.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LOOMIS: Regardless, it's ineffective. And then to me, the issue is it's totally ineffective.

SHEFFIELD: Well, it is and it's ineffective because [00:08:00] basically it was premised on the idea that, well, we can get some, people who don't like either candidate to vote for Kamala Harris. But the problem is they also didn't, hadn't created a gigantic media machine to 24/7 push their case.

And so, Basically now, if, as I said in an essay last month that the election was decided by people who didn't like both candidates. And it was really, it, but it came down to the people disliked Harris more. That was it. And it was evenly divided between the people who like each one, and then there were 2 percent of people in the exit polls who said they liked both of them.

I want to hear from those people. Uh, But ultimately, they didn't create the infrastructure to run a negative partisanship campaign, it seems like.

LOOMIS: I mean, you were right in that essay, you don't have a media infrastructure at [00:09:00] all. People were like, oh, we need to create the Democratic Joe Rogan. And it's like, well, that doesn't really it doesn't I mean, yes, in a sense, but that doesn't quite get it. Like the people saying that don't understand what Joe Rogan does or what's history or any of this sort of thing. I think that the broader takeaway there is kind of going back to what you said is that the Democrats don't have an ecosystem at all, right? There's just no ecosystem. It's all about activating voters at a very particular time. And that's very effective for base kind of vote, but it's not very effective for lower information voters it's not very effective for people who have pretty short term memories about things people who don't pay attention to what Donald trump is saying or doing don't pay attention to who he's naming to the know naming cash Patel to the FBI, the head

SHEFFIELD: they don't even know his policies. Yeah.

LOOMIS: and it's that

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LOOMIS: is

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LOOMIS: You need a kind of a media network That allows your [00:10:00] candidates and your ideas to reach into a different kind of voter. Right? And MSNBC does simply does not do that, right? That is that they are, I mean, I'm mixed on various MSNBC shows, but and regardless of its future, it's totally ineffective at touching those kind of voters too.

Right, right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's only one channel, whereas Fox, there are seven alternatives to Fox that are, all of them are even further right.

How unions and local organizations preserve collective memory

SHEFFIELD: but even aside from media though, like infrastructure means an ecosystem mean more than just that. So, and that was something that you had mentioned, written recently about that there were these local organizations that used to be very common and were driving people into the Democratic party and the understanding sort of the shared theory of the case for voting being on the left and can you talk about that?

LOOMIS: I mean, if you look at the 1930s, for instance, and the aftermath of that going through the 60s and [00:11:00] 70s, so a long period of time and I understand the nation is different today and people have different activities that they do. But what it meant to be a Democrat was something that was actually central to your entire life.

I mean, the first thing there was in large parts of the country was the union hall, right? And the reality is part of what we're dealing with right now, is the wages of an entire generation of Democrats that turn their back on the labor movement.

And, here, I'm not talking about Joe Biden, who was older and, did what he could and, it was very good for unions with the limited power they actually had to create policy that could get through courts and such things. But here we're talking about not only, but very much talking about Jimmy Carter, very much talking about Bill Clinton, to an extent talking about Barack Obama, but even generations of, a whole generation of Democrats did not actually get to the White House.

Like, Michael Dukakis was horrible on unions, right? Michael Dukakis actually lost his first term reelection campaign to governor of Massachusetts because he had angered the union so much, right? Gary [00:12:00] Hart is extraordinarily anti-union. Jerry Brown is incredibly anti-union. So you had a whole generation of Democrats coming up in the 70s and 80s at the same time that these manufacturing jobs are disappearing.

They're actually fine with basically gutting the labor movement. And what that did is Was to undermine the tight connections between large swaths of the American working class, the labor movement and the Democratic party, the kind of thing that had been tied in by people like Walter Reuther, people like Sidney Hillman, but also by politicians, but people like, FDR, of course, but even the Harry Truman, who was not explosively pro union or anything, but understood coalitional politics. So that's just totally gone. But you also have the other kinds of social organizations that were big through much of the 20th century that tie people together, and they're also gone. I mean, you have these, like, Americans, and I'm hardly the first person to make this point. I mean, the sociologist Robert Putman famously wrote about this [00:13:00] in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone.

But Americans are incredibly atomized, and we don't get together to talk about things, talk about politics, talk about life. We're in our tiny little communities and these communities don't really meet. so you have what that ends up leading to is in part this incredibly fractured kind of media environment that Democrats have not understood and have not been able to make any connections with well Also just really having no ideas about how to engage voters or just engage even base democrats on a Day to day month to month kind of basis and I think we suffer for that, right?

We suffer for not having something that we can actually go out and do on a daily or monthly basis, other than like register people to vote and the kind of same old, but actually building community and pride as democrat this really is totally gone in much of this country now.

The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party

SHEFFIELD: It is. And it's, and it's not just about, community, although that's obviously very important, but it's also about understanding why we're doing this like [00:14:00] the sense of a collective story.

And I think it's illustrative to look at because as you said, the unions were the local roots for the Democratic Party, democratic activism historically. But that wasn't true in black American communities and where that was what it was for them was the black church. That was the community epicenter.

And it's notable that when you look at black voter demographics in every single poll that's out there, it's always the younger ones who were less identified with the Democratic Party, and that's because they're less likely to go to church. And that held true in this past election that we had where the older black voters were, extremely pro-Democratic. And black women were one of the few demographic groups that voted more for the Democrats versus in 2020 and a higher percentage.

