What Democrats Should Take from No Kings Protests

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Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today on the show, we're going to be talking about a series of protests that took place across the country

this weekend-the No Kings protests.

So, we'll be talking about kind of what that means, the game theory of it, the broader implications, whether we think this is a good strategy, all sorts of risky business-y takes on the protests,

including why I'm scared of crowds.

But before we get into all of that, Nate, there was some news over the weekend that the Louvre was robbed.

And within seven minutes, a team of robbers was able to get into the second floor window and steal some priceless jewelry.

They got in.

They got out.

By the way, this was 9.30 in the morning, right?

Like this wasn't late at night.

Just completely brazen daytime robbery.

9.30?

Why would you?

I think people are accepting it then, right?

Yeah, it's a nice.

I mean, the French, with the French.

I mean, they're barely even woke up.

They're having their third cup of coffee and their fifth cigarette, right?

So they're just getting started.

I mean, yeah, I think 9.30 a.m.

They are still getting started.

And yeah, the robbers, they took a truck-mounted ladder and then they gained access to the second floor, which was the Apollo gallery.

And so they were able to get some of the French crown jewels that dated back to Napoleon.

And eight of nine items remain unaccounted for.

They dropped one,

which was really weird.

They dropped a crown.

I was like, wait, you know, how do you did it break?

I don't think so.

I was like, how do you drop it?

Like, was your tote bag wrong?

Like, what, did something rip?

Like, were you using plastic bags?

Like, what's going on here?

Are they going to sell these on eBay?

Where are they going to sell them?

I have no idea.

Oh, apparently, actually, they dropped two items and not actually one item.

So, yeah, I have no idea.

What do you do with crown jewels?

I mean, I guess one of the things you can do is

take the jewels off, right?

Like somehow, like break it apart and from priceless relic, make it into just black market jewelry.

It seems like not very economical, right?

Like you have people seal jewels that are not crown jewels.

And like, like who would buy would like,

maybe Trump would buy it.

Yeah.

I don't know.

But yeah, the crown of Empress Eugenie

is the item that was identified.

The other one, we don't know.

By the way, that piece has 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds.

That's insane.

It was slightly damaged.

It was slightly damaged, but it didn't completely break.

Okay, also, like, what the hell, Louvre?

Like, their security, like, I think this is the museum with the most number of robberies, like, that...

over in the 20th and 21st century that i know of the mona lisa was stolen right like that should be the one thing that like you're really really guarding really well.

And they've had other break-ins throughout history of like, come on, French people, French security, like get your shit together.

What's going on?

They just do things in their own way.

I admire the French.

I admire the French.

I, I, listen, I admire the French.

I admire the robbers here.

And

I'm so sorry, tourists who, you know, were leaving your tour of the Mona Lisa to the last day.

You know, you were planning to go on a Sunday, you were really excited.

And then the museum ended up being closed because, you know, some royal jewels were stolen.

But this is, you know, talk about risky business.

That's, I think that your question, Nate, like, I laughed at it, but like, what in the world are you going to do with it?

It's a really pertinent question because this is a huge risk, right?

Like, you are actually, like, if you're getting, if you get caught, like, that's, seems like those consequences are going to be pretty dire.

So you probably need to have a really good plan in place for what you're going to do and how you're going to profit from this heist.

And a lot of people don't think that far ahead and don't realize that a lot of stolen artifacts are really hard to move.

So unless maybe they have a buyer already, like maybe there's like somewhere an Elon Musk type figure.

And I mean that in terms of like the amount of money that you have who is willing to pay, you know, millions and millions of dollars for these specific crown jewels.

If you, if you buy

stolen property, isn't that like some felony or misdemeanor at least?

Well, I don't know the rules in France, but yes, absolutely.

And we'll, we'll, uh, there will definitely be interpol on the case.

And yes, there's definitely, there are safeguards in place against buying them, but I'm assuming that the person who would purchase them would also do it completely, you know, off the grid.

Like some, they're on the blockchain, Maria, on the blockchain.

Yes, all right.

This, uh, this episode brought to you, this heist brought to you by Bitcoin.

On the blockchain.

