State of the Discussion

Every other President in my lifetime has represented himself as serving in the interests of all Americans: this one is for his people only.

He's not even doing that, at least if equate "his people" with people who voted for him. His tariff war is seriously damaging for a variety of farmers. Cutting the ACA market subsidies will do particular damage in red states that haven't expanded Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts are going to exacerbate the financial problems facing rural hospitals.

When I was on the budget staff for my state's legislature, from time to time I heard members from rural areas say, "The Front Range urban corridor has declared war on rural Colorado." My job was understanding the state's cash flows. I was always tempted to say, "No, they haven't. You'll know they've declared war when the subsidies for your schools, roads, health care, electricity, and phone service stop."

I agree: what Pro Bono said. And on his last bullet point, about the SCOTUS, it's going to be interesting to see if this makes any difference (my guess is not, but I suppose it could give a bit of cover in case any of the disgraceful 6 is starting to feel uncomfortable)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/us/politics/originalism-trump-supreme-court-unitary-executive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tE8.z6ee.Bseton8hbgR1&smid=url-share

*what this tells me about the other side is that influential people on it are unconcerned with reality.*

I wonder about that. Is it that they are unconcerned with reality? Or are they (at least many of them) just as caught up in the alternate reality as any Faux News viewer?

Certainly there are some there who will ignore anything that looks like an inconvenient fact. Not to mention those who are simply delusional. But the (mis)information bubble there is both very real and very pervasive.

I understand the reasoning that the best vote-winning arguments are ones which appeal to voters' legitimate self-interest. But there are other things which must be said loud and often:

• this Administration is not normal. Every other President in my lifetime has represented himself as serving in the interests of all Americans: this one is for his people only.
• Troops are the streets should be there only to address an urgent crisis, not because the President has been confused by old videos.
• Everyone who is not reasonably suspected of serious crime should be immune from being dragged from their bed by government agents.
• corruption is rampant in this Administration.
• election procedure should not be a partisan matter.
• The Supreme Court has abandoned any shred of legitimacy. During the Biden administration it adopted a "major questions doctrine" to stop him doing things which the literal text of the law allowed. For Trump, the Court is using its emergency docket to allow him, without explanation, to do things which the literal text of the law and the Constitution disallow. The Court must be radically reformed.

1) Immigration. Immigration was higher in Trump's first term than in Bidens. Ackman is wrong.
2) Trump in his first term showed himself to be indifferent to the national debt. Ackman is wrong.
7) The USA has been a net fossil fuel exporter since 2019. Ackman is wrong.

I could go on - there are very few valid points. Yes, it's important to understand why people voted for Trump. But what this tells me about the other side is that influential people on it are unconcerned with reality. I hope that most of the electorate thinks otherwise.

Ok, I forgot that the comments now read in an opposite direction, so a lot has been posted since I started writing this (in spurts, given my crazy schedule). That link by GftNC was particularly interesting, especially the description of how limited the ideologues really are on either side. So the following didn't take all of that into account.

"I think it’s worth exploring how to communicate with MAGAs because, even when King Pussygrabber strokes out on the toilet at three in the morning, we won’t be over the madness. We will still have the MAGA voters, the Republican party’s commitment to the election tactics of Othering and engineered polarization, and the extensive well-funded Republican hate/fear propaganda bubble (Faux, etc) which, for many people, substitutes for news and shapes their voting behavior."

Well, with respect, I probably wouldn’t start like this.  Criticizing a side for “othering” by what seems to be to be “othering” of another sort isn’t a winning proposition. And dialing up the rhetoric to 11 isn’t likely to do any good either.  And claiming the other side “lies” when the issues are often nuanced only makes each side more entrenched. You could substitute in MSNBC for Faux, Democrat for Republican, woke Democrats for MAGA, and post this on a right-wing site and it would fit right in. And that, IMHO, is the problem.  

I’d say the first thing to do is to try to understand the other side. And not the talking heads on TV, but real people of good faith.  Why did so many vote for Trump? What policies were behind that decision?  Or what was it about Biden/Harris that voters didn’t find attractive? You can argue that the election was lost by not being loud enough, or confrontational enough, or tough enough, but I think that misses the mark.  

