Neon Liberalism #25: Does the Narrative Matter?
Join Samantha and guest Will Stancil as they talk the vexed question of whether politics is driven by merely material conditions, ask why tyrants are obsessed with their own popularity, and assess why the Democratic budget standoff fizzled while Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador broke through—and shifted public opinion on Trump's immigration policies.
Neon Liberalism can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.
Link to Stancil's essay, referenced in the podcast: https://www.offmessage.net/p/kilmar-abrego-garcia-public-opinion
Full Transcript
Samantha Hancox-Li [00:01]
Hi and welcome back to Neon Liberalism, a weekly podcast where we talk about the things that are happening in our world today and try to put them in a larger theoretical and historical context.
So one thing that I think has been on a lot of people's minds lately, especially in the context of the recent election, is the role of media in politics and the role of media narratives and media choices in driving political outcomes or not as the case may be.
So I thought I would have on policy researcher and sometimes internet personality Will Stancil to talk about these issues. Will, thank you so much for coming on Neon Liberalism. Glad to have you here.
Will Stancil [00:56]
Glad to be here.
Samantha Hancox-Li [01:06]
So yeah, for me, I see one of the big questions is whether media there, like, there's one view, right, that media narrative is downstream of material conditions, and that it's, in some ways, you might say epiphenomenal, right? That the media is just responding to material conditions. Material conditions are driving our politics. Media just reports on it, but doesn't really affect outcomes.
And there's another view, which is that media narrative very much matters, that it drives public opinion and that it drives political outcomes. So I kind of wanted to talk today about like, how much this stuff matters, and what can we do about it? So I guess my first question for you is like, what's your take on this particular question?
Will Stancil [01:40]
I am very much of the opinion that media is an independent force in politics, and that communication is an independent force in politics. And I think that this is in contrast, I think, to what has been the kind of consensus view, in fact, such a consensus that a lot of people don't even realize that they're adopting it, that politics flows out of the economy. It flows out of basic political structures, you know, legal and constitutional structures, and then all of this chatter, the talking, the media, you know that just reflects what's happening deeper down. And so it just, you can safely ignore it in your analysis of political outcomes.
And I think that there are reasons that that view has become so embedded, but the last few years have shown us that this is basically false, that the social layer, the communicative layer of politics, is actually driving outcomes independently of these other factors.
Samantha Hancox-Li [02:32]
Yeah, I mean, I think we've certainly seen people, you know, in the debate over like, how did we elect Trump? What just happened? A lot of people have reverted to looking for economic explanations, right? They say, well, obviously it must have been inflation. It must have been this complicated measure of whether people are getting better off than at a higher rate or a lower rate than they were getting better off for years before various kinds of factors people try to look for there.
And I've always been struck by when you see these interviews with people who voted for Trump right the me, not not his core base, but the median voter who swung towards him and who pushed him over the edge in a very tight election, they seem really misinformed. They seem to really be confused about what Trump was promising to do and what he stood for and what was happening in our country.
Will Stancil [03:12]
And then, the other thing I'd say that people were even more confused about, I would say that the greater confusion was actually over Kamala Harris. Very consistently, when you hear these interviews, you know, they say, well, Kamala Harris, she's for, you know, like letting in a million, you know, 20 million illegal immigrants and, you know, forcing all school children to have sex change surgery, and this is deranged. I mean, there's literally, it's not just that there was more to her agenda than that. It's that this has nothing to do with anything that Kamala Harris or any Democrat talked about for like, five years.
And so it was entirely coming from this idea, which was incredibly widespread among people who were not Republican partisans, but kind of non-committed swing voter types. It was coming from somewhere, you know, it's got to be coming from somewhere, and it's not coming from the Democrats. So the only answer I could come up with is it's got to be coming from our media structures and from our communication structures.
Samantha Hancox-Li [04:08]
Yeah, I think there's certainly, you know, especially once you start to talk about, like you say, culture issues, whether that's trans people, trans rights, or whether that's questions about immigration, it's hard to see how people's obsessions with these things, and in particular, their weird beliefs about what Democrats are proposing in these areas, could possibly be driven by material factors.
Will Stancil [04:26]
I think that, oh, I've always been a little more amenable to the idea that the social layer of politics is important, you know, and more important than people say. But I think what really the moment for me, that kind of a light bulb went off - it was early in Biden's administration, probably late 2021. One of the things that I had spent my whole life believing up until then was that if the economy got bad, then the President would be unpopular. If the economy was good, the President would be popular.
I think this is a really common belief. I think people have internalized it to a degree that they don't even realize that it is an assumption. And I certainly subscribed to it myself. And then in 2020 you had this catastrophic economic situation that affected people's lives top to bottom. You can argue that a lot of the dire economic effects were mitigated by policy, but the reality is that people's lives were changed regardless. You weren't going to work, you were stuck in your house. Unemployment rate really did go up. A lot of businesses did shut down. We did have kind of a mini recession during COVID, or very brief but sharp recession during COVID, and there wasn't much change in the presidential polling.
I mean, and you can argue that the polls at the end didn't reflect, or the outcome didn't necessarily reflect the polls, but the continuous trend to the polls, there was just not like a big shock, where Trump got way more popular, way less popular, because of the economic changes. And so I kind of went, huh, that's odd.
And then in 2021 you see this kind of post-COVID surge in economic growth. Everything comes back online. Employment goes way up, unemployment goes way down. There's rapid growth. I mean, by any realistic measure, I thought the economy looks like it's booming, and I was waiting for Biden to become commensurately more popular, and he just wasn't. It wasn't happening. There was no effect. In fact, he was becoming much less popular.
And I remember, I mean, I tweet this out at the time, I said, something's broken like I said, no one is paying enough attention to this. Something is really wrong here. All the assumptions we have made about how these structural factors drive our politics, they're wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean, something is not right here.
And I remember all these political scientists came into my mentions on Twitter and said, you know, you're stupid. That's wrong. You know, obviously everyone knows economy drives everything. Matt Grossman, I remember particularly had annoyed me because he was very condescending about it.
And then it just kind of kept getting worse. The mismatch just kept getting worse. Throughout the Biden presidency, the economy just kept getting better. We had inflation spike within, that subsided. Unemployment stayed down. You know, we just had growth and growth and growth. And not only did Biden's popularity never seem to change, but in fact, people's reporting about the economy was dismal.
