Why do so many influential voices spend their time policing the manners of the left while the right dismantles democracy? In this episode, Michael Hobbes — cohost of the much-celebrated “If Books Could Kill” podcast — joins me to discuss the “reactionary centrist,” a type of commentator who believes that both sides are to blame for everything and demonstrates this by spending every waking moment scolding Democrats.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Michael.
Michael Hobbes
David.
David Roberts
What do you know about reactionary centrism?
Michael Hobbes
All I know is that whatever it is, both sides are to blame for it.
David Roberts
Hello, everybody, this is Volts for January 30, 2026: “All about reactionary centrism.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
Hello there, Volts listeners. It’s me, Dave. I have a slightly longer than usual intro for this pod today because it’s something a little bit different. I just want to start by saying to my audience, this pod episode is not about decarbonization. It’s not about clean energy. I know a lot of you love the clean energy stuff and you’re not so into the politics stuff. This coming hour is all politics. It’s 100% politics. It’s got nothing to do with decarbonization.
If you’re not into that, the skip button is right there. No hard feelings. I will further say this is going to be political in the way that a lot of people who don’t like political stuff dislike. It’s going to be polemical. It’s going to be polarized. We’re probably going to be table pounding. We’re going to take sides. We’re going to be divisive. We’re going to divide people. If you’re not into that kind of thing, truly no hard feelings, this episode might not be for you.
Michael Hobbes
The important thing is to email Dave and tell him that you’re not. People love getting feedback.
David Roberts
It’s fine.
Michael Hobbes
This is not for me.
David Roberts
It’s michael@volts.wtf. If you’re coming here as a fan of Michael’s, I just want to say I’m not as funny as his other hosts. I’m not the wit that Aubrey and Peter are, so everybody just —
Michael Hobbes
But neither am I, so it’s fine. People have low expectations.
David Roberts
I just want to make sure everybody’s got appropriately low expectations for what’s to come. Or don’t listen at all, really would be another good way to go. If you’re not into this kind of stuff, don’t listen. That’s the first thing. I should say I’m here with Michael Hobbs, famed podcast host, multiple podcast host. It started with “You’re Wrong About” and then “Maintenance Phase,” which I think you’re still doing, and also “If Books Could Kill” with Peter Shamshiri, which is a great pod, highly recommended. Everybody listen to it. I’m here with Michael Hobbs.
We’re here because we want to discuss reactionary centrism, which is a concept and idea that’s been floating around a lot lately among leftist critics of what’s going on these days. But as far as I have been able to tell, there’s no clear place to send people when they ask, “What is reactionary centrism? What does that mean?” No one’s done a straightforward laying out of what it is, what we’re talking about. There’s a lot of oblique references, etc.
We should say that the term, as far as we know, goes back to —
Aaron Huertas.
Previously a very active political operator, campaigner, etc., who I think has transitioned to carpentry?
Michael Hobbes
The way of all journalists, the way of everyone who gives a shit about the left in America.
David Roberts
Finally went mad and abandoned journalism and politics —
Michael Hobbes
Understandable.
David Roberts
— for carpentry. But we think he coined the term reactionary centrist. It’s one of those things where, once you hear the term, you immediately think, “Ah, yes, I know exactly what that’s all about.”
Michael Hobbes
It does dovetail a little bit with your audience, because he was a climate activist and he presented the concept specifically in relation to climate politics, where there are these people who are officially on the left, believe that climate change is real, yet they dedicate all of their public energy to scolding the left, excoriating the left. “The left has gone too far. Left solutions will not work.” If you look at the totality of their work, you wouldn’t get the sense that climate change itself is a problem. You would get the sense that climate change activists are a problem.
This has then spread into almost every issue that we have. I would say this is the dominant ideology of intellectual elites in America. This idea that both sides are to blame for everything, that we have to dedicate roughly 50/50 time to the excesses of the left as we do to the excesses of the right, oftentimes dedicating more energy to the excesses of the left than the excesses of the right.
David Roberts
That’s the thing. This is something Chris Hayes and I talked about when I was on his pod. The way that a lot of this political dysfunction and specifically epistemological dysfunctions, weird misinformation and passing around information, a lot of that stuff germinated in the climate movement for years before becoming dominant.
It’s so weird to think of myself, back in 2008, battling these people on climate denial boards, noticing all these patterns. I just had no conception of the fact that that was going to become the default, that all of US politics was going to replicate the worst of climate politics. This is not something I anticipated.
I just want to do one bit of frame setting. The way we’ve decided to do this is because one of the points I want to be careful to make is it’s not a team thing. It’s not like you wear this jersey or you don’t. You are or you aren’t. It’s a cluster of tendencies or habits of thought, not all of which are shared by all the people that we’re going to discuss equally. I’m not trying to say that every writer or thinker or politician we discuss is the same or is the same quality or whatever. They just share some of these tendencies and they express themselves in different ways in different people. It’s a cluster concept, whatever you want to call it.
What we’re doing is, we each picked three tendencies that we notice and we’re going to go through a list and you’re going to get a cloud concept where some people belong more squarely than others. Some people indulge in it, but not all the time. There are edge cases, but I think we’ll be able to convey a general sense of it. That’s the project. We’re going to go through a list. We each chose three tendencies. We don’t know the other’s tendencies. We’re going to find out if we chose the same ones. That will be interesting.
Michael Hobbes
There will probably be some overlap.
David Roberts
Probably some overlap. One more bit of table setting.
Michael Hobbes
This is a left wing podcast. It has to be 80% table setting. We actually talk about the topic at hand in the last ten minutes.
David Roberts
At least we’re not bantering about our breakfast for 30 minutes before we start that part. The other bit of frame setting, which I like, is that it’s very easy to think of this and to see this as a dysfunction characteristic of our current times and our current social media, etc. But I do think that the basic pattern we’re going to be talking about is not new to us and is not novel. It replicates itself. I think that historical context is the most important thing to understand here.
This quote has always stuck in my head. This guy, Ignazio Silone, was a writer about Italian fascism. He wrote a book called “The School for Dictators.” His line is, “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.”
This is, I think, crucial. What he identified among the rise of Mussolini and Italian fascists is they came online warning that the left in Italy, the communists and the homos and all that, all the usual, were right on the verge of taking over Italy and fundamentally changing Italy’s core character and its historical traditions. They were right on the verge. Only fascist violence could prevent that from happening. Only fascist violence could prevent the imminent takeover of the left.
Once you see that pattern, you start to notice that the way the far fascist right succeeds — and you’ve seen this run over and over again throughout the 20th and 21st century — is that the right convinces the center that the left is the biggest threat. The center spends its time fighting and yelling at the left while the right waltzes in and sets up fascism. That’s what happened in the 20th century over and over again.
This is not a new or novel thing. The idea of the right trying to convince people that the workers and the unions and the commies and the liberals and the professors and the queers and the deviants and the Jews are all colluding, all just about to take over — that is always the key way to prepare the ground for fascism. When we’re talking about this going on today, that is the context and it is playing out again like it was written into a script. It’s so clear, it’s just happening again.
The people we’re talking about, the reactionary centrists, are not just doing something that’s bad on a world historical scale. They’re taking part in a pattern that is very well established that leads to terrible places every time, and they are not self-aware enough, they do not have enough self-discipline, enough self-awareness to see what’s going on or to care — or maybe they do and don’t care, it varies.
The people we’re talking about, the reactionary centrists, are not just doing something that’s bad. I think on a world historical scale, they’re taking part in a pattern that is very well established, that leads to terrible places every time. They are not self-aware enough. They do not have enough self-discipline, enough self-awareness to see what’s going on or to care, or maybe they do and don’t care. It varies.
Michael Hobbes
I feel like a lot of times, because I’ve been reading all this stuff about the Nazis this year, and for them it was, I think someone said this explicitly at one point, “We have to do to the Jews what the Jews want to do to Germany.” This idea that it was 2 or 3% of the population at the time, totally radicalized and had all this power that they clearly didn’t have. But you have to present this enemy as a threat against which you have to mount all of this self-defense. It’s always cast as self-defense.
I think the most obvious example of that now is the universities. The Trump administration is doing this all-out, complete totalitarian assault on universities. All of this — the stuff about “free speech on campus” and “wokeness out of control” and “elites” and “ivory tower professors” — seeded the ground for this.
I don’t think a lot of people really want to stick up for universities because we’ve had a decade or more of this, “Well, universities are fundamentally illegitimate.” When somebody goes after an institution that you think is illegitimate, it doesn’t produce a lot of defense. It’s much harder to say, “Well, they messed up, but maybe Trump has gone a little too far.” That just isn’t as strong of an argument as, “This is an unjust assault.” And it is an unjust assault, but we’ve had years of just softening the target a little bit.
David Roberts
Yes. There’s lots of social dynamics around all this, social and professional incentives that lead us away from just saying, “Taking over colleges and telling them what they can and can’t say is bad, full stop.” No, but what did liberal professors do to make this happen? Just saying it’s bad doesn’t get clicks. You don’t get attention. And attention is the coin of the realm.
We’ll get to some of that stuff later. We each chose three tendencies. I’m going to let you go first.
Michael Hobbes
Okay. To me, the core argument of reactionary centrism is twofold. First of all, Democrats are about to become authoritarians and Republicans are about to stop being authoritarians. These are the two core beliefs. You have this inflation of anything that is “on the left.” Even if that’s a person on social media who says something nuts, a random person with 85 followers, that counts. That’s indicative of a problem on the left. The left needs to reckon with this creeping totalitarianism, whereas elected officials on the right saying completely, very straightforwardly authoritarian stuff, and that doesn’t really count because, “Oh, they didn’t really mean it,” or, “Oh, they’re just expressing what their constituents want.”
It’s always downplaying radicalism on the right and playing up radicalism on the left. The best example of this, I went to the Atlantic’s website to get a little survey of —
David Roberts
That’s reliable.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, they’re basically the bible of reactionary centrists at this point, especially increasingly over the Trump era. If you read the way that they have covered RFK Jr., for example — basically lifelong anti-vaxxer — these are some of the headlines that they have published about RFK Jr. in the last couple years: “RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency. He would be a great agriculture secretary.”
David Roberts
Oh my God.
