Sarah Longwell, the founder and publisher of The Bulwark, became politically aware during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair. She remembers Republicans talking about character being very important.
On this episode of “Deseret Voices,” Longwell discusses the paths that America’s political parties have traveled since then and why she is a critic of President Donald Trump.
Longwell compares the current state of politics to the old Cherokee parable of the two wolves. She feels our leaders are locked in what she calls the “Republican triangle of doom.”
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Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
McKay Coppins: Few people have spent more time exploring the psyche of the American voter than Sarah Longwell. A longtime pollster and political consultant, Sarah has held focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum over the years. She’s listened to them describe their hopes and their grievances, what motivates them and what scares them. And more than a decade into the Trump era, she believes supporters and opponents of the president still fundamentally misunderstand each other in surprising ways.
Sarah herself is a former Republican strategist who broke with the party over Donald Trump, and now publishes The Bulwark, a publication founded by conservative opponents of the president.
This week on “Deseret Voices”, Sarah and I discuss what Democratic and Republican voters get wrong about each other, where she sees conservatism going after Trump, and what gives her hope about the future of American democracy.
Sarah Longwell, welcome to “Deseret Voices.”
Sarah Longwell: Hey, thanks for having me.
MC: Sarah, you and I have known each other for a while. I’ve talked to you as a reporter. I’ve sat in on the focus groups you lead, which we’ll talk about in a minute. And you are known as a prominent and unsparing critic of Donald Trump and his allies, I think it’s fair to say.
SL: Very fair.
MC: But, before the Trump era, you were a longtime Republican strategist. And I think just to set the table, it would be helpful for our audience to know what made you a Republican or a conservative in the first place.
SL: Sure. So I grew up in a very small town, like 700 people in central Pennsylvania, so some of it was just cultural. Like I grew up in the parts of the country that, you know, where people have guns in their living rooms in cases and you get the first day off for deer hunting season and you take hunters. I am not personally, but you know, in fifth grade they had you take hunter safety because, you know, I just grew up in the woods and...
MC: Are you a deer hunter?
SL: I am not personally, but, you know, in fifth grade they had you take hunter safety because, you know, I just grew up in the woods. And so I think that was part of it, is that’s where I sort of came from. And then I went to private school when I was in eighth grade and they would take the people from my county. There was like eight of us and we would gather at the local police barracks and we would take a van, sort of an hour into the city to go to this private school. And, you know, it was a much more liberal environment, which is when I sort of started to hone my positions against maybe the more liberal positions of my professors and even classmates. And then I was super into politics. And so my mom probably put Thomas Sowell into my hands at a pretty young age. I remember reading Dinesh D’Souza’s “Letters to a Young Conservative” and Christopher Hitchens’ “Letters to a Young Contrarian.” Like, those were the books that formed me. And then I went to Kenyon College in Ohio. And that was kind of what formed me intellectually. And from there, I went to work at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which was a conservative think tank in Delaware. And so I came up and I think what I look back on and think of as Conservatism, Inc. There is a real pipeline on the conservative side that kind of pulls you through. And so that’s what I did. And then I was working in a sort of Republican communication shop for 15 years. Like I had two jobs. I worked at a conservative think tank for a few years. And then I worked in Washington at a Republican PR firm with a guy who did — he was kind of like a bare-knuckle brawler on comm stuff — and mostly it was policy and communications and I love that; that fit me well. But when Trump came along, what was interesting was just what a contrast he was from how I had been raised up in Conservatism, Inc. Like, everything about him was anathema to what I had learned. I mean, even just some of the basics, which is that character counting. Like, that was a big thing and you know sometimes people, I get asked this question a lot about why I became a Republican. And I do think one of the pivotal moments was that when I was 18 and a senior in high school and really getting interested in politics was the same year that Bill Clinton was getting impeached for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, who was not very much older than I was. And so I became politically aware at a moment when Republicans were the ones talking about character being very important, not lying to Congress was very important. And the Democrat was kind of like, behaving like a dirtbag and also I watched for the Democratic establishment feminists, you know, kind of rally to his defense. And I was like, well, that’s not, I don’t think that’s right. And so like, that was just formative for me.