People reported their view of the economy - at one point like 60% of people thought we were in a recession. People said that unemployment was way up, which was like, couldn't be more wrong. And I thought something is - there's a breakdown here in the transmission mechanism, and it's between the real conditions, so to speak, and what people believe.
And in some ways it seems like the transmission mechanism, which I think is necessarily media and mass communication, is what's driving politics, rather than the structural factors. And once I saw that, once you see that, it became very difficult for me to not think that to a large degree, all of our politics are being driven by this transmission mechanism.
Samantha Hancox-Li [07:35]
So I don't know if I'm going to endorse the strong thesis that it's all media all the time, but I think you're absolutely right to note that there does seem to be this breakdown between economic fundamentals and Presidential polling, mass opinion and the media narrative about it.
Will Stancil [07:47]
I'm going to make a case for the strong, strong version, in a little bit but we can keep going.
Samantha Hancox-Li [07:55]
Oh yeah, no, please, please make the case. But first, I kind of want to turn away from the now, now, now of politics and go into a slightly broader historical perspective, because one thing I see a lot of people saying these days is like, "Oh yeah, Trump's gonna crash the economy and everybody's gonna hate him, and he's gonna be super unpopular, but it doesn't matter, right? Because he's made himself an authoritarian and popular opinion doesn't matter in authoritarian countries." So I kind of want to start with that - does popular opinion matter? Does it still matter, and why?
Will Stancil [08:30]
Absolutely, I mean, I think that I have a hard time seeing - one of the things I'm definitely not saying here is that popular opinion doesn't matter. In fact, I think that the breakdown is very specific. You have the structural, so to speak, real, material, measurable conditions on the ground, which is, you know, I would say the economy, but also things like the structure of the government and who's in which office, and all that.
And then you have public opinion, which is just literally the aggregate of what people believe. And in between that, you have the layer in which people exchange ideas and talk to each other and learn information. And my view is, of course, the public opinion matters, because that's what makes people decide how to vote. What makes people decide what to do when faced with particular political problems.
A lot of Trump's strength is actually derived from the fact that there's this public viewpoint right now, especially among institutional elites, for some reason, that Trump is effectively a dictator and can do whatever he wants. And what you should do is try and get out of the way and just let him do it. If people start to not have that viewpoint, say, "Hey, wait a second. The President's actually not allowed to, like, blackmail Harvard University or whatever." Then suddenly he's going to lose a lot of those kind of extra-constitutional powers he's been exercising. So I think public opinion is really important. The thing we're talking about is that second layer, where people talk to each other and form public opinion.
Samantha Hancox-Li [09:48]
No, so I think that's exactly right, and this is something that Americans maybe don't have a lot of experience living under or understanding authoritarian regimes, but the people who study these things always come back to media, and they always come back to popular opinion, right? And so, like, the easiest way to illustrate this is like, if you are performing a coup in a country, there are two things you absolutely need to seize, and one of them is the President that you're trying to do a coup to. You need to get him physically. And the number two thing you absolutely have to do is get the TV station.
Will Stancil [10:26]
TV stations, right? That's that. I said this so many times during the Biden presidency. He said, if you want to control the country, seize the TV stations. You don't seize the economic policy, the Treasury office or the economic policymakers, you seize the TV stations. And that's the first step. And you know, the right, to a large extent, has literally seized our TV stations.
Samantha Hancox-Li [10:49]
I didn't know that that's crazy.
Will Stancil [11:05]
I think that people think of dictatorships as this sort of cinematic version where you have the oppressed masses who want to get rid of the dictator but they can't because he lives in a castle and then they rise up and, of course, push him out. But a real dictatorship is usually where you tell people the things that they need to hear to make them not want to rise up against you.
I mean, I think now today, one of the things obviously in the news lately is Bukele in El Salvador. Guy is essentially an authoritarian, and it's really depressing, though, because if you look at how he's received in El Salvador, he's wildly popular. Or, I mean, Putin seems to be genuinely relatively popular in Russia, and that is really the key to their strength and their ability to subvert other institutions.
If you're popular enough, then it doesn't matter what the law says. It doesn't matter what the Constitution says, because people will simply ignore those rules when faced with the prospect of challenging you.
Samantha Hancox-Li [12:20]
No, I think the comparison with Putin is very important. And again, political scientists who study this, there's a book that I especially like called "Non-Democratic Politics" by Marquez, very good, and it talks about how authoritarians and dictators are in some ways even more concerned with popularity than Democratic politicians are. They are obsessed with it, in fact.
But like you say, Putin doesn't rule Russia by raw force. It's not as if there's a man with a gun on every street corner, you know, subjugating the populace. There's a TV in every home that's playing state propaganda in which Putin is like the great Russian nationalist who's protecting Russia and delivering for pensioners and all this other stuff that is designed to keep him popular.
Will Stancil [13:09]
In some ways it's interesting because there's a functioning democratic system like the United States, I would say, arguably, had 10 years ago. You know, a politician's sort of, the structure of the power around them depends on a lot of different things, you know. What are your majorities in Congress? What are your - who are the judges? What is the - how many states do you have, or Democratic, or Republican? All these factors, and public opinion is one of them.
But in an extra-constitutional context where all that can be pushed aside, you know, if you're sufficiently popular, the only metric that matters at that point is, do enough people like you or fear you to let you do that? And so, yeah, you would become hyper-focused on that one thing.
Samantha Hancox-Li [13:46]
I think, I think that's just something that's important for people to keep in mind these days, to not give in to doomerism, to recognize that like just because you declare yourself a dictator, that doesn't make you a dictator. You know Emperor Norton declared himself Emperor, but he was just some crazy guy who lived in San Francisco.
So I kind of want to turn to the question not just does popular opinion matter, but how is it shaped, and how is it transformed? And to do that, I kind of want to talk a little bit about the history of media and the history of mass media. That mass media isn't right, because mass media, the media environment, seems to be one of the core ways you can drive public opinion, but it wasn't always such a central human institution, right? There were times in history when there was no such thing as mass media, there were no radios, there were no televisions, there was no newspapers, there was no mass literacy.
And it's specifically in the modern age that we get these kinds of mass publics right. And Benedict Anderson writes about this in his book, "Imagined Communities," about the way that the idea of nations at all is generated by mass media, by we're printing a newspaper, and everybody in the country is reading that newspaper, and we all know that everybody is reading the newspaper, that it generates a common knowledge of what that is happening in our nation, and that this is transformed in some ways by broadcast media, by the moving image, but it's still - there's a lot of centralization to it. There's a lot of commonality to it.
