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Jewish Latinxes for Kamala Harris · Politix

0:00
SPEAKER_01: they're cooking something up there and what they're cooking is like not good for
0:04
SPEAKER_01: women and it's not good for democracy um when the alt-right writes its manifestos
0:09
SPEAKER_01: they call themselves things like bronze age pervert um it's so true and it's so
0:14
SPEAKER_01: fucking weird and like that's weird
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Hey everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the Politics Podcast.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, we'll talk about the new divide in partisan politics between normal and weird.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: What do Democrats mean when they say Republicans are weird?
0:34
SPEAKER_00: How normal are Democrats actually?
0:37
SPEAKER_00: And having drawn this line,
0:39
SPEAKER_00: can Democrats now concede anything to quote-unquote weird Republicans as they
0:45
SPEAKER_00: appeal to swing voters ahead of the election?
0:48
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about all of that, plus some more deep-stakes stuff.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: So I hope you enjoy the conversation.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: And if you want to hear the whole thing, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at politics.fm.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: Hey, everyone.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Politics Podcast.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm Brian Boyler.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm Matthew Iglesias.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: So I've been practicing here.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: Kamala Harris entered this week,
1:11
SPEAKER_00: newly popular,
1:12
SPEAKER_00: significantly more popular than Donald Trump,
1:14
SPEAKER_00: it seems,
1:15
SPEAKER_00: but in multiple polls,
1:17
SPEAKER_00: actually more popular than she is disliked.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: And Democrats have found new footing with a newish majoritarian appeal where
1:27
SPEAKER_00: they're distinguishing themselves from Trump-era Republicans,
1:32
SPEAKER_00: personified in particular by J.D.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: Vance as Democrats being normal and Republicans being weird.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of fun on the internet, but we want to talk a little bit about
1:43
SPEAKER_00: what it means, how real the divide is and what the implications are for the campaign.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: What do you think about that?
1:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:49
SPEAKER_01: I do just want to like level set that,
1:52
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:53
SPEAKER_01: I checked this morning,
1:54
SPEAKER_01: the economist turned their polling average back on and it's Harris down by one.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: which is a lot better than Joe Biden was doing a week ago,
2:06
SPEAKER_01: but is about where Joe Biden was six weeks ago.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: Harris down by one nationally means probably down by four in critical swing states.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: And so not out of the woods, right?
2:21
SPEAKER_01: And I want people to keep that in mind.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Um,
2:24
SPEAKER_00: we,
2:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
2:24
SPEAKER_00: it's,
2:25
SPEAKER_00: it's fair to say that that is like,
2:27
SPEAKER_00: we always say polling is a snapshot,
2:28
SPEAKER_00: but often polling is steady and the snapshot is pretty accurate.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: Like Harris could be in launch and we just don't know yet.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: There is clearly reason for optimism.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, this was, uh,
2:40
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot going on,
2:41
SPEAKER_01: but I mean,
2:41
SPEAKER_01: it's just like,
2:42
SPEAKER_01: what you don't want to have is an attitude of total complacency,
2:45
SPEAKER_01: right?
2:46
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: You know,
2:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
2:47
SPEAKER_01: I think in a lot of ways,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: the best thing about the weird critique is just literally that it is different.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: I think that there's nothing...
2:57
SPEAKER_01: wrong with the argument that Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: I think people who don't love that as a message sometimes overstate the case against it.
3:09
SPEAKER_01: It's a perfectly good message.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people believe it.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: It has brought a lot of people to Democrats' side.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: We've just been talking about Donald Trump and the threat to democracy a lot for a really long time.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: And the merits of coming up with something
3:25
SPEAKER_01: Like I think this scratches most of the same itches, but like it's not literally the same.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: So you not only get to go on television and say it, but you get the like second order articles, right?
3:38
SPEAKER_01: But there's like a New York Times piece and it's like Democrats are saying Republicans are weird.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: And that's just like the virtue of changing things up, you know, in like slightly arbitrary ways.
3:49
SPEAKER_01: And I do think that it cues into, you know,
3:54
SPEAKER_01: And it's part of it, right?
3:56
SPEAKER_01: It's literally Tim Waltz's line.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: But more broadly,
4:00
SPEAKER_01: like all the people auditioning for VP are these like Midwestern politicians,
4:07
SPEAKER_01: which is good because,
4:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
4:10
SPEAKER_01: the Midwest is like the quintessential normal part of America.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: Boring, I think would be the normal critique that people make.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: No hills there.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Of the Midwest.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, and just like the people, the personalities, right, are like not super pizzazzy.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: But Vance is a Midwestern politician, right?
