Touch Grass Populism

Simple but Not Easy

I joined Plain English with Derek Thompson to discuss fighting Big Social and why Democrats must redefine the center instead of serving a Diet Coke version of MAGA. Derek Thompson labeled me a ‘touch-grass populist’, and I happily agreed.

The below is an edited transcript of excerpts. You can listen to the full interview here.

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Social Media Tax

Derek Thompson: I think many people are familiar — especially if they’re listeners of Plain English — with the case against phones. What they might not be as familiar with is what you, Jake Auchincloss, want to do about it. You have a policy proposal that would directly take on this wave of essentially digitally delivered anxiety and depression. What is your policy solution?

Jake Auchincloss: It’s a series of them. One is, I think we need to start talking about what we’re talking about when we do policy around these companies. The major tool that has been used over the last 10 or 15 years has been antitrust. And frankly, parents don’t care whether Google has to share information with Bing. It doesn’t matter to them. It doesn’t affect their life, it doesn’t affect their kids’ screen time, it doesn’t stop screen time from stealing from family time. What they care about is their kids.

And so we need the Consumer Product Safety Commission to work with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and come up with an evidence-backed assessment of the effects of social media, of pornography, of online gambling in particular, on the developing dopamine system and come up with some neuroscientifically grounded regulations about what is acceptable that would inform adult use and that would restrict children’s use.

You can know as a parent whether a bicycle helmet is safe. The CPSC says, “hey, this thing is safe, we’ve tested it.” Nothing like that exists online to put parents in the driver’s seat. It’s a regulatory mindset shift — stop chasing corporations as they shapeshift across platforms, and start just focusing on the target area that they care about, which is the ventral striatum and the delivery of dopamine.

Number two is tax ‘em. Tax these companies. It’s a vice. They reward the seven deadly sins, and we have a very simple way of getting less of a vice. We’ve used it for cigarettes or alcohol, and that is to tax it — and in particular to tax the digital advertising revenues of the social media corporations.

I’m not talking about taxing the users of the platforms. I’m talking about taxing these corporations. Meta and Google, for example, make $250 billion every year on digital advertising, pay precious little tax because of all of their international shell companies. We should just tax their top-line digital advertising revenue and plow it back into things that matter in real life.

It starts with a premise — and a premise that I think I have a front-row seat to as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee in Congress. And for everyone’s awareness, the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House has jurisdiction over a huge cross-section of the American economy. Everything from energy to tech companies. And what that jurisdictional vantage point has shown me is that we have massively stacked the deck in this country for online activity and against in-real-life activity. If you try to put an accessory dwelling unit in your backyard so your in-laws can live with you, you’re gonna spend much longer than it’s taking Meta to build a data center that’s training chatbots that Mark Zuckerberg thinks should have, “sensual conversations with 12-year-olds.” That’s ridiculous. We need to put some sensible guardrails on internet activity — again, particularly around adolescents — but then we also have to unleash the world of atoms so people can build stuff.

And obviously, Derek, I don’t have to preach to you on this subject, but I think it is important to emphasize that this isn’t some Luddite reaction against technology. I think technology is great. I ran the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition — like, I’m all about it. I want technology that solves real problems for people, whether it’s disease-related or energy-related, AI-driven robotics that can get us stuff better, faster, cheaper. What I am not as enthusiastic about is a generation of slop thrown across the internet that creates a post-literate society.

Derek Thompson: In the biggest picture, I am totally for this. I mean, the way I see this policy is sort of three parts. Number one, research the effects of social media and smartphone ubiquity. Number two, tax the digital vice. And number three, fix the fact that — and this is sort of my gloss on what you just said — the digital world is underregulated and the physical world is overregulated. It is easy to disseminate porn to children and difficult to build enough houses in America. And that is an asymmetry that makes absolutely no sense. I’m on board for all of that. But when I dig into the details of number two — tax the digital vice — I wonder how you feel about, and surely you’ve heard this criticism, many of the things that TikTok or Instagram or Facebook are doing are also being done by television. So why would this tax only affect social media companies and not essentially be a kind of across-the-board tax on anything that consumes our attention in a way that we don’t like?

Jake Auchincloss: An important point. The short answer is because we should care more about outcomes than process. And this goes to my criticism of the antitrust approach. The antitrust mindset is one that would find your argument very compelling and say, “wait a minute, wait a minute, we gotta think about the structure of the business. We gotta think about how they operate. And we have to think about consumer surplus and producer surplus and conspiracies against trade.”

And my view is: a lot of that has been obviated by the very simple fact that these are monopoly companies. They’re really more like utilities at this point. They actually create, classically defined, a tremendous amount of consumer surplus. So that whole concept is kind of out the door. And what we have seen since social media — and since smartphones became ubiquitous with social media — is a collapse in social trust and adolescent well-being that we hadn’t seen before that happened.