But yeah, it's a, it is a hilarious,

I mean, not hilarious, but it is a funny bit of news.

And maybe, Nate, so we're recording this on Monday, October 20th.

Maybe by the time it airs on Wednesday, the thieves will have been caught.

And that will be like a huge win for French police.

But it took a long time for the Mona Lisa to be recovered when it was stolen.

And I'm from Boston.

I obviously remember like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, which was huge.

Those, none of those works of art have been recovered.

So it can take a really long time from moment of theft to actually recovering.

And that moment of time could be never.

So let's let's see what happens this time.

Dave, if you were going to rob a museum, purely hypothetically, what would you steal?

Like, is there an item in a museum somewhere that you're like, man, I'd really just want this at home?

No, because I would get caught.

I'll get caught.

I would go to like the little cafe where they have a jaded barista and take like, you know, whatever, 500 bucks.

Yeah, I wouldn't like, I wouldn't want to deprive

people

of the opportunity to see art.

I've always found it a little bit strange to have like a really valuable piece of art in your private collection.

And we collect, we collect art, like, but nothing super.

Yeah.

I totally, I totally agree with that.

And I hate, you know, I, I hate when there are people who buy some like truly beautiful painting and then refuse to loan it out.

And like, I understand their insurance considerations, et cetera, et cetera.

But come on, like, if the Guggenheims could lend out their entire collection, like you can, you can make it work.

And, you know, I totally get wanting to live with a beautiful piece of art in your home but you also like you can't protect it and take care of it the same way a museum can and i think that you there's a there's definitely a case to be made that sure you can have it but like lend it out let people see it um share the beauty right share the beauty with the world and by the way um talking about risk during the palisade fires um earlier this year some absolutely irreplaceable works of art were destroyed right because you could could be a billionaire with a gorgeous

Pacific highway house in Malibu or wherever,

and

your house goes up in flames.

And

that's it.

Unless you're the

Getty was fine though, right?

Yeah, the Getty was fine.

The Getty has an incredibly sophisticated anti-fire protection system, but most normal houses do not.

So some works of art were really

gone forever now.

And that's a risk that you take when you have something like that in your home.

Or in the Louvre, I guess the risk you take is that it's going to get stolen at some point.

So yeah, no, I actually, I agree with that.

I don't think I wouldn't steal anything either

because I really do think that these art is to be shared, right?

Art is something that makes us all uniquely human and it's such a beautiful thing for all of us to share in in common.

If I'm going to do some high-risk crimes, I can think of a lot more fun,

possibly be high-risk crimes, Maria.

I totally

absolutely.

Like what, Nate, hypothetically speaking?

We'll take this.

We'll take this off the podcast.

More

for our Pushkin Plus subscribers.

What would

crime?

Yeah.

So

our would-be criminal spree, Nate, is short-lived because we've decided that we're not going to steal anything from the art museum, but we will retain the optionality of doing something that's going to be lower risk and higher reward.

On that note, let's talk about the No Kings protests that happened over the weekend.

Nate, did you participate?

No.

A, it's not my vibe, although I'm sympathetic to the angel protesters.

And B,

in certain ways, I do take myself seriously as a journalist.

And I think if I went, it would be appropriate to cover them at more arm's length and not to participate.

But, you know, we can talk about that or not.

Did you, Maria?

I did not

for various reasons, but the biggest one of which is I can't deal with crowds.

Like I hate events where they're, no, I really can't.

Like I get really claustrophobic and really anxious.

And I know.

I mean, look, you or we both, we both live

in New York City and Las Vegas, which are maybe, I mean, not in the words.

No, but there's a very different, so there's, so there's a very different mentality when you're in a huge crowd of people protesting versus like, you know, on a commute.

And just to, just to like give you an example.

So this Saturday, which is when the protests were happening,

I went to...

Grand Central, where I never go.

I hate Grand Central.

But I went because really?

Yeah.

Grand Central is nice.

It's beautiful.

You compare to fucking 10?

But I just, oh, I don't like any of the, like, I don't like going to train stations.

Like, and if I go there, it's for travel.

But like, Grand Central, I never have to use.

Like, for whatever reason, you know, I never travel out of Grand Central.

