In Bed With The Right - Episode 38： The 2024 Election

00:00:00.000 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

00:00:14.100 And I'm Laura Donaghan.

00:00:15.440 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

00:00:17.900 So Adrienne, today we are talking about the subtext under this lovely joyful election

00:00:27.460 season, which is that

00:00:29.560 this presidential election seems

00:00:31.560 to have something to do with gender. 0.99

00:00:37.060 Yeah, this is

00:00:39.440 going to be maybe one of

00:00:41.260 our more frustrating

00:00:43.740 episodes. So if you're

00:00:44.780 prone to slamming your head against the wall

00:00:47.500 or if you just cannot take any more election content,

00:00:50.280 I don't blame you.

00:00:51.820 Just, you know, rate and review us on iTunes

00:00:53.800 and pretend you listen and download

00:00:55.660 and tell all your friends.

00:00:57.460 Yeah, yeah. Rate and review all episodes except for this one on iTunes.

00:01:01.700 But like, I wanted to talk to you about this, Adrian, because first of all, you're one of the smartest people I know.

00:01:06.740 But also, you know, there is a sort of undercurrent or like running commentary on the role of gender in these elections, in this election in particular for the presidency, that seems not right sized to what's happening, and also seems asymmetrically reflected in the actual campaigns, right?

00:01:24.780 one of these campaigns is running a much more gendered like sort of sales pitch than another

00:01:31.180 one is right and also we're kind of seeing asymmetrical gendered realignment of the

00:01:38.080 electorate yeah in this election that's going much more one way than the other so tell me what

00:01:42.900 you're seeing i think one of the things that i've noticed is that you know everyone's obsessed with

00:01:47.960 polls everyone's wondering about polling average etc etc and the big story the thing that's

00:01:54.700 got every Democrat in the country currently pissing their pants, of course, is the seeming

00:02:00.160 racial realignment around certain groups, especially African Americans and Latinos.

00:02:06.860 It's very important to note that those realignments are still pretty minuscule, but these were

00:02:13.300 demographics among which Democrats were running up truly insane margins in the Obama era and

00:02:20.620 well beyond it. And there is a lot of data in the cross tabs that kind of suggests that that is

00:02:29.020 coming to an end. But what's funny is that I rarely ever see remarked on when people sort of

00:02:38.460 try to draw stuff out of these polls, that really it's not a racial realignment, it's a gendered

00:02:44.220 realignment. That is to say, really what you're seeing is support for first Joe Biden, but then

00:02:49.320 also Kamala Harris, has cratered among, or has not cratered, but it has definitely declined among

00:02:55.860 men of color, not among women. That is to say, right, if you're trying to figure out how someone's

00:03:00.660 going to vote, the first question you should ask is not what do they look like or where do they

00:03:04.980 live? It is, you know, do they identify as male or female? That seems to be a better guide. And

00:03:10.420 it's interesting that that doesn't seem to come through in the discussion of the polls and of

00:03:16.900 predictions at all. Yeah, there's almost been an unwillingness, at least among some sectors of the

00:03:24.120 media and the pundit class, among which I reluctantly count myself, to look at the role

00:03:29.400 that masculinity is playing in the election, right? And to overlook the degree to which this

00:03:34.780 election has become really a referendum on the role of women in American life, particularly

00:03:41.120 post-Dobbs. And if the pundit class doesn't want to have that conversation, I'll tell you,

00:03:45.460 like Donald Trump does, there is a real gendered cast to Trump's campaigning. You know, there is

00:03:54.820 his selection of J.D. Vance, who has made male gendered grievance and contempt, particularly

00:04:03.060 for childless women, but really for a whole swath of liberal coded gendered and social arrangements

00:04:10.520 and family arrangements, really central to his political identity over the past few years,

00:04:15.420 right? That guy is now number two on the Trump ticket and Trump's presumed heir for the leadership

00:04:23.180 of the Republican Party, right? And that guy's gender grievance has become really,

00:04:29.340 really central to the campaign. You also see the Trump campaign leaning heavily into male

00:04:35.260 grievance among young men voters, right? They have Trump going onto a series of podcasts where

00:04:42.300 he's giving these really long interviews. A guy whose time we're supposed to believe is very

00:04:48.120 valuable is spending three hours talking to Joe Rogan, one hour or two hours talking to these

00:04:55.140 other manosphere, male audience centric podcasts, right? Because his pitch is almost exclusively

00:05:03.180 to men under 45, trying to turn them out, 1.00

00:05:07.300 trying to make them feel like they can be vindicated

00:05:10.640 by Donald Trump.

