Do you know this joke? There’s an elephant in a bathtub. He’s just lathering, luxuriating in water, and the elephant keeper comes up to the elephant and says, “Soap?” And the elephant looks back at the elephant keeper, clears his throat, and says, “No soap. Radio.”
Get it? No? Maybe you’re not concentrating properly. There’s an elephant and an elephant keeper, and the elephant keeper says, “Soap?” And then the elephant says, “No soap. Radio.”
If you still didn’t get it, it’s maybe time to put you out of your misery. The point of the joke is that it makes no sense. Its purpose is to get you to chuckle along. But then the real purpose of the joke is for the two of us to team up and tell it to other people, with you supporting me, and then with us getting everybody else we meet to chuckle along with the joke too.
This joke—a 10th-grade staple—offers an exquisite illustration of how political coalition-building sometimes happens. The idea is to be completely content-free and use peer pressure and FOMO to build collective consciousness. And often enough, it works.
What brought this to mind was the spectacle of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which has for the most part been an impressive exercise in saying nothing at all. But lest we think all politics works on this principle, we should recall last month’s Republican National Convention, a different experience altogether. More than platforms, more than policy, more even than candidates, the comparison of the two parties is a contrast in language and style. If the Democrats are the party of No Soap Radio, the Republicans are the party of Talk Radio.
The impact of talk radio on conservative politics continues, I think, to be underestimated. In a 2005 essay, David Foster Wallace wrote: “Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.” I thought of that essay when I found myself alone on a long drive in Texas in 2012 listening to Michael Savage on the radio. I disagreed with virtually everything that Savage said, but I couldn’t tear myself away, and in the middle of trying to understand why that was, Savage himself crowed: “You listen to me because I’m sort of hypnotic.”
I admit that I try to listen to Donald Trump as little as possible, but earlier this year, I had to listen to an entire speech of his for work, and belatedly, it clicked for me that that’s what Trump’s schtick was: A talk-radio monologue hitting the campaign trail. In talk, the enemies are dead air and boredom. Everything is extemporaneous. You have your themes that you return to again and again, but you follow the digressions. If there is a crowd (or radio callers), you go down the rabbit hole with them, always teasing towards hidden pools of knowledge that more mainstream sources don't want you to access. But above all, you stay hooked to a few points that tap deep into the amygdala and that shape the rest of your discourse. When Trump won the presidency, commentators tended to look to The Apprentice as the stepping-stone for his ascent, but The Apprentice was a politics-free show; talk radio was the real workshop for his presidential run.
And that has meant that as the GOP is reshaped in his image, everybody else has started to share the cadence of talk radio. DeSantis didn’t manage to do it—it is an “exotic” set of skills, after all—and flamed out. J.D. Vance has some of the freewheeling, improvisational style that resulted in its share of peculiar utterances, which Democrats are now so gleefully picking apart. For that reason alone, it’s not surprising that Trump selected Vance as the heir apparent to MAGA.
As has been clear since the DNC began, there is no adept among prominent Democrats of the rattling, meandering speaking style perfected by Trump, and the most obvious reason for that, simply, is that nobody who’s anybody in the national party cut his teeth on talk radio. Going by the first days of the convention, what the Dems are looking to do is to communicate entirely through polished soundbites. Everything is “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice.” There are discussions of hardscrabble childhoods and nods to working-class solidarity. The overriding message is the villainy of Donald Trump and, like a child’s fortune teller, that opens up into the sub-themes of an abortion ban, Project 2025, the Jan. 6 riot, and the felony convictions.
“The discipline is impeccable.”
The discipline is impeccable. Nobody wanders off-script, nobody looks away from the teleprompter. What it’s meant to suggest is credibility, legitimacy, and substance. But there’s an irony in there, since no substance is to be had. On the first night of the convention, I didn’t come across a glimmer of concrete policy discussion. Based on the convention I couldn’t begin to tell you what Harris wants to do about Ukraine, China, Iran, or any other geopolitical flashpoint. On the domestic front, inflation has already been addressed and will keep going down—so said President Biden. Immigration, Big Tech regulation, health care, and the environment went mostly unmentioned. It was difficult even to get a sense of who Kamala Harris is or what her credentials are—but it was very impressive that she stood up to a bully when she was 5 years old.
But no matter. That isn’t the style of this iteration of the Democratic Party. If Democrats in their Al Gore or Elizabeth Warren moments sometimes swerve into wonkiness, the party’s rhetoric in recent cycles has gone in a very different direction. It’s No Soap Radio: the art of saying nothing many times, and then having a consensus of the like-minded affirm the content-free messaging.
The respective styles of the two parties may prove decisive this year. In a close race in which those who have firm opinions have already decided, those in the middle are as likely to be influenced by how the messaging comes across as what it says. The race, then, may well turn on what the undecided respond to—whether a greater share of them is charmed by the cheery vacuousness of No Soap Radio or the hypnotic, digressive, apocalyptic style of Talk.