Yascha Mounk
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Jeremiah Johnson on Why Gen Z Isn’t Actually Doomed
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Jeremiah Johnson on Why Gen Z Isn’t Actually Doomed

Yascha Mounk and Jeremiah Johnson examine the disconnect between economic data and public sentiment about young Americans’ prospects.

Jeremiah Johnson is the co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism. He hosts the New Liberal Podcast and writes at Infinite Scroll.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jeremiah Johnson discuss why young Americans think the economy is worse than it actually is, whether social media has made us permanently pessimistic about institutions, and how elite failures are now exposed in real time.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.


Yascha Mounk: There’s been an interesting debate over the last few days on social media over why Zoomers are having trouble buying homes—why they’re doing so badly in material terms. One faction was saying, it’s all because they’re spoiled: they go out to lunch too often, they order on DoorDash all the time, and they just have terrible financial habits. The other half of the debate said, no, it’s because of neoliberalism—the economy is in a terrible state, and why are you blaming these poor kids? It’s not at all their fault; it’s our evil economic system. What do you think is actually going on?

Jeremiah Johnson: To set the stage for people who are blessedly offline and not poisoned in the same way that maybe you and I are: Kevin O’Leary—the guy who calls himself Mr. Wonderful and is on TV—gave an interview where he said something along the lines of, it makes me sick when I see some young kid who’s making $70,000 a year spending $28 on lunch. This went viral in the way that these things do, because it’s intergenerational conflict—people yelling at each other about their personal budgets. One group was saying, yeah, that’s ridiculous, $28 for lunch—kind of redoing the whole avocado toast thing that everybody’s aware of. Bizarrely, certain left-leaning commentators jumped in to defend the Zoomers. Sometimes this took on the bizarre quality of: well, lunch just costs $28 now—have you looked at a menu recently? Or: people need to use DoorDash because they’re disabled and they can’t make lunch for themselves—and in this case “disabled” usually means having an anxiety disorder and being unable to talk to people.

Mounk: I’m sure there are some people who are disabled and generally can’t make lunch for themselves, but that is not the average person.

Johnson: That is very much not the average person. On a very basic level, you can join one side or the other: you can say it’s ridiculous to pay $28 for lunch and that you can easily pack a lunch, or you can join the people who say this is not the reason Gen Z can’t buy a home—that saving $5 on lunch is not going to allow you to buy an $800,000 home in a nice metro area. But there’s an implicit assumption in both of these arguments that things are indeed really bad for Gen Z, that Zoomers are suffering, that they’re never going to be able to afford a home, that it’s really bleak out there. People have this sense of doom about the economy.

What I find interesting is that’s just not true, at all, if you look at the data. Gen Z is actually buying homes at an increased rate compared to where millennials were at the same age. Gen Z homeownership is tracking significantly higher than millennial homeownership, and Gen Z is earning more money than any previous generation—not literally at this moment, because they’re all young and early in their careers.

Mounk: The average 25-year-old today makes more money than the average 25-year-old 10, 30, or 50 years ago—and presumably not just in nominal dollar terms. Even adjusting for inflation, that is true.

Johnson: Even in real terms, it is true. This entire narrative around Zoomers being screwed—I just don’t think it’s true. The general economic picture certainly has some downsides. The entry-level job market right now does look a little grim, inflation is higher than we’d like it to be, and there are some things you can point to. But unemployment has been lower than 5% for five straight years now, job growth is good, and GDP growth is good. This is, relatively speaking, a pretty good economy. If you are waiting for some other economy to show up that’s going to blow this one out of the water, I’m sorry to report you’re going to be waiting for a while.

To me, the interesting part of this is not who’s right about the question of the $28 lunch. What’s interesting is: why do we all think that society is doomed, that this generation is doomed, when the numbers and the reality on the ground just don’t bear that out?

Mounk: I’ve been thinking about this in a slightly broader context, and then in the narrow context of liberalism. Perhaps let’s start with the broader context. People now have much less trust in institutions, and they have, generally speaking, a more negative view of the world—at least in North America and Western Europe. The question is: why is that? Is it that institutions have gotten worse? Is it that institutions have always been bad in all kinds of ways, but social media allows us to see those failures much more easily? Even a politician’s most embarrassing moment in the past probably wasn’t caught on camera—or if it was, it would have been played once on the evening news for five seconds. Now, every time a politician posts something on social media, the first comment is going to be a five-second clip of them choking on a pretzel or whatever. We are just much more aware of the weakest moments of people in institutions. Or is it that institutions were pretty good 15 or 30 years ago and are pretty good today, but we now have an unduly negative view of them?

