What the Democrats Can Learn from MAGA

0:06Hey, Charles. Hey, Tyler. How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. This is such a treat. I'm really excited to talk about your latest piece. I mentioned this to you before we started talking, but I think it's rare to read a piece that is both critical of the state of the Democratic Party right now, while also kind of offering some suggestions as to how the party can do better in terms of organizing and creating an effective coalition. So I think this is I'm feeling a bit more optimistic after reading your story. Oh, that's great to hear. And what's interesting is that when I reached out to academics who study social movements, they were all in complete agreement as to what the Republicans in MAGA are doing really well and the Democrats are doing wrong.

0:51And so I think it's one of those situations where if we go back to the science, we go back to the expertise, we can actually turn this around. We can figure out what needs to happen for this nation to come back together. — That's Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author. His latest piece for The New Yorker explores how Republicans and the broader conservative movement have managed to build and sustain a wide-ranging coalition and turn it into a series of electoral and political victories over the past few decades. Democrats, Charles argues, have often struggled to do the same, frequently getting sidelined by litmus tests and internal divisions.

1:33I wanted to talk with Charles about the lessons that Republicans have learned around short-term mobilizing versus long-term organizing, why Democrats haven't been able to build or wield comparable power, and how those dynamics are playing out in today's left-wing and progressive social movements. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, a senior editor at The New Yorker.

1:56So before we talk more about what the Democrats have been doing poorly and what the Republicans have been doing well, I mean, let's just start by talking about the beginning of your piece, which juxtaposes two organizations that emerged at around the same time, which is DARE and MAD. Can you briefly walk us through what each of these groups was trying to do and sort of why you decided to start the piece with this contrast between two organizations that I guess maybe they're political, but not really, right? It's sort of a different area. Right. So the answer why I started with that is because I was born in 1974.

2:29So I'm like, I'm as Gen X as they come. And I think that, and I just like, and like MAD and DARE are these things that I grew up with. And I've always wondered, like, MAD, which is Mothers Against Drunk Driving, like, today it's a powerhouse. And D.A.R.E., when I was a kid, D.A.R.E., which is the drug abuse resistance education program, when I was a kid, this was like the biggest thing on earth. And today you never hear about D.A.R.E. The only time you hear about D.A.R.E. is when, like, the stoner is wearing a D.A.R.E. shirt that he got at a vintage shop. With like the lion mascot. Yeah. Exactly.

3:03Exactly. And they're doing it ironically, right? So I wanted to go back and figure out like why these were two social movements that you're right, were not political. They were rooted in very specific issues. One of them has gone on to become hugely successful, MAD. The other one has basically failed completely. In fact, there are studies showing that if you participated in D.A.R.E. in the 1980s, you were more likely to use drugs on average than the kids who didn't participate. And it turns out that when I looked at the organizations, it comes down to what we know about the science of social movements.

3:35So DARE was fantastic from the start in how it was set up. It was organized from Los Angeles. It was run with strict efficiency from a central headquarters. They got backing immediately from major companies. Their budget went up. President Ronald Reagan declared dare day and kids were let out of school to learn that if you smoke even one joint, you're going to become homeless within minutes. It was very, very effective at what social psychologists and what academics call mobilization. And mobilization or mobilizing is convincing people to go out into the street. It's convincing people to take up the cause, to write letters to their congresspeople, to make donations.

4:18Mobilizing is what we see when we look at those protests that are happening in Minnesota right now, when we look at the No Kings Day, when we look at the Women's March. That's mobilization. on the other hand mad was a little bit different mad was a mess when it started and it was a mess for a long time it was basically started by this woman whose child had been killed by a drunk driver and she got angry about it and there was no central coordination or very little central coordination and it sort of seemed like the type of group that should fail frankly to get any traction yet what it was really good at was the other part of what a social movement needs to succeed in addition to mobilization, MAD was really good at what's known as organizing, which is pushing down leadership to local representatives who take responsibility for building communities, who build that infrastructure that a social movement needs to succeed.

5:10And in part, this was inadvertent on their part. Central headquarters for MAD was such a total mess. The woman who ran it, who founded it, was using the organization's funds to like pay for dry cleaning. So she got pushed out. But all these local leaders basically said like, oh, this is important to us. Like, we're going to run this on the local level like we think it should be run. And we're going to step up. We're going to fill in these leadership vacuums. And so as a result, MAD became this like kind of training grounds for how to be a leader, how to run an organization, how to build an organization.

5:42And it turns out that social movements need both mobilizing and organizing. But that does not mean that they're equally important. organizing is more important than mobilizing it's more valuable it's more powerful particularly when a social movement is starting organizing developing that infrastructure so that not it's not all dependent on one person but rather it's dependent on thousands of people who have built little communities around them of people who are dedicated to this cause that is what makes a social movement sustainable that's what allows you to do mobilizing that's effective and that kind of explains what's going on right now with the Republicans and Democrats.

