A Rogan To Call Their Own

To history students of a certain bent, there’s nothing more fascinating than the idea of being a fly on the wall for history’s great mistakes. Any square can daydream about witnessing John Hancock sign his John Hancock, but what about lurking in the meeting that resulted in the Maginot Line? Imagine watching people decide that heavy fortifications should stop before reaching the French-Belgian border — you know, the one the Germans marched over last time. You can play this game up and down the cultural scale. Imagine being in the room when the Cleveland Browns have a No. 1 draft pick.

I bring this up because the Democratic Party has decided to create its own Joe Rogan. Or, at least, something Rogan-like.

If you’re wondering why they would try to do such a thing, you are ahead of both the Democratic Party’s strategists and its major donors, the former of whom, the New York Times reported last Tuesday, are asking the latter to pony up millions to counter President Donald Trump’s online presence with influencers of their own, including a pet Rogan. This is not just a bad idea; it is a bad idea tucked into nesting category errors.

The first problem is that there is no Joe Rogan of the right. There’s a Joe Rogan who was spared from being the worst person on NewsRadio by the presence of Andy Dick; a Joe Rogan who later hosted a network show where people ate bugs; and a Joe Rogan who is into bodybuilding, works as an MMA commentator and had something shaped like a comedy career where he explored his uncomfortable curiosity about stimulating his anus. But there isn’t a Republican Joe Rogan. There’s just a guy with a podcast who gets mentally worked over by obvious charlatans and who pockets nine figures from a hosting company that steals from musicians. 

Rogan is able to amplify political opinion because it’s something he does while being relentlessly himself, which is the only thing he’s qualified for or interested in doing. He’s your stoned buddy who tells you the Pentagon has a secret engine that can run on water, asks you to Google it for him, shrugs when he’s gainsaid and moves on. Listeners find his interviews accessible because they provide an unsurprising humor-like product that is largely conflict-avoidant. Rogan doesn’t do the reading and cedes the classroom to another person for a few hours, asking guilelessly curious questions whose answers he lacks the means or ambition to double check. The show promises listeners a low-effort trip to a place they haven’t been before. 

That his grievances have skewed rightward over the last few years owes more to coincidence and solipsistic incoherence than any real politics. Rogan was, after all, a Bernie guy at the start of the 2020 Democratic primary. His turn toward MAGA began a few months later, possibly the result of earnest conspiratorial thinking about the pandemic — including opportunistic conspiracies marshaled on behalf of keeping comedy clubs open — knee-jerk opposition to the zeitgeist or too many fan interactions on Twitter. Whatever it was, it was his journey, not the result of Rahm Emanuel telling him that “working families” were the magic words of the day. If the latter were ever to become true and clear to his audience — that Rogan is the tip of the spear in an organized messaging apparatus — the appeal of his affable oaf-journeys would fall apart faster than an ancient Ice Age civilization of supermen. He would be seen as a tool, with all the connotations that word conjures. 

Aside from the fact that obvious Democratic mouthpieces performing obvious messaging synergy will alienate the same podcast/YouTube electorate they’re baiting — if not become a dunk victim on every social media platform from TikTok to “North Korean Myspace” — the Democrats have a bigger problem: casting. Growing your own Rogan in a vat takes time, even if you artificially pump him full of the proper discourse nutrients. Rogan had a big organic head start that isn’t replicable, including a lack of obvious political coding or agenda, a respectable expertise and celebrity in a popular sport, a recognizable nationwide pedigree in stand-up, a combined 11 years of exposure on a broadcast network over two different shows in two different decades, and one of the most downloaded podcasts in America. Assuming they could find or build such a creature, Democrats would still need to pay this notionally apolitical personality to pied-piper young men into the Democratic Party while hiding any breadcrumbs suggesting that this was always his intended purpose.

Even a successful Build-a-Rogan program would only solve a symptom, leaving the Democrats blind to their main problem. Once again, the party is projecting its failure onto its messaging instead of its message, scrutinizing a list of candidates other than themselves to solve a problem other than themselves. The politics are presumed to be inerrant, just a few tweaks away from optimal; everything else is merely a matter of distribution. It’s like finding out that the board of the “$100 Jade Vase Company” has decided to address its tendency to take $100 from customers and then ship them turds by announcing that they are interviewing potential replacements for UPS.

To drive this point home further, Rolling Stone reported Wednesday that the prospectus for increasing Democratic reach in the young male attention marketplace called for “expanded child tax credits, homebuyer incentives and workforce training,” using demographically calibrated terms to sell “a path to economic empowerment rather than government dependency.” Which is to say that the big plan is to take two years to study how to combine male influencers with every Democratic Party platform of their lifetimes, plus a thesaurus that has been updated to include the contents of UrbanDictionary.com.