Johnson: There’s some nuance here. Our institutions have absolutely gotten worse, and specifically in the last year under Donald Trump 2.0, we’ve seen a rate of institutional decay that we have not seen in decades, in generations. Our institutions are absolutely being hammered. But I really do think that, broadly speaking, that is for the most part a last year or two kind of phenomenon.

Mounk: But in an interesting way, that is sort of downstream from the previous stuff—which is to say, it’s because people soured so much on the institutions and became so mistrustful of them that Trump was elected for a second time. Now, in fact, in office, he is degrading institutions at a very alarming rate. But in a way, that comes downstream from people having lost faith in those institutions, which is what allowed him to win power again in the first place.

Johnson: What I was going to say is that the things we’re talking about predate the election of Donald Trump for the second time. Consumer sentiment is at the lowest it’s ever been right now, unemployment is something like four and a half percent, and job numbers remain pretty decent. Yet if you ask people, they report lower consumer sentiment than they did during the 70s stagflation, than they did during the Great Recession, than they did during the COVID recession. You can extend this to all sorts of things that are not just the economy. People think that race relations are worse than they were 30 years ago, that gender equality is worse than it was 30 years ago.


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You can look up all the Gallup polling—Gallup does a lot of very good polling over time where they ask the same question for decades, so you can really see how people are answering the same question over time. People think that race relations and gender relations are significantly worse than they were in the 90s, which I feel like would come as news to Rodney King. Certainly race relations have hit some rough spots in the last few years. But the idea that we’re not making progress strikes me as incorrect.

To keep going: when they ask whether people think crime has gotten better or worse in the last year—they’ve asked this for 30 or 40 years straight—in something like 29 out of the last 32 years, people think crime got worse. People think crime is getting worse every single year. The 90s were absolutely a high point for crime, and yet people continually believe it’s worsening, despite the fact that crime has been on a very large decline from the mid-90s until now. It’s not even a comparison.

So in every way—economically, socially, with crime, with everything—people think things are getting worse. I do think that is a function of our media ecosystem and the ways that has changed, and I think social media plays a lot into this. There’s an interesting question of how differently social media shapes our expectations as opposed to the forms of media we used to have—the nightly news, newspapers.

Mounk: To play devil’s advocate: if people have said for 29 out of the last 30 years that crime has gotten worse, that predates social media. So perhaps there is just a general tendency for people on particular topics like crime to see the world very negatively. One interesting thing is that, in the same way people absolutely hate Congress but often like their own congressman, people sometimes think crime is terrible in the world but their own neighborhood is kind of fine. Part of this is that the places people know very well they can often judge relatively accurately, whereas the places that are far away from them they end up having very negative stereotypes about.

But insofar as it’s true that on all these other metrics overall sentiment has gotten worse—and I think the evidence of that is pretty clear—why is that? Is it social media? Is it that our media environment has changed? Or is it that our institutions deliver less for people than they once did?

What’s certainly true is that you had a very rapid improvement in living standards that was really anomalous in human history, and that completely shaped our implicit baseline. When we think about what a normal developed economy or a normal consolidated democracy looks like, we tend to think about the 1960s and 1970s, which were a period of just extraordinary economic growth. The living standards of the average American doubled from 1935 to 1960, and doubled again from 1960 to 1985. At some point it becomes harder to grow at that pace.

Even though, as you’re pointing out, the story is actually much less dire than it’s often believed—I have an article showing that the economic doomerism of the 2010s, where a number of economists argued that inequality was only growing, that global economic growth only benefited the richest, and that wages were stagnating for the middle class in America, was significantly challenged or revised—we tend to think Zoomers are doing worse, when actually they’re doing better than millennials were at the same juncture. So the story is not that negative. But it is true that I don’t feel like my living standard is vastly better than my mom’s was, and I don’t think my kids are likely to have a vastly better living standard than I do. Fifty years ago, people probably did feel that way.

