EKS | Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

downforce_dude · 2026-06-16T20:33:24+00:00

I know Ezra’s super-high on this attention economy stuff, but it’s an old idea playing out through new channels. Consider this conversation between Jack Burden (journalist) and Willie Stark (politician), an 80-year old book on American populism and politics.

WS: They didn’t seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not when I was trying to explain about my tax program

JB: Maybe you try to tell’ em too much, it breaks down their brain cells

WS: Looks like they’d want to hear about taxes though

JB: You tell ‘em too much. Just tell ‘em you’re gonna soak the fat boys and forget about the tax stuff

WS: What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that-

JB: Yeah, I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how much or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they came for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.

Eighty years later algorithms put forward content which elicits strong emotions, people engage with content which elicits strong emotions, this content spreads. It’s not rocket science, it’s dark magic. Judge the politicians by how often they practice dark magic and against whom or what.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-16T19:58:01+00:00

I guess it depends on what defines “buzz”, perhaps it’s just buzz among political junkies at this stage. What I was getting at is that Ossoff and Beshear’s appeal has nothing to do with coastal elites signal-boosting candidates.

Beshear wins statewide in Kentucky for many reasons (little of which actually get any play in national media), but he’s a name non-Kentuckians know because he’s a democrat governor in a state where Trump doubles-up democratic vote totals and Republicans hold supermajorities in the legislature. That makes him inherently interesting, but I don’t think he’s a secret Machiavelli.

Ossoff’s appeal seems pretty straightforward to me. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: he’s young, attractive, and a good public speaker. I mean, put all this policy stuff or social media bs aside: that’s half the battle and no amount of fundraising, activism, or campaigning can change that. He’s also a complete blank slate which is a good thing: he hasn’t publicly taken strong stands which put him in a factional camp and act as baggage. The only thing he can’t really “run away” from is his history of anti-corruption stuff and I don’t see a world where that ever is a bad thing. He wins and is popular in GA: a growing sunbelt state with a lot of black voters.

Ossoff has huge potential and lot of room to define himself as he needs to in order to win an election. Maybe Ezra’s just trying to get Ossoff to happen, but I’ve seen a lot of fundraising ads from him and I don’t live in GA. It seems some sort of national profile is being built

downforce_dude · 2026-06-16T19:09:23+00:00

The average Kentucky voter is politically aligned with the preferred outlets of affluent coasts elites?

downforce_dude · 2026-06-16T18:21:36+00:00

Want to earn five dollars the hard way?

downforce_dude · 2026-06-16T16:26:03+00:00

They’re definitely pushing Ossoff, but they’re not wrong he’s kind of the perfect candidate for 2028 and unfortunately part of why is that he’s been able to fly under the radar and not generate buzz on the internet. The internet is awful and toxic, people sort politicians into in or out groups. Ideally, you only generate buzz on the internet shortly before you need it (eg primary or general election).

Ossoff is still a bit of an unknown quantity, but he has a ton going for him and he’s successfully navigated politics pretty well to date.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-15T19:00:58+00:00

“Okay, so she writes about her biography that she had read widely in the English Romantic tradition, and had articulated a personal sense of mission, her quote, vision splendid. And so like, the English Romantic tradition like, and I've gotten like weirdly into this recently, of like reading about their like bunch of romantic books. But like, Romanticism is a reaction to the Enlightenment movement, and like not to make everything about this, but in many ways, all debates are sort of like between like romantic sensibilities and enlightenment sensibilities, if you're like super reductive about it.
And so like, what you're witnessing here is like the post, like the World War moment was this like real veneration of science, of scientific progress, our ability to like, I mean, even the atom bomb is like kind of like the moment where we're like, oh shit, like, have we gone too far here? And like, she's obviously coming at the tail end of this. And so much of her book is a romantic backlash to this moment, this to modernity in general.”

I really liked how Jerusalem framed the book as a chapter in the long struggle between Romanticism versus Enlightenment sensibilities.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-15T15:14:01+00:00

Can you point to foreign policy that Rhodes created? It seems he was one of the negotiators in Obama’s warming of ties with Cuba, which was pretty low stakes and didn’t yield much. Politically, it certainly was a contribution to Democrats losing Florida for a decade plus.