IMHO, a lot of people that voted for Trump/Vance were not anywhere close to the cartoonish MAGA voter you describe. There were so many reasons to vote for or not vote for Trump, just as there were so many reasons to vote for or not vote for Harris.  And many of those reasons deserve respect. To claim otherwise is to have blinders on.   You can hate a position, but hating the person holding that position is an entirely different matter.

Take just one former Democrat, Bill Ackman, and his voiced reasons for voting for Trump over Harris.

https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1844802469680873747   

I chose him simply because he has a list handy that I read some time ago. I may not agree with all of his reasons (and you won’t either) but I think his reasons deserve respect on the whole.  And this is his list. I think there are several more that could be added, but IMO, numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 24 , 28, 31, 33 were quite resonant with those that voted for Trump (not necessarily in that order).  Ackman was not “born” or “made” in the sense you describe.  

I am deliberately not responding to the specific examples in your post, Wonkie (i.e. Calloway, Walz, healthcare truth, Portland). I just didn’t want you to think those arguments were lost on me. I can acknowledge some validity in what you say. I just didn’t want any differences I have to detract from the tenor of my response.  

russell - I also disagree with nous’ thought that health care “codes” as a management issue. At the policy level, it does. At the level of “do I have to choose between health insurance and rent” it does not.

Then we agree, because that is what I was trying to get at with my: It doesn’t register for workers as a policy thing so much as it does a wages and benefits thing. The voters that the Dems are losing are going to tune out as soon as the conversation starts focusing on the details of health policy, same as rank-and-file union members start getting sore feet and shuffling as soon as the rep with the bullhorn starts babbling on about the importance of changing the language in Article 5 Part 3 of the CBA.

Keep the language focused on struggles and outcomes and whose side you are fighting on. And if there are cleavage lines over policy choices, focus on the need for solidarity.

And it has the huge merit that it will classify as elite a whole bunch of people that today's self-important elitists will be horrified to be classed with.

Nobody cares.

Until they lose it, or can't afford it. Especially if they or someone they care about has an expensive and / or chronic illness.

I also disagree with nous' thought that health care "codes" as a management issue. At the policy level, it does. At the level of "do I have to choose between health insurance and rent" it does not.

IMO (D)'s do well to hammer the hell out of this one.

I second wjca's thought that most people aren't really motivated by the whole "threat to democracy" thing. "People Like Me" might be, most people aren't. The connection between that and their daily life is not always clear.

I'd go so far as to say if you give a lot of people a choice betwen democracy and a basic level of personal and financial security, they would choose the latter without a second thought.

"Democracy" is kind of abstract. "My job is going away" is not. "I can't afford insulin" is not. "My hospital closed and the nearest one now is an hour away (or two hours away, or not even in my state)" is not. "I can't afford to not work, but I can't afford to pay for care for my kid" is not. "I work a full time job and have to take care of my disabled kid / my parent with Alzheimers / my partner who had a stroke" is not.

The price of eggs is too small bore. Have you lost your job? Are you clinging to a job you don't really like because you don't know if you can find another one? Do you make enough to buy a house? Do you make enough to start a family? Do you have a kid that needs any kind of special ed? Trump just took that away. Can your kids afford to go to college without taking on six figures of debt? If they don't go to college, can they find a job - not just a "job", but a career, a path in life - that will give them a decent quality of life?

Does your life feel stable? Can you see a path forward for yourself and your family, if you have one? Can you see a path forward to the life you thought you might have?

How worried are you about your future?

When I listen to folks, especially young folks (which for me at this point is basically anybody 45 or younger) this is the stuff that nags at them.

(D)'s should absolutely give zero ground on basic human rights. Women'sLGBTQ, trans people, black people, Latinos, immigrants of any stripe.

Defend them all. Do not give an inch.

But that needs to happen in a context that makes people understand that those folks' rights are not being defended at the expense of everybody else. That the (D)'s are not forgetting the folks who aren't "marginal" - not a member of a non-mainstream demographic.

I.e., to more or less stereotype it, people who might self-describe as more or less a plugger. Someone trying to do the right things, trying to "play by the rules". Someone who isn't trying to change the world, they're just trying to take care of themselves and their family. And who nonetheless finds themselves lying awake at night trying to figure out how to make it work.

