Krystal Ball, co-host of Breaking Points, joins Current Affairs to discuss the Democratic Party’s failure to connect with working-class voters and its disastrous response to Trump’s victory. We also discuss the challenges facing independent media, including the dangers of audience capture, corporate influence, and the growing prevalence of access journalism within alternative media spaces.
Krystal’s 2017 book Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World remains an indispensable explainer on the current state of U.S. politics. Video of this interview is available on YouTube.
Nathan J. Robinson
Here’s what I want to do. I want to read to you a tiny bit of a New York Times article that came out a couple days ago:
“Democrats argue that the 2024 election actually had its bright spots. Some leaders have begun to put a sunny spin on the November outcome by pointing to down ballot victories, a possible sign that Democrats may not tear down their party after all.”
It says, “For some Democrats, for most Democrats, losing to Donald Trump was a devastating gut punch that sent them out, linked to the into the political abyss. But to hear some party leaders and their allies talk, Democrats had plenty of November victories to be proud of. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee said Democrats beat back global head winds that could have turned this squeaker into a landslide. Hakeem Jeffries said that they defied political gravity, and it says these Sunny Side Up views of the election serve as something of an antidote to the notion that Democrats, humbled by their 2024 mistakes, are about to begin rebuilding their party from the ground up.”
I was hoping that I could get your reaction to that, Krystal Ball.
Krystal Ball
I actually had not read that, and that is absolutely extraordinary, but also not surprising. You heard this from some people. I remember Jim Clyburn—who, of course, has a lot invested in the current status quo of the Democratic Party—immediately after the election came out and said something to the effect of, everyone needs to just chill out—it’s fine, everyone needs to just chill out. And look, they have a case to make because the election was pretty close. If you do a little bit better—I think if you had a better candidate, if you made some different decisions, you aren’t running around with Liz Cheney, or run around maybe with Shawn Fain or Bernie Sanders instead, I think it’s plausible they might have won this election. But what they don’t want to acknowledge, and what I think much of the Democratic base really sees and intuits, is that number one, if you’re losing to Donald Trump, that is an epic, colossal, monumental failure for a party that has really structured itself not on any sort of policy goals but solely around the purpose of defeating this person. Number two, if these shifts and trends continue in the direction that they’ve been going, of more and more working-class voters shifting out of the Democratic Party and affirmatively into the Republican Party—more and more young voters, more and more Latino voters—then there is almost no bottom to how bad things could get for the Democratic Party, and right now, that’s effectively the track that they’re on.
The Pod Save America guys revealed that Biden, apparently, when he was still in the race, had this internal polling that said he could lose to Trump. Trump could get 400 Electoral College votes. That’s how bad things looked when Biden was on the top of the ticket. If Democrats do not figure out a way to reverse their declines with working class voters and continue this slide, that is the type of future that they are staring down right now and why the alarm and the panic and the need to rebuild has never been more apparent.
It’s also possible that Trump screws up so badly and is so horrible, and the pain and the cruelty is just so unmasked, that there is a reaction against him in the next midterms, in the next presidential election, etc. As a leftist, I am not (aiming for) the Democratic Party to “win”. My goal is for that to actually mean something and to actually mean affecting change in people’s lives. And so some of the electoral analysis misses the point that it’s not particularly inspiring to be associated with or cheering for a party that’s doing fascism at the border like Trump. (The idea is that) we can also crack down in the same ugly ways, we can just be like the Republicans, just maybe do a kinder, gentler fascism, I think is the path that many Democratic leaders actually want to put the party on.
Robinson
You’re pointing to something really important there. Which is to say, it’s very easy to lapse after the election into a conversation where the question is framed as, how can Democrats win, and what do Democrats need to do to win? And then there are all these arguments about, well, no, Democrats need to go populist in their messaging, or no, Democrats actually need to go harder on the centrism.
Ball
They can’t go harder on the centrism. They’ve gone pretty hard.
Robinson
Although that case has somehow been made. Matthew Yglesias coming out saying, this is because they’ve caved to all the left-wing interest groups. And we’re like, oh, they did? I don’t remember that. I don’t remember getting everything we wanted. But at the same time, it’s kind of a morally hollow argument when you say which direction the Democrats need to go in order to win, when the real question is, how do we actually improve the welfare of Americans? I like that you draw our attention to that distinction.
