What does it mean to fight?
Great questions from one of this week's guests
The latest episode is out and it features my interview with two great friends of mine, who have recently co-authored a book called Just Evil Enough. You can listen to it here:
It’s long. I know it’s long.
The reason the episode posted late yesterday is that I spent a few hours going back and forth in my head about whether to cut the last 20 minutes or so. I even thought about dropping in an introduction before the introduction before we published. In the end I decided that making it a full 90 minutes was not doing anybody any favors.
But the thing is that part of the conversation both makes me uncomfortable and feels like a necessary artifact of the moment we’re living in.
Toward the end of my interview questions, I made an offhand remark about Pete Hegseth. I called him a degenerate. There is ample reporting to support this characterization.
Alistair then asked me if I was worried about any blowback from calling the new Secretary of Defense a degenerate. So we had a long conversation about what worries me and what doesn’t, why I am not worried about me in particular, and so on.
We had this conversation a week ago.
This week I have to admit I’m not as confident as I was last week.
I still rely on the fact that I am extremely un-famous, that I do not have a paid job in government or politics. I make this podcast at my own expense; I write these newsletters myself. My clients want to know about consumer behavior and purchase drivers and pricing strategies and how their brand is performing in the marketplace and where their growth will come from. I advocate for democracy as a little hobby.
But things are getting weird out there. And I think between last week and this week something shifted in my mindset — instead of continuing to hold two views in my head at once (‘they are incompetent and weak and are already facing setbacks’ v ‘they have (so far) unchecked power and are moving awfully fast’), I think I’ve started to integrate the two ideas. One no longer cancels out or mitigates the other. I’m in my “why not both” season.
They are incompetent, weak, facing opposition and setbacks, and moving incredibly fast with nearly unchecked power.1
What is it to be Just Evil Enough?
Alistair and Emily are not Americans. They live in countries with troubling politics and political figures, but they are not directly dealing with the American situation.
They are both entrepreneurs, and big thinkers about how brands and businesses grow. Their book (available here), provides a variety of examples, some extremely useful frameworks, and for purchasers of the book a host of tools and guides for using those frameworks.
I’ll outline a few ideas that I really got excited about when I got to read a pre-publication edit of the book. These are things that I think any brand that is trying to grow (from zero to one, or from small to big, or from old to new) should work through.
And I think it goes double for pro-democracy groups, or the parties that want to represent democracy2.
Become aware that you are in a system, and try to see the system clearly (or at all). This is harder than you might think — living within a system is just how it is. The system is the water we swim in; and we’re the fish, who don’t even know what water is. Systems have rules, they have customs, they have structures.
Disagree with the status quo — and therefore the system. If you’re not growing, something in the system, or the way that you act within it, or interact with it, is not serving you. Adopt a mindset of disagreeing. You don’t have to accept that because that’s how it has been, that’s how it is.
Seek novel tactics. Remember how you are part of a system. When you disagree with that system, you should begin to disagree, in a sense, with yourself. All those things you’ve been doing forever? Set them to the side. All those things you’ve never tried? Try them. I have a poster in my office that reads, “I have a strategic plan - it’s called doing things.” Do things, but do things you haven’t done before, do things nobody in your category has done before, do things you’re not “supposed to” do.
This is not advice that leads you to “we need a Joe Rogan of the left”. In fact that argument reeks of the status quo and agreeableness. Having a Joe Rogan of the left would be, in practice, conformist — accepting as given the new system we’re in, eschewing novel tactics to adopt the rules of the new system, and in so doing, fundamentally agreeing with our current status quo.
BTW — the truth about Joe Rogan’s influence is quite straightforward:
People get political ideas from “non political” places — in fact they low-key prefer to, because overtly political places aren’t that fun for most people.
Politics isn’t policy — politics is pro wrestling (1 part sport, 2 parts entertainment — in which a core component of the entertainment is “there’s a twist!”)
People don’t experience politics differently from any other category of content; their relationship to the parties and candidates operates like fandom when they like them or like conspiracism when they don’t.
The trick is taking the audience from a place of WTAF to a place of LFG. We’re not just getting attention for its own sake — we’re getting attention so we can motivate people to act.
There’s a lot more than that in the book (which you should read), and in our conversation (which you should listen to), and that brings me to Alistair’s other question.
What does it mean to “fight”?
A lot of people are calling on Democrats in Congress (and statehouses, and governor’s mansions, and city halls, and school houses, and church houses) to “fight”.
What does that look like?
We’re seeing the now-familiar forms of “fighting”.
Protests on the steps of various government buildings, and in public squares
Fundraising (I got 12 text messages yesterday; my feeds are full of ads from AOC’s PAC)
These are what I might call “table stakes” — they are necessary, but probably insufficient.
There is a lot of talk about whether the resistance is over so Democrats should pick their spots and try to get things done for the American economy. Many Democrats have been approving Trump’s appointees and speaking the language of appeasement.
But there is also Brian Schatz, who has placed a hold on all State Department nominees.