4:30
SPEAKER_01: And so you have Democrats from Pennsylvania,
4:33
SPEAKER_01: Michigan,
4:35
SPEAKER_01: Minnesota,
4:36
SPEAKER_01: who are like,
4:37
SPEAKER_01: you know,
4:37
SPEAKER_01: they know their people.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, they...
4:43
SPEAKER_01: have a line on sort of painting Vance in particular,
4:48
SPEAKER_01: but more broadly,
4:49
SPEAKER_01: this kind of actually like California-based sort of like new right intellectual
4:54
SPEAKER_01: ethos that he's part of as like,
4:57
SPEAKER_01: no,
4:57
SPEAKER_01: like they're weird,
4:58
SPEAKER_01: right?
4:58
SPEAKER_01: And that's just kind of, you know, Kamala Harris is like from San Francisco.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm from Greenwich Village.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't...
5:07
SPEAKER_01: But, like, we are weird, like me and Kamala.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you're trying to win in the swing states.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: And this kind of thought of, like, how do we seem normal?
5:17
SPEAKER_01: How do we paint them as exotic?
5:19
SPEAKER_01: Like, that's good.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: That's a good line of thought to be having.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: So I like your point about it being new,
5:25
SPEAKER_00: just kind of being a breath of fresh air and just like a new way for people to
5:29
SPEAKER_00: think about what their political commitments ought to be.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: I think it's more flexible than a straight, they're fascists, they want to end democracy appeal approach.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Because it can attach to a lot of stuff.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
5:46
SPEAKER_00: quite obviously,
5:48
SPEAKER_00: the main point of connection to politics is the gender politics of this new right
5:52
SPEAKER_00: and J.D.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: Vance and the the like fusion with Donald Trump,
5:57
SPEAKER_00: this immoral libertine sex abuser makes for some weird politics.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: Right.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: But you hear Tim Waltz talk about like wanting to raise the price of insulin is weird.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: Like who has that as an objective?
6:11
SPEAKER_00: And so you can you can extend it in a lot of different directions.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Why it doesn't trouble me as somebody who thinks that the democracy appeal is
6:19
SPEAKER_00: important is that it's very consonant.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
6:21
SPEAKER_00: like I feel like in some sense,
6:23
SPEAKER_00: the 3D chess move will be to eventually talk about why these are the same critique,
6:30
SPEAKER_00: because if you I mean,
6:30
SPEAKER_00: if you.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: If you read any history of any fascist or dictatorial push, there's a lot of weirdness there.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: There's obviously a lot of misery and death and violence,
6:44
SPEAKER_00: but there were weird Nazis and there were weird Italian fascists.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of weirdness in the MAGA movement.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: And it...
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And so you can make the same critique under the weirdness framework rather than the
6:59
SPEAKER_00: like everything is on the line framework.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: And it speaks to me because we've talked about this tension before where the old appeal,
7:07
SPEAKER_00: you know,
7:08
SPEAKER_00: you're patriotically bound to vote against Trump because democracy depends on it,
7:14
SPEAKER_00: is an inherently defensive and kind of weak framework.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: appeal it's like you should be scared of them they are strong and we are fighting
7:22
SPEAKER_00: for our lives right um and that's i i think that there's merit to it but turning
7:27
SPEAKER_00: the appeal around to talk about them being weird just strips the strips the fear
7:33
SPEAKER_00: out of it right like we are not scared of them we want to beat them because um we
7:38
SPEAKER_00: don't want our lives to become bizarre the way theirs are um and so it um
7:45
SPEAKER_00: it simultaneously puts the correct stigma, I think, on MAGA without
7:52
SPEAKER_00: without coming across as sort of like soft and fearful.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: So I like it.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: I think that's why it sticks.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: I think there's like a fundamental linkage here, right?