Ball
Yes. And we think back to the ’90s and Bill Clinton. His approach to politics was a way for Democrats to win, and Barack Obama’s approach to politics was a way not for Democrats to win, but for him, personally, to win. So it’s not enough to ask if they cave and say, we’ll be like Trumpism but shave some of the rough edges off. Could that succeed electorally? Yes, I think that’s possible, but that is the exact opposite approach that they need to take to actually improve the welfare of society.
I’m curious how you feel. I feel pretty dark about where we are as a country. I think the most likely outcome is that Democrats just do a fascism-lite and just think that’s the easiest path because it gives them a possibility of electoral success, and it keeps them—their coalition of donors and interest groups, and all the forces that they cater to—all in line. So it’s the simplest possible direction.
But at the same time, I feel there’s a possibility that exists now that didn’t previously that also has me kind of invigorated, that at least there’s some chaos, some possibility that we could actually move in a different direction than in the trajectory that things have been on. So that’s been the way I’ve been thinking about (things)and feeling right now.
Robinson
I have that same complex mix of feelings. On the one hand, it’s really bleak because the Republicans are controlling all three branches of government, and because the Democratic Party, I thought, maybe might learn a lesson in 2016. In your book that you wrote in 2017, you laid out all the lessons that the 2016 election should have taught Democrats and basically showed what happened: you didn’t have a good economic message; you didn’t speak to people’s pain—you dismissed their pain; you didn’t understand the sources of Donald Trump’s appeal. But if you do all these things, then maybe it could change, and they didn’t do any of them. And then, sure enough, eventually Donald Trump came back into power.
But 2020 was a little odd because Biden squeaked in and probably would have lost if the pandemic hadn’t happened, but none of the lessons were absorbed. And then this election happens, and it looks like, from this New York Times article, even as they lose all over the place, even as Vermont starts shifting Republican, they’re saying, we over-performed in this one district over here, so don’t look at this catastrophe.
Ball
Exactly. Don’t look at the fact that the man that we said is a fascist—Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski compared Trump to Hitler, which I think is correct—was someone we ushered in to the White House. Just ignore that and pretend like everything is fine. One of the things that makes me feel that there is an opening right now is not the reaction of most Democratic elites, although I have been surprised by Chris Murphy and David Brooks—
Robinson
Yes, you might want to say the Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has said, basically, Bernie was right, and we should respect that.
Ball
And David Brooks, also, from the New York Times, saying maybe Bernie was right. So there have been a few things even among the elite class. But what has made me feel like there might be some possibility here is that I do think the liberal base really is disillusioned with their media organizations and with their elected leadership. They feel lied to. They have been sold a bill of goods for years that the way to defeat Trump was exactly the way that Kamala Harris ran her campaign. I think that the Joe and Mika trip down to Mar-a-Lago is incredibly significant. I honestly think it’s one of the most significant things that’s happened post-election in terms of the shattering of the faith of the Democratic base, vis-à-vis their media institutions and elite figures.
Again, here you had people who were sounding the alarm about Trump in the most strident possible terms, and then immediately after he returns to power, they’re booking a flight down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. And it just exposed, number one, that they didn’t actually believe anything they were saying. We did, and we do, but they didn’t. They just monetized our concern, our actual deep concern for this country, for their own benefit. And number two, their entire ideological architecture that told us that Liz Cheney would be a path back to power for Democrats and a path of resistance against Trump was totally bunk. And so we see the huge ratings decline at MSNBC, and you see channels like my husband Kyle Kulinki’s blowing up. I think you have a lot of liberals who are in a position, frankly, to potentially be radicalized at this moment. And that really is, to me, where we have to start in terms of this work.
Before you can even get to a general election to have a shot in the big leagues, you’ve got to get through the Democratic Party. That’s obviously been the stumbling block since 2016. It was a stumbling block in 2020. And for the first time, that idea of, this is the way you get elected, and this is how you go about things, and this is the conventional D.C. wisdom, I think that’s really been shattered and has created an opening to change some minds and win some converts over to a different approach to politics and a material-based policy.