6:18Yeah, I mean, let's get into that, because I feel like you make the argument in the piece that Republicans have been better at organizing, even though it you'll explain in a bit why that is the case. But I also feel like a lot of it does feel like it's kind of this top down thing where it's like, OK, there's this guy, Trump, everyone in the party likes him. And so, yeah, it doesn't necessarily feel like there are all these like little communities, you know, kind of just feels like it's all based around one guy. So I think from the outside and from the Democratic perspective, it appears like that, but exactly the opposite is true.

6:48So the groups that have built the infrastructure in the communities within the right, the Republican Party, groups like Faith and Freedom Coalition, the precinct strategy that was launched by the Tea Party to take over local Republican precincts, in fact, Turning Point USA, headed by Charlie Kirk, they were all anti-Trump when Trump was first running, right? They all were terrified by this guy and really upset that he was so crass and so undignified. And you see that from Ralph Reed, the head of Faith and Family. You see that from Charlie Kirk, who is critical. He actually compared Trump to Hitler at one point.

7:22Then when Trump started winning, these groups were opportunistic, as all politicians and political groups are. And they realized that Trump can be a great vehicle for them. But what we see right now as MAGA is not actually Trump. MAGA is this thing that is powered by hundreds and hundreds of organizations that have come together and they've all said, okay, Trump's the guy that we're going to stand behind. He's the winner. We know that he can get a certain number of votes. So we're all lining up behind him, but they're not Trumpers. And in fact, as soon as Trump is out of this picture, like we're going to see a bunch of diversification.

7:59What is important is that those groups have been, have been under construction for two decades now. and it's the distributed nature of them. The fact that you and I don't know about Faith and Freedom Coalition, which is probably the most powerful conservative organization in the nation right now, the fact that we don't know about them is a testament to their success. Can you tell us more about them just in general? Because I know that they emerged after Obama won in 2008, right? And it seems like a lot of the leftist organizers you spoke to in the piece kind of pointed to them as like an example of like, you know, they're doing the work.

8:35They're amazing. They're amazing. So yeah, so Ralph Reed, who you'll remember, was the head of the Christian coalition back in the 80s and 90s. After the 2008 Obama election, he looked at exit polls and he realized that religious voters were voting for Obama in larger numbers than he had ever seen anyone vote for a Democrat before. And this was really concerning to him because basically he had built a coalition of religious voters to support Republicans consistently. And so he starts trying to figure out why. What did Obama do? And what Obama did was this kind of interesting thing. Obama turned campaign conventional wisdom on its head.

9:11Usually you have a bunch of volunteers for a campaign that are managed by the professional staff from sort of central headquarters. Obama did the exact opposite. What he basically said was, if you want to become a franchisee of the Obama campaign, if you want to start your own local initiative, we support you 100%. And you know what? We'll give you some talking points and we'll give you some guidance, but you should do what you think is best. You should become the owner of your local Obama franchise. And one of the consequences of this was the largest volunteer turnout in U.S. history, right? You had 2.1 million people who tried to convince their neighbors something like 30 million times to vote for Obama.

9:53And that's one of the reasons in 2008 we saw such a huge victory for Obama and for congressional Democrats. So Ralph Reed looks at this and he says, look, we've been doing this all wrong. we need to imitate Obama. And in fact, that's exactly what they did. They took the Obama playbook and they started the Faith and Family Coalition. It started in 2009, and their theory was this. What we want to do is we want to find people who are religious or who are conservative. We want to inspire them to found their own local chapter. And then we're basically going to give them a little bit of support, a little bit of money, but it's up to them to figure out how to organize, what issues to advocate on, how they're going to conduct themselves.

10:31Because learning from Obama, we think this is going to attract more people. And in the last Trump election, the last presidential election, the 3.1 million Faith and Family Coalition members around the country approached their neighbors 86 million times to vote for Trump, three times larger than Obama's record-setting initiative back in 08. That's insane. But the thing is, it's insane. It's insane. But none of us have heard of this, right? And the fundamental unit, the atomic unit of the Faith and Family Coalition is 10 to 12 people who get together. They're neighbors and they get together once a week.

11:11Sometimes they do it for Bible study. Sometimes they just do it to socialize. They do it year round. And when time comes to ask them, can you sit down and make, you know, 30 hours of phone calls this week? They say, sure, I'm going to do it with my friends. Why wouldn't I do that? That sounds like fun.

11:30More with Charles Duhigg after the break. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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12:20Part of what's interesting here is like, especially when talking about faith and freedom, which like, it seems like they learned a lot from the kind of like Obama playbook, is that these are Republican organizations that are sort of adopting these tactics from Democratic organizations, except now it seems like we're seeing less of this from the Democrats. So, I mean, what what happened in your opinion? Like, why is it that, you know, Obama kind of has this playbook, this like franchise idea, and then we see faith and freedom pick it up. And now this is something that is more associated with the Republicans and with the Democrats.