Anyway, so I went there specifically to see the Dear New York exhibition from Humans of New York that was closing this weekend.

It was two weeks during which Grand Central, all of the advertising was taken off and it was completely taken over by the Humans of New York photography.

And they also had a Steinway piano, which was donated that was in the middle of the hall and they had Juilliard musicians play during the day and some other cameos.

Anyway, so this was a big thing and I really wanted to see it.

And I ended up leaving very quickly because going the day before it closed was not a good idea.

And it was so ridiculously crowded.

And there were so many people that I couldn't appreciate the photography and the art and all of these things because not only could I not see anything, but I was being jostled from every every single side.

And I was like, you know what?

It's, it's not, I'm getting out of here.

Like I actually started feeling, you know, this sense of claustrophobia and anxiety.

So I don't do well in situations where there are too many people near me.

I hate crowded subways, Nate.

Whenever I see one that's too crowded and I have to get on, I'm like, oh man,

I suddenly envision the worst case scenario, which is that we get stuck, right?

That we get stuck in between stations.

And I'm on this ridiculously crowded subway car.

And I have.

Did something happen in childhood or like I don't know.

I just really, I have no idea.

I just really do not like crowds.

It's something that like I get very anxious over.

So no, I did not go to that protest and I'm not a protest person.

But but

the underlying question was kind of

was there for a reason, which is that if we if we think about protests in a broader sense, there's a very strong kind of game theoretic reason why protests are powerful.

And that has nothing to do with like, oh, you're in a crowd, but everything to do with signaling, right?

So a protest, there's, I didn't not go because I don't think it's not worth it.

I didn't go because just personally, I, like I said, I hate crowds, but I do think it's worth it for the simple reason that there's coordination issues and kind of there's power in sending a very strong signal that people can then look at to say, oh, I'm not the only one who feels this way.

There are lots of people who feel this way.

And now I know, right, now that I know that there is all of this support out there for something that I believe.

that is not always visible because when you're online kind of in, you know, Twitter or whatever it is, you see a very specific subset of opinions.

You're in a very specific bubble.

But protests throughout history,

when people go out in public, it's a signaling mechanism, right?

And it's then a coordination mechanism where you can actually point to it and say, okay, look, here's a group of people who hold certain views.

And that can be incredibly powerful for future momentum and future decision-making.

By the way, it's even more powerful when we're talking about truly

authoritarian regimes, countries where there's very little communication between people.

We're not there yet in the United States, but it's powerful even in a democratic society.

Yeah, look,

these processes had a very large scale.

They happened in hundreds of cities.

I'm always a little bit skeptical of crowd size estimates, which tend to be overestimates, but several million.

I think it's safe to say, which ranks it quite high on the list of like all-time one-day protests, at least.

I mean, look,

as you get a larger size of

crowd, then these things tend to become a little bit more amorphous, right?

And you can see various critiques like,

okay, maybe the protests are a little bit cringe.

And considering who we're dealing with, right?

We're dealing with like kind of like mostly boomery good government Democrat types.

Yeah, they're a little cringe, right?

And like,

the message just you can critique, I mean, you know, does no kings quite make sense and i'm not sure the idea is trump is a king so much as a authoritarian those aren't quite the same thing exactly but um

it kind of doesn't matter because like what you're trying to do is a demonstrate that like you know yes we don't have elections all that often and yes last time we had an election trump won narrowly um

but there are a lot of us, number one.

You know, it can serve as a reminder to like the media and things like that.

I mean, Trump is not that popular in the polls.

He's not popular in the polls.

He's not that unpopular either, right?

But like, you know, these things can be

a spectacle in part and attract attention.

That is, if anything, like a little bit outsize relative to

the number of people participating, right?

Because they're physical.

They're outside.

They're in some cases, these seem to be rather gentle-minded, but they can be like, confrontational, right?

If you looked at the number of

students, other people participating in the pro-Palestinian protests over the past year and a half, those are not, I'm being honest, those are not particularly large protests if you look at the numbers for that.

It's not like no kings or something like that, right?

However, they still got a ton of media coverage, shifted the narrative.