MC: Yeah, it’s one of the more fascinating kind of switches that’s taken place in our politics over the last 10 years is seeing people who used to talk about the importance of character and integrity and our public leaders kind of completely backpedaling from that position and saying, actually, all that matters is that, you know, they fight for me and they have policy positions I agree with and I don’t really care about their personal life. And then at the same time, I think you see a lot of those former kind of Clinton apologists, you know, saying that, actually, character really matters and personal integrity matters and marital fidelity matters and things like that. I could see how that, that would be jarring for somebody who came of age in the Clinton era. I want to ask you though, like, are there now, given all that’s going on in our politics, the realignment that’s taking place, a lot of the stuff that you cover at The Bulwark, are there still kind of core conservative ideas and principles that you learned in your teenage years, college years, that you hold on to today?
SL: Yeah, mean, look, I’m still a free marketer. I’m still a capitalist. And actually, these are the places where I kind of tear my hair out at what Trump is doing. We talk about socialism, and to me, what is wild is the socialism on the right. Donald Trump is taking stakes, active stakes in businesses that we are propping up using taxpayer dollars. Like, these are the kinds of things that were base-level principles for orienting yourself as a Republican, right? We’ve talked about Mitt Romney’s three legs of the stool. And so like, do I like free markets, limited government and American leadership in the world? I still do. I still think, you know, America, like, and this is where like personal integrity, it’s not that, it’s not that I’m obsessed with, sort of, the personal lives of the politicians. And I think, look, let me tell you what, voters do not care about those things anymore. And I also, like, I’m not gonna get so wrapped up around that. What I do care about though, is that somebody is a decent enough person that they care about people. They don’t do extrajudicial killings of people without trials. They don’t send people to foreign gulags. The conservative principles of wanting humanity to flourish, to conserve the things in our politics that were good. Those instincts are not part of the Republican Party today. They are still part of me, right? Like even the parts where right now where I would consider myself kind of a pro-democracy advocate or even just a pro-American values advocate stems from the idea that I want to preserve so much about America that I think is great. I mean, Donald Trump’s whole, need to make America great again. I mean, it is, there is plenty that is to conserve about what is great about it now and he is tearing down so much of that. So actually a lot of what Donald Trump does sort of animates the conservative instinct I have to conserve what is good about America and not throw things out quickly just because everyone’s like, well, Trump, he’s at least he’s doing something. And I understand that instinct from voters. I don’t think that the voters appreciate like, the at what cost is he just doing something like a lot of voters because they’re not super tapped in with all of the minutiae of it might say, well, I don’t care if he’s bombing boats of drug dealers in Venezuela. Good. Like, you should, let’s kill those drug dealers. And it’s a lot to try to explain to people why without knowing if they are actually drug dealers, if they were actually coming to America, like, why the president just deciding to kill people, why that’s really wrong and we should be against that.
That’s tough, but that used to be the conservative instinct. It’s still the conservative instinct I have. But it is no longer the instinct of the party.
MC: Well, when you started The Bulwark, the idea was to take a stand against the spread of Trumpism in the Republican Party, right? And all these years later, I think it’s probably fair to say that that battle is lost, at least in the near term. Do you think the Republican Party, as it’s currently constituted, can be salvaged from your view?
SL: No, absolutely not. There’s no going back with the Republican Party. And in fact, it’s getting worse. Because Trump’s hijacking of the party, it caused a political realignment. So there’s a lot of new people in the party with different views. But I will use an example of something that’s happening right now, which is the Heritage Foundation, which was a sort of a seminal conservative think tank that when I was coming up in conservatism, they were always having talks and lunches and I had been in that building plenty of times, the president had to go out and make a video about defending the relationship with Tucker Carlson, not even defending it, saying this is a very important relationship that we have with Tucker Carlson. And they were doing it because Tucker Carlson just sat down with Nick Fuentes, noted white nationalist. Tucker Carlson himself has been doing a lot of I’m just gonna have this Holocaust revisionist on my, you know, somebody who doesn’t, you know, thinks Winston Churchill was the actual villain of World War II. Like, there’s a real corrupting, like, when I was coming up, the conservative movement had a deep intellectual strain that was very meaningful to me, the sort of Kirk, Burke, Hayek. And you could sort of wrestle with those ideas and you could find really smart people to talk about those ideas with. And now it’s like, Tucker Carlson platforming Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, and then the Heritage Foundation having to sort of alibi those people. That is what the movement has become. It is sort of bereft of all of the things that attracted me to this movement in the first place. So, you know, The Bulwark, there was a time early on, in 2016, almost up to 20-, certainly up to 2020, I thought, that you could salvage the Republican Party. I thought that if you beat Trump by enough in 2020, the Republican Party would sort of snap back and would recognize that this was a bad experiment that it had just indulged in. But of course, Trump lost only narrowly. And once I saw that the Republican Party, after he lied about the election being stolen, after he convinced a mob of people to attack the Capitol over those lies. When I watched the Republican Party say that Trump was temperamentally and materially responsible for the day and then not impeach him, and then Kevin McCarthy go down to Mar-a-Lago, bring him back, when they decided that after all of that, Trump still was the leader of the party, that was when I knew it was over and not coming back. And I don’t think it’s doing anything but going. And it’s interesting, the people like Kevin McCarthy, the people like Mitch McConnell, who sort of did all the blocking and tackling for Trump, they’re gone. I mean, the voters hate them, the Trump voters, the MAGA voters. And that’s one of the deep ironies of all of this is that the people who really facilitated Donald Trump’s rise did so in the hopes that it would give them a certain amount of political capital, but actually, what it has done is just accelerate their demise within the party.
