Transcript

Bros And Cons · Politix

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SPEAKER_00: And this is why I don't think that the Trump gambit is likely to work,
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SPEAKER_00: is that you might get a lot more young men to say,
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SPEAKER_00: yo,
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SPEAKER_00: Trump is so based.
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SPEAKER_00: But then they're just going to be stoned on their fucking couch on election day.
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00: Hey everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the Politics Podcast.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: This week,
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SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump is making an all-in bet on his ability to juice turnout among what may
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SPEAKER_00: be the smallest and least reliable segment of the electorate,
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SPEAKER_00: which is young men.
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SPEAKER_00: So the question is,
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SPEAKER_00: can he realign the electorate even at the margins enough to outwit pollsters and
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SPEAKER_00: their models of the electorate and all the election forecasts to make himself the favorite?
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SPEAKER_00: Do young men really care that much about things like vaping?
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SPEAKER_00: to change their voting patterns?
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SPEAKER_00: And where do abortion rights fit into this analysis?
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SPEAKER_00: Matt and I will run through the whole strategy and what we think of it.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: So I hope you enjoy the conversation.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: And if you want to hear the whole thing, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at politics.fm.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: Hey everyone, welcome to the Politics Podcast.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm Brian Boitler.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm Matthew Glycias.
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SPEAKER_00: So Matt, you're a medium-aged, I guess recently young-aged man.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Are Donald Trump's flip-flops on vaping and cryptocurrency and TikTok making you
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SPEAKER_00: rethink all your priorities?
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SPEAKER_00: Are you like full MAGA now?
1:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh, yes.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, okay.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: I think we should explain a little bit what we are talking about.
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SPEAKER_00: No, I just want a hot start.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, so no.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: When you and I were young and, uh, men, I mean, we were young men, uh, in the Obama era.
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SPEAKER_01: there was a very pronounced age gradient to voting behavior.
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SPEAKER_01: There was also a gender gap between men and women,
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SPEAKER_01: but the age gradient was so pronounced that Obama was handily winning
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SPEAKER_01: young men while also losing older women.
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SPEAKER_01: So there was an age-specific gender gap, but there was a very big age gap across the lines.
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SPEAKER_01: Today, over 10 to 15 years later than that period,
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SPEAKER_01: We are seeing a gender gap that is very pronounced in the youth cohort,
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SPEAKER_01: but not as much of a systematic age gradient.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: And I think that people struggle sometimes with the description of exactly what's happening.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: I read, I think, a Paul Starr column that said younger men are drifting to the right.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: But it's not clear that that's true.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: The men who were young and liberal are just like, we're not young anymore anymore.
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SPEAKER_01: And the young men who are voting for Donald Trump were mostly not eligible voters
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SPEAKER_01: in 2012 and oftentimes not eligible voters in 2016 either.
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SPEAKER_01: But they are more right wing than young women.
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SPEAKER_01: There's also different polls show this different ways.
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SPEAKER_01: There's some surveys that really show this as women breaking hard to the left.
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SPEAKER_01: And other surveys show it as men breaking hard to the right among youths.
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SPEAKER_01: And it's not 100% clear which of those is true.
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SPEAKER_01: Because when you think about poll margins of error,
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SPEAKER_01: right,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: you do a normal poll,
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SPEAKER_01: you've got like a three point,
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SPEAKER_01: three or four point margin of error.
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SPEAKER_01: Then when you look at just men or just women, it doubles to six.
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SPEAKER_01: And when you look at just youth, it usually more than doubles because it's not that many people under 30.
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SPEAKER_01: So when you look at age by gender, you're looking at huge margins of error.
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SPEAKER_01: And you can tell pretty reliably that the gender gap is larger in the youth cohort.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: But anything more specific than that,
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SPEAKER_01: like which direction it's coming,
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SPEAKER_01: I think would require a much more high-powered survey than we've seen.
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SPEAKER_01: So I will say the highest-powered survey that I have seen...
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SPEAKER_01: which was shown to me privately,
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SPEAKER_01: does indicate that this is mostly a question of young men of color are more
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SPEAKER_01: conservative than older men of color.
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SPEAKER_01: Which is not to say that they're a conservative group per se, right?
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SPEAKER_01: But that it's like- At the margins.
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SPEAKER_01: If Harris is winning young black men by 40 points,
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SPEAKER_01: that's like cataclysmically bad by historical standards of any African-American.
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SPEAKER_01: population subgroup.
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SPEAKER_01: But I'm not 100.
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SPEAKER_01: Even the person who showed me this was not like,
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SPEAKER_01: take this to the bank because it's not,
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SPEAKER_01: it would be hard to conduct a survey designed to show this on that level of granularity.
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SPEAKER_01: So Trump seems to be doing better with young men.