And so, and it was because they have, there are places to give them a shared story and understand [00:15:00] this is the point of what we're doing. This isn't just. An idle exercise. This isn't just fun and games or just something to do. It actually is meaningful what we're doing here, and you have a place in, it

And we don't have that

LOOMIS: That's such an important point, a very important point. And the decline of the white liberal or the white mainline Protestant church has been a very big part of this, right? Because that was another place in which people got together. I mean, just let me tell you a personal story.

I mean, so, I'm from, The town of Springfield, Oregon. And a far-right group called the Oregon Citizens Alliance targeted my town to pass an anti-gay hate ordinance. And it passed in that town. And it went on, that group went on to attempt to pass several statewide ordinances in Oregon and were defeated. And it was a very traumatic thing. I was a senior in high school, so it was like my friends were going out and like, we hate gays. And I was like, what are you talking about? Who cares? I just didn't really get it, right? And I wasn't even particularly political, but the reason I tell this story is that, we came out of [00:16:00] a Lutheran family we're not overtly liberal or anything like that on a general basis, but like the pastor of the church was like very active in pushing back against these evangelicals who were pushing this anti-gay hate, right.

And this was the kind of leadership. you've got for mainline Protestant churches and members of those churches who in those spaces. Could potentially have uncomfortable conversations about social change, right? Or rally around candidates, rally around a vision of economics that was more shared, rather than this, New Gilded Age plutocracy that we see that the Evangelical Church is pushing. another area in which it's totally got the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, The Congregationalists, their numbers have just totally cratered. we've lost that space as well, and you are now beginning to see that in the Black community as well. This nation is more atheist [00:17:00] h than it's ever been in its history. And while some people might think that could lead to more progressive politics, it in fact has the opposite the opposite impact.

SHEFFIELD: So for communities that had benefited from government action, they had a place to understand how that happened, like the core problem of governance is that you don't want to think about it.

People, the whole point of having a government is that it works, and you don't have to worry about it. And the Republican Party, because of this, Ayn Rand market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism. declared war on modernity and on functioning government, beginning with Bering Old Water.

And Ronald Reagan made that very explicit. And so the goal was to make government as bad for everyone else as they saw it as this noxious, horrible influence on society. [00:18:00] And so they've been, running around constantly tearing everything down and it worked, we're at this position now where we have fewer federal employees as a percentage of the GDP, than in decades.

And then Elon Musk is talking about, he's going to cut 75 percent of them which would do almost nothing in terms of the federal budget. But this is their ideology. And these are complicated things to understand if you don't really pay attention to politics. As a person, it's not your hobby or it's not your job, whatever it is, it's if you're not that, and because we're a minority, I think that's something that people who have, progressive or democratic commitments always forget is that most people don't care or understand, and they're not going to, so you have to do something about that, you have to play with that in mind.

LOOMIS: I mean, that's right, right? I mean, I think, I mean, I write for the block lawyers because of money and it has a lot of commenters and they tend to be like very much, pretty well educated white kind of base [00:19:00] Democrat types and they, like we all do, right, exist in these kind of tiny self, self-reinforcing communities.

And they were so determined that Harris was going to win. So determined that abortion was going to take the woman over the top that women were going to, once, women were going to lead. A democratic for a democratic victory. And of course, Trump won white women for the third election in a row. And so it's very easy for people who are deeply engaged in this stuff to convince themselves of that, that other people are too, and they're simply not, and if you go back to the thirties through the seventies, I mean, one of the things that you saw in that time was not so much a deep understanding of policy, right?

Like the unions would certainly provide some of that. And there were also things like democratic clubs, which I actually think would be great. Like, why don't Democrats start democratic bars, right? An actual bar that was for Democrats explicitly. And like, you could, other people could come in, but it's a [00:20:00] democratic space. And like there's good beer or whatever. And, again, these kind of like, what would a modern social function be that could replicate some of these club-type things that would help with this stuff. But the point is this honest, if people understood like the creation of HUD or something under, whenever that was, Kennedy or Johnson or whatever it was, but it was the understanding. That there was a person in the White House who was going to work for you, right? And so, everyday people would have pictures of FDR on their wall, like next to the Jesus picture. Or, even if, certainly for Catholics, Kennedy. And like, it meant something more than just a politician being elected.

It was somebody Who ultimately believed was working out, was looking out for your interests. and that alone, and I think that developed through those kind of institutions and that share understanding that you might not, understand what's going on in Washington per se. [00:21:00] And, everybody always thinks You know, the bozos in Washington are doing X, Y, and Z and whatever, but that person was looking out for you and that person was connected to a democratic party that you were pretty likely to vote for at least most of the time. And that was strong enough its policy positions even when you might vote for a Republican, like in the Eisenhower era, as an example, or even to an extent the Nixon era, what you were actually voting for was somebody who was going to hold up most of that state. You might not understand, but you knew it was going to work for you because the political cost of doing so was going to be too toxic and Reagan is ultimately the moment in which that transforms and a lot of that has to do with civil rights and race.

And, we can get into that if we want to, but that we've lost that ability and it's really critical to gain that back because sending a bunch of text messages a month before the election about, this candidate is one point behind this other candidate give, a hundred dollars is clearly not working.