MC: Yeah, it is. I mean, I’ve covered the Republican Party and the conservative movement for a long time, and it’s become almost a cliche to describe this as a hostage situation, right? Because you do encounter this over and over again, these Republican politicians who, in private, will tell you one thing about Trump and then kind of, in public, realize the political incentives are only flowing one way and they do what they need to do to stay on his good side. But the interesting thing is that I feel like voters are kind of smart enough to know what’s going on. It seems to me that like voters can suss that stuff out pretty easily. And it’s one of the reasons that they didn’t end up really getting politically rewarded for doing whatever President Trump told them to do.
SL: Yeah, although I think that’s true. And look, it’s a little bit like the emperor has no clothes situation where the voters know that, yeah, these elected leaders are just pantomiming support for Trump. The voters, the way that they suss that out, though, is to say, I want pure MAGA in there. I want people who are purely for Trump. And so what ends up happening is that the sort of McCarthy and McConnell and even like Lindsey Graham, all these people who are kind of, were faking it until they made it. Eventually what happened is like the whole party went that direction and then they were not pure enough and the voters kicked them out for doing it. And so yeah, that’s right. Voters know that they’re not authentically MAGA and so they don’t give them credit for it. And the normies don’t give them credit for it though either. Like, they end up in the sour spot with voters.
MC: Right. So OK, if you’re a conservative listening to this conversation, think probably a lot of them will say, this is where these conversations hit a dead end. Because there are a lot of Trump-averse conservatives still out in the country who will say, I get everything you’re saying about President Trump. I don’t like him either. I agree that he’s doing a lot of things that don’t seem traditionally conservative in any meaningful sense, but I’m not a Democrat. I’m certainly not a progressive. And even if I’m willing to vote for a Democrat strategically as kind of a Trump protest vote or whatever, I’m not going to ever feel at home in the Democratic Party. So lay out for us your kind of vision for a healthy post-Trump conservative party movement, whatever. Like if everything goes the way that you want it to go, where do those voters find themselves five years from now, 10 years from now?
SL: I do think that, well, so you’ve set me up for a little bit of a, I don’t know if it’s a catch-22 is the right phrase, but the problem is, is that I don’t think there’s a real healthy direction that I see the Republicans going in. I mean, at its healthiest, in going the direction it’s going, it becomes kind of a working-class populist party, but it is strips out kind of the corruption, the lawlessness. But it is sort of purely working class, right? And it is trying to figure out how to elevate working-class issues and it is trying to, it is focused on jobs. I think that this conservative movement, one of the things that’s happening is, there’s a real brain drain happening. Like it no longer has sort of a policy direction that is thoughtful or like, you know, JD Vance can do his sort of Curtis Yarvin infused in return to our industrialist roots type thing. I don’t see that as being a particularly good direction for the Republican Party. I actually think that in my best case scenario, what happens, because I believe the Republican Party has been so thoroughly corrupted, is that the Democratic Party actually comes more palatable for a lot of these sort of swingier voters. Now, to me, I can see it’s easier to see a path for Democrats to sort of knock off some of the identitarian politics that seems to drive them and move closer to being just like the normal, moderate-ish party that is thinking about, hey, how do we make energy cheaper? How do we focus on affordability?
I mean, Donald Trump was able to bring in a lot of these working-class voters by saying, “We’re going to lower prices on groceries.” Well, he just lies to people. He didn’t have a plan for that. Doesn’t have a plan for lowering health insurance costs. Like, there’s no economic framework for what Donald Trump believes or what Republicans believe in terms of how are we going to make things more affordable in this country for people? How are we going to help people get ahead? How are we going to put more money in their pockets? Which listening to voters all of the time in the focus groups that I do, that is what they care about.
