00:00:26.860Unless, of course, you went straight to the dumpster.
00:00:29.020I like my shirt. I like my choices. I had a great time in Austin and I have a topical zinger.
00:00:36.100I was going to do something about Brownback Mountain. It's maybe too niche. It's only
00:00:39.580Kansas heads will know. Michael. Peter. What do you know about what's the matter with Kansas?
00:00:44.880I have no idea what's the matter with Kansas, but I do know that the way to fix it
00:00:48.320is to send national political pundits there 24 hours at a time to reach sweeping conclusions.
00:00:59.020so this is a book from 2004 by thomas frank who's sort of a lefty historian journalist guy he's one
00:01:16.160of the co-founders of the baffler to start off here i feel like you need to situate yourself
00:01:21.100in 2002. George W. Bush is the president. We are post 9-11, so he is crazy popular.
00:01:30.220His approval rating briefly passed 90% after the attacks. In November of 2002,
00:01:36.860the GOP sweeps the midterms. They control the presidency, the House, and the Senate.
00:01:42.200And Democrats are in a state of what is basically complete despair.
00:01:46.160Let me just hold my breath, pause for a moment, and try to picture what that's like.
00:01:49.940i might need more time for this just to feel that way in the midst of all this john judas who's a
00:01:54.900politics writer and roy texera who's a political scientist they publish a book called the emerging
00:02:01.340democratic majority oh yeah and they basically argue that if you look at changing demographics
00:02:08.300in this country women people of color people with higher levels of education they were all gaining
00:02:13.300a larger share of the electorate and the theory was that this would deliver the future to democrats0.53
00:02:18.560Right. Yeah. And this really captured the attention of Democratic strategists and political scientists and pundits because it felt so counterintuitive at the time.
00:02:27.760It felt like Republicans ruled the world. Right. Not only were they in power, but, you know, the war on terror as an issue dominated our politics and culture. Right.
00:02:38.540Yeah. Most television shows were about the importance of being racist against Muslims in 2002.
00:04:31.560So Thomas Frank makes a bunch of arguments in this book.
00:04:34.240I'm going to try to section them off and I have distilled them into three major pieces.
00:04:41.240First, he claims that the white working class is shifting away from Democrats and voting for Republicans despite the fact that Republican policies don't benefit them.0.99
00:04:52.380Second, he says that this is because conservative elites have basically duped the white working class into acting against their own interests by pushing cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage.0.60
00:05:03.160And then third, he says that part of why this scheme works is that Democrats have embraced neoliberal policies that leave working people behind.
00:05:12.620I would say that's nuanced, but we can get there.
00:05:15.760I will also throw another caveat in here before anyone yells at me.
00:05:19.260When we talk about like the white working class, we're leaving out big chunks of the working class that are not white.
00:05:26.340At the time Frank wrote this, and really up until 2024 to some degree, it made sense to talk more about the white working class because those were the people who were shifting their behavior.0.68
00:05:38.240Whereas like until fairly recently, the black working class was pretty much voting the same way they had voted for half a century.
00:05:46.420Frank was looking at a specific phenomena of white people leaving the Democratic Party.0.75
00:08:11.440Now it sounds like a number from a Broadway musical.
00:08:13.620Roy Teixeira, one of the guys who wrote the Emerging Democratic Majority book, he looked into this and found that if you introduce the variable of a college degree, the situation changes dramatically.
00:08:25.120So if you look at people without college degrees who make 30 to 50K per year, the white working class has been steadily shifting away from Democrats since the 1960s.
00:08:35.600In fact, all white people have been shifting away from the Democrats since the 1960s, but the trend is much more severe for whites with lower socioeconomic status.
00:08:44.220There's also the thing of like many, many, many more people are getting college degrees during that time too.
00:08:48.700So it also – that cohort of people without college degrees making sort of bottom third of the income ladder, the number of people in that cohort, the percentage of the population in that cohort is also changing at the same time.
00:08:59.560They're still quite large as a percentage of the population, but they are shrinking.
00:09:02.700Because I think it's like 35% of the population has a college degree now.
00:09:28.080To me, the bottom line is like Frank is correct in the sense that he has identified a real population that is shifting away from the Democratic Party.0.99
00:09:38.380And yeah, you can call them the white working class.