Robinson
This same New York Times article notes that as these Democratic leaders are saying there are upsides to all of this, people are fleeing MSNBC, the ratings are completely collapsing. I just did an article about the way that the Harris campaign squandered money. The Harris campaign did all of these very urgent appeals for money—“send us money, send us money”—and they made a billion dollars, and then they just seem to have thrown it away. You see even big wigs in the Democratic Party, people like James Carville or the mega donor John Morgan, saying it’s like the money was stolen, like legally stolen, and Carville says there needs to be a massive audit. So a lot of people recognize something is terribly wrong, and a lot of people in the consultant media class don’t really seem to believe anything. And certainly, they actually don’t know what they’re doing. I’m sure you watch the Harris people on Pod Save America afterward, and you’re like, oh my god, they don’t even think they made any mistakes. Who are these people? Why are they running anything?
Ball
It was incredible. But also, in their little narrow world view, their job is not just to elect Democrats, it’s to protect this particular model of the Democratic Party. These are mostly Obama people who are interested in preserving the Obama legacy and the Obama way of doing things. And so they’re looking within their bag of campaign consulting tricks: we just put up new 30-second ads, and maybe we’ll do a billboard in Las Vegas—wouldn’t that be creative? Within that bag of tricks and within their goal of maintaining this donor aligned corporate Democratic Party model, I think they’re right. I think they did everything within that little box that they could possibly think to do. But that’s exactly the problem. And I think you’re correct in sensing that that was really also another seminal moment in terms of liberal base disillusionment, because again, they feel the Trump threat in a very visceral way. They are deeply concerned about what this next four years is going to look like, and then you have these brainy bean counters in there, like, well, we did our best, and we’ll get them next time, with zero emotion and zero concern, acknowledging no fault whatsoever that there wasn’t a single decision that they would rethink. And it is outrageous. It is actually outrageous, that spectacle.
Robinson
What’s the thing Joe Biden said, where, during the campaign, he had some interview where he was asked, what if you lose? And he’s like, well, I did my best or something like that.
Ball
He did say something like that. Your whole thing is supposed to be that it is existential to stop the ascent of this man to power and to keep him from retaking the White House. And you’re just like, well, I’ll give it the old college try. He said something like, I’ll feel good about myself, which is not really the point here.
Robinson
I’ll be rich and retired. What’s the problem?
Ball
Yes, now that’s it.
Robinson
There is a kind of paradox about the fact that—this is something I’ve always felt as a leftist—I always feel like I talk less about Trump than, perhaps, a lot of the kind of mainstream liberal Democrats, but I feel like I’m more viscerally anti-Trump. I see people probably say to you, as they say to me, why always criticize the Democrats? Why are you criticizing? And I’m like, I’m more anti-Trump than you. I actually take this stuff seriously. He’s not just a cartoon for me.
Ball
Right. I think that the liberals who operate in good faith, not like the Joe and Mikas who are just saying something because they think it’s good for their audience or whatever, I think they’re correct about the level of threat that Trump represents, by and large. I think they’re correct about that. I just think they’ve been dead wrong about the way to fight that threat, and we don’t have to imagine. We can look to our own history, obviously, with FDR. That was a very successful program for fighting fascism. We know what it looks like. And it also resulted in these massive democratic, lasting, durable majorities, and crucially, huge gains for the working class that sustained and built over many years.
So, we understand what the threat of Trump is now, and how do we deal with it? Their theory was, basically, talk about democracy, talk about authoritarianism, try to stitch together this coalition that involves including some mythical moderate Republican who loves Liz Cheney— which there’s no evidence for outside of a cable news green room. That was their theory. But in reality, what needed to be done was to actually deliver for people. You actually have to prove to people that it’s worth fighting for democracy, that democracy is something that can deliver fruits to you personally in your life.