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SPEAKER_00: For this reason,
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SPEAKER_00: because the data is so thin,
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SPEAKER_00: I really think that the advantage you and I have is that we were young recently.
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SPEAKER_00: We kind of remember what it was like to formulate political opinions.
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SPEAKER_00: And maybe me a little more than you,
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SPEAKER_00: because you came from a household of the literati,
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SPEAKER_00: and I came from a household of a doctor and a stay-at-home mom.
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00: So I really did...
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SPEAKER_00: form my, my like adult political opinions as a young adult.
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SPEAKER_00: And just like,
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SPEAKER_00: like plant yourself in those shoes and just think about what,
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SPEAKER_00: what,
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SPEAKER_00: like what made you become a liberal or a Democrat?
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SPEAKER_00: And I think I have a,
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SPEAKER_00: hypothesis of,
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SPEAKER_00: of what's going on with young men and,
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SPEAKER_00: uh,
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SPEAKER_00: with Trump and why,
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SPEAKER_00: why I tend to not think it's going to work.
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SPEAKER_00: But if I was going to make the bullish case for like this idea that Trump has cleaved,
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SPEAKER_00: um,
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SPEAKER_00: the youth vote in this way and that it might,
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SPEAKER_00: um,
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SPEAKER_00: like become a,
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SPEAKER_00: essentially a lifelong or like a,
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SPEAKER_00: a decades long problem for,
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SPEAKER_00: for Democrats,
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SPEAKER_00: it would be,
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SPEAKER_00: it would like the,
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SPEAKER_00: the story would go something like this,
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SPEAKER_00: right?
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Like that, um,
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SPEAKER_00: My formative experiences, your formative experiences in politics were the George W. Bush years, right?
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SPEAKER_00: And so, like, they were bad.
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SPEAKER_00: And they reflected very poorly, I think, on the Republican Party.
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SPEAKER_00: And to, I think, most people, that's about Iraq and ultimately the economy.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: But for age-specific purposes, it was also...
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SPEAKER_00: The Republican Party was understood to be the party of people who are really weird
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SPEAKER_00: about sex and don't want women to have abortions.
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SPEAKER_00: And add that all up, and of course, millennial men voted overwhelmingly for Obama.
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SPEAKER_00: It's just not...
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SPEAKER_00: There's no mystery about it, right?
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Fast forward to 2024, and there are some Gen Z men who probably have adult memories of the Trump years.
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SPEAKER_00: And if they're tuned in enough, they know that Trump is responsible for overturning Roe.
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SPEAKER_00: But a lot of them are just 18 now, and they don't really remember that.
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SPEAKER_00: What their formative political experiences are is Joe Biden.
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SPEAKER_00: And Joe Biden is super unpopular with young voters in general.
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SPEAKER_00: And so just as a mirror image dynamic,
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SPEAKER_00: you would expect that to move the youth vote in the Republican direction unilaterally,
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SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: Like young women, young men.
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SPEAKER_00: It's just that there's this abortion situation that Republicans are responsible for.
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SPEAKER_00: And that could explain why young women are staying planted where they were when we were
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SPEAKER_00: when we were in our 20s and why young men seem to be drifting a bit.
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SPEAKER_00: That's, I think, like the best hypothesis.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: But,
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SPEAKER_00: like,
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SPEAKER_00: that doesn't suggest that,
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SPEAKER_00: therefore,
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SPEAKER_00: Trump can,
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SPEAKER_00: like,
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SPEAKER_00: hasten the dynamic by saying,
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SPEAKER_00: I'll give you vapes and I'll give you cryptocurrency.
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SPEAKER_00: Like...
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SPEAKER_00: That's where I feel like his theory of politics is kind of taking a page from you and the popularists.
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SPEAKER_00: Like, I'll just propose policies that appeal to those guys.
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SPEAKER_00: But I think that that's where this falls apart.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: We could get into why.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, we'll see.
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SPEAKER_01: I think two specific things are really worth looking at as kind of formative youth
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SPEAKER_01: experiences because they're issues that have –
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SPEAKER_01: Not that much ideological,
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SPEAKER_01: not that much policy content,
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SPEAKER_01: which is the kind of thing that tends to influence like persuadable people more,
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SPEAKER_01: right?
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SPEAKER_01: Which is when we were young, gay marriage equality was a very high salience political issue.
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SPEAKER_01: People were talking about this all the time.
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SPEAKER_01: in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, through to 2012.
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SPEAKER_01: It was a very frequent subject of conversation in politics.
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SPEAKER_01: And in particular, it was one of George W. Bush's
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SPEAKER_01: big winning issues.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, was he campaigned in 2004 on a constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage?
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SPEAKER_01: He perceived accurately, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Like George W. Bush's theory of the case was that Democrats would deny that they favored gay marriage.
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SPEAKER_01: win elections, and then appoint judges to the Supreme Court who said that you should do gay marriage.