00:09:41.180But this is just a distinct group of people and the shift is real.
00:09:44.720After the 2004 election when Bush won re-election, this was like a hot topic to some degree and I think was a hot topic in part because of Frank.
00:09:54.760The catchphrase at the time was moral values voters.
00:09:58.080Oh, God. Just say people who hate gay people. This is taking forever. We live in hell. Anytime you hear the word moral in politics, it's like, oh, we're not actually talking about morality. We're talking about people who don't like thinking about what I do with other gentlemen.0.99
00:10:10.560So if you look at Pew survey data, in 1994, voters with college degrees favored Republicans by about a 10-point margin. In 2004, they were about even, and now it is completely flipped. This is a big post-election narrative right now, right? The diploma divide.
00:10:27.440It's a little bit oversimplified in the media, in part because the divide doesn't really
00:11:19.380I don't want to hear someone say it was – I'm a political scientist and you emailed me Friday night before the election and never followed up after that.
00:11:34.600So we're just going to call you dumb bitch one and dumb bitch two et al.1.00
00:11:39.160What they found, what these anonymous authors found was that if you look at white people below the median income with no college degree, steadily moving to the Republican Party since 1992, and the 2016 election was just following the same trend.1.00
00:12:04.620Obama did well in 2008 with these groups.
00:12:06.820But for the most part, yeah, Trump's support among the white working class defined like this was basically as you would expect if you look at this chart.
00:12:15.560I also want to say that now that I've been to Texas for 72 hours, I can pretend to be an expert on these people.
00:12:21.540Although the only actual person I met there was this hot as breakfast barista who asked me what my podcast was called and then ghosted on me after I sent him an episode.
00:12:29.160I was trying to think of like the sexiest episode we've done.
00:12:32.780Like what's the episode that makes me look the strongest and most masculine?
00:12:35.860And I thought rich dad, poor dad was it, but maybe it was the rule.
00:12:38.780You should have sent him the episode where you sound the most diminutive.
00:14:12.800And he frames modern conservatism as basically a bait and switch.
00:14:17.480Republicans generate outrage over cultural issues and they use that political capital
00:14:23.520to implement policies that favor business over working people.
00:14:27.320So the working people are basically being duped into supporting a party that undermines their own material conditions.
00:14:34.220This is roughly how I would put it, right, if I was like speaking off the cuff?
00:14:36.960We'll get to like what I think he's wrong and right about, but there's definitely some truth here.
00:14:42.860I wrote an article when I was at HuffPost about differing life expectancies in Republican-controlled versus Democrat-controlled states, and like it's really stark.
00:14:50.640It also is important to remember that a lot of the people upon whom that harm is inflicted are not necessarily the ones voting for it.
00:15:12.940And it's also hard to know – it's hard to – you can't really prove or disprove the idea that Republican leaders are duping the voters, right?
00:15:20.640Frank's primary argument in support of this is that the right doesn't deliver on its culture war promises.
00:15:28.420I'm going to send you his argument here.
00:15:37.400The cons have altered the state's political environment considerably, but their record as legislators is more mixed.0.63
00:15:43.240Like their faction nationally, they have made virtually no headway in the culture wars.
00:15:47.740They have not halted abortion in Kansas, or secured a voucher program, or even managed to keep evolution out of the schools.
00:15:53.800Indeed, the issues the cons emphasize seem all to have been chosen precisely because they are not capable of being resolved by the judicious application of state power.
00:16:02.500Senator Brownback, for example, is best known for stands that are purely symbolic,
00:16:06.420against cloning, against the persecution of Christians in distant lands,
00:16:10.380against sex slavery in the third world.
00:16:12.900These are issues that touch the lives of almost nobody in Kansas,
00:16:15.960that function solely as rallying point for the con followers.
00:16:19.240They stoke the anger, keep the pot simmering,
00:16:21.420but have little to do with the practical day-to-day uses of government power.
00:16:25.280Thus, they allow the politician in question to grandstand magnificently
00:16:28.420while avoiding any identification with the hated state.
00:16:31.200Yeah, this is my thing with like right-wing propaganda, which is like you pick these weird things of like they've got kitty litter in the bathrooms at the school or like they're canceling people online.
00:16:42.100And a lot of these issues don't really have like a legislative fix.