00:05:11.820 Well, and look at the appeal via his other great surrogate

00:05:16.280 and maybe a surrogate son, Elon Musk, right?

00:05:20.240 We were talking in another episode

00:05:23.140 with friend of the pod, Irene Carmon,

00:05:26.000 and she pointed out that the childless cat lady comment

00:05:29.520 really was J.D. Vance tried to audition for Trump, basically, by melding kind of Trump style

00:05:37.280 insult comic Bush belt masculinity with the kind of incel and or breeding obsessed kind of Silicon

00:05:46.140 Valley creep masculinity of Elon Musk. And so that's been in the DNA of this campaign every

00:05:52.340 step along the way. It is really a pitch based on masculinity and on gendered hierarchies.

00:05:58.980 And I want to zoom in a little on the state of the young male vote, because the thing about young men, these under 45, particularly the under 30 male voters that Trump is making this big pitch to in the waning days of the campaign, is that they are kind of traditionally, like a lot of young voters, understood to be an asset to Democrats.

00:06:23.060 They're also not really understood to be very high propensity voters, right? They have interests and grievances and desires and anxieties that haven't normally been really well captured for political action, right? They're maybe more capturable as consumers, but not so much as like voters, right?

00:06:46.180 So this is an interesting strategy by Trump, and I think it reflects both an ideological commitment, but also maybe a sense of his own sense of where his strengths are and sort of the truth of his message. I don't know. What do you think?

00:06:58.900 Yeah. I mean, to me, like every other left-leaning person in America, I'm terrified of what's going to happen next week. The one thing that does, you know, when I'm absolutely hyperventilating or it gives me a little bit of pause, I'm thinking maybe this won't be quite so bad, is the fact that Trump's strategy really does seem designed to maximize support in a group that infamously doesn't show up to vote.

00:07:21.220 and he seems to be looking to alienate Americans

00:07:26.520 whose propensity to vote is much higher.

00:07:29.320 I don't know, maybe in 10 days we'll sit here and say,

00:07:32.300 well, gee, it was a risky strategy, but he did it.

00:07:36.420 But it is interesting, right?

00:07:38.240 It is trying to sort of perform a kind of political magic

00:07:42.100 with a group that, as you say,

00:07:45.280 is much more reliable as consumers

00:07:47.520 as it is as political actors.

00:07:50.260 And to some extent, obviously, that plays to Trump's strength in this particular kind of retail politics in that he, well, he doesn't do retail politics in the traditional sense, but what he does do is try and sell you some stakes.

00:08:05.200 And, you know, like basically Musk and Trump sort of are united in the fact that they're both these grifters that really give you a sense, like all good self-help gurus, I think that you too could become a grifter like them and that everyone else is a mark, right?

00:08:20.980 So I do wonder whether some of this is just going to raise money and bring in cash much more than it brings in votes.

00:08:27.860 But I guess we'll know more in a few days.

00:08:30.960 Yeah, there is a way that Trump's own campaign has sort of taken on some of the sleazy, like, snake oil salesman-like qualities of, like, a Twitch streamer or, like, a crypto guru or, like, a late-night infomarshal even. 0.99

00:08:50.680 Like, he's hawking weird shit. 0.99

00:08:52.980 Yeah. 0.99

00:08:53.200 Like, commemorative coins.

00:08:55.420 Yeah.

00:08:55.800 And gold sneakers.

00:08:58.280 Although, taken on, I feel like it's always had that.

00:09:00.760 I mean, Lindell and Trump basically peas in a pod.

00:09:04.280 I mean, the man made his money or became famous for basically auditioning people to work with

00:09:11.920 him while his company was failing.

00:09:13.480 I mean, in some way, he is the late night infomercial guy or the car empire that's always

00:09:22.080 teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

00:09:24.720 That's him.

00:09:25.400 It's interesting that the aggrieved masculinity vote overlaps so much with the, like, get rich quick scheme mark vote, you know, the guys who maybe are really certain that Dogecoin is going to take off and that they're not going to have to get a job.