Johnson: There are a couple of books I would point to here. There’s a great book by Robert Gordon, where he examines the nature of economic growth called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. He argues that we had this really anomalous period of wild growth that was more than just the headline GDP number—that it was really impactful stuff. We were electrifying the country, we were inventing new forms of household appliances that eliminated a significant amount of manual labor, we were really revolutionizing a bunch of things. And that the computer revolution, while significant, has not actually changed daily life in quite the same way that plumbing, electricity, appliances, and antibiotics did.

Mounk: Life expectancy shot up in the middle of the 20th century because of inventions like antibiotics and because, for the first time, most people had access to medical care—and it’s hard to replicate that a second time.

Johnson: There’s some argument that our current level of growth is just not as emotionally or viscerally impactful as previous growth was. But I would also point to a second book called Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. The thesis of Revolt of the Public is that everyone is mad all of the time about everything, and this will basically be the state of things forever.

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Gurri is a really interesting figure. He wrote this book essentially before Trump, before Brexit—when he wrote it, he was talking about things like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and different protests in Spain and Israel about the general state of society and cost of living. He was looking at this from a roughly 2012, 2013 perspective. His thesis is basically that elites and institutions have always failed to deliver on their promises—that is the human condition, as far back as you can possibly go. But it used to not matter that much, because we had media systems that either protected the elites, covered for them, or made it very hard to organize around those failures. What social media has done is made those failures—which have always been happening—very obvious in real time, and made it very easy to organize around them.

He gives the example of JFK’s invasion of the Bay of Pigs: early in his presidency, JFK tried to invade Cuba using a group of Cuban émigrés, and it turned out to be a complete disaster. A bunch of people got killed, it was hugely embarrassing—and the reaction from the press was basically, that’s too bad, he’s a young president, he’s learning, he’s growing into the role. They were just fully covering for him. Can you imagine the United States trying and failing to invade a country in 2026 and the press simply saying, oops, we’ll get them next time? You can also think about FDR—there was a kind of gentleman’s agreement that nobody was going to talk about the fact that he had polio and could barely stand up. That kind of informal agreement simply doesn’t exist today. Social media makes it impossible.

The result is that people are constantly being bombarded with the failures of elites and institutions, constantly angry about it, and don’t have much of an idea what to do with all that anger. This is kind of the defining feature of a lot of these movements—Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring—that they know what they are against but don’t really know what they are for. The Arab Spring was not for anything in particular: some people wanted liberal democracy, some wanted Islamism, some wanted an entirely separate set of things. Occupy Wall Street was united by anger but had no real policy agenda. You can see the same thing when you look at Brexit or Trumpism—these are movements primarily against something, not really unified in what they are for. They just know they’re very angry and that they need to toss out the people who were in charge. I think the media environment has a lot to do with why people are so dissatisfied all the time about everything.

Mounk: Revolt of the Public is a really interesting book—I’ve had Martin on the podcast for a couple of conversations, so if people are interested, they should go and look at those episodes. The thing that is quite persuasive in Martin’s book is the somewhat nihilistic impact this might have. What he calls the periphery—these self-organizing publics, people who come together for some cause very quickly and might also very quickly dissipate—has a really strong ability to take on power and challenge hierarchies, but a really weak ability to actually organize, impose a structure of their own, or coherently put forward an alternative program. What you get is this lurching from one thing to another. There’s a kind of nihilistic, restless element to it. I find that quite persuasive.

In terms of the movements you talked about, I would quibble a little and say there are distinctions between them. Occupy Wall Street was a set of people who had somewhat unified politics for all their differences, but no concrete vision—they wanted to occupy Wall Street and make Wall Street go away, and it’s just not really clear what that means or what they wanted to put in its place. A bunch of them were influenced by a kind of utopian socialist thinking which, compared to where a lot of progressive spaces are today, seems somewhat charmingly quaint. The thinking was that it’s impossible to really make an alternative to the current system within the system, and so it would take a democratic revolutionary process to figure that out—and so somewhat deliberately, they didn’t want to offer that alternative upfront. That really was an example of a movement that just didn’t have a clear alternative in mind.

The Arab Spring was different, because a lot of the people who took part did have very clear visions of what they wanted—just different visions. What they were united around was getting rid of these old, corrupt, moribund dictators who had been dominating their countries for so long. They could build a coalition around that shared goal, but what to put in its place divided them entirely: some genuinely wanted a liberal democracy, others wanted a Muslim Brotherhood-style soft Islamic government, others wanted an even more fundamentalist Islamist government. So it’s not that nobody had an idea of what they wanted—it’s that they all had different ideas, which is a slightly different problem.