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SPEAKER_01: He was right.
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SPEAKER_01: That is exactly what happened.
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SPEAKER_01: This is also a strategy that members of Obama's campaign articulated off the record
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SPEAKER_01: in the 2008 campaign to donors and activists who were concerned about this.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, they didn't quite put... There was a wink-wink, yeah.
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SPEAKER_01: They would...
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SPEAKER_01: Talk,
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SPEAKER_01: if you asked,
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SPEAKER_01: about the Loving v.
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SPEAKER_01: Virginia ruling by the Supreme Court,
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SPEAKER_01: which struck down bars on interracial marriages.
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SPEAKER_01: Again,
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SPEAKER_01: emphasizing that the mechanism was the Supreme Court,
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SPEAKER_01: that the Johnson-Kennedy administration never passed a law doing that.
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SPEAKER_01: Now, as it turns out, right,
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SPEAKER_01: Gay rights had a very steep age gradient.
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SPEAKER_01: So,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: at the time that Bush was killing Kerry on the gay marriage issue— I mean,
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SPEAKER_00: didn't Ohio Republicans put— They put it on the ballot initiative to just turn out— And,
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SPEAKER_00: like,
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SPEAKER_00: maybe it flipped the election.
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SPEAKER_00: Like, it could be.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
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SPEAKER_01: But under-30s favored gay marriage at that time.
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SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
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SPEAKER_01: And it was like the first intra-office cancellation that I witnessed when I was one
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SPEAKER_01: of the young cancellers was specifically about this.
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SPEAKER_01: The old guys at the American Prospect after the election were like, what are we doing, people?
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SPEAKER_01: We're losing national power over gay marriage?
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SPEAKER_01: Who cares?
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SPEAKER_01: This is such a weird boutique activist issue that no normal person cares about.
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SPEAKER_01: We got to just toss this under the bus, right?
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SPEAKER_01: And me and the other young people on staff were like, this is a fundamental moral question.
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SPEAKER_01: And I think that had a big impact, particularly on less political young people.
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SPEAKER_01: you know what i mean it was just like part of the local conventional wisdom was
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SPEAKER_01: that like gay people were fine like bigots were being bad and it was intertwined
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SPEAKER_01: specifically for men with the overall like sex negative vibe of the georgia b bush
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SPEAKER_01: years right like the marriage promotion initiative um when we were both in college
11:55
SPEAKER_01: i think uh ross doubt that and i had a kind of um
11:58
SPEAKER_01: you know, funny student newspaper exchange where I was saying, like, premarital sex is good.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Like, it's free.
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SPEAKER_01: It's fun.
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SPEAKER_01: It's environmentally sustainable.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, and he was like, I'm a Catholic.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, don't do that.
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SPEAKER_01: And so this was the stuff people talked about all the time.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: What a hypocrite.
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SPEAKER_00: I read his memoir.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is before that was, you know, deep, deep lore.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you flash forward and
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SPEAKER_01: A big thing that we had in the recent past was COVID, which was something everybody had to care about.
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SPEAKER_01: You don't need to be a politics junkie to be like, ah, COVID policy is important to me.
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SPEAKER_01: And Democrats were really asking,
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SPEAKER_01: in particular,
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SPEAKER_01: young people to sacrifice their hanging out and having fun social lives for the
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SPEAKER_01: sake of social responsibility.
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SPEAKER_01: And that came on the back of Me Too and many other issues.
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SPEAKER_01: The whole kind of rise of you can't say that kind of stuff,
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SPEAKER_01: a shift toward more,
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SPEAKER_01: you could call it political correctness,
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SPEAKER_01: you could call it more simple politeness,
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SPEAKER_01: but just asking people to be more self-controlled in their expression.
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SPEAKER_01: asking people to be more self-controlled in their inter-office behavior,
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SPEAKER_01: asking people to be more self-controlled with regard to their socializing during
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SPEAKER_01: the pandemic.
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SPEAKER_01: And Democrats,
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SPEAKER_01: I think if you're 25,
13:33
SPEAKER_01: right,
13:34
SPEAKER_01: in your recent life,
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SPEAKER_01: Democrats have been the more scoldy party,
13:41
SPEAKER_01: right?
13:41
SPEAKER_01: The party that is more asking you to like not do stuff, right?
13:47
SPEAKER_01: And that's really different from how it was in the 2005 to 2010 era.
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SPEAKER_00: So I think you're right about the dynamic.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about the contribution that COVID had to it.
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SPEAKER_00: I would like to think that if a pandemic had emerged in the George W. Bush years when I was in my 20s,
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SPEAKER_00: And he was like, you know, cause George W. Bush actually was concerned about pandemics.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: He studied up on it.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: He started like, he was a big pandemic.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: He's the one who cooked up, uh, all that social distancing.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, he, like he, he opened the, the office that Trump famously closed on 10 pandemic response.