00:09:44.440 Uh, that seems to be sort of the similar demographic, right? There's a degree of like, narcissistic wounded entitlement mixed with, I think, like genuine economic despair. Yeah, that might be a tad more humanizing than what I actually mean, but like a sense of lost options, right?

00:10:02.260 And I think there is something, you know, I'm very politically suspicious of, you know, pundits making serious inquiries into the fallen state of men.

00:10:16.160 But there is something that Trump has become a product of, which is a real combination of the rise of women's status and their entrance into the workforce and into public life in really large numbers during the Roe era, following the advent of the pill of second wave feminism in these last five or six decades.

00:10:37.540 And the simultaneous decline in the American industrial economy that provided a lot of men with, you know, not just their jobs, but also their identities and their sense of their life's meaning. Right. So they've lost status and they've also lost relative status. Right.

00:10:56.060 they are not doing as well as their fathers were and they are not as important and domineering

00:11:04.920 vis-a-vis women as their fathers were and they are really focusing on that latter half right

00:11:10.500 the anger that these you know supposedly dispossessed downwardly mobile young men have

00:11:16.860 is much more easily harnessed, I think, for misogyny and for a project of domination politics,

00:11:26.400 which is necessarily misogynistic, than it is for like an anti-corporate or anti-elite politics,

00:11:33.300 right? I'm comparing like Trump's pitch to this cast of young male voters to Bernie Sanders,

00:11:41.980 right? Bernie Sanders was like, you know, one of the things his movement was doing was

00:11:46.760 trying to create an alternate path for a masculinity that had lost relative status right

00:11:53.860 and they never really successfully i mean they never really admitted that that's what they were

00:11:58.060 doing and they also never really successfully integrated that masculinity project with their

00:12:04.180 left-wing politics right because it has at its core a status grievance and a status grievance

00:12:12.340 fits in, I think, much more easily with a right wing hierarchical enforcement politics like what

00:12:17.800 Trump is doing. Some of this, I think you're absolutely right, does reflect real shifts in

00:12:22.240 the American economy, right? The number of Americans who basically hustle to make money

00:12:30.940 in this way has increased and it's not necessarily by choice. It's partly because of long term trends

00:12:38.320 in US industrial production, union rates, et cetera, et cetera.

00:12:43.980 At the same time, it's very noticeable, right?

00:12:46.460 I think the figure is something like three quarters

00:12:49.380 of influencers in America are women, right?

00:12:53.340 So it's really this thing, it is once again, 0.89

00:12:55.860 it is a real economic problem

00:12:57.980 over which a symbolic matrix of gender

00:13:00.500 and status is overlaid, right?

00:13:01.920 Like where if one group does it, it's okay.

00:13:04.840 If another group has to do it, it's not, right?

00:13:07.540 And I do think that that's very clearly what's going on here.

00:13:11.300 We had an event at Clayman recently where, you know, a guest said something really smart,

00:13:16.320 which was to say masculinity as a status will always need its other, right?

00:13:20.480 It always needs to be higher than.

00:13:22.700 That's what makes the status, right?

00:13:24.120 Like someone, if you have it and get certain benefits through it, someone else must not

00:13:28.840 have it, right?

00:13:29.760 And this is the kind of change, the kind of symbolic change that a lot of this politics is responding to, even when there is a real underlying economic problem that, as you say, that Bernie Sanders might feel like he wants to address.

00:13:46.740 But there is an additional layer to it, and Trump is working with and appealing to that.

00:13:53.340 Yeah. And I think it's, I think this might be, I mean, it is drawn into a little bit starker relief in this cycle, not only because Trump is running against a woman candidate, which he has not done since 2016, but because this is also happening in the wake of Dobbs, right?

00:14:16.180 Dobbs was not only a blow to American women, I think in some ways it is being metabolized as a vindication for American men, right? 0.64

00:14:28.000 Like, look at this ruling that was the symbol of women's status, right?

00:14:33.640 Like, we do not have the ERA, we do not have formal sex-based equality in our Constitution.

00:14:37.500 What we had instead was Roe v. Wade, which bore a ton of symbolic weight as as a stand in and really like a shorthand for women's legal and formal equality in the US that has now been stripped away.