I want to connect all of this to the question of liberalism. In a way, these are two separate questions—we’ve been thinking about the legitimacy of institutions, and our institutions are in certain respects liberal but in other respects not perfectly so. But I do think liberalism faces a similar set of problems, because people associate liberalism with the status quo, and because part of our political order has been built by liberalism. A lot of what’s good in our world exists insofar as it actually lives up to liberal principles and precepts. The trouble that liberals have in defending their ideas is, I think, a little bit related to the trouble that institutions have in sustaining respect and approval. Because on social media, whether you’re clobbering liberalism from the left or from the right, it’s very easy to say everything is terrible. The person pointing out that, actually, Zoomers are buying homes at higher rates than previous generations, or that there are some pretty good things in our world compared to any other epoch in human history, just doesn’t have standing in that debate.

Is that an inherent feature of liberalism as a political ideology, or just of our political order being somewhat liberal and therefore representing the status quo and being mistrusted? Or is it the fault of liberals for not knowing how to argue for their positions on social media? You’re obviously well placed to speak to that question as somebody who has really thought about how to argue for liberal points of view in the daily battle of social media.

Johnson: I don’t think it’s an inherent feature of liberalism that it’s just destined to lose arguments on social media. But I do think there’s an inherent feature of social media that benefits extremist ideologies—that extremism in virtually all of its forms is inherently more viral and more algorithmically beneficial than moderation. Liberalism has not always been the moderate option. There were points in history where to be a liberal was to be at one of the extreme ends of the political spectrum—liberalism was a very revolutionary form of politics. But that’s no longer the case. For all intents and purposes in the West, philosophical liberalism has built virtually all of our institutions, and liberals were the great victors of the 20th century—winning World War II, winning the Cold War. So, they are the ones poised to lose in a new system that basically ensures whatever’s currently in power is likely to be tossed out.

One of the ways I like to think about extremism on the internet is through a non-political example. Say you’re on YouTube, bored, just surfing, and you see something about someone who baked a four-pound cake. Would you click on that? Maybe not—it’s not that interesting. What about a 40-pound cake? What about the world’s largest cake, a Guinness World Record 400-pound cake? You’re much more likely to click on that. This holds true for basically any form of content.

The world’s most popular social media influencer is a guy named Mr. Beast, a YouTuber whose whole thing is that he just does really, really big things. His first viral video came when he got $10,000 from his first big brand deal and said, I’m just going to give this to a random homeless person on the street. It went insanely viral. So in the next video he gave $20,000, then $50,000, and then he just bought a house and gave it to someone on the street. He just kept going bigger, and he became the world’s biggest influencer—he has something like half a billion followers on YouTube and is about to hit 500 million. His entire ethos is: never go small when you could go big.

The internet has done this in a lot of ways. If you’re a spicy food enthusiast before the internet, you might know one or two restaurants with really spicy food, or subscribe to some niche magazine, or order a really spicy sauce by mail. These days you can go online and see people breeding the Carolina Reaper crossed with something that registers 10 trillion Scoville units. You can literally chart the spiciness of the hottest pepper over time, and it’s gone off the charts. This is just what the internet does—it pushes everything to its extremes. It’s doing that to our politics too.

Which political message do you think goes more viral? One that says the world is burning and we’re all going to die in the next 30 years from climate change, and the oligarchs have screwed us, and the reason you can’t get ahead is all these greedy people looting the world while it burns to the ground? Or one that says climate change is a serious problem and some people are certainly going to be harmed by it, but if we have the right policies we can mitigate that harm, and society will probably be fine in the end, and economic growth will probably continue? The first one goes incredibly viral. The other one gets maybe seven total likes. This is just a feature of how algorithms work—things that inspire a response inherently go more viral.

