Yascha also answers listener questions about whether it's good or bad that it is so hard to pass a new law in the United States and the importance of public choice economics.
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The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Welcome to the second monthly installment of the mailbag in which you ask questions that I try to answer as best I can. If you have questions to ask me for next month's mailbag, please send us an email at goodfightpod@gmail.com.
We have a bunch of questions about interesting general intellectual topics and a bunch of questions, understandably, about the incoming Donald Trump administration.
Sophie asks, what should journalists be doing now that Trump has been reelected? How are you planning to cover the next four years?
Yascha: Boy, do I have thoughts about this question. The first thing that I want to say, and some of you will have seen me write about this on my Substack, is that journalists need to return to their traditional role conception. In an understandable way, journalists, around 2016, started to think that it was their job to save democracy, because the threat to democracy is real. But that has led them down the garden path in a number of important respects. The first is that they vastly overestimated the extent to which they could influence their audience. Many reporters started to think that their job in each news article was to frame what they were covering in such a way as to maximize the chances that democracy will survive, which in their mind meant maximizing the chances that the readers would never vote for Donald Trump. But readers are much more intelligent than journalists tend to assume. And they do not like being preached to. So readers either did the opposite of what those reporters wanted them to do, or they simply switched the channel, changed the online sources they were consuming, and canceled their subscriptions. It is one of the reasons why there's an ongoing decline in trust in the media.
The other thing that happened is that many journalists delayed the debates that Democrats needed to have. Two obvious examples are the fact that various European diplomats have told me in the last weeks that it was well-known in European capitals that Joe Biden was suffering from significant mental decline years ago, because he would show up to meetings not knowing where he was, because he would repeat himself in the same meeting two or three times until he was ushered away by some of his staff. If the mainstream media had reckoned with this fact in a much more explicit way, we could have had a genuine primary in the spring of 2024. We could have ended up with either Kamala being a stronger candidate by having to compete in that primary or an alternative candidate that would have been stronger than her. And secondly, once she was elevated to the nomination without a real primary, there was this whole moment when the media was pretending there was an organic upsurge of enthusiasm like for Obama in 2008 and that she was on track to win the election. That's one of the things that led Democrats to adopt a low-risk or no-risk strategy—for example, having her decline to appear on podcasts like Joe Rogan's. In both of these respects, the very framing that was meant to help Democrats ended up harming them. Journalists should return to a much older role conception of reporting the news straight, being skeptical of everybody, and asking them pesky questions, even if they seem to be on “their side.”
More broadly though, I've been reflecting in my capacity as the editor of Persuasion about how we collectively should be covering the incoming Trump administration. And in conversation with my team, we came up with three primary principles of what we're going to be doing. The first principle is that we're going to be covering the Trump administration in the way that journalists should with a basically critical mindset that is open to positive surprises. We will try to focus on the really important things the administration is doing, rather than getting drawn into the outrage over the latest stupid tweet that Donald Trump is sure to send. We will evaluate the extent to which the actions of the Trump administration undermine the key democratic rules and norms about which I deeply care, and undermine the values of a liberal tradition that Persuasion was founded to fight for. When they are damaging to those values, we will say so very, very clearly. When, as in the case of free speech, the administration might in certain respects do something that is positive for those values, we will also hold ourselves to saying that clearly. Secondly, it is really evident at this point that we desperately need to renew the liberal tradition; that the way in which liberal principles have been applied to society and the way in which they often have been betrayed in mainstream institutions has lost the majority of the American population; that if we want liberal values to continue to be the lodestar of American politics in the 21st century, we need to reinvent this tradition for a different political era. We have been doing a lot of that work at Persuasion over the last years, and we will double down on that work in years to come. And finally, it is unseemly in these political circumstances to say, “I told you so,” but we did tell you so. We did, for example, warn about the heavy electoral cost that various forms of left-identitarianism would have on the Democratic Party. We did push back against that ideology on both strategic and on principled grounds. And we will continue to do that work in the coming years with as clear and forthright a voice as everything else we try to do.
Ruben asks: I am trying to make sense of how to think about the nomination of R.F.K. Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He seems to hold many positions with which I disagree and that appear irresponsible. At the same time, I have lost a lot of trust in public health authorities over the last years and I'm intrigued to see that many of my liberal and even progressive friends actually embrace the positions that RFK holds. How should we think about whether or not RFK is going to be dangerous as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services?
Yascha: This is an excellent question and I certainly echo the sentiment that public health authorities have given us good reason to lose faith in them, and to be more critical about some of the things that pass for conventional wisdom in that profession over the last years. And yet, I'm worried about RFK's nomination, and for reasons that are a little bit different from what most people might think.
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