The Problem with The Bulwark
Sarah Longwell’s The Focus Group isn’t just a podcast. It’s a mirror held up to the consultant class—and it’s not a flattering one.
There’s a moment in The Focus Group podcast that captures everything broken about elite political culture. From a sterile office in Washington, D.C., Sarah Longwell and her guests—pollsters, consultants, and Beltway insiders—sit around a table listening to clips of “regular people” talk about politics. The format is meant to look like humility, but what it reveals is something closer to parody: a professional class so pathologically removed from the public it claims to serve that it now treats voter sentiment like game tape. The Focus Group is politics as Beltway SportsCenter—banter, predictions, buzzwords—except the stakes are democracy, and the punchline is that no one on the mic seems to realize they’re part of the problem.
The show is built around the idea of “listening.” But this is not relational listening—it’s surveilled listening. The voters are heard through the audio equivalent of a two-way mirror: stripped of context, geography, and moral weight, then dissected for strategic value. It’s not empathy. It’s ethnography—from a safe distance, filtered by professionals whose job is not to be changed by what they hear, but to map it onto the same broken political logic that got us here in the first place.
And that logic is alive and well in The Focus Group’s commentary segments, where the clips are analyzed like trends in a marketing campaign. Rage becomes a messaging challenge. Alienation becomes a branding opportunity. Populist frustration is gamified into micro-narratives about swing voters and “candidate likability.” The guests, often veterans of Democratic and anti-Trump circles, speak not as citizens but as strategists—tasked with reassembling a fractured electorate without ever questioning the party machines, donor ecosystems, or ideologies that fractured it in the first place.
In that way, The Focus Group isn’t just emblematic of elite failure. It’s emblematic of elite adaptation: how quickly the political consultant class turned “we have a democracy crisis” into a genre. And nowhere has that genre been more successful—or profitable—than at The Bulwark.
In 2024, The Bulwark reported its first profitable year through a sprawling media empire of newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube content. The site is making $5 million a year on Substack subscriptions alone. With a YouTube channel that brings in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month, they’ve built a business not just on resisting Trump—but on narrating their own journey away from him. It’s a kind of redemption arc that flatters the professional class: we saw the danger, we pulled the alarm, and now we host podcasts about it.
But is the alternative they offer—centrism, rebranded with slightly better manners—really as noble as they make it seem? The show may be about listening to “regular people,” but the real story is a new market for elite self-awareness, where the same people who helped build the crisis now profit from analyzing it. This isn’t analysis. It’s content marketing for the status quo.
To be clear: many of the people behind The Bulwark deserve credit for disavowing the direction their party took. Sarah Longwell, Bill Kristol, Tim Miller—these are not fringe characters. They spent decades shaping the political culture we now live with. And it took real courage to walk away from it. But walking away from a party isn’t the same as walking away from the system. And the system—the donor class, the consultant industrial complex, the pundit feedback loop—is still the air they breathe.
That’s the deeper work—the kind that doesn’t fit neatly into a podcast episode or a think tank newsletter. It’s not about disavowing your intentions or denying your values. It’s about cultivating the plain, moral clarity to recognize what your actions, incentives, and silence have helped maintain.
Listening to voters is easy. Monetizing political grief is even easier. But building trust again? Reimagining systems of power? That’s slow work. Humbling work. The kind that doesn’t get you a media company or a Substack bonus.
The question isn’t whether Sarah Longwell and her guests care about democracy. I’m sure they do. The question is: when will they stop narrating its decline and start stepping back from the systems that continue to break it?
Finding a way to profit in chaos does place one and all under suspicion. The monetization of opinions in this day and age devolves into sides, not deep inquiries. I doubt there are 1000 people in the general population that could hear, let alone understand the significance of the argument you are making, and to me that is the bigger issue. You are correct in everything idea you question. Mainstreaming questioning will be tricky, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't question. That you question democrats and never trumpers equally is to your credit. Reading your piece ,the echo of truth that will remain is the stark fact the status quo has no answers. ipso facto trump would have lost, if any answers were to be had. ipso facto the post election pivot-those answers were admissions of the void. But opinions are profitable, and therein lies our doom. ipso facto Nate Silver. We are drowning in a sea of 'who has answers' as opposed to who is brave enough to ask questions. Brava to you and it's a tough road, yet the only one to bring meaningful change. As a developmental and neuropsychologist I know when I am speaking to desert people who have never seen the ocean about the ocean. It's a fact that only way to the ocean conversation is questions. It's how our cognition functions. Keep asking, as deep questions are the only thing that will save us on the heros journey.
Your article hit on several points that I have felt as vague questions around the foggy edges of my mind. I am a Bulwark subscriber, but I often find myself wondering what these folks offer other than an expression of the panic and bewilderment that I share. I can never stop thinking that these are the folks who never asked the question “what are my strategies doing to American political discourse?” In their earlier careers, they functioned from an ethic that prioritized winning at the expense of reason. They relied on arguments from fallacies, won elections, and now voice their confusion about why voters fall easily for such blatant lies. I heard Tim Miller complain that people who criticize him for having worked for a fervently anti-gay party forget that Obama claimed to be against gay marriage to get elected. Yes, that’s true, but Obama didn’t run an election on a “God, guns and gays” message that increased anti-gay sentiment. He should check the statistics on the increase in gay hate crimes during the 2004 election. I listen to these folks now and wonder how do we address the bigger structural problems that they helped create. They helped create a mess and, then, they wonder why the people trying to wade through it don’t clean it up. The Democrats certainly carry a large share of the blame, but other than being appalled by the consequences that they helped create, these former Republicans spend their time complaining that the Democrats aren’t doing enough or doing the right things to fight back. I’m frustrated by the Democratic Party’s lack of strategy in dealing with Trump as well, but the real problems are, as you clearly delineate, deeper than what voters think. Thanks for your clarity.