Factually! with Adam Conover - The Secret Reason the Dems Keep Losing

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) Being part of a political party used to actually mean something other than being hounded for money over text and being disappointed by your choice of candidates at the polls every few years. Here’s how the death of mass-membership organizations tanked the American political system—and left everyone feeling more disconnected and dissatisfied.Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 50% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. So the Democratic Party has spent the past couple months arguing about why and how they lost this election. Even though they raised and spent more money than any candidate ever, even though they had the largest army of volunteers ever assembled knocking doors and getting out the vote, and even though they sent all of us endless emails and texts begging us to donate now or they're gonna make AOC walk the plank, they got smoked. According to the strategists and consultants that ran Kamala's campaign,

they did everything they possibly could do to win. So how on earth did they lose? Well, you know, could be the fact that they never took a stance on Israel's mass killing of the civilian population in Gaza. It could be the party's refusal to acknowledge how working-class Americans are being preyed upon by the wealthy. And it could be that Kamala spent the entire campaign parading around a cheney baby who nobody likes. But, you know, there's also a deeper, hidden reason that Democrats keep losing that almost no one is talking about. The truth is that spending all that money on ads, armies of door knockers, and spamming people's phones doesn't actually win elections.

What does win is real political engagement, and that is something the Democratic Party has abandoned. In fact, so has almost every other liberal group in America. And the result is that average people have been pushed out of the political system and turned into consumers rather than participants. And the party and its consultants are to blame. But before I get into that real quick, I just want to remind you that I am on tour with a brand new hour of stand-up comedy right now. The Nihilism Pivot Tour comes to Dallas on January 10th through 12th, Toronto on January 23rd through 25th,

Omaha on February 12th, Minneapolis on the 13th, and then Chicago, Boston, Vermont, London, Amsterdam, and yes, even Providence, Rhode Island. All those tickets and a lot more dates available at adamkonover.net and head to patreon.com slash adamkonover if you'd like to support this channel directly.

And I hope you do. So let's say you want to join the Democratic Party, God help you, or another liberal political group like the ACLU. What actually happens when you become a member of one of these groups? Well, they start begging you to donate, they send you a lot of junk in the mail, and they blast your phone with a sh**load of texts. But do you actually get a say in what the organization or party does? Is it yours in any meaningful sense or are you just another name on a spreadsheet to them, another wallet to reach into? In other words, do they see

you as a member or do they see you as just another customer? I think it's the latter, and if you ask me, that f***ing sucks. But you know, it turns out that that shallow transactional relationship with the political group that we're all used to is actually a new thing in American society. 70 years ago, America was full of true membership organizations that didn't just beg their members for cash, they truly made them a part of the political process. So put on your poodle skirt and pop a couple of mommy's little helpers.

We're going back to the 1950s. So in the middle of the last century, civic life in America was centered around community membership organizations. There were religious groups like churches, workplace organizing groups like unions, political groups like the Legal Women Voters and the NAACP, and even social charitable organizations

like the Elks and the Masons. Now, many of those groups still exist in some form today, but they're mostly just websites with donation buttons at this point. Back then, they were a part of the actual civic and social life of their community. You know, in 2024 we spend our time arguing in the TikTok comments, but in 1955 folks were chopping it up in person at their local union hall on spaghetti night. For the holidays, instead of

staying home to watch the Sabrina Carpenter Netflix special on your laptop, you'd celebrate by getting lampshade on the head drunk with your neighbors at the Elks Lodge. That's right, a lot of these organizations specifically had beer halls where you could get hammered for cheap with your buds. Today the only place you can get drunk that cheap is a supply closet at work, and then only if you're willing to go blind afterwards. In the era before the internet, these organizations simply were most people's social life, And I can't overstate how omnipresent they were. Like the members of your favorite TikTok polycule, they touched everyone. In the 50s, a third of working Americans were in a union, and national membership

organizations could have as many as 17,000 local chapters each, each of which was run by volunteers from that community. In the mid-50s, researchers estimate that about 5% of American adults were leaders in these local chapters. And, you know, they weren't just social clubs. These groups often had a specific political purpose, like fighting for workers' rights, veterans' rights, or people of color, and they expected their members to show up in person and lead that fight. Sure, at work you were just a welder,

but at night you'd go and run the shit out of a union meeting. Like, fuck yeah, Cynthia's approving the minutes. She's calling a quorum. She's planning a fucking strike, baby. Because these groups actually organized their members to participate in the political system and fight for their causes.

These organizations were one of the main drivers of social change in the last century. I mean, take the Montgomery bus boycott, right? We learn about Rosa Parks in school, but what's often left out is that she was the working class secretary of her local NAACP chapter. Rosa's refusal to stand up and leave her seat is often portrayed as this solitary individual act of bravery.