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SPEAKER_00: That's like root based at the white house and, um, was based at the white house, uh,
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SPEAKER_00: And,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: I think that if there had been a COVID like pandemic in 2005,
14:40
SPEAKER_00: he would have done something very similar to what Democrats wanted the response to
14:46
SPEAKER_00: COVID to look like.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Right.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: And I would have found that annoying because I liked going out.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: I was a prolific goer outer in my 20s.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: I also like to think that I wouldn't tally that as like one of the reasons I didn't like George W. Bush.
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SPEAKER_00: I would have said like exigent circumstances require exigent measures, right?
15:09
SPEAKER_00: But where I think you're right is that
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SPEAKER_00: Me Too and Trump are sort of inextricable, I think.
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SPEAKER_00: And what happened,
15:22
SPEAKER_00: I think,
15:22
SPEAKER_00: starting in 2016 is that for totally valid reasons,
15:27
SPEAKER_00: but also reasons that I think have had downstream effects that nobody really saw coming,
15:33
SPEAKER_00: but do make sense in hindsight,
15:34
SPEAKER_00: is that
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Democrats started running against Donald Trump as basically a lout.
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SPEAKER_00: He cheats on his wives.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: He abuses women.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: Then he sexually assaults women and brags about it.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think it'd be criminal in a way not to try to exploit that vulnerability of
16:00
SPEAKER_00: your opponents if you know about it.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: But then Trump wins the election and he is now like a fixture.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And so Democrats have spent all of the Trump years trying to emphasize how immoral all this is, right?
16:17
SPEAKER_00: And they're correct.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: But also, even though Republicans have essentially banned abortion in half the country during this time,
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SPEAKER_00: They are led by the guy who's just like, whatever, I fuck who I want and I get away with it.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: And that's the dream, young man, right?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And Democrats have been thrust into this role of being like, no, that's just...
16:39
SPEAKER_00: shitty behavior.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: And I think that is also correct.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Um,
16:44
SPEAKER_00: but we are now in a much different world than we were in say 1996 when Bill Clinton
16:50
SPEAKER_00: was the avatar for the democratic party and all of his behavior that went along
16:54
SPEAKER_00: with it.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: And,
16:55
SPEAKER_00: and,
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SPEAKER_00: and Republicans were running candidates like Bob Dole and then,
16:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
16:59
SPEAKER_00: eventually Mitt Romney who like exuded prudishness.
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SPEAKER_00: And, um,
17:05
SPEAKER_00: that is going to make young men be like,
17:07
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about,
17:08
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:08
SPEAKER_00: that doesn't,
17:09
SPEAKER_00: the changes they want to make to the country might not be great for my love life.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: And now it's flipped.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's flipped completely.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: on the merits,
17:19
SPEAKER_00: like eventually Donald Trump will pass from the scene and the leader of the
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Republican party will be somebody like JD Vance or Marco Rubio who has all kinds of,
17:29
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:30
SPEAKER_00: like weirdo views about sex and vaginas and stuff like that.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh,
17:36
SPEAKER_00: and then I hope that the young man like revert to the mean,
17:41
SPEAKER_00: just like,
17:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah,
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Republicans are the party that want to,
17:45
SPEAKER_00: um,
17:46
SPEAKER_00: make it so that women don't want to sleep with me.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: And Democrats are the party who are like, go forth and fornicate young people.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: And, um,
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Sorry to be weird about it,
17:56
SPEAKER_00: but that is the dynamic that I kind of see coming,
18:01
SPEAKER_00: particularly if Trump loses in November and then the Republican Party has to reshuffle.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: They are not going to keep the Donald Trump,
18:09
SPEAKER_00: cheat on your wives,
18:10
SPEAKER_00: rape women,
18:11
SPEAKER_00: brag about it aspects of Trumpism.
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SPEAKER_00: They're going to keep the other stuff that keeps the main parts of the coalition together.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: And then young men are going to have to rethink what their political priorities are.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, so I broadly agree with that.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: I do want to like put a pin in our disagreement about the COVID thing because I just, you know,
18:36
SPEAKER_01: If you think back, I agree with you.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: Like,
18:38
SPEAKER_01: I think that if a pandemic had broken out in 2005 or 2006,
18:42
SPEAKER_01: that Bush would have pushed something similar to the Democratic approach.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
18:47
SPEAKER_01: because the Democratic approach was largely based on the pandemic flu playbook that
18:53
SPEAKER_01: was written by the George W.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: Bush administration.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: I actually think if you think about certain influential media figures like Glenn
19:01
SPEAKER_01: Greenwald and Matt Tabe,
19:03
SPEAKER_01: who were clearly identified as left thought leaders at that particular time,
19:08
SPEAKER_01: and who are now associated,
19:10
SPEAKER_01: I would say,
19:11
SPEAKER_01: more with the right and more with the Trump movement,
19:13
SPEAKER_01: they were very hostile.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: to like COVID protocols and things like that, right?