And then the other thing, Nathan, that is a little bit of a new revelation for me with this election, and I wonder what you think about this. I care a lot about and think a lot about policy, about what would be the best program, etc. I do think that’s important in electoral politics, and, obviously, it’s most important for actually delivering for people. But I also think I can get too caught up in, well, this issue polls this way, and that issue polls that way, and this focus groups that way, etc. Listen, Donald Trump is obnoxious. He says all sorts of things that are extremely divisive and unpopular, but he says them with his chest, and he captures attention, and I think that’s part of it, too. It’s being less obsessed with, well, this polls this way and this polls that way. No, here’s what we believe in, here’s our agenda, here’s what we’re going to fight for. And if it’s controversial, let’s fight about it and invite the argument on things like this.
The example of that the healthcare CEO getting murdered and having this debate about healthcare now in its wake, where people are very uncomfortable—“oh, my god, but you’re saying this in the wake of this murder”—is a perfect example. I’m not advocating for vigilante justice here, just to be clear, but we should lean into divisive issues when they force a debate about delivering for working-class people. You saw a little tiny bit of this, to use a less fraught example, during Kamala’s campaign, when she announced this policy on price gouging, and there was this whole media narrative—“oh my god, price controls and socialism and communism,” whatever—that was a great debate to have.
But Democrats are so afraid of having anything be controversial and divisive that she immediately ran away from it. It also serves her interest, that of her brother-in-law, Tony West, to run away from anything that might rein in corporate power. But those fights are things that they need to lean into and be unafraid of, (to articulate) a real program with their chest and fight for it.
Robinson
Yes, Kamala has a history of embracing populist policies opportunistically—
Ball
And then running away from them.
Robinson
She embraced Medicare for All in 2020, and then, instead of this time saying, here’s why I support Medicare for All, her campaign spokesperson just put out, no, she no longer supports that, she no longer supports that job guarantee. And it’s like, okay, on the price-gouging thing, instead of backing down on it, say, I care about the cost of groceries—I recognize that we in the Biden administration haven’t, in fact, brought down the cost of groceries, but we’re going to fix that. Why don’t you say that? And what you’re saying there I think is so true, and it’s one of the reasons that I admire Bernie Sanders, and think he is effective. It’s not just that Bernie has the policies that he does, which we can cite polling saying whether people want universal healthcare or not. It’s also that people have a sense that Bernie Sanders is authentic. There is a stylistic aspect to him. There is a personality aspect. People like who he is. That’s why you hear that he’s capable of bringing even Trump people on board. Because they go, I don’t like what he stands for, but gosh, I really think he’s fighting for me.
Ball
He is a divisive figure in the best possible way. There was a lot of discussion about this “they/them” ad that Trump ran: “Kamala Harris is for they/them, and Donald Trump is for you.” And a lot of debate about, should Democrats moderate on transgender issues, which I think is a similar argument, effectively, to the argument that the New York Times is making about there being some silver lining that actually, it wasn’t that bad. All the Democratic Party has to do is to throw transgender people under the bus. Trust me, they are almost all happy to do that immediately, and it requires no pain from the donor class whatsoever. So that’s another argument of, basically, we can just keep doing the status quo.
But in any case, if you believe—I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made—that if the ad was damaging to her whatsoever, you have to ask yourself this deeper question of why. Why was she susceptible to an argument that she doesn’t really care about you and your family, that she cares about these “fringe” cultural issues? And Bernie Sanders, who has the same, if not more, left-leaning cultural positions, would not be susceptible to that same attack ad.
Or if we want to move on from Bernie Sanders, Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky, would not be and was not susceptible to those very same style of attack ads. And the answer is very simple: they have credibility on the issue of caring about you and your material interests and your family and fighting for that first and foremost and putting that at the center of their politics. And so if you are a Kamala Harris-type figure—she’s an archetype, and there are many like her, such as Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, who may have different stylistic capabilities, maybe more polished and put together, etc.—the type of politician who’s just moving around to wherever the current moment blows you, whatever the donors are telling you, or whatever your focus group tells you, then yes, you will be susceptible to an attack that you’re not really focused on things that people care about or that you are potentially focused on things that we’re actively uncomfortable with.