I'm not sure whether they shifted the narrative in the direction the protesters wanted, but they have a big effect.

potentially.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And I do think that

the narrative is also something that's quite important.

So I mentioned before kind of the signaling mechanism, which is on an individual level, I think, important to then coordinate action further down the line.

But also

framing the narrative is,

especially in the modern age, something that is

really important in

an attentionally divided economy, right?

It's not in the past where everyone watched one single TV show, right?

Or one single news channel and there was kind of this collective

knowledge of like, oh, these are the things that are in the news, et cetera, et cetera.

These days, it's very fragmented, right?

There's a very fragmented media landscape and so many different things are vying for our attention on any given basis.

And the Trump administration has shown itself to be much better than a lot of Democratic operatives, to be perfectly honest, at capturing attention and creating a narrative, right?

And creating something that makes it feel like it's this inevitable all-American force.

And something like the No Kings protest is a really interesting moment that can potentially shape the narrative of, wait, you know, we have protesters in the heart of red Texas and all of these different areas, and they've all come out and they're all coordinated, and it's a pretty significant number of people.

And so, it's a, I think it's a way of creating a counter-narrative to a lot of what we see online.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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This might lead us, Nate, to kind of a broader consideration of, you know, what matters, right, when you're trying to kind of craft this, craft a narrative that actually changes minds and changes action because one of the critiques one can have of things like protest is, well, you're not actually doing anything, right?

You're not voting.

You're not lobbying.

You're not changing legislation.

You're not reaching out to your congresspeople.

Like you're not doing anything like that.

But on the other hand, you're doing something because you're sending a signal to the government, you know, that these are the things that matter here where people who feel this way live, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So

let me just stop there and get your thoughts on this and on kind of your thought, your thoughts more broadly, kind of about

the effectiveness of certain tactics versus other when you're trying to shape a narrative that with the ultimate goal because presumably this is the ultimate goal of change right of actually affecting real change in the government and government policies and in what happens in the country going forward yeah look i mean compared to other things i'd say protesting is relatively effective i mean like i you know protesting is higher effort than voting and

voting is famously questionably rational i suppose If you live in a state like New York, you have your vote in Nevada, but like in general, New York, you're

voting kind of as a

symbolic act, as a civic act, as a protest almost, and not necessarily as like, I'm going to actually influence the election result, right?

Yeah, look, part of it is, I don't think the people that kind of talk about like setting the narrative very often

are very good about setting the narrative.

Yeah.

I think that's very true.

And, you know, I critique the Democrats' strategy on the shutdown, right?

Because, like, um,

it's like

it's like too narrow, and like, it's not, you know, I don't know, right?

And it's like, you have to focus on healthcare, right?

But their mention is not about healthcare.

If you look at like Google searches for healthcare, people are not particularly focused on that.

It's not what they're, I mean, they care about healthcare.

It's like not what their heart is into.

So have this kind of like

amorphous

outpouring of

peaceful anti-Trump sentiment that's kind of more not normie.

I'm sure the people there are watching what they miss NBC and reading a lot of substacks, right?

But like, but to have this kind of more normy

vibe, I think is

worthwhile, right?

And, you know, it's probably more effective than the shutdown, which again, I don't think it's accomplished anything for Democrats very much at all.

You know, so I do not think,

you know, people in blue sky can quote me on this.

I do not think that we are on like

the doorstep

to authoritarianism.

I think, I think America has,

I think it's the oversimplification, right?

I think America has a lot of robust checks and balances, which are being substantially frayed.

I think we might be in like the anti-room

before the doorstep, though, right?

Yep.

And if there are actions such as like

trump trying to make it difficult for people to vote in 2026 or 2028 for example right i mean you can imagine open defiance to leave the white house after his term is over open defiance of a supreme court order you know one thing that i'll hear from is you'll see you'll hear kind of democratic activists types kind of say like look um i realize that if you're kind of like leading your life then things might seem pretty normal unless you're an immigrant or unless you're,

you know, a student, unless there's other certain categories.

And like in some sense,

in some sense, Trump has been smart about that, right?

Like

he's been smart about like the world doesn't feel like it's in chaos if you live in New York, right?

And I even think that like,

you know, there are things like the ICE raids and National Guard deployments in different cities and things like that, right?