So we, you know, we can debate from first principles the relative merits of TV versus social media. But the simple truth is, it wasn’t until 2012 that you began to see a real corrosion of civil society and well-being, and the precipitous decline that’s been chronicled by Jonathan Haidt. And so we should address the prime driver of that directly.

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Touch Grass Populism

Derek Thompson: I feel like one answer to the question of where Democrats go from here is: well, they run toward populism. You run toward the economic populism of Bernie and of FDR. I wanna get your take on populism because three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, you went on Ezra Klein’s podcast and offered what you called a “Diet Coke theory of Democratic politics.” I would love for you to recapitulate that Diet Coke theory because I think it bears quite directly on the question of where Democrats go from here.

Jake Auchincloss: The Diet Coke theory is that when someone orders a Coca-Cola, they don’t want a Diet Coke. And if Democrats think that we are going to beat MAGA populism with a more polite version of populism that sort of offends fewer people, we’re gonna lose. The way to win is: one, to understand that the electorate is being realigned—the seventh time in American history it’s happened, and the first time in my lifetime. The electorate has been realigned. The biggest city in my district, Fall River, voted for a Democrat for president every four years for the last century… and then voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

This is a realigned electorate. Okay? Fall River’s a multi-ethnic working-class city. When there is a realignment happening, the advantage goes to the party that can define the new center, ‘cause that is equivalent to defining the terms of debate. So it would be a very tired proposition for us as Democrats to say, “We’re gonna have a contest between center and left; one of them will win, and then that faction will go campaign.” The much more productive debate would be: let’s, as a party, define the new center and take the best ideas from across the variety of ideological factions in American life.

The libertarian hostility to centralized and personalized executive power? Yes, we should adopt that. Goodness knows MAGA is not gonna be welcoming to it.

The conservatives’ traditional support for free enterprise, faith, and family? Yes, we should adopt that. We should have different policies to actuate it, but we should uphold those values.

Traditional liberals’ support for due process and civil rights? Yes.

Progressives’ commitment to investing in a level playing field? Yes. I talked about baby bonds, which is a traditionally progressive idea that I think is a great idea: give people an equity stake in America.

Populists’ skepticism of corporate capture? Yes. When that comes to health insurance or social media corporations, we should adopt those ideas.

We should be promiscuous in taking the best ideas from across American life, putting them together into a platform that defines a new center. And when you define the new center, you invite people into this new debate.

Derek Thompson: I don’t particularly consider myself a populist, but I wanna briefly defend populism here in a way that I don’t think many populists will appreciate. I think populism is essentially a political skin suit. I think it’s a costume. I think almost any idea can be dressed up as populism. Yes. And we acknowledge this when we use the word populist: Trump is a populist, Bernie is a populist, FDR was a populist, Obama knew how to play the populist card. These people’s politics have nothing to do with one another. I think populism is the ability to draw a very specific line in the sand that says: over there are the small number of powerful people who are bad, and over here are the many people who are good.

And to orient your politics around that line. As I was thinking about your idea for the digital dopamine tax, I thought: wait, Jake Auchincloss is a populist in a way. He’s a narrow populist in that he’s drawing a line in the sand that says the vast majority—the largest number of people, the children of America, and the phone-addicted people of America—they are good. And the small number of people, the social media companies—they are bad. You are, Congressman, I’ll just name it now, a “touch-grass populist.” Like, that’s what this policy is. It’s touch-grass populism.

So, I agree that there is a benefit to being ideologically promiscuous and taking the best ideas from libertarians, conservatives, liberals, and MAGA. I think there was a paragraph in my original Abundance Agenda article that said that that’s what I wanted abundance liberalism to be. But ultimately, I think politics is about specificity, and it’s about focus, and picking what you wanna talk about and who you wanna name the enemy. And there’s a way in which I think the success of your digital dopamine tax is precisely the power of its populism. You’re a touch-grass populist. How do you feel about that accusation?

Jake Auchincloss: Derek, I could not put it better myself. It’s almost like you frame ideas for a living. That’s exactly right.

Derek Thompson: Well, expand on the confidence. I mean, like, how…

Jake Auchincloss: I can’t. I mean, you’ve nailed it. I am a hundred percent a—I’m gonna take that term, by the way, in the spirit of ideological promiscuity: a touch-grass populist. It is absolutely an us-versus-them. It is absolutely a moralistic good-versus-bad. It is absolutely the many versus the few. And I believe that it is productive populism in the sense that it is corralling that energy toward a productive end, in the sense that it is a set of policies that are gonna expand prosperity and belonging for Americans, rather than drag us further into tribalism, which is what too much of particularly ethnically motivated populism tries to do.