Robinson
Going back through your 2017 book, it really reminded me that we have a model. You talk about FDR and the New Deal, and you cite Harvey Kaye’s great work, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, where he talks about how it’s not that difficult to figure out what kind of progressive politics can win in a country like America. What did FDR do? Well, he talked to people directly through the fireside chats. He reassured them that he understood their pain, that he was dealing with the crisis. That’s what he did every week. He would come out and explain what he was doing for them, and if it hadn’t worked yet, he would explain that we’re working on it. There were transformations that people could see. There were parks. There’s a park in New Orleans, and it still says Works Progress Administration on the stones there. You would notice they built this bridge, and so you would have an answer when you think, where is my tax money going? You would have a physical answer, which is that the money built this bridge. These are quite simple things, and we even have this precedent that built a powerful left-leaning coalition for a long time.
Ball
Yes, I think too about the sewer socialists who were mocked as being sewer socialists. But that was the whole thing: we built this great public work system that has literally delivered for people in their lives. And guess what? We’re getting elected because people really like it. It was this pragmatic approach to governance. And I do think Andy Beshear can be a good model of this, especially when talking to people who aren’t leftists, who maybe are skeptical of the idea that Bernie would have won or that Bernie Sanders style democratic socialism is the answer to democratic electoral woes. A lot of what you said are things that Andy Beshear can really claim. He’s not as lefty as we are, but his original gubernatorial run was after the wave of teacher strikes in Kentucky. He runs aggressively against this very Trumpian style wealthy businessman named Matt Bevin, and he runs on saying he’s going to restore teacher pensions, restore funding to public education, make sure that we have jobs coming into the state and that those jobs are union jobs, and make sure health care is affordable. This is a very basic economic bread-and-butter case, and he wins.
Okay, now you’re in, and now you’ve got the difficulty of governing, especially during a really fraught time. This was during Black Lives Matter in Kentucky. This is during COVID as well. And he made some decisions—for example, there were times when he said the churches cannot operate on Sundays. You can imagine this was a very fraught and controversial decision in the state of Kentucky. But to your point, he was in constant communication with the public, taking questions almost daily, explaining his decision-making. And then, in addition to that, he was also truly delivering for people in terms of some of the campaign promises and bringing a significant amount of job development, and union job development through the auto industry, into the state. He vetoed some anti-trans bills that came through the Republican dominated legislature, which I guarantee you, was not a popular position for him to take in the state if you were to poll it. But he explained it, and he had some credibility.
And so not only does he win the election the first time, the second time he wins by an even more resounding victory against a kind of hand-picked candidate of Mitch McConnell’s, who’d been groomed for leadership for many years. He wins easily in the state that’s very difficult for Democrats to win in. So again, he’s not a democratic socialist, but I do think that his example proves the point of some of what we’re talking about in terms of approach to politics.
Another thing I’ll say about Andy—I lived in Kentucky, and I say with affection that he’s not a charismatic politician. He’s just not. I don’t think he’d be in politics if he didn’t come from a family of politicians. He does not have a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama level of touch and charisma and eloquence or whatever. He’s just kind of comes off as like a regular dude who’s trying to figure it out. And so it’s not like he’s tapping into some magical oratory gifts, either. He’s just taking a very straightforward approach, and it has worked in a difficult state.
Robinson
Yes, this is also what happened in Mexico. AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador), the former Mexican president, had the same thing where he went out every morning and had these press conferences every single day speaking to people and focused on delivering. And this is what irritated me about people like Matt Yglesias saying, the election could just be explained by the fact that incumbent parties are losing everywhere because of inflation. And 10 feet away, over the other side of the wall, that didn’t happen.
Ball
We have a different example, yes.
Robinson
So maybe it depends on what you do in response to those conditions.
Ball
Yes, Mexico had higher inflation than we did here. Actually, our inflation, while it was a huge problem that continues to be a major source of pain for many people, was much lower than most places in the world. And yet, because AMLO instituted minimum wage increases that exceeded the level of inflation, many Mexicans were lifted out of poverty. And so there was really direct delivering on material well-being. And then also, stylistically, he has a little bit of Trumpian bombast in him. He’s likes to pick fights with people. He fights with a billionaire and goes back and forth in this very sort of theatrical way. Again, I don’t think we can ignore the style. The substance is obviously what’s most important, but the style matters, too, in the way that you engage with these things and your willingness to have those fights and not come off as fearful in the face of challenges or attacks.
