00:00:55.100you know while moira cries that's my coping um i'm not i'm not super emotional but i i do kind
00:01:01.720of love me a pudding when i really need it um but there is a reason other than we didn't want to why
00:01:07.040we didn't do this right away because i have i personally have this bee in my bonnet when it
00:01:12.280comes to any election analysis right that like it has to kind of include two things there's what
00:01:17.460happened in the election and then there's what the various actors whether they're political parties
00:01:21.800the press, et cetera, et cetera, sort of like think or frame happened. And those three things
00:01:27.460usually aren't totally unrelated, but they're not the same thing, right? The question of which
00:01:32.300groups and which messages made a difference and the question who the incoming government thinks
00:01:37.800made a difference, like those are two separate questions. And a lot of the early punditry,
00:01:43.500you couldn't tell whether this was a genuine reading of, you know, let's be clear, a vote
00:01:48.320picture that is still emerging. There's still, I believe, votes being counted in parts of the
00:01:52.420country as we record this. And how much of it was just pundits kind of beating up on their favorite
00:01:58.400targets that they would have beaten up on no matter what the data said, right? And I think
00:02:03.800that's honestly particularly important with a politician like Donald Trump, who has, let's say,
00:02:11.080both a kind of transactional approach to politics and a deeply Manichean worldview, right? You're
00:02:17.660either with him or against him, you either matter to him or you don't. And I do think that puts a
00:02:22.860particular onus on election analysis after the fact, because it may well influence how various
00:02:27.960groups are treated and how policies are implemented in the next four years and possibly right beyond.
00:02:33.860Which is to say that when someone right now says like, oh, we should have beaten up on X group or
00:02:38.620Y group, and then surely Kamala Harris would have won, like you're basically creating the discursive
00:02:44.180environment in which that very group is going to be set upon in the incoming Trump administration.
00:02:49.500And your analysis of what allegedly happened in this election has material impact on what's
00:02:55.200going to happen to different groups and regions of the country in the coming months and years.
00:03:00.660So that's why we didn't want to sort of shoot from the hip when it comes to these results. We
00:03:03.900wanted to kind of think through what we can sort of tell from the data. And of course, as always,
00:03:09.000we're going to be focusing on the question of gender. So yeah, I'm glad we took a couple
00:03:13.780days, but we're back to try and muddle through all of this. And I'm glad, Adrienne, that you
00:03:21.780took a look at like the post-election commentary, which has really sort of settled into two
00:03:28.140overlapping camps, right? You know, in this ritual post-loss democratic and lefty self-flagellation,
00:03:35.000there's kind of like two narratives of what happened. One is sort of what we could call
00:03:40.080like the Bernie Sanders narrative, which is that I think his catchphrase was, you know,
00:03:45.260the working class abandoned a party that abandoned them, right? The Democrats have not made sufficient
00:03:53.360policy moves towards the interests of working class voters, particularly in these like post-industrial
00:04:00.860heartland Midwest and South districts, right? So that's like one theory of the case. And then the
00:04:08.020second theory of the case is that the democrats are too woke um and that's and and you know
00:04:13.420sometimes you do hear these coming from the same people right they can be kind of two sides of the
00:04:16.560same coin this notion that uh cultural and economic issues are different that they are
00:04:23.660clearly distinguishable and that the democrats only favor one of them right so that they did0.62
00:04:30.200too much around race and gender, uh, that, uh, feminists were too angry and this made men1.00
00:04:38.220alienated. No question about whether women have anything to feel alienated or angry about. Um,0.97
00:04:45.300you know, and, uh, that young men's sort of disaffection, young white men's disaffection,0.68
00:04:50.500uh, and, and working class men's disaffection is righteous and that it is caused by the
00:04:58.820Democratic Party's cultural politics excesses, right? That's kind of the other one. And so you've0.64
00:05:03.740got, like, you need to do more for the working class, right, on the one hand. And then there's
00:05:09.720you need to shut the fuck up about, like, Me Too and trans people, right? And it really does seem0.99
00:05:16.280to be gender politics in particular that are coming in in the post-election commentary as,
00:05:22.840like, the Democrats' scapegoat. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. It's identity politics
00:05:26.760with this really interesting elision that as someone who studied the kind of phrase identity
00:05:31.540politics for quite some time, with this kind of new extension, which I think you've already
00:05:35.720sort of implicitly pointed to, which is the analysis kind of seems to posit or seems to
