May 21, 2025 • 12 mins
Between 1933 and 1981, there were 24 sessions of Congress. For 22 of those 24, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. During the same time there were 12 presidential terms. Eight were served by Democrats.
Now Democrats can lose, twice, to a party led by Donald Trump, whose campaigns have been natural experiments in just how bad a candidate can be and still beat the Democrats.
What happened?
They got caught in what Max Weber called the Iron Cage: stuck in their rationalistic heads, Democrats have become alienated from much of America.
Find the full transcript at dastardlycleverness.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in theService of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley.
This time (00:04):
Chapter 10 of The Liberal Backbone:
“The Iron Cage.” You can find the previous chapters
in previous episodes,or at dastardlycleverness.com,
on the Dastardly ClevernessYouTube channel, or at Substack:
just search therefor Spencer Critchley. And
as always,if you have any comments or suggestions,
(00:25):
I’d love to hear them. Here we go.
The crisis of liberalism is nowhere
more serious than on the liberal left.
As I write, public approvalof the Democratic Party stands, wobbling,
at 29 percent in one major polland 27 percent in another.
This may not be surprisingto young Americans,
(00:49):
who have never known a timewhen Democrats didn’t feel like underdogs.
And yet for almost 50 years,the Democratic Party dominated American
government. Between 1933 and 1981,
there were 24 sessions of Congress.
For 22 of those 24,
Democrats controlled both the Houseand the Senate.
(01:12):
During the same time there were 12presidential terms.
Eight were served by Democrats.
Now Democrats can lose, twice,to a party led by Donald Trump,
whose campaigns have been naturalexperiments in just how bad a candidate
can be and still beat theDemocrats. What happened?
(01:33):
The durable conventional wisdom has it
that the problem is policy: Democrats have moved too far left. (01:35):
undefined
Or no, they’ve moved too far right.
And Democratslove to argue over policy, to do
polls on policy, and designclever new policies.
But the fact is that most Democraticpolicies have always been popular
with most Americans, and pollsshow most still are, even now.
(02:00):
Most Americansjust don’t like Democrats any more.
And they’re telling Democratswhy, if Democrats can hear.
Just after the 2024election, Navigator Research organized
focus groups with voterswho had formerly voted Democratic
but either switched to Trump or didn’tvote at all.
(02:21):
For many, Kamala Harris representedwhat was wrong with the party.
This participant, quoted in Politicomagazine, spoke for many:
It seemed like a lot of what she came out
and said wasn’t really off-the-cuff,wasn’t coming from her.
Seemed like every interview, every timeshe came out and talked about something,
it was planned out and never her thoughts,didn’t seem genuine to her thoughts,
(02:46):
whereas, Trump, even though you neverreally knew what he was going to say,
when he was going to say it,it was always him and genuine
to what he thought,so that’s what swayed me.
Democrats,no matter how highly qualified they are,
as Harriswas, have come to exemplify alienation.
They’ve become strangersto much of America,
(03:08):
including much of their former blue collarand minority base.
Politics,now more than ever, depends on connection.
Trump,ostentatiously unqualified, connects.
A MAGA voter in Tennessee
summed it up for a New York Timesreporter in 2018:
I don’t reallylook at him as a politician.
(03:30):
Even now, I look at him as just one of us.
He doesn’t act like he’sabove you, as a person.
This blue collar
Tennessean was talkingabout a rich, scandal-ridden Manhattanite
who had recently been caughtexpressing his contempt for Southerners.
But as we’veall long since learned, the truth
about Trump doesn’t matter much.
(03:53):
One of the most iconic politicalcartoons of this
era was drawn by PaulNoth for The New Yorker.
It shows a flock of sheep grazingunder a campaign billboard for a wolf.
The headline is “I AM GOING TO EAT YOU.”
“He tells it like itis,” says one sheep to another.
It’s not
(04:14):
the message, it’s the way the messagefeels.
And Trump can make a message feel rightto his voters, no matter how wrong it
is.
Voters often talk about Trump’s
authenticity, and Democrats’ phoniness,even when Trump lies
flagrantly and Democratsbring stacks of facts.
Trump just feels more authentic.
(04:36):
People trust peoplethey connect with, who are “one of us.”
And this, by the way, is true of peopleon the left and the right; it’s
just that on the right it’scurrently on spectacular display.
Yale psychologist Daniel Kahan studies
a phenomenon called “identity-protectivecognition.” Even highly educated people
(04:59):
unconsciously warp reality to fitwhat their group believes about reality.
And despite the fond hopes of liberals,more information doesn’t help.
Kahan demonstrated the power
of identity-protective cognitionin a 2013 experiment.
Participants were sortedaccording to two characteristics:
(05:20):
their political viewsand their “numeracy,” or math skills.