But it wasn't. It was part of a coordinated movement by an entire community organization, of which Rosa was a member and a leader. And change like that wasn't only sparked by progressive organizations. The conservative group, the American Legion, drafted in one passage of one of the biggest American social welfare programs of all time the GI Bill of 1944 and they didn't do that out of the kindness of their hearts or out of charity for the poor veterans

They did it because the organization was made up of veterans and that is what those veterans wanted to fight for the members Literally called the shots and of course wanted to fight for. The members literally called the shots. And of course, America's unions used member power to get countless pro-worker policies passed, like the eight-hour workday, overtime, and basic safety protections. These groups made the average person not a consumer,

not a spectator, but an actual participant in the political process. I mean, hell, during election season, the candidates might actually come to your group's spaghetti dinner, listen to your concerns, and then adopt them because they needed not just your vote, but your organization's entire political might behind them.

That means that back then, working people had real influence in the political system. But today, we all know it is not like that. Today, we are ruled by the rich. Our laws are written by billionaire-funded corporate lobbyists, and our incoming president is a billionaire whose campaign was bankrolled by the world's richest man. And that man, Elon Musk, appears to be the guy who's actually running the country right now. In fact, the two of them are spending most of their time inviting the rest of the world's billionaires to brunch to talk about how they're gonna f*** over the rest of us.

That headline, by the way, was from this video's sponsor, Ground News. And you know, I use Ground News because they pull together headlines from all across the political spectrum. Like, if you want to see every story about Elon Musk and how he's using his power over Trump to enrich himself, well, you can go right to Ground News' topic page for Elon. They rate each source by how left or right leaning it is so you can see the difference and how the different sides are covering him. And they also give factuality ratings

so you can make sure you're getting the real story, not misinformation. And my favorite is that they have a blind spot feature so you can see which stories you're missing because let's face it, we all live within a bubble that we need to break out of. And guess what? You can get 40% off of ground news

if you use my special code, just go to groundnews.com slash factually. That's groundnews.com slash factually. So the mass membership organizations of the past gave working class people real political influence and participation in the American political process. But today, politics has become a spectator sport, something we watch on TV or gets pinged to our phones.

No matter how many overly friendly texts you get from your bud Mayor Pete, you know you're never gonna get to eat asobuko with him and Chastain at Nobu. I'm sorry, the joke's confusing. Asobuko's a food, Chastain is his husband. Was that not clear? Is it Chastain or is it Chastain? I'm not. Sorry, man. I didn't look it up. I apologize. We're not friends. I mean a Democratic Party doesn't try to involve the average person in the political process at all.

Even if you take it upon yourself to look for a volunteer opportunity during election season, it'll probably just be to send more of these godforsaken texts like, hello, it's me, Kamala. No, it's not. It's Steve pushing buttons from his recliner in Iowa. So how did this change? How did we go from a society where we have bottom-up grassroots participation in civic and political life to a top-down one where the party elites tell us who to vote for and beg for our money. Well, there's a couple of explanations. Part of it was the Vietnam War, the draft divided the country, and young people didn't really want to join groups with the same old guys who were sending their buddies off to

get shot. More importantly around this time, Republican-led states waged a campaign to destroy the unions, the mass membership organizations that represented working people. See, unions had been such staunch supporters of Democrats that Republicans started teaming up with corporations to pass so-called right-to-work laws that dramatically weakened the unions. In a response to this attack, many of the unions that survived started taking a less militant, less democratic approach to organizing. Instead, they began to function more like companies that just offered a service to their customers,

rather than a real union made up of members with power. But the final nail in the coffin was a shift in strategy across every one of these organizations that was caused by new communications technology, like direct mail and cheap phone calls. See, a truly democratic structure might be effective and powerful, but it's also expensive and time-consuming. You have to rent a headquarters, throw events,

let members hold their little elections and listen to them complain. Ugh, annoying. So the Democratic Party and its related groups realized that they could use new technology to do away with all that. Why bother to hold a super fun live event fundraiser when you can just send a letter begging for cash? And why bother to have a meeting where average members can participate in the endorsement process when you can just tell them how to vote with a phone call or a billion fucking texts?

In other words, the Democratic Party and other groups across the country decided to stop being Democratic bottom-up membership organizations, and instead became top-down organizations that treated us not like members, but again, as customers. And the result of this has been the decimation of their memberships. In the 1950s, a third of American workers were in a union, but after decades of attack by anti-worker corporations, that number has fallen to 10%. The League of Women Voters lost over 15% of their members in the 70s alone, and from just

2011 to 2022, the American Legion lost 700,000 members. And the starkest effect of this decline has been on working-class people. You know, the same people who swung for Trump this year. See, our economy has become so tilted, so unfair, that now you have to work two jobs just to make ends meet. So how are you supposed to join or lead a community group after your second graveyard shift at the gas station? That's why today, it's actually college-educated Americans who are more likely to join a community group or a union and even more likely just to have the pals over for a beer. In other words, being a part of a civic

group in your community has gone from a basic part of human life to a goddamn luxury group that you can only get with a hundred thousand dollar degree. There's a famous book called Bowling Alone that charts how the decline of these organizations actually led to a decline in our social lives as Americans overall. I mean we are literally hanging out less as a people than we used to. We're even f**king less. I mean no wonder people feel alienated. We are literally lonelier than we used to be.