00:14:54.140 But in the years that it was, in effect, allowed those women to enter the workforce, allowed our economy and our social world to reorient itself so that it would be thinkable that a man would have a woman boss.

00:15:07.700 And that is something that has been taken away as well as the formal abortion right, right, is this mechanism by which women gained independence and status relative to men, right?

00:15:21.940 So when we talk about Roe v. Wade being taken away, you know, the sex politics of the anti-abortion movement are very complicated. The sex politics of Dobbs are very complicated. Right. I don't think conservatives, including Donald Trump, see this as a unmitigated win because abortion, in addition to granting greater autonomy for women, also granted greater sexual access for men.

00:15:48.600 So there's a way in which pervert masculinities can become pro-abortion. We've talked about Dave Portnoy, who's pro-abortion. Hugh Hefner was famously very pro-abortion. But there is also a symbolic victory for that wounded masculinity in Dobbs' demise. It goes, yeah, fuck you.

00:16:06.320 And now we're going to restore the previous gendered order in which we're on top and we are going to punish you for having disturbed it in the first place in the latter half of the 20th century. 1.00

00:16:19.140 And that is, I think, one of Trump's pitches.

00:16:22.200 It's certainly something that J.D. Vance is really trying to sell.

00:16:25.820 At the same time, I think Vance gets at something else that's interesting.

00:16:29.640 I mean, you're right that some of this is about men's status.

00:16:32.220 but it's funny that of course so much anxiety attaches who counts as men right so for one

00:16:37.980 thing there is this kind of real anxiety about trans people that that you know that brings out

00:16:43.000 really the the worst rhetorical excesses in this campaign and trump's and vance's campaign but on

00:16:49.240 the other hand there's also this kind of insistence that men are no longer men which is kind of weird

00:16:53.580 to do by a party that's currently winning men earlier today jd vance tweeted who do you actually

00:16:59.720 think the gross majority of the men who stormed the beaches of normandy would vote for the answer

00:17:04.120 is obvious donald j trump right like it's really kind of interesting well no it's it's casting them

00:17:09.680 as as a return to that wounded right exactly right yeah like voting for trump is like storming the

00:17:16.780 beaches of normandy because it is a vindication uh and a reclaiming of a rightful leadership to

00:17:27.480 which you have of which you have been denied right uh that has been stolen from you good friend of

00:17:32.740 mine and friend of the pod annika brockschmidt that texted me on twitter a video that elon musk

00:17:38.000 apparently shared that is basically that and she was like this is i think he just made that for

00:17:43.320 in bed with the right and like yeah we might have to do a breakdown of that in you know frame by

00:17:48.120 here slice in the audio this is what it's for it's what the format's for so um fun fact about

00:17:54.100 me moira what you may not know is that i don't know how to do that how to splice it in but why

00:17:58.260 don't we just watch it together and react in real time to this video from elon musk who i'm i have

00:18:04.980 blocked so i didn't see it before um but yeah it's uh one minute and 39 seconds and it seems

00:18:11.060 to be a wild ride this is a uh video posted to elon muck's twitter account or i guess his x account

00:18:19.080 It has 90,000 retweets and about half a million likes.

00:18:22.920 We live in hell.

00:18:24.140 Anyway, so let's start it on three, two, one, go.

00:18:32.280 Wow.

00:18:33.140 Someone's singing.

00:18:34.020 Statue of Liberty.

00:18:35.240 Okay.

00:18:35.420 Fighter Jets.

00:18:36.220 Mel Gibson.

00:18:37.340 Mel Gibson in The Patriot.

00:18:40.080 Casper David Friedrich.

00:18:42.460 Stock market.

00:18:44.400 Elon.

00:18:44.800 Yeah, oh, then Elon Musk.

00:18:46.220 Really charismatic.

00:18:47.220 fiery face the rocket ship rocket ship so many western civilization yeah there's like a very

00:18:54.800 intense song like a power ballad but it's not in english more rocket ships more rockets

00:19:00.640 hulk hogan donald trump is the gladiator no that's uh him as achilles in troy then oh 0.99

00:19:08.200 warhammer 40k hey this is something for okay um this really is all shit oh a guy on a treadmill 0.98

00:19:14.660 mill running very fast him as alexander the great a helicopter god the images are just flashing so 0.90

00:19:21.840 i know i'm like stroking out here as a wrestler trump from real trump from one of the rocky

00:19:28.520 movies eyes he's boxing now it's a cartoon more mel gibson and a lion lion or aslan or something

00:19:37.000 like that who knows trump voiceover of trump saying he's gonna spill blood mel gibson again 0.84

00:19:41.760 Kill people, more Mel Gibson, more lions. 1.00

00:19:45.320 A literal predator. 1.00

00:19:46.840 And then the Watchmen guy, the one with the hanging dong, bald eagle.