12:55Yeah. So I think and there's been widespread, very legitimate critiques of the Obama administration that they did not do enough on the local side. They basically use this strategy to get elected and then they sort of let it wither. But I think what's happened on the Republican side that's important to this is that as Democrats, particularly when Trump was first elected, there was such outrage, right? People talk about this Trump derangement syndrome, which I think is a kind of unfair way of critiquing his critics. But to a degree, it's right that people reacted very emotionally to Trump. And there was this feeling almost immediately, the Women's March happens the day after Trump's inauguration, right?

13:31And because he's been accused of rape credibly, because he has made comments about women's bodies, this outrage manifested. And there was this belief that if we could just turn millions of people out into the streets, that it would affect some change. And even more so, there's a belief that those millions of people who show up, they have to have some ideological unity, right? We have to present a unified front to say, we are so angry at this man being elected that we are coming out to the street and we're all united against him. There's a couple of problems with that. First of all, as we mentioned before, mobilizing millions of people means that they go out into the street one day and then they go home and they don't do anything else, right?

14:15They feel like they've done their job and they're not part of a community. They don't even know who to turn to. There's no infrastructure building as a part of getting millions of people into the street. Those millions of people will march and then they'll go home. The second thing that happened is that this focus on ideological unity is really, really damaging to creating the big tent that you mentioned earlier. So take the Women's March as an example. It was at that point the largest single day mobilization in U.S. history. But there were all these things that were exclusionary. So the Women's March actually said, if you are a feminist, if you belong to a women's group, women's right groups, but you're pro-life, there's no place for you here.

14:55We don't want you to show up. There were all these debates and internal controversies that happened almost immediately about the roles of Jewish people in racism, about whether sex workers should be seen as victims or seen as people who are empowered. And it was vicious. I mean, we've all lived through this, right? We remember this era and how if you said the wrong thing, you were suddenly cast out by your peers. And I understand the impulse for that because you want to present ideological unity. The consequence of it, though, is that all those people who are sort of ambiguous, who are ambivalent, there's very little opportunity to convert those people to your side because you're already telling them, like, if you're uncertain about abortion, like, you don't belong here.

15:41So then they're just not going to show up. And that's been one of the things that's happened on the left is that we have seen a focus on ideological purity. We've seen a focus on these big spectacle mobilizations like no King's Day, millions of people. And what all the science tells us is that does not change the vote. It does not change what swing voters believe or how they act. It doesn't change the nation. It actually probably makes it harder for us to come together. How do you like distinguish between a like an ideological purity test and legitimate concern? I mean, I get that like when you're mobilizing a bunch of people or organizing a bunch of people that it can make sense to have that big tent.

16:23But I'm thinking more about like even just like the kinds of things that we saw during the most recent presidential election where you have people who are, you know, unsure about voting for Harris because they don't like the Biden administration's, you know, sort of approach toward Gaza. I guess at what point do you think that people should kind of put aside some of their concerns? And and at what point do you think that it's important to dwell on those concerns? Yeah, it's a really good question, right? It gets at the core of like why we are political as people. I mean, let's talk about what they're doing on the right, because the Republicans have basically said, and I think this is very savvy, although not ideologically coherent.

17:01They basically said, look, if you wear the red hat, like if you're willing to vote for Trump, we don't really care what you believe beyond that. Some of these people are anti-government. Others are pro-government. Some of them are pro-life. Some of them are pro-choice. Some of them are pro-guns. Some of them are anti-guns. These fault lines that used to exist on the right about who's allowed in and who's pushed out, they've basically disappeared. And as Sarah Longwell, this Republican strategist that I spoke to said, if you put on the red hat, you are a member of the MAGA movement. It doesn't matter what else you believe.

17:32Now, hopefully, others have more ideological honesty, right? And I think to get to your question about, we don't want the Democratic Party, we don't want the left to become something where it's, if you put on the blue hat, you can say whatever crazy things you want. But it is a question of what is a core democratic value, and what is not a core democratic value. I think for many people, they would say that the right to have access to abortion is a core democratic value. but historically that hasn't been true there's been pro-life democrats until about 20 years ago who did very well nationally right i think that there's a number of people who you know the difference in the perception on january 6th and whether that was an insurrection or whether that was legitimate um protest i think there's a lot of people in the middle who say like you know like it doesn't seem legitimate they hurt cops but at the same time it doesn't seem like insurrection Insurrection is like a big deal.