SHEFFIELD: [00:22:00] Yeah, no, it isn't. Well, so I mean, you're a labor historian. So, but let's maybe circle back to that aspect of this here. So, a lot of people have remarked how labor unions have declined in this country. Tell, tell my audience why you think that happened. I mean, obviously there's a lot of reasons for that.

And did they, were people in the labor union leadership? Did they really try to do anything about this while it was happening? I don't know if they did that much, did they?

LOOMIS: Well, it's complicated. I mean, the short version of the decline of the labor movement is a combination of about four factors, right? One is that a lot of the jobs simply disappeared, right? They went to Mexico. They went, then they went to Asia and to China, part of globalization, which is something that was pushed by both political parties. The second was automation so you have this like peak of the labor movement in the 50s. But even by this, even before the jobs really started disappearing in the mid-60s automation and technological change was taking thousands and thousands of jobs in fact, in industries every single [00:23:00] year. And so you had that kind of decline. Third certainly was the end of the organizing era, right? The labor movement itself dropped the ball it effectively stopped organizing after The leftists were thrown out of the movement in the late 1940s, early 1950s. You had a movement that was pretty fat and happy, a movement that believed it had it had a permanent partnership with the Democratic Party and a lot of influence within the Republican Party. And when that was proven to be untrue, it really did not have the ability, wherewithal, or even the skills and energy at that point. To really do very much about it. There's other critiques that can make the labor movement as well I mean, I think those three are the biggest things but then also a kind of again, a political transformation in this country that really, comes out of the 1960s, is a bigger, more of an existential crisis, I think, than we give it credit for, which is the rise of this very [00:24:00] extreme atomized individualism that was, yes, the Randianism of the far right is a big part of that, but the counterculture absolutely 100 percent embraced that as well. That the man the union became part of the man in the 60s and was part of the problem And so, I as an individual I’m going to withdraw from society I'm going to go out on my own I’m going to do what You know, join a commune for a while or whatever I'm going to do, but it became even on the left among Democrats is extremely individualistic ideas about politics.

And that's still tremendously influential today. And that is across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right. We conceptualize ourselves as incredibly empowered individuals and parties need to appeal to me and my personal beliefs, as opposed to me needing to make broader connections with others around a complexity of issues [00:25:00] that may or may not completely reflect my politics, but that engage in an idea of solidarity. And solidarity is transformed from we help each other to You need to help me around my issue without any say obligation from me going back to you on your issue and that's really the opposite of What's the development of solidarity look like out of labor movement of late 19th century?

SHEFFIELD: well, and it's interesting because in the Republican Party, they developed an inverse of this concept, which they called fusionism, which was this idea that, you know, if you were somebody who was interested in Christian supremacism, or you were interested in, aggressive foreign policy, or you were interested in business, giving the oligarchs whatever they want.

Yeah. You needed to understand that you have to support the candidates with these other two issues. And you may not like them, but you need to keep your mouth shut [00:26:00] and not criticize them. At the very least, that's what you have to do. And that powered the Republican Party through Ronald Reagan.

Like that was the difference-maker between the complete disaster of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan's 1980 win was that, that they had that sense And they really did explain this. Like if you talk to anyone of who's, who is a who is, or was a Republican, who's let's say 50 and older today, they all have this knowledge of the three legs of the Republican stool.

They all say it, you tune into talk radio, all the hosts, they all say it. All the callers say it if they're old enough. This is this shared story that they have. And now, they've updated it post-cold war to be, more about, well, we're against the deep state. That's what we're, that's what we're against.

And that's now the shared narrative for the right. And it's to what you said, this idea of ignorant [00:27:00] anarchism, which in many ways calls itself leftist, but in, in operations actually ends up becoming right wing and Bobby Kennedy is probably the best-case example of that.

LOOMIS: that's a great point. And I think you're absolutely right about the Republican Party. Whereas Democrats will say, and this is especially true on the left, that candidate has to earn my vote. Well, why? Right? What is your obligation to the rest of the country? And people really don't like to have to be asked that question.

They, there's a, that leads to a lot of resentment I found. And it really goes back to a kind of lost idea of what solidarity really means. Like, yes you, you know what every candidate is the lesser of two evils, or perhaps the greater of two evils in given cases. That's the way the world works.

Like, I'm sorry. That's the actual reality

SHEFFIELD: That's always how it's been. Yeah.

LOOMIS: of politics, that's the reality of how things are always going to be and the just like stubborn unwillingness of people on the [00:28:00] left who call themselves leftist to just shrug their shoulders about that fact. Go out and do the right thing and understand that if you win, you have a stake in that broader coalition. And if you lose, you have nothing but your own self regard. And to make that choice about having some power in a coalition it's a real problem on the left. And I think that, going all, I mean, like, look, was I, a personal level, was I happy to be voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016? No, I was not.

Right. So I hate Phil Clinton. Hillary is no better, but you do what you have to do because of this is the nation, which we have. It may not be the nation we want to have, but it's the one we got and we see, and we saw the we saw some of the some of the consequences of that.

And yet there's a real unwillingness to learn. So it's very difficult to come up with collective solutions. When people talk a game about collectivism, but in fact act as incredibly empowered [00:29:00] individualists

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely.

Why reproductive freedom didn't save Democrats in 2024

SHEFFIELD: And to circle back to another issue that you mentioned earlier the, there was this very widespread hope that the end of Roe versus Wade was going to activate millions of American women. And what people missed and didn't understand is that basically what, because Democrats had become the party of the educated class.