Michael Hobbes
“RFK Jr.’s testosterone regimen is almost reasonable.” “RFK Jr.’s confusing disdain for Medicaid.” “The food dye crackdown is finally here.” “RFK Jr.’s philosophy of contradictions.” “The case for finding common ground with RFK.” “The two sides of America’s Health Secretary.”
David Roberts
Wait, didn’t Emily Oster post one of this variety, like yesterday? I’m going to Google. I think it’s literally like, go ahead, but I want to find this.
Michael Hobbes
I can’t even keep track of them. The one that I really got stuck on was one called “A MAHA box might be coming to your doorstep.” This is from a leaked draft of this children’s health issues thing that RFK Jr.’s HHS produced. There’s one sentence that says that they may be sending out “MAHA boxes,” which are basically like, the USDA is going to send food to the homes of food stamp recipients so that they’re getting fruits and vegetables.
David Roberts
Sure they are.
Michael Hobbes
It says, actually, let’s do — for my podcast, I’ll send you a little paragraph from it, Dave.
David Roberts
“MAHA boxes are likely to come in some form or another.” Well, that’s true.
Michael Hobbes
They’re definitely coming.
David Roberts
“Some of the packages might end up in the trash. Lots of people, and especially kids, do not enjoy eating carrots and kale. Just 10% of US adults are estimated to hit their daily recommended portion of vegetables. But if done correctly, MAHA boxes could do some real good.”
Michael Hobbes
They could be great, actually. This is a throwaway line in a document that also has sections on how fluoride in the water is bad. It has a header “vaccine injury.” It has a section about how electromagnetic radiation is causing cancer. There’s an RFK thing where he thinks water Wi-Fi causes cancer. This article in the Atlantic is ignoring all of that. They’re taking one line out of context about this idea that would not work, just a ridiculous idea. The author is constructing this as a good idea.
Like, “Oh, you have to give him credit. There’s one sentence in this deranged document that’s good.” But why are you ignoring all of the bad things and then wishcasting a person who doesn’t exist? “If done correctly, MAHA boxes could do real good.” Well, is this administration likely to do something correctly? Is this an administration that says that it cares a lot about food stamp recipients and poor people?
David Roberts
I feel like this impulse has a credible instinct at the root of it. The idea is as open-minded people, we’re not going to dig in and just play team sports. We’re going to be open to things. We’re going to try to steelman the arguments of our opponents. We’re going to find the best. You see Ezra Klein constantly doing this and he’s totally earnest about it. He’s 100%. He means it.
Michael Hobbes
It’s a good instinct. On a personal level, this is something I try to do with people I know. It’s fine.
David Roberts
But at a certain point, if a professional movement has basically made it its modus operandi to operate in bad faith, you have to update that. It can’t be that people who have lied to you, like, nine times, that the 10th time you’re like, “Well...”
Michael Hobbes
You gotta give it to him.
David Roberts
“It could be true in XYZ light.” This overlaps — a lot of these instincts overlap. A lot of this has to do with this expectations game, this identity game. If you are simply a person who says, “RFK Jr. said another crazy thing, he’s wrong again, he’s doing bad things to the agency again. It’s bad top to bottom. Gonna produce bad results. It’s just bad.”
That is inert in today’s media environment. It is true, if you’re a journalist or a pundit, you ought to care that it’s true and it’s important and it’s newsworthy and it is more newsworthy than whatever glimmer of good faith twist you could put on it if you strain hard.
But if you just care about getting clicks, getting attention, and not just clicks and attention, but if you want to — there’s something like an elite circle of pundits and commentators and journalists and polls in DC, the cool kids table. If you want to get at the cool kids table, if you want to get a link on Noah Smith’s blog or whatever, you want to get a piece in the Atlantic, you simply cannot just write a piece saying, “These bad people are doing a bad thing that is going to produce bad results.” It’s just boring.
Michael Hobbes
The problem is we’re in this one-dimensionally evil era and writing a one-dimensionally evil piece about, “Hey, this guy who’s been an anti-vaxxer for 20 years is probably going to erode vaccines when he gets into power.” That’s true, that’s what we’ve seen. But that’s not an interesting take in any way. You have to find this weird bank shot where it’s like, “Oh no, maybe if we give him a chance, he’ll have Americans eating better.” No, this is not going to happen. This is not the crusade that he spent the last 25 years of his life on. But it is very boring to just say, “This thing that looks bad is bad.”
David Roberts
It’s funny, I just ran into a little example of that just the other day. I was listening to an energy podcast called “Open Circuit.” I love these guys — two men and a woman. They talk about energy stuff. I listen, love them all dearly. But one of the guys, Stephen Leahy, they were doing their 2025 wrap-up episode and his wrap-up of the year, the sort of villain of the year, they were choosing a villain of the year. His villain of the year was uncertainty. Like, businesses don’t know what things are going to cost or what policy is going to be day to day.
Uncertainty is sure messing us all up. His co-host, Jigar Shah, bless him, was like, “But Stephen, all of that uncertainty traces back to a guy, a person. It seems like the person should be the villain of the year, should be the story.” Steven just said in passing, not even really thinking, “Oh, but that’s just so predictable. It’s too easy.” That is true even in not explicitly political spaces, but just in our circles. The general professional left is just viewed negatively to be flat-footedly obvious and just say, “Orange man bad.”
Michael Hobbes
It’s cringe or one-dimensional or —
David Roberts
Yes.
Michael Hobbes
Or you’d have to join the movement of people resisting him. You’d have to go to marches and stuff. You’d have to do something with that knowledge. There’s also a psychological kind of protection happening — if I admit what is going on in the United States, I have to do something.
I struggle with this, too. I’m like, I don’t know what the fuck to do. What protest should I go to? What should I give money to? What should I write letters to? I get it. It’s really, really scary. But also, I think there’s this need to make things more complicated, to soothe yourself in a way that, “Oh, if it was fascism, I’d be marching.” But it’s not. It’s not fascism yet. We’ve seen this very consistently over the last 10 years.
Before we move on, I also want to read the headlines that the Atlantic published about Zoran Mamdani.
David Roberts
Oh, goodness.
Michael Hobbes
Over roughly the same period. One of them is “The Magic Realism of Zoran Mamdani: The Socialist Candidate’s Proposals Don’t Hold Up to Serious Scrutiny. Or Will That Matter?” There’s one called “Zoran Mamdani Reveals the Absurdity of Affirmative Action.” There’s one called “The Mainstreaming of Zoran Mamdani: Which Flavor of Socialism Would the Mayoral Candidate Bring to New York City?” “Why Won’t Zoran Mamdani Denounce a Dangerous Slogan?” and “The Choice Between Cheap Groceries and Everything Else: Zoran Mamdani’s Goal of Lowering Prices Conflicts with His Own Stated Priorities and Those of His Allies.”
You don’t see the same kind of thing, of, “Give him a chance. If implemented, his ideas could be really good.”
David Roberts
“This could be smart if you did it just the right way.”
Michael Hobbes
Right?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Michael Hobbes
And then after he wins, we get, “Mamdani is the Foil Trump Wants. So That’s Going to Be Good for Trump?” “The Question Mark Mayoralty: Zoran Mamdani Ran a Progressive Campaign, but How Will He Govern in New York Remains Something of a Mystery.” “Zoran Mamdani Is About to Confront Reality.” “What the Left Still Doesn’t Get About Winning: Mamdani Won by a Modest Margin in a Deeply Blue City, Not Because of His Radical Commitments, but Despite Them.”
RFK is this complicated figure. He has these contradictory beliefs about, “Oh, he wants us to eat better, but he doesn’t love Medicaid.” Such a complicated figure. Mamdani is like, “It seems like he’s pretty dangerous. He won’t denounce the slogan.”
David Roberts
I know.
Michael Hobbes
His policies don’t work —
David Roberts
You don’t have to hand it to him. You don’t have to hand it to Mamdani. Even though he’s saying, “I love you, I want to do well by you. I want you to prosper.” He’s, “I want to give you things.” None of that. You don’t have to hand it to him for any of that. You just got to see that, because we all know, the core ideological commitment that doesn’t even count as ideology because it is so widely shared in DC is that the left, the left-left, the progressive left is silly. Everyone agrees on that. You cannot get in the door unless you agree with that much.
Even if you want to say something positive about the left or a leftist, someone who’s governing on the left, you can’t do it unless you also say, “Now, to be sure, we all know that the left is silly and full of dreamy, you know... they’re not adults.”
Michael Hobbes
I’m an adult. I’m a pundit. These people are not adults. I’m a serious person. What’s also so amazing to me is there’s also, as you said earlier, the construction of radicalism. If you actually look at most of Mamdani’s proposals, they’re actually fairly standard. He wants to freeze rents for rent-stabilized units.
David Roberts
I know.
Michael Hobbes
Or raise taxes on rich people. New York City had free buses during COVID. Even that is not all that out there.
David Roberts
They had free grocery stores, too. None of this is —
Michael Hobbes
It’s not completely nuts. You have to be presenting this as somehow outside of the political mainstream, which I think it objectively isn’t. Whereas RFK Jr. gets put within the political mainstream. “Well, he wants Americans eating better. There’s this one idea that he has that’s really good.”
You’re talking around or ignoring or oftentimes blithely acknowledging in one sentence, “To be sure, he’s an anti-vaxxer, but...” Then you get to this broader picture of, “No, no, he’s really within the mainstream.” That just isn’t the case. RFK Jr.’s policies are getting kids killed. This is not even up for debate. That’s what he’s dedicated his life to.
David Roberts
Another reason people do this, and this is one of the less flattering ones, is if something obvious is going on and you say the obvious thing — “Bad thing is happening, and the people who are doing it are bad, and the people who are trying to stop it from happening are good. That’s what’s going on.” — you are not clever. There’s nothing clever about that.
Above all, punditry values glib cleverness. You have to be clever. You have to have a slightly different twist than everybody else. Which is why this tendency is becoming so glaring today. Because, as you say, reality is sorting itself into very — reality has become comically un-nuanced. Cleverness, you have to gin up cleverness out of nothing. People are really digging deep, getting into the rocky soil, trying to find something clever or counterintuitive to say about all this.
Michael Hobbes
What’s yours?