And if you're very politically aware, these will seem awful, right?

But like,

but I don't think they're that noticeable for ordinary people either, right?

Like I was in Chicago for a talk the,

you know, the weekend there were a bunch of ICE actions there on the south side of Chicago.

And like I actually had a bunch of like.

political conversations there.

I mean, I had friends there who were interested in politics and I gave a talk where we talked about politics and stuff like that.

And like, it didn't really come up, right?

Not because the way they think about politics are unaware of it, but because because like you know i think there's this gap between um the way that political insiders and political message crafters people who are very online experience politics and the way that ordinary people do i mean talking about a protest that has mass numbers millions millions um you're bridging that gap like a little bit right um because you know what percent of people watch

msnbc fox news cnn it's like one percent of the country like watches them on a given day.

It's like quite small.

You know what I mean?

Is that right?

Yeah, it's really small.

And if anything, probably, you know, political surveys are biased people who participate.

Right.

And so, yeah, like,

you know, the number of MSNBC viewers in the demo is in like the low to mid-six digits, usually, meaning 18 to 49, or however they define that, right?

You get a lot of older people who are just kind of watching TV and maybe not doing that much else.

But yeah, people kind of miss these scale things.

And like, and the number one problem that like political strategists, most political strategists have is like, they

think exactly the opposite from how, from how the normies do.

Right.

And, you know, a more

narrow protest, right?

Like,

you know, I would take, again,

the Gaza protests as something that have like relatively clear

goals.

right and they spin out new things and there's messaging that might be dumb and whatever else right but like you know on a university we want the university to invest these investments and change this policy and this and that right um

you know and those are pretty narrowly targeted protests but smaller in scale this is amorphous i mean things like

occupy wall street which was not particularly large protests right but like um where the tea party is an example on the republican conservative side a little bit more right those are a little bit amorphous um

and amorphousness can be good because like

you want different people to be able to interpret it in different ways.

And

the overall sentiment is clear enough.

Trump bad, but we're going back to our charity rule

or monarchical rule.

I'll give them

a pass on the imprecise metaphor.

What do you think is more effective, having a protest that has very clear stated goals or ones that are expressing these broader sentiments?

Because I don't know what your perception of Occupy Wall Street's ultimate effectiveness was.

Mine was that not much ended up changing.

It was also, Occupy Wall Street, by the way, was on a much smaller scale than what we're talking about with no kings.

But what's your sense of like, if you were trying to be like, okay, you know, I want people

to

be aware of all of these, I want to draw attention to all of these excesses happening that people might not be aware of unless they're very like politically tied in.

I want them to be aware of tipping points in kind of the legal structure, et cetera, et cetera, that some of these checks are,

yes, so far democracy is holding.

We do have robust checks and balances, but we are in the ante-room, as you said, as you phrased it.

And some of these things are really...

being strained and a lot of people don't seem to be aware of that.

Like if you were organizing a protest, would it look like the no-kings protest broadly speaking broadly speaking like let's as you say you know let's ignore the semantics like would it be kind of more amorphous like general sentiment like please work with us legislators and like let's try to figure out a strategy to counter this or would you say you know what before we do this protest like let's

think of three big goals and like have everyone have posters with those, you know, with those goals, et cetera, et cetera, and like actually try to do something that is more targeted, but still broad um i don't know that i have a clear answer to that so i'm curious whether you do yeah look i don't know if i'm the expert on protests here by the way i think occupy wall street punched somewhat above its weight like it kind of introduced or at least popularized the phrase we're the 99 and the one percent and like that's true that's me that's a good thing that transmits for many years 14 years later whatever it is is pretty powerful potentially yeah look it's so funny i totally forgot that that came from occupy wall street yeah you're right um

look

I think you have different issues here.

One is that although Trump is unpopular, he's not enormously unpopular.

He won election twice, including just, you know, not quite a year ago.

And the critiques of him are kind of

disparate, right?

People don't like, you know, some people are concerned about the economy, which I think might be a more appropriate subject for focus in part because like it is noticeable day to day a little bit more.

People are concerned about immigration or authoritarianism.