There are some figures that I really like here about how in the 1960s the there were the big three broadcast news networks. See what is it? CBS, ABC, NBC and CBS alone has 30 million CBS Nightly News has 30 million viewers by itself. The Big Three, taken together, had about 70 million people watching pretty much every night, and you can contrast that with the world we live in today, right? Where, if you just again, you look at the big three alone today, altogether, the big three, that's 19 million people, right? That's fewer people than were watching CBS by itself.
Will Stancil [16:01]
And to be clear, I mean, the country is a lot bigger. I mean, as a share of population, there's been a much sharper decline in viewership than even in absolute terms. So this is the story. So the way I see is, this basic story is that you have in the 20th century - I mean, really starting before that, but we can start for our purposes in the 20th century - you see mass, national media, broadcast media, largely TV. You know, obviously there's newspapers, but they're fewer, they're smaller. And so everyone in the country is kind of plugged into whatever narratives are being conveyed through these major media institutions.
And the other part of this, in some ways, is an economic story, because the economics of media production and transmission publishing in the early 20th century to pretty much like the 90s, I guess, is that you really have to have a lot of money, a lot of capital, in order to do it. And a big operation - running CBS nightly news is like a big thing. It costs a lot. You have to have a huge team working on it. The stories are carefully fact-checked. You've got bureaus all over the world.
And so there are all these kind of institutional checks, just from the fact that you have to run it through this whole process on what gets published. You know, CBS nightly news can't do mean jokes. They can't do random, stupid little one-off things, because there are hundreds of people going into work. The effort of hundreds of people is going into every minute of broadcast. Millions of dollars.
Newspapers, the same thing on a somewhat smaller scale. You know, newspapers have hundreds of people for a city. They have reporters dedicated to all kinds of different things. You get offices for each little town or whatever. Every story's got copy edited, fact checked, all this stuff. And so there is a care, level of care and detail that goes into this, into producing it, that manifests in the final product.
And what has happened over time is that the cost of publishing, especially with the internet, but really before that, for other reasons as well, the cost of publishing and the cost of broadcasting to a large audience, even a national or international, worldwide audience, has dropped precipitously. Today in order to reach the entire world, you really just need a cell phone and internet connection. You know, I mean not to say that you could necessarily do that, but you could, you know, you could make a TikTok dance that 50% of the world population sees within a month for $400.
And so what this has done is this led to this massive outgrowth in new media sources, both in the forms of writing, of video on social media, and that has hugely fragmented the media landscape. Instead of everyone tuning into CBS, nightly news, 70 million people, everyone's got a completely different media diet. Everyone's got their own little bespoke media diet made up of, you know, maybe you read The New York Times, but you also have a few favorite websites, and you go on social media, you have your own unique follower list of 400 people that you yourself picked. And then you go on TikTok, and TikTok has a unique algorithm for you that feeds you what it thinks you want to see, and so what you see is not the same as what anyone else sees. And that has really had, I think, pretty stark political consequences.
Samantha Hancox-Li [19:08]
I think you're absolutely right here. I say that a lot, but you know, that's why I invite these kinds of people on because they have good opinions.
There's been a fundamental economic change, right? This wasn't a political decision. It wasn't that we passed some law to change the media landscape. It's not a cultural decision, but what we are doing right now illustrates the point. Right? You and I can get together and, like, we have a microphone and the camera on our computer, and we can just talk to each other at a great distance and produce a video and distribute that to an audience that theoretically anybody could watch anybody in the world.
Will Stancil [19:37]
I think the entire the entire world is going to watch this podcast.
Samantha Hancox-Li [19:42]
I think that's right. I think this is going to go extremely viral. We will prove the strong Stancil thesis just by doing it right.
But this is an economic change. I think that's going to inform a lot of how I think about solutions to it, because you're never going to unring that bell, right? You're not going to make cell phones unaffordable. You're not going to recreate the economic situation that led to market concentration in media.
Will Stancil [20:08]
That's right. And I think that you hear this a lot when you talk about media, it's funny, because people don't - this is the component that people don't want to talk about. You say, people - it's become easier and easier, especially with Trump's ascent, to get people to understand that media is playing some role here.
But people go, okay, but the problem is the right-wing control of the media, and I agree that's a contributing factor. Or they say, "Oh, the algorithms, the evil social media companies are evil algorithms." And they say that we haven't - I don't know, just there's all these political "oh, we got to bring back the Fairness Doctrine" whatever.
And the problem is, it's not a political choice. It's not even an intentional choice by anyone. It is a reflection of the fact that it used to cost $20 million a year to broadcast to half of America, and now to broadcast to 6 billion people, it cost 400 bucks. And I don't know how you fix that. Well, fix - I don't know how you change that.
Samantha Hancox-Li [21:01]
I know, I think that's - I don't know how to change that either. I mean, you know, who knows what technology is coming or what economic changes are coming, but I just, I don't see any prospect of that changing in the near future. And I think that that brings us to what I want to call the bad solutions that there are people right who kind of accept on some level. Okay, misinformation matters. Control of the narrative matters. And so what we need to...
Will Stancil [21:26]
Well, I'm going to jump in, because I think there's one thing here that we do need to talk about before we talk about the any solutions good or bad, which is why the fragmentation matters. Because, people - okay, fine, it's fragmented. You know, instead of watching CBS, I read 10 different things. Who cares?
The problem is the problem with fragmentation, and people go, "Oh, well." And then there have been political science studies and say, you know, are people living in an information bubble that is teaching them conspiracy theories? And oftentimes these will say, "No, people getting different kinds of sources" - but why? The reason the fragmentation matters, is it forces you to pick. It forces you to pick what you consume media-wise.
You cannot consume everything. You cannot watch all the news channels. You cannot watch every single person saying every single different thing. And so, whereas previously you had three news channels, they were kind of reporting the same thing. They're all three are running with the Vietnam War, or whatever.
Today you have effectively, a bottomless menu of options between your phone and your computer and all the websites and the TV and all that, and people pick the sources that they find personally validating and affirming. Doesn't mean they're picking the ones that are making them the happiest. A lot of times, it's stuff that makes them the maddest or most upset, but it's stuff that they find resonant.
And so if you are inclined towards, let's say, xenophobia, well, you can find a lot of people out there who are willing to tell you that immigrants are destroying America and killing 10 million people a year. If you're inclined towards, let's say, hating Donald Trump, there's an entire media universe out there telling you that he is on the cusp of self-destruction any day now, and they will just feed you that forever.