00:16:45.040But it's just it's easy to whip people into an emotional state and then say, vote for me to basically send a thumbs down to these people who you don't like or these people who are condescending to you or whatever.
00:19:28.200And I think he sort of overlooked them because it's not quite his beat.
00:19:31.500And also, I think, partly to downplay the threat, I think a lot of people just don't want to believe what's happening.
00:19:37.840I mean, you've heard of these focus groups where they describe like Republicans' proposed policies to people and they literally don't believe them.
00:19:43.960They're like, no, they don't want to cut Social Security.
00:20:57.440That's something that is really happening.
00:20:59.400And I think we can use that to go on a little bit of a tangent here.
00:21:04.000There's an underlying argument that Frank is prodding at and that I think, especially in light of the last election, is worth talking about.1.00
00:21:14.300And that is, are voters fucking stupid?0.99
00:21:18.080Voter rationality is something that's been studied extensively by Larry Bartels, who's the same dude who wrote What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas and then sort of, in my mind, lost the argument.1.00
00:21:28.300Let's start in 1916, the presidential election between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes.
00:21:35.040Wilson wins, of course, but somewhat inexplicably loses his home state of New Jersey.
00:21:47.440That summer, there were a series of deadly shark attacks at the Jersey Shore.
00:21:52.120Not only were people very frightened, but it was devastating for tourism.
00:21:56.180Bartels runs a bunch of analysis, regressions, controls for every variable he can, and concludes, quote,
00:22:01.960In summary, then, every indication in the New Jersey vote returns is that the horrifying shark attacks during the summer of 1916 reduced Wilson's vote in the beach communities by about 10 percentage points.
00:22:13.940Idiocracy. The documentary. We've always been here.
00:22:16.620Little side note. I didn't really know this, but in like the popular imagination, sharks weren't that dangerous before this.
00:27:27.580He basically showed that if you have a jury and each juror is only slightly more likely than not to make the right decision, as a whole, they are very likely to make the right decision, right?
00:28:37.880It's more that like the media is pumping people full of irrelevant information and just expecting people to be able to see through it.
00:28:46.140And I just don't think that that's something that we should rely on.
00:28:48.540So Larry Bartels and another guy, Christopher Atchin, publish a book called Democracy for Realists a few years ago.
00:28:56.020It compiles their research on voter rationality.
00:28:59.020And they basically conclude that voters aren't really rational in any sense.
00:29:03.020Instead, they vote based on a combination of partisan loyalty and social identity.
00:29:09.880They cite some interesting research basically arguing that a lot of issue polling gets it backwards.
00:29:15.140It's not that people have a position on an issue and then they vote for the politician based on that.
00:29:19.420They have a politician or a party that they identify with and they take direction from them on the issue.
00:29:24.140So they give the example of social security privatization, which was a big issue in the 2000 election between Gore and Bush, believe it or not.
00:29:32.240Which, by the way, you were just mentioning how you can't get people to believe that Republicans want to get rid of Social Security.
00:29:38.220They literally were running on this 25 years ago.
00:29:41.500Over the course of that campaign, the statistical relationship between voters' views on privatization and their preference for either Bush or Gore doubled.
00:29:51.020So at a glance, you might think that this was people sorting themselves, right?
00:29:55.060They had a view on the issue and then they chose the correct candidate.
00:29:58.140But some researchers conducted interviews with the same people throughout the campaign.
00:30:02.240And they found out that what was actually happening was that people who supported one
00:30:05.320candidate or the other were changing their positions on the issue to match the candidate.
00:30:08.420People always talk about this with legalized weed, that like that's one of the issues
00:30:11.360where like, I don't know, 70% of the entire population says, yes, we should make weed
00:31:31.320So he uses this to conclude that a candidate's political ideology isn't very significant to the point where people aren't really punished for extremism the way that some people think they are.1.00
00:31:42.800So if you look at LBJ's win over Goldwater or Reagan over Mondale, these big famous blowouts, they're actually both basically explained by incumbency in the economy.
00:31:52.760They map onto the graph just like any other race would.
00:31:55.820So the idea that those guys were too extreme, Mondale and Goldwater, probably not true.
00:32:01.940It's just a function of where the economy was and what the sort of where the political winds were blowing.