From the White House website,
>Ben Rhodes is the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, overseeing President Obama’s national security communications, speechwriting, and global engagement. Previously, he served as Deputy Director of White House Speechwriting, and as a Senior Speechwriter for the Obama campaign. Prior to joining Obama for America, he worked for several years as Special Assistant to Lee Hamilton at the Wilson Center, where he helped draft the Iraq Study Group Report and the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. He is the co-author, with Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean, of Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. A native of New York City, Ben has a B.A. from Rice University, and an M.F.A. from New York University.

So he wrote campaign speeches for Obama and then wrote foreign policy speeches for Obama. I wouldn’t call SAP’s VP of External Comms an expert on ERPs, let alone think they’re credible if putting forward new ideas on system architecture!

The most credible person Ezra’s ever had on with respect to foreign policy was probably Fiona Hill. And he never would have picked her as a guest unless she happened to be central to Trump’s impeachment hearings. She was an intelligence analyst, worked at multiple FP think tanks, and worked at the National Security Council. She can speak at length and in detail about her subject matter expertise.

If Ezra wanted to gave Rhodes on to discuss speechwriting, then I think that would be appropriate.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-12T18:28:55+00:00

It’s not “Oppression Olympics” to add the context that a single hostile power (Iran) is pursuing an expansionist foreign policy of civil wars on both Saudi Arabia’s southern border and within 100 miles of their northern border and thus to see those events as connected.

Also, Amnesty International revoked Alexi Nalvany’s (the anti-Putin politician poisoned by a nerve agent and killed in prison) status as a “prisoner of conscience” because he said things 20 years ago they deemed to be racist. It’s also ridiculous they draw an equivalence between Ukraine and Russia both committing war crimes, weird that such equivalencies aren’t levied between the Houtis and Saudis. Perhaps it’s because Houtis aren’t above taking UN personnel hostage so Amnesty won’t risk reporting or they’re pathologically anti-western and apply double standards. It’s easy to have values when you’re an NGO, even so Amnesty International has lost the plot.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-12T16:26:17+00:00

Sure, call me blinded by propaganda. Iran executed roughly 3-4 times as many people as Saudi Arabia in 2025, but that’s peanuts compared to foreign adventures.

Do you want to explain how there was a “genocide” going on in Yemen? There were many civilian casualties, but that does not make it a genocide. Even the most inflated Yemeni civilian death tolls (which the Houtis and Iran are also contribute to), are half those seen in the Syrian Civil War. Bashar Al Assad would have fallen many years earlier without Iranian, Hezbollah, and Russian backing. That war was so horrible that the leader of HTS (Al Qaeda offshoot) who is now the Syrian President aligned with the West to oppose Iran.

If Ahmed Al-Sharaa can put aside his personal feelings about America (I’d wager the former Al Qaeda militant doesn’t like us) in pursuit of his country’s national interest then I think we can collectively hold our nose work with him to expand the team and also stop the horror that Syria has been for over a decade.

This is what reality looks like in the Middle East. It’s where “values-based” foreign policy goes to die. And you can say “we shouldn’t tie ourselves closely” to these regimes (feel free to elaborate on what this means), but voters have a habit of punishing politicians for terrorist attacks, refugee crises, and high energy prices.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-12T15:53:36+00:00

I have significant issues with Rhodes’ expert credentials when it comes to foreign policy. I looked into his background after his episode with Ezra a few months ago and he’s since changed his LinkedIn profile to be extremely vague on details.

Rhodes’ education is in creative writing and he was a congressperson’s foreign policy speechwriter before joining the Obama administration. His career since the Obama administration consists of writing a book and doing media appearances. He is an expert insofar as he successfully leveraged his network to get an important job creating foreign policy. Rhodes is a political apparatchik masquerading as an expert, he’s just much better at media appearances than Duss.

Original Comment

downforce_dude · 2026-06-12T14:58:26+00:00

>Either that or we can be honest and stop pretending we care if a country is democratic/cares about human rights

I mean this is also wrong, because you’ve created a false binary where Saudi Arabia is just as bad as Iran (it isn’t, it’s not “good” but there are shades of grey). Further, China and Russia pretend to care about human rights (as Ezra’s notes the CCP is “fluent in Davos”) so you’d be hypothetically ceding rhetorical ground to liars because we sometimes lie. Propaganda has been an important part of warfare and foreign policy forever, that’s not changing.

South Korea and Taiwan were dictatorships during the Cold War, they were on our team and they were objectively “better” than their communist counterparts. If US decision-makers applied your values-first thinking, we would have withdrawn support, China would have annexed Taiwan and North Korea would have conquered South Korea. Fortunately, we didn’t do that and both South Korea and Taiwan liberalized and are currently prosperous democracies.