19:18
SPEAKER_01: There was a kind of a, I think that you would have had, you know, guys like RFK Jr.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: as the sort of leading opponents, right?
19:30
SPEAKER_01: of the George W. Bush lockdown policy.
19:33
SPEAKER_01: And because all of us,
19:34
SPEAKER_01: you and I,
19:35
SPEAKER_01: everybody is prone to social influence and negative polarization and other kinds of
19:41
SPEAKER_01: things like that.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: I think that a lot of young men who voted for Obama in 2008 counterfactually would
19:50
SPEAKER_01: have been lockdown opponents in our 20s if they were being led by George W.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: Bush.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: That being said,
19:58
SPEAKER_01: Counterfactual is counterfactual.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: It's tough.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: Trump.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: 90s politics was,
20:04
SPEAKER_01: like,
20:04
SPEAKER_01: really different from contemporary politics in ways that I think are somewhat hard
20:10
SPEAKER_01: to convey to people.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: I was a teenager in the 90s, but I was a teenage political junkie.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: I would regularly watch Judy Woodruff on Inside Politics after school in the late 90s.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: I went to, like...
20:25
SPEAKER_01: politics camp in Washington, D.C.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: in the summer of 1998 when Monica Lewinsky was doing her depositions and things like that.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: I was like super, super duper interested in this stuff.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: I think a good nerd
20:40
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: I think a good sign of the times in the 90s is that Nina Burley,
20:46
SPEAKER_01: who was a Washington correspondent,
20:50
SPEAKER_01: I think,
20:50
SPEAKER_01: for Time magazine at the time,
20:52
SPEAKER_01: but sort of pivoted off like a hard news beat a couple of years later to become
20:57
SPEAKER_01: more of like a feminist pundit,
20:59
SPEAKER_01: public intellectual.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: She said infamously at the time that she would have been happy to give Clinton a
21:08
SPEAKER_01: blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: And that was a joke.
21:14
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
21:15
SPEAKER_01: That was not like her serious analysis of the situation.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: But it was,
21:20
SPEAKER_01: as jokes are,
21:21
SPEAKER_01: like it was a joke that expressed the mainstream feminist viewpoint on the
21:28
SPEAKER_01: Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in the second half of the 1990s,
21:33
SPEAKER_01: which was that whatever you might say or think about Bill Clinton,
21:38
SPEAKER_01: Like he was a hero to the movement.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: He had appointed an unprecedented number of women to influential positions.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: He was responsible for saving Roe v. Wade, which was dangling by a thread at the time.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: You know, in the wake of the Gulf War, people thought George H.W.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: Bush is definitely going to get reelected.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: We're going to have more Clarence Thomas type justices on the Supreme Court.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: It's lights out for abortion.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: And Bill Clinton prevented that.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: you know?
22:06
SPEAKER_01: And he had very strong feminist support from institutions,
22:12
SPEAKER_01: from writers like Nina Burley,
22:14
SPEAKER_01: et cetera,
22:14
SPEAKER_01: et cetera,
22:15
SPEAKER_01: et cetera.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: People were aware of the like,
22:18
SPEAKER_01: this is an inappropriate kind of relationship to have sort of critique of him.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: But overwhelmingly,
22:26
SPEAKER_01: the criticisms of Clinton were understood to be coming from a scoldy Christian
22:32
SPEAKER_01: right moralist perspective.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: And then it was seen as incredibly hypocritical that some of the Republican men
22:39
SPEAKER_01: leading the charge against him had had extramarital affairs,
22:44
SPEAKER_01: right?
22:44
SPEAKER_01: That pushed Newt Gingrich out.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: There was a short-lived successor.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: Bob Livingston.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: Bob Livingston, who was also bounced for infidelity.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: The whole thing was processed at the time.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: as a dispute fundamentally about infidelity in marriage,
23:01
SPEAKER_01: in which the right-wing position was that it was really bad,
23:05
SPEAKER_01: but also that conservatives were very hypocritical.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: And then you rolled into George W. Bush and gay rights.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: And again, he was just talking about Jesus constantly.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: And Trump is just not like that at all.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: There are public policy issues on which Trump is aligned with the religious right,
23:27
SPEAKER_01: but he is not personally like a devotee of evangelical politics.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: in a way that, say, Mike Pence is.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: That was always what was funny about the Trump-Pence duo,
23:41
SPEAKER_01: that Mike Pence had all these weird hang-ups about,
23:44
SPEAKER_01: can I be alone in a room with a woman,
23:47
SPEAKER_01: or would that be a betrayal?
23:50
SPEAKER_01: And Trump was like, whatever, I'll just appoint some Federalist Society judges.
