Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…Biden picks Harris for different reasons. My view at that time was I was sort of a Tammy Duckworth person and thought he should have picked Tammy Duckworth. But there were different people out there. And then the kind of moment that Harris was running in just sort of dissipates. First, she has a particular background from California where she’s tough on crime. Her book is called Smart on Crime Prosecutor. But she runs in the Democratic Party at time when it’s turned on that kind of politics. People want a lot from her personally, but they don’t want a sort of prosecutorial character. So, she sort of abandons that and never I think really finds another political identity, certainly before she begins running in 2024. That works. But she’s a talented debater. She’s a very talented performer on the stump, but she doesn’t really have a theory of politics and policy that she’s identified with. But she’s a way for Biden to signal that he understands that him being in 2020, a 78-year-old white guy, he understands the future is not him, or at least not just him. And he’s sort of trying to make a coalitional pick that speaks to his own potential weaknesses. I think by 2024, you have two problems. He only steps down, what is it, June? They’re weeks from the DNC. They don’t have time anymore for an open convention. You know how the Biden position is very unpopular for a number of reasons, but particularly inflation and cost of living. So, now you have Kamala Harris running with a sort of anvil of being associated. It’s a Biden-Harris administration. She doesn’t really have a lane on cost of living. It’s not something she’s known for working on in the Senate. It’s not something she has a bunch of great ideas about. It’s not something she could write a talking about. It’s probably not the candidate you would pick for a cost of living election. And she’s had no time to build that out. Maybe if she had been running in a primary for a year and a half, having to fend off Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg and whomever else, she either would’ve figured out how to do it. Primaries or periods of education and learning for the candidates too, or they would’ve found somebody else who could do it. But she doesn’t get any of that. She’s thrown into the game with three months to go. So, they picked the candidate in 2020 who won. Whether you think Biden’s inspiring or not, he was a reasonable pick for that moment. He should have never run for a second term, and he sort of implied to a lot of people that he wouldn’t. And then the handover to Harris was a very difficult handover to a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We’ll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe. a candidate who didn’t go through any kind of selection process for the moment in which he was running. We’ll see what they do in 2028, but the consequences of what they did in 2024 have been severe. There’s two really big questions on the table that I think click together in an interesting way. You asked one, why did Trump win? And two, why do Democrats have this certain communication style that might make them less interested in coming onto an unstructured three-hour conversation with you? Let me try to tell a story that connects them. I think Trump’s victory in 2024 was over determined if there are a lot of factors here. Number one, if you look internationally, incumbents lost all over the world. They lost in the US, they lost in Europe, they lost in pretty much every developed country at rates that we really haven’t seen in 50 years. And that’s largely because the inflation crisis that came after COVID created an absolute disaster for incumbent establishment power. People couldn’t bring prices down. Voters were furious and they were destroying establishment orders all over the world. Democrats happened to be in power, and as a result, they got the brunt of it. That’s number one. Number two, if you look at elections over the 21st century, two things are true. One, almost every election is unbelievably close. For reasons that I’m not sure I entirely understand, the parties have gotten really good, historically, bizarrely good at getting each group to come to the polls with about 48% such that every election is a battle over the next 1.5%. And in a world like that, little thermostatic swings are very important. And what we’ve seen over the last few years, and there’s this theory about thermostatic public opinion in American politics, that says that what often happens in politics is one party has a very compelling message of change, they become the establishment and then they become the victims of exactly the weapon that they marshaled. That then the next out-group party says, “We have a theory of change and we’re going to throw out the bums.” And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose. pon that they marshaled. That then the next out-group party says, “We have a theory of change and we’re going to throw out the bums.” And the next party comes in and they overreach and then they lose. In a world where you have thermostatic change and every election is very close, you tend to have elections swinging back and forth. So, I think that also explains why Democrats and Republicans have struggled to hold onto power for six-year, eight-year, 12-year terms the same way they did say in the 1930s or 1960s. But finally, you have to look at what kind of character Donald Trump is and what kind of a media figure he is. We were just talking off camera about how every age of communications technology revolution clicks into focus a new skill that is suddenly in critical demand for the electorate. The world of radio technology is a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be powerful in a way that he can’t be in the 1890s. And then you have the 1950s. Dwight Eisenhower, 1956, I believe is the first televised national convention. Famously the 1960 presidential debates between JFK and Richard Nixon take an election that is leaning toward Nixon and make it an election that’s leaning toward JFK because he’s so damn handsome and also just electrically compelling on a screen. We have a new screened technology right now, which is not just television on steroids. It’s a different species entirely. And it seems to favor, it seems to provide value for individuals, influencers, and even celebrities and politicians who are good at something like live wire authenticity. They’re good at performing authenticity, as paradoxical as that sounds. Trump is an absolute marvel at performing authenticity even when the audience somehow acknowledges that he might be bullshitting. He’s just an amazing performer for this age. And it speaks to the fact that he seems to be, to borrow Ezra’s term, remarkably disinhibited in front of every single audience. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of background algorithm in his head calculating exactly how to craft these message to different audiences. He just seems to be like a live wire animal in front of every audience. And I think that compares very distinctly to the democratic character of bureaucratic caution in our age. And there is a really important distinction between this vibe of the Trumpian ruler and the vibe of the rule follower. And the vibe of the bureaucratic rule follower is a little bit afraid of unstructured conversation, is always performing the background algorithm of how do I communicate in a way that balances all of the coalitions on my side? Because if you look at the Democratic Party right now compared to the Republican Party, I mean in 2015, I think there were four political parties in America. There was MAGA, there was the Center Right, there was the Bernie Wing, and there was the Biden Clinton Obama wing. And what happened is that Trump killed and skinned the Center Right and is now wearing it as a hat.…

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