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Which you can see if you read back in April 2009,
8:06
SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel,
8:08
SPEAKER_01: the wealthy investor,
8:10
SPEAKER_01: venture capitalist,
8:11
SPEAKER_00: et cetera.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is where I'm getting to.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, he published an essay in Cato Unbound about,
8:18
SPEAKER_01: That's titled The Education of a Libertarian.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: And it says things that are not the same as J.D.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: Vance's or Blake Masters' politics.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: But he says in this essay from 2009 that he's come to believe that
8:33
SPEAKER_01: Freedom,
8:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:34
SPEAKER_01: as he understands it,
8:35
SPEAKER_01: and democracy are fundamentally incompatible,
8:39
SPEAKER_01: that the growth of the welfare state is relentless.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: He cites the fact that over the past hundred years,
8:46
SPEAKER_01: women have had the franchise,
8:49
SPEAKER_01: which has skewed politics toward more left-wing outcomes that he doesn't like.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: And what he says in this essay is that like,
8:58
SPEAKER_01: as a result of this,
8:59
SPEAKER_01: he's kind of like giving up on politics.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: And he's talking about seasteading or forming space colonies or like using,
9:09
SPEAKER_01: they didn't have cryptocurrency in 2009.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: But he's talking about the idea that untraceable cybernetic financial transactions
9:16
SPEAKER_01: could let you away from the long arm of the state.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: Sometime between 2009 and 2024, Thiel reengaged with the political process, right?
9:28
SPEAKER_01: He backed Donald Trump heavily in the 2016 election, and he recruited both J.D.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: Vance and Blake Masters into the electoral arena.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: Both of those guys,
9:43
SPEAKER_01: both Masters and Vance,
9:44
SPEAKER_01: have been heavily invested in this like bizarre cat lady rhetoric,
9:49
SPEAKER_01: right?
9:50
SPEAKER_01: that I think is really like the connective tissue.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: This idea that like women are like a problem,
9:59
SPEAKER_01: that it's just like problematic that women exist or have agency,
10:04
SPEAKER_01: like is weird.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And it's like,
10:07
SPEAKER_01: you can see it's freaking out Meghan McCain and other right of center women,
10:13
SPEAKER_01: but it is connected intimately to Thiel's original critique of democracy.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: And he has never explained,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: as he went from,
10:25
SPEAKER_01: like,
10:25
SPEAKER_01: democratic politics cannot deliver the policy outcomes that I favor,
10:30
SPEAKER_01: so I'm going to try to build a libertarian utopia on Mars,
10:34
SPEAKER_01: to,
10:34
SPEAKER_01: like,
10:34
SPEAKER_01: no,
10:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to recruit Senate candidates.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: Right.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't publish essays anymore.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: He instead sponsors,
10:43
SPEAKER_01: you know,
10:44
SPEAKER_01: Mencius Moldbug,
10:45
SPEAKER_01: and he holds salons that bring together conservative politicians and weird
10:51
SPEAKER_01: alt-right internet figures.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: But they're cooking something up there.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: And what they're cooking is not good for women, and it's not good for democracy.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: And you can tell that...
11:04
SPEAKER_01: The fact that like one of the icons of this movement,
11:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:07
SPEAKER_01: so they're pseudonymous because they fear cancel culture,
11:09
SPEAKER_01: like fair enough,
11:10
SPEAKER_01: right?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: But like when they wrote the Federalist Papers, they called themselves publius.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: When the alt-right writes its manifestos, they call themselves things like bronze age pervert.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: It's so true, and it's so fucking weird.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: That's weird.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: It's not just that it's unusual.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: It's self-consciously weird.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: You're thinking there.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: You're like, what kind of pseudonymous persona am I going to craft for myself?
11:39
SPEAKER_01: When you hit upon a name like Mencius Moldbug...
11:43
SPEAKER_01: Or you hit upon a name like Bronze Age pervert.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're being deliberately avant-gardist.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: And there is a program here,
11:54
SPEAKER_01: I think,
11:54
SPEAKER_01: whose dimensions you and I don't fully understand because it's not transparent.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: But it's like something to do with reactionary gender politics, with Donald Trump, and with the idea that
12:10
SPEAKER_01: democracy is incompatible with the level of business friendly right wing public
12:18
SPEAKER_01: policy that should be made.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: Like the opposite.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: It's like an actual like inside out version of the like, oh, J.D.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: Vance is a populist who wants to take on politics.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: corporate power.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: That's not what his progenitors are saying.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: It's not really what Hillbilly Elegy is saying.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: All of this is people complaining that the electorate is too feminized or drug
12:44
SPEAKER_01: addled or something to accept the bracing right-wing doctrine.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: of the Bronze Age pervert and Peter Thiel.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: And so- One of these people,
12:54
SPEAKER_00: people like,
12:56
SPEAKER_00: now I'm forgetting who it was,
13:00
SPEAKER_00: like a female MAGA person was talking yesterday about how the insult weird itself
13:06
SPEAKER_00: is so feminized.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: It's like what women would say.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: And it was like-
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Like,
13:15
SPEAKER_00: thank you for proving the point that this is really just about,
13:18
SPEAKER_00: like,
13:19
SPEAKER_00: thinking that womenish things are ick.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: And then also,
13:23
SPEAKER_00: like,
13:25
SPEAKER_00: making your point in this,
13:27
SPEAKER_00: like,
13:28
SPEAKER_00: eugenicist sort of,
13:29
SPEAKER_00: like,
13:30
SPEAKER_00: I can tell from using my calipers that,
13:32
SPEAKER_00: like,
13:32
SPEAKER_00: the Democrat Party is filled with soft men and women who domineer them.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like weird...