David Roberts
My first tendency is an absolutely scrupulous adherence to Murc’s Law.
Michael Hobbes
Oh, okay.
David Roberts
Online sickos like us will know what Murc’s Law is. It’s very famous in our circles. I think this was Scott Lemieux, a legal blogger years ago, more than 10 years ago, who coined Murc’s Law. The idea is that the way pundits and observers and commentators treat US politics, they treat it as though Democrats are the only players with agency who are making choices and doing things. The right is just happening. They happen in reaction to things that Democrats do.
If the right does something, the first reaction is to say, “Well, why didn’t Democrats stop them from doing that? Why didn’t Democrats stop that?” This is one of those things. It’s like when you start looking for Volkswagen Beetles on a road trip. Once you start seeing this, it is so ubiquitous. In fact, the central political story of our time is some version of this. Democrats came, took away all the manufacturing jobs and didn’t do right by the rural people whose jobs were taken. So the rural people turned to fascism.
This is so commonly accepted that you can say stuff like this. No one will blink. It will not even come off as an op-ed. It won’t even come off as a piece of opinion. This is just something everybody knows. Even though if you think about it for two seconds, this party tried to raise my minimum wage but fell two votes short. Therefore, I’m going to vote for a party that has opposed minimum wage hikes without exception for the entire modern history. If what they’re about is their economic welfare, that story just doesn’t make any sense.
There are a lot of reasons for this. I want to go through a couple of examples because one example comes from my world, energy and climate world. The one thing I want to say about this Murc’s Law is it’s not just professional commentators. I feel this particular mind virus is very common among normies too.
Michael Hobbes
Oh, totally. I think all of this stuff is, honestly.
David Roberts
Yes.
Michael Hobbes
It’s really trickled down into the population. I find it everywhere.
David Roberts
In my energy world, we just spent years putting together this climate and energy bill, passed it. One of the thoughts was a lot of the benefits of this energy bill are flowing into red districts and red states. This is going to give it some political resilience. Then we elected Republicans and they nuked it. Nuked it all.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
How do you analyze this? I cannot tell you how many people I’ve heard in the energy world, in the politics and energy world, who just, without even thinking about it or justifying it, immediately pivot to, “This happened because Democrats did something wrong.” Like, “They built the wrong kind of legislation” or “They built good legislation, but Biden was too old and tired to go sell it. So he didn’t sell the legislation.” Or “They should have, in addition to tax credits, done more of this or a little bit more of that.”
Always, “Why did this happen? It’s something Democrats did.”
Michael Hobbes
It’s never a bad faith campaign or a party that is enthralled to this super anti-government, super nihilistic ideology. It’s never that. It’s always, “You weren’t nice enough.”
David Roberts
What happened is they wanted tax cuts for the rich.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
That’s what the Republican Party is. That is the central goal of the Republican Party in modern times, going back 100 years. Lots of things vary. Lots of things come and go. But their devotion to reducing taxes for rich people has never wavered. The obvious, to me, political analysis of what happened was they wanted to cut taxes for rich people and they didn’t care about anything else. There’s no magic set of words, no framing that Democrats could have used to talk Republicans out of valuing tax cuts for rich people above literally all other public policy goals.
But you cannot find a human being in the media who will just say that, “They killed the climate thing because they care more about tax cuts for rich people,” which is the overwhelmingly obvious thing. Every left and liberal and Democratic person I heard analyze this immediately and instinctively started and finished with, “What did Democrats fuck up?” Then they’ll go, “Next time they should focus on jobs and trying to bring back manufacturing.” I’m like, “They did that. That’s all that they did. You’re just recreating what they did.”
What you want is the policy without the fighting and the meanness. But it’s not the Dems who are bringing the fighting and the meanness and the lies.
Michael Hobbes
This is one of my categories too.
David Roberts
Oh, Murc’s Law.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, yeah. I word it slightly differently, but basically the same. Read this because this is exactly what you’re saying. This is from Yascha Mounk in an article called “Don’t Expect Democrats to Give up on Wokeness Anytime Soon.” You knew we were going to talk about wokeness today.
David Roberts
I knew we were going to talk about Mounk too.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
“To overcome the damage to their increasingly toxic brand” — this is another thing, like we and our entire magazine and our entire movement have been shitting on Democrats —
Michael Hobbes
We’ve been calling them toxic for decades.
David Roberts
Without cease for a decade. “To overcome the damage to their increasingly toxic brand, Democrats need to change how they talk and what they say. This includes jettisoning some of the most unpopular elements of the left’s identitarian thinking, popularly known as woke, that they took on over the past decade. The emphasis on equity and DEI, the vocabulary of BIPOC and Latinx. But it goes much further than that. Democrats need to convince Americans that they are willing to speak the truth, even when that truth shocks the activist groups that make up a big part of their base.
That they sympathize with ordinary citizens who are fed up with crime and chaos, rather than with the petty criminals who disturb the public order. And that they have figured out how to stand up for inclusion without violating common sense.”
Michael Hobbes
No common sense anymore. This is an argument that I’m stealing from you — 99% of those “Democrats need to do X” articles are things Democrats are doing.
David Roberts
Yes.
Michael Hobbes
You cannot find a Democrat who says BIPOC. No one has said Latinx since 2020. No one in the 2024 election was saying Latinx. This is something Democrats have already done. Democrats ran to the center in 2024, but there’s this weird punditry thing that is just, “Democrats need to run to the center. Democrats need to run in moderation,” rather than just trying to figure out why that didn’t work. I think it’s complicated why that didn’t work in 2024, but instead of actually analyzing it or having an adult conversation about it, they’re just like, “Oh well, they ran on wokeness and they shouldn’t do that anymore.”
David Roberts
This gets to one of my honorary mentions. It has to do with ignoring the larger media environment. Mounk could go through the legislative record or the speeches of prominent Dems and not find anything, not find the word BIPOC a single time. Yet in Yascha Mounk’s epistemological world, examples of crazy lefties saying that kind of thing pop up all the time, over and over again. He’s surrounded by them, they’re pelting him from every side. It never occurs to him to stop and wonder, “Why is that? Why is there so little in actual legislation or actual words of actual Democrats, and yet it seems to me like this is ubiquitous among Democrats? I wonder if that has anything to do with who is feeding me information and what kind of information they’re feeding me. I wonder if there are any agendas involved in the people who choose what’s in the news.”
Michael Hobbes
I wonder if we live in an imagined community or if I’m simply receiving facts as they happen in the world. I think it is a problem that Democrats are perceived as holier than thou and elites and condescending. But that perception has been curated by right wing media over the course of the last 20 years. I don’t think it’s actually true, especially when it comes to right wing voters, that Democrats are not giving talks where they’re like, “I hate farmers, I hate factory workers.” They’re not doing this. All they’re doing is kowtowing to these people.
David Roberts
It is again taken as fact, not even considered opinion, taken as fact, that Democrats disdain and look down on rural voters. Again, go through what actual elected Democrats actually say, find me a single one doing anything but absolutely groveling toward rural people. You can’t find it. Yet if I want to find a right winger saying that all Democrats are radical communists who want to destroy America, every one of them is saying that in public, on record, every day. They don’t get hung with “condescending.” They’re not tagged with “dividing.”
It’s just bizarre. It’s bizarre. My favorite Murc’s Law example, this is not the most substantive example, but it is the famous. This is an article from the Free Press, Bari Weiss’s Free Press. It is about this woman. I don’t know if you remember this incident, but she was caught on film calling a black guy the N word.
Michael Hobbes
Okay.
David Roberts
Repeatedly. It’s not one of these ambiguous cases. Very clearly what she was doing. This woman writes an article for the Free Press. She gets called out for calling a black guy the N word on tape repeatedly. The right wing spontaneously responds by starting a fundraiser for this woman. They have sent this woman hundreds of thousands of dollars for saying the N word. There’s no larger context. She was not involved in any larger goal or anything. It’s just pure that.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
They’re rewarding her for that. This reporter at the Free Press writes an article about this. Here is the slug at the top of the article. It’s just one sentence.
Michael Hobbes
“The excesses of the woke era created a backlash so intense that the right now celebrates racism.” Conservatives being racist — first time. First time we’ve ever seen it.
David Roberts
Democrats were so woke, Michael, that they have caused the right to become racist. Can you believe that they did this?
Michael Hobbes
It’s a satire. If you hadn’t been so woke, I wouldn’t have used the N word numerous times.
David Roberts
Let me just tell you, you can go read the whole article. That is it. The article is an extended argument, basically, that the left was so woke and so involved in throwing out accusations of racism where they didn’t belong, that they have polarized the right —
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
— into racism.
Michael Hobbes
Into behaving the way the right has behaved since World War II.
David Roberts
This is Murc’s Law taken to its logical conclusion. The left made the right racist by accusing it of being racist. My other example on this is David Brooks, of course, one of the champions, one of the old school champions of this thinking.
Michael Hobbes
“You accused me of having dinner with Jeffrey Epstein so many times...”
David Roberts
“I finally had to have dinner with Jeffrey Epstein.” We could talk about David Brooks alone. These are all pundits that you and Peter have devoted episodes to — some of my favorite episodes. But this particular one, I just thought on the Murc’s Law thing was very good. The column, David Brooks column is called, “Hey Lefties, Trump Has Stolen Your Game.”
Michael Hobbes
Oh, yeah, I love this. I love this, like the woke right shit, god.
David Roberts
There’s a ton of stuff in here. But basically, if I can boil it down, it is: the left came up with this theory that powerful people who claim to be acting on principle are actually just acting for their own power. This sort of postmodernism, this idea that there is no set fundamental truth, etc.,
Michael Hobbes
Something that of course the right does all the time, but whatever —
David Roberts
Critical theory. Now, this is David Brooks’ argument: now Trump’s coming along and acting as though there is no truth. Therefore, he’s adopting the left. He’s adopting the left game. I just want to say to David Brooks, that’s very confused, David. The reason those theorists wrote that stuff is they were trying to describe and capture the behavior of the powerful people they saw around them. Trump is acting like those other powerful people. The description fits him, but he is not a postmodernist. Because he acts like there is no truth. He’s just doing what powerful people do.
That’s what the postmodernists said. The postmodernists did not talk powerful people into pursuing their own power under cover of principle. They were doing that already. That’s why the leftists came along and wrote the books.