They want things to be cheaper. They want the schools to be better. They want to feel safe. And so I think that Democrats have to figure out, OK, guys, if Americans want to feel safe, you need to figure out how to explain to them how you’re going to close the border, how you are going to fight crime. then you can have sort of the next, once Americans feel, this is just a human thing. For a person to feel empathy, right, the empathy that I think is required for us to have a robust immigration system, they need to feel safe first. And Donald Trump has done a really good job of telling them a story that says, well, when people come in from the border, that also is, that’s about terrorism, that’s about drugs and fentanyl, that’s about crime. And so that immigration thing is all wrapped up there. And so people can’t access their empathy when they feel under threat. And so I do think Democrats are going to have to figure out how to say, hey, we care about crime.
SL: We care about securing the border. But also, we need a million new cops. We need a million new nurses. We need a million, and we need community cops. We need more nurses. We need more doctors. And start focusing on the jobs, middle-class jobs. And I think if they could find that and haven’t gone off the deep end of that progressivism brings them, like, they can find the middle ground in a world that is running to extremes, which is where most of the voters live.
MC: Do you find in your conversations with prominent Democrats, Democratic politicians, operatives, I’m sure you’re talking to them both in public capacities and in private, do you find a lot of appetite in the Democratic Party for reaching those, we’ll call them bulwark voters, right? The disaffected Republicans who are maybe kind of center right but can’t stomach the Trump era Republican Party?
SL: Yeah, I mean, there’s an active fight going on in among Democrats right now. It’s sort of like, should the party be more progressive? Should it be more like AOC and Bernie and more economically populist? Because they view Trump’s economic populism, has helped Republicans bring in more sort of a multiracial working-class coalition. And they say, we want that coalition back. That’s our coalition. So, so is that a Bernie? Or and that would be like, OK, well, instead of the bulwark types, but they are trying to bring back sort of white working class voters or multiracial working class group of people that are non-college and live in these swing states, these industrial states, and is that more economic populism? Or do you bring in the bulwark types, which is more college-educated, suburban, Mitt Romney, John McCain voters who now find Trump totally unpalatable. And it’s interesting because there’s a lot more white working class, not college voters. Like mathematically, there’s just a lot more of those voters than there are of the sort of college educated suburban voters. And I actually think the Democrats are suffering a little bit by becoming too much of a college educated suburban and urban party and not having any inroads into more rural areas and more working-class areas. And so I, but like, if you asked me what I would do, I think you can get both of those groups. Like, I think you could build a coalition that includes both of those groups by Democrats, not being so much, I don’t think you have to be progressive populist. I think you have to focus on affordability, prices and jobs and people’s pockets.
Like, that’s what people care about the most. And so I think that the Democrats can do that if they sort of get their heads out of the college faculty lounge and start thinking about people’s jobs again.
MC: Well, so something that makes you, I would say, somewhat unique among people who do this for a living, appear on podcasts and TV and talk about politics, you and I both do that, is that you spend actually quite a lot of time talking to and listening to voters. In fact, it’s your whole thing. You’ve done focus groups with probably hundreds, how many voters would you say —
SL: Thousands, no thousands. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’ve been doing the focus groups at least once a week, if not multiple times a week, since 2018 now, so that’s a lot of groups.
MC: So you have listened to thousands of voters talk about politics.
I want to ask you a few questions based on those conversations that you’ve listened to. And by the way, people should check out Sarah’s “Focus Group” podcast if they haven’t. It’s really, I think, edifying for people who want to understand voters better and where they’re coming from. But I want to ask you this because we live in a moment when people make a lot of, I think, lazy assumptions about different types of voters based on kind of the algorithmically tailored social media bubbles that they live in or the media they consume or whatever else. So I’m going to ask you a couple of questions. First is, what is one very common misconception that people have about Trump voters? Something that a lot of people assume about Trump voters, but that from your focus groups you think is not really true.
