Americans want big ideas, but Trump’s opponents aren’t providing them
Description
Episode Summary
One of the most enduring myths of the Trump years has been that everyone who votes for him does so because they agree with him. Obviously a lot of his supporters do, but polls have consistently shown that Trump is a historically unpopular president with issue positions that most Americans have never supported.
And yet, it remains the case that a majority of voters in the last election decided to vote for him anyway. We’ve talked in previous episodes of Theory of Change about how part of this is due to the enormous reach of right-wing media. It is the mainstream media for millions of Americans–whether they deliberately choose to watch it or not.
But media saturation isn’t the only factor. Another significant factor behind Trump’s durable political appeal is that his opponents have been unable to present a larger alternative vision to MAGA. That matters because a lot of people aren’t interested in policy minutiae, they want to hear your big-picture vision.
Democrats simply have not done this. And as a result, the party is facing some of its lowest approval ratings in years–including from people who identify as Democrats.
Joining me to talk about all this is someone who has been doing this work from the ground up for over a decade: Seth Flaxman. He’s the co-founder of Catalyst for American Futures a new liberal group that’s building a broader-left political coalition that focuses on improving the country so that everyone has a fair chance, ideas that they’ve put into a new book called Out of Many, One: Writings on American Universalism and on a website, The All American.
Previously, Seth led Democracy Works for twelve years, an organization that helps tens of millions of Americans get trusted election information.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
10:18 — American universalism as a political philosophy
14:22 — The spirit of St. Louis and the civil war
18:29 — Understanding modern authoritarianism
21:14 — Building majority support for democracy
24:31 — The need for open debate and disagreement
28:02 — Problems with Democratic party messaging
34:24 — The missing movement infrastructure
37:19 — Economic solutions beyond neoliberalism
41:09 — Learning from right-wing political tactics
46:19 — The role of government in the modern economy
49:38 — The importance of public rallies and engagement
54:32 — Creating a new culture of political discourse
58:28 — Working in coalitions despite disagreements
01:01:59 — Lessons from the civil rights movement
01:05:01 — Closing thoughts and contact information
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Seth Flaxman. Hey Seth, welcome to Theory of Change.
SETH FLAXMAN: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, good to have you. Well, so, why don't we start off a bit before we get into the discussion just tell us a bit about your background and how you got into politics and what you've been doing since.
FLAXMAN: Great, thank you. I mean, I I, don't even know if I would say I've been in politics. I've been working on strengthening US democracy for almost my entire professional career the last 15, 16 years or so. And I got into this space because I thought our democracy was in a really dangerous position. And for me, the warning lights like 2000 and going back 2009, 2010 maybe, were just low turnout in everything, especially anything local or primary election related. But then the rise of birtherism was terrifying to me. Also Proposition 8 was very scary to me at the time. [00:04:00 ] And I wasn't sure what to do because, for most of my peers, Barack Obama's president, everything's fine. And so I just felt like I was in a very different wavelength and I felt like the thing I can do is use this new force in our society technology to try to increase voter engagement because we know technology can do one thing very well if it makes things easier and more people will do it.
So I spent a long time just trying to get the, like bugs and kinks out of the voting system, where can I make things easier and increased participation? And after doing that for 12 years and three presidential cycles, I came to the conclusion that it was valuable work. It was like critical for our democracy, but it was not going to solve the democracy crisis that we were facing.
And. So I've been spending the last few years trying to understand what is this global rise of authoritarianism in addition to this, how it looks like in America and like what do other countries do about it? What have we do
United States