There are long-standing concerns about about climate change and

whatever else.

People think he's

racist, xenophobic, sexist.

People think he's corrupt.

I'm not unendorsing any of these ideas, by the way, right?

But like Trump has always given people so many, such a large attack surface to term is different ways in that, like, it actually kind of renders itself sort of ineffective, right?

And so, like, on the one hand,

it might seem like the way to

attack that is to focus on one particular avenue, right?

However, A, is that the right avenue?

And B, like, I think Tyrant Tutley, that might, that might work less well, right?

Because like,

number one, again,

all the total anti-Trump Democratic energy, they're trying to make a shutdown about healthcare.

If you read the newsletters, read the subsex, liberal subsex or.

blue sky, whatever else, right?

Maybe one or two percent of the messages are about healthcare from like not the actual base, but like the activist online part of the base, right and so like you know you're kind of losing people there a little bit number two trump is very very good at like changing the subject or redirecting attention right so if he ever has a weakness he's like it's so the metaphor of like Trump being a ship that you have different conduits to attack right like it doesn't quite work because it can fight back in different ways right yeah um

so you know yeah maybe having this kind of like more

amorphous kind of gathering of energy you know what i don't know of

having i've been to the protests right um you know the most important thing is probably are you gathering

lists of people who can become politically organized in

in different ways and importantly for me you know

Can you have these lists that are outside the offices of the kind of capital D Democratic Party, right?

I think the Democratic Party is often healthy at like a local and state level.

But like I, too, for its approximation, think that like

every person in a position of power in the Democratic Party should be fired, right?

Like I think the party has lost.

No, I mean, seriously, like the Democratic Party has like lost, like, you know, it lost an election to Trump twice, right?

It just thought re-nominating Joe Biden was a good idea.

All the leaders are too fucking all.

Like anybody over the age of

50 in a leadership position.

Let's let's have a generational goodbye, right?

Anybody over the the age of PFP, the Democratic Party, I think, should

I think you know, Democrats goals would be better off if those people were,

you know, replaced.

Do you want to take a couple of mulligans who are exceptional, right?

But, like, you know, so to have, like, you know, so yeah, I'm not so sure that it's so far from what I endorse.

Again, the vibe is not mine.

It feels a little cringe to me, but like, the cringe is okay.

Cringe happens when you have mass support for something, right?

It's inherently a little cringe.

If you go to like a NFL game, the NFL is the most popular sport.

Hey, look at it's a little bit cringe.

I love football, right?

They're a little bit cringe.

Parades are fucking cringe as fuck, right?

Holidays are cringe.

I mean, all these things that are really popular are like, you know, if you still watch American Idol, American Idol is cringe.

Like, popular things are cringe for you.

Oh man, don't get me started on parades.

I used to live right next to the Halloween parade in New York.

You've had a dinner reservation canceled because of the Halloween.

That's what happened.

So I had lived in the West Village for my whole, like my, all of my New York existence.

You know, that's where I moved when I just moved from

Boston and just loved the area and stayed there.

And so every single year I saw, you know,

the havoc that happened with the with the Halloween parade

and knew that like basically on Halloween, I had to just stay in my apartment and like don't do anything that crosses 7th Avenue.

And then one day

decided I saw like there was a restaurant I really wanted to go to and like finally saw a reservation pop up and I was like, yay, and took it.

And of course the reservation popped up because it was on the other side of 7th Avenue.

You checked the Berlin Wall for a day.

It really, if you haven't experienced it, it's very hard to like

your way.

But go up to like a rooftop and like find ways to escape and their guests.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's horrifying.

And we'll be back right after this.

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You know, it's interesting to talk about this and to talk about like the importance of general lives.

Because if you and I, when you and I talked about, you know, the best way to organize a little less than a year ago, Nate, and we were talking about, you know, what's what can Democrats do?

We

decided collectively that they needed to focus on a few issues.

And when we were talking about how do they win, right, before Trump got elected, we were saying, okay, you know, your messaging should be focused on a few issues where you can actually get votes where people are passionate about this because the Trump campaign was much more effective at that.

And we were saying, you know.

I remember you talking about immigration and saying, hey, Democrats, like immigration's not your issue.