23:54
SPEAKER_01: And you'll see how annoyed Trump is that Dobbs is a millstone around his neck.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: He keeps wanting to talk about the abortion rights issue
24:05
SPEAKER_01: as if it's like a hyper earnest question of constitutional law.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: in which he's just like,
24:10
SPEAKER_01: there were always a lot of lawyers who felt that the road decision was like badly written.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: And now we've returned it to the States.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: And like, I have no opinion about the underlying merits.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, it's what he's trying to pull off.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: Right.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: But he's trying to put like,
24:26
SPEAKER_00: as with,
24:26
SPEAKER_00: as with everything with this guy,
24:28
SPEAKER_00: like his thing is not like,
24:30
SPEAKER_00: I listened to the best constitutional law.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: It's like, I only, I could do this.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: Right.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: Like,
24:36
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yes.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Everyone, you know, so he dominated, you know.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: But it's a thing where like,
24:42
SPEAKER_01: if you care about abortion rights,
24:46
SPEAKER_01: like Trump has fucked you and you're going to be mad at him.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: But Trump has sloughed off the vibes, right?
24:56
SPEAKER_01: Like the Christian right religious moralists
24:59
SPEAKER_01: vibes where like you know i'm not gay it didn't like impact me that george w bush
25:05
SPEAKER_01: was like against gay rights but it struck me as bad it conveyed to me that he's
25:11
SPEAKER_01: like a bad guy like a wrong kind of person um and and trump has has ducked that and
25:19
SPEAKER_01: he's made republicans he's captured that like
25:25
SPEAKER_01: Bill Clinton square of the board from the 90s.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, done so quite effectively, I think.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean... In a more secular, more, frankly, progressive country.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: You know, like, you just, like, you couldn't win with George W. Bush's voters today.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: Too many of those guys are dead.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, to really make the... You know, the politics were obviously different then and now.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: But...
25:55
SPEAKER_00: Bill Clinton being both the savior of Roe v.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: Wade and Allout kind of like forced liberals and progressives to make a choice,
26:08
SPEAKER_00: like what matters to you more?
26:12
SPEAKER_00: And I realized that when,
26:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:15
SPEAKER_00: the obvious answer I think still is like abortion rights,
26:18
SPEAKER_00: not like the behavior of Bill Clinton.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: I know that that...
26:24
SPEAKER_00: sort of veered into or made feminists at the time, including like men, feel obligated to not just say,
26:34
SPEAKER_00: his behavior is bad, but his policies are good.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: And so we're on board with it, but to actually just defend the behavior, right?
26:40
SPEAKER_00: Like there's like this personal sex stuff between two consenting adults and,
26:45
SPEAKER_00: and like,
26:46
SPEAKER_00: why should we care?
26:47
SPEAKER_00: And that aspect of it has worn poorly and that subsequent democratic presidents
26:53
SPEAKER_00: have been more personally upstanding.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: And so that's between that and, and, uh, time, uh,
27:00
SPEAKER_00: and the fact that Donald Trump became the face of the Republican party has like
27:05
SPEAKER_00: given those same people in many cases,
27:08
SPEAKER_00: like the space to rethink that,
27:10
SPEAKER_00: like actually Bill Clinton and what he did was very wrong.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: Even if we still think it's better that he won in 1992,
27:17
SPEAKER_00: rather than,
27:18
SPEAKER_00: uh,
27:19
SPEAKER_00: rather than George HW Bush to really test the,
27:24
SPEAKER_00: um,
27:24
SPEAKER_00: the principles here.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: I think you would need to end up in a situation which we haven't had.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: Um,
27:31
SPEAKER_00: which is essentially like a replay in the Me Too era where let's say in 2020 after
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Trump is vanquished,
27:45
SPEAKER_00: it turns out Joe Biden has been a real player behind the scenes and has slept with
27:52
SPEAKER_00: a bunch of White House interns.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: And Republicans run Mitt Romney again or somebody like that in that mold.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: like what happens roe v wade is still on the line uh but um but now the choice is
28:10
SPEAKER_00: is clear and it's like after the me too movement has has like uh forced the
28:16
SPEAKER_00: question on us and what do people do and i i kind of think they'd make the same
28:21
SPEAKER_00: decision because ultimately like
28:24
SPEAKER_00: Saving Roe v. Wade is a higher priority.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: And then Trump just did the unexpected thing.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: It's like if Bob Livingston had been the Republican nominee or something like that,
28:42
SPEAKER_00: or Newt Gingrich had been the Republican nominee in 1996,
28:44
SPEAKER_00: is just...
28:48
SPEAKER_00: gives Democrats an opportunity to say,
28:51
SPEAKER_00: not only is their policy on abortion bad,
28:53
SPEAKER_00: but the people leading the movement are themselves unchurched hypocrites who don't
28:59
SPEAKER_00: believe any of this shit.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: And I'm actually slightly surprised that Democrats haven't leaned on that messaging more, but it's why...