Those are the people who vote in off your elections more. And that was the reason why Republicans got hurt so badly in 2018. And in 2022, it was because the high propensity voters, that's, those are, like when you, when, and people we've talked on this show and you've written about, like the people who pay attention to the news the most.

They vote Democrats for Democrats now. And the ones who don't pay attention at all, they vote for Republicans. So that's what happened with the [00:30:00] the midterm elections. And I remember saying this a couple of times and people got very offended that I would dare to suggest that that was really what was going on because, when you and then when you look at the numbers it is, it was true that for Gen Z women, who are directly, I'm impacted by these horrible laws that Republicans are pushing through in their states and are killing You know young women that's predominantly who's being you know made worse impacted by these things they did have made a very sharp turn to become much more democratic than any other generation but for gen x women and women out, older than that there is this natural human myopia to think, well, if it doesn't impact me personally, then I don't care about it.

It doesn't matter. And so a lot of women, who are, for whatever reason, not having children at that stage in their life. That was, they thought, well, Hey if they did, if Trump's, he turned it over to the state, so [00:31:00] we can just vote for him anyway, it's safe to vote for him.

And even if we had a bad law, it wouldn't affect me. So who cares?

LOOMIS: And look we've seen this for years and years with the minimum wage Where you have voters on ballot measures overwhelmingly support, rise to the minimum wage.

And then we'll vote in Republicans in places like South Dakota and Nebraska who are outright opposed to even the sheer existence of the minimum wage. And we're like, we'll vote to, we'll vote at the state legislative level to overturn that ballot measure, but they don't, they just don't make those connections.

And I think that what I've seen a lot of the people who comment on the site is a kind of wake up after November 6 to just what this nation is. who these voters are but the response is these people are morons and Screw them like they deserve what they get I’m out. These people are too dumb for me to deal with and I guess I understand a kind of immediate post [00:32:00] election outrage But boy, that's not going to be very helpful in trying to save people's lives keep unions legal, keep abortion legal, or anything else that these, liberals in this case claim to believe it, right?

I mean, you simply have to find ways to connect with these voters. And again, what the Democratic Party has done, and what that entire kind of infrastructure of Democratic leadership, has pushed forward over these last several elections again. It's just not working, right? And so we have to figure out ways to engage those voters in some kind of way.

I mean, even if we fail to do so, I'm not going to sit here and claim I have all the right ideas because I don't know. I do know.

The rise of AOC-Trump voters

LOOMIS: That what is we have right now is not working and we need to new deal style in a sense, right? We're in the early new deal. FDR didn't know if any of these programs were going to work, but a lot of them didn't, right?

And he would just like, okay, well, we'll try something else. That's kind of what we need to be thinking about in terms of what it means to be a Democrat in 2025.

SHEFFIELD: yeah [00:33:00] absolutely. And there also is this very common use of the phrase, f**k around and find out now where people, they think that the voters are going to, they're going to learn that Republicans are bad based on bad policies. And you know what? I don't think they're going to, because they, because Republicans basically Their entire goal is to break the government.

So in a sense, making government not work, making it non functional, that is what they voted for. And the people who voted for Trump, they think the system is horrible. Like, they want to just, So like, they don't want to f**k around and find out. They want to f**k it off. They want to blow it up.

And they have this, it, and it is a very naive nihilism, but that's basically what the Republican party has done is that they've taken their own, religious nihilism because now it's not possible. And I say this as a [00:34:00] former Mormon fundamentalist that, when I was a Mormon fundamentalist, I truly did believe that Native Americans were ancient Jews.

I really believed that, even though I knew that I couldn't prove that. I knew I couldn't prove it, and it made me angry at society because they rejected what I believed was the truth. And so, Republicans have been, the hardcore base activist. That's what they've been doing is to try to weaponize and instill nihilism in everyone else.

And it's working to a large degree.

LOOMIS: what Democrats have to do is to quit pretending like the system is working, right, and to quit defending the system.

And instead simply accept what voters are telling them, that to them the system is not working, and then figure out ways to engage them in drastic change. I mean, I, what I thought, a moment I thought was very interesting, after the election is when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, actually reached out to voters in her district, which [00:35:00] went, way toward Trump.

I mean, one of the most, biggest swings for Republicans in the entire country was that district. And she's like, who are the AOC Trump voters? Right. And. And they were probably open about it, right? Both AOC and Trump meant change, meant who stood up to the system, stood up to the b******t and said it was b******t and that's who I want.

And they're not thinking very much deeper than that. Well, there's an opportunity there. Right. There's an opportunity there to, for Democrats to move away from defending the system that is a system, as a nation dominated by billionaires, a nation in which it's feels like, regardless of the Republicans are responsible for this or not, and of course they are, the government's not working for them. There's an opportunity to create a kind of politics out of that is a Ocasio Cortez type of politics where you really do say [00:36:00] 'this system is totally broken and we are going to revolutionize or remake the system' and to channel that anger and channel that energy in a more productive way than Donald Trump's like, let's kill all the trans people.

Biden's communication failures made it so no one knew about his policies

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, that is essentially what he's saying to people is, Everything is horrible. So let's just tear it down and let my billionaire buddies privatize everything. And, the average voter, they didn't pay, they didn't pay attention to that latter part because Trump didn't actually say that.