And the problem with this is because it's so easy to publish that as long as there's a market for an idea, an audience for an idea, someone will produce it, and then it will obtain an audience. And so people's media universes, their media diets, they have this, like people talk about information bubbles. Well, I think the issue is, you have an information buffet you can pick, all you can eat, whatever you want. And people's media diets begin to reflect kind of their deeper political and personality features in a way that just fragments us politically.
And so that is why the fragmentation has become a problem, and over time, it has led to increasingly separate universes. If you're a Republican, if you're a right-wing Republican, you live in a factual universe where Trump has never done anything wrong and his policies are smashing success all the time. But if you're a left-wing Democrat, you live in a universe where the problem is that like the Democratic Party has, the Democratic Institutionalists have crushed the left in the class consciousness. Or if you're a resistance liberal, you live in a universe where Donald Trump, like I said, is always on the cusp of imploding. I mean, they're just, there's not a lot of factual overlap between these people. And yet to them, it's all true.
Samantha Hancox-Li [24:26]
That's definitely something I want to harp on, that there are people who, like I said, who have looked at the media situation. They say, okay, Media Matters, and their instinct is, we need to go back. We need to go back to the era of one really big megaphone telling people what to think, and we got to make sure it's our megaphone. And you see this on the left and the right, I think.
So on the right, there's kind of a conspiracy theory popularized by the sky, Curtis Yarvin, which is the idea of the cathedral, and the cathedral is like the woke Marxist conspiracy in the academy. And what they're doing is indoctrinating America's youth, and they choose what kind of woke ideas people are going to have, and they all push it out there and and this is why America has become so woke. That seems to be what they believe.
And you can see this reflected in their policies. That, you know what Elon Musk is trying to do in the federal government. It's like, he's trying to find the cathedral and destroy it. He's like, Okay, we need to go after like, you know, USAID is clearly where is part of the conspiracy, and we need to destroy it. Or, you know, this kind of government grant that supports academia is where all of these leftist ideas come from. If we can just find it, if we can just find the central conspiracy that's telling people what to think, we can get rid of it and replace it with our our preferred ideas. Um, and that's very conspiratorial, um, kind of goofy in a lot of ways, but these people are pretty goofy, um.
But I think you can also see a kind of a similar idea among progressives, right progressives who reacted to the loss, to the loss to Donald Trump, the loss of Kamala Harris, and said, Okay, well, the cathedral doesn't exist, but we should absolutely build one. We should, you know, it would be good if there was a cathedral, if we did establish a progressive media network that was nationwide and was always pumping out progressive messaging and reached the whole whole country. And that's what we have to do To try and Change the conversation. I
Will Stancil [26:40]
I think this is - and to be clear, I actually don't, I think this not a terrible idea in some ways. It would be good to have louder progressive voices, people talking about progressive ideas. Joe Rogan - there's a lot of debate over that. But like having cultural figures, notable people who were espousing progressive ideas probably would have a beneficial effect.
But I think people miss that to some extent, this isn't possible, because this isn't a planned conspiracy. This is a reflection of basic economic realities, and that the reason people listen to right-wing sources, is because we don't have a way to stop those voices from publishing. There's no really non-authoritarian way to stop them from publishing. And there is an audience demand for those ideas.
And so, you can't just replace them days long without unless we, like, go around and, you know, I guess, like, have our thugs shut down Joe Rogan and right-wing comedians or whatever, but which, you know, I'll hear it out. But, you know, I don't think that's a realistic solution.
Samantha Hancox-Li [27:35]
I know, I think this is and sometimes on the internet, you hear this called audience capture, where there's one idea, well, okay, there's the media source, and they decide what to say, and they just kind of beam it down into their audience, who's already there, and the audience says, oh, yeah, of course. Like you can see that happening sometimes.
But on a longer term, broader level, what's happening is the audience is there, and they kind of have an idea of what they want to hear, the kind of stuff they enjoy, the stuff they enjoy listening to, and then they seek out sources that beam that message back to them. And the source can kind of tell, in a lot of cases, right? The media can kind of tell who their audience is and what plays and what doesn't, and they're always chasing what plays to the audience.
Will Stancil [28:18]
I'm going to maybe go off on a little tangent here, but it's relevant, I think, somewhat, which is that two things on audience capture. First, I think that this dynamic is why we saw this irrepressible growth, for instance, in what I described as anti-woke, anti-political correctness, liberal liberalism, New York Times, kind of writing, anti-trans, all that. And it was just literally a manifestation of audience capture.
One thing, there was this huge upsurge in these kinds of articles. They were incredibly repetitive. Was always the same handful of anecdotes recited in response. And I remember thinking like, why are people just writing the same thing over and over and over? Like, it's so boring, right? About something else, even if it's a real problem, write about something else.
And then you realize they're not trying to be interesting. They have just found a button that gets a response, and they're pressing it over and over and over again because it plays to certain almost subconscious prejudices in their audience.
The other thing I would say is, I think this dynamic of audience capture is universal throughout human history. I mean, this all media, all communication has this basic tension. The audience wants to hear something. You need their attention if you're speaking, the more you're saying what they want to hear, the more attention you get. That pulls you towards what the audience wants to believe. This is like unavoidable in communication, if you care at all about having an audience.
What has changed over time is that the amount of feedback between audience, listener and audience, and the speed of publication and the ability to shape your message to an audience free of factual constraints has increased on the internet. No one cares what you're saying is true. You can just literally make up any idea you want. You're not going to get usually bounced from your platform if you just are lying egregiously.
So you have the full range of concepts to play with, rather than having to shape like to some sort of basic factual reality, as you did on traditional media. You have huge audiences from very minor publishing platforms. So if you hit the jackpot, say something a lot of people want to hear, it's like, suddenly you've got 10 million people listening to you, regardless of whether or not you're true.
And you have immediate feedback. Like, I go on Twitter and tweet 100 different things, and I can see which 10 of them perform best. And then I go to those and I iterate. And you can, very quickly through this process, determine what the audience wants to hear and move in that direction, move in that audience capture direction.
And the one last thing I say about this is that if you don't want to do this, if you have, let's say, some basic moral scruples, you're just not a terrible person who wants to lie all the time and be a demagogue - like, imagine that. Congratulations. But someone else is going to do it, and then they'll get the audience. So there's a competition problem where the voices that are playing by the rules just get drowned out by the people who don't care.