Mounk: How do you think about pushing that reasonable message in a way that is more exciting? You started a bunch of accounts called Neoliberalism and other things—and I don’t want to presume your opinion about climate change, but I’m guessing that the boring message is a message you in fact believe in. So are we just doomed? Is that message just never going to cut through? You don’t seem to think it’s doomed, because you seem to think it is in fact worth engaging on Twitter, on Reddit, on all kinds of other platforms, trying to push out that more middle-ground message if you believe it to be true. Is it a question of repackaging it? Is it engaging in the fight knowing you’re always going to be at a disadvantage and will probably lose, but it’s worth at least trying? What’s your rationale, and how do you go about doing that?

Johnson: I think we’re always going to be at a structural disadvantage—and by “we” I don’t necessarily even mean liberals, but just anyone who tries to offer nuance and depth and reasonableness, who wants to provide a message that plays towards factual reality rather than emotional reality. There’s always going to be a structural disadvantage. It doesn’t mean that you can’t win, but it does mean that you’re starting at a disadvantage. So you have to take certain steps.

The reason this all exists is because social media rewards the opposite of nuance—it rewards really quick reactions and thoughts. Sometimes I like to think back to what the media was like in a previous era. I think back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, to go all the way back to pre-Civil War. This was the hottest thing happening in 1858—these debates were national news, the front page of every single newspaper. You know how they were structured: one man would give an hour-long speech uninterrupted, the second would give a 90-minute rebuttal, and then the first would come back for a 30-minute closing. This was to packed venues—people’s attention spans were such that they were riveted by it. Today, our political discourse has devolved from that to the Buckley-Chomsky debates, to CNN Crossfire, to just 10-second out-of-context clips on social media. The age of nuance is dead, to some extent.

But there are some things you can do. You can create these little islands of quality. The fact that social media is structurally against nuance doesn’t mean that nuance will never survive anywhere—there are still going to be people who care about it. You can create communities of people that actually want to understand the world in a realistic way, and I think those communities are what allows you to get your message out. You have to build a group of people that cares about something, whether that’s in a subreddit, a Discord server, a Substack newsletter, or a podcast like this—people who actually care about the world as it really exists and about nuanced, complicated, complex questions that can’t be answered in 10 seconds. If you can get those people, keep them, and convince them that they’re not just individuals but part of a group, that this is part of their identity, that’s really powerful. That’s part of what we’re trying to do at the Center for New Liberalism—build an identity around that kind of politics. Because identity is really powerful.

Mounk: There are a few slightly different questions here that feel identical but are important to keep distinct. One question is: are the extremes—the people who are angry, the loudest, the least subtle—always going to dominate certain social media platforms, particularly the ones that are especially political? That seems likely. It seems likely to me that Twitter, by its nature, is always going to be dominated by the most extreme people.

The question is also what “winning” and “having an advantage” actually mean. The most viral tweet is often going to be pretty extreme—but that’s different from whether the tweet actually persuades and convinces people. Part of it is that the people who are on Twitter exposed to political content are already quite a small percentage of the population. Most people seek out social media, but not primarily for political content—they might encounter political content every now and again, but the people whose Twitter feed is dominated by political tweets rather than sports or gossip are a very self-selected minority. That’s an important thing to bear in mind.

The other thing I was wondering about is whether there might not at some point be a kind of course correction in norms and expectations. There was a time when it was enough for three or four people to claim they were terribly offended by some exhibit, play, movie, or speech for that to go super viral, for The New York Times to write up the controversy in very neutral terms, and for the thing to get canceled. There was a time when you could post a 10-second video of somebody seeming to misbehave without any context and everybody would credulously jump on the bandwagon and say, that must be a terrible human being. Eventually people kind of got the message—they realized that this was just inviting conflict entrepreneurs to gin up completely spurious cancellation attempts, where a lot of the time the 10-second video came from a five-minute context in which somebody was being antagonized for four minutes and 50 seconds, and all that gets captured is the 10 seconds where they can’t take it anymore. Nowadays, quite often when people post that kind of content, the median response is not credulous outrage but: why is it only 10 seconds? What about the rest of it? People have become a little bit smarter about it, and the appetite for that kind of social media drama has somewhat abated. I don’t want to overstate the point—there’s still a lot of social media nonsense—but it does feel like people have gained some kind of literacy.

So I wonder whether at some point something similar is going to happen with extreme political views and statements—whether at some point people are going to say, here’s another person breathlessly making this exaggerated claim, and just roll their eyes or push back. Whether we might over time learn to adapt in ways that lessen that advantage. Is that overly optimistic?