Michael Hobbes
There’s also the weird pundit thing of, they don’t think that it’s their job to read history or contextualize things. I’m reading Rick Perlstein’s books about the rise of the modern right. These are threads that go back to Goldwater. They go back further than that. The far right takeover of the consensus, “normal” right is a thing that has been happening for a long time. There are so many examples of it that you can point to throughout history. The kind of censorship that they’ve been doing and the way that movement has given way to liars.
If you look at William F. Buckley’s career, he also was someone who got famous by writing a book saying some professor should be fired. Then he would lie constantly throughout his career as a public figure. You have this gradual increase of nihilism on the right. That’s something that’s been going on for decades. You can pick any strand to pull on. For some reason, opinion columns don’t think that’s their job. They think it’s their job to have a weird perspective on something.
You sit down and you start typing rather than just, “Hey, there are books about this.”
David Roberts
The idea that you’d blame the behavior of those people on an academic theory meant to describe their behavior — they didn’t read books. No, postmodernism. It’s just all... My final example, Murc’s Law is a huge one. You can throw a dart and hit an example. This is another one of my favorites by our old friend Shadi Hamid.
Michael Hobbes
Oh, yeah, classic.
David Roberts
Over at the Washington Post. The headline is enough. This is from February 2025. I think this is pre-shooting a woman in the face and invading Venezuela, but well post many other things.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Roberts
Shadi Hamid writes an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “Why I Still Criticize Democrats More Than Trump.”
Michael Hobbes
At least they’re admitting it.
David Roberts
The slug is, “Here’s a counterintuitive answer.”
Michael Hobbes
Perfection.
David Roberts
Did you think “Maybe it’s because I’m cleverer than you?” That’s it.
Michael Hobbes
Is that his argument? What’s the argument?
David Roberts
The argument is, and this is unbelievable, the argument is basically, Republicans have abandoned any fealty to the norms and principles that bind America together. They don’t care. So there’s no point saying anything to them.
Michael Hobbes
On some level, this is another feature of reactionary centrism where they will admit this. Oftentimes you’ll have one sentence in all of these articles.
David Roberts
To be sure.
Michael Hobbes
Yes, to be sure. “The right is much more authoritarian than the left. But... “ and there’s 7,000 words about how the left poses a problem. The way that people consume news, no one’s reading entire articles. People aren’t seeing headlines, they’re seeing framing. They’re seeing what gets put into feature stories, cover stories, packages. They’re not looking at the one sentence and going, “Ah, yes, okay, I should be worried about right wing authoritarianism.” They’re looking at how many articles you publish about left wing authoritarianism and forming their beliefs based on that.
The fact that these writers are like, “Ah, yes, to be sure, the right is worse in every single way. And yet here’s another article about how you should be worried about campus activists,” is insane.
David Roberts
The same writers, those same people — and this is in Shadi’s column too — basically saying, criticizing Trump even though he doesn’t care about it and is not going to change is silly. “This is another thing that silly leftists do just because it makes them feel better. It doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t change anything. Just makes lefties feel better. Saying that the fascist who’s taking over the country is a fascist taking over the country is just boring and silly.” There’s so much wrong with this.
Hamid never — none of these guys ever seem to think through, “What incentive structure is this creating? What is the larger incentive structure here?” If you proclaim to have values and to care, we will criticize you relentlessly. We will characterize everything you do as falling short of or betraying those values. But if you just don’t give a shit and act like a nihilist, you’re good. We won’t criticize you because it would be silly. Why would we bother? This is something I’ve said online many times.
The centrists have talked themselves into this. This is a very widely held thing among these people. “It’s pointless to criticize Trump and the Republicans. Democrats are the only ones who listen and care when we criticize, so we should criticize them all the time.” The center is criticizing Democrats all the time. Republicans are criticizing Democrats all the time because they rightly view them as their political opponents. The left, as you well know, the Bernie left, is constantly criticizing Democrats.
Michael Hobbes
That’s what we’re doing on some level, too. This ends up being a whole ecosystem where everybody’s shitting on the left.
David Roberts
Yeah, I know. Everybody craps on Democrats. Everybody craps on Democrats. It is to everyone’s professional advantage. That’s how you get ahead in your little circle, almost no matter your circle, even if you are one of the elected Democrats. You get ahead, you set yourself apart, you become a special, different, worth paying attention to Democrat by shitting on the other Democrats. That’s how you have to start if you want to be taken seriously. Murc’s Law: everything that happens, basically the Democrats did it. The Democrats are responsible for Trump rising. Biden’s refusal to crack down on immigration is the reason that we’re having fascism on the streets now.
The right is like a weather system that just comes in. No point trying to persuade it. It just is. It just is what it is. Democrats are the only people who can make decisions about what to do about it.
Michael Hobbes
There’s also this idea among the pundits who produce this stuff that it kind of doesn’t matter or that they’re not producing outcomes with this kind of journalism. “All I’m doing is putting forth my opinion.” But we know that media is instrumental in forming conventional wisdom. If you look at what the population believes about crime, huge numbers of people think that crime is at record highs. That’s not even necessarily because the media says crime is at record highs. It’s because every time you open the newspaper, there’s an article about a murder.
You assume there’s dozens, hundreds, thousands of murders going on all the time. People form their beliefs about reality from this kind of work. If every time I open the newspaper, there’s an article about these “Crazy leftists, Leftists are lying about this, leftists are wrong about this,” I’m going to form a vision of reality that the left is the primary threat to democracy in America, or at least an equivalent threat.
David Roberts
We have this heuristic of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” that they prey on, that they are experts at preying on. Like you said, you spent half your career chasing down these individual examples. In the woke era, it was, “Oh, the undergrad kid complained about the banh mi in the cafeteria.” This example will get passed around. It will show up in 10, 20, 30 of these columns from these guys. None of them, zero of them, will do the five minutes of due diligence.
Just Google and find out. You, Michael Hobbs, are the only person who goes and reads the article. What actually happened. All the examples, when you press on them just a little bit, fall apart almost immediately. But the ubiquity of them, there’s so much of this stuff in the atmosphere all the time. Of course you’re absorbing it.
Michael Hobbes
It’s like the Hillary Clinton emails thing. Everyone’s talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Most people could not actually articulate what she did wrong specifically to this day. But it’s like, “Something, something emails is bad,” and there was really no fire there. But there was so much smoke that, even in opinion polls, people would be like, “Oh, I’m really concerned about her email practices.” That’s completely constructed out of essentially nothing. If you look at the actual merits of the case.
David Roberts
I even think you could get conservatives, give me a thousand conservatives, I bet 999 of them could not tell you specifically what was she — same with Benghazi. We’ve been involved in this for a long time. I started doing this in 2005 and back then there was a mainstream media and a right wing media that was viewed as fringe, that was pretty distinctly fringe. Now we know that’s no longer the case. All my political life I’ve been complaining about this, how the right can take some non-story, some nonsense like this, like Benghazi, and just pound the table about it until they browbeat mainstream reporters into covering it.
I saw this happen in climate world so many times, over and over again. The “climategate” scandal, the email, the leaked emails, remember that? 2010, again, an early model that the right would later use on a larger scale. This sort of going through leaked emails and selectively picking out phrases that look bad.
Michael Hobbes
I want to do an episode on that so bad.
David Roberts
They’ve done that a bunch of times since. That was the prototypical case and there was never anything to it. It’s not like there was an open question at the beginning and it later settled out that it was nothing. It was very obviously bullshit from the beginning. They got it in the news by just repeating it, by whining, coordinating and whining and repeating and whining and repeating and whining and repeating over and over again. They don’t care whether this specific example holds up or not. It’s on principle. They whine and complain because it shifts the refs over time.
Michael Hobbes
This actually gets to my next one. The other thing that I notice in reactionary centrists is putting aside the merits of arguments. There’s this need to cover things as, “There’s a debate,” or, “People are talking about this thing,” or, “Is this hurting Democrats in the polls?” without looking at the merits of it and whether or not it is true. My example of this is right after the Skrmetti decision, which essentially upheld the right of states to ban gender-affirming care, the New York Times published numerous articles talking about how activists had completely fucked this up for Democrats. They published, “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way,” “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost,” “Transgender Activists Questioned the Movement’s Confrontational Approach.” You read through these things and you don’t get any basic statistics about how many kids are transitioning. How common is youth transition? Is there any evidence that kids are being rushed into irreversible treatments without assessment? I’ve been covering this for almost a decade now. It’s been around for ages. There’s not even really a good confirmed case of this happening. We definitely don’t have large numbers. There’s only around 200 top surgeries a year in total. Those are mostly on 16 and 17 year olds. All evidence indicates these kids are very thoroughly assessed. We’re talking years on puberty blockers, years on hormones before they’re getting these surgeries. The regret rates of these surgeries are extremely low. If you’re someone who vaguely follows the news or you see some headlines, you see that there’s a debate, you’re going to assume that, “Well, yeah, there must be tons of kids who’ve been rushed into these pills and surgeries. There must be, right?”
David Roberts
Especially since you see that mentioned casually, in passing, constantly, over and over and over again.
Michael Hobbes
If you’re writing an article about a debate, this is what I do when I’m doing podcast research: “Okay, people are fighting about this thing. Well, I should get the basic facts about it. How many kids transition every year? What do we know about youth transition? What’s the evidence? Basic who, what, where, when, why stuff.” There’s this weird kind of almost deliberate refusal to address, “Why would we look into this? What we’re talking about is the debate.” But if one side of the debate is lying or one side of the debate has no evidence for their claims, that should be the core of your coverage of the debate.
David Roberts
Everyone in journalism is so eager to rush past the substance and get to, “But now people are talking about it, and it’s an issue. How are people positioning and how’s it going to affect the polls,” all the stuff that they love talking about, that they’re free and easy talking about. It’s got no ideological content. You can look savvy all day long without ever saying anything.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah. You don’t have to do any work, you don’t call any sciencists.