But that is what he's going to do. And, and there's a, I mean, it's just incredibly clear in that regard. And There is a certain irony in the fact that you're a university professor and we're talking about this also, but like, the educational system for America.

So like Joe Biden, he did he took a step in, in acknowledging that a lot of people were basically conned into paying [00:37:00] for college degrees that got them nothing and now they just nothing but debt and they're carrying it around like a millstone for the rest of their life or a ball and chain.

But he didn't say what they were feeling. He just said, well, I'm going to try to help you with this debt. And he didn't say why. And like, that's, I think, that, that is the core problem of the Biden administration is that, that they had the right ideas on a lot of policies, Lena Khan and, a lot of the FTC stuff and some great regulations out of the FCC and, other regulatory bodies and, prescription drug negotiating authority.

And I mean, they let Joe Manchin and the Senate parliamentarian boss them around on other stuff, but overall it was. He made a lot of the right policy choices, but he never explained to the public, this is why we're doing it. And I'm doing it for you.

LOOMIS: If the public tells you. That eggs are too expensive, then they're too expensive, right? It doesn't matter why.

SHEFFIELD: [00:38:00] Yeah.

LOOMIS: matter. You as a political leader. to be able to take that or to take that anger and articulate that in a way that makes you and your party and your policies look like the only solution and just, I mean, Biden, yes, absolutely. But Harris is really no better. It is a real failure doing that and acknowledging the anger saying I too am angry. And taking actions that show that you're in that you respect that anger and you're going to do something about it. And people respond to that, to their anger being validated.

I mean, if there's one thing that Donald Trump demonstrates is that people respond to their anger being validated and Donald Trump does a hell of a job of doing that. I believe Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid human being, but he has this innate ability to channel people's anger and hatred and Democrats actually have to do that too, right?

If you can't say yes, this higher education system is a disaster. And it's horrible that you have this [00:39:00] debt and we're going to, we're going to do whatever we can to make sure that future generations don't have that or that, the price of eggs is outrageous or that healthcare systems are, incredibly, Toxic and are killing people.

I mean, we recorded this day after the killing of that, United healthcare CEO. And it's like the kind of visceral response that is among people who just generally loathe the American healthcare system. Why are Democrats not taking advantage of that hatred? And like, I know that liberal based liberals hate the idea that, well, I should even use the word hate here.

They disdain the idea of that kind of emotionalist politics. But I don't really see how you fight the growth of American fascism without recognizing that the majority of this country thinks this nation is pretty broken. And have that and require an emotionalist response in order to gain their support in their votes.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. You need to [00:40:00] understand that, while it is, I mean, basically the system is now effectively rigged against people who don't have a postgraduate degree. That's essentially what it is like you can get a job, but it's going to be 40, 000 a year and that's it You won't have any choice You'd like you can't afford to live in some of the more expensive areas of the country in part because they don't have you know They won't build new housing, and that's another kind of residual It like the NIMBY coalition is this Weird bipartisan happening where you've got, older Democrats who use fake environmental objections when really they have the same concerns of, well, I don't want these poor people moving into my neighborhood.

LOOMIS: the housing

SHEFFIELD: don't want that the wrong kind of people.

LOOMIS: The housing issue and the nimbyism is a perfect example of this extreme individualism that I talk about, right? Like, [00:41:00] like,

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah.

LOOMIS: people who moved 1968. Bought a house in the mid 70s and like we're still in the house and are determined that nothing's ever going to change Ever and they don't really care what the consequences that are because their house is worth You know some ungodly amount of money and that's all that's all that matters to them.

I mean You know and you know So now everybody hates California is moving away and they're moving to Texas in part because of resentments around that Because you can build cheaply in Texas

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And people have the right to be angry about that. Like this. And the terrible irony of these NIMBY policies is that they have cost the Democrats the House of Representatives, because of population loss in blue areas, because people can't afford to live there and they want to.

LOOMIS: California is projected to lose I believe four seats in the 2030

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LOOMIS: I mean, that's incredible. All of them are going to go to Texas and Florida.

Operationally, Democrats are more conservative than Republicans

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, [00:42:00] and as a former Republican, political activist and media consultant. It is, it just been, it's always stunning to me how conservative that Democrats are and how they do things and how Democrats are far more capitalistic than Republicans are.

Republicans are communalists. They are constantly lifting people up. So like, on, in the Fox news, they will reach down to the most anonymous Twitter poster that they can find and put them on their show. Whereas, if you're the host of a popular left wing podcast or something, They, they don't give a s**t who you are and or you're a popular left wing writer.

They're not they're only going to promote people who are their friends. And this is not a movement mentality and that's why the right is having these wins because they understand that you have like, that solidarity isn't just about the issues. It's about how you treat each [00:43:00] other.

LOOMIS: And I think, I mean, frankly, I think that there's a lot of Democratic leadership types are actually pretty fine with Republican economic policies, right? Like they want lower taxes too. Like they, it doesn't actually hurt them that much as Donald Trump's president. I think that this is this is part of the issue.

I mean, the, it's a bunch of very wealthy Beltway people who control the democratic party. And it's a very, it's, again, it's very insular. I mean, this sort of like. Attempts by certain members of it within the party. Like let's resurrect Rahm Emanuel. It's like, what are we doing here? Like, how was that? What on earth response is that going to be to Donald Trump to resurrect the career of Rahm Emanuel and put it back in charge of the Democratic party it's amazing. But I think a lot of it has to do with if there's one, if there's one group in this country that actually recognizes that's class interests, it's the rich that includes rich Democrats.