Samantha Hancox-Li [31:16]
Yeah. So I agree with you about the speed of iteration, where it's something I'm on social media and, like, it's very obvious to me, like, you get that feedback about what works and what doesn't. You get that hit of, like, seeing something go viral, and it feels really good, and you chase that, and people learn how to do it.
I do want to push back a little bit on some of the anti-trans stuff, because I think that, you know, for example, the kind of anti-trans movement we saw in Britain seems to be a case of a pretty elite-driven phenomenon. I do not think that TERFs in Britain were responding to an organic demand from the British public for anti-trans articles, right? And that's just kind of visible in the data.
Will Stancil [39:35]
And then when I say, when I say, you know, you're responding to demand - a more nuanced version of this is that, for instance, for elite writers, for elite writers, the audience that they care about are other elites often. So, you know, if I'm writing for the New York Times or a lot of times people - I mean, the best example here are some of the just kind of token progressives that write for these things, like EJ Dionne, who, like, my grandmother loved EJ Dionne. I know a lot of very just kind of basic, not super politically connected liberals that love these kinds of writers, but they are obviously held in lesser regard than some of the really heady, sophisticated writers, and it's because they don't get the same - the elites just kind of gloss over what they say.
So I think that, in some cases, like the anti-trans stuff, for instance, is elites trying to play to an audience of other elites, who, for whom that is - that stuff hits hard. But anyway, that's, again, that's sort of like 201 level.
Samantha Hancox-Li [40:20]
Fair enough, I can certainly see that happening in the American case where, like, you say, a lot of these people do seem to be writing for their friends at cocktail parties, right? For the kinds of social gatherings that they go to in New York City. New York City specifically, bizarrely.
Will Stancil [40:36]
Yeah, that's a whole - the whole elite media ecosystem is, like, pretends to have national relevance, but it's, like, really insular in certain ways. But anyways, that's a whole - I hate 40% of them.
Samantha Hancox-Li [40:51]
And yeah, when you see a little bit under the hood of that social world, you're like, oh, that's where some of this stuff is coming from, some of these obsessions.
But what I really want to talk about here is not just the problems, right? Not just "Oh yeah, well, mass media broke down and what are you going to do when we live in a fragmented world?" It's easy to realize we live in a fragmented world. What are we going to do about it? Right? How do we succeed at pushing our kinds of messages in a fragmented media landscape?
Will Stancil [41:01]
Yeah, you've written about this, right? There's an essay you just have up at Liberal Currents about this.
Samantha Hancox-Li [41:01]
That's the "New Media" I've written about it several times.
Will Stancil [41:12]
So I think that you can find moments where, essentially, you have, like I said, fragmented audiences and the way this is manifested politically is that people seem almost anesthetized against like political events. You know, Trump will do something corrupt, and it's like the polls don't change, or Biden will pass a big bill and the polls don't change. Nothing happens. Nothing seems to matter. No one seems to care about anything.
And I think that that largely reflects the fact that people are just getting their information about these events, to the extent they get it at all, is getting filtered through media diets that are tuned to whatever they already want to believe. So if you like Trump and he does something scandalous, well, you're probably listening to sources that will tell you it's not scandalous.
But there are moments in which you can see public opinion shift dramatically. People are all paying attention to something. And the key thing I always think about - the obvious one, the really striking one for me, it's not the biggest, but some of the striking is the Afghanistan withdrawal during Biden. And the reason for that is this is kind of a foreign policy event. This is not something that's affecting most people's daily lives. We'd been in war in Afghanistan for decades at this point. So it wasn't like Afghanistan was breaking news.
And it wasn't like it was something where people - public opinion polls show that Americans mostly wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. So Biden was withdrawing. He was literally just following the public consensus. And what happened is, especially in the first day or two, you had this disastrous withdrawal situation where people were falling off of airplanes, and there were bombs going off, soldiers dying and it got covered as a crisis. People suddenly - everyone was watching this because they didn't know what's gonna happen. It felt like the whole thing was gonna implode.
And that sense of crisis pervaded all of these different media spheres. And suddenly, first of all, everyone was talking about it. And it was this kind of big national media event, and the opinion of Biden changed as a consequence. People say Biden got unpopular because of inflation, or whatever his age, but Biden's popularity declined at a very specific moment and never went back up. And it was Afghanistan withdrawal. I mean, it's just perfectly matched with that. It's just there's not really another plausible explanation. In my view, it was Afghanistan, which doesn't make a lot of sense in any frame, I think, except from this media frame where people suddenly start paying attention to something that looked bad for him, and it just permanently tainted him.
Samantha Hancox-Li [43:50]
No, no. I just want to emphasize that I was also very struck by the Afghanistan withdrawal, because it seems to disprove so many of these things that we're told right? Like, one of the things we're told always is Americans don't care about foreign policy, and foreign policy never matters, and it never affects anything. And we're also told all economic fundamentals, and people got mad about Biden because of inflation. But like you say, if you look at Biden's popularity, there's a very specific moment. There's a very specific moment when it drops markedly, and it's the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Will Stancil [44:38]
And it doesn't make any sense with what anyone has told us, how it's supposed to work, like that should be the one thing that shouldn't matter, the least it should matter. Not at all. And it ends up being the most important moment of his presidency, in some ways.
Samantha Hancox-Li [44:50]
Yes, I think that's right. And again, like you say the other crazy thing, and this comes back to the popularist narrative that we've kind of been dancing around, which is that people wanted us out of Afghanistan, right? Leaving Afghanistan was popular, and Trump said he would do it, and Biden's basically just executing on this Trumpist policy.
And then we actually do it and, like, in certain kinds of material terms, we do a pretty good job, right? We do, in fact, lift a few 100,000 people out of this one airport. There aren't really a lot of casualties. There are a few casualties. Most of the people we want to get out, we get out. It's like, in some ways, a very orderly withdrawal. But the first couple days are really messy.
Will Stancil [45:29]
Yeah, I mean, I remember even now, I remember the images right - this runway that is just crowded with people, and a C-130 lifting into the air with somebody clinging to the wheels, and you can see him fall off the airplane. And it's like indelible.
Samantha Hancox-Li [45:43]
Yeah, and that's what's so striking. Yeah, so, I mean, I think that the only way to explain the political impact of that is to understand that it was like the imagery spread through the media system in this sort of crisis frame that reached much further than most political controversies do.
And I think that you can so then there are other moments too. I would say that when you see these crises, you know, crisis moments that spread through the media ecosystem, the obvious one - it's hard to disentangle this from media versus everything else - is COVID. But I will say that, because, of course, COVID had pretty substantial effects on our daily lives. But COVID as a media crisis actually happened before we start seeing lockdowns and daily people getting sick and stuff.