(D)'s should be able to chew gum and walk at the same time. They should be able to say "those people who aren't like you are no threat to you, they're just living their lives" AND ALSO say "we see how tentative life is for you, here is what we will do to help that".

Not either / or.

It's a really unsettled time, people are worried, and everything Trump does makes it worse. Hammer that, every single day.

If you aren't rich, Donald J Trump is making your life worse. Less secure.

Are you rich? What exactly are you getting out of this administration?

Hammer that.

You can tell the difference between the Dems with close union ties and allies and the ones who have never been a part of a union and only have ties to people in management.

Healthcare codes as a management concern. It doesn't register for workers as a policy thing so much as it does a wages and benefits thing. Policy details don't land with working class voters because those decisions are made by other people. What matters is whether they are feeling like government is fighting for workers or for the big people.

I really think it's that simple. Low information voters don't listen to policy discussions, and they don't trust people who spend all their time talking about that stuff. It's a cultural divide.

I think wj is absolutely right, nobody using the word knows what definition of "elite" anybody else uses. In the case of Rory Stewart, it can be quite hard to imagine how he wouldn't know he was part of "the elite", having been educated (as he was) at Eton and Balliol. It is of course a point in his favour that he only attended one meeting of the Bullingdon Club having realised how appalling their prevailing behaviour was, but on the other hand I believe they make a bit of a fetish of only selecting the "right kind" of members, which would mark you out as being a member of what many people (like Etonians for example) understand "the elite" to be. The only thing that would perhaps make sense is that he imagines the elite to be about money: he is right when he says that Oxford professors are not what most people these days consider "rich". Of course, before they started the immensely popular podcast, neither was he, although I believe he and Campbell are now!

I sympathise with novakant's view of Campbell, it took me a long time to get over his behaviour on Iraq etc. And I have never forgotten how he stormed onto the C4 News, with no notice, and tried to browbeat Jon Snow about the Dodgy Dossier. Watching it again makes me very much miss the calibre of those kinds of journalists (JS, not AC).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBWE7QzADe8

It's almost tragic to see how Campbell seems to be incapable of understanding that the problems we face now regarding a post-truth public have their root in the handling of the Iraq war by the US/UK.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WEzvesJUAuc

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bxs-dmb9nY

I think one of the great (and often overlooked) issues in this kind of discussion is: What is your definition of "elite"? Is it how much money you have (regardless of whether you earned it, inherited it, or maybe won the lottery)? Is it how much you make (whether you hang on to it or not)? Or is it how much education you have (regardless of whether you actually use anything you learned)? Or maybe something else?

Granted there is some correlation among the first three. But they are certainly far from identical. And yet anytime the term comes up in discussion, everybody seems to assume that everybody else is working from the same definition. Or should be.

And that is at the root of any suggestion that someone doesn't recognize their own membership in "the elite.". Almost certainly the other person is coming from a different definition of the term. Under their definition, they might well be correct.

That's how an Oxford professor can believe that he isn't a member of the elite -- he doesn't make enough. While someone who uses the level of education as the governing criteria will think that of course he is part of the elite. Different definitions.

P.S. It belatedly occurs to me that the converse also applies. Some people consider themselves part of the elite. While lots of others strongly disagree. (Only consider the term nouveau-riche.) Again, different definitions.

The Portland Frog.
We’ve been talking about communication to reduce polarization and fight fascism. I think that at this moment in time, the smartest communicator I know of is the Portland Frog.
Why? Because he exposed the Trump admin as lying crisis actors and he did it in a way that is easy to understand, accessible to the non-political citizen, and catchy enough to get the attention of the MSM. 
What's going on with the Portland Frog standing off against ICE?
Among Portland Protests, It’s Frogs and Sharks and Bears, Oh My! - The New York Times
I raised the question of whether MAGAs were born or made. I think that the comment about authoritarian personality types is very relevant: There are people who are natural born followers of a leader who is perceived to be strong. They care less about where they might be led than they do for the comfort of feeling that someone big and mean is in charge and will keep them safe.
No one is a natural born follower of a leader who is an idiot.