00:05:41.080agree that abortion is ultimately an identity politics issue. That is to say, it's sort of
00:05:46.380grouped in with dignity arguments around various interest groups, which to me seems already kind
00:05:54.660of tricky, right? You tend to emphasize that, you know, abortion is a dignity harm to women and that
00:06:00.840it very clearly is understood that way by many voters. It is not only that, right? Like the
00:06:06.260ability to participate fully in societies, what this is ultimately about, which surely is an
00:06:12.520economic issue as well. In the framing after the election, I think the very fact that sort of like
00:06:18.860when people say identity issues, right, as you say, they point to trans people and they point to
00:06:23.280women and to abortion. And you're like, well, first of the Democrats did not thematize trans
00:06:28.840people. There's the other party that that, right. It's not that they ran affirmatively on, you know,
00:06:34.620Leah Thomas's right to compete in college meets, right. Like that was not, that was not a democratic
00:06:39.620pitch, but it also sort of seems to agree that like, basically it'd be nice to have abortion,
00:06:46.960But like it's not part of the real meat of politics. And I think that is like not just pouring out the baby with the bathwater, that's pouring out the baby with the bathwater and then smashing the fucking tub.0.99
00:06:58.500Well, it's an analysis that presumes, as much of this does sort of subsexually, that the only legitimate voters, the only real legitimate political subjects are men or women to the extent that they understand themselves as men functionally.0.96
00:07:14.040you're like, you know, men plus, or, you know, not voting on gendered issues, right? The legitimate
00:07:20.160gender grievance is always the male gendered grievance, right? Because at the same time that0.97
00:07:24.900abortion is downplayed as a material concern, men's very immaterial sense of malaise is being
00:07:31.020elevated, right? As like a great moral crisis. So you really just see a gender hierarchy at work,
00:07:36.400right? Men always just matter more than girls in this worldview. But you're also sort of,1.00
00:07:40.360We're circling around two errors that I see in these election postmortems, right?
00:07:48.040One is a factual error because the fact of the matter is that Biden ran the kind of economic
00:07:56.620You know, he really did focus a lot of his presidency on, you know, industrial policy
00:08:03.180that would help the Midwest and the South on bringing in particularly like green jobs
00:08:08.680So places like Georgia on encouraging union work. Right. Sustainable union jobs were the big Biden economic policy agendas and like robust antitrust regulation.0.73
00:08:20.780You know, these were these were the kind of left wing Bernie Sanders type of policy wins. Right.
00:08:27.260There's a reason that Bernie Sanders and AOC and that cadre of the Democratic congressional
00:08:33.480representatives and senators did not pressure Biden to resign, right, because they had actually
00:08:39.020had a degree of influence in the Biden White House.
00:08:41.640So economically, Biden ran the kind of policy agenda that I think a Bernie Sanders would
00:08:49.560And he's acting now like he didn't win those fights over the past four years.
00:08:54.140But then there's also conceptually, and this is this really touches on what what you were talking about, which is the idea that you can separate out culture and economic issues at all. Right. Right. You know, in our focus, we talk a lot about how women and, you know, minority gender oppressed people, trans people, queer people experience these dignity harms simultaneously as material harms.
00:09:22.380Right. Right. Right. Like if you can't get an abortion, that shit is expensive. Right. You are physically harmed by what happens to your body against your will. And you are diverted from the workforce and you are forced to spend a lot of money and earn a lot less money. You know, like that is a extremely materially tangible harm violence that is being done to you. Right. If you are trans and you can't access your health care, your body will physically change. That is material harm. Right.
00:09:52.220If you are trans and you are stigmatized socially for not being able to pass or if you are subjected to violence for not being able to pass, that's a material harm.
00:10:09.180If you experience psychic distress at your inability to transition, that can prevent you from being able to work.
00:10:14.140These are real long-term effects that flow downstream from these quote-unquote dignity harms that are being dissuaded as identity politics.
00:10:23.520The flip side of this is that these majorities also understand economic rhetoric to be bound up in their own dignity and status aspirations and resentments, right?
00:10:37.760When they talk about being working class and feeling like Trump is standing up for the little guy and Democrats represent the elites, right? That is about their own sense of deprived status that can be often quite explicitly is racial and gender resentment, right?
00:10:56.320This is sort of presented by a lot of Marxists as a bait and switch, right? Like, oh, they are supplicated with the ability to oppress women or beat their wives in the home as sort of a compensation for the indignities that they suffer at work, right?