SHEFFIELD: It does. Yeah. And there, there is, I mean, essentially neo liberalism is what has sometimes been referred to as [00:44:00] high tax liberalism. That's all it is. That, it's about, it's fine with deregulation. It's fine with centralization of power. It's fine with redistribution of wealth to the upper class.

But with just, a little bit more taxes off the top. That's it. Everything else is the same

LOOMIS: Right, right,

SHEFFIELD: and

That's not going to work.

LOOMIS: and a kind of a social liberalism that, that

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LOOMIS: well with that, right? Like a very, maybe a robust support of say gay rights or abortion rights. Yeah. But, but of that threatens the class interests of the people who are benefiting from these neoliberal policies.

And I mean, I think that in, in no small part, part of what we're dealing with right now is. basically the impact of the neo liberal emptying out of the American working class, right? I mean, well,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah.

LOOMIS: and Clinton and Obama explicitly pushed forward policies that undermine the American working class.

So why would American workers support These people who, the [00:45:00] republicans might not do anything for them economically either, but at least they channel their anchors and fears about other things, right? I mean, what did Barack Obama do for the United auto workers?

Right. He forced them to take a horrible deal when he preserved the when he bailed out the auto industry in 2009, right? Like why would, it's very hard to get UAW members to. Be like big time supporters of Democrats because they remember what Barack Obama did for them.

And it's true of Clinton. It's true of Carter. I mean, this is, we have to rebuild a lot that these Democrats,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LOOMIS: Tore down as well as Republicans tearing it down too. But we expect the Republicans to do this. We shouldn't expect it from our own party.

Economic and social justice need each other to succeed

SHEFFIELD: And here's the other perverse irony is that. They broke the connection between economic and social justice because those two things actually require each other to be protected. And this is something that a lot of them who want these more conservative economic policies that they tell people, well, we can't [00:46:00] have gay rights if we don't, give the Republicans what they want on taxes. But that's not true actually. And what we're seeing with the hollowing out of the class sort of ethic in the Democratic party is it's made the social gains vulnerable. Because now, now, so now Republicans are talking about repealing same sex marriage.

Now we're seeing them, literally banning the teaching of about institutional racism or the history of race, or, talking about gender discrimination and like all of these things that the, you That they did, they stuck their necks out to some degree. I mean, Joe Biden, certainly famously did support same sex marriage before any other major democratic politician did, but all of these gains, they don't mean anything because without that shared sense of everyone should have a [00:47:00] shot, then no one gets a shot except for the people with the money.

LOOMIS: I mean, I think it's really important for people to understand you can't engage, you can't protect people and you can't push forward people's rights if you can't win an election. You have to be able to win. You have to figure out what it takes to win those elections and to build that kind of broad based. broad based coalition that can fight against what Republicans are offering. If you can't do that, then all your policy stuff around trans rights and civil rights and gender issues, none of it's going to win. Like you're going to lose all of it. And that's what we're seeing right now, right?

Look, the white working class has always been vulnerable to racism. This goes back to the 19th century. It's a deep problem with American life and it's a reason why America does not have did not have the kind of radical labor that you saw in much of Europe, right? Because it was divided by race. It's always been an issue.

But what was the one organization that could temper some of [00:48:00] that? What's the one organization that existed in the United States that could convince whites: 'You actually do not have these racial interests, you need to unite across race around class interest?' And that was the labor movement, right.

So why would class Americans have always had a vulnerability to racism? This has been an issue going back to the, going really back to the Irish in the 1820s and 30s who began to embrace whiteness as a way to break into the American economy and American life.

So this has always been an issue. And it's part of the reason why Americans have, people often wonder, especially the left, why doesn't the U. S. not have the kind of the kind of radical working class that that has existed in Europe? And this is a big part of the reason why.

But the point is, even given that there's one institution in American history that's been able to take that anger of, or that, that racism that often existed in the white working class. And tell people, tell their members, look, this is wrong. This is bad. And you're hurting yourself. You need to unite around the issue of class [00:49:00] and go and vote for the party.

That's going to push for the benefit of all workers. And that has been somewhat effective, right? The difference between, and it still is today, right? Union members still vote for Democrats today at very consistent levels, right? Union, Kamala Harris, one union members. The difference is that today, 10 percent of American workers are union, whereas, half a century or more ago, it was 35 or even 40 percent of American workers.

And that's millions of voters right there.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And yeah, no, and I think that's a very important point because Republicans have been at great pains to try to portray themselves as a working class party. They're just constantly flooding. The internet with that type of messaging. And, it's not true based on the policies that they implement.

And, you look at who the people that are the supposed tribunes of the working class, whether it's Donald Trump, who is a billionaire, who is paying taxes. greatest policy achievement was a tax cut for [00:50:00] billionaires. It's Josh Hawley, who is a wholly owned subsidiary, a subsidiary of Charles Koch.

And all these fake populist people out there who implement policies that are nothing, any more different, any really different from the people that were there before.