There was a moment, there was a week or two where COVID was impending and people are freaking out, but, like, our lives hadn't really changed. Tom Hanks got COVID, and you're like, "Oh, my God, no, it's real." And so that spread through very quickly, obviously had effects on public opinion during COVID.
George Floyd, very - you had this, suddenly 60% of the country says they support Black Lives Matter. I mean, things - what was always striking to me, because you could see the flames out my window, is the burned down police station in Minneapolis. And it like pulled positively, like it got polled above water to burn down the police station. And, of course, like no one was talking about anything else, anywhere in the country, or really the world, during George Floyd - it was all consuming.
A few others you saw - the Kavanaugh confirmation became all consuming. The ACA standoff in 2017. Charlottesville was kind of had this. And January 6 was this. And in all these moments, you saw public opinion change. And so one of the things that I sort of thought is like, what is it about these specific moments that allowed them to affect public opinion when most things do not? And I can answer that question, but you know, I've been talking for a while.
Samantha Hancox-Li [47:48]
Well, no, I mean, there's, like I said, there's an essay you wrote recently, "Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Roots of Public Opinion." And in there you say, you know, effectively, there's no mic - there's no single microphone that's ever going to be as big as all of the microphones pointing at you all at the same time, right, or pointing at an issue, right? That it's not, to really go viral, as the saying goes, to capture the national attention - it's not about capturing a specific news source, but it's about the kind of event that captures people's attention, right? That leads the audience to demand "we want to see that," and then their sources will show them that material. And you have some ideas - you think it's not just random, right? It's not just...
Will Stancil [48:32]
It's not just random. I think there is an element of randomness to this. Some stuff just, you know, it's noisy, and some stuff bubbles up. But the things that tend to capture the audience just go viral. And I think virality is really the key here. You have many, many nodes in our modern media system. Something goes viral when people start repeating it independently of each other. And that is really the tipping point for a lot of stuff.
Samantha Hancox-Li [48:53]
Right? I mean, whatever like as somebody who works on the back end of Liberal Currents, like this is something that's very visible to us in the numbers that there are pieces that we publish and people read it because we link to it or they follow us. And then there are the things that make that next step, where people start sharing it independently, and the numbers are on a completely different level.
Will Stancil [49:14]
Yeah, I mean, it's like some stuff, you could see it on any social media, any digital platform you have access to publishing numbers. I had a TikTok go viral and it's kind of fun. But this one, it was like, literally, I had friends from around the country suddenly reaching out to me and be like, "Oh, my God, I saw you on my TikTok." And I'm like, wow, like, literally, for a day, there were millions of people seeing me, and it's like, totally really different level.
I think the stuff that goes viral in this news sense are things that tend to be crisis or conflict, stuff that feels pressing. It feels urgent, like something is breaking, something - there's an imminent danger, imminent threat, or there's a conflict, there's some sort of important standoff, some sort of dispute that is genuinely unresolved, that we do not know how it'll end.
I think that this has attentional properties that people want to tune in. They want to know how it'll end, because they're curious, because they're fearful, because they're stressed about it. I think that this tends to draw attention. So I think all of the things that I talked about that are in these turning public opinion, turning point moments - I think that they have a lot of these properties.
Like, the Afghanistan withdrawal felt like a crisis. It felt like a disaster was impending. And in fact, one of the things that happened, one of the things that kind of screwed Biden, is that once it became clear that the initial days were just chaotic, and then it kind of became a more regular process and started working better, it felt like less of a crisis, and people stopped paying attention to it. And so people only remember the beginning when it was a disaster.
Or if you look at George Floyd and the growing protests and the riots - they're burning things down. People are tuning in. And then, as you have over the summer, it becomes this more regular process of people passing reforms, people kind of tune out again.
I think that if you look at Kavanaugh or ACA, these are both political standoffs, but unlike a lot of political standoffs where it's like, including, for instance, Trump's impeachments, where it's like, oh, the outcome is being treated as a foregone conclusion. These people vote and they'll go this way, and then these people vote will go the other way. There was a genuine question like, Will Kavanaugh get confirmed? Maybe he won't. Or will the ACA be repealed? And in fact, it wasn't.
And I think that the fact that it is a narrative here without a conclusion that you can know in advance both gets people to tune in, and it gets people who are speaking and publishing, who are generally a little bit more savvy, to pay attention. Like, it's hard to get reporters to pay attention to when Democrats will do this thing. Sometimes they're like, we're gonna do a filibuster, we're gonna do a fake standoff over something we don't actually have the votes to block, and like, no one actually cares, because anyone who's savvy enough to talk about it knows that it's all just for show. But if it's the ACA repeal, reporters are staying up all night to watch that, because they don't know how it ends either, and so it gets published.
Samantha Hancox-Li [52:03]
I think, I think this is all very key to me, and it's key to think about these things in terms of their dramatic structure, like what you would write as a writer in a novel to generate attention, right? You want a conflict. You want one person wanting one thing, and somebody else is trying to stop them, and there's that conflict between characters. You want the conflict to be important, right? It's not just like, do I put mayo on this sandwich or not? But it matters in some larger way. It has stakes, as they say.
And almost as importantly, the outcome is uncertain, right? You can have all that stuff, but if the outcome is obvious, people don't care. They don't engage. It is precisely when you don't know, necessarily, who's going to win this fight that I'm watching, or how are they going to win this fight, or who's going to get the McGuffin that they're trying to fight over, that's kind of what engages people.
Will Stancil [52:54]
That's right. I think this is what Democrats most often screw up, is that they understand that there are high stakes conflicts, but they don't understand that a genuinely contested outcome is important. And so they'll say they'll do a big fight over some law, but it's like everyone knows how it's going to end. So who cares?
Samantha Hancox-Li [53:13]
And you see, the budget standoff is a great example where you talked about this in the essay that there is this big standoff, like, are the Democrats going to approve President Trump's budget, or are they going to block it and shut down the government? And the answer that the Democrats give at the very beginning is, basically, we're not actually going to shut down the government, but we're going to have all this procedural wrangling, and we're going to make go through some rigmarole to prove that we're standing up to Trump before actually the budget passes. And it's because the outcome is known in advance that, like, nobody's very impressed by this.