00:32:07.080So Bartels and Achen point to the shark attack example and they look back at historical data on droughts and floods in the United States, which basically shows that incumbent parties lost something like 0.6 or 0.7 percent of the vote during drought or flood years.
00:32:21.760And so even if citizens are voting based on their experience of the current administration, that's not really rational if they're voting based on factors that are not actually related to governing.
00:33:03.920I just don't think people want to think that like politics – sort of the way that people like you and me experience it doesn't really matter that much because most people are so low information.
00:33:13.360Political campaigns really aren't battles of ideas.
00:33:35.240That's what I love about hindsight is how clear it is, Mike.0.99
00:33:39.760I mean, compared to fucking Trump, it's like Trump ran a joke of a campaign.0.98
00:33:44.300Look, I don't want to get yelled at online.1.00
00:33:47.160And you're sitting here saying it's competent.
00:33:50.040And you know that someone's going to reply ignoring the entire episode and just being like, I shut it off when you said that the Harris campaign was competent.
00:33:57.460And I'm here to tell that person it's OK.
00:36:36.380These people think they're better than you. You are the beating heart of America and they look down on you.
00:36:43.580Right. And these rich assholes think they're better than you. Vote for me, a rich asshole.1.00
00:36:47.960Yeah. I also think I do want to point out, I think Frank misdiagnoses some things.1.00
00:36:54.180He says that, quote, the anti-abortion crusade is central to contemporary conservatism.
00:36:59.780He also brings up gay marriage. All of this was probably true when he wrote it or felt true when he wrote it.
00:37:05.600But we can see now post Roe v. Wade that it's a little more complex than that.
00:37:09.540Just a couple of years ago, Kansas voted overwhelmingly to secure their abortion rights in the state constitution.
00:37:15.420And we've seen that in various red states.
00:37:17.400Frank thought that Kansas residents had really strong feelings about abortion and gay rights and that those feelings were being manipulated by conservative elites.
00:37:25.820It seems like what's actually happening is that conservative elites to some degree can dictate what people get angry about.
00:37:32.660Any issue is on some level constructed, right?
00:37:35.360Because there's a finite number of things that end up in the newspaper that get constructed
00:43:53.560But the Trump voter base is the culmination of the trend that Frank is writing about here.
00:43:59.380And if you look at the Trump coalition, it seems like racism is a big factor.
00:44:06.540So there's some work by David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley where they looked at data from the 2016 American National Election Survey, which is some of the best data that comes out of elections.
00:44:17.740White voters without college degrees were very likely to support Trump, but that also varied across regions.
00:44:23.920They were much more likely to support him in the South and Midwest than in the Northeast, for example.
00:44:28.460They said white voters only favored Trump when they shared his prejudices.
00:44:32.880Less educated voters supported Trump in exceptionally large numbers because they were likely to share his prejudices against immigrants, minorities, Muslims, women, and authority figures who defended those groups.
00:44:43.880The same was true for white college graduates who were only less visible in this respect because they were less likely on average in the aggregate to share Trump's biases.
00:44:53.720Right. So they're basically saying the big narrative coming out of the Trump era is the
00:44:57.920diploma divide. People with college degrees will vote for Democrats. People without college degrees
00:45:03.320will vote for Republicans. They're saying if you control for all of these various prejudices,
00:45:08.960the diploma divide goes away. The real correlation isn't with degrees. It's with prejudice. Degrees
00:45:14.980are just a good proxy. Yeah. This lines up with a ton of other research about how racial resentment
00:45:20.100predicted support for Trump and Republicans. There's a book called Identity Politics by John
00:45:24.940Sides and a few others from a few years ago. It shows a bunch of research about this. About 30
00:45:29.760years ago, if you were someone who attributed racial inequality between blacks and whites to
00:45:34.580a lack of effort among blacks rather than discrimination, you were not much more likely
00:45:39.900to be in one political party than the other. By 2012, that group goes for Republicans by about
00:45:45.96030 points. I mean, I guess I do get it, but I don't get this thing that everybody wants to run
00:45:50.840away from like racism as an explanation for these shifts. We're like one generation away
00:45:57.420from the civil rights movement, which is extremely controversial at the time. A lot of people did not
00:46:02.920like the civil rights movement. Those are like our parents and our grandparents, man. And yet
00:46:07.040when it comes to like the way that people vote, especially for an extremely fucking xenophobic0.99
00:46:11.280candidate, they're like, oh, well, I think it's really the economics. Why?0.99
00:46:15.280I think that there is one thing that's sort of like, it feels defeatist, right? Saying,
00:46:20.800well, it's racism. It feels like there's no corresponding affirmative strategy for like
00:46:26.640the Democrats, right? So saying it's racism might be a diagnosis, but there's no prescription.