00:19:51.020 Bald eagle at the end, making weird eye contact.

00:19:54.780 More lions.

00:19:56.920 Trump at WWE.

00:19:58.740 Fighter jets.

00:19:59.060 Is that the Challenger explosion? 0.99

00:20:02.040 What the fuck did I just watch? 0.98

00:20:04.260 I am not well. 0.99

00:20:05.360 It is kind of like a...

00:20:07.760 I don't want to be insensitive here.

00:20:11.760 But it reminded me of those videos that they like music videos they used to play where

00:20:16.060 they would have like the epilepsy warning.

00:20:17.900 I mean, I definitely think I definitely think people should not be watching this if they

00:20:21.320 are if they're given to seizures.

00:20:23.380 Yeah, it's a lot of flashing different images of various mask aspiration, right?

00:20:29.820 So there's a lot of war imagery, but mostly like war machinery.

00:20:34.680 So there was like some machine guns, there were a lot of planes, there were a lot of

00:20:37.380 rockets.

00:20:38.480 I take an Elon Musk's rocket.

00:20:40.380 Howitzer, I think, in there somewhere.

00:20:41.760 There were a lot of birds of prey. There was a lot of ancient Roman pastiche and Trump's face

00:20:49.920 sort of like pasted onto scenes of like... It's all Greek. It's from the movie Troy and from

00:20:55.920 the movie Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone's not masterpiece starring Colin Farrell. Yes,

00:21:02.580 they mounted noted 79-year-old McDonald's enthusiast Donald Trump onto Colin Farrell's

00:21:08.400 body. I mean, these people are 13. I'm sorry. What is going on? And then there was a lot of

00:21:16.200 running, like Mel Gibson in The Patriot running in various directions, various Trump avatars running

00:21:23.240 in various directions. And then I think the quintessential shot was the guy on the treadmill,

00:21:29.100 a white guy on a treadmill with spray tan and bleach blonde hair, wearing sunglasses. He's

00:21:35.160 inside and he's got a trump flag and he's running incredibly fast and i think that's the perfect

00:21:41.200 metaphor because he's like really self-important and he's working really hard and he's going

00:21:47.020 absolutely nowhere you know nowhere yeah yeah yeah it was uh it was very childlike it felt like

00:21:53.600 it had no content right probably the creepiest part was the voiceover of donald trump promising

00:21:58.960 actual violence right talking about the death penalty talking about killing people talking

00:22:03.820 about shedding blood and then which was you know spliced over with shots of actual donald trump

00:22:09.020 and then also um like predator animals like ai lions attacking other lions but you know i think

00:22:16.360 your friend was right i think this is like a kind of you know it's clearly a vibes based yeah

00:22:23.640 promise right it's not really a a coherent masculinity except in its promise of domination

00:22:32.160 and power right and in the fact that like no one there can credibly embody that masculinity

00:22:39.380 nor does everyone probably like between trump whoever whatever 13 year old made that video

00:22:44.420 and musk who shared it like they don't even probably mean the same thing but you're right

00:22:49.460 they can find each other in the sort of lingua franca of like domination right that's that's

00:22:55.000 the one thing they all respond to keyboard smash of signifiers but they do have they do have this 0.55

00:23:01.540 one underlying uh commonality yeah it's it's if uh jean if it's if jean rodrillard married an

00:23:07.300 axe body spray basically it's just pure simulacra of dude sweat yeah yeah i did feel like i could

00:23:15.960 smell it yeah yeah it's dark man

00:23:39.740 but so that's but you're right i mean but at the same time it does suggest not something to be proud

00:23:45.660 of but something to be regained right um and and i do think that that's that's kind of interesting

00:23:51.180 because it does for instance it's different from the gendered pitch that hillary clinton made in

00:23:56.180 2016 right which was not about what we what women can be but what women already have accomplished

