At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”
Here’s the thing, Rogan could lean left (not centrist, left). Remember this?
Here’s the deal: there will never been a popular centrist online presence which is stronger than the right wing populist one. Centrists don’t do popular. They don’t have the instincts. It’s all about pandering to elite and PMC ideology: thing Yglesias and Ezra Klein and their ilk. They can run numbers, sure, but no one gets super worked up. No one who wasn’t going to vote Democratic no matter what loves them.
Rogan is a populist. He was willing to go left, he’s willing to go right. He’s not going to go Centrist. There will never be a centrist Joe Rogan.
This is a symptom of a larger problem.
Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.
If by left-leaning they meant left, this would be theoretically possible, but what they mean is centrist:
Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.
It’s been memory holed, but there was a time when the left was stronger than the right online. Vastly stronger. The 2000’s, the days of the so-called netroots or blogosphere. It wasn’t even close. The big names were left wing, and the biggest right wingers did numbers that were one-tenth of theirs.
This was widely acknowledged. There were mainstream press articles about the right wings online problems.
Then Obama took power and the word went out: if you’re a Democratic operative or donor, you should stop funding the Netroots, and if you don’t, well, you will be frozen out of work if an operative and if a donor your interests will not be prioritized.
I was there, I was an insider, and I know. Combined with the Google and Facebook systematically driving advertising revenues into the dirt, along with some other issues related to Democratic core voters lack of any actual principles other than “our party is always right and the Republicans are always wrong and the left owes us their votes and has nowhere to go”, the Netroots died. Took a few years, but the job was done.
The Netroots mantra was “more and better Democrats”. We fundraised for Democrats, but we also primaried Democrats we considered bad. This was unconscionsable to Democratic power brokers. We were supposed to be entirely an adjunct and not interfere in internal Democratic politics at all. So they put the Netroots down like a diseased dog.
Democrats want a cheering section. They don’t want anyone who will do anything but promote the candidates chosen by insiders.
That’s NOT how a popular online movement works. It isn’t how any of the movements which have been successful on the right worked. They all primaried Republicans they didn’t like and pushed policies they believed in even if the party didn’t agree.
So donors can throw as much money as they like at the problem, but unless they’re willing to fund the actual left and to understand that funding doesn’t mean they get complete control, they will fail.
Better would be encourage already existing left wing populist figures, to give them some funding and to not try to astroturf a new online movement.
But then they might say “Free Palestine” or “Biden is senile”, and you can’t have that.
And without that, no one will really trust them, and they won’t grow to huge stars.
You can have effective powerful left wing online populists or you can have court eunuchs who always back the party line.
Choose one.