Johnson: I think it might be, to be honest. Unless we change the way that algorithmic feeds are constructed—the way TikTok operates, Instagram Reels, Twitter, and Facebook, which is still very influential among older generations—unless we literally change the nature of algorithms, the saying holds: a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. We know scientifically that negative information is more viral than positive information. So in terms of just the way our information systems are set up, we’re always going to be operating at a disadvantage. We might still win certain battles, but we’re going to be the underdogs a lot.

Where I am a little more optimistic is that I think we can’t spend the entire time thinking about this problem just in terms of messaging, because the other thing that actually influences how people feel is reality on the ground. When you do enough good for a long enough time, people do notice. I’ve been talking about how things are good but people believe they’re bad—but even in that context, if you do enough, people start to notice that their lives are improving. The stimulus checks during the pandemic were very, very popular. Now, did they help Joe Biden get reelected? No, because they went out three and a half years before the reelection campaign. But I don’t want to make the case so strong that material reality just doesn’t matter anymore, because it still does matter when you don’t deliver for people.

Trump was reelected largely on the back of cost of living, and he is making the cost of living crisis worse. He started a war with Iran, so gas prices are spiking. He’s implementing tariffs all over the place, so consumer products are more expensive. People notice, and he’s less popular than he’s ever been. The hope, obviously, is that if we can elect someone with better, liberal principles to succeed him and reverse some of the damage, people will actually notice that we’ve started fixing problems—and that leads to a virtuous cycle rather than the damaging cycle that we’re in now.

Mounk: In terms of actually being present on social media and making the case—give us some examples of how you thought about making the case for philosophically liberal principles on social media. What was the goal? It sounds like the goal wasn’t necessarily to have the most viral tweets, but to have enough presence to create a tribe of people. And I don’t know that I’d recommend to any podcast listeners to engage actively on social media, but if they want to engage and be active, how should we think about what they can do to put forward reasonable, moderate points of view—without getting into a polarization spiral, without getting slowly incentivized to make more and more extreme statements? What should the goal be, and what are the means?

Johnson: One of the ways I like to think about this is that social media breeds extremism and conflict. Conflict drives engagement, engagement metrics get noticed by the algorithm, and the algorithm sends more people to the conflict. Social media is just built structurally to encourage conflict. You can think about it as roving groups of tribally aligned people who yell at each other all the time—and that’s not necessarily a bad model of social media, whether it’s political, whether it’s pop stan armies like the Sabrina Carpenter people yelling at the Taylor Swift people, or how sports fandoms work online.

But there’s another way to think about it. You’ve got all these tribal identities roaming around—K-pop stans, Oklahoma City Thunder fans, liberals versus socialists versus MAGAs—and one thing you can do is just make your tribe an attractive place to be. You can cultivate your garden, so to speak, rather than sending people out to fight all the time. Create spaces that are informative, friendly, welcoming, and fun—and fun is an important part of it. People have to want to be there. If you can do that, you’ll see those spaces grow, because people want to spend time talking about the things they care about in a place where they’re not going to get yelled at, with people who might agree with them, teach them something, or just give them a good time. Inside jokes and iconography are an important part of this.

Weirdly, a lot of this is the same way that religions form—and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad analogy, because people believe in their current political ideologies with a very religious fervor. But if you want to build a community, it needs to have visuals, it needs to have iconography, it should have its patron saints. If you are a socialist, that’s probably Marx, Lenin and Mao. If you are a liberal, maybe that’s Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke. The early days of the neoliberal movement were punctuated by doing lots of memes with Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen with lasers coming out of their eyes defeating the populists. It was just a bunch of silly fun—but that’s the kind of thing that makes people happy, makes them come back, and makes them start to identify not just as someone who agrees with a set of ideas, but as one of these people. This is who I am, rather than just this is a thing I kind of believe. That’s a very powerful thing to create.

So the model of building a garden, tending your garden, expanding your garden—building a community that actually reflects the values you want to see in the world—is a very powerful thing. You can see this in movements like Effective Altruism, the New Liberals that I’ve been a part of, and in the way the left built power through the 90s and 2000s before the Bernie Sanders explosion. Getting beyond just fighting all the time and building something internally is one of the ways we can short-circuit the cycle we’ve been talking about.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jeremiah discuss the new liberal ecosystem and how to build a lasting online community. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

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