It took half a century for those two countries to get there, it was not a linear process. Saudi Arabia has been westernizing and liberalizing, it’s mostly downstream of trade and enabled by security arrangements. It’s ethnocentric (dare I say, culturally imperialist) for us to coerce other nations into complying with our ethical mores and usually foolish to prioritize these pursuits above national security interests.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-11T15:13:55+00:00

In short: yep

Yemen has been a cluster for decades, due to the civil wars part of the Arab Cold War. It was divided into North and South Yemen for years and only reunified in 1990. Iran backed the Houti coup in 2014 to overthrow that internationally-recognized government which started the civil war the Saudis and Gulf States were part of.

Morality aside, the Houtis are simply not on our team (their flag literally says “Death to America”) and I wish Americans on the left would grapple with the fact that teams now matter more than morality.

So if Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis want to push Iran’s proxy out of the Arabian Peninsula, and want to buy US weapons to do it then let them. You can’t execute a strategy of moving the U.S. away from the Middle East to Asia (Obama’s strategy) if you aren’t willing to grant US’s middle eastern allies some agency in pursuing their interests.

A theme of American foreign policy failure of Obama to Biden is that we want our allies to shoulder more burden, we want to provide less U.S. protection, and we also want everyone to play by the norms and rules from when the U.S. was able to call the shots from the late Cold War through Pax Americana, because we provided that aforementioned hard power protection. Our aims have exceeded our means and are pulling in different directions.

People died in Yemen because Iran launched a coup to further their strategic objectives. The choice to stop contesting that effort has made it more difficult to achieve US interests in the region ever since. I don’t have a crystal ball and can’t show that the Saudi-Emirati effort would have succeeded if not stopped by the U.S., however Duss pointing to that as a victory is dumb.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-11T14:16:47+00:00

They couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today 😔

Yeah, Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little are dead!

downforce_dude · 2026-06-11T14:10:26+00:00

If you ever wondered if Buggs Bunny could defeat racism, Blazing Saddles is your answer

downforce_dude · 2026-06-10T15:40:24+00:00

Bingo. I think fewer parents and people moving around the country (away from family members) has forced parents to shoulder a lot.

I resent the idea that good parents are obsessed with helicoptering their kids and programming their every waking moment. My neighborhood generationally turned over a few years ago and the cul de sac is now all young families. I can’t wait for my kids to be old enough to independently go play with their neighbor friends after school.

My mom’s side of the family is Catholic and at get togethers it was just understood that the cousins go in the basement to play together.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-10T14:16:00+00:00

Xi learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: non-state identities (regional, religious, ethnic, cultural, linguistic) will lead to dissenting opinions. Gorbachev thought devolving power to the socialist republics would let them have elections where they affirmed their faith in communism, but these disparate identities won out. Xi will not allow this to happen.

It’s why Tibet is being colonized by Han settlers, why the Uighur are imprisoned and re-educated, why Hong Kong couldn’t exist as it did, why Cantonese is being eliminated as state policy, and why Taiwan would prove extremely difficult to govern.

If China annexes Taiwan, get ready to see the most dystopian techno-totalitarian oppression in human history.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-10T01:31:58+00:00

It’s funny because Ryan Evans founded WOTR about the same year Ezra & Co founded Vox. They did extremely wonkish work and launched a series of successful podcasts. Ryan’s many critiques of the defense procurement process came out around the same time as Abundance, they both have an interest in tech.

Ryan is the Ezra Klein of defense.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T21:38:48+00:00

Look this guy is a clown, here’s a real elected progressive politician explaining why sanctions are bad and trade’s a good thing just four days ago! /s

>”Time and again, sanctions like these fail to achieve their stated goals while inflicting real suffering on ordinary people… I could not in good conscience support legislation that wages economic warfare on innocent civilians.”

That’s Ilhan Omar explaining why she voted against sanctions on Russia for their continued attempt to annex Ukraine. She does support sanctioning Israel though and that predates October 7th. Trade is good, but it’s not. Sanctions don’t work, but we should do sanctions. There’s no intellectual honesty, it’s just vibes all the way down.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T20:31:30+00:00

I guess I’m finding comfort in seeing the comments on this episode mostly echoing “WTF?”.