00:11:12.340I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think they see these entitlements to control over women, to superiority over people of color, to having these lower status people they can lord over and have contempt for and see as their enemies. I think they see that as an asset the same way that they see their jobs as an asset.0.54
00:11:34.500I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.
00:11:36.340I do want to sort of, well, not necessarily push back, but just kind of ask, you're right,
00:11:41.500there is a version of this critique that simply assumes that cultural issues are distinct
00:11:48.480And then there's the other one that's sort of more, I think, sort of like more wonkish
00:11:52.720version of this critique that says what the exit polls and what the results, especially
00:11:57.400of the abortion referenda vis-a-vis Kamala Harris's performance suggests, is that voters,
00:12:03.160even if they're not distinct, they are able to make that distinction. And that's a problem for
00:12:08.080Democrats. Like, what would you say to that? That is a slightly different critique. It's not saying
00:12:12.160like they might all say, yeah, I agree that these are at the root linked. The problem is somehow
00:12:17.780the Democrats are not able to tie them together effectively. Yeah. I mean, you're referring,
00:12:22.960I think, to one phenomena that reflects a broader trend in this election, which is split ticket
00:12:27.080voting, right? Right. This was not a thing for a long time. We had been told over and over that
00:12:32.420split ticket voting was over. The people had partisan identities and senses of self. That
00:12:38.420seems to have stopped, at least in this election, as we undergo a process of what's being called
00:12:43.420de-alignment, right? And people are sort of rearranging themselves across party lines and
00:12:50.500in relation to several issues. And that has produced a lot of split ticket voting. Among
00:12:55.320them, you see pro-abortion or pro-choice referenda passing in states that Trump won,
00:13:01.440Right. You also see Trump winning states where Democrats won Senate seats. Right. So like Tammy Baldwin, for instance, kept her held onto her seat in a hotly contested race in Wisconsin. Trump picked up Wisconsin. Right. Abortion ballot measures passed in states like Missouri, which went heavily for Trump and actually didn't just like protect existing abortion legality, but overturned a ban that is in effect. Right.
00:13:30.840Yeah. Even Florida went for Trump by something like possibly double digits, like an insane margin.
00:13:37.400400%. Yeah. Florida, very, very red state, right? Their abortion ballot measure failed,
00:13:43.520but only because it had a 60% threshold. It got 57%, you know? 57%. That's not especially close,
00:13:51.260right? That is a real mandate for abortion rights, right? And that means that people are
00:13:59.020seeing abortion in particular, but I think several other issues also, as something that they can
00:14:05.900separate in their vote for Trump, right? And we can talk about specific rationales behind that.
00:14:13.800People think Trump isn't very serious about his anti-abortion commitments. We can talk about
00:14:20.020the causes for that perception and the degree to which it's justified or not. I have a lot
00:14:25.280of thoughts about that. Like we can refer people to, to your column, which makes a good case for
00:14:30.060this. I mean, for those of you who, you know, don't want to click the link, uh, which we'll
00:14:34.940put in the show notes, TLDR, these people are kidding themselves, but still it's an interesting
00:14:39.400kind of question about what, where does, what are the conditions for the possibility of this
00:14:43.840disjuncture? Right. Right. I think, I think something that I really believe is that when
00:14:50.100people are voting well okay no i'm lying cut this because i just realized i don't totally
00:14:58.120believe what i'm saying no just that's just great this is all staying in i think there are at least
00:15:03.160some people and they may have been a determining number there are some people who are voting for
00:15:11.340trump for reasons that are not policy-based yeah and something you've seen this might
00:15:17.000make a decent segue into the next part of our conversation, which is where we wanted to talk
00:15:24.400about the difference between the pre and post election understandings of the race.
