Podcasts as Leftist Talk Radio, by Nate

My dad got stationed at U.S. European Command in 1990, and because of issues with on-base housing, we wound up living in a small town near Stuttgart, Germany. Although my mom spoke very good German and could watch the local news, American Forces Network was effectively a cultural lifeline for the rest of us. Because we didn't have cable or satellite, and because most German broadcast TV was pretty uninspired back then (it might still be), radio was our chief medium for news and entertainment.

In November 1992, Clinton won the Presidency, and my parents were devastated (whatever their politics were in the '70s, it didn't matter — they were in the military under Reagan and became committed Republicans). This is important because with our very devoted radio listening habits, it follows logically that they'd start listening to Rush Limbaugh (whose show appeared on AFN). By the time that we left Germany in mid-1993, they were converts. My mom even called in to Rush one time and got through — I remember how surreal it seemed to hear her voice on the air, only slightly out of sync with her voice in the other room, complaining about Hillary or something along those lines.

For better or worse, my parents were caught up in the early- to mid-'90s talk radio revolution that culminated in the 1994 Republican clawback of seats in the House and Senate, the era of Newt Gingrich and the various Clintonite programs that came back to haunt us in the 2016 election like the crime bill, 'ending welfare as we know it,' and so on. The Democrats, famously lacking in spines or ideology for the better part of the last half-century, caved to Republican demands fueled through both think-tank generated policy and an engaged voter base. Right-wing talk radio had a huge role in animating that voter base, and to this day it's still massively popular on everything from AM radio to fee-based satellite radio services (on a side note: I would love to be able to listen to Sirius's XMU indie rock station, but they run a right-wing talk radio channel called SiriusXM Patriot that includes Breitbart and Hannity — so fuck them into the sun).

There was never an equivalent to right-wing talk radio on the left, even though Air America tried its damnedest and failed very quickly (it was bankrupt within two years of its 2004 launch). Most of this owes to the fact that it's honestly hard to generate content for a left-wing audience in a manner similar to that of talk radio: listeners simply aren't homogeneous enough. No matter what your strand of American right-wing thought in the past 50 years, there are three universal qualities that make it much easier to attract an audience: racism, contempt for the weak, and anti-tax fundamentalism. I think the diversity of the left is an absolute strength, but it definitely makes it harder to create one-size-fits-all content. Also, I think it's important to recall that Aughts liberalism (given the near exclusion of the far left from all aspects of American life, certainly in that era) was useless and ineffective because it couldn't dare posit ideas to tangibly improve people's lives: it could only decry hypocrisy and unfairness. We were supposed to get excited because John Kerry wouldn't be a mean liar when he had his agents torture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's grade-school-age kids. That doesn't make for very compelling radio listening, or politics for that matter.

Some people are willing to sit through it because they need some sanity in their lives, which I get — I remember the sense of elation I felt when I'd periodically catch bits of the Daily Show while rotating back to FOB Sharana in 2009 and 2010 — but it's not enough to sustain a network that can outmatch the right-wing radio machine. Right-wing talk radio is cruel, venal, vulgar, and false, but if it’s not targeting you, it’s entertainment. If the best the liberals at Air America could offer was the criminally somnolent lineup of Janeane Garofolo, Al Franken, Ed Schultz, and Alan Colmes, it was doomed from the start. And very little of America's political establishment, the kinds of people who would bankroll and support left-of-center talk radio, has changed. But now we have podcasts.

To be fair, podcasts aren't new. And Marc Maron, whose WTF podcast is successful enough to secure Obama as a guest, is an Air America veteran. But the methods of distribution have changed: social media allows for entertainers to emerge without the formal vetting of an establishment platform, free- and low-cost communication and distribution networks have exploded (try finding someone to give you free hosting in 2004 when you needed anywhere from 1 to 10 TB in downloads per month), the cost of securing decent equipment has reduced, and funding models like Patreon exist for people who would never be able to find sponsors a decade and a half ago.

It would be foolish to say, "2018 will be like 1994 because of podcasts." The Democrats are impervious to evidence, gerrymandering has created an institutional advantage to Republicans, and if there is a wave election it will likely owe to a number of things unrelated to leftist media. But I think that a similar momentum is there; I think that the post-Sanders explosion of democratic socialism in this country is helped along by the transmission of leftist ideas and rhetoric, and as any MSNBC viewer can attest, that is not happening because of establishment media. The sheer multiplicity of ideas on the left, the diversity of voices and approaches to politics, and specificity of content available allows us to escape the bottleneck of "mainstream liberal content" that Air America generated. It's a hyper-specific derivative of talk radio that better captures who we are and what we care about.

We make money off our show, so I'd clearly be disingenuous if I acted like all of this positive sentiment is pure altruism. I want all podcasts to do well because I have a financial incentive at stake. But I also think about how much I would have appreciated a left-wing military podcast when I was in uniform, and how that might have helped me to identify with socialist politics much sooner than I did. If that's happening along similar lines because of this medium, and if it's paired with organizing, I think the political consequences will be felicitous for the left. And if nothing else, our shows will suck a lot less than whatever the hell they play on Sirius XM Patriot.