The Fantasy of a Liberal Joe

The weeks immediately succeeding an electoral loss, particularly a Democratic one, tend to be a stormy season of insta-postmortems and finger-pointing. Prescriptions abound: The party should’ve gone more to the left; the party should’ve gone more to the right; Joe Biden shouldn’t have stepped down; Bernie would’ve won. Among the clash of rapid takeaways is the notion that liberals need to “build their own Joe Rogan,” referring to the outsize shadow the podcaster casted over the final days leading up to the election. Trump went on the show on October 26, then J.D. Vance on October 31, then finally Elon Musk, their billionaire surrogate who finally sealed the deal on securing Rogan’s endorsement on November 4, which was then broadcast over social media right before Election Day.

We can’t be certain the extent to which Rogan’s endorsement actually helped tip the electoral contest toward a second Trump presidency, but it capped off what appears to be a successful execution of the Trump campaign’s strategy to employ a full-court press on the so-called “Manosphere” — the loose constellation of influencers like Flagrant’s Andrew Schulz, the comedian Theo Von, and techno-bro Lex Fridman who have collectively developed a constituency largely associated with, though not necessarily exclusive to, what you could refer to as “disaffected young men.” Rogan was the pièce de résistance of this push and its biggest possible get: The Joe Rogan Experience is still widely understood to be the most listened-to show in the podcast business by a wide margin but is particularly popular with men.

In the face of this, the impulse from liberals to replicate the juice by developing their own Rogan equivalent is understandable but ultimately myopic. The idea is little more than fantasy wish-casting, driven by a top-down desire to inorganically bring into the world something that can only exist organically. It’s an effort to side-step the more pragmatic though much less heartening move: tackling the constituency that Rogan’s audiences, and the messy personalities and platforms in the Rogan orbit, represent head-on.

There’s a fundamental difference between the so-called “Manoverse” and, say, the equally growing ecosystem of explicitly right-wing podcasts typified by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire operation, newer conservative talking heads like Dan Bongino, far-right personalities like Charlie Kirk, and the continuing afterlives of Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. The latter are extensions of existing political bases, basically serving as platforms for organizing and ideological reinforcement; they don’t expand tents so much as maintain the ones that exist. To a large extent, liberals and the left already possess equivalents in this arena: Crooked Media on the center left, alternatives like Hasan Piker and Chapo Trap House for those further down the spectrum, though they don’t quite reach the financial and audience scale of their right-wing rivals.

In contrast, what Rogan and the Manosphere represents is a purely cultural space that’s often politically squishy, either by design or disposition. Someone like, say, Theo Von has his beliefs, but they aren’t foregrounded, and in any case, they’re not easily boiled down to a fully defined ideological profile. Rogan developed a following first and foremost as a comedian, a mixed-martial-arts personality, and a dude who’s really into galaxy-brain ideas, weird conspiracy theories, and his own beliefs about the world, some of which are noxious. His arrival as a political influencer was incidental as much as it is consequential: Over the years, he attracted the attention of right-leaning politicians each time he expressed disaffection with liberal values, which they have now successfully exploited. But Rogan continues to be difficult to shove into any specific political container. Four years ago, he endorsed Bernie Sanders, even as he raised doubts over the COVID vaccine. He seems to believe in human-caused climate change; he mocks trans people. Even with his endorsement of Trump, it’s still not quite right to say he naturally “belongs” to any camp.

Same goes for Rogan’s listeners. According to an Edison Research study, the show’s audience consists fairly evenly of those who identify as Democrats, Republicans, and independent or “something else” (27 percent, 32 percent, and 35 percent, respectively). Because of this squishiness, his show, and others like his, have a natural capacity to draw in groups of listeners who have yet to politically define themselves. This is the opportunity: Those constituencies are still open to be shaped by ideological entrepreneurs, but their very attachment to those shows serve as signals for what different corners of the American electorate are thinking and feeling. Democrats have historically been reluctant to go on shows like Rogan’s due to concerns they may come off to their supporters as indirectly endorsing the host’s more controversial views. In retrospect, this was a self-limiting position, one that automatically collapsed any distinction between engaging with an interlocutor and simply ceding to them. It is clear now that it is crucial for liberals to simply grapple with these spaces as they are, not only to establish a presence but to understand how one may begin to address certain concerns and arguments — no matter how oppositional to one’s beliefs they might be. Of course, there is a natural imbalance at play here: Trump and his fellow Republicans can nod along with Rogan’s more pernicious views, like his transphobia and penchant for conspiracy theories, while liberals have to shoulder the burden of defusing and challenging them while working through the conversation. But that’s the job.

This advice doesn’t just apply to Rogan and the Manosphere, because they aren’t necessarily a singularly impactful phenomena in the podcast universe. Rogan might be operating on a scale of his own, but there are an increasing number of other podcasts, YouTube shows, and online spaces with growing and naturally formed constituencies whose political identities remain fluid. To some extent, the Harris campaign activated a counter-response along these lines when the candidate appeared on Call Her Daddy, which represents the interests and concerns of young, left-leaning women around the country, and All the Smoke, a NBA nostalgia-pod the Harris campaign tapped into to reach Black men. The problem was that it was too little too late, and that Harris, as a candidate, never figured out how to engage enough. There were too few appearances, and on the shows she did go on, it felt less like community outreach than a sales road show. Say what you will about Trump, but the guy knew how to work an audience. Liberals shouldn’t be thinking about “building their own Joe Rogan.” They should be effectively engaging with the Rogans and the growing class of alternatives that already exist.

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