18:30And yet on their left, it's become this article of faith, this dogma that you have to say that January 6th was an insurrection. What I would say is we need a conversation within the Democratic Party. And I think it's going to happen next year in the following year as we lead up to 28. We need to have a conversation in the Democratic Party about what it means to be a Democrat. And that has to be, these are three or four core values that are important to us. And it might be that we are against racism. We are against bigotry. We are for the rule of law. But then beyond those three or four to say, you can believe anything you want outside of these three or four core issues.

19:11If you're pro-life, if you're pro-choice, if you think that the trans issue is one that really troubles you or you think we're not doing enough on trans rights, we need to create space inside the Democratic Party for all those people and decide what our core values are. And that's what a primary is. It's a debate over what the core values ought to be. I just wonder if like the core value that we've at least seen kind of articulated by a lot of Democrats, like I feel like if I had to pick a core value right now that I would associate with the Democrats, it would be protecting people who they see as marginalized.

19:42And so that kind of applies to women who are seeking abortions or people who are seeking transitions or who are getting persecuted for being trans or, you know, people who are at risk of getting deported. And so if you kind of accept that as the core value or as one of them, it almost feels like it's impossible to expand the coalition without feeling like there's something really essential that's being compromised. Yeah. So maybe that can't be the core value. But then that is like, you know, it's a good core value to have. Well, I think that there's a way. So when Tip O 'Neill would talk about this, what he would talk about is he would say, we need to have a safety net in place to take care of people who, for whatever reason, aren't able to take care of themselves.

20:25Right. That wasn't based on the color of your skin or your immigration status or your sexual orientation. It was very much based on just where, like, can you take care of yourself? And in fact, I'd argue that it was probably much more economic than we give it credit for. So I think another way of reframing what you said is, and there's a strain within the Democratic Party that's pushing for this, that if we make our focus on marginalized people around people who are primarily economically marginalized, like they simply cannot get the resources that they need in order to live successful lives, I think what it does is it captures a lot of the groups that you just mentioned, right?

21:04But it also expands that out to working class, frankly, whites, right? And working class women and working class men. Working class men have basically just completely abandoned the Democratic Party, in part because they feel like the Democratic Party isn't offering anything for them. They see the Democratic Party the same way you did. The core value is that they want to take care of minorities and they want to take care of people who are undocumented in this country. and I'm a blue collar white man living in the South. I'm neither of those things. So why would I vote for the Democratic Party when it offers nothing to me?

21:38I actually think, I don't think we can ever criticize someone for voting in their own self-interest. It is enlightened and something I admire when we vote for things that are not in our self-interest, when the rich vote to raise taxes. But I don't think it's a winning strategy and I don't think it's ethical to criticize someone who says, I don't want to vote for the Democrats because the Democrats don't seem like they want to do anything for me. That's a legitimate way to vote. I mean, just thinking about voting, like, is there a politician right now, like, who kind of represents this version of the party, you know, this kind of big tent, you know, if you're for democracy but you're pro-life, you know, there's a place for you here, or is there like a figure who's trying to build a coalition of this kind that you can think of?

22:27So I don't think we know yet, because I think that everyone who's like going to be one of those people is right now trying to figure out what they can say safely and what they can't. Right. There's this concept of the Overton window, which is what we're talking about. What's acceptable to say within within society, in this case, the Democratic Party. There are a number of candidates. Gretchen Whitmer, for instance, is a great example of this. There are a number of candidates who are trying to expand that Overton window. I think the governor of Pennsylvania, I think, is another example of this.

22:56And actually, in his own way, Gavin Newsom is an example of this. They are trying to expand the tent. What they're terrified of, and what we won't know until the primary really starts, is they're terrified of stepping on a landmine. Like, if I expand the tent a little bit too much, is it going to blow up in my face? And all of a sudden, everyone's going to say, oh, he's not really a Democrat, or he's not really electable, or he's not really someone we want to get behind. So what we're seeing right now is this jockeying. Every candidate that I think is a legitimate candidate, if you look at them, is actually trying to expand the tent.

23:28And they're trying to figure out what they can safely say. Gretchen Whitmer is a great example because she's working with Trump, right? She doesn't say, she doesn't really say that many like bad things about Trump. And she's from Michigan. She's a governor of an area that has longtime conservative roots. She is someone who is clearly trying to expand the tent without drawing attention to herself for doing so. And in so doing, become a lightning rod for criticisms. So there's this moral question of like how big the coalition should be and who you should let into it. And then there's also the kind of like, I guess, like more tedious on the ground work of like creating these, you know, sort of organizations.

24:05And like I'm thinking about the MAGA-led precinct strategy, which encouraged activists to run for leadership positions within their Republican Party chapters, their local chapters, and become poll workers. So do you see the left is like, even though the left kind of engages in these purity tests, you know, we've been talking about, do you think that the left is still focused on that kind of like slow local work, which is the kind of thing that I would, you know, would have historically kind of associated with the left? Or have you seen like the left backing away from that as well? Yeah, you know, this is even better than I do.