Then each one was asked to interpret
data from a simulated scientific study.
Sometimes, the study would beabout the effectiveness of a new cream
in treating a skin condition.
Other times,it was about the effectiveness
of a new gun law in reducing crime.
(05:41):
Sometimes the numbers showed thatthe cream
or the gun law worked,other times that they didn’t.
Unsurprisingly,
highly numerate participantswere more likely to interpret the numbers
correctly —when they were about skin cream.
But if the same numbers were about the gunlaw, and the correct
interpretation would challengethe participants’ views on guns,
(06:04):
they were much more likelyto get the wrong answer.
They weren’t doing it deliberately.
Their political opinionshad changed their reasoning —
even though they were good at reasoning.
Is it any wonder that a candidate’s policy
can be this or that,or as so often with Trump, nothing?
Their voters will make it right,
(06:27):
as long as the candidate is “one of us.” In recent decades,
for too many Americans, Democraticcandidates have not felt like “one of us.”
They’ve felt like aliens. There have been exceptions:
masters of personal, emotional connection,like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
(06:47):
But the rule has been Michael Dukakis,Al Gore,
John Kerry,Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris.
All were eminently qualified,and none of us
who aren’t family or friendscan know what they were like in private.
But in public, they came acrossas alienated, like many Democrats do.
(07:08):
It’s not what they said.
It’s how they said it, and how they lookedand sounded while they said it.
It’s how they felt.
And as we saw with Alex Todorov’sexperiments with candidate photos,
people can decide how they feel about youbefore you say anything at all.
Much other research yieldssimilar results.
(07:29):
My experience does too.
One example among many: While working on campaigns for Obama (07:32):
undefined
and then Hillary,I shot thousands of photos of each.
They’re equally fine-looking people.
But going over all those frames,I discovered that it’s
hard to take a good picture of Hillary
and nearly impossibleto take a bad one of Obama.
(07:53):
The camera captures thingsthe conscious mind misses:
fleeting expressionsthat either do or don’t invite connection,
because they do or don’t express feelingslike warmth, ease, confidence, or humor.
Unconsciously,we’re like the camera, sensitive
to all those instantaneous images.
(08:13):
They create a strong impressionbefore someone says a word,
let alone makes a speech.
Obama and Bill Clintonare frequently described as “charismatic.”
The word echoesthe work of the influential
early sociologistMax Weber. Weber identified
three sources of political authority: traditional, charismatic, (08:31):
undefined
and rational-legal,otherwise known as bureaucratic.
Obama and Bill Clinton personifythe charismatic leader.
Such a person, Weber says, has
…the extraordinaryand personal gift of grace (charisma),
(08:51):
the absolutely personal devotion [to]and personal confidence in revelation,
heroism, and other qualitiesof individual leadership.
When someone has the gift of charisma,
their mere presencemakes a powerful impact.
I can vouch for that in the case of Obama,having watched him
(09:11):
enter quite a few rooms.
I’d call the effect mysterious,except it can be
analyzed, as Todorov does in his work.
I will say it’s extremely hardto learn and imitate, though.
When people try, they often make things
worse, like when Dukakis rode in a tank,Kerry posed in hunting
gear, Hillaryhoisted a cold one in a blue-collar bar,
(09:35):
or Kamala did an expert jobof re-running an Obama campaign.
You probably
have a good guesshow Weber would see them.
Rational-legal leaders,he said, claim authority
not by their personal charismabut by virtue of the belief
in the validity of legal statute
and functional 'competence'based on rationally created rules.
(09:58):
Not quite as inspiring, is it?
Weber is one of the most-citedscholars of modern alienation.
Or, as he also calledit, “disenchantment,”
echoing the poet and philosopherFriedrich Schiller.
Weber wrote: The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization (10:13):
undefined
and intellectualization and, above all,by the disenchantment of the world.
The rational-legal bureaucratis the tribune
of the disenchanted world. Weber recognized that Enlightenment science
had produced unprecedented progress
(10:34):
– more then had occurredin all of previous history.
And he recognized the necessityof bureaucracy in running
the complex world science had created.
But that world could also feellike what Weber
called an “iron cage.” Inside
the iron cage is only what’s rational.
Everything else is locked outside.
(10:56):
That “everything else“ includesgods, spirits, omens, blessings,
curses, ecstasy, awe, terror, meaning,
and… connection.
It’s not just that you can no longerbelieve in things that don’t exist.
Even things that do feel less real.
You’re no longer immersed in the world,but observing it, and all that’s in it,
(11:20):
not so much experiencing itas considering it.
That includes other people.
If your communication with othersis confined
within the bounds of rationality, their,
and your, physical presence is missing.
I don’t think thatif you use Enlightenment reason
it will inevitably take over your mindand condemn you to the iron cage.