The party needs to understand that there is no elite street marketing unit they can assemble that can sell product harder and faster than the Democratic Party can be the Democratic Party. There is no Roganesque delivery device — no matter the Q-rating or logistical capacity — that can transcend an unappealing politics. It does not exist and cannot be created. No media personality is beloved or charismatic enough to hook independent voters on a Democratic Party that has responded to 100 days of Trump’s record-setting crime spree by debating whether they should quietly abandon their most vulnerable constituencies (transgender Americans, non-whites) and hope no one notices. Nor is there any alchemical mixture of ambient masculinity, getting stoned and doing comedy riffs that is going to create a responsive, assertive and proactive working-class party where none exists. 

For years, the Democrats’ message about Trump has been that he is an existential threat to democracy that we can also continue to wait and see about. “Maybe things will get so much worse that a popular response will happen organically, and then the Democrats can sign onto popular actions foisted upon them” is not an idea that has fans anywhere outside of the offices of the Democratic representatives already not doing things. As it is, their timetable on their reply to a fascist takeover of the government has been like the guy in “Star Wars” who gets shot in the ass and augurs his flaming X-Wing into the Death Star after spending a minute saying, “Allllllmosssst therrrrrrre …” You could release an “Almost There (Taylor’s Version),” and while it might yield a few million in sales from completist fans and ironic purchases, it’s not going to move enough units to count.

The mistakes don’t end here. As Hamilton Nolan notes in his excellent newsletter, the unfavorable information environment facing Democrats is a journalism problem, not a personality problem. Yet more targeted propaganda would leave the underlying crisis unaddressed; if Democratic lifer consultants getting the word out about how “Deplorable Donny Is a Dangerous Don’t for Democracy” worked, it would have worked by now. Putting lifeless, inoffensive and politically null alliteration into the mouths of podcasters won’t disguise the material; it will only fumigate it with denser clouds of loser stink. Podcasters, YouTubers and TikTokkers are popular because they are free to go wherever their rants take them. If they sound like they are reading scripts coming from the top, then it’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” all the way down.

Worse, the pitch to find the Dems’ own Rogans is being sold to big-money Democratic donors like Tom Steyer — which is to say, people who already spend tens of millions of dollars to find out the hard way that the solution to America’s problems is not “Tom Steyer.” These are the same people who will yank their funding the instant a messaging experiment becomes monstrous and turns on them, diagnosing them as part of the problem or calling for solutions at their expense or inconvenience. A fix to a voter information problem that begins by self-censoring effective responses and pretending some problems don’t exist is, at best, more delay in a solution’s clothing. It is yet another way of saying that the problem with oligarchy is their oligarchs, not ours.

Perhaps the saddest thing here is the avoidance of solutions with real, long-term structural benefits. Democratic donors could flood existing alternative media with funding and see who emerges organically, rather than prematurely narrowing the candidate field. There are countless local alt-weeklies, activist journalists and newsletters doing critical work in their communities that could be funded for a decade for the same amount of money being discussed at Democratic retreats. Whether or not that money produces a Spotify superstar who can shoot the moon with viral callouts, the party will be able to point to a far more meaningful accomplishment: rescuing and bolstering local instruments of community building and accountability. 

Take the quarter-million ex-journalists in the United States who would love to return to their careers. Better yet, pay them. With money Steyer found in a suit he wore last year, journalist collectives like The Aftermath, Defector or The Appeal could have a guaranteed future and the latitude to serve their audiences locally or regionally instead of needing to break through as national voices just to break even. I once worked for a company that tried to correct for the loss of statehouse reporters around the country by creating a political network of regionally franchised websites like SB Nation and which died ahead of schedule when the money guys didn’t start minting cash or solve journalism in six months. That model is still there; for what he spent on a seven-month presidential campaign, Steyer could put two dedicated reporters on $80,000 salaries in every statehouse in the country for over 30 years. But Democratic leadership won’t do that for all the obvious self-interested reasons. Too many reporters might notice that the problems are the candidates, their policies, their advisers or their funders, all of whom have power, interests, sinecures and investments to maintain at the expense of everyone else. 

After exempting the politics, the power brokers and the party itself from the diagnosis, the only thing left to be modified is the messenger, and it’s no surprise that we find ourselves in the midst of a familiar candidate process. To scroll through YouTube and Instagram looking for checkable demographic boxes is to embrace a default Democratic mindset: “Pick someone who looks the part, with name recognition in key groups, with frontrunner Q rating, and get the money behind them early.” Every election, we go through this process before the primaries even start, deciding 12 months before the Iowa Caucus who has everything it takes to be standing on the dais on the last night of the convention. It’s going to be just as accurate and effective here, too.