00:15:30.400Yeah. Because before the election, up to the day, the very day of the election,
00:15:35.360we had, or at least the media I was consuming, had depicted this race as really a referendum on
00:15:43.280Trump and specifically as being a referendum on Trump's proposed vision of gender. Right now in
00:15:51.420this post jobs world, Trump had really leaned into male identity grievance and a kind of politicized
00:15:59.060misogyny. Now he had elevated these fringe figures to places of prominence as his surrogates and in
00:16:06.560his campaign. You know, they had a viral video of a guy who worked for his campaign making a like
00:16:12.780joke about repealing the 19th Amendment. He had elevated J.D. Vance to a position of prominence
00:16:19.860who just can't stop talking about childless cat ladies and his desire to breed. He had gotten
00:16:25.280really close to the billionaire Elon Musk, who has several sexual misconduct allegations,0.89
00:16:31.120appears to have constructed a compound for this harem of women who have given birth to his children
00:16:37.320uh in texas and is you know threatening celebrities like taylor swift with insemination you know um
00:16:44.440he has elevated robert f kennedy jr who has uh sexual assault allegations against him you know
00:16:50.560there's a slew of misogyny that was really joyously deployed and and foregrounded in the
00:16:57.520trump campaign right that accounting of the fact that he ran that campaign like a pretty hatefully
00:17:05.720vulgarly grossly anti-woman campaign and that he then won that has been completely absent
00:17:13.740from post-election analysis it is like it it's almost uh verboten to talk about yeah maybe it's
00:17:21.880perceived that doing so would be doubling down on this like quote-unquote cultural politics
00:17:26.740yeah that apparently only the democrats run on but i think that the republicans ran on a kind
00:19:49.260The alleged trialed sex trafficker, the guy who was said to have shown nudes of random women to colleagues on the floor of the house, and who also has a weird son.
00:20:04.020This is apparently our next attorney general.
00:20:14.800I think with Matt Gaetz, that seems to be a reliable bet that that's the allegation, you know.
00:20:21.020I was joking on Blue Sky that it's a big tent, but it's just not allowed within 100 feet of a school.
00:20:27.040I mean, it's worth kind of thinking about, right?
00:20:29.180Like, this is something that I have not seen remarked on in mainstream media at all, right?
00:20:33.480There are, like, it's very clear that Trump is, like, he may also just, like, like rapists and just—0.94
00:20:40.280I think he affirmatively is pro-rape.0.93
00:20:42.380I think he understands sexual violence as a confirmation of his virility, and I think he understands it as an asset and sign of the strength of character of the men who commit it, right?
00:20:53.620That is a demonstration of their masculinity and their power, and he respects it.
00:20:58.320I think he's a personally pro-rape guy.
00:21:00.020Yeah, but at the same time, I think it's important to note that, like, functionally what the Gates appointment is supposed to do is test the loyalty of the legislative branch, right?
00:21:08.840To see how far advice and consent will really go with all this.
00:21:12.380Now, he could have just picked a bunch of people who were at the Capitol on January 6th that would do the exact fucking same thing, right? Like, I'm taking convicted felons who, like, try to, like, take a shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk, appoint them to a bunch of things, right? That would do the same thing, but it's not. It's not what he does.0.98
00:21:30.880The route is always, as you say, through questions of sexual domination.0.61
00:21:36.080That is the language by which he kind of looks to, you know, cuck the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.0.87
00:21:45.580Maybe. You know, I do think there is, like you mentioned, Trump is having a very transactional view of politics, right?
00:21:51.180And there's a way in which these appointments have just been rewarding loyalists, right?
00:21:56.000You can read the tea leaves of them and see like some of his priorities.
00:22:00.300Yeah, but Matt Gaetz, like you could have just – Eileen Cannon is like sitting by her phone, right? Like she could do this. She's no dumber than Gaetz.
00:22:09.600Yeah, or Jonathan Mitchell will also see who the Solicitor General appointee is. But I think part of it is about rewarding people he sees as loyal to him. And I think it's also about who he thinks has the right look.0.92
00:22:49.240The deus volt guy does seem like the answer to the question, why use 14 words when two words will do, right?
00:22:54.860The domination style of politics that Trump is bringing to these appointments is the same that he brought to the gender politics of his campaign, right?
00:23:04.600Like, I think, Adrian, you're right that partly this is a exercise in asserting his power over the other branches of government, right?
00:23:14.760He seems to be trying to convert the Senate into a rubber stamp.
00:23:17.840He seems to be trying to consolidate control over the military, and part of this is daring politicians to stand up to him who he knows will not stand up to him, and in so doing, to demonstrate his dominance, right?
00:23:32.880So it's like a statecraft that partakes of the same logic as sexual violence.
00:23:38.940Right. I mean, there's that famous picture of him and Mitt Romney at dinner, which is exactly – I always think of that, which is just that.
00:23:46.000the yeah you know marco rubio is going to be our secretary of state who was humiliated with that
00:23:50.980whole little marco uh primary campaign right he was like talking about emasculation he just called
00:23:56.060him small and that uh ruined that guy's career until he decided to abandon his neocon past and
00:24:04.440uh apparently also all his self-respect that he may have ever had did he have self-respect uh to
00:24:09.920join the trump campaign well it's the the absence of it has certainly paid off for him now right
00:24:15.240Yeah, good job. Congratulations, Marco. The other thing this raises, right? Like, in some way, I think you're right to point out that there's this real break and this kind of amnesia that comes along with the before and the after of coverage in or before election coverage and post-election coverage, right?