Robinson
I want to ask you about the way that you think about constructive engagement with the other side. Because, as people have heard, you describe Trump in very extreme terms. You think that the word “fascist” is plausible. And you’re obviously a deeply committed leftist, but at the same time, you share the kind of Bernie thing that the way you talk to the voters on the other side has to be without condescension or disdain. And there is this attitude that prevails among a lot of Democratic elites, which is most infamously captured in Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, or the people who said that Bernie shouldn’t have gone on Joe Rogan because Rogan is just such a horrible person that you can’t even speak to him—this kind of attitude. In your book, you talk about when you were running for Congress. You got hate emails from people. You got someone who was very nasty to you, and you responded very politely, engaged with them, and then all of a sudden, it turns out that person becomes a volunteer in your campaign. So tell us a little bit more about how you think about that. And obviously, you have, for many years now, co-hosted a program with someone who profoundly disagrees with you politically.
Ball
Yes, and we are not afraid to air those disagreements, as anyone who has watched the show knows. I guess on a fundamental level—I don’t know if it’s the right electoral calculus, I suspect it is, but I just don’t believe in treating people with contempt. I think people have a lot of different roads that they walk to get to the place that they are. I think most people are just trying to do their best. My experience of humanity, on a person-to-person level, is honestly very positive, even as I see so much ugliness, evil, and destruction in the world. I might have written about this in the book—you might be the only person who actually read it after I published it outside of like—
Robinson
Everyone should read it. It’s so prescient.
Ball
But one of the things I think I wrote about is that when I moved to Kentucky, this very red state, the way that a lot of Democratic elites talked about people in Kentucky was one of the things that really radicalized me, that shook me out of my just “Democrats are amazing and the good guys” kind of mentality. It’s really this attitude of, well, those people voted the wrong way, so basically, screw them—they deserve what they get. And Lord, have we seen that in the wake of this election, too. You’ve seen many prominent voices on Twitter who are like, well, enjoy when your mixed status family gets deported. Or that person who targeted Mehdi Hasan directly and was like, enjoy it when Trump comes for you. And wow, this was right there under the surface, this level of sadistic contempt for people who you disagree with politically. And so on a moral level, I think it’s no way to live and treat your fellow human beings. And I suspect that, on an electoral level, it’s probably not the way to go, either, to treat people with contempt.
Now, for people who have power, I think you have to have no-holds-barred, unvarnished truth about what they’re doing, what the effect will be, what their motivations are, etc. There’s a genre of YouTube content that’s like, let me find the dumbest possible Trump supporter, let me put them on blast, let me call them this and that. Okay, but what is this really accomplishing? This person doesn’t have any power, they’re not the cause of your concern. They’re not the reason that the country is the way that it is, ultimately.
Robinson
Some of the stereotypes about elites do seem to be true. You have this great quote in your book from one of your friends who worked in television, who you keep anonymous, who said to you,
”Can I tweet out I’m embarrassed to say I know more about Paris than I do about rural America?”
And you’re like, don’t tweet that. Don’t tell people that. And you say that when you were at MSNBC, I think three out of the four co-hosts were from Massachusetts, and you’re like, okay, the out of touch thing, that’s real. That’s a thing.
Ball
Yes, that was very interesting for me working at MSNBC. I’m from a small town in Virginia. Actually, I still live in that small town. I went to public schools. I went to Clemson University, then University of Virginia—UVA is a good school, but it’s a public university. This was really my first true immersion experience with this kind of elite atmosphere. And so it was eye-opening to me in a lot of ways, and some of the assumptions that were endemic there and were just taken for granted were pretty interesting. So at the time, there was a big debate about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was fraught within the Democratic Party. Obviously, Trump ended up using this issue of bad trade deals to great effect. It became a central issue in the 2016 campaign. And I remember, when I brought up to producers that we should talk about this—I want to cover this—there was a hand wave dismissal of, oh, people don’t really care about that.
Robinson
Wow.