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Trump being a guy who probably has paid for abortions,
29:15
SPEAKER_00: who knows,
29:16
SPEAKER_00: like being the face of overturning Roe,
29:19
SPEAKER_00: has made Democratic politics more fixated on the personal behavior aspect of this
29:27
SPEAKER_00: duality than they would have been under a different Republican leadership.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: And,
29:34
SPEAKER_00: and so I ultimately think it's just like passing an atmospheric I don't just like I
29:39
SPEAKER_00: don't in a way I don't think that the politics of like the political dynamics are
29:44
SPEAKER_00: so different than they were in the 90s,
29:46
SPEAKER_00: except that it's the Democrats who have the morally upstanding leaders and the
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Republicans who don't,
29:51
SPEAKER_00: and,
29:52
SPEAKER_00: and,
29:53
SPEAKER_00: like what's going to happen in 2028.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: If, you know, if.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: I have no idea who Republicans are going to nominate in 2020.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: If it's Donald Trump Jr., then we might have to relive this whole nightmare.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: But if it's like if it's just somebody like Rubio,
30:07
SPEAKER_00: like I don't think that young men are going to find him more appealing than a
30:13
SPEAKER_00: second Kamala Harris term.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, you know.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting,
30:20
SPEAKER_01: though,
30:20
SPEAKER_01: because,
30:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:22
SPEAKER_01: so one thing we're talking about is kind of the specifics of abortion back and forth.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: But I think that there is more than the contingency of, like, Trump's a scumbag to this.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: There is some of that, right?
30:41
SPEAKER_01: But there is a, I think, a principled disagreement, right?
30:49
SPEAKER_01: about, like,
30:55
SPEAKER_01: how much you need to shut down people for like stepping outside the lines.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: Like essentially a wokeism principle.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I mean, if you think like wokeism has like a content and a process element to it, right?
31:14
SPEAKER_01: And so like left and right are just gonna disagree about like the content of trans issues,
31:20
SPEAKER_01: gay rights issues,
31:20
SPEAKER_01: abortion rights,
31:21
SPEAKER_01: a million other things.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: But there's also,
31:24
SPEAKER_01: I've seen surveys,
31:25
SPEAKER_01: like,
31:26
SPEAKER_01: women are much more likely than men to say that they have broke off a social
31:32
SPEAKER_01: relationship with somebody due to a political disagreement.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Right?
31:38
SPEAKER_01: So you start with Democrats being the party that has more women in it.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: And then you add in the fact that, like, women are more likely to be like, I'm through with you.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: Like, we can't be associating anymore.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: Right?
31:52
SPEAKER_01: And you get,
31:53
SPEAKER_01: I think,
31:54
SPEAKER_01: not a,
31:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:55
SPEAKER_01: like end of time lock-in,
31:57
SPEAKER_01: but a somewhat self-reinforcing spiral of behavior.
32:03
SPEAKER_01: I've always loved the They Might Be Giants song,
32:07
SPEAKER_01: Your Racist Friend,
32:09
SPEAKER_01: which has this,
32:10
SPEAKER_01: this is from the 90s,
32:11
SPEAKER_01: but it's become very,
32:12
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:13
SPEAKER_01: in the mode,
32:13
SPEAKER_01: right?
32:14
SPEAKER_01: And the guy's saying, I can't stand here listening to you and your racist friend, right?
32:19
SPEAKER_01: So it's like,
32:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm me, you're my friend.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: You have another friend who's being drunk and racist at a party.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: And so like, I can't be at your party anymore.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: That's the procedural element of wokeism,
32:35
SPEAKER_01: the quote unquote cancel culture that I can't just laugh it off or decide I don't
32:40
SPEAKER_01: care about this or something like that.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Women are more likely than men to have that viewpoint.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's become a more prominent element of democratic politics.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: Why do you think that that has something to do with the interiority of women as opposed to the fact that
32:58
SPEAKER_00: the avatar for conservative politics for the last 10 years has been Donald Trump, right?
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Like if I'm at a party.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: And there's a friend of mine has brought his friend and his friend is like being drunk and anti-Semitic.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: I might not end my friendship with my friend,
33:16
SPEAKER_00: but I might leave the party because it's just an unpleasant situation to be in.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: Or the alternative is like,
33:20
SPEAKER_00: maybe I'm going to get into a fistfight and I don't really want to do that,
33:22
SPEAKER_00: right?
33:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: I think that that's a totally reasonable position to take.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, that's sort of the position that- I know you do because you're a lib.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying that's a position that more women take.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: No, I think a lot of-
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Jewish conservatives would be of the same mind.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's just like, it's a human reaction to somebody who is
33:46
SPEAKER_00: embodies hatred of you, disdain for you, or wants to make you second class in some way.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: And I feel like all of the women in America for the last nine years have been
34:01
SPEAKER_00: thrust into this position because of Donald Trump.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: In 2012, I don't know what the data said about...
