What Georgetown Thinks and What America is Watching

Vox Populi, Vox Nihil

There is a particular species of American intellectual—concentrated in Washington, scattered across prestige media, overrepresented in the podcasts and Substacks that cater to the politically curious—who believes himself to possess a superior map of the political terrain. He is not a partisan, you understand. He is above that. He can see both sides. He has transcended the tribal loyalties that cloud the judgment of ordinary citizens and can therefore offer a more accurate assessment of where the dangers lie and how seriously to take them.

This person is watching the wrong scoreboard.

Consider how this class talks about media influence.

Joe Rogan reaches ten to fifteen million listeners per episode. His interview with Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign likely moved more votes than every Atlantic endorsement piece combined. And yet, in the vocabulary of the Georgetown class, Rogan is “just a podcast bro”—not a serious figure, not someone whose influence merits the same attention they lavish on New York Times columnists with a fraction of the reach.

This is a fascinating way to measure influence. It defines “serious” by institutional affiliation—newspaper mastheads, cable news contracts, invitations to the right panels. By this measure, a writer at the Atlantic with fifty thousand readers is more significant than a Substacker with five hundred thousand subscribers. The former is credentialed. The latter is merely popular.

Now consult the actual data. Cable news is consumed almost exclusively by Baby Boomers. It is, to borrow a term from the technology industry, a legacy platform—still profitable, still prestigious within its own ecosystem, but increasingly disconnected from where political opinion is actually formed among voters who will shape elections for the next forty years.

Rogan’s audience skews dramatically younger. So does Ben Shapiro’s. So does the entire ecosystem of YouTube commentators, TikTok influencers, and podcast networks that have replaced appointment television for an entire generation. When the Georgetown class wants to understand “the right,” they read National Review. Actual young conservatives are watching something else entirely.

If you were an alien sociologist dispatched to Earth to assess political influence in America, you would not count cable news contracts. You would look at reach, at demographic composition, at where the future of the electorate is being shaped. By any such measure, the intellectual class is measuring respectability when they should be measuring impact. They are tracking what Georgetown thinks rather than what America is watching.

This is not an argument that popularity equals virtue—only that influence cannot be wished away because it is unfashionable.

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The implications extend well beyond media criticism.

The anti-anti-Trump intellectual positioned himself as the clear-eyed realist who could see past the hysteria. Trump was vulgar, yes. Norm-violating, certainly. But the real threat to liberty came from the left—from campus speech codes, from DEI bureaucracies, from the creeping soft authoritarianism of progressive institutions. Trump was a chaos agent, perhaps even a useful one, a disruption to a system that had grown sclerotic and self-serving.

This analysis required looking at a particular scoreboard. If you measured threat by what was happening at elite universities, in corporate HR departments, in the editorial pages of the New York Times, you could convince yourself that the left was ascendant and dangerous. These were the institutions that governed the world these intellectuals inhabited. These were the parties to which they wished to be invited, or from which they had been excluded, or against which they were in rebellion. This was their Georgetown.

But this was not where American politics was actually being shaped.

While they watched the New York Times, millions of Americans were watching Tucker Carlson. While they debated the fine points of cancel culture, a mass movement was forming around the explicit rejection of democratic constraints. While they assured themselves and their audiences that Trump was a buffoon who could be managed, a political realignment was underway that they entirely failed to see—because they were looking at the wrong scoreboard.

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The consequences of this error are now upon us.

We have a president who has pardoned those who attacked the Capitol on his behalf. Who defies court orders. Who threatens war over Greenland and blockades Venezuela and invites Vladimir Putin to advise on Middle East peace. We have a Republican Party that has been rendered entirely supplicant. We have a conservative movement that—as I write this—is laughing off the fraying of the Atlantic alliance as though it were a joke rather than a consequence.

Consider what happened this week. The President of the United States addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos and delivered what CNN‘s fact-checker called a “barrage of false claims”—”pure fiction.” He claimed he invented the idea of AI companies producing their own electricity. He asserted the United States “gave Greenland back to Denmark” after World War II, when in fact Denmark retained sovereignty throughout. He declared “you can’t find any wind farms in China,” an up-is-down reversal of a country with absolutely gigantic wind installations. He confused Greenland with Iceland three times in a single speech.

This is the leader of the free world, on the global stage, spouting nonsense. And the conservative response? Amusement at the Europeans’ discomfort. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, used his Davos appearance to mock Gavin Newsom as “Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken.” This is what passes for statecraft.

Meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni—one of Trump’s closest ideological allies in Europe, the prime minister who has positioned herself as his bridge to the continent—found herself on camera, visibly furious, asking whether Europe should “close American bases” and “storm McDonald’s“ in response to Trump’s Greenland threats. The words were sarcastic. The anger was not. She was expressing the bitter exasperation of an ally being driven toward thoughts she never wanted to have. What are we supposed to do? Look at the impossible position you’ve put us in.

That even Trump’s friends are now publicly grappling with whether to contemplate the unthinkable—the closure of American bases, the severing of trade relationships, the end of the post-war alliance structure—tells you something the Georgetown class refuses to see.

The American right treats this as entertainment. Meloni’s rhetorical questions become fodder for smug jokes about European weakness. They cannot perceive that they are watching the post-war international order—the system that has underwritten American prosperity and security for eighty years—being dismantled by a man who cannot keep straight which Arctic territory he wants to annex.

And we have an intellectual class that spent the last decade warning about the wrong thing.

They were so attuned to the threat from campus progressives that they failed to notice the fascist movement consolidating power in front of them. They were so concerned with the excesses of the left that they created what social psychologists call a “permission structure” for disengagement from the actual emergency. They told their audiences, implicitly and explicitly, that the real danger was wokeness—and in so doing, they gave those audiences permission to look away from what was actually happening.

This was not neutrality. It was a choice. A choice about where to direct attention, what to treat as urgent, which threats merited alarm and which could be dismissed with a knowing chuckle. And it was the wrong choice, made by people who prided themselves on their superior judgment.

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There is a particular irony in all of this.

The heterodox intellectual styled himself as the person who could see past tribal loyalties, who was not captured by either side, who could assess threats objectively. But objectivity requires looking at accurate data. It requires measuring the right things. It requires, at minimum, understanding where political power is actually accumulating rather than where it is politely discussed.

By their own stated standards—clear-eyed realism, epistemic humility, resistance to tribal capture—they failed. They were captured by their own tribe: the tribe of people who find progressive excess gauche and Trumpian excess embarrassing but ultimately manageable. The tribe that gets invited to Aspen and publishes in the Atlantic and appears on podcasts where everyone agrees that the real problem is that people are too upset about things.

They watched Georgetown. America was watching something else. And now we are all living with the consequences of their mismeasurement.

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I do not write this to relitigate the 2024 election. That is done. I write it because the mismeasurement continues.

Right now, today, there are intelligent people who dismiss Joe Rogan as “just a podcast bro” while treating cable news as the center of political gravity. Who think the conservative movement is defined by what National Review publishes rather than what millions of young men consume on YouTube. Who watch the Atlantic alliance fray and see only an opportunity for jokes about European military spending. Who assess the health of the republic by what Georgetown thinks rather than what America is watching.

These people will continue to be wrong. They will continue to miss what is happening. And they will continue to provide their audiences with a map that does not match the territory.

The rest of us will have to navigate without their help. Those who insist on reading the wrong scoreboard will not merely be wrong again—they will be irrelevant when it matters most.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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