What do males need? Democrats must know after their election drubbing by Donald Trump and the “manosphere” final 12 months. They’ve responded by commissioning “Speaking with American Men”, a strategic plan that may research “the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” in on-line areas.
Information of the two-year $20m challenge bolstered critics’ view that Democrats have grow to be the celebration of an aloof, college-educated liberal elite whose pursuit of working class males resembles a Victorian explorer wielding a butterfly internet. Which makes the publication of David Litt’s ebook, It’s Solely Drowning, a well timed contribution to Democrats’ ongoing autopsy.
Litt is a former senior speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation dinner monologues. The 38-year-old has written speeches and jokes for athletes, chief executives and philanthropists and was head author and producer within the Washington workplace of the comedy studio Humorous or Die.
It’s Solely Drowning, his third ebook, centres on an unbelievable friendship that develops between Litt, a Yale-educated liberal with a concern of sharks, and his brother-in-law Matt Kappler, a tattooed truck driver who listens to podcaster Joe Rogan and by no means registered to vote.
Their chasmic variations in background, training, ideology and way of life initially appear unbridgeable however, when Litt asks Kappler to assist him learn to surf, the shared expertise gives impartial floor for connection.
“What started as a surfing book became a story about basically a will-they won’t-they?, except it’s whether an Obama speechwriter and a Joe Rogan superfan can become friends,” Litt says in an interview on the Guardian’s workplace in Washington. “Like a lot of Democrats, my natural inclination is to be a little annoying and condescending. I certainly wasn’t doing that when I was the one who desperately needed to learn from him.”
Litt, who divides his time between Washington and Asbury Park, New Jersey, describes himself as a high-functioning, high-anxiety one who skilled situational melancholy throughout the coronavirus pandemic. He had a sense of overwhelming dread, problem getting away from bed and located himself endlessly doomscrolling.
His spouse Jacqui’s brother, in contrast, appeared to be thriving. Kappler is a guitar participant, a bike fanatic and a daredevil surfer. Litt displays: “I had always thought of him as a crazy person, and I still do, but he was able to deal with the ups and downs of life in a world that’s on fire in a way that I began to envy.
“He did well during the pandemic and he seemed resilient in a way that, to be totally honest, I didn’t. I definitely was not about to get tattoos or try to drive a truck because I would bump into things, but I could see myself trying to surf and that’s what happened.”
It might not be simple. On the age of 35, it required creating new muscular tissues and confronting intense concern and humiliation. Nonetheless, Litt moved to the Jersey Shore and enlisted Kappler to assist with browsing classes. After months of battle, he set the formidable purpose of driving an enormous wave in Hawaii.
Browsing grew to become a metaphor for confronting concern, each bodily and existential, and an antidote to Litt’s ordinary overthinking. He says: “Weirdly, the feeling I get, that sense of dread when a wave is about to crash down right on top of me, is actually somewhat analogous to the feeling I get when reading the news these days. It’s that sense of looming disaster and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
And most significantly, Litt got here to think about Kappler a good friend. “One of the only things more difficult than learning to surf is making a new friend in your 30s, so I feel like I might be even more proud that I was able to accomplish that than riding an overhead wave on the North Shore.”
As he tells this story, Litt displays on America’s deep political and cultural divisions and the way they have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Variations in style and way of life grow to be “identifiers” declaring political allegiance. Litt admits that, had Kappler been a good friend somewhat than household, he would in all probability have lower off contact after studying that Kappler refused the Covid shot.
“He played electric guitar in a ska band that is a big deal on the Shore; I played ultimate frisbee. He was into death metal and I was into Stephen Sondheim. So we never had anything in common. In the run up to the pandemic all of these differences weren’t always political but then somehow they started to feel like they were telling us what team we were on. It felt like we’d been drafted into opposite sides of the culture war.”
Litt doesn’t fake that there was a Hollywood ending wherein he and Kappler discovered widespread floor and adjusted one another’s minds. However he does argue in favour of shared actions that permit for connection and understanding between people with differing views.
“What we found was this neutral ground. Surfing is a space that is not politically coded and you can talk about something that isn’t one of the gazillion fault lines in our society right now. It’s hard to find those spaces but, for the exact same reason, it’s worth trying.
