Meeting Krystal Ball
Source: Bek Anderson, The Cut
Note: This interview was conducted in October 2020, several weeks prior to the 2020 Presidential election while the outcome was still unknown.
Aaryan Balu: Just to start things off—Krystal Ball, who are you and what do you do?
Krystal Ball: Oh my God, that's a complicated question. I am the host of a political talk show called Rising. I'm the left host; my co-host's name is Saagar Enjeti and he is what he describes as a right populist. I consider myself a left populist. Previously, I was a host at MSNBC, and the way I actually got into politics was...I guess, in some ways, it was unusual. In other ways, I think a lot of people could relate to this: I was not a particularly politically active person; I was sort of a normal, informed citizen. And then I was really enraged by the Iraq War and the abuses of the Bush administration and the endemic corruption that I saw had overtaken both parties in Washington, DC. So I decided, in 2010, to sort of jump headfirst into this and run for a congressional seat in Virginia--the 1st Congressional District.
I did not win. But I got some, frankly, unwanted media attention about some party photos from when I was just out of UVA. Fully of age, nothing illegal going on, but people found them salacious, so I ended up as part of this cable news cycle. So when I lost the congressional race, some of the shows that had had me on to talk about that [the photos] continued to bring me on to comment on politics. So I sort of stumbled into this accidental media career.
It's been exciting, interesting, and ultimately, I feel incredibly grateful to just be able to have a platform and speak out on issues that I care about and the future of the country.
AB: For those who don't know: what is Rising? It’s a strange show to pitch.
KB: Rising is put on by TheHill.com-- a lot of the people reading this would probably be familiar with their news content, which is pretty normal, down-the-middle-type news items. The unique thing about Rising is it looks and feels like typical cable news or network news morning show. It's got the chirpy music and the polished set and all of those things. But Saagar and I represent very unusual political perspectives. Usually, when you're going to have a bipartisan morning show, it’s "centrists." They agree on things like cutting the deficit and the debt. They agree on things like getting us into more wars. And they will disagree a lot of times on social issues.
So Saagar and I have an overlap in terms of an economic populist view. Both of us are sort of left of center in terms of expanding the government's ability to help regular working-class people. And so the show focuses a lot around what I consider to be two rising strains (hence the name!) in American politics, which is a new sort of Bernie Sanders-aligned left, and then the best incarnation of the Trump right: the type of Trump-populist rhetoric that you frankly saw a lot more in 2016 than you've heard from him this time around. To me, in the conception of the show, I just thought it would be interesting to have that conversation because it wasn't happening anywhere else. And it seems like a lot of people have found it interesting and useful, and also has helped them hate people who have different views from them less, which is something that was an important concept for me from the start of the show.
AB: I wonder if Saagar would agree with being characterized as left-of-center, even on economics. Is that the best way of putting it at this point?
KB: It's really not, to be honest. I just think that these are pro-working class policies. And I think a lot of standard political rhetoric would characterize it as left-of-center. But it's really not even accurate. I was just looking at some polling that shows 83% of Americans support universal affordable childcare access, including 77% of Republicans. You've got 72% of Americans who want a $2 trillion stimulus right now, you've got around 60% who support Medicare for all, you have around 70%--again, including a majority of Republicans--who support a Universal Basic Income. So the reality is the positions that we support on economics--even though they're caricatured as radical or left or outside of the mainstream--are actually the center of what real American opinion represents. I think our economic views actually just accurately represent what most Americans would like to see their government and their society look like.
AB: You became politically involved in 2010, and then joined the media with MSNBC over the next couple years, and then made a pretty big jump to Rising in 2018. How have your own views evolved over that time, or is it more that you finally found the right fit?
KB: It feels more like I found my right fit. When I go back and look at the commentary that I was doing at MSNBC, I was definitely more of a Democratic partisan, like a party cheerleader. There were areas where I dissented; I dissented on TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], I dissented on some of the more Wall Street-friendly picks. There were areas where I definitely diverged from the party. But I kind of bought into this idea that, like "The Democrats are the good guys and the Republicans are the bad guys and that's the way that goes." So I gave them a lot of benefit of the doubt that I just don't grant them anymore, because I don't think that they deserve it. And I don't think that we should be giving people in power, regardless of their political persuasion, the benefit of the doubt, period. They're not our friends, they're not our celebrity icons or idols. These are people who want power and want to shape the way that life unfolds in this country, and they should be held to account. So I think that's probably the area where I've shifted the most.