00:24:01.880 right so it's i mean the part of that is you know the reactionary versus the progressive that in

00:24:06.940 some way the reactionary does have to have to spell out that like you guys should be proud of 0.91

00:24:11.840 this status you have but also you're shit at it because like you're no longer living in the past 0.97

00:24:16.760 no but well it was stolen from you right it's i think i think that where i would disagree with 0.99

00:24:22.420 you is you understand the indictment of like modern manhood or liberal manhood that is being

00:24:28.360 made by somebody like vance to be an indictment of the audience right and i don't think that's true

00:24:34.160 i don't think he's saying you failed i think he's saying you've been failed like this has been taken

00:24:39.780 from you. Now take it back. Well, I mean, I think I was just making the point that it feels

00:24:44.720 strange to make that your pitch to someone, right? But then again, I guess this is what

00:24:50.240 they've been saying about America all along. They claim to love it. And then every single

00:24:54.840 indication of it and most people in it, they can't stand. It feels like you don't really

00:24:59.920 love this country that much. Right. Like the stratification of the real men from the fake

00:25:04.120 soy boys is mirrored in their stratification of the real americans versus the enemies within

00:25:09.820 right people who can be excluded from that in group but you know like it's interesting you

00:25:14.660 talk about hillary clinton and her pitch about what women are um because i wanted to turn in 1.00

00:25:21.620 the time we have left to kamala yeah who is also experiencing a gendered realignment on her support 0.60

00:25:28.380 but who is making a very very different pitch in terms of her own gendered performance 1.00

00:25:33.920 uh for this office yeah like i think kamala harris would prefer if everybody forgot that 1.00

00:25:42.760 if elected she would be the first woman president yeah she's made a like a pretty conscious effort 1.00

00:25:47.580 to like de-sex herself in uh as much a way as she can without being like conspicuously gender 1.00

00:25:55.140 non-conforming you know like um like i don't think she'll have you'll ever see her in a skirt 0.84

00:25:59.460 yeah but also not a tux yes or like there's no uh non-constructed blazer in her future you know

00:26:06.020 uh but there is a total absence of the gendered pitch for her candidacy which i thought was very 1.00

00:26:13.640 present in hillary clinton's 2016 you know i'm with her uh all those the future is female t-shirts 0.97

00:26:19.660 that that everybody was wearing that that year you know um this optimistic feminism completely 0.91

00:26:27.260 absent. What you have instead is a really conspicuously not angry, but mournful post-Dobbs

00:26:34.980 abortion message. And what do you think about how she's positioning that?

00:26:38.560 So you and I talked about this briefly yesterday, and my read on it is that it's post-Dobbs in two

00:26:45.980 ways. One is that you can't tell a story of straightforward progress anymore. The Supreme

00:26:53.680 court has seen to it that that is not going to be the story no matter what and then the second

00:26:58.360 thing that makes it post jobs is that to some extent you don't have to do the the 2016 you 0.99

00:27:04.080 know go women stuff because the gendered realignment predates right uh kamala harris's 0.81

00:27:12.080 entrance into the race like this is this is there there will be many people hoping next tuesday when 0.99

00:27:18.940 they are in the booth that they are voting for the first female president. You don't have to say

00:27:25.580 that anymore. After Dobbs, it seems like, or at least that's her calculus, I think, that in some

00:27:30.140 way this will be understood. The people who will be moved by that message will already have been

00:27:36.700 moved and that there's nothing to be gained from putting a bow on it at this point. That's how I

00:27:41.820 read this as opposed to Dobbs kind of candidacy. In some way, this was different for Biden, who

00:27:47.000 had to prove that he got it, right? Like there isn't there's a visceral understanding that she

00:27:52.660 gets it. And I think that her answers on the abortion issue and on Dobbs in the debate or

00:28:00.060 made that forcefully clear. And at the same time, I do think that there is a that in a paradoxical

00:28:07.940 way means that she doesn't gain very much by then front loading gender any further. Does that make

00:28:13.720 sense that's sort of my read on it i think i think you're right i think there's a degree and you know

00:28:19.100 you'll hear a lot of off the record quotes from people who work from her saying something to this

00:28:24.560 effect it's like everybody knows she's a woman they can see her you know um and the notion that

00:28:31.020 leaning into an affirmative feminist politics is not necessary i would say that i also think that

