Tim Miller is the host of The Bulwark’s flagship podcast, inheriting the seat from his predecessor, Charlie Sykes. But has the substance of The Bulwark Podcast gotten better or worse under his stewardship?
In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Evan and I analyze Tim Miller’s style of political storytelling, using his own writing in Why We Did It: A Travelogue to the Republican Road to Hell as our backdrop. Miller has written candidly about coming from a Washington D.C. professional tradition that prioritizes the game of electioneering over actual governance, it is one that reinforced racist and homophobic campaign tactics because winning mattered more than leading.
Miller was a hatchet man for GOP PACs and the RNC, attacking Democrats even when those attacks targeted people like himself. His dissonance stems from a belief that he could compartmentalize his sexuality and that he didn’t need to be as open as other gay men, but still could win the game of D.C. career elevation, even when that game came at the direct expense of his own right to marry who he loves.
That dissonance persists today. He tries to square three irreconcilable things: belief in a version of America that never existed, loyalty to a professional game that was always rigged against him, and the quiet truth Trump’s victories revealed about the bigoted foundation of conservative politics. Sometimes he disappoints by playing into right-wing frames. Sometimes he surprises.
My conclusion is that Tim Miller is best understood as an artifact — a peculiar and revealing outgrowth of the pre-collapse conservative professional class that briefly found a home in the pro-democracy coalition. The game never stopped for Tim. He just changed teams. Now he plays for reactionary centrism, punching left and laundering right-wing frames as reasonable moderate opinion for an audience that finds that reassuring.
He's worth analyzing carefully.
He's just not always useful in charting the path forward.
Previously on Stew On This:
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