And I do, in a certain sense, credit the Sanders movement with that opening up perspective and mindset. I've kind of always positioned myself along the left edge of where you were allowed to be. And I think what Bernie Sanders' movement ultimately did was expand the conversation. It was like, "Oh, you don't have to stay in these narrow confines. You can actually imagine a larger, more large-scale change. You can actually dare to ask for more and better for working-class Americans." And he had a critique of the Democratic party that I hadn't heard really fully expressed before, because it wasn't really permitted in mainstream media. So I think that started to expand my horizons and make me question a lot of my own assumptions about the sort of fundamental goodness of the Democratic Party and whether they should really be beyond reproach. Which of course, the answer is no. No one should be beyond reproach, especially not the people who would look to lead the country and look to hold power in that way.
AB: It’s interesting, looking back at the oldest Rising videos from 2018. Obviously, the production quality is much higher now. But also, older videos averaged around 500 views, with breaking news occasionally cracking a few thousand. Can you walk me through the journey from there to where you are now--regularly getting a few hundred thousand views every morning?
KB: Rising really exploded when Saagar and I started posting it to YouTube. I mean, this is obvious, but that's where the people were. And you have to meet people in the space where they're consuming this type of media.
So the first interview that we saw really pop was a long-form interview that we did with Andrew Yang. And first of all, at that point, almost all media was dismissing him completely. They'd leave him off of graphics, they'd misspell his name, they were trying to smear him as a white supremacist--it was crazy. And I've actually known Andrew for a while--I knew him from my MSNBC days, back when he was doing Venture for America. So I invited him on the show. And we just had a 30 minute conversation that was substantive. We actually asked him what he thought about the issues and people really responded to it. He already had this online fanbase that had developed and was growing and that content wasn't available anywhere else. So when we saw the success of that interview, it was a little bit of an "A-ha!" moment because we saw that there was this huge appetite for a certain type of discussion, a certain type of politics and approach to politics, a certain type of focus on policies and issues that wasn't occurring in the mainstream. So it was an unmet need. And from there, it really just sort of took off.
And, you know, I think there's just a massive unmet need for a less constrained political conversation and conversation in general. You see this with the success of Joe Rogan, for example. He goes places where it's very uncomfortable. He asks things that you're really not supposed to ask, and talks about things you're really not supposed to talk about. And that can come with upsides and downsides. But you see that there's this deep hunger for a different and less guarded and bounded conversation than what you get in traditional media spaces.
AB: What’s different about doing journalism when you're outside that bubble?
KB: For one thing, Saagar and I don't hide our ideology. We're very upfront, which I think a lot of people appreciate. Rather than people who are trying to pretend like they're down the middle, but it's really clear that they're not down the middle: that they have a particular lens that they're looking at things through. I don't have an issue with that. I just prefer it to be up front.
Outside of that, I mean, we have so much more freedom within Rising--which I hope comes through--than I ever did at MSNBC. One of the things that's really different on YouTube versus cable news is that for a lot of people, cable news is on in the background. They're not really focused in on exactly what you're saying. So when I would write a monologue for cable news, my rule of thumb was always: "First of all, no more than three minutes." And it needed to make one point and make it a couple times. And that was basically the best you could do. The monologues that we write for Rising, which are kind of the center of the show (we call them Radars), they're usually more like eight minutes long. The arguments are a little more complex. And that's because people on YouTube show up to actually watch that video. They're way more engaged, they pay way more attention to the specific wording you use and the specific arguments you're making. I mean, that's a double edged sword, since they'll call you out when you get things even slightly wrong. They're just paying way closer attention. So there's a much more intimate connection between audience and host on YouTube than I ever experienced on cable news.
But in general, the process is the same. I think we have more freedom in this show than I did previously, certainly at MSNBC. We have a lot more room for experimentation, to try out things, see if they work or if they don't work. But we try to be diligent about making sure that we're not wish-casting what we want to happen or hope to happen, that we're actually looking at the facts and the numbers and the data and presenting it as accurately as we possibly can to the audience.
AB: You've spoken about a general distaste for the celebrity-driven nature of modern political coverage, with figures like Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris, or Beto O'Rourke being covered more as personalities than for their policies. How do you balance that with the more personality-driven nature of your own role? People come to Rising for the news, but like you said, there's a more personal connection thanks to YouTube. They're also coming specifically for Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. How do you balance that?
KB: I don't know that I really see it as a balance or tension. We certainly bring our personalities and our ideology. But if you watch the show--look, I've been a fan of Bernie Sanders, but if I interview him, I'm going to ask him tough questions. He's not going to get off the hook either, if he does something wrong. I've criticized him on the show for plenty of things. Saagar was a Trump supporter. He's been extraordinarily critical of the President, especially in this era with his mishandling of coronavirus. So I'm not sure that I see those two things in tension. Our underlying goal is just to be honest about what we see happening, whether it happens to be good for "our side" or not. And I think that's what the audience shows up expecting from us as well.