LOOMIS: Well, I mean, I think for when you lose the ability and Democrats have done this, when you even Biden would get a very pro union president in his heart. When you lose the ability to channel economic anger, And to talk the language of economic anger, what you do is you open up the, you open the door to cultural anger and Republicans are very good at cultural anger, right?

I mean, take all the WWE stuff or the UFC stuff that has been, that has is this like extremely masculine kind of cultures that may not really be working class, but certainly. Certainly plays working class and really make them their own Democrats again have totally lost the ability to grab on to [00:51:00] any kind of actual working class cultural identity and make it their own, right?

Where is the working class cultural identity in this country that is explicitly connected to some form of liberalism? I mean, other than the union itself, it doesn't exist. Donald Trump is a master of this.

SHEFFIELD: The other thing is that I think Democrats, Democratic operatives They had the assumption that Donald Trump was a weak candidate, but in fact, Donald Trump is a very strong Republican candidate, probably the strongest, well, I mean, objectively, he is the strongest Republican that they have had since, since Ronald Reagan, I mean, he got.

He got the job done for them. And in a way that George W. Bush even could not do, even though he won reelection, the, he has real loyalty to himself and his brand and Democrats, they have consistently under us, look, I mean, the reality is Donald Trump is not a particularly intelligent person.

He, his brain is [00:52:00] clearly in cognitive decline. But nonetheless, he has that salesman approach and he listens to the customer, maybe not to give them what they want, but at least to tell them what they want and to tell them that he's listening.

Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win

LOOMIS: Yeah, I mean, that's the lesson Democrats need to take care of, right? You, having a candidate who could articulate a policy is not going to win. Nobody cares. Having a candidate that can articulate your hopes, your dreams, your fears, or your hatreds, that's a win. That's a much more winning approach, right?

And they'd better learn that, right? Some, I don't know, like. The conditions in 2028 are likely to be different, right? So maybe a Josh Shapiro Gretchen Whitmer, some of these people on a fairly deep Democratic bench could win, but if they are going up against somebody, presumably not Donald Trump, but who can continue to channel the kind of Trumpian resentment.

There's a very good chance that while we may think that these people are clowns, that they are in [00:53:00] fact incredibly strong candidates because the everyday low information voter sees them as articulating their again, hopes, dreams, fears, and or hatreds. And if Democrats don't learn that. Then it's going to be very difficult for them to tap into what is a very clear desire for a populist politics in this country.

And populism could go either way, right? Populism can be incredibly reactionary as in Trumpian populism, or it can be channeled for a progressive, for progressive aims as it was in the 1930s. Democrats have to figure out how to manage that. And if they don't, then people that we might think are idiots and clowns, like anybody who's been appointed into the Trump administration, like one of them is probably going to be the candidate in 2028, whether it's a Vance, or another candidate, or Laura Trump, I mean, or Dana White, the head of UFC, like maybe a perfect Republican candidate.

Democrats better figure this out.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And the [00:54:00] cultural politics, it works. Because people, it's easy to make a scapegoat and so like transgender Americans have been, people have been trying to claim that, oh, well, Trump won the election because of fear about transgender people.

And that's probably not true, but it is true that those fears, really were helpful to him. And but so there, there was a poll that was done by you gov. a couple of years ago that asked people, well, so what percentage of Americans do you think are, in various minority groups?

And they asked people, so what percentage of Americans are gay or lesbian? And people said 30%. of Americans were gay or lesbian. And they said that 30 percent of Americans live in New York city or and 30 percent were Jewish and 33 percent were atheists. And then when, if you look at our transgender population, People said 21 percent of Americans are [00:55:00] transgender.

So when Donald Trump is talking about, the evil trans women are going to come in your daughter's bathroom. If you think there's 21 percent of Americans are transgender, like that's, this is behind the fear that these Republicans are using and leveraging. And, the only, the problem is though, you can't you can't remove an idea from people's mind. All you can do is put another one in. You can't fact check your way out of fascism, but what you can do is teach people something different and something better.

LOOMIS: That's a really great way to put it. I mean, Democrats have to figure out who they're going to hate, frankly. And unfortunately because of the ways in which the donor class works Democrats are reluctant to engage in a board over class warfare. I mean, because ultimately what you need is you do need an enemy, right?

People respond to that. And it doesn't mean the enemy needs to be beaten [00:56:00] or killed or have some violence placed on them, the kind of ways in which Republicans talk about. But you need to have somebody to target. Frankly, I mean, FDR

SHEFFIELD: Well, you need to give them an explanation. That's what you need.

LOOMIS: I mean, FDR was

SHEFFIELD: Who did this to you?

LOOMIS: Yeah, right. FDR was perfect about this. It was the corporations. Even though FDR was a super rich guy who had tons of corporate people in his White House, right, who was incredibly pro monopoly, right? I mean, like, FDR's actual

policies were not some kind of crazy populism.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, was how he put it. Malefactors of great wealth. And that was a phrase he used over and over in variations of that. And it worked. And Republicans basically have, to go back to what I was saying they've created the enemy now, which is the deep state and of course the deep state, they never define what that is or what that even means or who's in it or what it does.

They don't have to do any of that stuff. All they tell people is, there's this, group of people that are highly educated, that are non [00:57:00] religious, and they like gay and trans people, and they're out to get you. And we're going to stop them from hurting you. And look, and it's laughable, and it's offensive, but it's effective.