There is Brian Driscoll, who has decided to “dig in” at the FBI and refuse to comply with orders to conduct internal witch hunts on agents who even tangentially worked on January 6 investigations.
There are the local police departments who treat ICE claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. There are the groups trying to respond in real time to fears — both real and rumor — of immigration raids.
The thing about an autocratic system is that it is often treading on thin ice (pardon me, this is not a pun). In particular, an autocratic system layered on top of American democratic values is in dangerous territory. Americans do not remember a previous authoritarian regime; they do not remember kings; they do not remember any kind of government with limitless power. In the short term, some may take comfort in the strongman, but a government that oversteps could find itself falling through the ice. For all that voters want change — they also really don’t.
Call their bluff.
Oh, you want to “take over” Gaza and remove all Palestinians? Good luck.
Oh, you want to make it a felony for local elected officials to vote to support sanctuary city provisions? Have fun.
Oh, you want to stop trillions in federal spending with a single memo? Knock yourself out.
Calling the bluff is not a form of participation. It is a not even a form of permission. It is a form of opposition, of challenge: show us what you’ve got.3
I used to wait tables, and after the restaurant closed, we’d all go to a dive bar in a strip mall. One evening, as we sat at a table a little too close to the bar, a guy in his early 20s kept bumping into me. I realized he was trying to pick a fight with a guy in his late 60s who was trying to rebuff him. The younger guy kept bumping into my shoulder with his hip, and finally, nearly fell back into my lap and onto our table. I pushed him away and stood up abruptly. Now he was in my face. I said something — I don’t remember what. The guy didn’t like what I said very much, and he changed his posture in a way that told me that he was going to hit me. So I said — and I leaned towards him, because I am an absolute idiot — “Go ahead. You’ve never met a better witness.”
At this point, everyone at my table was on their feet. The bartender was right next to us. Other patrons at the bar had turned around. He said something, probably called me a name, and slunk off.
I don’t want a smug, “We’re going to make them own it” response from the smarmy party elders. I want a menacing, “Go ahead.”
To do that, you have to fight as hard as you can until the only thing left is for them to do what they’re going to do. You do not vote with them. You do not shake their hands. You do not accept their premises. You never treat them like serious people.
Sometimes they’re going to go ahead and do the crazy thing you’ve just dared them to do. And so, calling their bluff is a signal that a fight could happen, but it’s not a whole-ass fight.
Try to prevent the harm from being done: organize an opposition, try to pressure the other side into not doing harm, vote no.
Try to mitigate the harm: I think Democrats spend too much time in this zone and not enough in the other zones. Mitigation usually takes the form of negotiation — and this looks to ordinary people like cooperation (or capitulation).
Call their bluff: Diminish them in the eyes of the public, make it clear you think they are unserious, weak, chicken. Blame them for the problem they pretend they’re trying to solve (blame them, don’t call them hypocrites). Call them out. Let the chips fall.
Slow the harm down: Take them to court. Block the roads. Boycott. Lock the doors. But also, see its absurdity. Cruelty and retribution is almost always absurd, because it is out of proportion.4
Try to remediate the harm after it’s done: this is, in the near term, a job for civil society. It relies on philanthropies, non-profits, mutual aid societies, community organizing, labor unions, journalists. Elected officials should stand behind these activists, come to their meetings, speak at their rallies, endorse them on the record, invite them to testify in hearings — in other words, the role of electeds here is amplification and legitimization of the civilian opposition.
But once the harm starts, the harm is done.
And so the other thing I’ll say about fighting is that, per
(subscribe to her Substack) you’ve got to Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts (buy her book).5 Don’t just stand back and let them own it — claim the issue, name the problem, blame the other side, and then drive a wedge between them and their potential supporters.Anybody who is giving the advice that pro-democracy groups need to pick their spots, and find common ground, and present their alternate vision for a wonderful future is, in my estimation, not seeing the moment we’re in.
There will be time for that — for rebuilding and reinventing. But right now, we need the opposition to adopt the mindset shift prescribed in Just Evil Enough, and get caught trying.
In other words, they look a lot like most autocratic regimes as they come to power, moving from “attempt” to “breakthrough” to “consolidation”. We’re currently somewhere on the road between breakthrough and consolidation. This episode of “Throughline” from NPR does an excellent job of explaining the preconditions of autocracy as Hannah Arendt identified them, and of explaining Balint Magyar’s theory of autocratic attempt, breakthrough and takeover, via M. Gessen.
I know it’s very fashionable among the pod bro set to look down on people who work in advertising. They seem to think their work is very different from ours. It isn’t. Also, it’s extremely strange for a trillion dollar industry to be written off as knowing nothing about its core function.
This is not the same as “we’re going to make them own it”, by the way, and I can’t stress this enough. That formulation is a recipe for finger-wagging and virtue-signaling, the sort of “I told you so” posture that gets Democrats labeled as — at best — nags.
Shout out to Erika Hall for pointing out that David Graeber wrote about frivolous forms of resistance in his posthumously published essays, including puppetry!
If you haven’t read her book or listened to her work, you can get a feel for how she thinks in a conversation I had with her last fall.