13:41
SPEAKER_00: just a weird way to think about dividing up society and like,
13:44
SPEAKER_00: especially if you happen to be like a female Republican,
13:47
SPEAKER_00: I think.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I mean, do you know, um, do you, do you know about the long house?
13:56
SPEAKER_00: I do.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm, I mean, I know, I know what like a long house is in like, um, like Scandinavian lore.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: And I know that it's like become a metaphor on the alt right for like, um,
14:12
SPEAKER_00: a community where everyone bows to women's domineering leadership and thus everyone
14:18
SPEAKER_00: is in some sense cooked,
14:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:20
SPEAKER_00: like,
14:20
SPEAKER_00: right.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: So,
14:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
14:21
SPEAKER_00: that,
14:22
SPEAKER_01: that,
14:22
SPEAKER_01: that,
14:23
SPEAKER_01: that exactly was the case that like the weird critique is,
14:27
SPEAKER_01: is feminized that in the long house where you're under the matriarchal purview of women,
14:35
SPEAKER_01: um,
14:35
SPEAKER_01: everybody needs to be conformist,
14:37
SPEAKER_01: um,
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Um,
14:38
SPEAKER_01: whereas,
14:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
14:39
SPEAKER_01: out in the,
14:40
SPEAKER_01: um,
14:40
SPEAKER_01: uh,
14:43
SPEAKER_01: the bronze age chariot warriors,
14:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
14:45
SPEAKER_01: we're all going to be,
14:47
SPEAKER_01: we're all going to be as weird as we want.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, no, I mean, I, I, so I, I, I think the idea of the historical reference is that, um,
14:56
SPEAKER_01: there was these European farmers who were living in these longhouses.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: And then the Yamnaya steppe invaders came in and conquered them.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: And so you're supposed to affiliate yourself with the manly steppe conquerors.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: I see.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: Rather than the longhouse dwelling farmers.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, you know, we have a conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: It goes down through the ages.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: That's Cain and Abel.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: That's the plot of Oklahoma, the musical.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, so this is like a genuine, like, resonant kind of thing that exists.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: It's also an odd way to talk about the world.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, they cook up all kinds of weird jargon, odd concepts, extreme opinions.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: I think what they would tell you, or I don't know if they would tell you, I would tell you that
15:49
SPEAKER_01: As strange as this all is, it does echo, I think, academic left politics, consciously or unconsciously.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: In particular,
16:00
SPEAKER_01: this insistence on coming up with very hard-to-parse jargon instead of saying what
16:08
SPEAKER_01: you mean clearly.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: If there were humanities PhD programs run by right-wingers,
16:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, this is what they would do there.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: So instead, you know, we they're they're all left wing, all this kind of stuff.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: And people also.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Well,
16:26
SPEAKER_00: there I mean,
16:26
SPEAKER_00: they're like there is a more than fuzzy divide between intellectualism and pseudo intellectualism.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Like you may think that a lot of like left wing academic liberal arts stuff is pseudo intellectual stuff.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: But there are standards.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's standards, yes.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: It's not just video game addicts who have not had a girlfriend in five years.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, I am talking specifically about the weirdness.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
16:54
SPEAKER_01: This compulsion to use unfamiliar terminology is like quite similar, right?
16:59
SPEAKER_01: And it's part of what's appealing about, you know,
17:04
SPEAKER_01: A nice Midwestern governor talking about, oh, those guys are weird, right?
