Jon Favreau's The Wilderness podcast has a smug, Washington-insider vibe.
Something worth checking out, if you haven’t already, is The Wilderness podcast. It’s a 15-part series on the woes of the Democratic Party by Jon Favreau, who hosts another podcast popular among liberals called Pod Save America.
Actually, The Wilderness inadvertently identifies exactly what’s wrong with the modern Democratic Party. Favreau spends most of his time interviewing friends and acquaintances from the Obama campaigns and administration, where he was a speechwriter, and not so subtly plugging their consulting businesses, nonprofits and personal causes. The whole show has a smug, Washington-insider vibe to it even while Favreau and his compatriots criticize Washington insiders. (He singles out Mark Penn, a long-time moderate Clinton advisor, for special wrath.) What it’s really about is criticism of older Washington insiders by young Washington insiders. It’s the kind of thing that Obama-Trump voters would listen to for two minutes and switch off immediately because they could feel its condescension.
I could barely stand it myself, but I put up with it because the substance is really very good. And to be fair, I’m not Favreau’s target demographic, which appears to be heavily educated people in their 20s and 30s who live in large metro areas and who really, really like the word “bull-s—t”, which Favreau and his guests use with great and disturbing frequency.
For all its flaws, The Wilderness takes what I found was a serious and pretty honest deep dive into the history, mistakes and promise of the Democratic Party and of the political left. I think I would have enjoyed it more to read it as a short book because so much of what’s wrong with the podcast is the tone, the manner and the underlying self-satisfaction that comes through in the voice of the host and his guests. This would work better on paper.
That aside, two of the best episodes were Chapter 6, The Big We, and Chapter 11, The Filter. The Big We makes a crucial point that gets lost among a lot of Democrats these days and I give Favreau credit for arguing for something much of his audience does not want to hear, namely that you can’t just give up on blue collar white voters because there’s too many of them. The numbers just don’t work for a party that’s inclusive of everybody except less educated white folks.
And The Filter does a concise job of documenting the fall of traditional media and the effect that’s had on Democrats. We’re a party of people who respect facts, even sometimes ones that are uncomfortable for us. We’ve never been able to match the size and impact of an outlet like Fox News because, by nature, liberals tend to question things, not take marching orders.
While almost none of The Wilderness offers new insights or information, it still organizes things in a way that makes you think and it makes a few connections that I, at least, hadn’t thought much about. One of those observations is that there are 21 metro areas that used to have a newspaper with a bureau in Washington, D.C., but don’t now. The result is that there’s still plenty of Washington news but it comes from national outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. So, nobody dogs a state’s senators and representatives in Congress about how their votes impact folks back home.
As a result the national government seems even farther away and less relevant than ever. And because daily newspapers have been weakened overall, coverage of statehouses and local government is also pretty thin.
So here’s another step that my own thinking takes me, though Favreau doesn’t quite get this far. When Trump talks about “fake news” liberals go crazy because they think he’s just discrediting factual reporting that is critical of him. Of course he is, but I think that what a lot of his supporters hear goes deeper and even has a hint of validity. They sense that what gets reported, even when accurate, isn’t relevant to their worlds.
And I agree with that part of it. When The New York Times sends a reporter to the Midwest the stories read as if they’ve been sent on safari to explore the strange customs and attitudes of the natives. Similarly, National Public Radio’s premier news program All Things Considered has anchors in Washington and Culver City, California. You get the sense that they know there’s a bunch of land between Reagan National and LAX, but they’re really not sure just what’s down there and they have serious doubts that the sushi can be very good.
It’s not that they get the facts wrong, but the story selection and the sensibility with which they do the reporting is very much rooted in an urban, coastal reality. Just like Jon Favreau and his podcasts.
The Wilderness is worth 15 hours of your time for what it intends to deliver in terms of analysis of the state of the modern Democratic Party but also for what it delivers inadvertently in its tone of smug condescension. Favreau’s a smart guy. Maybe someday he’ll figure out that he’s the problem.