David Roberts
You don’t need to read anything, you don’t need to know anything.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
You’re literally putting a tuning fork out and saying, “What are the other people on the other screens saying? I’m going to report that the other screens are saying this thing. I’m just going to say it again because the other screens are saying it.” You’re just involved in this ouroboros high school, you’re all repeating rumors to one another. It is amazing. I’ve lost a lot of my illusions about journalism, believe me, over the years. But just fact checking, the whole notion of, “If we’re going to make a claim, we should have some basis for it.” What’s replaced that is just, “Well, so many other people have said this. It must be true.” This is how moral panics work. Your work, your pods have been excellent on this dynamic.
Michael Hobbes
That’s another really good example. I think it was a third of the population in the 1990s thought their children had a 50/50 chance of being kidnapped by a stranger by the time they were 18. That’s not because there were a lot of kidnappings. Only around 100 kidnappings of children by strangers a year. That wasn’t because of an actual phenomenon. That was because of media coverage. Media made people believe something about the world that was not true. People in the media seem weirdly reluctant to accept that this is a phenomenon.
We have so many examples of this.
David Roberts
This will really get us in trouble, but another one of these is the lab leak thing.
Michael Hobbes
I was like, please say lab leak. Please say lab leak.
David Roberts
I’m punching myself in the face by doing this. I’m just soliciting dumb emails by getting involved in this. But this is a classic example where, look at the substance of the case. There is no positive evidence.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, none whatsoever.
David Roberts
Yeah. That it came from the lab. There’s only this sort of meta, “Why won’t they let you talk about it? Why are they trying to suppress the debate around this? Why are they gatekeeping?” At this point, so many people have written articles about it, you just want to say, “Well, look, whatever gate was up, it’s clearly fucking down now. You’re all talking about it.”
Michael Hobbes
No, I know. There’s so many articles about it.
David Roberts
Maybe quit talking about how you’re not allowed to talk about it.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah. Make the case and try to make the actual argument. Whenever people try to make the case, they’re like, “Oh, the emails were deleted,” or whatever. What?!
David Roberts
It’s all just this sort of selective, hand-wavy, “Here’s a thing that would be commensurate with this being true.” That’s not really how arguing works.
Michael Hobbes
Or people just say it’s Bayesian probabilities, even though a novel virus has never leaked from a lab. This thing that has never happened is just true because we think that it could happen. That’s also not how Bayesian probability works.
David Roberts
They need for there to be an example of the woke left tyrannically suppressing debate. My second one is what I call anti-politics. This also manifests as tone policing, which a lot of people identify with reactionary centrism. My basic diagnosis of reactionary centrism: they came up in a society, in a postwar US society, basically, liberalism was ascendant. Liberals have majorities in Congress for most of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and the basics of, “We’re a tolerant society, we’re not racist,” etc., that was mainstream. These people grow up and adopted these mainstream liberal beliefs. Then you get to a certain level of prominence or comfort. Especially Democrats today, there’s been a lot of talk about the sorting and how Democrats basically have become educated, cosmopolitan, thinky, talky people, people who are A students who have done well by the system, who have mastered the system. They know how to do well by the tests, they know how to get the right certifications and degrees and the right institutional associations.
These people are masters of the system. You have this instinct, once you become a successful adult person, this very deep instinct that says, “Protect this system. The system by which I am doing so well, that is supporting me, that has made my life, that constitutes my identity. We need to preserve this system.” Then you have to reconcile your self-image as a basically liberal person with this instinct of, “Hey, let’s not rock the boat.”
That’s why you constantly find people — I had a couple for this piece — basically people who are like, “The liberalism of my youth was good and correct.”
Michael Hobbes
Oh, yeah.
David Roberts
“But the shit the kids want these days is crazy.” If there is a core to reactionary centrism, that is it.
Michael Hobbes
“If you consult the evidence, everything that happened after my 35th birthday is really too far. Everything before my 35th birthday is fine. All that activism, fine.”
David Roberts
Right around the time music and movies got bad, also liberalism got bad.
Michael Hobbes
Jamiroquai stopped releasing albums, and it all went downhill from there. That was it.
David Roberts
If you saw Ruy Teixeira — some people will know who he is — liberal commentator, analyst, goes way back, but has really fallen down the reactionary centrist hole. Deep, deep, deep down it. He was on Ezra’s podcast, and I’ve never heard someone come so close to just stating baldly that the advances in liberalism and egalitarianism and freedom in his youth were good and correct and the ones that the kids want these days are crazy. Right around the time he matured, weirdly, liberalism found its apex. You and I know there’s this stereotype floating around of people like this, the bourgeois who grow up liberal and then become stodgy, small-c conservative when they grow up. It’s a cliché.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
I’ve never witnessed someone act it out so theatrically with not a hint, not a glimmer of self-awareness, not a crack of light of self-awareness in it. It’s amazing.
Michael Hobbes
I used to live in Berlin, and there’s a thing in Berlin where everyone says, “Berlin is over,” but it’s always exactly three years after you arrived. If you arrived in Berlin in 1989, you’re like, “It’s over in 1992.” If you arrived in 2015, you’re like, “2018 was the turning point.” You just got here and it isn’t new anymore.
David Roberts
Famously, gentrification started about five years after I arrived at wherever I was. I think that this pro-system bias manifests as this discomfort with people yelling and fighting and caring.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
Loudly caring and conflict. You have this sense of, “Things are working. I made it. Everybody just settle down. Let’s not rock the boat here. I’m okay with anti-racism and stuff like that, as long as it’s what people are doing. But when we start fighting about it...” This is so obviously a personality, a psychology thing, it’s got no ideological content, but it is ubiquitous among that crowd and no one has captured it better — this is one of my favorite pieces that I went back and reread to prepare for. This is about Pamela Paul. Listeners will know Pamela Paul was an op-ed — she ran the books section of the New York Times for 10 years, which is just bizarre.
Michael Hobbes
Kind of chilling, honestly. Now about her work and her intellectual...
David Roberts
Slightly chilling. Like what was going on there? For some reason they just plopped her on the op-ed page and gave her an op-ed. She is an unusually clear case of someone who doesn’t know anything, who’s just like, “What are my bourgeois instincts? I’m going to flop them out onto the page.” Andrea Long Chu, the critic at New York magazine, wrote this goodbye to Pamela Paul when Pamela Paul stepped down. I’m sure you remember, it’s so great. It really captures what we’re calling reactionary centrism.
Chu called it the “far center,” but basically talking about the same thing.
Michael Hobbes
Chu says, “Paul seems to have risen to the rank of professional opinion haver by the sheer upthrust of discomfort. Like an earthworm in the rain. Today she is a shouted murmur. Her principal opinion is that everyone else’s opinions should be as weakly held as her own. The idea being that if all our opinions were weaker, society as a whole might be stronger.” That is perfect.
David Roberts
Or wait, it’s even better. This one’s even better. She says, “One gets the sense that politics has gone off like a cell phone in the darkened theater of Pamela Paul’s mind. It is worse than wrong. It is rude.”
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Roberts
Which so perfectly captures that, “I don’t like it when people are mad and yelling and fighting. The main thing we need for politics to get better is for everybody to calm down.”
Michael Hobbes
That’s also another thing that people are always saying to Democrats, “We need unity. We need someone who can unite the country,” which is basically what Barack Obama ran on. His Democratic convention speech that made him famous was, “You got some gay friends in the red states. We’re the United States of America.” Did that work once he was in office? Did we have an outpouring of unity? This whole thing, people psychologically, I totally get it. I would love it if we were fighting less.
I would love it if everybody got along more. Thanksgivings were less tense. I would love that. But at a certain point you just have to admit that that’s not really on the table anymore and that we can’t have a politics of unity when the whole point of politics is, “I have a vision of something and you have a different vision and we need to push toward our vision.” This is what drives me insane: “We should all be quieter and not care about stuff.” But what’s the point of politics if you don’t care about anything?
David Roberts
It’s to keep the system running and in place. This is — I’ll read you this quote, this is from an article about Zuckerberg, about Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, his political evolution. “Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now considers his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or classical liberalism, according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulation that restricts business, an embrace of free markets and globalism, and an openness to social justice reforms, but only if it stops short of what he considers far left progressivism.”
Michael Hobbes
So just say you’re a right winger. This is taking forever.
David Roberts
It’s like, “I’m a rich guy who made it to the top of this system, and my politics now is that we should preserve the system. Yes, I’m fine with social justice reforms insofar as they make me feel good and they show up on the Wheaties box, but it’s got to stop short of far left progressivism.” What does that mean? That’s the things that people fight about and get angry about and yell about. If you’re facing a group of opponents who think like this, all you have to do to scare them away from an issue is to start shouting about it, to polarize it.
The right knows if they polarize something, if they make something miserable to be engaged in — this is what they did with climate, again, pioneering their pioneering work in climate — they made it so that if you wanted to have an opinion on climate change, you were basically signing on for total ideological warfare. Most people don’t want to sign on for that. If you can just polarize things and make them uncomfortable, you scare these people away. All these people really care about is, “Let’s all just calm down.”
Michael Hobbes
It’s also funny because it’s precisely the same arguments that they made against women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. They’re saying it’s not like these previous movements, but while making the same arguments people made about those previous movements. “Why won’t women just shut up and not vote? It’s not a big deal.” This is exactly what they said. I think also because people didn’t live through those eras or maybe they were too young to really notice them. Andrew Sullivan has written a bunch of articles about the gay rights movement, “Now the trans rights movement, they’re super mean, but the gay rights movement, they were never strident.” Stonewall wasn’t a little bit strident, like the die-ins, the FDA — that wasn’t strident, man?
David Roberts
I know. The people who hate fighting and conflict were saying exactly those same things about that fighting when it was happening. “I don’t mind a little, you know, we give them their own water fountain, but if they’re out on the streets...” It’s the same bourgeois instinct of, “Let’s not rock the boat here.” The only other tone policing one I wanted to throw out was, I had to use a Bret Stephens in here. The King.
Michael Hobbes
Final boss. Yeah.
David Roberts
You and I know the special mental doors that unlocked and opened when we discovered that Bret Stephens and Pamela Paul used to be married. Everybody remembers where they were.
Michael Hobbes
The universe was in sync in that moment.
David Roberts
When you found that out, you’re like, “Oh.” This column was written in 2024, prior to the election that reelected Donald Trump, by Bret Stephens. The headline is, “There’s One Main Culprit if Donald Trump Wins.”