And no wonder so many working class Americans feel alienated from civic life. Our political and civic groups literally abandoned them. And you know who swooped in to fill the gap? The right wing. See, in rest belt America, unions like the United Auto Workers and Mine Workers used to be the center of civic life. But once those unions declined and were beaten back by big business, the NRA stepped in. See, a lot of Democrats don't really understand what the power of the NRA truly is. They think it's the NRA's money and its donations to politicians, but that's not it at all.

The source of the NRA's strength is the social role it plays in the community of its members. Let's say you live in Erie, a Pennsylvania county that used to be a manufacturing hub and went for Trump in 2024, and you're looking for something to do. If you search the Democrats website, the closest event is in Altoona, over three hours away. But if you go to the NRA website, well, they have this great event section with a women's wilderness escape group, annual meetings, gun shows. And if you scroll down to find an event near you, there are multiple places within a 10-minute drive

where you can go and get involved. So say you're a random person in Erie, Pennsylvania, which organization do you think you'd feel more attached to? The party that doesn't give enough of a shit about your town to even have an event within 100 miles? Or the NRA chapter down the street, which will give you free gun training and a rad hat. And when election time comes around, whose endorsements will you trust? The group you're actually a member of that you participate in that hosted your women's wilderness retreat? Or the nerds from New York who come parachuting in every four years with some big fancy words about fracking? I mean, think about this. The Democrats' literal strategy is to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the big cities on the coast,

and then use that cash to blanket swing states with TV ads and send get-out-the-vote teams made up of out-of-state teenagers. Ding-dong! Hello, I'm a stranger with acne and no connection to you and your community. Can I tell you how to vote today? I mean, is it any wonder most people say get the fuck out of here? This strategy doesn't fucking work. The here? This strategy doesn't fucking work. The election proved that it doesn't fucking work, but the people who run the Democratic Party won't acknowledge that because they are literally paid not to.

Instead, their consultants get to charge for the mailers and the ad buys and the rallies because they don't want our participation anymore, they just want our money. And if you want proof, just look at the Democratic Party's website right now. Their only option for ways to pitch in now to help are four different donation buttons. Oh wait, there's a fifth button, other, let's click that. Oh, okay, great, it's another fucking donation screen.

Well, if you do manage to click out of the donation deluge, you get to this site, which tells you who the Democrats are, who we are, who we serve. You know what it doesn't tell you? What it would mean for you to be a Democrat, how you can get involved, how you can influence the decisions the party makes. It is obvious on its face that the entire operation is run from the top down. And you know what else makes it glaringly obvious? The fact that the Democrats are spending all this time and energy arguing about where they went wrong, polling the public, debating what it is that the people really want,

when if they were a truly Democratic participatory party, they would know what the people want because the party would be run by the people. I mean, it's right there, guys! Now look, we are in a bit of a dark period in terms of civic participation, but here's the bright side. The Democratic Party, and in fact all of American society, does not have to be this way. We know from history that when you give people, average people the opportunity to engage in a real way and you make it fun and you give them free spaghetti

and beer, well guess what? They actually show up and they are a part of the organization and we can do that again. You know, we always talk about how Americans are nostalgic for the 1950s. Donald Trump's entire campaign was premised on a return to the past. But maybe what we're craving is not actually the soda fountains and the racism.

Maybe what we really miss about the good old days is just being a part of a community that actually makes a difference in the place that we live. So if there are any Democratic consultants or strategists watching, and I hope there are, thanks for taking a break from the Pod Save guys and hanging out. Here's my advice. If you really want to win, the best thing I think you could do

would be to turn your party back into a true democracy. You could revitalize your local chapters. You could throw social and community events that actually help people and fill community needs rather than just lining the pockets of consultants. And you could give average people true membership and participation in the political process and let them decide what the party is going to do, not you. And you know what? I'm not the only one talking about this.

There are actually commentators on the Democratic side who are starting to push for these changes. So maybe we'll see some progress over the next four years. I hope so. And if you're just an average person watching at home, and I thank you for being here too, well, you know what? This isn't a change you just have to wait for or hope happens. It's a change you can be a part of by finding a local community group in your area to join and participate in. You can join the League of Women Voters, you could revitalize your local Elks Lodge, or you could start a union in your workplace. And yeah, you know, that's a lot harder work for everyone than sending or receiving a couple

million texts every four years. But it is also how every important change in this country has ever been won. Because you know, we say it all the time, but this country is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. So if we wanted to change for the benefit of the people, well guess what? The people need to be f***ing involved. That was a HeadGum Podcast.

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