AB: A few days ago, I was reading through The Populist's Guide to 2020, your and Saagar's book that came out this February. And it's such a fascinating snapshot of the before-times. The introduction says: "we're living in a chaotic, nerve-wracking and occasionally terrifying time," which is almost comical in retrospect.
That’s all to say that even before the pandemic even hit, you identified several areas where things have been going wrong in America, both in politics and media. Could you expand on that?
KB: There's something fundamentally broken at the core of America. And I think that in a lot of ways is the starting point for the show Rising. Before the pandemic, politicians would point [to things going well]. Whether it was Barack Obama: "Oh, look, the recovery is amazing. Look at low unemployment, look at rising GDP numbers." Or Donald Trump: "Look at the stock market, things are going great." And yet at the same time, you see record-breaking levels of addiction that we've never seen in American history. Which, by the way, this year will be the worst in American history in terms of overdose deaths, something that gets very little attention. You see all sorts of deaths and despair on the rise, including massive rates of suicide. You see this sort of coming-apart of the country, which I think everybody, no matter how engaged they are in politics, feels on this visceral level. So there's something broken at the core of America.
Part of our thesis is looking at younger generations--you know, millennials and Gen Z--why do their politics look so different than politics of older generations? Because while everybody has been affected by this incredibly chaotic environment, younger generations have been disproportionately impacted, whether it was being sent off to fight and die in wars overseas, whether it was older millennials who came out of college during the financial collapse and saw their prospects for their entire life dimmed. If you look at the numbers, you see younger generations have much less ability to accumulate wealth, and create a stable life for themselves than previous generations. And none of that was their fault. So it's created very different politics among young Americans in particular, and our goal on Rising is to explore what's underlying that, and also to explore what potential positive directions might look like to get out of this.
And certainly, the pandemic has only accelerated all of those trends. We had an unequal America before; Gilded Age levels of inequality. We had this incredible divide between white collar professionals who are treated respectfully and can earn decent wages, and people who are working in the care professions or service industry, blue collar workers, who are treated as less than--both in terms of their wages, and also just in terms of the way they're treated as human beings. You have these massive divides. And during the pandemic, it's just exacerbated all of that. We've witnessed one of the largest transfers of wealth upwards, maybe in American history. What is that going to look like? How is that going to play out? I don't think it's just going to go smoothly, and all be fine.
So that's kind of the core of the show: exploring what went wrong. What's the reality for the majority of Americans? Not the top 1% or 5% or even 10%, but for the majority of Americans, what does life look like? And what is the path forward? One of the central theses of the show is: there is no path forward in which we view our brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and friends and neighbors as an existential enemy. That's not going to work.
You watch the show enough [and you’ll] know there are times when it's very tense between Saagar and I; there are issues where we really vehemently disagree. Where it's uncomfortable. Where it'd be a lot easier for him to have someone who agrees with him sitting next to him, and for me to have someone who just agrees with me on everything sitting next to me. But I believe that if we can't actually even engage in those conversations with someone who's smart and operating in good faith and trying to come at this from an honest way--I think we're screwed as a country if we can't do that basic thing. So that's one of the core ideas in the book. It's one of the core ideas in the show, which is “yeah, this is ugly.” Saagar has views sometimes that I find not just wrong, but actually offensive. But I can't deny the fact that those views represent the views of a lot of Americans. And I believe that it is more effective to argue and try to persuade, then just try to ignore and shun and censor.
AB: How do you deal with that? I mean, I guess you kind of answered it. But how do you deal with that kind of fundamental disagreement that goes beyond policy and into worldview?
KB: Yeah. It's not easy. I mean, we just have to sort of work through it. And we're in the best-of-all-possible-worlds scenario, the two of us, because we have a deep respect, and there's a level of trust there. I believe if we're going to have a better country for the multiracial working class, you actually have to have a multiracial working class coalition. And so if you have the perspectives of white working class people not able to even be in conversation with the perspective of Black or brown working class people, that's not a project that's ultimately going to work out.
So I try to keep that larger perspective in mind--and our audience helps us a lot. We've had a lot of people reach out to us who say: "You know what, I couldn't even talk to my dad or my brother or my friend or my uncle or whoever about politics. And now we have a little bit of a shared language through Rising to be able to at least communicate with one another." And I consider that--I'm really proud of those moments when they're communicated to us.
AB: Are these divisions unique to the modern age? If so, how did they start?