Ball
It wasn’t based on anything. It was just, well, I don’t care about it, and nobody I know cares about it; ergo, it probably won’t rate and nobody really cares about it. Obviously, that turned out to be dramatically untrue. It’s like the water that you swim and don’t even realize it. It’s not a concern that ranks for me and my social circles, so I’m just going to transpose that on the rest of the country and just assume that’s the case as well. And as media becomes more consolidated, I think it has only become more and more of an issue. You have very little in the way of local journalism, with many fewer people coming up from different backgrounds. So there is a real class bias that has infected all the media institutions.
And yet, I’m also very much less pollyannish, I guess, about the potential of independent media. I think the potential is still there, but so much of what has happened in the independent media space just mirrors a lot of the worst impulses and incentives, sometimes amplifies the worst incentives, of the mainstream media space. Without having some really clear-cut ethical lines and boundaries, a lot of these outlets just end up replicating the worst of mainstream lies, abuses, propaganda, etc.
Robinson
Tell me more what you mean about that because I did want to ask you about independent media. If you had been someone who was willing to have the opinions necessary to thrive in corporate media, I’m sure you could have had a long and flourishing career in it. But you chose not to. You’ve chosen to build an independent media institution which has been successful, Breaking Points. You really built an institution, which is very cool. So tell us a little bit more about what you think independent media needs and this problem that you’re identifying, that just because it’s independent doesn’t actually mean it’s better.
Ball
Well, and it doesn’t actually mean that it’s independent. I need to stop calling it that. Just because something is on YouTube or not on cable news doesn’t mean that it’s truly independent. So I’ll start with the way we set up Breaking Points to try to create a different set of incentives. We’re human beings, we’re imperfect, and we recognize all of our flaws, etc. And so, we have a rule: we are not going to read ads, and we are not going to talk to any corporate advertiser. Period, end of story. And so that way, there cannot even be a question that what we’re putting on the air has been influenced by some bank or from some like—
Robinson
Crypto.
Ball
Right, crypto, or some gold scam, or Big Pharma, or whatever it is. I don’t even want to question about that. And of course, it’s not just a question. When you are taking a significant amount of money from these interests, whether you know it or not, it’s going to influence you. So there’s that. There are some who have made a similar choice, but very few creators do.
And then there’s also the problems of audience capture. When you’re on cable news, first of all, even regarding the advertising piece, there is an arm’s length distance between you and the people who are selling the ads. So if you’re the anchor who’s on air, you don’t know that it’s a pharma commercial coming up next or whatever. You actually do have a little more distance from it than people who are in independent media who make the choice to read the ads in the first place. You’re literally reading the ad. Okay, so there’s that, but there’s also a little bit more of an arm’s length distance from the audience as well. Whereas, obviously, when you have this direct connection, this can be a double-edged sword. It can be good to have that direct connect with your audience and really have that sort of parasocial relationship, and really be in touch with what they’re thinking and feeling, etc. But you also see too many creators who fall prey to just trying to tell the audience what it wants to hear all the time, and it becomes very stale and predictable. It doesn’t lead to a good place in terms of content or edification, etc. So that’s a danger as well.
And the same dangers of wanting access and wanting to be part of the powerful circles, that exists in alternative media spaces as well. How embarrassing were every one of the Trump interviews that were conducted on independent media? They were all uniformly embarrassing, and I would rather have had George Stephanopoulos or Anderson Cooper, or whatever your most cringe mainstream figure is, conducting those interviews. They would have done a better job, and we would have gotten more out of it. Kamala Harris did less of those types of interviews, but the ones on that side were equally embarrassing.
Robinson
That’s right.
Ball
The Call Her Daddy interview also was totally embarrassing, just like a propaganda puff piece. And the other thing is that it’s no accident that our shows don’t get a lot of these interviews, or other spaces, where they feel like they would get difficult questions. They just opt out of those. So all the incentives are: “I’m just not going to criticize my God King Trump” or “my Lord and Savior Kamala Harris” or whoever, if you are that person who wants to be able to be in those circles and be in the mix and get invited to parties and have the access, etc. So it’s a lot of the same bad incentives.
Robinson
It’s true. Because when you’re independent, and say they come down with a big interview offer, it might be hard to—I think Roland Martin got something like $350,000 from the Harris campaign and then did a sit down interview with her.
Ball
I learned about that today, and my jaw dropped. That is crazy.