Michael Hobbes
Who is it, Dave? Who is it?
David Roberts
Michael, can you guess? Is it the vast movement of billionaires who have spent decades dismantling regulation on political giving and on political communication and created a vast network of dark money? Is it media that’s been taken over?
Michael Hobbes
Is it people who voted for him and like him, voters?
David Roberts
No, no, no, no, no. Is it even manufacturing policy or raising minimum wage? No, no, no, no, no. Is it legislation? No, no, no, no, Michael. It is their tone. They’re condescending.
Michael Hobbes
If you call me a vegetarian enough times, I have to be a vegetarian. That’s just how it works. Whatever you call me, I have to be that if it’s false.
David Roberts
He even says — this is what brought this to mind — this is a remarkable bit in this piece where he basically says that Democrats condescend to voters who claim to be feeling insecure by telling them that in the actual world of facts and statistics, crime is going down.
Michael Hobbes
That’s the actual argument. That’s such a dumb issue to make that argument about.
David Roberts
You find that argument and you point at the Democrats, “You’re the one getting it wrong. The heartland, the real Americans have a feeling, and it is simply coastal elitism to tell them that their feeling is factually wrong, that they’re wrong.”
That’s always been kind of implied. He’s just basically out saying it explicitly, “This is why people hate Democrats. They’re coming along with their actual facts.”
Michael Hobbes
Very basic statistics about American life.
David Roberts
Yes. Your job as a politician is, if the media has successfully made the public hysterical about crime, your job as a politician is to participate in that hysteria. That is the heartland, in touch.
Michael Hobbes
Also your job as a pundit is not to write a column about, “Hey, a lot of people in my constituency, fellow conservatives, believe this thing is not true.” That’s not Bret Stephens’ job. His job is to scold the people who are being correct about this thing. I wish conservatives gave a shit about facts and would actually go out on a limb and say, “Hey, his campaign, he says Haitians are cooking cats. They’re not actually cooking cats. That’s false. They don’t do that.” They rush to condemn the left.
A sign of a healthy intellectual movement is when you have people policing epistemology on their own side. If a left wing person lies constantly, other left wing people will in general point out that they’re lying. That does not happen on the right. These people think their job is to make it the left’s fault.
David Roberts
This is very illustrative on the crime thing or on the immigration thing. What we’re told is that you should play to the instincts and feelings and personal experience. Basically what Stephens says is, “Sure, crime’s down, but it feels bad. Feels like disorder.” As we have mentioned a couple of times, this is one of my runner-ups. No sense of awareness of, “Is there a reason that it feels that way to me?”
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
“Has someone designed the information to which I am exposed in such a way maybe as to deliberately make me feel...” No. He doesn’t bring it up and dismiss it. It just never comes up. On the left it’s interesting, there’s a little bit of a mirror because on the left there is a sentiment among lefties, hardcore lefties, to always be kind of doomerist about the economy. “Everybody’s struggling, things are worse than ever, no one can afford anything,” etc. Similarly, the statistics will often show, “Well, the purchasing power of the lowest end of the economic scale went up during Biden. A lot of the objective economic indicators were moving the right direction under Biden.” It’s not the case that it’s always miserable and always getting worse. There is an argument happening on the left over that. People are doing the doomer thing, but they’re being corrected and there’s a dialogue happening. There’s a self-correction mechanism. In the right, not only is there no self-correction mechanism, it is viewed as a positive good to exacerbate the hysteria. That’s what you’re supposed to do on the right.
Michael Hobbes
There’s also something interesting too. I think you saw this in the interview between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about Charlie Kirk and about what to do. I think Ezra Klein was really struggling with himself as a political actor and didn’t seem to understand what I think is the core function of us as journalists: we’re not political actors. I’m obsessed with bike lanes. I think cities should put in bike lanes. If I was running for office, I would not make installing bike lanes the center of my campaign. That would be insane. It’s really unpopular. But as a journalist, I can say, “This is the correct policy,” and try to move people’s opinions. Politicians can pick that up and make it on a bumper sticker. They cannot do that. It’s really not my job to do that. My job is to try to, as best as I can, tell people what’s going on in the world. “Hey, there’s this policy you might not think about, but it’s actually really good.” What’s weird is so many pundits don’t think — they think their job is, they’re a strategist in some way and that they’re engaging in politics.
Bret Stephens could also just write a column about, “Hey, it might feel like crime is up, but it’s actually down.” You’re a journalist, you just tell people facts about stuff. It doesn’t compute that your job — you’re not an electoral strategist, just say things that are true, man.
David Roberts
This is what Matt Yglesias is going on and on about now too. Not only should the Democrat running for Senate in a purple state not say anything that might irritate swing voters in a purple state, but everyone — the national Democratic leadership, other Democrats, randos on Twitter, bloggers, podcasts — we should all be saying the things that are going to help the senator in the purple state win the purple state. That’s not the job of most of those people to do that.
Michael Hobbes
Also it’s downstream of the right wing framing that every single random left wing person on Twitter is a representative of the Democratic Party. If you can find a random Oberlin sophomore saying something stupid, that somehow reflects on Nancy Pelosi in a way that a random right winger — right wingers who want deranged shit online — that never reflects on Republicans. To the extent that’s a problem, it’s not that we need perfect message discipline. You’re never going to get that from tens of millions of people. We need to push back into this idea that every single person is “the left” in this weird monolithic way.
David Roberts
My third, I had trouble with the third because I got a bunch of also-rans in there.
Michael Hobbes
They’re all overlapping.
David Roberts
You and I know everybody engages in what’s called motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is basically behaving like a lawyer rather than a scientist. A scientist is supposed to go into an investigation with no presumptions. They’re supposed to be a blank slate and let the evidence tell them what is true. A lawyer goes in with a case to make, so they’re also doing analysis, they’re also forming arguments, but a lawyer is not going to be persuaded by the other case. It is their job to argue a case. Motivated reasoning is when you’ve already decided you’re right and you’re basically just going out cherry-picking evidence to support what you already think. It’s a basic feature of human behavior. Everybody does it on all sides. No one is free of it. I don’t think there’s any real way for an individual to be free of it. The only way to ameliorate it is socially, communally, by checking one another’s work over time. I will just say that a lot of the reactionary centrists, during this woke panic, this post-2020 woke panic, one of the themes that has struck me again and again is these are smart, educated people making arguments that if they were not already convinced...
If they hadn’t gone into it already convinced, this argument that you’re presenting, this evidence is flimsy. It’s laughable, it’s crazy. Only reason you’re accepting this as evidence is that you’ve already made up your mind. You know better than anybody, the woke thing is just — if you chase down an example and really look into the details of almost any one of these examples, you find, “Oh, it’s more complicated.” You dig into one of these professors who was subject to a disciplinary hearing because he said blah, blah, blah, and then you go read and you’re like, “Yeah, they opened a hearing, looked into it, didn’t find anything.”
And nothing happened. Nothing happened to the professor.
Michael Hobbes
That’s like 60% of the cancel culture stories were not meaningfully cancellations. It’s really remarkable.
David Roberts
The whole woke panic was just people writing the same examples back and forth to one another over and over again until they became a catechism. You look into any of them and they collapse. There were very, very few — for all the hysteria of the woke thing, all the years of hysteria — there were very few examples that I would say clearly demonstrate what they say they’re trying to demonstrate. I think David Shor getting kicked out of his think tank because he questioned the anti-policing — that’s legit.
Michael Hobbes
That’s one of the bad ones.
David Roberts
Yeah, that’s too much. That’s one of the bad ones. I’m perfectly willing to accept that there was a phenomenon there. Annoying, overreaching lefties, for fuck’s sake. You and I know, we —
Michael Hobbes
Live in Seattle, Dave. We live in Seattle.
David Roberts
We know these people all the time. I never would argue with anybody about how annoying the fucking left is. I have been in that seat. The one other example of this is our old friend Bari Weiss. I have not read nearly as much of her work as you have. I’m sorry to you that you had to go through that. All of Free Press —
Michael Hobbes
Yeah. The whole project.
David Roberts
It is a motivated reasoning engine. It’s literally built to do motivated reasoning. Built to help billionaires. Built to facilitate the motivated reasoning of billionaires. To tell them, “Yes, your little instinct that the left is kind of crazy these days and that the basic structure of capitalism is all right and social justice is okay up until it becomes...” This has been commented many times, that so much of social media and media these days has lost the truth-telling function that you were referring to a minute ago and just really acts as motivated reasoning fuel.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah. It’s like a feed trough.
David Roberts
Yes. If you want to think this, come here and we’ll feed it to you.
Michael Hobbes
I’ve always been totally willing to acknowledge the fact that some lefties, especially on social media, can be extremely annoying. I also think some righties on social media can also be really annoying. There’s this weird thing where nobody wants to compare like for like. There’s all these articles about how the social justice left is so insane, left wing activists, whatever. But there’s also right wing activists and there’s also — there’s a left wing fringe and there’s a right wing fringe. I’m actually happy to compare apples to apples about, “Okay, what is the danger posed by the right wing fringe versus the left wing fringe? How many mass shootings do we have? How many acts of violence?” There’s actual academic articles about this. Right wing violence is significantly more common than left wing violence. We also had all the anti-mask stuff around Covid, anti-vax stuff, the FAA, their complaints about unruly passenger behavior went up, I think it was fourfold or tenfold during COVID basically because people refused to wear masks. Those people were almost all right wingers.
David Roberts
It’s like you’re talking about substantive effects.
Michael Hobbes
The fact is, Bret Stephens is not getting yelled at by right wingers to the same extent that he’s getting yelled at by left wingers. That is proximate to him, or Matt Yglesias or all these people. Annoying leftists are proximate to you. They’re in your front view mirror.
David Roberts
Yes. This gets to one of my — which was almost my number three, but my top runner-up. The way I’ve boiled it down is emotional incontinence, which is basically an inability to separate your feelings and your personal dramas and interactions with your personal epistemic circle —
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, resentment. Really, resentment-based.
David Roberts
— from larger social issues. You’ve talked about this many times. All of these guys and gals have an origin story of basically getting yelled at online.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, it’s really scary.