Republican influencers are trying hard to convince the MAGAs that King Pussygrabber and Cruelty Barbie are defending us against an existential threat. The longer Portland activists can keep things silly, the harder it will be to keep up the lying.
Protest frogs vs. MAGA media influencers: the info war over ICE in Portland and Chicago
I am concerned about the upcoming No Kings Day. I am concerned about the leftwing wannabe heroes who do stupid and destructive things like blocking traffic, setting fires, and throwing things. If those jerks aren’t Republicans, then they should be because that’s who they’re helping. I hope the Portland Frog inspires people all over the US to make the NO Kings Day event be a day of silliness, music, and fun. Fuck Fascists with fun!
I’ll be down in Olympia WA where protests are always like that.
Best wishes to you all wherever you go and stay safe

Meanwhile, the NYT editorial board at least tells it like it is. Too bad the Rs have so bought into the fake news/MSM lie that they think they can safely ignore it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/opinion/letitia-james-indictment-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk8.XvAr.7ewQlq_sNfRI&smid=url-share

OK, my comment which was "awaiting approval" has now disappeared, so it looks like it didn't gain approval. If so, lj, I think it's important to know why, so I (and everybody else) can avoid such a failure in the future. If it was the length, at the old site all I would have had to do was split it into two comments, so if that were confirmed I could act accordingly.

I have no idea how this will copy across (in the original there are loads of links - hopefully here in blue - and images etc which I think have not copied) and I have certainly gathered that Ian Leslie is not everybody here's cup of tea. But although I don't know how much of this is completely right, I found it interesting. I have italicised the part that particularly interested me, and bolded the portion of that which is something I have been aware of for a long time. Years ago I used to call this phenomenon "cluster of attitudes", and not only is it infuriating, and misleading, it is IMO really lazy.

How Moderates Win In a Hostile Environment
Ian Leslie
Oct 11
Paid

It has not gone unremarked that Americans with different political views distrust and dislike one another. This is usually framed as a 50:50 division between supporters of the two main parties: two vast armies, fighting for entirely different values and policies, facing off in a cold civil war. Look under the surface, however, and something more complex is going on.
First of all, it’s not true that the America’s population can be easily divided into ideological camps, and while such questions are much debated among political scientists, there’s a good case that Americans overall haven’t become more extreme or rigid in their views. What’s happened is that America’s political culture has been poisoned by a minority of ideologues on either side.
Ideologues, in the sense used by political scientists, are voters who have consistent beliefs, organised into recognisable patterns. If you know they’re against immigration, you can predict they’re also anti-abortion and pro-gun. Non-ideologues either have no strong views on politics, or they have strong opinions which don’t follow a standard template.
Although the number of ideologues has been growing (they’ve doubled over the last twenty years) they still represent only about a fifth of voters. Most Americans aren’t as structured in their views and don’t easily fit into Democrat or Republican boxes. Many of them are ambivalent about the most divisive issues, like abortion. Plenty of them have a mix of liberal and conservative positions.
Ideologues have disproportionate influence and power, however. They shout the loudest and generate the most political content. They’re also the ones funding and running political parties. (Politicians are more ideologically consistent than most voters, partly because they have to be to get ahead but also because many of them are predisposed to be).
Another reason that ideologues matter so much is that they exhibit more anger, distrust and hostility towards the other side - and those feelings are contagious. While most voters don’t share the political fervour of this minority, they have absorbed their animosity. Voters who identified as Democrat or Republican didn’t used to have strong feelings about those who leaned the other way - it was just politics, after all - but they do now. “Affective polarisation” has increased and spread throughout the population.