17:09
SPEAKER_01: Is you are, you know, setting yourself apart, right?
17:14
SPEAKER_01: It's like Tim Walz, like I'm in the National Guard.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: I was a small town congressman.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm just a schoolteacher.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm just a regular guy who wants cheap insulin.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: These guys are being weird, right?
17:25
SPEAKER_01: Rather than,
17:27
SPEAKER_01: okay,
17:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm a guy who wants to deconstruct patriarchal power and problematize white supremacy,
17:36
SPEAKER_00: right?
17:37
SPEAKER_01: So it's a double-edged move.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: It's both a criticism of the Republicans and a means of distancing himself from
17:48
SPEAKER_01: from unflattering it's stereotypes of what's interesting because because you know
17:53
SPEAKER_00: what republicans are very wrong-footed by this attack because i think it's
18:00
SPEAKER_00: meritorious right like it's not there's no like scientific basis for saying it and
18:05
SPEAKER_00: like there are obviously weird elements in the broad uh left liberal alliance right
18:13
SPEAKER_00: um but the
18:15
SPEAKER_00: When you refer to someone like JD Vance or the people he reads or Donald Trump as weird,
18:22
SPEAKER_00: like the right wing internet hits back.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, here's a picture of you with a gay person.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: Here's a picture of you with a trans person.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: And you're saying that we're weird.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: Like, here's my family, like regular hetero nuclear family.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: And you like people who wear rainbow dresses or whatever.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Like, who's the weird one?
18:39
SPEAKER_00: And I think that it's revealing in some ways that they're going for the very
18:47
SPEAKER_00: bigotries that make their dark kind of weirdness so off-putting to normies instead
18:54
SPEAKER_00: of being like pointing to the academic intersectionalist jargony politics of like
19:03
SPEAKER_00: 2016 through 2020.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: 18 or whatever, and trying to affiliate Democrats with...
19:11
SPEAKER_00: people who,
19:14
SPEAKER_00: I guess they have been doing some of the like pronoun policing or whatever,
19:20
SPEAKER_00: but like their main thing is like,
19:22
SPEAKER_00: you can't call us weird because there's all these gays in your coalition.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: And to me,
19:29
SPEAKER_00: like,
19:30
SPEAKER_00: not only are they kind of proving the point,
19:33
SPEAKER_00: but they're proving,
19:34
SPEAKER_00: I think like a bigger point about how identity politics actually works in practice.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: Um,
19:42
SPEAKER_00: because there is like within the democratic party,
19:45
SPEAKER_00: there are leaders and strategists who think that anytime a culture war comes up,
19:51
SPEAKER_00: it's like dicey territory for,
19:53
SPEAKER_00: for the party.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: Because if you look at polling on certain issues under the umbrella of culture wars, this is like, um,
20:03
SPEAKER_00: trans youth playing sports and it's immigration,
20:06
SPEAKER_00: you can find evidence that the public is pretty conservative on those issues.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: And so if you're taking Republican bait and talking about those issues,
20:17
SPEAKER_00: you're on wobbly territory at best.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: And like you might end up in this weird position,
20:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:23
SPEAKER_00: like Republicans love it when they say like a Democrat can't define what a woman is,
20:28
SPEAKER_00: right?
20:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: They do love that.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: They love that, right?
20:32
SPEAKER_00: But I think in practice, this is a dynamic kind of fight.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: And what happens when politics –
20:39
SPEAKER_00: remains on this train for more than a second is that Mencius mold bug comes running through the door.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And like, then it's like a, uh, it's, you know, Tim Maltz would have it as us normal, then weird.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: But I feel like it's really like a mixed bag where like Democrats are a mix of
20:58
SPEAKER_00: normal people and yes,
21:00
SPEAKER_00: weird people,
21:01
SPEAKER_00: but like weird,
21:02
SPEAKER_00: happy,
21:02
SPEAKER_00: inclusive pride parade,
21:04
SPEAKER_00: attending people who wear costumes and welcome people in and,
21:07
SPEAKER_00: and like,
21:08
SPEAKER_00: everyone's having fun.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: So – Versus the Republican weird of – like there's no normal there and it's just
21:16
SPEAKER_00: like secretly we think trans is gross and gay is gross and women are gross.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And like when the culture war is that, it obviously, obviously benefits Democrats.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean –
21:33
SPEAKER_01: I think there's like a few different ways to say this, right?
21:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
21:37
SPEAKER_01: so Republicans have not successfully used trans issues as,
21:43
SPEAKER_01: I think,
21:44
SPEAKER_01: an electoral strategy anywhere.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: And I think that you're right to say that the reason for that is that Republicans,
21:53
SPEAKER_01: unlike foreign center-right parties,
21:57
SPEAKER_01: have a much more religious and homophobic approach
22:02
SPEAKER_01: sort of core that like can't help itself from coming out.
22:06
SPEAKER_01: You know,
22:06
SPEAKER_01: so you start with a conversation about like who should be allowed to play on the
22:09
SPEAKER_01: high school volleyball team and the pollings in Republicans favor.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: But then they immediately start going to
22:18
SPEAKER_01: You know, like we want to make like drag shows illegal.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: We want to, you know, we actually have reconciled ourselves to gay marriage.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, we don't care.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: We hate cat ladies.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: And they, you know, it doesn't work for them, right?
22:32
SPEAKER_01: Because they get really, really extreme.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's the same as saying that it's beneficial to Democrats to hold a very unpopular party.
22:43
SPEAKER_01: position on the specific question of high school sports.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: When you have a situation where it was the Lambda Legal Defense Fund had their memo
22:54
SPEAKER_01: on advising Democrats how to navigate various transgender issues.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: And on the sports question,
22:59
SPEAKER_01: they were like,
22:59
SPEAKER_01: oh,
22:59
SPEAKER_01: we haven't tested any messages that are effective on this topic.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: And like when an advocacy group is saying that, like, you know, that carries weight, right?
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Because people want to tell you what they've got going on.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: On immigration, I think Republicans have just done a better job.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, like Republicans do not mostly start ranting against legal immigrants, for example.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, like Donald Trump isn't deporting Melania, right?
23:33
SPEAKER_01: And they do a better job of keeping their rhetoric focused on border security.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: Now,
23:40
SPEAKER_01: I remember when Trump was president,
23:42
SPEAKER_01: it was not that long ago,
23:44
SPEAKER_01: and he implemented actually like a quite wide ranging crackdown on legal immigration.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: He says he is going to institute a like interior security mass deportation program
23:55
SPEAKER_01: that if it manifested itself would be incredibly disruptive and unpopular.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think on exactly these kind of normalcy,
24:03
SPEAKER_01: grounds right like the minute that you that your favorite diner closes down because
24:11
SPEAKER_01: half the kitchen staff got deported
24:14
SPEAKER_01: people are going to be like, what?
24:16
SPEAKER_01: Like, why did we do this?
24:17
SPEAKER_01: Like, what was the problem here that we were trying to solve?
24:21
SPEAKER_01: But he's not talking about that on the campaign trail.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: You know,
24:24
SPEAKER_01: he's doing a good job of talking about the border,
24:27
SPEAKER_01: of talking about crime,
24:29
SPEAKER_01: of talking about housing problems in blue cities that are bothering people.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: And so I just like,
24:39
SPEAKER_01: I think this weird stuff,
24:40
SPEAKER_01: like it's a good line,
24:41
SPEAKER_01: like it's a good gambit and it's confused them because they are not,
24:46
SPEAKER_01: weren't expecting Democrats to change things up.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: I just don't think people should operate with the illusion that it's like a magical
24:56
SPEAKER_01: weapon that,
24:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:58
SPEAKER_01: solves everything,
24:59
SPEAKER_00: right?
25:00
SPEAKER_00: No, of course not.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: The challenge, the promise and the peril of normal is,
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Is that, you know, you gotta act normal, talk normal, use normal language, appeal to normal people's...
25:20
SPEAKER_01: opinions about things.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: As always, I enjoy Kamala Harris's launch ad.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed Future Forward's first pro-Kamala ad.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: I think when Democrats make these ads, they stick to strong criticisms of Republicans.
25:37
SPEAKER_01: They talk a lot about insulin as their agenda.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: And
25:42
SPEAKER_01: You know,
25:43
SPEAKER_01: always I think the perennial question for Democrats is this is like slightly
25:47
SPEAKER_01: existential question,
25:48
SPEAKER_01: but it's like which party do they want to be?
25:52
SPEAKER_01: Do they want to be the party of we're a big normal tent and these guys are freaks?
25:59
SPEAKER_01: Or do they want to be the party of sweeping transformation of American society?
26:05
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26:06
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26:08
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