Like, stop talking about that.

Instead, like, let's try to focus on things that, like healthcare, right, that could actually be much more effective.

Then we were talking, you know, with the shutdown, et cetera, that we should really be focusing on like, let's focus on tariffs.

Like, let's do something focused when we're talking about inside the government and yet our advice for people kind of outside the government um seems to be to

have more of that vibe type of approach where you have as you say cringe but we don't have to call them cringe but when you have these large scale events that just show a general state of Malays displeasure and opens the opens the conversation up for policymakers to kind of act in different ways as opposed to like pinpointing one specific thing.

Yeah, no, that's the other thing.

It's like if you're a political operative, then ironically you have like often a very short-term time horizon, right?

You know, you have a job where you get up and go to the office at 8.30 every Monday.

Maybe it's a romanticization of it, right?

But like, but you know, you have particular goals you have for that day, that week, that news cycle, right?

And the media is the same way, right?

We have to, we have to, you know, some weeks, Maria, we have eight things we'd love to talk about, right?

Some weeks it's a little struggle, right?

Yeah.

But you kind of even that out and some things become talking point.

And so like, you know, yeah, it should be more long-term focus, right?

We still have more than a year until the midterm elections, even.

We have more than three years until the presidential election.

And so, yeah, you know, look.

The Democratic Party has always been that historically, they're kind of like this collection of different interest groups, right?

That Democrats Democrats were a collection of young people and union workers and people of color and college professors and like, you know, gay people and other people who are, you know,

ex-communists and like a whole motley crew of different types of folks that like don't necessarily have that much interest in common, but might be marginalizing

some ways, plus some kind of like 20-hit intellectuals, right?

You know, what the Democratic Party is now is a little bit less clear, right?

It's lost some support from every one of those groups except the pointy-headed intellectuals, basically, right?

It's lost support among Hispanic and Asian Americans.

It's also some support among Black Democrats.

It's also a lot of support among like working class union worker type of Democrats, right?

It's also supported by young people, particularly young men, right?

So,

you know, you still don't have a lot of people who have their

pet quote unquote issues with the environment or LGBTQ

plus rights or

healthcare or

economics or authority, right?

And like,

whenever you say, oh, let's focus on this one issue, well, the other groups feel really upset, right?

And they'll say, my issue is a matter of existential importance.

There's what's called special pleading, right?

It's like very hard to like have,

you know, who gets to pick and choose, what issues we prioritize.

And so like,

to have stuff be amorphous, I did, and project coaches like, ambiguity is okay.

You can be, yeah, the more ambiguous you are on your paper, the better.

I'm like, that seems kind of weird, right?

But I was pretty good at being optimizing for ambiguity.

I'm not surprised.

I'm not surprised.

But no, I actually think that you just made a really important point, which is that, you know, this also having a protest that's like the no-kings protest unites people, right?

As opposed to feel having people feel like they're left out, like this is not my protest.

This is everyone's protest.

This is like uniting on the absolute highest level issue.

We believe in our democracy and we want to preserve it.

Because if you think about kind of the psychology of in-groups and out groups, right?

We are very good at forming in groups and out groups based on anything, right?

Almost, almost immediately.

But we're also very good at unifying when you can actually kind of get a bigger issue that focuses on commonalities as opposed to divisions.

And so I think that something like a no-king's protest did a really good job.

of actually tapping into that element of psychology, right?

Of on a high level, like, let's put our differences aside, right?

Let's put aside whether, like, who we are and what to us is the existential issue and how we feel about, you know, all of these different people and all of these different policies.

And instead, let's focus on one thing.

Like, let's, we believe in America.

We believe in democracy.

We want to preserve this thing that the country was founded on.

And I think that's why the no kings, like,

even though not quite right, while symbolically, it actually helps kind of get to that unification.

It helps to harken back.

to a moment in history when America was united, right?

Where it didn't matter what political party you were.

It didn't matter.

Nothing mattered other than that we were fighting against the British and and we wanted to be free.

Yeah, look, I mean, this is a problem that you have in very online communities, maybe more the left than the right, currently for reasons I'll explain in a moment, but like the notion of online combat on Twitter, Blue Sky, Facebook, whatever, et cetera, right?