(11:44):
But I do think it’s happenedto a lot of today’s Democrats.
And that, maybe more than anythingelse, explains why they’re losing.
Thanks for listening.
If you found this useful,I hope you’ll share it. More next time.
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in theService of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley.
This time (00:04):
Chapter 10 of The Liberal Backbone:
“The Iron Cage.” You can find the previous chapters
in previous episodes,or at dastardlycleverness.com,
on the Dastardly ClevernessYouTube channel, or at Substack:
just search therefor Spencer Critchley. And
as always,if you have any comments or suggestions,
(00:25):
I’d love to hear them. Here we go.
The crisis of liberalism is nowhere
more serious than on the liberal left.
As I write, public approvalof the Democratic Party stands, wobbling,
at 29 percent in one major polland 27 percent in another.
This may not be surprisingto young Americans,
(00:49):
who have never known a timewhen Democrats didn’t feel like underdogs.
And yet for almost 50 years,the Democratic Party dominated American
government. Between 1933 and 1981,
there were 24 sessions of Congress.
For 22 of those 24,
Democrats controlled both the Houseand the Senate.
(01:12):
During the same time there were 12presidential terms.
Eight were served by Democrats.
Now Democrats can lose, twice,to a party led by Donald Trump,
whose campaigns have been naturalexperiments in just how bad a candidate
can be and still beat theDemocrats. What happened?
(01:33):
The durable conventional wisdom has it
that the problem is policy: Democrats have moved too far left. (01:35):
undefined
Or no, they’ve moved too far right.
And Democratslove to argue over policy, to do
polls on policy, and designclever new policies.
But the fact is that most Democraticpolicies have always been popular
with most Americans, and pollsshow most still are, even now.
(02:00):
Most Americansjust don’t like Democrats any more.
And they’re telling Democratswhy, if Democrats can hear.
Just after the 2024election, Navigator Research organized
focus groups with voterswho had formerly voted Democratic
but either switched to Trump or didn’tvote at all.
(02:21):
For many, Kamala Harris representedwhat was wrong with the party.
This participant, quoted in Politicomagazine, spoke for many:
It seemed like a lot of what she came out
and said wasn’t really off-the-cuff,wasn’t coming from her.
Seemed like every interview, every timeshe came out and talked about something,
it was planned out and never her thoughts,didn’t seem genuine to her thoughts,
(02:46):
whereas, Trump, even though you neverreally knew what he was going to say,
when he was going to say it,it was always him and genuine
to what he thought,so that’s what swayed me.
Democrats,no matter how highly qualified they are,
as Harriswas, have come to exemplify alienation.
They’ve become strangersto much of America,
(03:08):
including much of their former blue collarand minority base.
Politics,now more than ever, depends on connection.
Trump,ostentatiously unqualified, connects.
A MAGA voter in Tennessee
summed it up for a New York Timesreporter in 2018:
I don’t reallylook at him as a politician.
(03:30):
Even now, I look at him as just one of us.
He doesn’t act like he’sabove you, as a person.
This blue collar
Tennessean was talkingabout a rich, scandal-ridden Manhattanite
who had recently been caughtexpressing his contempt for Southerners.
But as we’veall long since learned, the truth
about Trump doesn’t matter much.
(03:53):
One of the most iconic politicalcartoons of this
era was drawn by PaulNoth for The New Yorker.
It shows a flock of sheep grazingunder a campaign billboard for a wolf.
The headline is “I AM GOING TO EAT YOU.”
“He tells it like itis,” says one sheep to another.
It’s not
(04:14):
the message, it’s the way the messagefeels.
And Trump can make a message feel rightto his voters, no matter how wrong it
is.
Voters often talk about Trump’s
authenticity, and Democrats’ phoniness,even when Trump lies
flagrantly and Democratsbring stacks of facts.
Trump just feels more authentic.
(04:36):
People trust peoplethey connect with, who are “one of us.”
And this, by the way, is true of peopleon the left and the right; it’s
just that on the right it’scurrently on spectacular display.
Yale psychologist Daniel Kahan studies
a phenomenon called “identity-protectivecognition.” Even highly educated people
(04:59):
unconsciously warp reality to fitwhat their group believes about reality.
And despite the fond hopes of liberals,more information doesn’t help.
Kahan demonstrated the power
of identity-protective cognitionin a 2013 experiment.
Participants were sortedaccording to two characteristics:
(05:20):
their political viewsand their “numeracy,” or math skills.
Then each one was asked to interpret
data from a simulated scientific study.
Sometimes, the study would beabout the effectiveness of a new cream
in treating a skin condition.
Other times,it was about the effectiveness
of a new gun law in reducing crime.