00:46:33.080Yeah. But no, I agree. There's a really annoying trend in political analysis where
00:46:38.660like the voters cannot fail they can only be failed right so if you're like david brooks
00:46:44.100when voters choose a republican the democrats must have done something incredibly wrong right
00:46:50.940right i feel like there's some merit to thinking like that if you're a strategist right if your
00:46:55.820job is to win votes then sure you need to think about what went wrong etc but i don't see why
00:47:00.940that precludes analysts like pundits from just criticizing the electorate being like they0.91
00:47:05.980fucked up on this one yeah they do terrible things all the time and if you look back at like0.96
00:47:09.180historical elections for example no one has any problem being like yeah people were racist like0.98
00:47:14.940southern democrats in the 1800s were racist and that's why they voted the way they did right but
00:47:19.320you look at people now and everyone's like oh let's not go there right why or other countries1.00
00:47:24.300too where people people get elected being like fuck the refugees fuck the refugees and then0.99
00:47:28.540people vote for them and we're like oh well obviously xenophobia has something to do with1.00
00:47:31.300this. Here, we're like, oh no, when he said fuck the refugees, what he actually meant was you need0.99
00:47:36.180a higher minimum wage. I will say that this stuff can get complicated. There's evidence that racial0.99
00:47:40.540resentment increases as economic distress increases. Political scientist named Michael
00:47:45.900Tesler also did some research and showed that people with high levels of racial resentment
00:47:50.360actually rate the economy worse on average. So it's not easy to disentangle these things. It can
00:47:57.100be hard to tell where racism ends and economics begins. But the idea that it's just not racism,
00:48:02.820that we don't do racism here, wrong, wrong. And also just like racism is a phenomenon and bias
00:48:08.160is just really complex. Yeah. I've always said that America is a land of contrast. And that's
00:48:13.260my conclusion. We contain multitudes out here. I always think about people who like, there's a lot
00:48:20.200of people who voted for Obama in 2008. And then that stupid thing where, you know, the cops broke0.99
00:48:25.200into this guy's house at Harvard, this black professor. Yeah, Gates. Yeah, Henry Louis Gates.1.00
00:48:29.840And then Obama had this like beer summit where he had like the cop and the dude. And a lot of people
00:48:34.100were like, oh, he's pandering to black people. And that was like this weird, like if you listen
00:48:38.940to interviews with like Tea Party people, this was a huge moment of radicalization for people,
00:48:44.040was this incident. I find it utterly bizarre. But it's like it's in the data as like one of the big
00:48:49.920breaking points with his presidency that people were like, oh my God, he's a black guy. Like
00:48:54.700Racism and the way that this plays out in people's actual behavior is so complex.
00:48:58.800There's actually a really good movie about this called Crash, which deservedly won the Oscar that year.
00:49:42.780It's a real Brad Pitt getting hit by a taxi cab in Meet Joe Black moment.
00:49:46.820So there's another way to tackle this question.
00:49:49.420If these folks were moving away from Democrats mostly due to their economic conditions,
00:49:54.700You'd probably see this show up in data a little bit more than it does.
00:49:59.540If you look at white voters without college degrees in 2016, those with lower incomes were actually slightly less likely to support Trump than those with higher incomes.
00:50:11.260In 2018, there was a survey where a sample of Americans were asked about whether they had experienced a negative financial event in the past year, drop in income, job loss, difficulty paying bills, etc.
00:50:23.240Some researchers use these answers to create an economic distress index for these voters and basically found that Trump voters were less likely to report economic distress.
00:50:33.400Voter data also shows that Obama to Trump voters who are like this great mystery in the minds of the pundit, those voters in the Midwest tended to come from high income, high employment counties.
00:50:44.440This is the boats for Trump phenomenon.