00:28:40.860 they are treating it as if it would be a liability right it would seem that one of the lessons taken

00:28:47.280 from hillary clinton's 2016 defeat and i think from the rise of anti-feminism as a much more

00:28:54.520 potent political force in the years since is that feminism is in some ways at least among some very

00:29:01.940 visible and powerful sections of the electorate incredibly unpopular yeah yeah and you also see 0.97

00:29:07.940 this a bit in the asymmetrical media coverage of the gendered realignment, right? Because you

00:29:14.440 talked about how we see a lot of media stories about quote unquote people of color, quote unquote

00:29:19.660 Latinos going to Trump when actually it's just black and Latino men, right? You see also a ton

00:29:26.700 of stories about Trump's advantage with men that often obscure the reality that Trump is winning

00:29:34.360 men according to the polls by less than what harris is winning women by yeah women have gone

00:29:42.120 to the democrats disproportionately more when you compare to how republicans are are gaining men 0.97

00:29:48.340 right yeah uh women are voting for the democrats in in it by a much much bigger margin right and

00:29:55.780 and they're moving particularly like white women are moving to the democrats and especially women

00:30:01.620 uh who are older like over 45 over 50 those very reliable senior citizen voters uh particularly

00:30:09.240 the women are really really moving to the left to the democrats and that had been a fairly reliable

00:30:15.860 republican constituency yeah yeah i mean hence the hence the what what i mean the probably the

00:30:21.900 biggest sort of 2016 moment that that harris has indulged in in the last couple of weeks is the

00:30:29.020 Liz Cheney thing, right? I mean, like, basically, that is the pitch, right? To say, hey, formerly

00:30:35.500 Republican women, how about it, right? Like, maybe you could, maybe kind of feels like you're

00:30:41.580 alienated from the party you've been voting for. This is the party that still has a home for you,

00:30:47.340 where not just anti-feminism, I mean, you're right about anti-feminism, but also we're just

00:30:50.880 woman-hating has become kind of the coin of the realm.

00:30:54.320 Very specifically Dobbs, right? Dobbs is understood correctly, as Donald Trump's doing. And women who will never need an abortion or will never need an abortion ever again, understand Roe to have implicated their status, right? There was one, I think it was maybe Nebraska, a Nebraska Republican Senate candidate was like, why are all these old women asking me about abortion? You're postmenopausal, you're never going to need an abortion again.

00:31:23.960 Which was so gross. But it also misunderstands the issue, right? Because Roe is not just about the material access to an abortion, although that is life changing for the people who are denied it. It is also about women's equal status and women's dignity, right? And in that, all women are implicated, even the ones who are very, very aware that they are not going to be needing to get an abortion in their red state anytime soon. 0.52

00:31:50.980 So the symbolic weight of Dobbs, I think, is really heavy, even without these constant parade of tragic stories of married middle class white women with wanted pregnancies who've had horrific health complications and suffered in unspeakable, needless ways as a result, which the Harris campaign is relying on very heavily in their swing state messaging.

00:32:14.200 I think it has an even bigger resonance, right? And that's another comparison you're not really seeing being made between the status deprived young male voters who Trump is trying to appeal to, and women, right? Because the male voters have had a decline in status that is decades in the making. The women voters had a decline in status that was dramatic, heavily symbolic, and very swift.

00:32:38.660 And it was quite recently. So there's all this hand-wringing over men's material conditions and men's social positioning that is being given a lot of moral and political attention in a way that suggests it's more significant than what happened to women.

00:32:58.060 Yeah, I think this is fascinating. What you're describing, of course, is far truer of the people who are supposed to be these neutral and objective analysts of this election than it is really of the MAGA movement. This is really what the New York Times seems to think. It seems to think that some people's loss of status somehow matters more, somehow is more salient to an analysis of this election than others.

00:33:21.380 I was just looking this morning at the Tilt, which is Nate Cohn's newsletter over at the New York Times, and it's about the exact problem that, you know, Harris seems to be doing well among high propensity voters and Trump seems to do better or the more low propensity the voter gets, basically.

00:33:39.000 Right. And as far as I can tell, Cohn gets through that entire newsletter, which is long and has quite a bit of interesting data without using the word gender or women once.