Will Stancil [53:41]
The example that always comes to mind for me, because I literally screamed my head off during it was Trump's first impeachment where Democrats did a very large amount of rigamarole. But if you read the political reporting, they would also say, "We want a sharp narrow short impeachment memory." And they were simultaneously negotiating Trump's trade deal at the time, and it was extremely, really frustrating to me, because if you paid even the slightest bit of attention, it was clear the Democrats' plan was to do a whole big show and then just go back to business as normal. And they said, "We want to finish this up by time campaign season starts so then we get to campaigning." It's like so you don't expect us to have any real effect. You just want to do it, get it done with, and then move on. Why would I care? Why would I pay attention? There's no dramatic - there's no drama here. Like, I know what you're gonna say, and then you're gonna say it, and then it's done.
You need to make a sincere effort to impeach and remove him, or else it is not, it is not, like, remotely interesting as a narrative. And it was just they didn't get it.
Samantha Hancox-Li [54:39]
No, I think, I think that's right. I kind of want to do come back to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but I also want to talk about this, not just in the case of democratic electeds, but in the case of progressives and activists groups. So there was a number of large protests that were organized across the country. Via some estimates, several million people turned out for anti-Trump protests, I organized the hands off protests, and people were kind of annoyed because they weren't really covered. But the reason they weren't covered is because the media just assumed, well, this is business as usual. The Liberals are protesting Trump. The Liberals are always going to protest Trump.
It's not like they don't have that element, like there's conflict, but is anything gonna change because of this? Is this unexpected? Do we not know what's gonna happen? No, we know what's going to happen. And I think to me, some of this is, is progressive groups, you know, they keep on pointing well, there are millions of people, but it's not about how many millions of people you put in the streets. It's about the narrative structure of these conflicts.
And something that I've talked about a lot on this podcast and at Liberal Currents, is the Civil Rights Movement, which is that the Civil Rights Movement didn't really put millions of people in the streets. That's you might think that they did, but I strongly urge you go back. Read about, go on Wikipedia. Read about some of the major actions the Civil Rights Movement did not put millions of people in the streets. They put a few 1000 people, few 100 people into a Woolworths, right? They put five people into a Woolworths and all they did is they came down and they said, "We would like some lunch service," and it creates a riot, right? Because they won't be served, and they're still sitting there asking, "We would like lunch service," while people are pouring ketchup over them.
And it creates this drama, right? It creates a clear conflict between Jim Crow and between the movement. It has very important stakes about segregation, and the outcome is uncertain, right? People don't know, like, are these kids gonna throw a punch, or are they just gonna keep on sitting there and take it? Are they gonna get the shit beaten out of them? Is Woolworths gonna cave and let them eat lunch at the Woolworths? Right? And so there's this uncertainty that focuses an immense amount of national attention in the right way, right that dramatizes the movement in the right way, that shows we're standing up to this monstrous, stupid, unjust power.
Will Stancil [56:58]
And I think that's right. You're creating a conflict that is - you create a conflict. You don't know what's gonna happen. You don't know how it's gonna end. You don't know if someone's going to - if the store will cave, if the kids will get themselves killed.
Over time, they continually create these conflicts. They kept going back and creating more conflicts. It was very important that they were doing it in a way that was coordinated so they would not cross the line, that they would not become the villains in the conflict. They would just continue to do the really basic thing that's causing conflict, and then as more tension focuses, the clear villain and hero of the story emerges, because it is ultimately a narrative, and people do look for the right side and the wrong side.
And it's very hard to sympathize in that story with the mob of jeering kids pouring ketchup on them, as opposed to the people who just want or asking for a sandwich. And this is the basic I think this is the basic insight. So, I mean, my background is civil rights law and I think this is the basic insight of the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, this is why King's non-violent protest works, because it creates these conflicts and dramatizes them in a way that attracts attention and then forces you to pick sides.
And then, like you said, we should talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, because this is where they finally figured it out a little bit.
Samantha Hancox-Li [58:15]
Well, at least one of them did, right, which is Senator Van Hollen, and he's this is a really interesting example, because it's not going through the regular order of the Senate. It's not holding a press conference where he describes things in striking terms. What Van Hollen does is buy a plane ticket to El Salvador, and he shows up, and he says, I want to see my constituent. I want to, you know, see this man who's been wrongfully deported.
And he tells these stories about their driving towards Seacot on the roads in El Salvador, and they get stopped by the police, and the police are like, "You are not going to see Abrego Garcia." And I don't know what happens next, but he does eventually see him, right? And it creates this, this conflict with real important stakes, that sets it up in a dramatic way where, like, you don't know, right? Is Van Hollen going to see this guy? What kind of condition is Abrego Garcia in? No one knows. No one's seen him, right?
Will Stancil [59:06]
I think that, if you - I think that what's interesting. So if you talk to elected officials, and you know, I do, I was actually on an NPR show with Chris Van Hollen a few months ago in which he kind of - we talked about the budget, and we would talk about the budget standoff, and he gave a really hedging answer about whether or not he would they would block it. It didn't come off particularly well on that.
And it's interesting, because I think that in that context he was speaking from this frame of a lot of elected officials who will think of themselves only in terms of their formal authorities. You know, what can I do? A vote? Can I do a press release? What can I vote to block outside of that? I don't, you know, I can't do anything.
But when he started, when he did this trip to El Salvador, he was thinking about it in the frame of public attention. As an elected official, as a pretty high up elected official in the United States, he already starts with an advantage in that anything he does has a higher chance of attracting attention. And he found a way to maximize that, to create, use his role, to create a conflict that is, like you said, entirely outside of his formal senatorial authorities, but was dramatic that you couldn't help but pay attention to.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:00:11]
And they were covering it on Fox, right?
Will Stancil [1:01:02]
I mean, how could you not? It was like, and then it even - presumabley, when he went, he had no idea what was going to happen. And then because he put himself in that situation, he has this dramatic meeting. I mean, I literally, like, I was out and about on a Friday night or something, when he met with him, and I checked my phone, I saw a picture of them together, and I literally cried, thinking about it. I was like, "Oh, my God, he's alive." And like, this is just - it was great television. It was a great story.
Obviously, it's a still terrible story, because we still don't have the guy back. But like, how did you not pay attention? And then what you saw in the polls is that suddenly Trump's handling of the situation is just dismally unpopular. In fact, his entire immigration policies become unpopular. It's seemingly as largely as a consequence of this, and this and other similar situations. And it was just, it was in some ways, like, the most effective I've seen a Democrat or a liberal or progressive use these sort of media attentional dynamics to change public opinion in a long time.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:02:02]
I think it is an important lesson. And it gets back to what you've been talking about in terms of, like, understanding the dramatics, the narrative aspects of a situation - that, you know, he didn't need to put a million people in the streets. He didn't need to put 1000 people in the streets. It was just one person, him is enough to create a narrative, if you can structure the conflict in the right way.
