The Fantasy of a Liberal Joe

The weeks immediately succeeding an electoral loss, particularly a Democratic one, tend to be a stormy season of insta-postmortems and finger-pointing. Prescriptions abound: The party should’ve gone more to the left; the party should’ve gone more to the right; Joe Biden shouldn’t have stepped down; Bernie would’ve won. Among the clash of rapid takeaways is the notion that liberals need to “build their own Joe Rogan,” referring to the outsize shadow the podcaster casted over the final days leading up to the election. Trump went on the show on October 26, then J.D. Vance on October 31, then finally Elon Musk, their billionaire surrogate who finally sealed the deal on securing Rogan’s endorsement on November 4, which was then broadcast over social media right before Election Day.

We can’t be certain the extent to which Rogan’s endorsement actually helped tip the electoral contest toward a second Trump presidency, but it capped off what appears to be a successful execution of the Trump campaign’s strategy to employ a full-court press on the so-called “Manosphere” — the loose constellation of influencers like Flagrant’s Andrew Schulz, the comedian Theo Von, and techno-bro Lex Fridman who have collectively developed a constituency largely associated with, though not necessarily exclusive to, what you could refer to as “disaffected young men.” Rogan was the pièce de résistance of this push and its biggest possible get: The Joe Rogan Experience is still widely understood to be the most listened-to show in the podcast business by a wide margin but is particularly popular with men.