In the post-2024 haze, Democrats are reportedly spending millions trying to find their own Joe Rogan. We’re investing in TikTok stars and YouTubers, hoping someone will magically “speak to the people.”
But here’s the problem: We don’t need our own Joe Rogan. We need to remember how to have a conversation.
I matriculated at Brown University in 2011 and by the end of my first semester, it was clear there were rules. And while those rules weren’t always spoken, everyone understood them.
One such rule? Some opinions mattered more than others. Speak out of line, say the wrong thing the wrong way, and there would be lasting consequences, especially outside the classroom.
One of the clearest examples of how these rules silenced conversation was the Ray Kelly incident. In 2013, Kelly, then the NYPD commissioner, was invited to campus to speak about “proactive policing.” Protesters shouted over his talk, shutting it down before he could begin, citing concerns over the “framing’ of the talk.
Notably, however, several critics of Kelly had decided they actually wanted to hear him speak. They were smart, educated, Ivy League students and prepared to challenge Kelly with their own questions during the question and answer section of the event.
It led to a campus-wide debate over who should get a platform and who should take up space. It added to the tension between the school as both an educational space and a living community where all students should feel safe.
Over time, I started to sympathize with the seemingly predominant view on campus, that avoiding harm or offense should be central to the academic exchange of ideas.
Then, after Brown, I pursued a graduate degree at Yale and completed a four-year joint degree program at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. Over that journey I began to see how the language and practices of academically-oriented progressivism could be used to create space, especially for marginalized voices, at elite institutions that have historically overlooked underrepresented voices.
The “inverted pyramid” theory — that those furthest from power should speak first and loudest — made sense to me and, in practice, did expose me to views, insights and experiences I would otherwise have missed. It also made sense to speak in person-centered language instead of bucketing and dismissing people as mere data points — for example, this is an “incarcerated person,” not a “prisoner.”
These rules and structures made me a stronger thinker, and I learned a lot. But I noticed that the approach also came with trade-offs. Those who did not adhere to these practices could barely get a thought out. Those who rejected certain basic, predominant premises were simply treated as not worth considering.
Then, toward the end of my education, I took an op-ed writing course and a public speaking class. Every op-ed I submitted read like a legal brief: Hedged, caveated and so over-polished it barely said anything.
“Stand by your opinions,” my professor would say. “Speak like a person, not a policy memo.” My speech professor similarly spent months trying to un-teach us the robotic habits we had picked up at Harvard and the places that led us there — habits designed to make us sound smart in academic, hyper-professionalized spaces, but not relatable.
Most voters don’t communicate that way. But increasingly, Democrats do. Especially those of us who have spent too long in seminar rooms and fellowship programs trying to become the next Josiah Bartlet or Barack Obama. We’ve developed a dialect that may sound clever in a classroom but that is foreign to everyone else.
It’s one reason Vice President Kamala Harris, for whom I was proud to be a presidential delegate for and whose style of communication resonated with me, was frequently criticized for “not saying anything” in her speeches. She was fluent in a kind of professional liberalism that speaks in implications, not declarations.
Look, if Democrats had our own Joe Rogan, we’d cancel him within a week. He’d forget to use “I statements” and be overly general. He’d ask the wrong question or use the wrong tone or not include the appropriate disclaimers.
Instead of an engaged conversation, we would wind up with a hundred callout threads on social media and a TikTok-led boycott. Strong points about power and privilege would be made. Valuable in several contexts, no doubt, but separate from the project of mass electoral politics.
The voters Democrats need to reconnect with don’t live in those threads (or use Threads at all). They spend their days in barbershops, diners and living rooms where you’re allowed to think out loud, get things wrong, change your mind and still get invited back the next day for the next conversation.
The left needs to tone down the tone policing — and, no, that doesn’t have to mean allowing bigotry to go unaddressed. It means letting people ask the dumb questions, have mixed (even conflicting) opinions and, most importantly, letting people speak before they are fluent.
Kaivan Shroff, a senior advisor to the Institute for Education, was a 2024 Democratic National Convention presidential delegate and worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.