00:50:45.720Right. There's also a very interesting study in 2020 that found that although Republicans win a lot of lower income whites, that's based on national income data. So those people are low income relative to the national average, but many of them are in lower cost of living areas and they are locally rich, meaning they are better off than most people in their zip code.
00:51:09.300So making 60K in Appalachia versus making 60K in New York City type of thing.
00:51:14.300So people in the highest quartile of income for their local areas are more likely to vote
00:51:20.320for Trump than people in the lowest quartile by about 10 points.
00:51:23.900And in general, being locally rich is correlated with voting Republican across the country.
00:51:30.240My big picture takeaway, and I admit much of this is gut feeling predicated on the research
00:51:38.420and what I know is that the white working class pulling away from the Dems, it's not just civil
00:51:44.760rights reaction per se. It's the development of a post-civil rights white social identity.
00:51:51.400So you get Northern Republicans waving Confederate flags, right? Something that sort of confounds
00:51:56.880liberals, right? Like what are they doing? They're signaling the social identity that
00:52:02.600Republicans project. Right. And the people who are telling us like abandon trans people, right?
00:52:09.360Like it's too unpopular. You're missing the point. If you cast trans people aside, they'll
00:52:15.900replace it with something else. Right. Even if Democrats were like, okay, you're right. We should1.00
00:52:20.380ban trans people from all sports. All it does is it reinforces the grievance, right? It reinforces1.00
00:52:25.720the narrative that these hegemonic institutions are under attack. And so they're not going to
00:52:31.400stop that complaint. What they're going to do is they're just going to move on to the next
00:52:34.420institution. And you see that with immigration, right? Like they put out the fucking border bill0.78
00:52:38.840and it didn't matter. Like the Democrats tried to match the Republicans and it didn't work.1.00
00:52:45.140It didn't work because, I mean, first of all, people can see through you. They know that you
00:52:48.220are the less anti-immigration party, but also people exist in this limited media environment.
00:52:53.800All they're taking is they're taking these very limited pieces of information, limited cues
00:52:58.660from media, from political leads, et cetera.
00:53:01.240And that's what they're working with.0.99
00:53:02.420You can't like do ticky tack bullshit and work your way around that.0.93
00:53:06.220I also think I'm going to make it the way it was.0.97
00:53:09.220It's like a really effective emotional appeal.
00:53:11.680There was a girl on TikTok that was getting dragged.0.98
00:55:10.660I think that like the takeaway for me from this was that Frank, considering this was 20 years ago, was like surprisingly insightful about what was going on, why it was happening.
00:55:21.040what the appeal of this, like, cultural and political movement was to people on the ground,
00:55:27.060like, why this sort of reactionary thinking is appealing.
00:57:31.960He wrote a very popular book called Listen Liberal after 2016 that hit a lot of the same themes and got a lot of attention because it was like a plausible explanation of Trump, you know?
00:57:41.200He also wrote a pretty good book about the wave of layoffs in the 1990s that I read for
01:02:42.480What policy, what politics could ever not be a series of top-down reforms by professionals?
01:02:48.020You want people who know stuff leading a political party.
01:02:50.460There's real tension between what he is prescribing here in the macro and what he
01:02:56.600prescribes elsewhere in the micro where he's like, unions, antitrust, right? Well, how do you think
01:03:03.480unions get protected? They get protected at the NLRB. They get protected. They get protected
01:03:08.820through legislation. And like antitrust, I mean, so he understands that the Biden FTC, for example,
01:03:16.200was pretty good on antitrust. But like, what is that if not top down reform? This whole thing
01:03:26.600But that said, I think that he is sort of on to something in the sense that what he's sort of prescribing is a new aesthetic for the Democratic Party, that the party needs to distance itself from the Silicon Valley elites and move elsewhere aesthetically, right?
01:03:50.760And that's much easier said than done, especially in a completely fucked media environment.
01:03:56.140But I do think that that's basically right and that the – like the project here is like a 20-year project, a 30-year project, right?
01:04:05.180Not like what if Pete Buttigieg says the right things in 2028?
01:04:10.100Like that's not how we get out of this, you know what I mean?
01:04:12.640I think that, like, what I gleaned from digging into this research was, like, people think too little about the aesthetics being projected by the party and too much about the details.
01:04:31.360Politics is both more complex and also simpler than Democrats are making it in different ways, right?