KB: Matt Taibbi (a great former Rolling Stone journalist who is now independent) wrote a book called Hate Inc., about how the media, in its quest for ratings--first they had the Cold War, then they had terrorism as this evil that they could use to gin people up and get them fearful and get them to watch hours and hours of cable news. And now what they've decided the enemy that they've turned to is basically one another. So if you watch MSNBC, it's always "Republicans are evil, Republicans are evil, Republicans are evil." And not just Republican leadership. Anyone who voted for Trump or didn't vote for Hillary Clinton is evil and irredeemable and they are a threat to the country. And if you turn on Fox News, it's the exact opposite. Liberals and leftists and progressives are destroying the country and they're gonna take your children and I don't even--like, things that sound crazy to us, right? But there's an audience for that. If you create this existential threat of: "your neighbors are literally going to end the country," it's great for ratings. It's great for business. It's great for them, and it's utterly destroying the nation.
AB: Shifting tracks a little bit--you mentioned the stark differences in how we treat white-collar work and blue-collar work. In particular, on the show you single out people like Pete Buttigieg, who worked for McKinsey--a firm that has been criticized for essentially maximizing investor profits at the expense of workers. I only ever heard of McKinsey when I came to UVA and hung out around McIntire students [those who attend the competitive McIntire School of Commerce, known for its high job-placement rates in finance and consulting].
Something comes up a fair amount on Rising, and Andrew Yang has talked about it as well--elite institutions like UVA tend to funnel the highest achievers into very specific sections of the workforce: finance, consulting, law, technology. What's your message and vision when it comes to young people, particularly those who have the chance to attend schools like UVA?
KB: We've set up a society that really overvalues the type of intellect that gets you into a UVA and gets you into McKinsey. And that's not to say that there's anything wrong with that type of thinking, that ability to process and manipulate symbols or rhetorical abilities. All those things are great. My issue is that we've created this narrative that people who happen to possess those gifts are better than the rest of the country. And that's the part that I absolutely reject--a part of the modern Democratic Party ethos that I reject. This idea that the only thing that we should really be striving for is to make sure that all the brilliant little Pete Buttigieges or Barack Obamas of the world have the opportunity to ascend to their rightful place in the great American hierarchy. That accepts that those individuals are worthy of, you know, if you're Jeff Bezos, billions and billions of dollars, whereas someone who is better with their hands, someone who has deep gifts of empathy and caring and compassion is not worthy even of a basic, dignified life. That's why Pete Buttigieg comes in for so much criticism --admittedly, it's a little unfair to him, but he's kind of the perfect emblem of the fetishization of that type of intellect and that type of career path.
Also, Pete and I are basically the same age. And this was something our generation was really fed, and I don't know if you're fed it quite as much as we were, but this idea that if you could go to McKinsey, not only was it good for you, but it was actually good for the world. That this was a way to give back. Rather than becoming a scientist and working on some brilliant cure, or working in a nonprofit space--no, the way to do good in the world, was to go to McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or another investment firm. And that's the other piece that I just wholesale reject. I think that it ultimately ends in a very soulless and deadening place. We're funneling our best and brightest oftentimes into industries that are created to oppress our fellow working-class citizens. McKinsey's one of them. Goldman's one of them. Many Wall Street firms, all of the private equity firms that ship jobs overseas and lay people off in the name of "efficiency," where people who are involved in the layoffs are always on the winning end, and the workers are always on the losing end--that's the structure of society that I really object to. And Pete Buttigieg happens to be kind of a perfect emblem of that direction of the country.
AB: Pandemic aside, what's next for Rising?
KB: I think we're all just waiting to see what happens in a couple weeks. And I think we feel like regardless of who the next president is, we have something unique to say about it. So if Joe Biden, as it looks, is the next President of the United States, I fully expect the partisan media outlets--MSNBC on one side, Fox News on the other side--to retreat to their corners. Fox, it will be "everything he does is bad." MSNBC will be "everything he does is good." And so I think there's an opportunity there for a critique of him from the left, that won't exist really anywhere else, at least in mainstream media spaces. It will certainly exist in lots of YouTube spaces.
If it's Trump again, I mean, that's a space that we're very comfortable with and familiar with. We have a critique of his presidency. My critique of him is a little different from Saagar’s critique of him, but I think in general, the show Rising's critique of Trump looks and feels a lot different than the mainstream critique of him. For example, you're not going to hear us going on about "Oh, Russia is really pulling the strings," because frankly, I think that that's bullshit. And listen, we're willing to give him credit, too, on areas when he does good things. The Trump DOJ just filed a big antitrust suit against Google. That's a phenomenal progressive win and should be celebrated as such even though it comes from Donald Trump. I think we know what that looks like, based on these years as well. But as with the rest of the country, we just have to take these events as they come and try to be honest about how we see them and where we think things are heading.
This interview was conducted in October 2020, several weeks before the 2020 Presidential election. You can find Rising every morning on The Hill’s YouTube Channel, and you can follow Krystal Ball on Twitter.