The Democrats Have an Authenticity Gap

The Atlantic

09-06-2025

Since President Donald Trump's victory last fall, Democrats have been trying to reengage with male voters, find a 'Joe Rogan of the left,' and even fund a whole left-leaning 'manosphere.' Young men—Rogan's core audience—were among the voting blocs that definitively moved toward the GOP in 2024, as a comprehensive postmortem by the data firm Catalist recently illustrated. In response, many powerful liberal figures have obsessively returned to the same idea: If we can't compete with their influential manosphere, why not construct our own?
One high-profile progressive group, the Speaking With American Men project, is embarking on a two-year, $20 million mission to build 'year-round engagement in online and offline spaces Democrats have long ignored—investing in creators, trusted messengers, and upstream cultural content,' though its leaders say they're not looking for a liberal Rogan. Another effort, AND Media (AND being an acronym for 'Achieve Narrative Dominance'), has raised $7 million and, according to The New York Times, is looking to amass many times that amount over the next four years to back voices that will break with 'the current didactic, hall monitor style of Democratic politics that turns off younger audiences.'
But in recent conversations with people in all corners of Democratic politics—far-left Bernie bros, seasoned centrists of the D.C. establishment, and rising new voices in progressive media—I came away with the sense that Democrats don't have simply a podcast-dude issue, one that could be solved with fresh money, new YouTube channels, and a bunch of studio mics. The party has struggled to capitalize on Trump's second-term missteps. It has yet to settle on a unifying message or vision of the future. Given this absence, such a tactical, top-down fix as deputizing a liberal Rogan looks tempting. The big problem is: That fix is both improbable and illogical.
The party's 'podcast problem' is a microcosm of a much larger likability issue.
'We are a little bit, you know, too front-of-the-classroom,' Jon Lovett, a former Obama speechwriter and a co-host of Pod Save America, told me. In a sense, the show's production company, Crooked Media, already tested the 'make your own media ecosystem' proposition: Five years after its independent founding in 2017, Crooked announced that it had received funding from an investment firm run by the Democratic megadonor George Soros. Lovett seemed less skeptical of the new initiatives than other Democrats I interviewed, but also acknowledged some limitations. 'We believe how important it is to invest in progressive media,' Lovett told me. 'But in the same way you can't strategize ways to be authentic, you can't buy organic support.'
The limits of this approach have already become clear. 'If you're trying to identify and cultivate and create this idea of a 'liberal Joe Rogan,' by definition, you're manufacturing something that's not authentic,' Brendan McPhillips, who served as campaign manager during John Fetterman's successful Pennsylvania Senate bid in 2022, told me. 'This fucking insane goose chase that these elite donors want to pursue to create some liberal oasis of new media is just really harebrained and misguided.'
Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and other prominent voices in the existing manosphere are not inherently political and, even when they do touch politics, don't adhere to GOP or conservative orthodoxy. Although Rogan and Von did attend Trump's second inauguration, both have also been enamored with Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont; and recently, Von delivered an emotional monologue about the destruction in Gaza, drawing ire from many of his listeners on the right. In short, these guys are guided not by ideology, but by their own curiosity and gut instinct. Fluidity in belief is central to their appeal, and helps explain their cross-party success. Their audiences also blossomed over time, not after the stroke of a donor's pen.
Throughout my interviews, I heard constant lamentations over the inescapable 'D.C. speak' in both Democratic politics and the left-leaning press. 'Normal people aren't out here talking about and paying attention to the kind of things that tie senior Democratic strategists up in knots,' McPhillips, who lives in Philadelphia, told me. You can't read white papers and study what goes on in the states from afar, he argued; you have to be there at eye level, living among real people, talking like a real person.
What politicians have been advised to do for decades—stick to short cable-news hits, repeat the same few points over and over—are habits that today's voters find, in the words of a senior official who worked both in the Joe Biden White House and on the Kamala Harris campaign, 'repulsive.' Although this person, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely about party strategy, discounted the premise of finding a 'Rogan of the left' as a fool's errand, they did say that, from now through 2028, Democrats should try to infiltrate sports-focused podcasts, paying particular attention to YouTube.
This operative has come to view the current moment less as center-left versus center-right, and more as a larger battle of institutionalists versus anti-institutionalists: 'The psyche of a liberal in this moment is institution defense.' Also: fear. Too many Democrats, they believe, approach every public conversation and media interview with a level of trepidation about what they're saying—not in fear of Trump, but in fear of the wrath of their own potential voters. During her 2024 campaign, Harris reportedly feared the potential blowback within her own team from sitting down with Rogan. 'There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn't want her to be on' his show, Jennifer Palmieri, who advised the second gentleman Doug Emhoff, said a week after the election. (Palmieri later revised her comments.)
This year, some progressives have found a way to break through. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who's proved capable of acing a hostile Fox News interview, has now grown facial scruff and has been popping up on the podcast circuit. Several Democrats I spoke with praised both Buttigieg's recent media tour— his appearance on the brash bro show Flagrant was singled out—and Sanders's ability to win over certain manosphere hosts. 'They're able to do that because they have the confidence and the skill to go on a program like that and just be themselves, and people believe what they say because they're being honest,' McPhillips told me.
On the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, and in his frequent podcast appearances, Sanders has positioned himself as an accessible and righteously angry force. Faiz Shakir, Sanders's 2020 campaign manager and now an adviser to the senator, told me that Democrats 'are too far removed from organic and interesting conversations that people want to hear about, and have become too reliant on a one-way push at people about the things we want to tell them,' rather than actually listening to voters. Although he himself is a Harvard alumnus who lives and works in D.C., Shakir criticized the Democratic Party's perpetually buttoned-up ethos, the opposite of an unstructured podcast hang.
He spoke about the power of anger—the defining emotion of the past political decade—as something that many Democrats don't know how to wield effectively. 'If you're angry, you're uncouth,' Shakir said. ' Calm down! That's not professional! ' Unless Democrats stop worrying about politely conforming to pre-Trump communication mores, he believes the chasm with voters will continue to exist, hypothetical new-media ecosystem be damned.
John Hendrickson: Jake and Logan Paul hit the limits of the manosphere
Two things can be true at the same time: Many centrist Democrats may be too timid or genteel, and lack the moxie to speak with the anger that resonates with voters. But the cause of men's alienation from liberal politics cannot be distilled simply into perceptions of gentility. Nor is voicing rage a plausible way to hack the manosphere. When it comes to podcasts—the medium of the moment—a different emotion reigns: curiosity.
Hosts such as Rogan and Von succeed across party lines not because they're indignant, but because they're inquisitive and, crucially, persuadable. Their talent is to seem real and relatable without trying. Throughout my conversations, I asked why liberals have not organically produced a figure of Rogan's magnitude and influence. No one really had an answer. But one thing became abundantly clear: No amount of strategic parsing will let Democrats fake their way through this moment. You can't buy authentic communication.