(05:41):
Sometimes the numbers showed thatthe cream
or the gun law worked,other times that they didn’t.
Unsurprisingly,
highly numerate participantswere more likely to interpret the numbers
correctly —when they were about skin cream.
But if the same numbers were about the gunlaw, and the correct
interpretation would challengethe participants’ views on guns,
(06:04):
they were much more likelyto get the wrong answer.
They weren’t doing it deliberately.
Their political opinionshad changed their reasoning —
even though they were good at reasoning.
Is it any wonder that a candidate’s policy
can be this or that,or as so often with Trump, nothing?
Their voters will make it right,
(06:27):
as long as the candidate is “one of us.” In recent decades,
for too many Americans, Democraticcandidates have not felt like “one of us.”
They’ve felt like aliens. There have been exceptions:
masters of personal, emotional connection,like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
(06:47):
But the rule has been Michael Dukakis,Al Gore,
John Kerry,Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris.
All were eminently qualified,and none of us
who aren’t family or friendscan know what they were like in private.
But in public, they came acrossas alienated, like many Democrats do.
(07:08):
It’s not what they said.
It’s how they said it, and how they lookedand sounded while they said it.
It’s how they felt.
And as we saw with Alex Todorov’sexperiments with candidate photos,
people can decide how they feel about youbefore you say anything at all.
Much other research yieldssimilar results.
(07:29):
My experience does too.
One example among many: While working on campaigns for Obama (07:32):
undefined
and then Hillary,I shot thousands of photos of each.
They’re equally fine-looking people.
But going over all those frames,I discovered that it’s
hard to take a good picture of Hillary
and nearly impossibleto take a bad one of Obama.
(07:53):
The camera captures thingsthe conscious mind misses:
fleeting expressionsthat either do or don’t invite connection,
because they do or don’t express feelingslike warmth, ease, confidence, or humor.
Unconsciously,we’re like the camera, sensitive
to all those instantaneous images.
(08:13):
They create a strong impressionbefore someone says a word,
let alone makes a speech.
Obama and Bill Clintonare frequently described as “charismatic.”
The word echoesthe work of the influential
early sociologistMax Weber. Weber identified
three sources of political authority: traditional, charismatic, (08:31):
undefined
and rational-legal,otherwise known as bureaucratic.
Obama and Bill Clinton personifythe charismatic leader.
Such a person, Weber says, has
…the extraordinaryand personal gift of grace (charisma),
(08:51):
the absolutely personal devotion [to]and personal confidence in revelation,
heroism, and other qualitiesof individual leadership.
When someone has the gift of charisma,
their mere presencemakes a powerful impact.
I can vouch for that in the case of Obama,having watched him
(09:11):
enter quite a few rooms.
I’d call the effect mysterious,except it can be
analyzed, as Todorov does in his work.
I will say it’s extremely hardto learn and imitate, though.
When people try, they often make things
worse, like when Dukakis rode in a tank,Kerry posed in hunting
gear, Hillaryhoisted a cold one in a blue-collar bar,
(09:35):
or Kamala did an expert jobof re-running an Obama campaign.
You probably
have a good guesshow Weber would see them.
Rational-legal leaders,he said, claim authority
not by their personal charismabut by virtue of the belief
in the validity of legal statute
and functional 'competence'based on rationally created rules.
(09:58):
Not quite as inspiring, is it?
Weber is one of the most-citedscholars of modern alienation.
Or, as he also calledit, “disenchantment,”
echoing the poet and philosopherFriedrich Schiller.
Weber wrote: The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization (10:13):
undefined
and intellectualization and, above all,by the disenchantment of the world.
The rational-legal bureaucratis the tribune
of the disenchanted world. Weber recognized that Enlightenment science
had produced unprecedented progress
(10:34):
– more then had occurredin all of previous history.
And he recognized the necessityof bureaucracy in running
the complex world science had created.
But that world could also feellike what Weber
called an “iron cage.” Inside
the iron cage is only what’s rational.
Everything else is locked outside.
(10:56):
That “everything else“ includesgods, spirits, omens, blessings,
curses, ecstasy, awe, terror, meaning,
and… connection.
It’s not just that you can no longerbelieve in things that don’t exist.
Even things that do feel less real.
You’re no longer immersed in the world,but observing it, and all that’s in it,
(11:20):
not so much experiencing itas considering it.
That includes other people.
If your communication with othersis confined
within the bounds of rationality, their,
and your, physical presence is missing.
I don’t think thatif you use Enlightenment reason
it will inevitably take over your mindand condemn you to the iron cage.
(11:44):
But I do think it’s happenedto a lot of today’s Democrats.
And that, maybe more than anythingelse, explains why they’re losing.
Thanks for listening.
If you found this useful,I hope you’ll share it. More next time.
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