Is Beyoncé the Joe Rogan of the Left?

Not really—which is kind of the point.

Image: José Goulão, CC

After every election loss, Democrats bemoan the dominance of right-wing media and the outsized influence which the right has on culture. Meanwhile, Republican media is largely devoted to endless whining about the dominance of left-wing media and the outsized influence the left has on culture.

Democrats aren’t entirely wrong here; the left doesn’t have an in-house propaganda network that rivals Fox News, and there are certainly areas—like podcasts—where right-wing blowhards dominate. That’s why there’s a perennial call for a left Joe Rogan—a shibboleth that Democratic donors are pursuing once again, according to an article this week in the New York Times.

The right, though, isn’t entirely wrong either. It’s not an accident that Kamala Harris’ endorsements included a who’s who of pop and Hollywood. She was endorsed by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Bruce Springsteen (all of whom Trump is now targeting) as well as Lebron James, Eminem, Jennifer Aniston, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Harrison Ford, Judy Blume—and the list goes on and on.

Which does make one ask: Is Joe Rogan really more influential culturally than Taylor Swift? Than Harrison Ford or Lebron James? Why are we looking for the left Joe Rogan when we already have the left Beyoncé?

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The culture is always hipper on the other side of the partisan divide

Obviously, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé aren’t the same as Joe Rogan. Rogan’s podcast introduces his manosphere audience to a lot of right wing anti vax cranks, celebrates billionaire assholes like Mark Zuckerberg, mainstreams anti trans bigotry, and generally pushes reactionary bro identity vaguely connected to current events on a weekly basis.

In contrast, Beyoncé, Swift, and other musicians are…musicians. They do some interviews, but that’s not their focus; instead, they perform concerts and release albums. Rather than a constant churn of more or less empty headed mutually self-aggrandizing conversations, they release a relatively limited amount of material which is meant to be listened to over and over.

These are real differences, and affect reception, distribution, and of course political valence. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Beyoncé or Taylor Swift have no political effect, or even that they have a lesser political effect. Pop music about female independence, autonomy, and self-respect encourages women (and not just women) to identify with and celebrate female identity and to treat patriarchy with skepticism. Voting is much more about identity than it is about policy positions, and with the widening gender gap, there’s little question about which party benefits when women are called to their identities as women.

Similarly, Beyoncé’s music is often about celebrating Black culture and claiming Black history and tradition—her Cowboy Carter album is an extended lesson in the history, present, and relevance of Black counry music. J. Lo and Shakira’s 2019 Superbowl performance was a celebration of Latin American culture in the middle of a presidency devoted to hating that culture.

Harris lost in 2024, as we’re all aware. Everyone hates losers and everything associated with losers, and when a presidential candidate loses, the assumption tends to be that all their choices were bad and useless. Winners, in contrast, are seen as magical geniuses who can do no wrong. Thus, when AND Media, a new funding venture, says it wants to move away from the “the current didactic, hall monitor style of Democratic politics that turns off younger audiences,” everyone nods along and says, yes, Harris was a boring hall monitor.

But was Charli XCX, announcing that Harris was “brat” really didactic politics likely to turn off young people? Was Trump babbling interminably and incomprehensibly about Hannibal Lecter really the cool content the youth want to hear?

Maybe play to your strengths

I’m not saying it’s all good; obviously it’s not all good! We’re living in a fascist nightmare! Things are bad!

What I am saying is that losing an election does not necessarily mean that your opponents are geniuses with a monolithic hold on the culture and all its works. A ton of people voted for Kamala Harris; Democrats are currently crushing Republicans in school board races in red counties in Texas. Joe Rogan is not convincing all voters all the time to vote for the GOP, possibly in part because there are other cultural influencers and influences out there.

Joe Rogan does have a large audience and substantial influence, and you can understand why Democratic strategists covet that. The problem, though, is that when you are looking for the next Joe Rogan, you tend to be looking for people marinated in the same sort of right-wing conspiratorial garbage that Joe Rogan is—and even purportedly left wing versions of that milieu often end up as reactionary nonsense.

Jimmy Dore is an example of a supposedly progressive comedian/talk radio guy who could be seen as a left Joe Rogan—except that these days he’s obsessed with anti vax conspiracies and hating trans people. Chapo Trap House, a left Bernie supporting podcast, had a fawning episode with Trump supporting, Musk-bootlicking hack Matt Taibbi in which they all talked about the pure working class credentials of cops and sneered at prison abolitionists. You can’t dismantle the master’s podcast with the master’s podcast. It’s difficult to capture the Rogan audience without being captured by the Rogan audience of conspiracists and bro bigots.

But the Rogan tools, and the Rogan audience, aren’t the only tools or audience. If the Democratic Joe Rogan is not Joe Rogan, but someone who looks more like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, then maybe Democrats should invest in someone who looks more like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift.

Obviously, Swift and Beyoncé don’t need the support of Democratic donors. But there are a lot of artists who do. Trump’s attack on arts funding demonstrates that Republicans understand that the arts are a nexus that is often inimical to them—and it also underlines the extent to which Democrats have failed to advance real, aggressive arts funding as a priority, or even an agenda item. Democrats do not generally campaign on funding the arts, though funding arts creates jobs, solidifies community, and can help build the vision of multiracial democracy and empowerment that Democrats are (with lapses, but still) generally committed to.

Supporting local arts can also be a way to support local reporting and media. It used to be that every reasonably sized city sported an alternative paper which provided coverage of the local arts scene as well as local, informed, and generally progressive political reporting. The internet destroyed the ad revenue model for these papers, and most have struggled since. The Chicago Reader, where I’ve written for 20 years, is facing yet another crisis right now and has mostly ceased commissioning freelance work (I’ve been donating short critic’s choice music blurbs over the last couple of months because I want them to stay afloat!)

The Reader, and papers like it, were part of a progressive infrastructure which helped develop investigative reporters, cartoonists, and arts writers, and which were vital for local arts scenes. They held politicians accountable, but they also made progressive community feel legitimate and cool. Most of them have disappeared now or are much reduced…but it wouldn’t be difficult, or that expensive, for funders to revive them. A network of well-funded alternative papers in Southern and Midwestern cities—Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin, Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh—could help build community and power in red and purple states. Alternative weeklies could even develop their own podcasts. Why not?

Stop being afraid to be who you are

As I’ve discussed before, we live in a white supremacist culture, and that means that white supremacy tends to be viewed as legitimate and authentic, while opponents of white supremacy are seen as fake, boring, unhip. You can see that in the endless quest for the progressive Joe Rogan, as if Joe Rogan, by sitting there being a white man spewing bigoted nonsense, has somehow found a unique key to realness and influence.

But the truth is that Rogan doesn’t look like an especially big fish compared to Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or Megan Thee Stallion or Steven Spielberg or any number of big name, broadly Democratic aligned celebrities whose art has made them cultural touchstones. This is a major cultural space where progressives dominate, not least because it’s a major cultural space that isn’t centered uniformly on white men.

If Democrats are looking for a way to increase their reach among young people, maybe they should build on the ways that they are already connected to young people, rather than trying to transform themselves into Republicans. The arts are huge and they’re right there. You don’t need to find the Joe Rogans. You just need to stop taking Beyoncé—and the next potential Beyoncé—for granted.