High levels of negative feelings about those on the other side have become normal. This is true even among independents. Most independents lean toward one party or the other. Between 1994 and 2018 those with “very unfavourable opinions” of the other side increased from 8% to 37% among Democratic leaners, and from 15% to 39% among Republican leaners.
In short, ideological polarisation is a minority pursuit, but affective polarisation is a national pastime. Most voters don’t actually have very strong views on economic or social policy and couldn’t necessarily point you to major differences in the parties’ platforms, but they have a strong feeling that the other side is wrong and bad. They don’t care much about politics but they know who they don’t like.
In Britain, things are a little different. Whenever I hear people say British politics is “polarised” I wince a little. To polarise means to divide into two opposing groups. The term is lifted from America, where nearly everyone votes for one of two parties, and it doesn’t make sense here.
In fact the salient feature of British politics in the last few years has been a decline in the popularity of both main parties and a fragmentation of the vote. Our slightly milder but still fractious political debate takes place between a series of cultural-political clusters which don’t line up neatly with institutional affiliations. There’s more than one way to cut the cultural cake but More In Common’s typology is a useful one (numbers here).

Parties aiming for a parliamentary majority need to straddle different clusters, which is far from impossible. Without America’s party binary, British voting patterns are inherently more fluid. The differences between most voters are not necessarily wide: most Reform voters favour same-sex marriage, for instance, and are vaguely in favour of diversity, even if they want immigration to come down (the latter being true of most voters). I hear a lot of politicians and pundits urging Keir Starmer to focus on his “natural” voters rather than on those tempted by Reform, but that would represent a tragic failure of ambition. Nigel Farage certainly doesn’t accept that he can’t win over left-leaning voters.
There is a sense of pessimism among centrist commentators - a feeling that British voters are both irretrievably atomised and radicalised. I’m not convinced by this. Pollsters who spend a lot of time doing focus groups tend to over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics, and also how miserable and angry voters are. Focus groups are socially awkward events, and one of the main ways British people bond with each other is by having a good moan.

My guess is that, as in the US, a substantial minority of hardliners on left and right generate most of the public anger and animosity, which breeds a listless but pervasive distrust and cynicism among voters at large. (More of the hardline anger comes from the right than the left - see the “Dissenting Disruptors” in More In Common’s framework, a very frustrated, verging-on-anarchist group of voters which now constitutes nearly a fifth of the electorate.)
In America and Britain ideologically driven voters are in the minority but on the rise, and they have an outsized democratic impact. America, in particular, places a lot of power in the hands of ideologues, via the presidential nomination process. The Republican Party was famously radicalised by Trump, and the Democratic electorate is a lot more left-wing than it was when Joe Biden won the nomination.
We might even say that the future of democracy depends on these voters. So it’s worth taking a closer look at how they behave. I found this new paper on disagreement among ideologues very interesting. It’s by a political scientist, Tadeas Cely, who studies America’s political polarisation. Cely adopts the definition of “ideology” coined by the godfather of modern political science, Philip Converse: “a system of explicit and unequivocal political beliefs”. Ideologues are people who are politically sophisticated enough to know, in Converse’s phrase, “what goes with what”, and stick to the pattern of beliefs that they share with their cohort.
Cely ran a survey of a couple of thousand American voters in which he presented them with the opinions of a hypothetical voter on controversial political issues (like immigration and gun control). The hypothetical voters was either liberal, conservative, a mild centrist, or someone with an unusual mix of strongly held views - a “messy” belief system. The respondents were classified in the same way, according to the firmness and consistency of their policy positions.
After viewing the hypothetical voter’s opinions, respondents were asked to rate how warmly they felt about this person, using a hundred point “thermometer” scale. Cely found that disagreement between ideologues produces more animosity than other disagreements. Not just a bit more - way more. When two ideologues clash, they hate each other about three times more intensely than after disagreeing with people with equally strong but “messy”, non-patterned beliefs, and four times more than with mild-mannered centrists.
Cely’s analysis of how animosity gets triggered is fascinating. In a second survey, he used the same model and told participants that their fictional interlocutor held views on two additional issues (student debt and Gaza ceasefire) without saying what those views were. What he found is that those “unrevealed” opinions increased the hostility of the disagreement. Why? Because the ideologues “filled in the blanks”. After having seen the person’s view on abortion, they just knew what this person would say about Gaza. And it made them furious.
We might put it like this: disagreement between ideologues is metonymic. The part stands in for the whole. As soon I know one of your beliefs, I know all of them. More than that, I know what kind of person you are: you’re somebody I hate.