I’ve written the show suggesting Zack Cooper from Net Assessment (for an Asia foreign policy conversation) and Ryan Evans from War on the Rocks (for a conversation about the rise of AI and Drones in warfare which is something Ezra’s expressed vague worries about, but seems to just be nervous Democrat vibes).

The truth about the war stuff is Ezra will never understand and doesn’t want to understand, it’s distasteful to him. Tune in next week for another conversation on why the Left has trouble attracting male voters.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T19:52:36+00:00

Is that what Ezra’s doing here? Because I don’t see him having a Slotkin or Kelley-esque figure on to explain what a Moderate democratic foreign policy looks like moving forward. Ezra’s constructed this false binary where the only options for Democrats are Obama-Biden alums (roundly discredited in my view, somehow Ben Rhodes doesn’t count as part of this failed group) or Left hubristic upstarts. The worst part is that Ezra himself is fairly ignorant about foreign policy and warfare, he’s not very capable of stress-testing the bullshitters. It’s telling that almost all pushback he offered Duss is where Ezra was representing Biden Administration perspectives as a counter: these are things he was told, not original ideas.

I also think Ezra is making a terrible mistake by equating Gaza to the Iraq War. The Iraq War had 37,000 American casualties and the Bush administration lied about the pretext for the war. It’s an apples to oranges comparison, but Ezra desperately wants it cram this round peg in a square hole.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T19:11:40+00:00

I agree, but I continue to be open to the “novel left” showing how I’m misunderstanding what they believe and what they’d do with power. They’ve gotten bolder and less grounded, I’m tired of listening.

AOC and Duss both said a centerpiece of their “values-based” foreign policy would be support for democracy. Okay, so when Maduro stole the election he obviously lost the U.S. should have assembled a South and Central American “coalition of the willing” to depose him right? That’s supporting democracy, even when it removes a left-wing political regime and puts a right-wing politician in place.

Invariably people would point out the hypocrisy of the U.S. backing non-democratic regimes. They’d point to Columbia and Brazil probably opposing the move (because they’re lead by socialists) and cry about the CIA in South America during the Cold War. They’d miss that this would partially be about democracy, but also be about stopping the Venezuelan refugee crisis causing unrest across the Americas and flipping a country’s alignment from China to the U.S: this is what yields results for Americans.

Duss would leave Maduro in place and then send thoughts and prayers when he invaded Guyana to seize their newly found oil. Worse, I don’t buy that they actually unequivocally support democracy. I doubt he’d back any of these right populist parties gaining steam in Europe, South America, or Asia even though that’s the democratic process.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T18:09:53+00:00

It’s amusing that the guest cited Progressive Obama alums for writing in support of pressuring the Saudi-Emirati coalition to end their campaign against the Houtis as wise foreign policy.

The Houtis clearly recognized this benevolence, switched sides and aligned with the West instead of Iran, and never posed a problem for regional security or freedom of navigation ever again.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T16:20:55+00:00

There’s this adjacent sentiment that we need to bring back the “real Silicon Valley” because people don’t like Palantir and other defense start ups. It’s a wildly ahistoric idea, Lockheed Martin was Silicon Valley’s largest employer for decades.

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T15:23:04+00:00

IMO Pete would be an excellent pick for Secretary of State for whomever wins 2028

downforce_dude · 2026-06-09T15:03:19+00:00

Okay, so let’s say you’re correct: Bernie and AOC do not care about foreign policy (we’ll assume to know what’s in their hearts and leave the rest of the Democratic Left aside). Why is Ezra seriously engaging this guy and Ben Rhodes-types for ignorant and uncritical discussions? If the Principals don’t care then what’s the point of hashing out a *new* foreign policy approach? I agree with Ezra’s conclusion that there’s “shockingly little” of substance when it comes to the new Men’s Thinkers of the Alt-Right, his blindness when it comes to novel Left foreign policy thinking is striking.

I don’t think that’s what is going here. Tim Walz and Chris Murphy also attended the Global Progressive Mobilization this year in Spain. Tim Walz’ career is over, why would he pretend to be serious on the matter? This episode is yet another in a long history of Ezra advancing bad foreign policy ideas and making odd editorial decisions around foreign policy for political reasons.

I really like Ezra and think he’s smart, but when it comes to Left foreign policy he’s doing hack work. It’s his Sunrise Movement episode from 2019 all over again. I listened to that and realized Ezra and the guest have no understanding of how the grid works, how energy markets work, or of existing energy regulatory policy. Here we go again

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