SL: That they’re all MAGA. I mean, I actually, for me, it’s become very clear the difference between somebody who is like, pure MAGA — and I’m gonna use MAGA to be like Trump’s base, people who are there for Trump — versus people who are — there’s a couple different terms, but one might be people who are red-pilled, which means that they are so anti-woke, so anti-democrat that — and Elon, Elon would be a good example of somebody who’s red-pilled. But for most, or for lots and lots of the voters who are just Trump voters, they’re not red-pilled, they’re not, they’re not MAGA, they just wanted things to be cheaper. And they were like, Joe Biden didn’t make things cheaper, gonna try this other guy. And yeah, I know he was there before and I felt like the economy was better when he was there. And you know, I think that sometimes people are like, those people are terrible people or they’re really hostile to them. And I’m like, guys. Voters make choices based on who is going to improve their lives. They are not often thinking about who is a threat to democracy. And I have colleagues who get really mad at the voters. And they want to be like, these guys, they’re so stupid. And how do they make these choices? And I’m like, listen to these, this woman’s got four kids. And she’s thinking about how to feed them. she’s not reading Twitter all day long. And this is, talk about a misconception. Most voters aren’t on Twitter. Like, the conversations we have on Twitter are so divorced from what average people are thinking about and they’re not low information. This was a … people used to talk about people like this as like low information voters. They’re actually awash in information now because of our technology and what they’re, you know, the amount of information that’s just in their pockets. And so like, the idea that they all have firm ideas and they love Trump and they’re in a cult, like for a lot of these voters, they say things like, I don’t know what to think. And so they base a lot of their opinions on, in some ways, I’d call it vibes; others I’d call it just like they swim in kind of a MAGA soup, like those are the culturally who they’re around. And so people who they think are more tapped in or smarter are telling them, well, yeah, I’m voting for Trump because of all these reasons he’s better for the economy. And they go, OK. And so that’s just one of the big misconceptions.
MC: I remember the day after the election in 2024, talking to some other journalists about the result. Like, there was this tendency among a certain type of person to say, wow, so whatever comes next, know, whatever the Trump administration does next, he has a clear mandate, right?
Trump was trying to claim that, certainly, but I think even a lot of anti-Trump people were saying, well, I guessed everybody voted for authoritarianism or illiberalism or whatever. And I kept trying to say, just take five minutes to look at exit poll data and you’ll see that an enormous number of voters didn’t really care about Trump that much at all. They just wanted inflation to go down. They wanted cheaper groceries. They wanted their bills to be cheaper. And when you just hand an incoming president this idea that he has a mandate to do whatever he wants, you’re actually, if you oppose that president, doing something pretty counterproductive, right?
SL: I really agree with that. I just, have this fight with people all the time and I had it going into the election. ’Cause I was hearing it from the voters and there’s a lot of folks who wanted to be like, what all I was hearing about was economy, inflation, economy, inflation costs, cost of housing, cost of groceries. And everybody was like, but the economy’s good. The economy is getting better. And I was like, it is better relative to other countries that are all still coming out of the pandemic, but nobody’s telling them a story of recovery, right? I think if somebody had been, if there was really a concerted effort from Democrats to say, we are still struggling through this recovery because Donald Trump put us in this horrible position with COVID and, you know, handled it badly. And so we have been digging out and we’ve been effective at digging out. But you guys, we are nowhere near where we need to be. You guys are still paying too much. I feel how hard it is. That’s not what they did. People were like, no, the economy’s good. I’m like, OK, well, people are still they’re struggling an enormous amount. And so what they say is, I don’t know, the old guy over here who seems like he’s barely with it, that guy’s not gonna lower my prices. This other lunatic seems like he’s got the energy and he’s telling me he’s gonna lower grocery prices and that’s all I want, so fine. And I just, there’s a reason that incumbents across the globe lost in that sort of just coming out of the pandemic. And it wasn’t because they all wanted authoritarianism, it was because everybody wanted inflation to be lower. And so I just, I think there’s a real tendency to over-read. And this, look, this goes back to one of my most central theses about people, which is like, they’re not bad. They’re mostly OK. Like, I just listen to these voters all the time say, you know, during the pandemic, like, they were crushed. They couldn’t see people, their relatives who were dying. But they take care of their sick parents and they volunteer at pet shelters and they take care of their neighbors.
Most people are not awful. They are a little more awful on the internet than they are in real life. But I don’t think everybody is bad and terrible. I do think that there’s been a huge shift in elites and the way that I — so I tell this story sometimes about there’s this like, parable. I think it’s like a Cherokee parable, but the grandfather is saying to his grandson, you know, inside every person there are two wolves.
One who represents goodness and truth and decency, and the other one avarice and greed and, you know, bad things. And they’re always in tension. They’re always fighting with each other. And the little boy says, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed, right? The one you feed wins. And there is an elite culture now that is willing to feed people just poison. You know, the election was stolen.