34:08
SPEAKER_00: women ending friendships over political disagreements,
34:12
SPEAKER_00: but I knew people who supported Donald Trump,
34:13
SPEAKER_00: men and women.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: And like, they had perfectly good answers for why they supported Mitt Romney over Barack Obama.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: Right.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: And none of them were,
34:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:24
SPEAKER_00: I,
34:24
SPEAKER_00: I thought that they,
34:25
SPEAKER_00: they reflected bad,
34:27
SPEAKER_00: bad values in a way,
34:28
SPEAKER_00: but not like irredeemable ones.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm pro-life and,
34:32
SPEAKER_00: I don't like abortions.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: Obama does.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: Romney doesn't.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: I think taxes are too high because I work hard for my paycheck and I should keep
34:40
SPEAKER_00: more and we should have fewer social services,
34:42
SPEAKER_00: right?
34:43
SPEAKER_00: Like you can run down the list and at no point did supporting Mitt Romney come down to,
34:48
SPEAKER_00: well,
34:48
SPEAKER_00: fuck your feelings.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: I like him, right?
34:50
SPEAKER_00: Like he frees me up to be a dick to you.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: And that is the value proposition for Trump.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: That's like basically the only one, right?
34:57
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it is particularly
35:02
SPEAKER_00: to women that they are like, that is unacceptable to me.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: And if you support that,
35:07
SPEAKER_00: I have serious questions about your,
35:10
SPEAKER_00: about like,
35:10
SPEAKER_00: like,
35:12
SPEAKER_00: like whether you're a safe person to even be around.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: And like,
35:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it'll happen because our,
35:17
SPEAKER_00: not in our lifetimes,
35:18
SPEAKER_00: because like,
35:19
SPEAKER_00: we're not going to become a matriarchy at any point in the near future.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: But if there was a, like some domineering female political leader in this country who, who fucked up,
35:32
SPEAKER_00: the lives of male Americans the way Trump has fucked up the lives of female Americans,
35:38
SPEAKER_00: we would probably be more inclined to be like,
35:39
SPEAKER_00: you know what,
35:40
SPEAKER_00: you support her,
35:41
SPEAKER_00: our friendship is over.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: I think.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: Sure, maybe.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, look, you know, we're talking about broad population trends, right?
35:50
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not dealing in absolutes here.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: But I think that the evidence is that
35:57
SPEAKER_01: women are more likely than men to be sympathetic to the idea that you need to do
36:04
SPEAKER_01: the kind of second-order shunnings of people who say or do bad things.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: And you see that the Republican coalition,
36:13
SPEAKER_01: for example,
36:14
SPEAKER_01: is not bothered by the odd,
36:18
SPEAKER_01: agglomerative nature of Trump's campaign.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, so that, like...
36:25
SPEAKER_01: You bring RFK Jr.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: into the fold.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: You bring Tulsi Gabbard into the fold.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: Those people disagree with most Republicans about many things.
36:38
SPEAKER_01: But it's not a concern.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: And you mentioned Jewish Republicans.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: I think it's palpably true.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: that Jewish conservatives are just not as bothered by the heavy presence of
36:50
SPEAKER_01: anti-Semites in the Republican coalition as Jewish Democrats are by the frankly
36:56
SPEAKER_01: lighter presence of anti-Semites in the Democratic coalition.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: Just like part of being a conservative is being thicker skinned about these kinds
37:05
SPEAKER_01: of things and more transactional.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: And I think that men are more likely than women to sort of have that kind of.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: So you call it, you call it thicker skinned.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: I find it so cowardly.
37:16
SPEAKER_00: It's like the pussiest thing in the world to be a Jewish guy.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: And you go to Mar-a-Lago and sit at a table with Nick Fuentes or like your,
37:22
SPEAKER_00: your father-in-law sits at a table with Nick Fuentes and just like,
37:25
SPEAKER_00: well,
37:25
SPEAKER_00: I guess I better go along with this because my money's on the line.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: Like it's the most, it's pathetic.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: It's not like, well, I like your pitch.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: That's your, your, your macho man pitch of it is pretty good.
37:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, anti-Semitic to, uh,
37:39
SPEAKER_01: Say it's because your money is on the line rather than principled support for the Jewish state.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I mean, I think that's a good framing.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: I just don't know that, you know, it fully captures sort of where we are at.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: I think we should take a break here to talk about the more specific tactical elements of this.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: Yes, let's talk about the tactical elements of it.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: We haven't even really talked about vaping at all, my favorite pastime.
38:03
SPEAKER_00: If you want to hear, I actually hate vaping.
38:06
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