And by creating that conflict, by creating that drama, you can draw attention to yourself. You can draw attention to the conflict in the way you want attention drawn to it, right? And we've seen Republicans do this in the opposite direction, right? That, you know, during Biden's presidency, they were always trying to create these, like, we thought of them as kind of goofy conflicts, where they're bussing immigrants north to democratic cities, or they were putting, like, barbed wire and saw blades in the Rio Grande and like, do these change national policy? Not really, but they generate attention, right? They generate questions, and they frame the conflict in the way that Republicans want them to be framed.
Will Stancil [1:02:49]
And you're taking swings. I mean, you know, obviously with Van Hollen's trip. I mean, you never quite know what's going to work. But he took a big swing and he hit. And if you're taking a lot of swings, you're going to get a lot more hits. There's really no penalty for not getting a hit. Like, if he had gone to El Salvador, no one had paid attention, it's not like anything at all would change about his political career as a result. You know, nothing would change. So there's - you should just be swinging all the time, swinging at everything.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:03:14]
I think, I think some of this is just the kind of courage you were talking about, a comfortableness with uncertainty. Is courage, and what Clausewitz would have called moral courage, right? There's one thing which is physical courage, right? Your ability to brave dangers that are known and understood, and that's valuable, and that matters. Moral courage is the ability to take a stand when you don't know the outcome, when you are putting something big on the line that's not just yourself, but your cause, and you are committing to it.
And I think a lot of Democrats are nervous, right? They don't necessarily want to take those big swings because they don't know what's coming next. But some of them do right. Some of them have the courage of their convictions that are willing to seek out confrontations where the outcome is uncertain and we need that. We absolutely need that.
Will Stancil [1:03:58]
I think that this is a, in some ways, almost a psychological difference between the parties, Democrats, liberals, especially today, tend to be effective, competent people who are used to following the rules and going through the, you know, crossing their T's and dotting their i's and having things work out.
And what's scary about this sort of political paradigm is that that doesn't work. You cannot launch your - if you only wait for conflicts you know you can win, then you will be waiting forever. And if you sit out the conflicts you know you might lose, then you'll sit out all of them. And so people who are used to conducting themselves in a way where they're making smart choices about only engaging with stuff that they'll win - although that's very effective in many parts of life, you know, and gets them high up in law firms and politics or whatever, it is actively detrimental to getting the kind of attention that you need to win in politics today.
And so I think that there is a little bit of a dearth of people who think like this on the liberal and democratic side right now, and hopefully over time, we can change that, because I think that's going to be necessary to beat Trump.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:04:53]
No, I think that's absolutely right. So yeah, I mean, I guess to reiterate some of the things we've been talking about here, like what I want to do here on this show, just generally speaking, is to try and show that, you know, it's just not all doom and gloom out there, right? That, if you look to history, there have been times when things were much worse, and people were in our situation, and that situation was much worse for them, right?
Will Stancil [1:05:14]
And people forget that - the Civil Rights Movement was, I mean, that's - people forget, but the Civil Rights Movement, you were living in an authoritarian state. And they beat it, they won. It wasn't that many people and they won.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:05:30]
I think that is, again, very important to understand, is just to reiterate over and over again that the Civil Rights Movement set themselves against a force that, from their perspective, seemed unbeatable, right? That no one had ever beat these guys. They'd been here since the founding of the country, and they always won. You know, they lost this little war, but then they just came back. And, you know, people who did try to stand up for themselves, or fight back or get guns, they all got killed. Every with their whole families got killed.
They set themselves against a very, very hard target, and they won. And they won through the kinds of strategies we've been talking about, right by understanding that public opinion absolutely matters, public opinion is fundamental, and public opinion can be changed, right, not just by material conditions, but by narrative and by persuasion, fundamentally, and that you persuade people by, you know, not just incremental change, not just following the rules, but by creating the right kind of conflict, by seeking out the right kind of conflict that will generate the narrative that shows you are on the right side of history and that your enemies are, you know, evil maniacs, basically.
So that's the kind of lesson that I want to draw from all this history in this stuff that, right? Yeah, we live in a fragmented media landscape. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be done. There is stuff to be done today.
Will Stancil [1:06:41]
Absolutely, and I think the one other thing I would add to that is that because one of the advantages and disadvantages of disconnecting political outcomes and events and terms from material and structural conditions and economic conditions is that it creates a lot of randomness. Because you know, we are not bound to the ups and downs of the economy, the ins and outs of our government structure. Things can happen that we don't expect.
Obviously that can go - bad things can happen. I mean, Trump's election, to some extent, was kind of this pretty sharp turn from the normal trend of Republican presidency - pretty crazy guy, but it means good things can happen that you don't expect, that Trump can take hits that you don't see coming. And so it really is important just to sort of not give up hope on this, and to understand that if you keep pushing, maybe something breaks through and we don't, you know, sitting in 2025 can't say what it'll be. And so it's really, for me this is a lesson here is like, keep fighting.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:07:35]
No, keep keep fighting. And, you know, I mean, again, the popularist narrative that I kind of wish we had more time to talk about, would say, Well, you have to just read public opinion and then just follow it, you know, like an automaton, because you can't change it, and you just have to do what it says. And it's like, that would have told you don't touch Trump on immigration, right? And you could see a lot of Democrats were, like, nervous about touching Trump on immigration.
Will Stancil [1:07:58]
People said this. People said, don't talk about it.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:08:01]
But like, you know, you talk - it's not just a press conference, not just a press release, but the right kind of media imagery can move the needle, even on stuff like immigration, where Trump appeared to be popular, was popular.
Will Stancil [1:08:11]
It would have - you know, no one would have said that you should hit Biden on withdrawing from Afghanistan, which was very popular, and yet it was devastating for him. You know, so you just - the willingness to adjust to conditions that exist, and you know, discourse as it exists, and you know, it really, really is an advantage here.
Samantha Hancox-Li [1:08:36]
Yeah, okay, so clearly we could probably talk for another hour. You might actually get the chance to defend strong Stancilism, which we were never came back to. Yeah, so maybe next time we can talk about the strong Stancil thesis.
But for now, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure to have you, and thanks to everybody for listening, and I hope to see you again next week.