LOOMIS: Well, yeah. And again, Democrats have to figure out how to create effective messaging. I mean, to be honest, like, how do and probably the target needs to be billionaires, right? I mean, like, like there are a group of people out there who are making your lives worse, right? These are billionaires and Donald Trump is the epitome of that, right? Musk and all these other people who are bringing into the administration.

The next four years are going to be billionaires ruling us in ways that are going to hurt a whole lot of people How do you create the messaging to target those people as in fact evil, right as malefactors as FDR said. And that has to be a piece of it, right because again the core issue of organizing and this is And political campaigns are not organizing.

It's [00:58:00] not the same thing. And it's one of the problems the Democratic Party has is conflating those two things. But you have to, but the first rule of organizing is you have to meet people where they are at, not where you are at, where they are at. Democrats have lost that. We don't meet people where they're at.

We assume a set of beliefs. And then if other people aren't part of that or whatever or reject that, then they're stupid or they're racist, or this kind of like these really broad claims that are being made about Trump voters. I mean, so sure. Some Trump voters are racist. I mean, yeah, tell me about it.

Right. But there's these masses of people who were disengaged, who were lightly engaged, who think Trump is funny. Right. Whatever it may be, you have to be able to reach out to those people. You have to meet the work they are at. And if you're not doing that, then you're not engaging in politics.

SHEFFIELD: You're not. And in, in a democratic political system. There will be either [00:59:00] economic populism or cultural populism. And if you don't understand that and you reject that, then you're going to lose. Like it's just that simple. And Trump and Republicans have, there's this entire industry now just kind of bemoaning, Oh, the Republicans vote against their self interest.

And they think that the government doesn't have their interest at all in mind. So they, their economic interests, they don't, they think the whole system is rigged. So that argument is meaningless to them. And so it, because they think that, and it's the same thing true on race, like there was this idea that caught on among a lot of Democrats that, demographics are destiny.

That is what they thought, that black people would always be Democrats, that Hispanic people would always be Democrats, and it's the exact same mistake that they made with blue collar white people. Because what made these [01:00:00] people Democrats was a shared story, was institutions, was a communal memory of who fucked them over and how they stopped it.

LOOMIS: And it shouldn't have taken more than a cursory look at American history to know that these Democrat demographics is destiny line was not going to work out like it's never worked out that way. I'm sorry. Like, like that's what this is. What American history is for is to provide us some lessons about what has worked and what has not worked in the past. Right? About trend history never repeats itself. Right. Don't never say it to a historian, but there are trends in American culture or trends in any nation's culture that we can learn from and try to like make adjustments for. And that's certainly one of them. Like demographics is never destiny.

People aren't going to do what you tell them to do based on a particular set of characteristics that you're giving them, we all know those characteristics are malleable anyway, and we all know that, like, there's an entire field of whiteness studies that demonstrate that, like, what means, what it means to be white changes all the time.

And of course, it's continuing to [01:01:00] change and bringing in all kinds of Latin Americans who are absolutely identifying with white power at this point. And so again the way to manage that is to actually engage in actual populist politics and actually reach out and engage people on the ground where they're at creating institutions, creating reasons for them to be Democrats, to be proud, to be Democrats, to go in streets as Democrats, to and to believe the democratic party is actually going to work for them in a very real way, as opposed to this, like, Oh, we're going to, We're going to engage in a like a slight change to the earned income tax credit, and that's really going to motivate voters.

Like, what are you talking?

SHEFFIELD: No, it isn't. And yeah, and it has, there is this, there's this temptation to think that, well, it's just this one thing. And if we just do this one thing different than we would win. No, it, that's not how it works. Politics is about what you say, how you say it, what you do and how you listen. And if you're not doing all those four [01:02:00] things, then you're going to lose.

It's that simple.

LOOMIS: Yep. Yep. I couldn't agree more.

Conclusion and final thoughts

SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, is there anything you feel like on the subject here that we need to hit on, or do you think

LOOMIS: I think we've covered everything we've covered. I mean, there's always more, but we've covered it pretty heavily. So I think this is if people are listening to 80 minutes of this, God bless them.

SHEFFIELD: Well, hopefully they are. So, and yeah, I know I thought it was a great discussion here. So for people who want to keep up with the stuff you're doing, tell us about your books and social media and websites and

LOOMIS: So, I have a bunch of a few books. And the one that's probably the most well known is called the history of America in 10 strikes. Came out with the new press back in 2018. I have a new book coming out this spring called organizing America 20 stories from our radical past. That the new press is also publishing that will be 20, 20 short biographies of Americans who made change, which I think is really valuable right now in an era where so many liberals feel hopeless.

I'm also very active. I was on Twitter X like everybody else, but [01:03:00] I have made that switch to blue sky. And it's Eric Lubas at blue sky dot social. And you can follow me there. I have daily labor history threads and I write almost every day at the website, lawyers, guns, and money.

SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. Yeah, I think that book, as you said, is going to be a really important one. So I encourage everybody to check that out. All right. Thanks for being here.

LOOMIS: Yep. You bet. Hey, thank you so much for having me.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion.

And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show with the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks especially to everybody who is a paid subscribing member of the show. You are making this possible. Thank you very much for your support. And if you can't afford to subscribe on Patreon or on Substack right now, we do have free options as well, if you want to keep tabs on the show that way. And I encourage everybody to visit Flux.community as well. Thanks very much for your support and I'll see you next time.

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