00:33:48.260 Right. Like it's it really does seem to suggest, hey, this is about about whose opinions really shape elections and whose don't.

00:33:57.540 And it's fairly clear who's, according to these pundits, at least kind of don't. Right.

00:34:02.940 Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things you're touching on here, Adrienne. One is the allergy among a certain class of intellectual and pundit to treating gender as a serious social hierarchy and a serious political force, right?

00:34:21.860 That is something that people have been very resistant to, or at least interpreting women's gender as a serious social force and women as meaningful, you know, and full citizens and political subjects, right?

00:34:34.860 That it's something that sort of seems to escape the consciousness of these, this particular type of nerd that, you know, there are girls who have full mental lives and interiority, just like them, and that their experience of these phenomena are shaping their decision making and their perception of the world, right?

00:34:57.980 And then the other thing that you're touching on, which I think is, you know, a force that has been in the ether, like socially, you know, pertinent, but not entirely like methodologically disclosed, which is that the polls and the punditry purport to reflect the race, right?

00:35:21.260 They purport to be depicting the state of reality back to us, but they are also shaping that reality.

00:35:28.520 They are shaping the ways, right?

00:35:29.800 People are seeing polls and they are making interpretations of those polls with the aid of this pundit class, this media system.

00:35:39.660 And that is shaping their behavior in turn, right?

00:35:42.760 So it's a two-way street.

00:35:44.480 Polls are both reflecting reality and they're informing it and creating it at the same time.

00:35:49.420 And we don't quite know how that works still, or at least I don't.

00:35:53.100 Yeah. And I mean, it's going to matter even more depending on, well, I mean, no matter what happens next week, right? How a victory or a defeat for whichever candidate is interpreted will be informed by the kinds of polling we see now, right?

00:36:07.480 And the kind of narratives that either sort of float in the ether or are sort of allowed to really be part of the story.

00:36:13.340 And, you know, the idea that, you know, whether it's a Harris victory or a Trump victory, that women and their voting behavior has been a major part of that one way or the other, like will likely be written out of it because they appear not to be collecting that data very carefully or they seem to think it doesn't really matter very much.

00:36:35.600 And so that to me is even independent of what happens next Tuesday. It does seem there's a deeper systematic kind of bias at work here that will persist, right? Just the same way that in 2016, it was the white working class that everyone sort of fixated on, even though that was most likely not, in the end, what pushed MAGA over the edge in those three swing states.

00:37:02.540 who gets to be the one who either spoils a Harris presidency or who makes it happen or who

00:37:09.880 turns out or doesn't turn out, right? You're absolutely right that it shapes the perception

00:37:15.380 of the race before it happens, but it also is going to shape its interpretation. Whatever

00:37:19.600 the result, we can say that it's going to be one of the most momentous elections of our lifetime

00:37:24.500 so far. Its interpretation and its political ramifications will be felt for years. And

00:37:32.300 there these kinds of lacunae strike me as you know deeply deeply dangerous and problematic

00:37:38.260 yeah there is a bias about whose desires whose status and whose suffering is more important

00:37:48.600 and that is going to shape both how this race is interpreted um before and then also after

00:37:56.200 tuesday's election day yeah you know if there's one thing i know for sure adrian as a pundit is

00:38:01.720 it is that first, every election is the most important election of our lifetimes.

00:38:06.900 And second, that no matter what happens, it will always confirm my prior.

00:38:11.620 That's right.

00:38:12.780 And that's how I sleep at night.

00:38:16.960 Well done.

00:38:18.180 Well done.

00:38:18.780 It's the worst election so far.

00:38:23.800 Hey, on the plus side, if he wins, we might never have an election again.

00:38:27.360 So that's a silver lining.

00:38:29.380 yeah every four years we'll do a special purge podcast to uh to tell our listeners uh you know

00:38:36.540 which areas to avoid during the uh the fourth annual purge yeah that might be a good place

00:38:41.860 to end it godspeed to all our listeners in these last few days before tuesday we're thinking of you

00:38:48.800 uh hope you're praying for us and uh we'll see you on the other side see you on the other side

00:38:59.380 The Met with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research

00:39:10.980 for generous support, Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio. Our theme music is by

00:39:15.700 Katie Lau. Our producer is Megan Kalthus.

In Bed With The Right - October 31, 2024

Episode 38： The 2024 Election

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