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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Okay, here's the deal. Today is the State of the Union, as you guys know. I hate the State of the Union. Hate it. I hated it even when I liked the president just fine. It's antiquated. It's stupid. It's all the puffery. It's all the reasons why I left D.C., But, you know, I got a job to do. I'm going to suffer for y'all.
It is my Lenten obligation. So here's our content plan for the State of the Union. I'm going to give myself and you a brief respite from the speech fun to trade this morning. So we have a very fun off-the-news guest I've been wanting to bring in for a while. We're going to get to him in a second.
Over on TNL with Sarah and JVL, we're going to cover everything news politics campaigns besides the speech. So you can go get your campaign fix on the Next Level feed. And then tonight... It's the only way I can tolerate it. I'm going to be mystery science theatering through the speech on YouTube. So you can come hang out with me on YouTube. And then after, we have a very special guest coming.
He's a very good talker. And so hopefully that will ease the pain of having to have watched Donald Trump for three hours or however long he's going to go. And then if you're hearing this on Wednesday morning, you can get the State of the Union reaction stuff over on the Bulwark Takes feed. So that's the schedule. It's a content marathon. I'm your humble servant. Soak it all in.
Today's show, we've got a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter at The New Yorker. His latest book, like a year and a half ago now, that book is called Super Communicators. It's Charles Duhigg. How you doing, man?
Good. How are you? Thanks for having me on. And I'm looking forward to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 State of the Union tonight.
If I had to watch it anyway, why would I sit on the couch and subject my husband to it?
Exactly. You might as well have two robots with you. Yeah, let him watch. You guys can just make comments this whole time.
He can watch whatever, Housewives, and I can sit here with you all and snipe at him. And that seems at least borderline tolerable. I want to get to the book, and I think there are a lot of lessons in Super Communicators for all of us, for what the mission is here, ostensibly, which is persuading people to the benefits of liberal democracy.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Charles Duhigg offer about MAGA's political organizing?
And in organizing, what you're doing is you're trying to push down leadership as far as possible to the local level. You're trying to train people to become leaders, to become advocates so that there is no need for central coordination as there was with DARE.
You don't have to coordinate things because all of these independent cells, these independent agents are out there figuring out what works best on their own, right? So we have these two components of social movements that are both really important. Mobilizing, getting people into the streets, organizing, building an infrastructure that teaches people how to be leaders.
What's important, though, is that this one, organizing, is much more important than mobilizing. D.A.R.E., as anyone who's been paying attention knows, basically was a fad. It sort of exploded in popularity, and then it turned out that if you went to a D.A.R.E. education program, you were more likely to do drugs. The program just kind of disappeared. I learned about huffing.
I learned about huffing from D.A.R.E. in fifth grade. I was like, wait a minute. I can party with the stuff underneath my parents' sink?
Yeah, exactly. Holy shit. All I need is a paper bag? Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
I was like, where would I have learned about huffing if it wasn't for D.A.R.E. telling me about the dangers of huffing?
Mad, on the other hand, has become one of the most successful social movements in America. And if we look at politics today, what we see is that the Dems are really good at mobilizing, right? Look at the No Kings marches. Look at the Women's Day protest. They can get millions of people into the streets overnight. And that's really, really impressive. But MAGA is really good at organizing, right?
And that's much less visible. It's much less high profile. But what they've done is they've created tens of thousands of local leaders, these little cells that exist to get out the vote on Election Day and organizing beats mobilizing every day of the week. Because the truth of the matter is, when you go to that No Kings Day rally and you feel so good to be in a huge crowd, afterwards you go home.
And you didn't get the names of anyone who is there. You didn't make any new friends. You don't set up a meeting, a plan to meet the next week in order to figure out how to continue the effort. It feels good, but it doesn't create change. And that's what we need to learn from MAGA.
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Chapter 3: How does Duhigg compare DARE and MAD in terms of effectiveness?
Absolutely. On Donald Trump, for whatever his faults, he seems authentic, right? He does not couch his positions to pander to the crowd. He speaks whatever seems to be at the top of his mind, which sometimes is nonsense. He's an authentic liar. Yeah.
And the people that listen to him think, yeah, sure, he's lying, but he seems like he's telling me what he really thinks. That's performance.
Exactly. That's performance. It's performance. It's performance. And this authenticity, though, is really important. You mentioned before the graphic on that article that sometimes the red hands are pointing at each other. And it made me think of the recent Turning Point meeting, the national meeting where J.D.
Vance and Rubio were on stage and Tucker Carlson was criticizing them and Vance criticized Tucker Carlson.
Ben Shapiro criticized Tucker Carlson.
Exactly. And everyone on the left was like, oh, finally, finally, they're attacking each other. Finally, the coalition is coming apart. But I saw it completely differently.
Those attacks were evidence to the crowd and to Republicans that they have a big enough party that they can criticize each other, that they they are comfortable airing their differences and being authentic about where they disagree with one another without actually saying, now we're going to break apart. Now we're going to go do our own thing. Now we're going to factionalize.
This ability to disagree in public is really, really important to creating that sense of authenticity. And what's interesting is if you look at Obama, and most importantly, if you look at Bill Clinton, that's what they did really well, right? Everyone remembers the Bill Clinton sister soldier moment when he comes out and he criticizes sister soldier for... for giving bad advice to black youths.
And that was an important moment because it showed that Bill Clinton was being independent. He was being authentic. And he alienated some of his base in doing so, but it was an important moment for the campaign. We need more of that. We need that authenticity. And I think we're going to see that on the stage for 2028.
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Chapter 4: What lessons can Democrats learn from MAGA's organizing strategies?
But they're differentiated from this unpopular thing. That's exactly right. And I do think there's a lesson there for Democrats right now. Like the Democratic brand kind of sucks and that's a job for some Democrats in D.C. to fix.
But like on the local level, you can create groups in your community that like are basically Democratic, have essentially Democratic positions, but are differentiated in the brand or the focus or the energy. Right. And I think that that would be smart.
No one in history has ever said, I'm going to that college Republican meeting tonight because I want to find someone to hook up with. Right? Those words have never, on the other hand. But then TPUSA made it happen. TPUSA.
When I talked to TPUSA, like half the people I talked to were like, yeah, actually I joined because there were all these hot girls there and I didn't really know how to talk to girls and I want to talk to them. Right? Like TPUSA made conservatism sexy. That's the hardest thing on the face of the planet.
And if you're a college student, nothing gets you more motivated than going to something where you might get, you might get lucky.
I'm going to have to have Will Summer on next week and we're going to spend an entire episode shitting on TPUSA because there's a lot not to like. There's a lot not to like.
There's a lot not to like. We're not talking about any of the ideology. We're talking about learning from the tactics. We're just talking about strategy.
All right. I want to talk about the book, Super Communicators. Well, just for folks who aren't familiar with the book, just give the little reader's digest version.
So we are living through this golden age of understanding communication because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. For the first time, we really understand what's happening inside people's brains when they communicate. And what we've discovered is that One of the big mistakes we make when we're having a conversation is that we think we know what that conversation is about, right?
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