And it’s being stolen from you and you need to hate people. And this is just replete through the focus groups, are people saying the thing they lament the most is how disunified we are as a country, how much it feels like we hate each other. But what’s funny is, is that five minutes later, that same person who laments our disunity is going to say, well, those libs are the reason that, you know, and so both of those things exist in people. And of course, Donald Trump feeds the absolute worst tendencies, which is why one of the things I constantly try to rail against is the idea that Democrats should just copy Trump, because I think that’s a real race to the bottom that leads us nowhere good.
MC: Tell me a misconception that Trump voters tend to have about non-Trump voters.
SL: Well, it’s sort of the same thing. So, well, actually, I’m going to tell you a funny one that always gets me, which is, and this is both groups do this. Both sides think the other side does everything better, that the other side is more unified. Like, you have to listen to Trump voters and they’re always like, well, the Democrats really stick together.
You know, they stick together, they don’t throw each other under the bus the way the right does. And I’m like listening to Democrats saying, those Trump people, they all just follow Trump and they’re unified. And I’m like, you’re all in disarray. Everyone’s in disarray. You all have, you know, and I do think actually, you know, on the Trump side, they do have the benefit, this is something I really see, is they have a benefit of a more homogeneous coalition in a way where the Democrats have this really fractious, very diverse set of things. And I do think that makes it slightly hard for Democrats to find the through line of all of their voters because they do come from all of these disparate places. Both it’s more racially diverse, it’s more economically diverse, it’s more geographically diverse. And so I think that Trump voters tend to think, well, these are all the same kind of pointy heads who, you know, our brain, you know, their brains have been turned to mush by the lame stream media. And like, I don’t think that’s true. Or they think that they’re all super progressive. My gosh, some of the funniest, that’s not funny, but when you listen to a group of Black voters, they are some of the most moderate, straightforwardly pragmatic voters. Like those are not the progressive voters. The progressive voters are your like white, very educated liberals.
And so it is, people sort of think about the diverse coalition as lots of Black people and Hispanic people and they tend to vote for Democrats and so those are all progressives. Those are not your progressives. Those people are incredibly culturally moderate and they are just like, is like, white progressives are the ones that are driving much more of sort of the progressive movement left.
MC: OK, so I want to close with this question. Because we are in, I think it’s fair to say, and you’re a pollster, you’re a political strategist, you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but we’re in a pretty gloomy moment in American politics, right? Trust in institutions has collapsed, people are expressing less and less confidence in America’s future. You spend all this time listening to voters. Is there anything in these focus groups that gives you hope about the future?
SL: First of all, there’s tons that gives me hope about the future, and I’m gonna say that, but actually I do wanna tell you one thing that actually worries me a ton. Because it’s a thing that is, it used to be in our politics that the voters really valued candidates who compromise. Because they understand, or they used to understand that the way that you get policy outcomes that you want is through compromise. So politicians used to make a big show of I reach across the aisle and I will work with whoever. And voters are demanding that less and less. And in fact, voters are now starting to demand more from politicians where they don’t want them to work with the other side. And so I think that is something that always alarms me. But I think that the thing that makes me feel better is that people do not want us to hate each other in this country. They still do have a lot of compassion. And if you go back to my sort of one you feed parable, I think that leadership matters a great deal. I think our leadership class has been failing us horribly. I think they’re locked in — I call it the Republican triangle of doom — but in sort of a toxic and symbiotic relationship where the right-wing infotainment media, the politicians and the voters are in this sort of radicalizing process.
And, but I just see so much inherent goodness and so much of a sense of people wanting to not be terrible to each other that I think if a politician emerges that really does try to counter the negativity with a kind of pro-America — not pro-democracy — pro-America sensibility that like renews people’s sense of what it is we’re doing here in this country, I think Americans can bounce back. I don’t have this sense that all Americans are lost. I worry about our politics. I worry about the people who are being drawn to politics and the sewage that they are pumping into people’s hearts and minds. But I believe people are still genuinely good. They do not want civil war. They do not want to be torn apart. And if a politician can come along and harness that contrast, I think they would do very well.
MC: So what I think I hear you saying is that appealing to our better angels actually could not just be a civic or moral good, but good politics.
SL: I think so. I think that the good wolf is starving and people are ready to have that one be fed.
MC: Well, Sarah Longwell, thank you for doing this. Thank you for the conversation and I hope we can talk again soon.
SL: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s great.