David Roberts
It was such a grievous ego injury to them. Of course, you can’t just say, “That hurt my feelings.” You can’t just say that. That sounds silly and petty. It has to be, “The lefties who annoy me are a serious social problem.”
Michael Hobbes
There’s a threat.
David Roberts
You have to make your annoyance into some big thing. It just makes me mad. Part of your responsibility as a journalist or a pundit is to do that, to try to separate your personal feelings and resentments. At least try to have a somewhat objective view of what is newsworthy, what really matters, versus “what just bugs me.”
Michael Hobbes
Dave, I was getting yelled at by furries for three days on Bluesky.
David Roberts
I forgot about that. That was a classic.
Michael Hobbes
But I couldn’t — I’m an adult. I can accept the fact that this was a vaguely annoying thing that happened to me for 72 hours on Bluesky. Furries being annoying is not a national crisis. I’m actually not against furries. The furries are fine. Furries are welcome with me. It was a misunderstanding, essentially. What is journalism other than, “Hey, there’s this thing that feels true. I’m gonna go see if it’s true. I’m gonna go look. Hey, it feels like crime is out of control. Why does it feel like that?”
David Roberts
The feeling is not news.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah.
David Roberts
And is not worth reporting.
Michael Hobbes
Just go look and see if it’s true and then you can report it. What frustrates me is how much of this coverage ends up serving this distracting role. It distracts people from basic facts. I think most people, if you laid it out for them, would acknowledge that the right-wing fringe is more radical and poses a larger threat to the country and democracy than the left-wing fringe. It just does. If you look at politicians —
David Roberts
Because it’s not the fringe anymore, you can’t even say fringe anymore. They took over.
Michael Hobbes
Exactly.
David Roberts
They’re running the country.
Michael Hobbes
People in power, Republicans in power, are much more radical to the right than Democrats in power are to the left. Democrats are a very standard, center-left party. Given those two facts, why are we talking about the left-wing fringe constantly? Why are we not comparing like for like? If you want to compare apples to apples, the right is the problem.
David Roberts
That story has been discernible and clear, I think, since at least — how far back you want to take it?
Michael Hobbes
You can go 2000 election. Yeah.
David Roberts
Gingrich. In my mind, Gingrich was the first appearance of this nihilistic, totally opportunistic, totally bad faith, just abandoned all pretense of anything else. You remember Norm Ornstein?
Michael Hobbes
Yeah. He wrote that book about, “The right is the problem,” and was super marginalized for that.
David Roberts
Even though in 2012, yeah.
Michael Hobbes
I think people, a lot of your audience will be listening to this thinking, “These guys sound like partisan hacks.” I can see people being allergic to these kinds of arguments. Frankly, we do sound like partisan hacks. I totally get it. But also, consider the evidence. My main issue with this kind of the reactionary center is their argument about ideological actors is that they let their ideology dictate reality. If you’re a right winger and you look at every single issue and you say, “Oh, this means government is too big, government needs to be smaller,” that’s stupid. If you’re a far left person and you say, “This means capitalism is bad, everything means capitalism is bad,” that’s also really stupid. But if you look at every single problem and say, “Both sides are to blame,” that’s equally as stupid. That’s also an ideology. This is the ideology, this is the motivated reasoning thing you’re talking about where it feels like people are looking at literally everything and just saying, “Well, both sides, it’s really both sides are to blame here.”
David Roberts
It’s going from saying, “Sometimes having a very strong view can distort how you see things,” which is a very obvious and true thing to say, to saying, “Having an opinion about something is de facto disqualifying.” Taking a side in a dispute is de facto disqualifying to these people.
Michael Hobbes
Some situations, you look at the actual evidence about them and you’re like, “Okay, both sides really are to blame here.” But you need to look at every situation specifically. There’s a huge number of situations and political issues in the United States where the right is just off the rails and the left is fairly normal. If you look at state governance, there’s I think 25 states that have a Democratic trifecta. You look at what they’re doing with power and it’s fairly normal stuff. Then you look at what Republicans do with power and it’s far right. Oftentimes it’s based on lies — the gender-affirming care stuff where they don’t even do basic fact-finding before passing laws. It’s really radical far right stuff. I feel like what I’m doing — and I know I sound like a partisan hack — but I really do feel like what I’m doing is looking at the evidence. The evidence in United States politics is that the right has radicalized.
David Roberts
Look at what they’re saying. Look at what they do with power. Go read it. Now they’ve taken power, and as we are talking, Michael, there are masked agents of the federal government on the street kidnapping people and sending them to torture prisons. We’re invading random countries with no congressional authorization. On and on and on. It’s here, it’s happening, what we said. Right wing radicalism is building towards something overtly fascist that is going to destroy America is happening. I don’t want to sound like a crazy lefty, but shooting women in the face, I don’t like it.
Michael Hobbes
Did you see David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour thing, one of those panel shows?
David Roberts
Oh, I saw your tweet. That was a great example.
Michael Hobbes
You have on camera an agent of the state, a masked agent of the state, murdering a woman in broad daylight. He was under no threat. Then you have David Brooks on PBS. They ask him what he thinks of the video, and he’s like, “Well, it just shows that everybody sees what they want to see.” The host is like, “Well, what do you see in the video?” He’s like, “I couldn’t possibly say. I’m just waiting for the authority to investigate.”
David Roberts
You can’t —
Michael Hobbes
You can’t —
David Roberts
Having an opinion is de facto disqualifying. The only way to be clever is to show how both sides are.
Michael Hobbes
He thinks that’s serious, but it’s not. It’s not serious. It’s morally monstrous. It’s also just evidentially wrong. We have a video of somebody being killed. We know what these people have been doing, what ICE has been doing for months now. You can just look at the video and say what you saw. His brain, he has this wall up where his brain will not allow him to just have an opinion on this very obvious injustice. That’s what’s so interesting to me, the psychological process by which all of these people have even more deeply entrenched as we’ve entered this one-dimensional authoritarian movement state.
David Roberts
It’s one thing during a moment of left ascendancy to be talking about this. What people like me were saying way back early in the trans thing, way back at the very beginning of the trans thing, is, “This is just another round of a very familiar dynamic.” Every new expansion of freedom or egalitarianism, you have people saying, “Well, the previous ones were fine, but this one is crazy.” What they’re going to do, because they know that if you just show Americans a frightened, uncertain 11-year-old groping around to find some sense of identity and some sense of belonging, people are going to feel sympathetic for that.
You have to find some wedge issue. In the big fight over gay marriage, attempt after attempt like this. For a while it was adoption. “Sure, gay people are fine, but would you really want them adopting a child?” Just trying to find that narrow, teachery little wedge framing that can trigger the right instincts in people. Then you get in there and you expand it and what you do is you expand it until you’re just in a pogrom against gay people.
That’s where it always fucking goes. At the beginning of the trans thing, lots of people — you, I, many other people — were just saying, “Here we go again. They’re going to find a vulnerable group that has sexual proclivities that make mainstream people slightly uncomfortable. They’re going to find some little wedge, divisive wedge issue, in this case, girls playing sports in high school. If you go along with them, they’re going to broaden that wedge until they are full on trying to genocide trans people. Then they’re gonna move on.”
Michael Hobbes
They’re gonna circle around to gay people. They’re already talking about overturning Obergefell.
David Roberts
So this one’s fine. We can have that argument in 2020. But now we won that argument. They’re doing it. It’s not an argument anymore. They are doing the thing. They are now trying to legislate trans people out of existence. This gets back to the emotional incontinence thing. If you are a centrist, an average normie centrist, you should have some historical awareness. If the right wing comes along to you and says, “Look at this marginalized group, they are a terrible threat to you. Only by visiting violence and discrimination on them can we save ourselves,” this seems a lot like something that’s happened a lot of times before and we know where it goes. I’m going to have a very high bar. I’m going to need a lot of very good evidence for me to sign on to this one because I know where the last ones went.
Michael Hobbes
They’re like, “You just want to inspect my wallet. The wallet inspector wants to inspect my wallet once more. Here’s my wallet.”
David Roberts
It’s so clear. The vast majority of people involved in this panic have probably never met a trans person or even met one. There are more right wing state laws forbidding trans girls from playing high school sports in the US than there are recorded cases of trans girls trying to play high school sports in the United States. Who are the people who are ensuring that this dominates the news and ensuring that this is what we’re talking about? Do they have an agenda? Am I being manipulated? They don’t care. They don’t try, they don’t —
Michael Hobbes
Even worse, they buy into the idea that it’s Democrats pushing this stuff. You still see this attack that it’s, “Well, Democrats went too far getting trans girls in sports.” Did Kamala Harris push trans girls to play Frisbee? Was that something that was going on? This is something that was going on to no outcry whatsoever. Trans kids playing on sports teams is totally fine. We’re talking about amateur sports. A 12-year-old, who gives a shit? It’s only because the right plucked this out of obscurity and also told you that the reason you’re hearing about this is Democrat overreach.
But no, this is not coordinated by Nancy Pelosi. This is normal communities engaging in sports in their community. It’s really not that big of a deal.
David Roberts
If you can’t understand that the right is the reason we’re all talking about trans stuff —
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, it’s —
David Roberts
Yeah, period. Then you don’t understand just the very, very basic dynamics of US politics and media.
Michael Hobbes
You should not be commenting on politics for a living.
David Roberts
I’ve sort of come around — and this is the cynical take — but I’ve come around to, people like Noah Smith or whatever ultimately feel they have that reactionary instinct, like this new novel gender thing is icky. They have enough residual liberal instincts and principles that they can’t just say that to themselves. That can’t be the story they tell about themselves. They need someone to give them a cover story. This was my other runner-up, this refusal to think about the larger information environment. I was listening to — Ezra interviewed this other — I can’t remember her name, she’s just some sociologist. It was all about, “Why have rural people come to hate Democrats?” If I asked you that question, Michael, what would be your first — what is your very first on the list of things? What is your number one?
Michael Hobbes
It starts with F and ends with ox News.
David Roberts
Ezra talked to this professional Stanford sociologist for an hour and a half on his podcast. It was 45 minutes in — I was walking my dog, listening to this, screaming, shouting at clouds, literally —
Michael Hobbes
“Say it!”
