The Best Way to Fight Back Against the Assault on American Democracy
Plus: Can I give practical political advice without punching my own side?
I can’t help but smile when I think about the phenomenon of audience capture, at least as I experience it here on Substack.
Of the roughly fourteen hundred people who pay monthly or yearly to read my posts in full, the couple dozen most engaged readers regularly leave comments, and they don’t hesitate to say if they approve or disapprove of something I’ve written. (I’m grateful to everyone who participates in the discussions and arguments here.) A few of them lean right, but most lean left. If I had to generalize about the views in the latter camp, I’d say the most common criticisms I see are that I’m too inclined to appease the right and too prone to judge my own side (the center-left) by unfairly high standards. The former tendency was supposedly on display in my first post from last week, and the latter came to the fore in week’s second post, where I expressed criticism of several pundits and analysts, but most prominently Substack superstar-historian Heather Cox Richardson.
For some, it wasn’t just that I punched left last week but that I did it at a moment when the Trump administration began to attack civil liberties in an especially ominous way, turning the assassination of conservative “influencer” Charlie Kirk into an occasion to launch an assault on free speech. Why wasn’t I focusing on the only stories that mattered last week, which were ones about the president smothering American democracy?
Which means that audience capture in the context of my newsletters amounts to my readers demanding I use my writing to highlight the bad things Donald Trump is doing and suggest tough-minded ways of fighting back against his efforts to govern as a dictator. And I get it: My two posts last week were pretty disengaged from what most pundits were talking about, and also from their relentless focus on Trump as the sole source of all the terrible things we see unfolding around us. I understand how that could be irritating.
But here’s the thing: I have never advertised this Substack as the place to come for relentless Trump attacks. I have written more half a million words about the man over the past ten years, the overwhelming majority of them sharply critical. But my primary ambition here is to increase understanding of what’s happening around us, not to reinforce my readers’ already highly negative reaction to Trump. Neither is my goal to contribute to “solidarity” among those who oppose the president and his party. There are any number of places to go for that. This isn’t one of them.