00:24:32.840And at the same time, as you point out, Trump is being nothing if not consistent. He follows one logic and he's telegraphed this for all those of us who hate the man to see, right? And yet, you know, the media is somehow twisting itself into pretzels to basically not see the continuity here.
00:24:51.820It does raise the question of information systems, doesn't it?
00:25:20.960There are Trump voters who genuinely make a distinction there, see a difference there that like, as you point out, is really hard to sustain. What is it about our information ecosystems that maybe played a role in that process?
00:25:33.500I do think there's an information story to be told here. But I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right?
00:25:51.100And they are voting for the spirit of resentment. They are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking. They are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies. Right. And that spirit, that like vibe of Trump is dominance, gratification and like fun resentment. Right.
00:26:13.260That is an emotional register that contains, can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right?0.94
00:26:38.040And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters. If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, right? But they do support the animating feature behind those policies, right? The sort of spirit of, you know, sadistic, jeering, fuck you.
00:26:59.600Like that's what they really like. They enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right? Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.1.00
00:27:22.380People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth,
00:27:25.540but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore.0.99
00:27:28.160So they're listening to a lot of fucking...0.99
00:29:02.620And that's what they're going to get in place of the policy outcomes that would actually improve their lives.
00:29:07.980Yeah, there was a, I forget who tweeted this, but there was a great tweet very early on about the idea that, kind of contradicting what we had talked about with Morgan Sung in our immediate pre-election episode where we said, like, is there such a thing for a campaign as being too online?
00:29:23.140And this person was raising the question, like, is there such a thing as a campaign that is not online enough at this point, right?
00:29:29.360Like, it turns out that a lot of people were on the exact same wavelength.
00:29:33.760We hear weird Twitter beef about like trans athletes and we think like, does this really resonate with normies?
00:29:39.280And it turns out there's a sizable segment of normies that it absolutely resonates with.0.99
00:29:44.620Or you can make them care about shit if you're online enough, right?0.99
00:29:48.000They weren't thinking about trans athletes because there's like fucking four of them in the whole country, right?1.00
00:30:03.180Kamala is for they, them, Trump is for you.1.00
00:30:05.220Yeah, that they saw that they played that several times during every single fucking football game.0.99
00:30:11.240You know, like that was put in front of people over and over and over again.0.98
00:30:15.120And so the campaign, the forces behind this, candidly the money behind it, made that a salient issue, right?0.98
00:30:22.900Because people will be led to care about horseshit that doesn't matter.
00:30:30.140What Trump does very well that I think people do like is he gives people an enemy and that enemy can be like so capacious and expansive, this big they, that a lot of their pre-existing frustrations and grievances can get sort of slotted into this imprecise Trumpian vision.
00:30:51.700So I think you do a really good job in sort of highlighting what people get out of voting for Trump in a kind of antagonistic fashion, like the people they want to see squirm, the people they hate and they want to see put down.
00:31:06.060But something that I'm sort of coming around to is that just because I have an extremely hard time understanding Trump as an identificatory figure or as like an aspirational figure at all, like it doesn't mean that he doesn't function that way to a lot of Americans.
00:31:21.700And part of the thing that I keep coming back to is like, you know, when you and I say like he's just some weird grifter who's trying to strip the government for parts, like we say that thinking everyone's going to be like, yeah, that sounds terrible, man.
00:31:32.220But that's the thing. Like there is in our highly online-ified world, there is a growing part of the population that ultimately, you know, is hustling online.
00:31:45.720And like there is a kind of recognition of the kind of we'll say anything for eyeballs kind of logic that Trump brings to the table.
00:31:54.340And frankly, the desperation he brings to the table might be their desperation.
00:31:57.920The way he feels, seems unprepared, unclear where he is and whatever.
00:32:01.580That is fully understand the irony of saying this on a podcast.
00:32:05.140Like that is the flop sweat of everyone who is just like pointing their camera at themselves and like trying to sort of like get eyeballs, get attention and make money that way.
00:32:17.940Like there's been this narrative around the election about the rightward shift of Silicon Valley and the tech bro.
00:32:23.460And I think if you look at the election results in the Bay Area, it's very hard to sustain that claim.
00:32:28.240What you probably do get are two things.
00:32:30.400The people at the very top, sort of Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, et cetera, et cetera.