Robinson
And I don’t want to cause you to speak ill of specific people, but I can. There’s this guy, Brian Tyler Cohen, a progressive commentator. I like a lot of his commentary, but he gets really high up people in the Democratic Party because the interviews aren’t adversarial, and if they became really adversarial, those interviews would stop. And those interviews get a lot of views because they’re big people, and you can get big people if you’re really nice to them and flatter them. Then you can build your independent channel. So, as you say, you got to be careful. Just because you’re independent, you could be like Russell Brand, conspiracy of the week.
Ball
Well, I think he is one of those people who became very audience captured and just wanted to chase the clicks. And then, obviously, he got very credibly accused of rape and suddenly went through this whole performative conversion to Christianity as well. So there’s a lot to say about him that we’ll just put to the side. But you’re exactly right. And I think I would like for more politicians to learn the lesson of Ro Khanna, who would tell them, hey guys, I go on these channels, I get asked tough questions, we mix it up. If it was a one-off, people might just not like him if we were adversarial with him, and that’s that. But because he comes back consistently—I’ll tell you, our audience is ideologically diverse. There are plenty of people in our audience who are more Saagar than they are me, and that’s fine and good. The whole audience really respects Ro, even when they disagree with him, because he’s willing to come on and fight for his position and make the case. And it does speak more broadly to some of the failures of the Democratic Party, that they’re so scared of their own shadow. But I can say on the Republican side, so many of their creators are just shameless hacks and shills that they all know they can go on and just get a tongue bath, whatever creator they need to pick.
Robinson
I don’t know if people have noticed this about your show, but your audience disagrees with you, and that’s a good thing. Your comment section is not uniformly people who agree with you, and that’s a rare and special thing.
Ball
Our comment section can be kind of unpredictable. I mostly just don’t look.
Robinson
I think that what you’re doing at Breaking Points is so important. As I mentioned, the book that you wrote in 2017 is very prescient. People should go back and read it. And you quote in there something that you said in February 2014, so 10 years ago. Over 10 years ago, you said,
“We’re in a moment of existential crisis as a country. As we recover slowly from the Great Recession, we’ve discovered that we don’t much like what we see. Only 28 percent of Americans say the country is headed in the right direction. Some 67 percent are dissatisfied with the wealth distribution in the country. As corporate profits soar to new heights, working folks get the shaft, sharing in virtually none of the gains of the recovery. We have two economies, one for a thin slice of educated elite, and one for everyone else. This is the moment we’re in.”
And then you said, in 2014,
“So I ask you, does Hillary Clinton sound to you like the right person for this moment?“
There’s got to be a certain frustration to have gone through the last 10 years having said that, having perceived it clearly, and then having David Brooks say in 2024, there’s an awful lot of inequality in this country.
Ball
Yes. It doesn’t feel good to be proven right. I would like to have been proven wrong, I guess is what I would say.
Robinson
No, it doesn’t feel good.
Ball
And I just hope it’s not too late. I hope there’s a possibility for change, and I hope it’s not too late. And that’s, I think, where the fight is right now. That’s my personal view of the work to be done right now, outside, of course, of labor organizing, which is always the bedrock of left movements. But I think there’s an opportunity to try to turn back some of the Bernie-to-Trumpers. That was a group that I was a little bit skeptical existed, but there’s definitely was a Bernie to Trump pipeline. People were just disgusted with the system and wanted something different and had been bought in by the false siren song of Trumpism. Seeing what is inevitably going to be ugliness, failures, and just absolute, overt oligarchy that we’re witnessing already with the incoming Trump administration, I think there’s a chance to pull some of those people back. And I hope that’s an opportunity that Breaking Points can be part of. I don’t want to overstate our role, but that’s part of my goals there.
I do think there’s an opening for liberals who were previously skeptical of a left populist project to radicalize and awaken to a new understanding. And listen, the economic precarity has really moved up the income ladder. So even a lot of college-educated people very much feel that level of economic precarity. So there’s a level of class solidarity that could be possible, even with people who were liberal Morning Joe MSNBC watchers. And so I think that’s also a really important project at this moment. I think you are a really important part of that as well.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.