The notion of dunking on people, achieving kind of social superiority, right?

Talk of people competing for

hierarchy to tear down a hierarchy, to regain footing in the hierarchy themselves, right?

And by definition, it's kind of, it's kind of exclusionary, right?

Republicans do lots of that too.

They are

fortunate enough to have this kind of, and again, I'm not a super lib, right?

I'm going to say this in a way that I believe is like a correct arm's length critique, but like there is a substantial like personality cult around Trump that helps keep Republicans united with all types of long-term consequences and consequences to the country, right?

But like Democrats have no equivalent of, right?

So

they're both exclusionary, at least you look kind of like the blue sky types and

leaderless.

And that's a really bad combination.

You know what I mean?

It's like, we have a good idea, but we don't want you, you don't want you participating unless you agree with us on all these issues, right?

So the breadth and inclusivity is

very important.

Yeah, I think that that's a key issue that Democrats have been ignoring for too long and that they really, really need to focus on, which is that it's okay, right?

Shades of gray are okay, and we want to include you, even if you don't check all of these boxes for kind of what the perfect liberal mind thinks on all of these issues, you know, what's in vogue on all of these things.

I think that the Republicans have actually been much, much better at including people in the party and saying, Yeah, fine, like you don't believe in that, but like at least you believe in Trump, you believe in this, like come on in.

And I do think that the Democratic establishment has actually been very quick to,

I don't want to say like cancel, but to cancel their own, right?

To say, well, like, sure, you're, you're a Democrat, but you said something I don't like about this issue.

And so, or to dismiss whole groups of voter, you know, Hillary Clinton made the

infamous, like, deplorable comment in 2016, I guess it was, which is saying, like, you know, half of

not all voters, half of Trump voters are irredeemable, racist, misogynist, et cetera, and half are redeemable and a little bit misguided, right?

Which I think is actually probably

might be about right as a kind of empirical statement, right?

It's a piece of political analysis.

But like as a

politician.

Yeah.

And like, and the fact is that like, you never know where you find like, this is a big kind of,

you know, people mistake like the group tendency with the marginal.

Yeah.

In any group, sure.

And I've tried to mathematically model this and like, but i won't get into the details now in any group there are always marginal voters right you know the fact that trump would like go to the bronx and say i'm going to do a rally among the black community in the south bronx and if you look at the details and a lot of people are not black and or not from the south bronx or the bronx at all right but like the fact that he's saying i would like to have your vote right like i don't think democrats do the same thing right

um

They don't go and say to an evangelical white church and say, you know what?

Here is rationale as well you might want to vote for Democrats, right?

Maybe Maybe you kind of implicitly do it.

And like people who are on the center left are regarded as enemies by the far left and often vice versa.

And so like, it's, it's, you know, getting out of that mentality is, is essential.

It's absolutely crucial.

And I think, you know, the No Kings protest is a really good step in that direction.

So yeah, the main kind of takeaways here are

like coordination is important and signaling is important and kind of understanding all of that from a game theory standpoint is important.

But also inclusivity is important and trying to frame things in broad terms where you can actually unite people and focus on uniting as opposed to dividing and nitpicking and like.

you know, saying, oh, well, you belong, but you really don't.

You're not our perfect archetype of who we want.

That it's really important to think in those types of terms.

And the third thing that we haven't talked about as much, but we have mentioned is like people just don't think long term.

Like, if I don't do something right now the Democratic Party is just going to implode like if I don't if I don't do this then these are the long-term consequences and you don't think well like if I don't speak out now then there might be nothing to speak out

nothing left to speak out for in a few years so I think that thinking more long-term and long-term strategy is very important I don't necessarily endorse Nate you know axing everyone over 50 50 seems awfully young but still

I you know I think that what you were, the spirit of that, that we do need kind of a little bit, we do need some young blood is fair because we do need to be thinking about the future.

And people who are 80 years old are not the future because they're going to be dead in the long term that we're talking about, absent the singularity.

And with that, maybe we can retreat from the ante-room to the foyer before the ante-room before the doorway to authoritarianism.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kanakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

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Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

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