The Realignment: Are We Selling Out with Our Guest Booking?
Episodes of the week + what's up next, original written content, Bookshop, and more...
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Welcome Back to The Realignment
This week’s episodes with Andrew Yang and Bradley Tusk essentially came down to the question of: “Can the state of American politics improve without systemic, structural change?” Both guests effectively answered no. Andrew proposes a new third party to advance open primaries and ranked choice voting, while Bradley thinks we need to institute mobile voting to radically increase participation in elections.
What’s your take? Marshall’s writing a response that will be featured in next week’s newsletter. He’ll draw on your perspectives.
Side note, Marshall’s going to sub-in for Krystal on Breaking Points on Monday. See you there!
Does The Realignment Talk to the Mainstream Too Much?
I (Marshall) love mixing it up with the audience in the YouTube comments and on Reddit. So I’m surfacing and expanding my response to today’s argument (via user Cas8228), which started as follows:
Sorry, but the guests you keep having on are all "pro cathedral talking points". Its making it tougher to want to listen to.
This guy (Bradley Tusk) worked for Bloomberg. Chafkin still writes for Bloomberg. Yang calls anyone on the Right horrible things and won't talk to them. You are going along with the narrative of the cathedral and only have people on that appear to have that bias. You guys give a little pushback, but not much. Its just not very interesting, would love to see more Populists on.
First off, I 100% get what Cas8228 is saying. We need to book more populist and conservative guests. As both our shows have gotten bigger, it’s gotten easy to swim in more mainstream waters and attention.
That said, Breaking Points and Krystal Kyle and Friends are doing an incredible job of covering the broader populist ecosystem. Bringing on mainstream/cathedral guests helps expand the show’s reach and gain us credibility so that when we do platform populists, they get exposed to new audiences. Now, we need to be reminded and pushed to bring on new voices and not just roll with however Penguin Press is sending our way, but that’s what you, our engaged audience is there to help us with.
We’d grow faster by turning literally turning The Realignment into long-form Breaking Points, but I don’t really care about our growth rate at the moment (check back in a few years) and am more interested in hitting our editorial objectives. The show complements Breaking Points well not only because of the different format, but because it has a different point-of-view and type of guest/topic.
We should be more explicit about this, but I’m not a populist, and think a huge portion of our populist-leaning frame during our first season (when we were at the Hudson Institute) was straight-up wrong. I’m growing increasingly concerned that populist/independent media is growing increasingly insular and self-referential and think there’s a huge need to build a platform that has credibility with the mainstream vs. the already crowded independent media space.
It’s easy to critique the MSM, but it’s pretty clear that independent media features plenty of non-cathedral people shouting into the void about corruption and evil just for clicks. There’s an increasing nihilism and doomerism about the country right now, and we shouldn’t be another voice shouting into the void.
That said, there’s no beef if you don’t like a specific (or consecutive set) of episodes. We don’t program this show to maximize happiness across every single set of our audience. As I said on YouTube, realistically, the typical listener will really like 33-66% of our episodes.
I hope this was useful, as we need to do a better job of letting the audience know what we’re thinking, especially as we ask you guys to join us on a ten-year-plus journey.
Let us know what you think below!
This Week’s Episodes
Episode 165: Bradley Tusk: How Mobile Voting Could Save Democracy
More information on Bradley’s mobile voting proposal here.
Episode 164: Andrew Yang: The Case for a New Party, Open Primaries, and Ranked Choice Voting
Andrew’s book: Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy is available at our Bookshop storefront.
Next Week’s Episodes
Episode 166: Former head of news policy at Google, Jacob Helberg, on his new book: The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power.
The Wires of War is available for pre-order at our Bookshop storefront.
Jacob actually came on The Realignment during the election last year to discuss China issues. Take a listen here. If you’re part of the conservative part of the audience, ignore the “Case for Joe Biden” part of the title. There’s lots of great stuff in it, even a year later.
Episode 167: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos on his new book: Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.
Evan’s three books: Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, and Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China are available at our Bookshop storefront.
The Realignment Bookshop
As a reminder, we’ve created a Realignment Bookshop affiliate store showcasing books by guests, what we’re actively reading this year, and deeper dives into the featured topic of an episode.
Most importantly, you don’t need to go with our recommendations if you want to support the show. If you go to Bookshop.org through our link and then purchase *anything* we still get your support.
If you purchase a book using our link, the show gets a 10% commission, a local, independent bookseller gets support, and you get an awesome book!
Here are two lists we’ve built out:
1) Books by Realignment Guests
2) Books we’ve read/listened to in 2021
Let us know what you think about this or any other week’s episodes. Please share The Realignment with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.
Marshall & Saagar,
I know you don’t have much reason to listen to some random commenter on Substack, but here it is:
“populist/independent media is growing increasingly insular and self-referential”. Are the likes of The Atlantic and The Washington Post not becoming increasingly insular or self-referential (despite influential)? Do they not employ many people who attended the same four dozen or so elite universities? This (education/credentials) is the main divide in our country.
I humbly suggest having more guests on The Realignment/Breaking Points who are either 1) is religious 2) originally comes from a “heartland” (to borrow from Michael Lind) part of the country 3) ideally does not have a college degree (or at least not an “elite” one). Various good ones might be Gladden Pappin, Rusty Reno, Matthew Walther, Sohrab Ahmari, or Aris Rousinoss (not American).
Thanks.
I listened to Yang with Krystal and then ya’ll.
The one word that leaped out was incentives. And established parties have established incentives.
Because Yang wants candidates to keep their current registration as Democrat/Republican it means they will keep some legitimacy (aka not full cringe Marshall 😬). We’ll see if any of them can best Sisyphus and push the incentive boulder over the hill.
Progressives and MAGA achieved a shift in language, but language is abstract. Incentives are concrete, cemented in evolution and rugged as asphalt. Incentives pave the way Forward (couldn’t resist).
This is a similar conversation to psychedelics, which according to the ongoing studies… essentially offer individuals an opportunity to craft new incentives.
Yang references legacy media incentives and social media incentives as well—Web 3 is a coordinated attack against those incentive structures.
Perhaps The Realignment (def: ‘to cause to form new arrangements or to have a new orientation’) is really about crafting new incentives for our Postmodern Digital Age.
Bradley Tusk also talked about incentives. He’s for radical change as opposed to Yang’s incrementalism. (I’m going to refuse the low-hanging fruit of a ‘yin to yang’ reference.) It’s Malcolm X and MLK JR. Someone needs to paint a positive vision of the way forward (I know, I know) and someone needs to threaten. You wanna lose weight? You better have that hot, summer bod in mind coupled with yourself stretched out on a gurney. Yang is hopeful and Tusk worries about The Divided States of America, but both want new incentives.
All the ambiguous talk of ‘systemic this’ and ‘systemic that’ is centered around the Issue of Incentives. I think your [un]intentional focus on incentives is the reason you have a bipartisan/diverse/blasé-buzzword audience. Save the incentives, save the world (thank you 2006 Tim Kring).
FIN // SLAINTÉ