David Roberts
Convulsing. I was convulsing. It was 45 minutes before they said the word “media.” Then he asked her, “Seems like media is kind of a thing.” She’s like, “Well, we don’t really have good tools to measure that. So...” And that was it. That was it. The media was gone.
That was the last time media was mentioned on the pod. To you and I, the increasing ubiquity and influence of right wing media — they basically took over all the things we warned about happened. They bought the Washington Post, CBS News, they bought the LA Times, they bought Twitter.
Michael Hobbes
And everything else has gone out of business.
David Roberts
They have Facebook, they have Sinclair. What little local newspapers there are left are owned by Sinclair. They own all the radio stations, all the biggest YouTube channels and all the biggest podcasters. Right wing media has become utterly ubiquitous and these people, their unwillingness to acknowledge it or discuss it, much less admit it as a causal factor, is pathological.
Michael Hobbes
It’s really — but again it’s psychological. I think people can’t, I think there’s a self-flagellating instinct in various people of, “It must be something I’m doing wrong.” Psychologically, there’s clearly some sort of defense psychological mechanism going on. When you actually think about it in very 30,000 foot terms, there’s a vast media apparatus that is saying Democrats suck constantly. Every right wing politician, there’s dozens of news websites, there’s subreddits doing this. CBS News is now saying this. There’s all these outlets saying this.
Then you’re like, “Why do people think Democrats —”
David Roberts
Washington Post, not even obscure anything. Washington Post is saying it.
Michael Hobbes
Then it’s perceived as some sort of mystery why a huge percentage of the country thinks Democrats suck.
David Roberts
I guess it’s just like if your professional identity is bound up with you having a clever critique of Democrats, and that basically describes a decent chunk of the commentariat, most of them, then admitting that the media is an influence, they think that drains power from their critiques of Democrats. It’s like saying, “Well, if media is at fault, then you’re letting Democrats off the hook.” That’s how they think, I think. But they over-torque, they over-correct. They refuse to discuss media despite the fact that the change in media, the introduction of social media and the takeover of mainstream media by the right are epochal events.
They’re completely reshaping public life — how we talk, who wins, everything. To be operating in the middle of it, simply being buffeted by it, pushed this way and that, refusing to apply any self-awareness or self-discipline or self-criticism, “Why am I reading this rather than that? What is my news diet like?” These people who hang out on X and are just absolutely convinced to their bones that they’re fine.
Michael Hobbes
I’ve seen so many pundits that I used to respect and have written things that I respect, and they’re now — one person whose work I respected until fairly recently is chatting with Richard Hanania in his mentions, having a cute little — I think it’s a conversation about baseball or something. You’re just palling around with a fucking white supremacist now. Do you understand what you’re doing? It’s this slow — I don’t think people realize it’s happening to them, but it’s like, “Yeah, you’re hanging out with the Nazi bar, man.”
David Roberts
All these brave free thinkers arriving at the same —
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, the same opinion that groupthink on the left is a problem while engaging in egregious groupthink.
David Roberts
You will never find groupthink more tyrannical than this group of centrists. They use the same rhetoric, the same language, they use the same examples. There’s a bottomless appetite for it. The Atlantic is still cranking out these articles. Persuasion, Free Press — a whole apparatus grew up around this anti-woke thing. So many grifters made their bones off it and now events have rendered it faintly ridiculous.
Michael Hobbes
Really embarrassing.
David Roberts
Shadi Hamid is still going to write another article about why he still craps on Democrats all the time even though they’re shooting women in the face.
Michael Hobbes
At least now they have a Volts podcast that they can complain about in the first paragraph. This is gonna be the news hook for all these people.
David Roberts
If you push back and say, “Well, maybe shitting on Democrats is not the only thing to say about current public life,” “Oh, so you don’t think Democrats ever do anything wrong?” It’s so funny. You and I hate the fucking Democrats. If they would just stop shooting people in the face in the street for a few days, I would get back to —
Michael Hobbes
Our passion.
David Roberts
— yelling at Democrats for not being better. The meta thing too is, you know the famous tweet, I think Andrew Lawrence tweeted, “I’m being suppressed for my right wing views that government should be smaller and taxes should be lower.” “No, no, not those views.” “Oh, which views?” “You know the ones.” That is the core meta move that all these people use, which is what they are. The whole anti-woke thing at its root is basically saying the average volk in America is a little bit racist and a little bit sexist. If you’re going to respect the people, then you should let them have those prejudices.
You should let people be a little racist.
Michael Hobbes
That’s a treat.
David Roberts
Literally, universities have to hire racists because there are a lot of racists out there.
Michael Hobbes
And affirmative action is okay now after you’ve spent decades saying affirmative action is bad. There’s one form of diversity you’re okay with.
David Roberts
It is a real dilemma that people with our values — basically, I would say, cosmopolitan values — are a minority in any population. It is true that the cosmopolitans are kind of a vanguard. They are a minority. This is how society’s values have always evolved: you have to have annoying people pushing and pushing it and making people uncomfortable. If they do that long enough, then they can move things a little bit. They are always hated for doing so and are always deemed annoying and radical and dangerous. Does democracy suggest that you are obliged to accept a level of racism and sexism that you find uncomfortable because it is the majority position?
How do you reconcile democracy with your vanguardist morality or social —
Michael Hobbes
I don’t even accept that everybody’s all that much more racist and sexist. Maybe on some implicit level, but I think the one thing we have going for us is all this fascist stuff is wildly unpopular. The video of the ICE agent, all this stuff, people do not like it. It’s egregious. I think most people do have a sense of common decency. If you actually sit people down and talk to them about the trans issue and, “Have you ever been a 12-year-old who wanted to play a sport?” Most people actually, I think most — I do actually think decency wins out.
But I also think it’s people with power, people in the institution of knowledge production that have forgotten — I always think of that old quote, “A liberal is someone too fair-minded to take his own position in a debate.” Liberalism is good, conservatism is bad. I think when society progresses and gets better for people and there’s more equality, that’s good. This whole attack on DEI stuff, diversity is good. I like having friends and people around me with different perspectives. All this stuff is good.
But no one wants to just stick up and say, “Hey, it’s bad when agents of the state kill people. It’s good to have a diverse workplace.”
David Roberts
It’s too easy, boring.
Michael Hobbes
You can write an article about, “Hey, you might not know this, but crime has been falling for a while. It’s actually much lower than it was in the 1990s. Here’s some facts for you.” You could just fucking do that if you’re a journalist. You don’t have to do this weird three-dimensional bank shot, “What’s going to be electorally advantageous?” I wake up every morning and I try to figure out what is true about the world. I don’t think that should be very unique among journalists, but I become increasingly frustrated that it is.
I’m trying to figure out what’s going on and then I try to tell people what’s going on. I’m not a political person, I’m not running for office. If you’re a journalist, if you’re a pundit, try to figure out what’s fucking true and tell people.
David Roberts
I would also say on the values question that it is true that there’s a bell curve distribution of these values that somebody like you and I are probably way over on the right end of. Call it cosmopolitanism. Over on the left end is your outright authoritarians, which are basically running things now. Most people are clumped up in the middle of the bell curve somewhere, which means they have lots of lightly held, mildly contradictory different instincts, which means they can be led one way or the other based on social signaling.
The right has been very smart, I think, in recognizing the power of virtue signaling and in trying to denigrate it and trying to mock it. Virtue signaling is signaling to all those people in the middle, “Here is the frame through which we think about these things,” a frame that encourages them, their empathy, their decency.
Michael Hobbes
Virtue signaling is good. Be nice. It’s good. Be nice publicly.
David Roberts
What we’ve been doing is, you could not have constructed an experiment where the right, with the center’s help, has been scrupulously trying to frame things for the last however long, how many decades you want to put it, trying to frame things in a way that elicits those reactionary instincts. That is their whole goal. They need the middle. They need the reactionary instincts to be kicked up in those middle people, for those middle people to start feeling less social trust and more suspicious of outsiders and more suspicious of difference. Conversely, we people who would like for society to continue progressing need to signal, “No, we’re decent people, we’re kind people, we love our neighbors,” etc.
Somehow, vice signaling has become ubiquitous. Trying to just stand up for decency has somehow become cringe, condescending.
Michael Hobbes
Like electoral liability for Democrats.
David Roberts
Yes, everybody — if you really get to the root of it, they seem to be saying, “Quit trying to make things better. When you do that, you annoy everyone.” It is true that people who try to make things better are annoying. But if you consider yourself an intellectual leader, a pundit, a spokesperson, a person who’s in public and part of the public, you should be self-consciously trying to speak up for what is good and lead people to what is good. Instead of devoting your professional life to ankle-biting the people who are trying to make things better.
Michael Hobbes
I think all of these institutions should be doubling down on truth and decency. Factual accuracy and decency. If that leads you to publish 10 times more fact checks of Republicans than Democrats, so be it. Our values are truth and decency.
David Roberts
And it will, it absolutely will at this point.
Michael Hobbes
Partly because they haven’t doubled down on that. They’ve doubled down on this both sides stuff, when they should be doubling down on factual accuracy. That’s what you should be trying to convey. That should be the central thing you are trying to convey to your audience: what is going on in the world? What is the reality of a particular situation?
David Roberts
You know what I would like to see? Just one reactionary centrist have a Road to Damascus moment.
Michael Hobbes
Yeah, an apology to me personally from one of these people.
David Roberts
Just a moment of self-awareness. As we’ve been saying, you’ve been nagging the left, scolding the left for years and years, and now the fascists won and they took over and they’re doing the fascist crackdown. At this point, it’s becoming like a —
Michael Hobbes
Fetish. Just say fetish. It’s becoming —
David Roberts
Yeah, it’s like a fetish. It’s weird that you grope for psychological explanations. What could keep you doing this after the fascists have literally taken over?
Michael Hobbes
The activists are getting put in jail. People getting put in jail for their student op-eds.
David Roberts
Literally getting put in jail for literally sending lists of words to government agencies that they’re not allowed to use. All the specters that they raised as fearful things that the left might someday do, the right is doing them now, and I have not seen one of them in any way update their priors on this. Anyway, well, thank you, Michael, for mostly listening to me.
Michael Hobbes
This is fun. This is what we do when we hang out in Seattle as well. I’m glad we finally got to record it and publish it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