“I heard from a lot of people in the run-up to this book coming out who said, ‘I have a friend or family member where politics is tearing us apart. We can’t talk about anything in the news and how do I convince them?’ What I would say now is talk about something else. Don’t talk about what’s in the news.
“Start by looking for that neutral ground and forgetting about this idea of common ground, because the reason it feels like we have no common ground is that we don’t. We just disagree on a lot of important things as a society.”
Litt is aware of that, had Kappler been registered to vote, he would definitely not have finished so for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Again in 2016, Kappler mentioned he would have backed both Trump or Bernie Sanders as a result of they have been probably the most entertaining.
Litt says: “Truly the biggest divide between us politically is that I think about politics a lot and that’s part of how I define myself. Matt watches the news, he cares about what’s going on in the world, but that’s not his identity. He’s not a political person.
“One of the problems that Democrats have right now is we’re very much the party of news junkies and most Americans are not news junkies.”
Movie star politics and cultural affect have moved in the direction of Republicans and the likes of Rogan and Elon Musk, who attraction to anti-establishment sentiment and declare to prioritise widespread sense over political events. A brand new era of rightwing podcasters and influencers began out as entertainers and latched on to points later.
“Democrats are still lagging.” Litt says. ‘The new media voices that are developing, many of them are great, but they tend to be political first and entertainment second, or politics as entertainment, and so they don’t attraction as a lot to individuals who don’t discover politics entertaining and people are the voters we’re going to want in ‘28.”
Democrats also have a well documented class problem. It has come to be seen by many as the party of Hollywood celebrities and college-educated elites, with a whiff of contempt for blue collar workers in the heartland, summed up by Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
The celebration’s perceived shift towards id politics and social justice points alienated some working class voters who as soon as shaped its base. Forward of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
It turned out to be unhealthy maths. Final November Republicans swept the White Home and each chambers of Congress. Trump received 56% of voters with out a faculty diploma, in contrast with 42% who favoured Harris, a shift from 2020 when Trump and Joe Biden have been roughly even.
Litt factors out the homogeneity of Democratic circles and the dearth of natural relationships with working-class individuals, significantly these with out faculty levels. This disconnect hinders their means to know their points or successfully talk.
Recalling his time volunteering for Harris’s ill-starred election marketing campaign, he says: “I would sometimes be on conference calls and people would talk about a policy or message and say, ‘Do we think this is going to work? Do we think this is going to be effective?’ I would basically say, well, let me go surfing and find out.
“Nobody else said, ‘Oh, let me go talk to my working class friend,’ because Democrats often do not have working friends who don’t have college degrees. The people who are in office, and the people who work for those who are in office, almost all are college educated and almost all their friends are college educated.
“You have Democrats sit in rooms where literally everyone has a college degree, and they say, how come people without college degrees don’t feel like we’re thinking about them or that we’re welcoming to them? Well, look around the room.”
Litt acknowledges that he’s writing a few friendship with one different white man, the smallest doable pattern dimension, making it laborious to attract sociological conclusions about working class individuals of color.
However he additionally notes that Republicans have sought to “repolarise” the nation on instructional and tradition battle strains whereas making race much less vital in figuring out how individuals vote. Polls present that Trump did make massive inroads with Latino males and, to a lesser extent, with African American males.
Litt says: “I don’t know that race stopped mattering but I do think there was a Democratic view that race mattered so much more than anything else, especially for people who are not white.
“What we saw is very clearly no, that’s not true and was maybe not the most empirically based attitude to have. The base of the Democratic party is still Black women but I do think there was some some of that racial depolarisation.”
Democrats do have a robust coverage agenda for blue collar staff however have failed to speak it, Litt argues. His friendship with Kappler is not going to clarify every little thing. However he gives it as a begin for a celebration that one way or the other allowed Trump – a millionaire businessman who cuts taxes for the wealthy – to steal its garments.
“If you had asked me three years ago, do you have a lot to learn from your brother-in-law, I would have said not really, and one of the things I had to learn was that’s a deeply obnoxious attitude. I’m still a professional Democrat – I can still be plenty annoying – but I think I am less self-righteous than I used to be. And it turns out life is more fun and you’re more persuasive that way. So why not?”