In a sense the whole political environment now operates metonymically. With so much competition for eyeballs, the amount of attention voters spare for politics is smaller than ever, so they make thin slice judgements based on content produced by ideologues on their own side - content which highlights the most outrageous and objectionable ideologues from the other side. Voters extrapolate from the worst to the whole.
If you’re non-ideological, moderate politician, you need to be able to speak to the ideologues on your side.¹ They’re a growing group of voters, overrepresented in the centres of power, who set the tone of the wider debate because of how noisy they are and how intensely they dislike the other side.
But if you only speak to the ideologues, you get trapped inside the ideologue’s rigid belief system, which makes it harder to reach the non-ideological majority. You’d also be faking it, which is quite easy to spot. The trick is to adopt enough of the pattern to avoid being denounced as a traitor by your own side, while adopting one or two elements beyond it which show that you’re not a captive of it.
Pattern-disruption is important both to be noticed in the first place - given that voters are predictive processors with scarce attention for politics who simply screen out familiar patterns - and to prove that the politician is their own person rather than a robot controlled by his or her party or faction. Most voters have ‘messy’ sets of beliefs and they respond to politicians who mirror them in that sense.
This is not to be confused with putting together a ragbag of positions based on whatever policies do well in polling. Ambitious politicians need a set of positions that are internally coherent, grounded in a story about how the country needs to change (beyond ‘get the other guy/party out’). But it can’t be a matching set; it has to be new or surprising in some way.
I’m not suggesting anyone emulate Trump’s brazenly offensive manner or authoritarianism, which have done so much to toxify American politics. But consider how his unlikely success in 2016 was based on a pattern-breaking combination of policy positions: strongly anti-immigration, opposed to foreign wars, pro tax-cuts, pro-Medicare. Consequently he was regarded by voters as less conservative than most Republican candidates, and more moderate than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Or recall Boris Johnson’s greatest political victory. He won the 2019 general election by mixing cultural authoritarianism (Get Brexit Done) with economic interventionism (”levelling up”). That broke the expected patterns and knocked down the Red Wall. Johnson and Trump were very different in style, even if they often get lumped together but it’s important to note that successful politicians practice strategic pattern-disruption at the level of tone as well as policy.
For instance, a moderate politician might not want to present as moderate. “Moderation” by itself doesn’t make noise, and at worst, it signals complacency and weakness. (If Josh Shapiro, the popular and moderate governor of Pennsylvania, wants to win the 2028 nomination, he will have to lean into his inner Bernie.) But pure “radicalism” keeps you in the ideologue box. A “combative moderate” uses the rhetorical intensity of ideologue wing to moderate ends. Hence the current incarnation of Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani is a pattern-breaker. Progressives often come across as stern and scolding; Mamdani is relaxed, funny, a good listener. He is a radical leftist who wears a smart, some might say conservative, suit and tie. His wire-crossing may end up extending to more than style or personality; it will be interesting to see if he ends up adopting a politically heterogeneous, ‘messy’ mix of policies once in office, as Ken Livingstone, similar in some ways, did in his first, successful term as London mayor.
It is probable that the share of ideologues in the electorate will continue to grow, as social media makes political discourse ever more algorithmic and ever more angry. Politics may eventually become a clash of armies with rigid, unyielding, static positions. But we’re not there yet, and we probably won’t be for quite a while. It is still possible for imaginative politicians to disrupt established patterns and create new ones, and plenty of space for them to do so in the middle ground. What they can’t afford to be is predictable.

Bob Altemeyer’s work is less well known than it should be. His research was primarily about authoritarian followers, that is, the people who follow authoritarian leaders. He was warning about the direction the United States was headed in 2006, long before Trump. You can read his last book at this link: https://theauthoritarians.org/

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After being snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, sources close to President Donald Trump revealed that he had not yet given up hope that he could win a Nobel Prize in Literature for his latest Truth Social post.

"I'm the only president that uses Truth Social, did you know that? The only one," Trump said. "And I've got some real bangers, let me tell you. Take this most recent one about China. I really scorched those Chinamen. It's a long post. Did you see it? It was almost like writing a book. It was really something."
It’s Not Over Yet: Trump Still Hoping For Nobel In Literature For Latest Truth Social Post

The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.

@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.